The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  To Bernadette and the local people, ‘damisèla’ had a particular connotation. Demoiselles were forest fairies, who dressed in white and disappeared if anyone came too close. Flowers grew at their feet. They could conjure up a sudden wind and calm it just as quickly. They lived in caves and grottos and were associated with springs and running water. They were also known to be on the side of the poor and could be quite violent when an injustice had been done. In neighbouring parts of the Pyrenees, when the Forest Code of 1827 placed restrictions on the food and fuel that could be gleaned from what had once been common land, forest guards and industrial charcoal burners had been terrorised by ghostly white figures. Their huts were set on fire and they were threatened with mutilation. The ‘War of the Demoiselles’ was at its height in the early 1830s but continued sporadically until the 1870s. The demoiselles of this rural Résistance turned out to be local men dressed up as fairies but they modelled their behaviour on supernatural spirits that were believed to exist as late as the 1950s.

  The events at Lourdes came to be seen as a battle between sceptics and believers, but there was a much older and deeper division between the authorities and the common people. The peasant mind was quite at home with mysteries and contradictions. The apparition was the Virgin Mary and she was also a pagan spirit. In folk tales told in many parts of France, the Virgin and the local fairy were interchangeable. Four centuries before, Joan of Arc and the children of her village had danced around the ‘Fairy Tree’ and woven wreaths for the statue of the Virgin. The vital point was not the metaphysical status of the being but her actions and sympathies.

  Like the forest fairies and most of the other Pyrenean Virgins, the Lourdes Virgin appeared on common land. She was kind to the poor but also quite capable of humiliating doubters and had to be appeased with offerings. Above all, she was not a creature of the Catholic Church. As usual in such cases, the Church authorities were sceptical. Like the local Prefect, they were also concerned about the threat to law and order. In their view, Bernadette was a simple-minded peasant, and the twenty thousand people who deposited candles and offerings at the cave were a nuisance and a public health hazard.

  Twelve years before, on a lonely mountainside at La Salette in the diocese of Grenoble, the Virgin had appeared to two shepherds – a sullen girl and a boy with such a short attention span that he started throwing stones while the Virgin was still delivering her message. The Virgin of La Salette was a far more questionable apparition than the Virgin of Lourdes but popular enthusiasm had forced the Church to validate the miraculous cures she performed.

  Four years passed before Bernadette’s vision was ratified by the Church, but by then her family and the town had been saved. Soon, Lourdes had more visitors than the grandest Pyrenean spas. Properties on the road to the shrine soared in value and shops sprang up like flowers at the feet of a fairy. ‘Here the relations of the celebrated child contrive to make money out of the connection by advertising in large letters above their shops, “Bernadette’s Aunt”, etc.’ (Henry Blackburn, The Pyrenees: a Description of Summer Life at French Watering Places, 1881). Whatever educated people chose to believe, this was not cynical opportunism. The little people had won a great victory, and it was right and proper, in their view, that they should profit from the Virgin’s gift. The demoiselle had chosen Lourdes, not Bétharram or Argelès. One day, Lourdes would have more hotels than anywhere but Paris, and Bétharram would be deserted. As Henry Blackburn’s landlady at Argelès remarked a little sourly, ‘It’s a stroke of good luck for Lourdes.’

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  THE EVENTS IN LOURDES were spectacular but not exceptional. They belonged to an ancient tale that can be traced back to the days of Roman Gaul, and even further, beyond the birth of Christ, into unrecorded history.

  Some of the early parts of this tale can be deciphered with a map of France and a list of place names. If all the places named after a saint are marked on the map, a distinct pattern appears: a concentration of ‘Saints’ (or the earlier ‘Dam-’ and ‘Dom-’, from dominus) in the centre and the west, and large areas with relatively few ‘Saints’ in the north, the north-east and the far south-west. This pattern reflects varying degrees of settlement and stability in the early Middle Ages: a town or village that was already well established when the new religion came was less likely to be renamed after a saint than a scattered settlement that only later coalesced around a church. Even at this distance in time, smaller details are also visible. Places called Saint-Martin (the Roman soldier who became Bishop of Tours and evangelized Gaul in the fourth century) tend to occur along the lines of Roman roads and perhaps reveal the routes by which the new religion spread. Places called Saint-Bonnet – excluding the ‘Bonnets’ that were derived from the name of the Celtic god Belenos – draw an erratic line across the country from Savoy to the Gironde, and appear to trace the route that was taken by Saint Bonitus. (Bonitus died in the seventh century while returning to Clermont-Ferrand from Rome, and then continued in a disembodied state or was carried in a reliquary until he reached the Atlantic Ocean.)

  The pattern of saints’ names is curiously reminiscent of a longterm trend that is known to geographers and historians as the Saint-Malo–Geneva line (p. 318). This imaginary line runs diagonally across the country from the Cotentin peninsula in the English Channel to the northern French Alps. At least until the late nineteenth century, it appears with surprising regularity when various sets of data are plotted on a map: south and west of the line, people tended to be shorter and to have darker hair and eyes; they were less literate, lived in smaller places, had less taxable income and were more likely to be employed in agriculture.

  The Saint-Malo–Geneva line may predate the north–south divide (see p. 67), and it may reflect ancient and otherwise untraceable movements of the population. It may be the ‘strange attractor’ of a chaotic process involving geology and climate, invasion and migration, enterprise and inertia. It does at least suggest that the Christianization of France was subordinate to other realities and trends, and it raises some tricky questions. Did the Church consolidate the nation by creating parishes and dioceses, or was it simply implanting itself – as it did at Lourdes – on societies and beliefs that already existed? Was modern Gaul created or only conquered by the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church? And were ‘superstition’ and popular religion just the jumbled bones of Druidism or a coherent system of belief ?

  The nervous reaction of the Church to Bernadette’s vision in 1858 betrayed a fear of insignificance that was almost as old as the Church itself. Since the fourth or fifth centuries, the Church had been eradicating and commandeering pagan sites. Sometimes, saints were invented to replace the old gods. Saint Minerve took the place of Minerva, Mars became Saint Mard or Saint Maurice. Ancient religious sites were converted to a semblance of Christianity. Saint Anne is the patron saint of Brittany, not because she ever went to Brittany, but because she was the closest plausible match for the Celtic goddess Ana and the sacred swamps where this world was joined to the world beyond. (Ana or anam was a Gaulish word for swamp.)

  The names changed but the holy sites were rarely abandoned. The chapel of Saint Agathe in the valley of the Vilaine in southern Brittany dates back to Gallo-Roman times. It has a fresco depicting Eros on a dolphin and a naked woman – either Venus or the local fairy – combing her hair beside the water. Before the ninth century, the chapel was rededicated to a certain male ‘Saint Venus’ who laterbecame Saint Vénier. In the eighteenth century, when the old miracle-working saints were replaced with the saints of the Catholic Reformation, the Sicilian saint Agatha was imported as a replacement for Saint Vénier, who had always enjoyed the reputation of making sterile women pregnant.

  Thirty years after Bernadette’s vision, the Church was still planting crosses on sacred sites. The aim of this cuckoo-like activity was ‘to give the cross the benefit of the respect and religious thoughts that were attached to the site’. Prayers to the local deity would be intercepted by the cr
oss and redirected to Christian heaven. Supposedly absurd beliefs and practices would die out and the people would be persuaded to abandon their fetishistic cults and to worship a god whose son was born of a virgin.

  There is plenty of evidence on the back roads of France that this spiritual war was being fought quite recently. Crosses commemorating missions at the end of the nineteenth century often stand at crossroads next to modern road signs, electricity substations and communal rubbish containers. Sometimes, a map-maker’s triangulation mark is embedded in the stone pediment of the cross. It is not usually obvious that these crosses are monuments to an ancient struggle. They are often assumed to have something to do with the ‘dechristianization’ of France by the Revolution and its subsequent reconversion to Catholicism. They seem to be a simple declaration of the fact that France is a Christian country, just as the whole road system seems to be oriented on the great Gothic cathedrals.16

  The roadside crosses belong to the same long tale that leads to Lourdes. They usually occupy ancient sacred sites that belong to a different religious tradition with its own decaying network of monuments. The prehistoric ‘nail-stone’ at Laon Cathedral, which proved a man’s innocence if he could drive a nail into it, was sacrificed to urban improvements in the early nineteenth century, but a large menhir still leans against the cathedral of Le Mans like a stubborn old relative ensconced in a corner of her daughter’s grand drawing room. Most of the monuments, brutalized by time and a continual process of desecration and reconsecration, are found in out-of-the-way places that hardly seem to be places at all. They stand along older routes that now exist only in a vestigial, disconnected state, interrupted by roads and railways and too erratic to be of use to high-speed travellers.

  The stones themselves appear suddenly in the corner of the eye like figures in a landscape that seemed a moment before to be empty. On a small, muddy road near Flers in Normandy stands a prehistoric stone that was carved on all four sides into the shape of a Christian cross about three centuries ago. This is a typical ‘prehistoric’ site: the area is deserted but shows recent signs of picnics and more intimate activities. A concrete culvert suggests a spring or a small underground stream. Two tall oak trees stand next to the stone, about four feet apart. The oak was sacred to the Druids, and even in the nineteenth century, passing between two trees or through the hole in a trunk was thought to have magical effects, usually associated with fertility. Since trees on sacred sites were often replanted when they died, the two oaks beside the stone are probably living on the site of their prehistoric ancestors.

  Stones like this have survived – when they were not smashed up and used for road-building – not because they were preserved by government commissions but because, until quite recently, they were objects of greater popular devotion than churches and cathedrals. They were associated with stories that were more familiar to most people than the Gospels. The carved stone near Flers is probably related to the bigger standing-stone five miles to the east on the other side of the village of Sainte-Opportune. This slightly stooping block of granite, which lies next to a willow and a boggy spring, was said to be the sharpening-stone used by the Devil or Gargantua in a ploughing competition with Saint Peter. According to another version, Gargantua fell asleep when he should have been mowing the field and when Saint Opportuna came and kicked him, he peevishly threw away his stone.

  These religious monuments – even the enormous megalithic alignments of Carnac – did not appear on maps until the twentieth century, though the map-makers often used prehistoric sites for their geodesic measurements and propped their instruments on the stones. By then, many of them had been vandalized by passing strangers and disturbed by treasure-seekers. Most are still undervalued as national treasures and some are still not shown on maps. One of the biggest dolmens in Europe, at Bagneux in the Loire Valley, was once used for feasting and dancing. It has since been engulfed by the suburbs of Saumur and was on sale in 2006 as part of a plot which includes two apartments and the cafe-bar ‘Le Dolmen’.

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  THESE OBSTINATE STONES may provide clues to the prehistoric past, but they can also be used as signposts to a more recent world.

  A day east of Lourdes – thirty miles as the crow flies or fifty miles by road – a cluster of hamlets lies just off the trans-Pyrenean road near the Col de Peyresourde, which is best known today as a regular obstacle on the Tour de France cycle race and as the pseudo-Himalayan setting for a James Bond film.

  A group of stones stands on the hills around the hamlets. Some were brought by glaciers and landslides, others were placed there deliberately to complete a circle or a line. Above the village of Poubeau, a road spirals up and a track leads off through the remains of a wood to an open field. At this point, the village below is invisible and there is a magnificent view of the mountains. A six-foot-tall lump of granite stands in the field. It was known as the ‘Cailhaou d’Arriba-Pardin’ (the Stone that Came from God) and could be made to tremble very slightly. Next to it there was once a smaller stone, about three feet tall, in the shape of a penis, now buried in the earth. Girls and women would sit astride the phallic stone or kneel on a slab placed in front of it. This was quite a common activity in many parts of France and perhaps very common indeed, depending on the interpretation of phrases in official reports such as ‘too disgusting to describe’. On the eve of Mardi Gras, a fire was lit next to the stone and there were ‘obscene’ dances.

  ‘Fertility rites’ were still being performed in Poubeau in 1875 when an anthropologist came to investigate with a local guide:

  The spirit who inhabits the stone does not enjoy an immaculate reputation in the region but the inhabitants think none the less of it. So many happy unions consecrated by marriage and by the birth of numerous children began with meetings at the stone that young and old alike have very pleasant memories of it. They love the stone and are quite prepared to defend it if need be.

  When an iron cross was embedded in the stone in the 1810s, the cross was destroyed by lightning, which enhanced the stone’s prestige. When workmen came to remove it in 1835, they were attacked by villagers. Later, unexplained accidents occurred. A local priest was killed by a falling rock. Finally, in 1871, another priest erected the cross that is still rusting away on top of the stone. The villagers then supposedly abandoned the cult and merely processed to the stone on Rogation Sunday to ask it for a good harvest. However, blushing girls interviewed by the anthropologist in 1875 hinted that the stone was still not entirely celibate.

  The Cailhaou Arriba-Pardin and its neighbours were the archivists and storytellers of the community. As well as the Cailhaou, there was the ‘peyre-hita’, which was still being ‘touched in a certain manner’ by local women in 1877. There was the group of stones on the pass where, some years before, Jesus had asked a shepherd for some food and was so annoyed by the man’s refusal that he turned him, his dog and his sheep to stone. There was also the ‘waltzing-stone’ near a bone-filled cave which once had a phallic appendage, the enormous ‘fire-stone’ by Peyrelade where the summer solstice was celebrated, and the amazing talking-stone just above Jurvielle at the source of a stream.

  The talking-stone was the home of an incantada, which entered and exited by a door carved in the granite. Its whispered messages could be heard if one placed one’s ear on a little cavity. Incantadas were angels who, when war broke out between Good and Evil, had declared themselves neutral. In those days, God was merciful but wanted to keep his mercy a secret for the time being, and so he banished the angels to Earth. They had to keep washing themselves until they were clean enough to be allowed back into heaven. This was a particularly good place to do the washing. Clothes washed at the talking-stone came out whiter than white.

  These cherished stones were not the numinous objects admired by neo-Druids. There was no ‘stone cult’, as priests and Romantic anthropologists believed. The stones were a normal part of daily life, marking the boundaries of the pays and embodying the life of the commu
nity: seasonal celebrations, storytelling, laundry, sex, and defiance of the authorities. They were spirits of the land who gave life to the landscape and made the physical world more interesting. The stones were a greater threat to the Catholic Church than the French Revolution: it was thanks to the spirits – but not the Church – that the local people had somewhere to dance, somewhere to celebrate the old festivals and somewhere secret where young people could find their way to the other side of virginity, watched only by the snowy peaks.

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  MONUMENTS LIKE THE STONES at the Col de Peyresourde marked the smallest of the concentric spheres within which people explored their world. Most spirits belonged, not to a pays, but to a particular site, and their influence rarely extended more than a few feet. In these tiny, magical universes, the intercontinental world of theological doctrine was meaningless. In 1890, at Bérou in Normandy, when a missionary preacher told his flock that there was only one Virgin Mary, a woman was heard to mutter, ‘Old fool! As if everyone didn’t know that the daughter’s here and the mother’s at Revercourt’ (two miles away).

  Popular saints did not like to travel. Statues and figurines that were moved to a church from the place where they were miraculously discovered – a pond, a ditch or a tree trunk that had grown up around a woody niche and concealed the statue until the tree was felled – invariably returned by mysterious means to the place of discovery. These silent acts of resistance were the saints’ way of demanding a chapel of their own, even if it was inconvenient for mortal beings. According to a story that was still being told at the end of the nineteenth century, the people of Six-Fours, Reynier and Toulon tried to entice their Virgin with beautiful shrines but she rejected them all and had to be enshrined on top of the Sicié hill with a lovely view of the Côte d’Azur. Until recently, it was impossible to visit her except on foot. Other Provençal Virgins made themselves so heavy while they were being moved that their human bearers had to give up the struggle and leave them where they had first been found.