The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  The millions of people who seemed so stubbornly inefficient to administrators were engaged in the mysterious activity known as ‘muddling through’. The closest economic term is probably ‘cross-subsidizing’. Few people, apart from blacksmiths, could earn a living from just one trade. A farmer might own a plot of land but also work as a day-labourer for someone else. A wine grower might also be a weaver. In the Alps, a single peasant, working on small plots at different altitudes at different times of year, could be a market gardener, a fruit farmer, a wine grower, a sheep farmer, a timber merchant and a dealer in hides and horns. Shepherds and shepherdesses had time for all sorts of other industries: making cheese (as some still do), weaving straw hats, knitting clothes, carving wood, hunting, smuggling, dog-breeding, searching for precious stones, serving as a guide to soldiers, explorers and tourists, making up songs and stories, playing musical instruments (which ‘amuses the sheep and keeps away the wolves’) and, like Joan of Arc and Bernadette of Lourdes, acting as messengers between this world and the next.

  Every town and village was a living encyclopedia of crafts and trades. In 1886, most of the eight hundred and twenty-four inhabitants of the little town of Saint-Étienne-d’Orthe, on a low hill near the river Adour, were farmers and their dependents. Of the active population of two hundred and eleven, sixty-two had another trade: there were thirty-three seamstresses and weavers, six carpenters, five fishermen, four innkeepers, three cobblers, two shepherds, two blacksmiths, two millers, two masons, one baker, one rempailleur (upholsterer or chair-bottomer) and one witch (potentially useful in the absence of a doctor), but no butcher and no storekeeper other than two grocers. In addition to the local industries and the services provided by itinerant traders (see p. 146), most places also had snake collectors, rat catchers with trained ferrets and mole catchers who either set traps or lay in wait with a spade. There were rebilhous, who called out the hours of the night, ‘cinderellas’, who collected and sold ashes used for laundering clothes, men called tétaïres, who performed the function of a breast-pump by sucking mothers’ breasts to start the flow of milk, and all the other specialists that the census listed under ‘trades unknown’ and ‘without trade’, which usually meant gypsies, prostitutes and beggars..

  As the Breton peasant Déguignet discovered to other people’s cost, begging was a profession in its own right. Beggar women sold their silence to respectable people by making lewd and compromising remarks about them in the street. They borrowed children who were diseased or deformed. They manufactured realistic sores from egg yolk and dried blood, working the yolk into a scratch to produce the full crusty effect. A judge at Rennes in 1787 reported ‘a bogus old man with a fake hump and a club foot, another man who succeeded in blacking out one eye to give a terrible, dramatic impression of blindness, and yet another who could mimic all the symptoms of epilepsy. ‘Idle beggar’ was a contradiction in terms. As Déguignet insisted in his memoirs, it was no simple task to hide behind a hedgerow and to fabricate a stump or ‘a hideously swollen leg covered with rotten flesh’.

  These rustic trades were also found in cities. In the 1850s, one of the first amateur anthropologists of Paris, the Caribbean writer Privat d’Anglemont, set out to explain how seventy thousand Parisians began the day without knowing how they would survive ‘and yet somehow end up managing to eat, more or less’. The result was a valuable compendium of little-known trades. He found a man who bred maggots for anglers by collecting dead cats and dogs in his attic, women who worked as human alarm clocks (a speedy woman in a densely populated quartier could serve up to twenty clients), ‘guardian angels’ who were paid by restaurants to guide their drunken clients home, a former bear-hunter from the Pyrenees who exterminated cats, and a goatherd from the Limousin who kept a herd of goats on the fifth floor of a tenement in the Latin Quarter.

  Once people were asked to define their profession on a birth certificate or a census form, they began to look like members of an organized, efficient population, highly specialized and distributing their efforts according to need. But this would have implied a degree of economic cohesion that barely existed before the First World War. The proliferation of trades could indicate a thriving market town, but it could also indicate a need to produce everything locally and an inability to pay tax except by selling manufactured goods. Large-scale industry was confined to a few regions and coal-blackened valleys (see p. 265). Until the late nineteenth century, French travellers who saw the hellish industrial conurbations of Britain felt that they were travelling on a different planet. Most factories in mid-nineteenth-century France were run by families, most ironworks were located in villages, and most textile manufacture was manual. Even in the 1860s, craftsmen outnumbered factory workers by about three to one.

  The truth is more chaotic than the census forms suggest. ‘Muddling through’ involved a great deal of bungling, improvisation, bluffing and deceit. A history teacher who explored his own département, the Aveyron, in 1799, found that the art of the potter was still ‘in its infancy’. People wove cloth but could barely be described as weavers. Builders were jacks-of-all-trades who were good at nothing. There were carpenters who had never seen a rasp or a mortise chisel, blacksmiths who hobbled mules with heavy shoes and who tried to mend clocks, shepherds who marked their sheep with indelible tar, and cooks whose only recipe was salt, spices and as much meat as possible.

  These trades, like most farm labours, were not practised at the rhythm of a production line. Deadlines were imposed by daylight and the seasons. At harvest time, a field hand might work for fifteen hours a day, but eight hours or less at other times. In the Indre, during the growing season, the fields were busy from six in the morning until seven at night, but empty for three hours in the middle of the day. Siestas were not peculiar to the sunny south. Relentless hard work was rare and, for most people, to judge by their diets (see p. 297), physically impossible.

  A calendar of weeks, months and years was not a prison wall with tiny windows of relief. Farm work usually took up no more than two hundred days a year. Factory workers rarely worked more than two hundred and sixty days. A typical year included several religious holidays (Holy Week, Easter Week, Midsummer Day, All Saints’ Day, Christmas, New Year and three days of carnival), an annual pilgrimage-picnic, the local saint’s ‘day’, which could last for several days, the saint’s day of the neighbouring village, markets and fairs about once a week and a dozen or so family get-togethers. In most parts of France, according to superstition, Friday was the day when it was safer to do nothing: starting the harvest or a new building, doing business, sowing seed, slaughtering a pig, adding a new animal to the herd, cleaning a stable, digging a grave, changing sheets, washing clothes, baking, leaving on a journey, laughing or giving birth – doing any of these on a Friday was asking for trouble. The shirt that was laundered on a Friday would become a shroud. Sunday, of course, was a day of complete rest. If a man went fishing on a Sunday, his children might be born with the heads of fish.

  A rhyme heard at Matignon in Brittany suggests that, with the right combination of excuses and at the right time of year, the entire working week could vanish like a thief:

  Lundi et mardi, fête;

  Monday, Tuesday: holiday;

  Mercredi, je n’pourrai y être;

  Wednesday, I can’t be there;

  Jeudi, l’jour Saint-Thomas;

  Thursday is St Thomas’ day;

  Vendredi, je n’y serai pas;

  Friday too I’ll stay away;

  Samedi, la foire à Plénée:

  Saturday is the Plénée fair,

  Et v’là toute ma pauv’ semaine passée!

  And that’s the whole week gone!

  *

  TO THE INHABITANTS of a particular pays, much of this book would have sounded like a history of the world in which their village happened to make a fleeting appearance. But if an inhabitant of the twenty-first century were deposited in a certain pays at a particular time before the First World War,
he might experience the same disorientation.

  A modern traveller who sat down to rest on the edge of a field and woke up two hundred years ago would see a very similar landscape, apparently suffering from long neglect. The crops would be shorter, cluttered with stubble and weeds, and busy with birds and insects. The road would be a rutted track between ditches, roughly aimed at the nearest steeple but hard to distinguish from all the other tracks that wandered across the fields. There would be fewer tidy parallelograms of forest and a more chaotic arrangement of hedges, ponds and hamlets. The scene might suggest a housekeeper’s attention to small spaces and a greater vulnerability to the elements. Without the large-scale geometry of water towers, silos, power lines and vapour trails, human habitation would seem to cower in the landscape.

  The lone tractor would be replaced by earth-coloured figures working at the rhythm of a herd. On closer inspection, the human machines would seem to be in a poor state of repair. Guessing their age would be impossible. In the mid-nineteenth century, over a quarter of the young men who stood naked in front of military recruitment boards were found to be unfit for service because of ‘infirmity’, which included ‘weak constitution’, a useless or missing limb, partial blindness and eye disease, hernias and genital complaints, deafness, goitre, scrofula and respiratory and chest complaints. In a typical contingent of two hundred and thirty thousand, about one thousand were found to be mentally defective or insane, two thousand were hunchbacks and almost three thousand had bow legs or club feet. A further 5 per cent were too short (under five feet), and about 4 per cent suffered from unspecified complaints which probably included dysentery and virulent infestations of lice. For obvious reasons, people suffering from infectious diseases were not examined and do not appear in the figures.

  This was the healthiest section of the population – young men in their early twenties. The physical condition of everyone else might give the traveller serious doubts about information culled from books, museums and paintings – even if the painters belonged to the Realist school. Jean-François Millet’s ‘Sower’ is an Olympian athlete and his ‘Man with a Hoe’, slumped over his tool, is tired rather than incapacitated. Jules Breton’s working women all have well-turned ankles, shapely breasts and laundered skirts. Gustave Courbet’s beautifully tattered ‘Stone-Breakers’ have not been blinded by chips of stone, their joints have survived the hours of jarring blows and they work in a dust-free environment. Painted peasants are nearly always up to the task. There are no crippled ploughmen, no puny blacksmiths and no myopic seamstresses. Naturally, the stench of sweat and wet wool, of cheese and rotting cabbage, is also missing, as is the whole topography of fresh and fetid odours that allowed a blind man to find his way to the nearest village and to know when he wandered from his pays.

  At first sight, the figures in the field are more impressive than the figures in the paintings. They have hips that can push against the haunches of a cow, and arms and neck muscles that can carry seventy or eighty pounds. (In the Alps, it was said that two women could carry the load of one mule.) But their sturdiness is deceptive. This is strength born of habit and the repetition of a small number of gestures. The faces tell a different tale. If one of the living figures turned around, the traveller might find himself looking at what Lieutenant-Colonel Pinkney unkindly called ‘a Venus with the face of an old monkey’.

  To judge by the reactions of contemporary travellers, the biggest surprise would be the preponderance of women in the fields. Until the mid- to late-nineteenth century, almost everywhere in France, apart from the Provençal coast (but not the hinterland), the northeast and a narrow region from Poitou to Burgundy, at least half the people working in the open air were women. In many parts, women appeared to do the lion’s share of the work.

  This simple fact was soon erased from histories of France by writers who either never saw the countryside or thought it futile to make distinctions between the potatoes in a sack (p. 91). From the Loire Valley to the Alps and Corsica, women ploughed, sowed, reaped, winnowed, threshed, gleaned and gathered firewood, tended the animals, baked bread, fed it to the men and children, kept house (‘badly’, according to a report on southern Normandy in 1802) and gave birth to more hungry mouths. Housekeeping was the least of their labours. Significantly, it was mainly in Provence, where a greater number of women worked as housewives, that houses were haunted by nimble spirits that did the washing up, made the beds and emptied the chamber pots.14 The spirit world left outdoor work to humans. All along the Atlantic coast, women were seen ploughing the fields, slaughtering animals and sawing wood while the men stretched out on piles of heather in the sun. In the Auvergne, in order to clear the snow, milk the cows, feed the pig, fetch the water, make the cheese, peel and boil the chestnuts and spin the cloth, women rose earlier and went to bed later than men.

  Some tasks, like fetching water, were considered exclusively female. Very little was considered exclusively male. At Granville on the Cotentin peninsula, women fished, repaired boats and worked as stevedores and carpenters. In the Alps, they were yoked to asses and hitched to ploughs, and sometimes lent to other farmers. Before the snow had melted, they could be seen scattering black earth on the snow to hasten the thaw, and lugging baskets of soil up to fields so steep that the animals sometimes toppled over in a strong wind.

  The report on southern Normandy cruelly suggested that women were treated as beasts of burden because hard work had robbed them of their beauty: a sun-baked, arthritic creature was hardly an ornament and might as well be put to work. In parts like the southern Auvergne, where society was patriarchal, women seemed to belong to a different caste. Tribal justice has left little trace in official records, but anecdotal evidence suggests that a woman born in the Velay, the Vivarais or the Gévaudan was more likely than women elsewhere to be beaten and raped with impunity, and more likely to be sold into marital slavery for the sake of consolidating farmland. Further north, women’s status was reflected in terms of address – the husband called his animals, children and wife ‘tu’, while she addressed him formally as ‘vous’. In many parts, while guns were fired and church bells tolled for the birth of a baby boy, the appearance of a girl was considered an embarrassing non-event.

  Hundreds of misogynistic proverbs from all parts of France seemed to confirm the impression that this was a barbaric society of sarcastic, sponging bullies:

  ‘Oats to goats and wine to women is wasted wealth.’

  (Vosges)

  ‘Marry your daughter far away and keep your dung heap close to home.’

  (Vexin, Normandy)

  ‘A dead wife, a living horse, a wealthy man.’

  (Brittany)

  ‘A man has but two good days in life:

  The day of his wedding and the day he buries his wife.’

  (Provence, Languedoc, Gascony, Basque Country)

  No female equivalents of those misogynistic sayings have survived. However, given the fact that nearly all of them were recorded by men, this is hardly surprising. And there are other proverbs that imply a certain unease at female solidarity: ‘At the well, the mill, the oven and the wash-house, women leave nothing unsaid’; ‘When a woman comes back from the stream [where the laundry is done], she could eat her man alive.’

  Any of those women in the fields might have explained that none of this exactly matched the truth. The women worked because the men were in the high summer pastures, or out at sea, or on a seven-month tour of France, selling trinkets from a wicker basket. When the men returned to the harbour or the mountains, the women were naturally in charge. They organized the farm, repaired the buildings, negotiated with landowners and officials and struck deals with traders. Often, the women were the first to migrate to the city or the plain, and the first to create an industrial economy by selling their wares to travelling merchants. Many of them had no particular reason to wait for the men’s return. Women in France are still automatically associated, in magazines, advertisements and casual conversation, with husband
s and children. Yet nineteenth-century censuses show that over a third of all women were single, and that 12 per cent of women over fifty had never married.

  The casual use of ‘les hommes’ to refer to the whole population is blatantly inappropriate. It is no exaggeration to say that the predominantly rural economy of France was supported and to a large extent run by women. This might explain why, despite earning half a man’s wages for the same work, women in France were often thought to have too much power and why the anti-feminist reforms of Napoleon and the Restoration government were so draconian. The Code Civil of 1804 denied married women the right to control their own property. The Code Pénal of 1811 effectively made a wife’s adultery an excuse for murder. Not surprisingly, many working women never married their partner and many communities took a lenient view of pre-marital sex. ‘No house was ever shamed by a girl who let her skirts be lifted.’ (Savoy)

  Misinterpretations were inevitable. Bourgeois observers saw dungy creatures grubbing in fields with their bottoms higher than their heads and, blind to the beauty of robustness, compared them to their own upright, fragrant wives. They found it odd that courting couples expressed affection by punching and throwing stones at one another, and they would have laughed at their terms of endearment. In a rare surviving love note, written on a postcard in the 1900s in almost indecipherable spelling, a Vendée peasant told his fiancée, ‘You’re so fresh and lovely the only thing I can compare you to is fields of young cabbages before the caterpillars have got to them.’15

  Patriotic observers blamed the apparent mistreatment of women on foreign influences, just as many people in France today imagine that most violence against women is perpetrated by immigrants. In everything they saw, they were hampered by ignorance of daily life in their own land. If Breton women stood while their husbands ate, it was not because they were slaves but because buckwheat crêpes make an even more dismal meal when deposited all at once on the table. And if women spent the evenings working together in a barn, it was not because they were segregated but because they preferred each other’s company and efficiency. According to the Breton writer Pierre-Jakez Hélias, who grew up among the Bigouden people of Finistère, a woman who walked behind her husband in the street, carrying the bags and wielding an umbrella, was not a servant following her master but a cowherd making sure that the animal stayed on the path instead of wandering off to join its friends at the watering hole.