by Simon Winder
I mention this because it was the seemingly infinite family web emanating from this former priory that furnished my sisters and me with French exchanges in coming years. These contacts were to have a deep impact on our lives. One sister ended up taking a modern-language degree, worked in Paris for a while and spent a lot of time in France; the other married a Frenchman and has lived in Brittany for many years, her two children so extraordinarily French that they seem to have been to a deep-immersion pout-and-shrug Gallic acting school.
My own experiences were less happy – mostly because of my incapacity in (and therefore hatred of) foreign languages. It seemed barely credible that I should be sacrificing two weeks of a school holiday to talk, or not talk, French. Even worse, if possible, the ‘exchange’ element kicked in and these French boys would then turn up at my home, filling up yet more holidays, and, in turn, failing to learn English. My first attempt at writing imaginative literature was sketching the outline of a novel where the French boy hosting an English boy tries to kill him by pushing him off a cliff. Through sheer luck the English boy lands on a ledge and works his way back to safety. The second half would have been about the doomed French boy, knowing his plot had failed, being sent over to England where he is reduced to insanity by dodging an incredible range of man-traps, oil slicks, poisons, out-of-control cars, etc., set up by the stylish and resourceful English boy. Called Exchange, I remember this notional novel enjoyably filling up lots of spare mental moments during the wearying hours of playing chess or going round the Tower of London with French boys no more interested in learning English than I had been in learning French.
I need to move on as I am only writing this to introduce my nervousness about writing French history, not to reel off pages of teen anecdote. Looking back, I can see I was sheltered by the sheer good luck of not having read at the time any books in the rich English tradition in which France was the arena for youthful sexual initiation. If I had known this then, every moment would have been a frenzy of anticipation as I manoeuvred socially through a wilderness of French people all themselves wearily well aware of their ancient duties towards young English house guests. Looking back it is hard not to be slightly cross that such a range of sons and daughters, fathers and mothers must have been appraising me and thinking, ‘No, I really don’t think so.’ Perhaps, when I had left the room, there were family arguments.
My relationship to French is like that of a small dog that can smell the food on a table, but cannot reach it and does not know what it looks like. All these times in France: the money, the collecting from the airport, the polite conversations at each meal – and all to get me a D grade at A-level. I stayed twice with the family who owned a farm north-east of Meaux. This was a remarkable experience. Both parents were impressive, energetic and kind. We went clay-pigeon shooting, drove around the farm in Monsieur’s American post-D-Day jeep (the star on its hood still visible), fed chickens, looked through the woods for mushrooms, ate brains-on-toast.
In any event, many hours would go by avoiding speaking French. We were once in the car and one of my exchange’s younger brothers said of me: ‘He is dumb like an animal,’ which I could understand but not reply to. We would go for walks, play ping-pong, pick more mushrooms, watch television – anything to avoid actual talking. I had the over-clever idea of bringing along Gide’s Symphonie Pastorale because the English translation used the French title, thinking I could get away with reading it with Madame none the wiser. I still remember her look of sad reproach as I came in from ping-pong to find her holding the book. We often took walks along the valley of the Ourcq River with occasional little memorials which I did not pay any attention to at the time, only later realizing that it was in these fields that in September 1914 the Battle of the Marne began, perhaps the most important few days in the twentieth century. I have to stop writing about this stuff – I so admired the family and did so little to make it all worthwhile by actually learning any French.
So now I am in my fifties and still terrible at French. Part of me would like to have a private gold-tooled library of French masterpieces, like Frederick the Great’s at Potsdam, where I could succumb to the noble tongue of Racine, but it will never happen. This book is the first time I have come face to face with writing squarely about France and it has been a fun and alarming experience.
A note on place names
British decisions on what to call places are a cheery pick ’n’ mix of inconsistency. There are spellings unique to the English language: Basle, Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Dunkirk. There are despairing approximations: Flushing for Vlissingen, Brill for Brielle, Dort (traditionally) for Dordrecht. There is the baffling tangle of The Hague for Den Haag – changing the pronunciation to match ‘vague’ rather than ‘aargh’. In Dutch and French it is clear that the city is just called The Hedge, but perhaps English diplomats recoiled from this as being too silly an accredition.
Some names have mutated over time. In the seventeenth century it was still normal to write Ghent as Gaunt (as in John of). Accents on places like Zürich were naturally whipped off, indeed five out of the six letters in the word Zürich are mispronounced in English. Kleve used, of course, to be Cleves (as in Anne of). Calais used to be put through an English wringer and emerge pronounced Kalliss. Some names are just oddly inconsistent – so we have the Frenchified Bruges, but keep Zeebrugge rather than Bruges-sur-Mer. This is just as well as the Flemish form sounds like a rather desolate ferry port (which it is) while the French form erroneously suggests people twirling moustaches and parasols and sipping iced drinks next to a bandstand.
There are a number of towns where how names are pronounced or spelled has sometimes meant a lot. French designs on the Rhineland led to Mainz, Trier, Aachen, Koblenz and Köln becoming Mayence, Trèves, Aix-la-Chapelle, Coblence and Cologne. In the nineteenth century these were all acceptable English usage, but now only the last has stuck. This may be because the word Köln is just too hard to assimilate in English or because the city is so closely linked with the eau de. In any event while we share the spelling with France, the pronunciation is almost unrelated: French stays close to German, something like coll-on, with a linger on the n, whereas in British English it is something like kerr-loww-n.
There are obvious daggers-drawn issues around Alsace and Lorraine: Nancy/Nanzig, Strasbourg/Straßburg, Sélestat/Schlettstadt, Lunéville/Lünstadt. Alsatian signpost makers must now look back at their guild dinners with drunken nostalgia for the golden times of 1870 to 1945. There is a similar Walloon–Flemish/Dutch issue: Bruxelles/Brussel, Gant/Gent, Bruges/Brugge, Liège/Luik, Ypres/Ieper, Louvain/Leuven, Courtrai/Kortrijk, Tournai/Doornik. And a related one for French Flanders, although the number of Flemish speakers is now tiny: Lille/Rysel, Dunkerque/Duinkerke. The Swiss move back and forth with bilingual ease: Bâle/Basel; Bern/Berne, Zurich/Zürich, Lucerne/Luzern.
One historical fossil is that Spain’s long and vexed rule gave many towns fun, specifically Spanish names: Brujas, Bruselas, Arrás, Lila, Luxembourgo, Mastrique, Gante, Dunquerque, all now sadly extinct. Some place names are so robust that they work in every language: Breda surrenders whether in Spanish, English or Dutch. I had been rather hoping it might be called Brède in French, but it isn’t. The Netherlands’ most off-putting of all town names, ’s-Hertogenbosch (‘the Duke’s woods’) – a wonderful place that would receive many more English-speaking visitors if their eyes did not bounce off the name – is rendered with great elegance in both Spanish and French, as respectively Bolduque and Bois-le-Duc.
In traditional English shorthand the names of the closest bits of the Low Countries are used to cover the whole lot, so the north is just ‘Holland’ and the south ‘Flanders’, with all the other counties and duchies (Hainaut, say, or Gelderland) having no real resonance. An even more extreme version was the Victorian tradition in English ships that all European sailors were simply ‘Dutchmen’ even if they actually came from Sweden or Italy or wherever.
From the late sixteenth century
onwards there are a number of ways of referring to the provinces that rebelled against Spanish rule. Those that succeeded coalesced into roughly what is today the Kingdom of the Netherlands. I invariably call the kingdom’s predecessor the Dutch Republic, but the United Provinces would have been as good a choice. The modern English names for both Switzerland and the Netherlands attractively bury ancient usages: the inhabitants of the former (particularly as mercenaries) once being ‘Switzers’ (‘Where are my Switzers? Let them guard the door.’ Hamlet) and ‘Nether’ for ‘Low’ as in ‘her nether regions’ or ‘Nether Wallop’. Nobody will ever update these to Swissland or the Lowlands.
Throughout this book I use whatever is the current, most common form in English.
* * *
The structure of the book is very simple. It is roughly chronological and follows how at different times different outsiders have tried and failed to get their hands on the wealthy and sophisticated lands of Lotharingia.
When I first started writing this book I printed off a rough outline map of Western Europe and used a yellow marker-pen to highlight Lotharingia, roughly in the form it was when it first came into existence in AD 843. I then adjusted the map by removing the area below Lake Geneva for reasons explained earlier, and adding bits of the Rhine’s right bank, as these were also often seen as ‘loose’ from other nearby territory. After a brief and chaotic separate existence Lotharingia was absorbed into the Holy Roman Empire, but with never-quelled arguments from many of its inhabitants about the zone’s separate nature, and from France that this transfer was simply illegitimate.
I then drew on my map what was meant to be a threatening and acquisitive eye for each capital city, looking gloatingly at Lotharingia. As my drawing was so poor, the eye looked in each case like a man on a gate, a Chinese ideogram or a farm animal. In any event, the most important eye is always Paris: as rulers of France and descendants of Charlemagne, the French kings have always seen the lands in between as potentially part of France – this is argued and fought about with varying degrees of success well into the twentieth century. When Louis XIV razed to the ground Frederick Barbarossa’s old palace at Haguenau it was to eradicate any further claims of ‘Germandom’ to the area, but it was only one in any number of acts of eradicatory chauvinism and counter-chauvinism. A further complication for France is that the Duchy of Flanders in the original division of Charlemagne’s Empire was made part of ‘West Francia’, i.e. France, but its counts were often able to maintain a sort of semi-independence. Other eastern parts of Flanders and the territories to its north and east (Brabant, Holland, Gelderland, etc.) were definitely Lotharingian and therefore part of the Holy Roman Empire. But the main part of Flanders was different and vulnerable to Parisian interference – as were the territories to its south: Artois, Boulogne, and at some points in history all the way down to Amiens and the Somme River.
The second eye is London. The security of the coast across from Kent and Sussex has always been crucial. London interferes along the coast whenever it can and its politics can often be expressed by British or mainland exiles skipping back and forth across the Channel, either fleeing disaster or returning home. Friendly Flemish, Zeelandic and Holland ports were as important in the eleventh century as in the twentieth.
The third eye is Amsterdam. This city was founded very late by European standards, not acknowledged as a city until 1300. It has always pursued its own interests as a city state, although it has also always acknowledged that its security requires friendly provinces to the south and as many of them as possible. Other cities in the Netherlands have always relied on Amsterdam’s extraordinary resources, but often resentfully, and with a strong sense that Amsterdam would drop them the second they were no longer useful.
The fourth eye is Madrid. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, for almost quixotically unnecessary dynastic reasons, the Spanish owned large blocks of Lotharingia, from Holland down to the border with Switzerland. Their efforts to hold this territory, to defeat its unruly inhabitants and fend off other interested parties, generated much of European history until at last, in a welter of expiatory masses and great clouds of incense, they threw in the towel.
The fifth and last eye moves about in ways which wreck the metaphor – but it is broadly a German eye which could be based at some points in Frankfurt, where the Holy Roman Emperor was elected, or Aachen, where he was crowned King of the Germans to match the crowning of the King of the French in Rheims (he only officially became Emperor when crowned by the Pope). As the equally legitimate successor to Charlemagne, the Emperor/King had his own historical explanation for Lotharingia, seeing it all as uncontestably part of the Holy Roman Empire. The Emperor had many tasks, one of which was to defend the western borders against France, but he also had interests in Italy and in the east which frequently distracted him. The question of what did or did not belong to France and what to the Empire was central to everything through to the end of the eighteenth century and fuelled generation after generation of scholars-for-hire. From the point in the early seventeenth century when the Imperial capital becomes near permanent, it is probably fair to place the eye in Vienna. Post-Napoleon Berlin both ultimately inherits the western issue and fights major wars over it until 1945.
The other players are briefer and more minor. The Dukes of Burgundy (with no real capital to stick an eye on) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries come close to making much of Lotharingia into their own state and tread very carefully in the spaces between the rival French and German rulers. Bern is also concerned, but generally just for defensive reasons. Most of all however, it is the individual cities which are so important, many Imperial Free Cities within the Empire (Basle, Mulhouse, Aachen), ecclesiastical states which survived for many centuries (Liège, Cologne, Essen) and smaller but durable counties or duchies (Cleve, the Palatinate, Baden). Many of these places have at times been among the great glories of Europe but their wealthy self-sufficiency has meant that the eyes of the nearest major capitals have always viewed them with greed and rapacity.
* * *
In 1672 foresters were cutting down some immense old oaks just south of the Rhône near what is now Lyon–Saint-Exupéry Airport. To their consternation their axes hit something very odd and after carefully cutting round the obstruction they found a terrible medley of pieces of metal and human bone which had been dispersed through the trunk and branches as the tree had grown. It was worked out that they must be the remains of an armoured Burgundian soldier who had hidden inside a hollow and either become stuck or been killed there at the Battle of Anthon in 1430, an ambush by French troops which ended the attempt by Louis II, Prince of Orange, to invade the Dauphiné. His troops were massacred and Louis, badly wounded, dashed to freedom on horseback across the Rhône.
Just to warn the potential reader – this book is filled with a lot of this sort of stuff.
CHAPTER ONE
Ice-sheets to Asterix » The warlord » Bees and buckles » The rule of the saints » Rhinegold » The call of the oliphant
Ice-sheets to Asterix
Almost all of the course of human history in north-west Europe will for ever be a total mystery. We can assume that over thousands of years there were all kinds of heroics, inventions, serio-comic leadership failures, natural disasters and exciting vegetable breakthroughs but their nature will always be opaque. The last Neanderthals (their remains first discovered just outside Düsseldorf in the Neander valley) seem to have died out forty thousand years ago, perhaps destroyed by the ancestors of modern humans. Humans had to coexist with various appalling animals such as European leopards and cave-bears but these, like most humans, were chased away or made extinct by the last ice age, which reduced the region to a polar desert. With the gradual retreat of the ice eighteen thousand years ago a fairly familiar landscape emerged: water levels and temperatures rose and more humans drifted northwards.
The one huge and glaring difference was the hilariously named Doggerland, an area that filled most
of what is now the North Sea and into which the Thames, Rhine, Meuse, Seine and Scheldt all flowed as a single monster river, coming out into the sea in what is now the far west of the English Channel. This deeply confusing landscape, filled with the little columns of smoke from villages, wolves, huge deer and proto-oxen grunting and cavorting along the swampy banks of one of the world’s biggest rivers, was sadly swept away by rising sea levels and tsunamis by 6500 BC. In one of the most dramatic geological events in Europe’s history – which must, among other things, have made an astonishing noise – the last, twenty-mile-wide rock-and-mud plug tore loose and Britain became an island. Poor Doggerland was swept away and the English Channel was born, watched by relieved and appreciative groups of hunter-gatherers lucky enough to happen to be on higher ground in proto-Kent and proto-Pas-de-Calais.
For so much of Europe’s history it is impossible not to feel that the heavy lifting is being done elsewhere – by, for example, the north-east Asians resettling the whole of the Americas or, later, such epics as the Bornean settlement of Madagascar. These great ecological adventures are a striking contrast to the quite boring if necessary efforts of small groups of European humans to sort themselves out in a bleak, still tundral environment. There was also an increasingly embarrassing contrast with, for example, the Fertile Crescent, where animals and crops were being domesticated and things such as wheels and writing and cities were being invented. As tens of thousands laboured under a burning sun to build great ziggurats at the whim of gold-clad priests and kings, northern Europeans were still playing about with lumps of bear fat.
At some hard to isolate point in time, north-west Europe, while lacking the increasing sophistication of the eastern Mediterranean, became a far more complex society. The traditional images in museums of circular huts, a worryingly feeble defensive wall made out of something like rushes, a thin wisp of smoke from a central campfire, with everyone resignedly waiting for the Romans to invade and build sewers and proper roads, have long gone. A historian who studied Iron Age Europe once made a head-spinning point to me – that before the Roman invasion of Britain the English Channel would have been crowded with big, complex sailing ships packed with goods, but they would have been filled with sailors and merchants who were entirely illiterate. This is obvious after a few moments’ thought – but those few moments, for me at any rate, switched my brain onto different tracks. A highly complex mercantile and military civilization, using ships, systems of barter and drawing on raw and finished goods from all over north-west Europe did not need to write anything down. Indeed the entire course of human history did not, until a certain point, need writing at all. From the angle of our own script-obsessed culture it may be difficult not to feel a bit sorry for such people, with their peculiar gods, animal-pelt clothing and general impenetrability. But vast dramas of emigration, invention, fighting and building went on across many generations, leaving countless, almost entirely mysterious results which once had complex meanings.
