The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  ‘Happy as a corpse’ was a saying in the Alps. Visitors to villages in the Savoy Alps, the central Pyrenees, Alsace and Lorraine, and parts of the Massif Central were often horrified to find silent populations of cretins with hideous thyroid deformities. (The link between goitre and lack of iodine in the water was not widely recognized until the early nineteenth century.) The Alpine explorer Saussure, who asked in vain for directions in a village in the Aosta Valley when most of the villagers were out in the fields, imagined that ‘an evil spirit had turned the inhabitants of the unhappy village into dumb animals, leaving them with just enough human face to show that they had once been men’.

  The infirmity that seemed a curse to Saussure was a blessing to the natives. The birth of a cretinous baby was believed to bring good luck to the family. The idiot child would never have to work and would never have to leave home to earn money to pay the tax-collector. These hideous, creatures were already half-cured of life. Even the death of a normal child could be a consolation. If the baby had lived long enough to be baptized, or if a clever witch revived the corpse for an instant to sprinkle it with holy water, its soul would pray for the family in heaven.

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  LIKE THE FACE in the museum, these desperate situations seem to contradict the material improvements that typify many histories of the period. One reason is that nearly every autobiographical account of ordinary life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France comes from the early chapters of memoirs written by exceptional men who rose through the ranks of the army or the Church, who wrote their way to fame or who were plucked from obscurity by a patron, a lover or, eventually, an electorate. Few men and even fewer women had the means or the desire to write a book on ‘How I failed to overcome my humble origins’. Apart from the countless riches-to-riches tales written by aristocrats, almost all the lives that we know about follow the same untypical upward trend: the farmer’s son Restif de la Bretonne, the cutler’s son Diderot, the watchmaker’s son Rousseau, the Corsican cadet Napoleone Buonaparte.

  These spectacular successes are more typical of long-term trends than of individual lives. Categorical terms like ‘peasants’, ‘artisans’ and ‘the poor’ reduce the majority of the population to smudges in a crowd scene that no degree of magnification could resolve into a group of faces. They suggest a large and luckless contingent that filled in the background of important events and participated in the nation’s historical development by suffering and engaging in a semblance of economic activity.

  Even with a short-term view, these categories turn out to be misleading. Rich people could fall into poverty and peasants could be rich and powerful. Many peasants lived in towns and commuted to the fields. Many were also craftsmen, traders and local officials, just as many so-called aristocrats were semi-literate farmers. Statistics based on a mixture of surveys, censuses and guesswork give what seems a balanced view of the whole population. In 1789, three-quarters were described as ‘agricultural’. A century later, the agricultural population had fallen to about 48 percent, while 25 percent worked in industry, 14 percent in commerce and transport, 4 percent in public services and administration and 3 percent in the liberal professions, and 6 percent were independently wealthy. But for reasons that will become clear, these figures always exaggerate the tidy divisions of the population and underestimate the number of people who tried to live off the land.

  In the following scenes of daily life, and throughout the remainder of this part of the book, the people of France will gradually discover their own land, including real and imaginary domains that would never be charted by historians and administrators. But they should first be pictured in their unhistorical stillness, in the shadows of winter and the silence of towns and fields. Though nothing much will appear to happen in the next few pages, this is still just a brief glimpse of what for many people was half of human existence. The practical problem is that a social history in which the length of chapters matched the amount of time spent on each activity would be intolerably though accurately tedious. Ninety-nine per cent of all human activity described in this and other accounts took place between late spring and early autumn.

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  WHEN STARS AND PLANETS were still a noticeable source of illumination and cloudy, moonless nights were as black as abandoned coal mines, travellers at certain times of the year could take their bearings from fires lit on hilltops. From the Vosges to the Pyrenees and from the English Channel to the Alps, bonfires marked the two big moments of the calendar. In some parts, the fires were lit at Midsummer and at Christmas, in other parts during Carnival and Lent. These celebrations of what scholars called the solstice were associated with various magical effects, especially with the fertility of fields, animals and people. They became much less common in the mid-to late-nineteenth century, when they were replaced by fireworks and secular holidays like Bastille Day and the Saint-Napoléon, doused by incredulity, fire regulations and perhaps, above all, by the fact that the year was no longer clearly divided into two.

  For the millions of people who danced around the bonfires and scattered the ashes on their fields, the year consisted of twelve months and two seasons. There was the season of labour when even the longest days were too short, and the season of inactivity when time slowed to a crawl and seemed in danger of stopping altogether. As they said in the Alpine Queyras, ‘Seven months of winter [November to May], five months of hell [June to October]’. In the eastern Pyrenees, when snow was falling or when the rain had settled in, ‘men were as idle as marmots’. (The marmot is the large and floppy mountain rodent that sleeps in a burrow and was harvested rather than hunted, tossed into a rucksack and sometimes boiled while still asleep.) The man who compared his compatriots to marmots was writing in the 1880s, almost a century after the abolition of the monarchy but several decades before technology, in the form of roads, lighting and the amazing luxury of coal and gas heating, had undermined the tyranny of the weather.

  The tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. Mountain regions closed down in the late autumn. Entire Pyrenean villages of wood, like Barèges on the western side of the Col du Tourmalet, were abandoned to the snow and reclaimed from the avalanches in late spring. Other populations in the Alps and the Pyrenees simply entombed themselves until March or April, with a hay-loft above, a stable to one side and the mountain slope behind. According to a geographer writing in 1909, ‘the inhabitants re-emerge in spring, dishevelled and anaemic’. But hibernation was not peculiar to high altitudes. More temperate regions, too, retreated into a fortress of sleep. Idleness and torpor cast an eerie pall over the well-cultivated parts of the Berry, where seasonal variations are slight and the temperature rarely falls below freezing. George Sand’s normally phlegmatic husband felt ‘something like fear’ when he saw a tidy land that seemed to be farmed by ghosts. The fields of Flanders were deserted for much of the year. An official report on the Nièvre in 1844 described the strange mutation of the Burgundian day-labourer once the harvest was in and the vine stocks had been burned:

  After making the necessary repairs to their tools, these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.

  Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies. In the Nièvre, according to the diary of Jules Renard, ‘the peasant at home moves little more than the sloth’ (1889); ‘in winter, they pass their lives asleep, corked up like snails’ (1908). People trudged and dawdled, even in summer. They ate more slowly than modern people. Life expectancy at birth now seems depressingly low: in 1865, it was a few months over forty years in only twenty départements; in Paris and Finistère, it was under thirty; the national average was thirty-seven years two months. Life expectancy at five was fifty-one. Despite this, complaints about the brevity of life are far less common than complaints about its inordinate length. Slowness was not an attempt to savo
ur the moment. A ploughman who took hours to reach a field beyond the town was not necessarily admiring the effect of morning mist on the furrows and the steaming cattle against the rising sun, he was trying to make a small amount of strength last for the working day, like a cartload of manure spread over a large field.

  A visitor to a chateau in the country might see the sun rise earlier over the fields and the leafing of trees and the stirring of animals without noticing much difference in the world of human beings. After the Revolution, in Alsace and the Pas-de-Calais, officials complained that wine-growers and independent farmers, instead of undertaking ‘some peaceful and sedentary industry’ in the quieter seasons, ‘abandon themselves to dumb idleness’. Modern conveniences – in this case, more efficient ploughs – were blamed for turning the stout yeomanry of France into human vegetables. Income actually seemed to act as a deterrent. At Beaucaire on the lower Rhône, the biggest fair in Europe was held every summer from 22 July to 1 August. In those eleven days, the local people made enough money to spend the rest of the year in idleness while their vast, deserted fairground slowly fell to pieces around them: ‘For the remaining months, the Beaucairiens smoke, play cards, hunt and sleep.’

  These season-long siestas dismayed economists and bureaucrats who looked enviously at the industrial power-house of Britain. They were especially horrified by the troglodytic dwellings that seemed to embody the sleepiness of France. In the Dordogne, the Tarn, the Loire Valley and the limestone and sandstone belt that stretches from the Ardennes to Alsace, thousands of people lived in cliff faces like swallows or in caves and chalk pits like prehistoric tribes. Whole villages of troglodytes lined the banks of the Loire and its tributary the Loir. From Anjou to Poitou, thin columns of smoke rose from the fields like the plumes of Lilliputian volcanoes. Quarries were dug into vineyards and then excavated laterally beneath the vines. Some of these subterranean apartment blocks had several floors and were home to hundreds of people.

  In Arras and other towns in Flanders, up to one-third of the population – artisans as well as labourers – lived in underground cities carved into medieval quarries. These ‘boves’ (an old French word for ‘cavern’) were later used as sanctuaries, bomb-shelters, secret routes to the front in the First World War and eventually as candlelit restaurants and tourist attractions. Little is said or known today about their use as normal residential areas. People whose lives were not divided by the seasons found these living arrangements unproductive and lugubrious:

  The vital air is constantly contaminated by the breath of eight to ten individuals who are piled up there in a tiny dwelling for twelve to fifteen hours a day with only one air-hole between them.

  To the writer of this report in 1807, this bleary half-life was a sign of moral deficiency: the artisans of Arras were ‘not very enterprising’ and the day-labourers were ‘apathetic’. But the people who lived safely underground in the sleep-inducing gloom were trying to survive, not to promote economic growth. Many of them could afford to move house, but preferred to stay where the summers were cool and the winters warm. When the workers of Lille were moved by philanthropic reformers from their ‘unhygienic’ cellars, they found the long trek up six flights of stairs to their attic rooms as depressing as the descent to a dungeon.

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  MEN AND WOMEN who did almost nothing for a large part of the year tend not to figure prominently in history books. Studies and museums naturally highlight enterprise and undervalue the art of remaining idle for months on end. They make those parts of France where winter lasted longest appear to have been impressively busy. In the twenty-first century, ‘traditional’ low-season industries make a big contribution to many local economies. Handcrafted briar-wood pipes can be bought in the Jura, wooden toys in the Queyras, esparto sandals in the Basque Pyrenees, leather gloves in the Aveyron, knives in the Aubrac and clogs almost everywhere from Brittany to the Vosges.

  Some of these industries are practised today with an intensity and expertise that would have amazed the original craftsmen. It is not uncommon to find a flourishing potter or basket-weaver who left a well-paid job in Paris for a troglodyte’s cave in the provinces. Many ‘lost skills’ never existed in the first place and were never the basis of a thriving economy. In most of these regions, only a few people remained busy all year round. In the late 1900s, when Alpine tourists were creating a new market for wooden toys, the Queyras still had just a handful of toy-makers. Most felt safer cocooned in idleness. As the son of a Pyrenean peasant in the 1880s explained, ‘They had hardly any spirit of enterprise and were loath to make life more complicated when it was already hard enough to bear.’

  Economists who wondered at this waste of human capital ignored the fact that the impetus for trade was not usually a desire to amass wealth. Otherwise, a peasant who spent several days taking a basket of eggs to a distant market and who did not include time in the calculation of profit would have to be seen as a remarkably dull-witted businessman rather than someone who had learned to match his footsteps to the rhythm of life.

  Until the late nineteenth century, money itself was scarce in France and little used by people who owned no land and paid no tax. Apart from salt and iron, everything could be paid for in kind, and there was little reason to work more than was strictly necessary. Even though its workers were highly specialized and connected to an international network of buyers and retailers, the cottage clock-making industry in the Rhineland and the Alps was not just a forerunner of full-scale production: creating and tinkering with tiny mechanisms for six or seven months of the year made time pass less slowly. Some men and women simply found clock-making more appealing than endless games of cards. The clocks, moreover, proved that time was indeed passing. It may be no coincidence that some of the main clock-making regions were those where pagan festivals still marked the moment when, after a hundred days of darkness, the sun returned to the deepest valleys.

  A sensitive economic barometer might register these activities as contributions to the gross national product, but it would give a false impression of the producers’ mentality. In parts of the Auvergne, women got together in the evening, sometimes until after midnight, to sew and knit clothes that they sold to travelling merchants for a pittance. In a technical sense, this was a form of industrial enterprise, but the main reason for the sewing was not to create a surplus. The idea was simply to make enough money to pay for the lamp oil that allowed them to get together in the first place.

  Boredom was as powerful a force as economic need. It helps to explain so many aspects of daily life, at all times of the year, that it could form the basis of an academic discipline: cottage industries and hibernation, bizarre beliefs and legends, sexual experiment, local politics, migration and even social aspiration. In small, suspicious communities where neighbour competed with neighbour, boredom was one of the main elements of social cohesion. It brought people together and counteracted the effects of poverty and class rivalry. Even in the insanely energetic universe of Balzac’s novels, boredom is one of the great guiding principles of French society, from the gilded tedium of Paris apartments to the cloistral silence of provincial towns:

  Life and movement are so quiet there that a stranger might have thought those houses uninhabited had his eyes not suddenly met the pale, cold expression of a motionless figure whose half-monastic face leaned over the window-sill at the sound of an unknown step.

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  TWO MONTHS BEFORE the fall of the Bastille, in the quiet towns of Balzac’s Touraine and in the black basalt hovels where the women of the Auvergne sewed to keep the lamps alight, there was, for once, a new topic of conversation. A rare conjunction of historical time and daily life had occurred. On 5 May 1789, at a meeting of the States-General,13 the towns and parishes of France were invited to list their grievances. The very idea that it might be possible to alter the conditions of life was a revolution in itself. For the first time, suffering seemed to have an audience and literacy had a point.

  The sixty thou
sand or so ‘Cahiers de Doléances’ were, of course, written by literate or semi-literate people, often by the local lawyer. Crudely drafted lists of grievances were passed to larger committees who prepared more politely abstract reports for the States-General. But enough of the humbler Cahiers have survived to construct a detailed panorama of daily life in France.

  Most of the Cahiers list the same grievances: taxation, the corvée (road-repairing duty), impassable roads and broken bridges, hospitals that no one could reach though they paid for them in taxes, the billeting of troops and their hungry horses, lack of representation and arbitrary or unaffordable justice, ineffective policing, the proliferation of con men, uncertified surgeons and beggars – either local people who were starving to death or aggressive intruders – and, of course, ecclesiastical and seigneurial privilege. Hunting rights were the sorest point: to see a furry feast scampering across a field and to know that catching it might mean death by hanging was more than a hungry peasant could bear. If the local lord spent all his time in a city or was not very keen on hunting, the area might be overrun by deer, boars, hares, rabbits and pigeons. To many foreign travellers, the characteristic sound of the French Revolution was the constant crepitation of muskets in the countryside exterminating the animals that had once enjoyed aristocratic immunity.

  In the Cahiers that were drafted by small parish committees, one complaint dominates all the others: 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. Many towns and villages described their predicament as though they were island states cut off from the outside world.