La douce France, land of cafe terraces, of long lunches, of village charcuteries that outshine Fortnums, where trains run on time, roads are pothole free, and even mountain tracks are blazed every few yards with a dab of red paint. A tamed and familiar land, as comfortable as an old espadrille. Or so we think. But this France is not particularly old. Much of its landscape is “younger than the Eiffel Tower”, notes Graham Robb, made by draining malarial marshes and planting trees on ancient heathland and naked mountains – compare the French and Spanish sides of the Pyrenees.

Its “traditional” food is an invention for tourists; “the true taste of France was stale bread”. Nor has its geography long been familiar, even to its inhabitants. Many picturesque place names were thought up by map-makers or promoters of tourism. The spectacular Verdon gorges, Europe’s grand canyon, were known only to a few woodcutters until 1906 – decades after their Colorado counterpart became famous.

The lengthy process of discovering rural France (always incomplete, because so much of the way of life he explores disappeared before the outside world arrived) is Robb’s theme. A distinguished literary historian, and the biographer of Balzac, Hugo and Rimbaud, he began 10 years ago to explore on his bicycle “the country on which I was supposed to be an authority”. He has followed in the footsteps of earlier explorers: surveyors, mountaineers, speleologists, ethnographers, administrators, writers and generations of tourists. Among the pioneers was the Cassini dynasty, who risked lethal violence from suspicious locals to make the first complete map of France between the 1740s and 1815 (a member of one of their expeditions was hacked to death by the natives in a remote hamlet in the Massif Central).

Such efforts to explore and possess the country fell short of the immense task. Empress Josephine, following a route chosen by Napoleon using a Cassini map, found that the road was imaginary and her carriage had to be let down a slope on ropes. Soldiers and officials in the rural outback still needed guides and interpreters in the 19th century: even in 1880, only about a fifth of the population was comfortable using standard French.

Tourists had to be tough. Phrase books included “I believe that the wheels are on fire”, “Gently remove the postilion from beneath the horse”, “Bring us some sheets . . . I warn you I shall examine them carefully.” There was an etiquette for sharing a bed with a stranger. As late as the 1870s, Robert Louis Stevenson, walking in the Cévennes with a donkey, relied on a specially made sheepskin sleeping bag and took a revolver in case the locals were unfriendly. Only in the 20th century were all parts of the country finally pieced together by maps, roads, railways and telegraphs: the first event made known to all of France on the same day was the outbreak of the first world war in August 1914.

Robb has an infectious taste for facts, the more prodigious the better. A “cursed race” usually known as cagots, often said to be the descendents of medieval lepers or Saracen invaders, was persecuted for centuries all over southwestern France; discrimination was still rife in the 19th century, and is traceable even in the 20th. Pyrenean shepherds had a language of whistles with a two-mile range. Packs of dogs were trained to smuggle tobacco and alcohol. A pedlar’s pack in 1841 contained 9,800 pins, 6,084 bobbins, 3,888 buttons, 3,000 needles, 18 snuff-boxes, and much besides. In the Landes, postmen in the 1930s made deliveries on stilts. One of the prodigious facts concerns himself: researching the book included “14,000 miles in the saddle”. The bicycle, as he notes, opened up rural France at the end of the 19th century and is still the best way to see it. There were millions of cyclists when there were only a few thousand motorists. It may even be, he suggests, that the bicycle increased average height by reducing inbreeding.

Robb’s concise and fast-paced writing pedals along with never a dull paragraph, as facts, events, characters and quotations flash by. The scenery is not unknown to readers of the late Eugen Weber, whose Peasants into Frenchmen (which Robb acknowledges) painted a similar picture of a polyglot land of arcane customs and heterodox beliefs. Weber was criticised for highlighting the most “undeveloped” regions, and the same could be said of Robb. For both authors, the criticism in my view is misplaced. Weber was interested in why and how peasant society changed – schools, military service, roads and so on – and although Robb accepts this, his concern is not to explain modernisation. His sympathies are with the “faceless millions” who lived in the vast diverse land remote from Paris. He does not want his standpoint to be that of the “patronising, parochial ignorance of Parisians”, voyeurs coming to gawp at quaint peasants.

The book is an elegy to what has disappeared, a retrospective exploration of that lost world. Robb shows vividly that it was a cruel and precarious world – where people went into semi-hibernation during the bleak and hungry winter to conserve food, and where the elderly were expected not to linger once they were useless – but it was also a place of unimaginable variety and ingenuity. He shows that modernisation was in many ways a narrowing of life, the end of an everyday epic of human beings living in a natural world only partly overcome. A similar process could doubtless be described for Transylvania, or the Po delta, or even the Cambridgeshire fens; and it continues today in India and Africa. But the British love affair with France makes this particular story special, and indeed British writers and tourists played a notable part in it. Robb, from his two-wheeled vantage point, has made a dazzling and moving contribution to a long tradition.

Tall story

No only did postmen use stilts as a speedy way to get around; so too did shepherds. “The shepherds of the Landes spent whole days on stilts,” says Robb, “using a stick to form a tripod when they wanted to rest. Perched 10ft in the air, they knitted woollen garments and scanned the horizon for stray sheep. People who saw them in the distance compared them to tiny steeples and giant spiders. They could cover up to 75 miles a day at 8mph. When Napoleon’s empress Marie-Louise travelled through the Landes . . . her carriage was escorted for several miles by shepherds on stilts who could easily have overtaken the horses.”

THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE by Graham Robb, Picador £18.99 pp427
Buy the book here at the offer price of £17.09 (inc p&p)

Robert Tombs is the co-author of That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (Pimlico)

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