The Discovery of France (7 page)

Some names referred to famous events in village history: the ‘
rôtisseurs
’ (‘roast-meat sellers’) of Ludres, who had once turned out en masse to watch their adulterous priest being burned at the stake, or the ‘
poussais
’ (‘chasers’) of Vigneulles, who took up pitchforks and routed their neighbours from Barbonville when they came to steal their miracle-working statue of the Virgin. Most names were deliberately
offensive. The ‘
oua-oua
’ (pronounced ‘wa-wa’) of Rosiéres-aux-Salines had a speech defect, caused by a local thyroid condition, which was considered hilarious. Some nicknames lasted into the twentieth century. The most insulting were probably never recorded except, when education had reached the village, in the form of graffiti. ‘Les mangeurs de merde [shit-eaters] de Lautenbach’ was inscribed in a Lauten bach bus-shelter at the foot of the Grand Ballon mountain in Alsace in 2004.

In a world where filth stayed close to home and the subterranean odysseys of today’s human waste were unimaginable, coprophilia was a common theme. The people of Saint-Nicolas-de-Port were known as ‘loudmouths’. Their neighbours at Varangéville across the river liked to assemble on the banks of the Meurthe to bombard them with a chorus of

While insults were the language of village foreign policy, domestic propaganda proclaimed the unsullied honour of the tribe. Many communities claimed prestigious forebears. The powerful Pignou clan of Thiers traced itself back to a single omniscient ancestor who, in the year 1100, had set down all the rules by which they still lived. (The actual date was probably 1730.) In Mandeure, which boasts a Roman amphitheatre, the dominant group believed itself to be descended from a Roman general. They had the carved lintels and the mosaics to prove it. Outsiders who tried to settle on their territory were repulsed as barbarians. Claims to ancient nobility were also made by a visibly distinct part of Issoudun’s population, as Balzac explained in
The Two Brothers
(1841):

Some of these claims to ethnic distinction were based on historical truth. The Foratin people of the Berry were descendants of Scottish mercenaries who were given forest land between Moulins and Bourges in the fifteenth century by Charles VII. (Some nineteenth-century visitors claimed to detect a slight accent.) A hamlet, a château and a forest clearing called ‘Les Écossais’ still exist, and the town of Aubigny-sur-Nère hosts an annual ‘Franco-Scottish’ festival on Bastille Day. The Gavaches or Marotins were a separate sub-population in the Gironde, east of Bordeaux, numbering about eight thousand in the late 1880s. They had been brought from Poitou and Anjou in the sixteenth century to repopulate a region devastated by plague and retained their separate identity into the twentieth century.

Most claims – especially those relating to the Romans – were pure fantasy. The blood of the Romans would not have filtered down unmixed through fifty generations. ‘Romans’ were the aristocrats of the common imagination, the lost rulers who had clearly been far better than the local lord. Some of their bridges were still in use and their buildings were often the most impressive in town. Many villages in the south named their local officials ‘consuls’ in imitation of the Romans. It was partly thanks to this genealogical conceit that the Roman remains of Orange, Nîmes and Arles were preserved at a time when ancient monuments were treated as a handy source of building material. History in the usual sense had very little to do with it. In the Tarn, ‘the Romans’ were widely confused with ‘the English’, and in parts of the Auvergne, people talked about ‘le bon César’, not realizing that ‘good old Caesar’ had tortured and massacred their Gallic ancestors. Other groups – the people of Sens, the marsh dwellers of Poitou and the royal house of Savoy – went further and traced their roots to Gallic tribes who had never surrendered to the Romans.

Even if this was oral tradition, the tradition was unlikely to be very old. Local tales rarely date back more than two or three generations. Town and village legends had a rough, home-made quality, quite different from the rich, erudite heritage that was later bestowed on provincial France. Most historical information supplied by modern tourist offices would be unrecognizable to natives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After a four-year expedition to Brittany, a
folklorist returned to Paris in 1881 to report – no doubt to the disappointment of Romantic lovers of the misty Armorican peninsula – that not a single Breton peasant had ever heard of bards and Druids.

*

T
HESE LOCAL LEGENDS
began to disappear just when they were most likely to be written down. A region that could be reached by tourists and ethnologists could also be reached by education and newspapers, which homogenized most people’s sense of the past and made the old tales sound ridiculously local. This is why the voice of tribal history could only be heard in relatively remote regions with a tradition of hostility to governments and friendliness to strangers.

A long stretch of the French Atlantic coast, in the former provinces of Aunis, Saintonge and Poitou, is still a midge-infested wilderness of partially drained marshes. Two hundred years ago, the Marais Poitevin was known to the outside world as a bleak backwater with a population of criminals, misfits and deserters from Napoleon’s armies who had headed west, marooned themselves in the reeds in decaying boats, and never returned to civilization. A few visitors who braved the fevers that came off the marshes were surprised, therefore, to see signs of a lively and well-organized society: livestock floating serenely across the flat horizon and families setting off for church in plank boats light enough to be carried under the arm. They found children whose long-legged beds were lapped by the water at high tide and who learned to sail almost before they could talk. Most surprising of all, these people, who called themselves Colliberts, seemed to be happy with their watery homes and refused to be moved when the canal-builders offered them homes ‘in the plain’.

The Colliberts were also known, disparagingly, as ‘Huttiers’ (hutdwellers) because they lived in shacks that looked like half-submerged islands in the swamp. The musky smoke of sun-dried dung filtered through a roof of reeds. Tables and chairs were made from bundles of reeds and bulrushes. A network of channels connected the marshes to dry land and the open sea. Many of the Colliberts made a living by selling fish at Les Sables-d’Olonne. There were more of them than anyone supposed. In the early twentieth century, the fleet on the Poitou swamp still numbered almost ten thousand.

Detailed descriptions of the Colliberts’ life are sadly scarce, but we do know that they had their own history and traditions. An educated Collibert called Pierre told the tribal story to a visitor in the 1820s. Pierre or his interviewer may have added some Romantic, Ossianic touches, but the elements of the tale are convincingly typical.

According to Collibert lore, Goths and Scythians who fought in Roman legions married the more civilized Agesinates, who had taken to farming the land.

The loss of land and exile, the radical distinction from the world beyond, pride in unchanged ways and the ancient purity of the race – all this is typical of tribal lore. The origins were invariably dated to
the dawn of time, and sometimes still are.
⁶
These legends were usually patched together from old tales and scraps of historical information gleaned from almanacs or picked up from travellers. The tale of the Agesinates comes from Pliny the Elder, not from collective memory. In reality, the Colliberts were probably freed serfs who farmed the first drained marshes of the Poitou in the thirteenth century.

The waterlands still exist, but the local people no longer define themselves as Colliberts nor trace their origins to a prehistoric tribe.

*

I
F EVERY TRIBAL TALE
had survived, a complete history of the French people as they saw themselves would form a vast encyclopedia of micro-civilizations. In most cases, only the bare bones remain. Hundreds of sub-populations were probably never described. Nearly all the places mentioned in this chapter lay close to major trade and tourist routes. Further into France, in parts that were untouched by roads or canals, the spaces are almost .

These groups should not be considered backward simply because their form of civilization was about to change. They were not formless planetoids waiting to be swallowed by a giant state. Like Goust, they were not extreme cases. The real extreme was something almost unrecognizable as a community, though it was common enough to form a significant percentage of the population. The improvised hamlets called
lieux-dits
(from the phrase ‘the place known as . . .’) are still quite numerous today. Some are entirely rural; others look like isolated sections of a shanty-town. Some seem to wander over small parts of the landscape from one map to the next. Many have names like Californie, Canada, Cayenne or Le Nouveau Monde (‘The New World’) – far-flung outposts of tiny empires, founded by paupers, foreigners, misanthropes or outcasts who tried to scratch a living on the edge of a wood or a swamp.

In many cases, all that remains of their identity is a name, which is often grimly literal or ironic. A place called Loin-du-bruit (‘Far-
from-the-noise’) is a tiny zone of immobilized caravans and metal shelters that cringes beside the screaming torrent of trucks heading for La Rochelle on the N137. There are still dozens of Tout-y-faut (‘Everything is lacking’), Pain perdu (‘Lost bread’), Malcontent, Gâtebourse (‘Purse’s ruin’) and Gâtefer (‘Wreck-iron’ – referring to the effect of stony ground on a ploughshare). About thirty places are called Perte-de-temps (‘Waste-of-time’), many of them not surprisingly now deserted. These precarious communities are a reminder that modern France is not just the result of continuous traditions; it was also formed from disappearances and extinctions.

Tribal histories briefly written on the landscape are barely decipherable, but their worlds can still be sensed.
Lieux-dits
are often encountered in significantly unpleasant circumstances – when the wind suddenly blows cold or the countryside turns ugly. Sometimes, their names appear on small blue signs in the roadside grass or on complicated panels which travellers have to memorize like magic spells before venturing into the maze of lanes. Often, they sound like warnings, laments or weather forecasts: Le Loup-garou (‘Werewolf’), Prends-toi-garde (‘Watch Out’), La Sibérie (‘Siberia’), Pied-Mouillé (‘Wetfoot’), Parapluie (‘Umbrella’), ‘Mauvais-vent’ (‘Badwind’) or La Nuaz (‘Cloud’) – a literally invisible hamlet that sits in the Beaufortain Alps at an altitude to which the cloud-layer usually descends.

*

I
T WOULD BE HARD
to venture any further into
la France profonde
without completely running out of information. The time has almost come to return to Paris and the relative comfort of bureaucratic control. But a sense of being lost in tribal France is an opportunity not to be missed. Anyone who avoids the main highways is likely to discover older itineraries by accident: pilgrim paths, drove roads, tiny river valleys, routes taken by saints or by their relics, arrow-straight ‘Roman roads’ that were cut across the landscape long before the Romans. Sites of no apparent interest begin to form a pattern: a place on the outskirts of a town where no one would stop unless they had to, a copse at the end of a lane that goes nowhere, the shady side of a stream or a windy patch of thorn and rubble where a cottage or a Gaulish house once stood.

It was in places such as these that one of the largest tribes of France used to live, scattered over a vast area that stretches from north-western Spain to the English Channel. This tribe will return us by an unexpected route to a more familiar world.

The earliest record of the people known as cagots dates from the year 1000. For over nine hundred years, they were found in small communities throughout the west of France under various names: ‘agotac’ in the Basque Country, ‘gahets’ or ‘gafets’ in Gascony, ‘capots’ in parts of Languedoc and Anjou, ‘caqueux’ or ‘cacous’ in Brittany. There were cagots in murky suburbs of Bordeaux and Toulouse, Rennes and Quimper, and on the edge of almost every town and village in south-western France. There were also a few isolated communities across the border in north-western Navarre.