The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  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. Hard-pressed provincial governors had equally good reasons to turn a blind eye. By most accounts, local justice was an effective blend of psychological manipulation and force. In Pyrenean villages from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, claims were settled in a series of three meetings, at the first of which both parties had to remain silent. Cases rarely reached the third meeting. In Mandeure, near the Swiss border, when something had been stolen, a meeting was called on the main square. The two mayors held a stick at either end and the entire population of several hundred people would pass underneath to prove their innocence. No thief had ever dared to pass under the stick. ‘Had he done so, and was later found out . . . he would have been shunned like a wild animal and the dishonour would have redounded on his family.’

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  THESE LOCAL SYSTEMS of justice might explain the apparently bizarre fact that, according to some nineteenth-century criminal statistics, France had an almost entirely law-abiding population. Crime in some départements seemed to have died out altogether. Sometimes there were ‘white sessions’, when courts sat but heard no cases. In 1865, in the Aveyron département, where the Battle of Roquecezière took place, there were eight convictions for crimes against the person and thirteen for crimes against property. In the Cher département (population: 336,613), the figures were three and zero. Nationally, excluding Paris, the 1865 figures suggest that it took eighteen thousand people to produce one criminal.

  It does not take a cynic to suspect that most descriptions of village republics are a misty image of the truth. Thieves, murderers and rapists did, of course, exist. François Marlin had picked his waythrough too many dung-obstructed, priest-forsaken places not to be impressed by Salency, but its cleanliness and the absence of crime were the public face of a necessarily despotic government. The self-proclaimed virtue of the people of Salency must have wrecked the lives of many people – ‘foreigners’, homosexuals, ‘witches’ and, perhaps more than any other category of undesirable, unmarried mothers. About ten times as many illegitimate children were born in Paris than anywhere else, not because Parisians were more promiscuous but because girls who ‘sinned against modesty’ were often forced to leave their pays.

  Village justice was not always benign or fair. Slight deviations from the norm – a man or a woman who married a younger person or who married for a second time, anyone who married a stranger, a man who beat his wife or allowed himself to be beaten by her – was likely to be punished with a ‘charivari’: a noisy, humiliating and often bloody serenade or procession. According to an anthropologist, adulterers in Brittany were ‘the object of insulting vegetable bombardments’. A cart containing the victim would make the rounds of neighbouring villages, turning him into an object of ridicule throughout the known universe. Bad roads prevented produce from leaving the region, but they also prevented fear and envy from evaporating into a wider world.

  In the eyes of the educated minority, there was no real difference between village justice and mob rule. When a ‘witch’ was burned to death in 1835 at Beaumont-en-Cambrésis, in the industrial Nord department, with the collusion of the local authorities, it seemed as though the Middle Ages had never ended. But to people who lived their whole lives in a small town or village, French imperial justice could be just as shocking and incongruous as it was to the people of colonial North Africa.

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  The Tribes of France, II

  THE SENSE OF IDENTITY attached to these little pays was more potent than any later sense of being French. The paysans had no flags or written histories, but they expressed their local patriotism in much the same way as nations: by denigrating their neighbours and celebrating their own nobility.

  The vast and vulgar repertoire of village nicknames is the best surviving evidence of this sub-national pride. A few flattering names have been officially adopted, like Colombey-les-Belles – now said to refer to the local women but perhaps originally applied to cows. But if all the nicknames had been adopted, the map of France would now be covered with obscenities and incomprehensible jokes. In one small part of Lorraine, there were the ‘wolves’ of Lupcourt, whose local saint was Saint Loup, the ‘greencoats’ of Réméréville, whose tailor had once produced a batch of jackets in green cloth that never wore out, and the ‘big pockets’ of Saint-Remimont, whose tailor cut his coats much longer than anyone else. There were the ‘shit-arses’ (culs crottés) of Moncel-sur-Seille, whose mud was unusually clingy, the ‘hoity-toitys’ (haut-la-queue) of Art-sur-Meurthe, who lived near the big city of Nancy, and the ‘sleepers’ of Buissoncourt-en-France, who dug a mighty moat around their village and lived in happy seclusion behind a drawbridge.

  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 deliberatelyoffensive. 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

  Booyaî d’Senn’Colais,

  Tend tet ghieule quand je . . .4

  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):

  The suburb is called ‘Faubourg de Rome’. Its inhabitants, whose race, blood and physiognomy are indeed distinctive, claim to be descended from the Romans. Almost all are wine growers and remarkably strict in their morals, no doubt because of their origin, and perhaps too because of their victory over the Cottereaux and the Routiers,5 whom they exterminated in the plain of Charost in the twelfth century.

  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, afolklorist 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.

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  THESE 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.

  I was born a Collibert. This is the name that is given to a class of men who are born, live and die in their boats. They approach dry land only to sell their catch and to buy the bare necessities.

  We are a separate race and our origins go back to the first days of the world. When Julius Caesar appeared on the upper reaches of the Dive and the Sèvre, our ancestors, the Agesinates Cambolectri, who were allies of the Pictavi, occupied the territory that would later form part of Bas-Poitou and which is now known to everyone as the Vendée..

  The Roman conqueror, not daring to set foot in our forests, considered us defeated and passed on his way.

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

  To rid themselves of the earlier inhabitants, who still led a nomadic existence in their midst, they hunted them out of the Bocage and drove them back into the swamps along the Ocean, trapping them between dry land and the stormy sea. . . .

  We were given the name Collibert, which means ‘free head’. Having robbed us of our forests, our conquerors left us our freedom . . . Yet as they wandered on the shores and in the swamps, our fathers ever had before their eyes the land they had lost. This painful sight gave the sad Colliberts an implacable hatred for the human race. . . .

  Such is the race into which I was born. Our ways have not changed since the first days of our exile. As they were in the fourth century, so are they now, and our close marriages have perpetuated in almost all their purity the unhappy remains of the ancient Agesinates Cambolectri.

  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 tothe 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.

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  IF 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.

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  IT 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.