Graham Robb
THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE
455pp. Picador. £18.99.
978 0 330 42760 9
In May 1789, the States-General of Paris called on all the towns and parishes
of France to state their grievances. More than 60,000 complaint books or
cahiers de doléances came flooding back from every corner of the Hexagon. As
summarized by the Revolutionaries, the main grievances chimed exactly with
their own political concerns. Down with the privileges of the First and
Second Estates! Down with the abuses of the ancien régime! Up with social
justice and equality before the law!
The view from the ground was rather different. In his fascinating
reconstruction of the “real” France, Graham Robb shows that many of the
cahiers from the smallest communities were not political documents at all.
Rather, they complained of such things as voracious pigeons and arid fields,
of weeds and wild animals. So far from opposing the privileges of the King,
some of the cahiers called on him to heal their suffering (“If only the King
knew! We cried a thousand times from the depths of our abyss” went one). As
Robb writes, the complaint which “dominates all the others” was “the pain
and botheration of living in the natural world. The desire of most people
was not to have their human rights enshrined in a glorious constitution.
They wanted freedom from poor soil and bad weather, from gales, hailstorms,
fire and flood, from wolves, cold and famine”.
This mismatch between the neat bureaucratic France of the metropolis and the
wild uncharted chaos of la France profonde is the great theme of Robb’s
book. The author of biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud, Robb
realized ten years ago how little he knew the country on which he was
“supposed to be an authority”. He set off on his bicycle to explore the many
regions and cultures of France, travelling “at the speed of a
nineteenth-century stagecoach”. Fourteen thousand miles (“and four years in
the library”) later, he sat down and attempted to describe the lives of the
vast mass of inhabitants of France from the eighteenth to the early
twentieth centuries, not as seen, with a sneer, from Paris, but through
their own eyes. Robb encounters a much weirder and more various land than
the word France usually suggests. Others have been here before – Robb builds
on the work of Eugen Weber and Sudhir Hazareesingh, among others – but no
one before has made it seem quite so unfamiliar. Again and again, Robb shows
how the centralizing ambitions of the metropolis were thwarted by peoples
who barely considered themselves to be “French” and did not even speak the
language.
“O Òc Sí Bai Ya Win Oui Oyi Awè Jo Ja Oua” is the title of one of Robb’s
chapters – just a few of the many words for “Yes” in the micro-dialects of
France. In 1794, the Abbé Grégoire sent out a questionnaire to town halls
asking how patois – which the Encyclopédie defined as “corrupt language as
spoken in almost all the provinces” – could be destroyed. His survey
revealed that France contained a mere 3 million pure French-speakers, 11 per
cent of the population. More than 6 million were in total ignorance of the
French language. The abbé found this alarming. “In liberty, we are the
advance-guard of nations. In language, we are still at the Tower of Babel.”
He followed this up with a report, “The Necessity and Means of Exterminating
Patois and Universalizing the Use of the French language”. To the abbé, the
Babel of patois was dangerous because it undermined patriotism. How could
there possibly be a nation without a common language?
Reading Robb, one is left suddenly uncertain as to whether France ever really
was a complete nation, at least until the early twentieth century. Even in
1863, a quarter of army recruits spoke only patois. As late as 1880, only a
fifth of the population was entirely at ease in the French language. And
this linguistic alienation went hand in hand with a hostility to the idea of
France itself. The abbé was right to have been worried. In Gascony and
Provence, they spoke contemptuously of the “Franchiman” and the “Franciot”,
by which they meant people from the north. Elsewhere, Robb depicts fierce
local communities in which there was a violent prejudice both against
visitors and against neighbouring settlements. In the early 1740s, a
cartographer taking part in the Cassini mission to make for the first time a
reliable map of France was hacked to death in a tiny village in the Massif
Central called Les Estables. A savage and irrational act? Not according to
Robb, who argues that these people “were defending themselves against an act
of war”. To be mapped was eventually, over time, to be phased out of
existence.
Much of the narrative takes on an elegiac note for this “suffering land of
fragmented village states”. To the metropolis, they may have seemed
apolitical, backward hamlets in need of unifying and classifying, but to
Robb they were self-governing communes ruled by their own systems of
justice, full of people engaged in the “mysterious activity known as
‘muddling through’”. Many places were far more organized than administrators
gave them credit for. “Some of these towns and villages were flourishing
democracies when France was still an absolute monarchy.” In the village of
Salency in Picardy, all 600 inhabitants were considered equal and even the
girls were taught to read. “Self-government was not an idle dream. It was
the unavoidable reality of daily life. People who rarely saw a policeman or
a judge had good reasons to devise their own systems of justice.” On the
other hand, this justice was often brutal and prejudiced.
These were far from being utopian communities. Despite Robb’s tone of regret
for the loss of this forgotten France, much of life there, most of the time,
sounds truly horrible. All over the country, there were numerous peasant
sayings to the effect that life was grim and it would be better never to
have been born. “Happy as a corpse”, they used to say in the Alps. “No fine
day without a cloud”, they said in Vosges. “When you’ve made a good soup,
the Devil comes and shits in it” was the line in the Franche-Comté. In the
Aosta valley it was considered good luck to give birth to a cretinous baby.
The child’s idiocy was compensated for by the fact that he would never have
to work – the ultimate peasant dream.
While it is possible to admire this black humour as a coping mechanism against
a sorry existence, there are many moments in this book when it is not hard
to see the appeal of the civilized comforts of Paris. One starts to relate
to Mme de Genlis, who suggested the following phrases for visitors to the
remoter parts of France: “I am suffering greatly. I am going to vomit. Give
me the vase. The smell of tar makes me sick. Is the wind always so
contrary/so bad? I have toothache. Shall we soon be there?”.
At the beginning of the book, Robb suggests that it might be used as a kind of
“historical guidebook” – the kind that he himself wanted to read when he
first set off on his bicycle. It would be virtually impossible to use it as
such, however, partly because it is subdivided by theme rather than by
region, and partly because most of what is being described is by definition
unfindable. Even the landscape is, for the most part, transformed utterly,
marshland having been drained, roads built, trees planted. The people, too,
are hard to locate, either in place or time. For all Robb’s emphasis on the
infinite variety and divergence of this hidden France, there is ultimately a
sameness to the peasant lives that he describes.
It is a sameness of existence, moreover, that is presumably far from unique to
France. The book’s great weakness is that there is not more comparison with
other countries. The reader is left wondering to what extent the
proliferation of these fierce little communities with their violent
prejudices, misfortunes and strange dialects is distinct to France, and to
what extent they resemble peasant communities that have yet to be modernized
more or less everywhere. The first half of The Discovery of France claims to
be “ethnology”, but the ethnology makes little sense without comparison. The
one comparison that Robb does make, on several occasions, is with the Muslim
population of modern France, which, he asserts, is another group that has
failed to “integrate” into the republic. This comparison seems forced. There
is a huge difference between the difficulty of immigrant communities in
adapting to established national traditions and the refusal of peasant
communities to give up their own traditions in a nation struggling to take
shape.
This is not to detract from the book’s great strength, however, which is its
panorama of wonderful historical details, intelligently described – the
shepherds on stilts “like giant spiders” who accompanied Napoleon’s empress
through the Landes; or the outlandish Breton belief that hedgehogs ate ducks
and must therefore be punished; or the sweet love letter written by a Vendée
peasant which compares his beloved to “young cabbages before the
caterpillars have got to them”. The civilized reader may finally close the
book glad to return to the France of Balzac, for whom “Paris marked the edge
of the civilized world”. But even this France will never quite look the same
once you know what else was out there.
Bee Wilson is the author of The Hive: The story of the honeybee and us,
2004. Swindled: From poison sweets to counterfeit coffee - The dark history
of the food cheats, is forthcoming.
