The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

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  IT WAS UNFORTUNATE for his reputation in France that Arthur Young happened to choose the Château de Combourg in Brittany as a prime example of ignorance and waste. He could not have known that the boy who grew up in the castle towers would become one of France’s greatest Romantic writers, François-René de Chateaubriand:

  SEPTEMBER 1 [1788]. To Combourg. The country has a savage aspect; husbandry not much further advanced, at least in skill, than among the Hurons, which appears incredible amidst enclosures; the people almost as wild as their country, and their town of Combourg one of the most brutal filthy places that can be seen; mud houses, no windows, and a pavement so broken as to impede all passengers, but ease none – yet here is a chateau, and inhabited; who is this Monsieur de Chateaubriant, the owner, that has nerves strung for a residence amidst such filth and poverty?

  Years later, Chateaubriand commented on this passage in his memoirs: ‘This M. de Chateaubriand was my father. The retreat that seemed so hideous to the ill-tempered agronomist was a fine and noble dwelling, albeit dark and solemn.’ He said nothing, however, about Young’s description of the town.

  This was not just a matter of personal pride. The underlying problem was that France, like other countries, came to be judged by the degree to which it met the standards of the middle class. It was as if the nation could have no adult identity until it cleaned its streets and citizens and enjoyed the benefits of international trade. Until then, the masses would be more vegetable than human:

  Each family is almost self-sufficient, producing on its own plot of land the greater part of its requirements, and thus providing itself with the necessaries of life through an interchange with nature rather than by means of intercourse with society. [. . .] The great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of like entities, much as a sack of potatoes consists of a lot of potatoes huddled into a sack. (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Napoléon)

  Arthur Young was a perceptive man with good, practical knowledge of his subject. On the castle lawn at Nangis, he showed the Marquis de Guerchy how to make a proper haystack. His faults were those of most observers, both French and foreign, who mistook the obscure logic of daily life for ignorance and exaggerated the plight of the common people in order to show how much they had to gain from civilization. They observed, without always knowing what they saw.

  Wealthy men from northern cities pitied the half of France where the prehistoric plough was little better than a hoe – but indispensable on thin and rocky ground. They pitied the huddled masses whose windows were holes in the wall or panes of oil-soaked paper – though many in the warmer south felt no need of glass and spared themselves the cost of window tax and wafery panes that were shattered by wind and hail. They patronized the toothless, stunted peasants of the ‘Chestnut Belt’ who preferred the meaty fruit of their useful forests to the tasteless, warty potato, and who lived in smoky hovels, cheek by jowl with livestock – who provided them with companionship and warmth. They felt a sense of patriotic shame when they saw their compatriots carrying their shoes on a string around their neck on the way to church or market, and ploughmen who preferred the supple leather of bare feet to the abrasive weight of a mud-caked clog.

  This was simplicity rather than deprivation, and even a kind of inoculation against true poverty. Most people lived in prudent anticipation of misfortune. Sayings of the ‘knowing my luck’ variety warned against the folly of trying too hard and expecting too much:

  ‘No fine day without a cloud.’

  ‘If the he-wolf doesn’t get you, the she-wolf will.’

  ‘Weeds never die.’

  (Vosges)

  ‘Illness comes on horseback and leaves on foot.’

  (Flanders)

  ‘Poor people’s bread always burns in the oven.’

  ‘When you’ve made a good soup, the Devil comes and shits in it.’

  (Franche-Comté)

  ‘If only God was a decent man.’

  (Auvergne)

  Compared to the moral marquetry of Parisian epigrammatists, these proverbs are rough-hewn blocks, but they express the experience of a whole nation, not just the neuroses of a tiny elite. Even the elite was not immune from the Devil’s tricks. Two years after Arthur Young’s last tour of France, one summer night in 1791, a large green coach trundled out of Paris by the eastern gate. It was carrying a valet who called himself M. Durand, some women and children and an extraordinary amount of luggage. After a night and a day, it reached the little town of Sainte-Menehould on the edge of the Argonne forest. While the horses were being changed, the postmaster’s son peered through the window at the occupants of the carriage. Then he looked at the coin in his hand and recognized the face. Twenty miles further on, at Varennes, the coach was stopped and the royal family was escorted back to Paris.

  The meteoric fall of King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette came to be seen as a horrible exception in French history. Their little son, the Dauphin, was imprisoned in the Temple in Paris, mistreated by his jailers and died in wretched obscurity. Yet the tale of his martyrdom became a national myth, not because it was so out of the ordinary but because it expressed a common fear and a common reality. Anyone, even a royal prince, could be reduced to prison rations and wiped from the face of the earth.

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  AS LONG AS HISTORIANS were unwilling to sacrifice the grand view from Paris for the humbler horizons of their native town or village, the mystery would remain unsolved and, for that matter, unnoticed: how, in these conditions, did a society that was recognizably French survive and, eventually, prosper? Perhaps the question should have been: did it survive, or is the continuity of French society – rather than Breton, Burgundian, Mediterranean or Alpine society – a historical illusion?

  Even ignoring the tribal loyalties of the population, their different languages and the continental size of the land, the political basis of the union was remarkably fragile. Civil order broke down altogether in the west of France during the Revolution, in parts of Provence during the 1832–35 cholera epidemic and in Paris itself at almost regular intervals. Lyon rebelled in 1831 and 1834 and had to be subdued by government troops. In 1841, a census created rumours that everything from furniture to unborn babies was to be taxed. Riots ensued, and for several weeks large parts of the country from Lille to Toulouse were out of control. In 1871, Paris became a separate people’s republic and the country was governed from Bordeaux while seven other cities declared their independence.

  The Revolution itself was not a storm that came and went but an earthquake that followed long-established fault-lines. In 1793, when the nation was in danger of collapsing into anarchy, the cities of Arras, Brest, Lyon, Marseille and Nantes had to be recaptured by the republican army and were treated as rebel colonies:

  DECREE OF THE NATIONAL CONVENTION

  [Paris, 12 October 1793]

  The city of Lyon shall be destroyed. . . .

  . . . The collection of dwellings remaining in existence shall henceforth be called Ville-Affranchie [Freed-Town].

  There shall be erected above the ruins of Lyon a column announcing to posterity the crime and punishment of that city and bearing the inscription,

  ‘Lyon made war on liberty. Lyon no longer exists.’

  The nation’s most successful foreign ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte, did not see ‘France’ as a foregone conclusion. When he crossed the country as a prisoner of the Allies in 1814, he was cheered as far as Nevers, booed at Moulins, cheered again at Lyon and almost lynched in Provence, where he disguised himself as an English lord and then as an Austrian officer. In Napoleon’s view, the restored king, Louis XVII I, should rule the country as a conquering despot, ‘or he’ll never be able to do anything with it’. Something called French society might have existed, but its features are hard to distinguish in the history of the state.

  A more convincing definition of French identity might be found by settling in a French town or village when it comes to life again in sp
ring, watching the comings and goings of the people and listening to their conversations.

  At first, the process of selecting a particular place would only emphasize the confusion. Rural France can be divided roughly into three zones: the open-field country of the north and north-west where cultivated strips of land radiate from the compact village; the patchwork bocage of the west and centre, where the fields are enclosed by hedges and paths; and the stony tracts and sparse settlements of the south and south-east. But within each zone, there are many different shapes of town and village. It might be a winegrowing town like Riquewihr in Alsace, walled in by its vineyards and hoarding shade for its cellars; a Provençal village like Bédoin, curled up like an ear against the shock-wave of the mistral; or a ‘street village’ like Aliermont, whose houses line the former main road from Neufchâtel to Dieppe for ten miles to catch the passing trade like fishermen on a riverbank. If the settler had time to become acquainted with the peculiar geometry of the place, he might choose one of the silent outposts of the Beauce, a patch of brown roof tiles in the plain, where farmyards alternate with houses and sudden glimpses of vast fields beyond; or even one of the scattered colonies of the Forez and the eastern Auvergne, where the separate parts of the village seem to have sprouted in ancient forest clearings and are still more closely tied to the field at the door than to the arbitrary church and indifferent town hall.

  These various types of settlement imply different, but not profoundly different, ways of life. All are moulded by the immediate countryside and only marginally by their nearest trading partners. Many still have a defensive air, though their sphere of activity now extends far beyond what were once the concentric rings of the customs barriers, the perimeter zone of gardens and cornfields and the forested horizon. Today, the only traces of defence, apart from restored town gates and fortifications, are barking dogs, speed-bumps and signs asking drivers not to kill the local children. Nearly all these places have become porous and suburban. Between seven and nine o’clock, Aliermont is emptied out by Dieppe and the local engineering factory; the tourist ‘Route des Vins’ on which Riquewihr stands is thick with traffic bound for Colmar and Mulhouse; Bédoin’s schoolchildren migrate for the day to Carpentras on a high-speed coach that tears along the back roads. Two centuries ago, most of the traffic came from the other direction, on market days, with tiny loads of vegetables or fuel, an animal to sell and a thirst for news and gossip. The morning rush-hour began before dawn. At Mars-la-Tour, on the road to Metz, Arthur Young heard the village herdsman sound his horn at four in the morning, ‘and it was droll to see every door vomiting out its hogs or sheep, and some a few goats, the flock collecting as it advances’.

  Whenever he saw the swarms of market-goers entering a town with their ‘trifling burthens’ – a basket of apples, a tray of grubby cheeses or a lone cabbage – Arthur Young knew that he was looking at the effects of the national disease: ‘a minute and vicious division of the soil’. Yet this fragmentation of the land was also its unifying feature. Even after the Revolution had taught these tiny worlds that they belonged to the same fatherland, this ‘vicious division of the soil’ might prove to be their salvation.

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  PERHAPS THE BEST PLACE in which to observe the effects of fragmentation – because the creator of the place intended it to be typical – would be a small market town on the eastern borders of Normandy. Yonville-l’Abbaye, in Gustave Flaubert’s novel of ‘provincial life’, Madame Bovary, lies along its little river ‘like a cowherd taking a siesta’. It has a tiny conurbation of thatched cottages and courtyards cluttered with cider presses, cart sheds and straggly fruit trees. The town centre has a smithy, a wheelwright’s workshop, a white house with a circle of lawn (‘this is the notary’s house, the finest in the pays’), a musty church, a town hall ‘designed by a Paris architect’, a tiled roof on pillars that serves as a market hall, the Golden Lion inn and a few shops. The draper and the chemist have pretensions to elegance; the other businesses are probably little more than workshops and doorsteps.

  The new doctor lives in ‘one of the most comfortable houses in Yonville’: it has its own wash-house, a kitchen with a pantry, a sitting room, an apple loft and an arbour at the foot of the garden. The person who designed this remarkable residence was a Polish doctor with ‘extravagant’ ideas who ran away and was never seen again. The new doctor’s wife, Emma Bovary, is the granddaughter of a shepherd and the daughter of a farmer, but her convent education has given her ideas above her station and she finds the house small and depressing.

  Since 1835, Yonville has been joined to the outside world by a road. Carters who ply the route from the port of Rouen to Flanders sometimes use it as a short cut. There is even a daily coach to Rouen – a ‘yellow trunk’ slung on huge wheels that spoil the view and spatter the passengers with mud. The driver of ‘L’Hirondelle’ (‘The Swallow’) supplements his wages by running a rudimentary freight service from the city: he brings rolls of leather for the cobbler, hats for the draper, iron for the blacksmith and herrings for his mistress. Despite these signs of progress, the town is still a willing prisoner of its setting. It lies between arable land and pasture,

  [but] instead of improving the ploughland, they cling to the pasture, however depreciated its value, and the lazy little town has turned its back on the plain and continued its natural growth towards the river.

  A progressive bourgeois like the town chemist, M. Homais, who is not directly dependent on the land, can afford to revel in the stupidity of peasants: ‘Would to heaven our farmers were trained chemists or at least lent a more attentive ear to the counsels of science!’ But improving land is expensive and animals are a comfort. A peasant might invest in fertilizer and increase the yield of grain, but why should she risk her livelihood in a volatile market? Grain prices are even less reliable than the weather. A pig in the paddock is worth more than the promise of a merchant in the city.

  Only people who have more than one source of food would use the expression ‘stuck in their ways’ as an insult. The smallholders of Yonville had good reason to be cautious. At about the time when the novel takes place, in the little market town of Ry, which Flaubert appears to have used as a model for Yonville-l’Abbaye, a woman complained to the authorities that she and her children were starving to death.

  If Yonville or Ry had been better connected to the city of Rouen, which in turn was connected by the river Seine to Paris and the Channel ports, they would have suffered more from shortages and unrest. In troubled times, towns and villages that lay within the supply zone of cities were sucked dry by military commissioners and the civilian population. Agricultural progress might create a surplus and encourage investment, but it could also create excessive demand and a transport network that could quickly pump out the region’s produce. Wheat growers and wine growers were more worldly but also more vulnerable to change. In the poorer parts of southern France, where the staple crop, the chestnut, was expensive to transport and not much in demand, winter supplies remained safely in the region. Townships in isolated areas like the Gâtine in Poitou were not as idiotic as they seemed to government officials when they came to rebuild their infrastructure after the Revolution and found that, ‘as soon as a bourgade [a large village] and even a town felt itself under threat, it destroyed all its bridges’.

  Until the advent of the railways, economic isolation was both a weakness and a strength. The fragmented, tribal state of the country allowed it to survive its partial, periodic disintegration. Flaubert himself lived in a grand house in Croisset by the banks of the Seine, three miles downstream from Rouen. Croisset lay on one of the major highways of European history. It had seen Christian missionaries, Viking invaders and Norman pirates. It saw the ship that returned Napoleon’s ashes to France in 1840. From his riverside pavilion, Flaubert could watch tourist boats on the Seine and the steamships and barges bound for Paris and Le Havre. And one day in the winter of 1870, he saw ‘the spike of a Prussian helmet glittering in the sun o
n the towpath at Croisset’. For a month and a half, Prussian soldiers occupied his house, drank his wine and read his books. For Flaubert, the Franco-Prussian War was a personal and financial disaster. He ended his life almost bankrupt, having lent most of his inheritance to the husband of his niece, a Rouen timber importer whose business suffered badly from the war.

  Meanwhile, in the little town of Ry, life went on much the same as before. By the time Flaubert’s home was invaded by Prussians, Ry had a post office, a small cotton mill and a bureau de bienfaisance for distributing alms to the poor. It even had a ‘Rural Institution’, founded by the local chemist, M. Jouanne, where local children were taught the rudiments of agriculture: ‘The man of the fields knows nothing of the composition of fertilizer’, declared M. Jouanne in a progressive social science journal. ‘The most elementary notions of agricultural physics and chemistry are completely foreign to him.’ But progress would leave the little town in peace. There would always be people like the old peasant woman in Madame Bovary who could look back on more than half a century’s service on the same farm and whose idea of a wise investment was giving money to the curé to say masses for her soul.

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  NOW THAT MANY small communities are trying to protect themselves from the effects of global trade and economic migration, there is nothing obviously implausible about the idea that France was held together by the ant-like activity of smallholders rather than by the grand schemes of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I I I or François Mitterrand. Long before the lofty reclamation projects of the Second Empire (p. 268), the land was being cleared and colonized, step by step, by the majority of the population who lived as farmers, sharecroppers, hired hands and gleaners.