by Graham Robb
In 1793, he was able to buy a château that was sold as part of the national domain. He dismantled it and made a profit, and then did the same at several points of the sphere in which he operated. Inspired by his early successes, he proposed something similar on a larger scale to one of his fellow countrymen who lived in Paris. And thus it was that the Bande Noire, so famous for the devastation that it wreaked, was born in the mind of old Sauviat the tinker.
Enterprising wreckers like Sauviat identified the architectural treasures of France as surely as though they had come into possession of a modern guidebook with a list of three-star sites. Meanwhile, French guidebooks were still being written in total ignorance of the treasures that were being destroyed. Carcassonne was cited for its cloth factories but not for its medieval walls. In the Gers, in 1807, a report claimed that priceless sixteenth-century books were being sold as wrapping paper and only English tourists were saving them. ‘If this destruction continues, we shall no longer be able to study our nation’s literature and history in our country.’ In 1827, on a visit to Orange, the novelist Pigault-Lebrun observed, with no obvious sign of concern, that ‘one can hardly put one foot in front of the other without trampling on something that once belonged to the Romans’.
The destruction of national treasures is usually blamed on certain groups with well-defined aims: Huguenots, priest-bashing sansculottes, Prussian invaders or the scavenging Bande Noire. But the Bande Noire never existed as an institution. Some of its more sophisticated members may even have slowed the process of destruction by finding a market for the treasures. The cloisters of the abbey of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa near Prades in the eastern Pyrenees can now be seen at the Cloisters Museum of Manhattan, along with those of four other French medieval churches. Without the Bande Noire, they might have gone the way of the saints’ heads and carved lintels that adorned the hovels of any local peasants who could be bothered to push a wheelbarrow up the hill. (Evidence of pilfering can still be found. A section of column from the basilica of Saint-Denis, for instance, now serves as a decorative door stop in a nearby cafe-restaurant.)
Most of the damage was caused, not by cynical dealers, but by casual theft, negligence, emergency repairs and ignorant restoration. A blacksmith had his forge in what remained of Mâcon cathedral. The church at La Charité-sur-Loire was overrun by hens and children. Notre-Dame-de-la-Grande at Poitiers sheltered a salt merchant’s store, the residue of which is still eating away at the stone. The walls of the Gothic church of Saint Gengoult in Toul are still encrusted with an estate agent’s office, a cobbler’s shack and the Marie-Jo boutique.
The Church conspired in its own dilapidation. The canons of Autun demolished the lovely tomb of Saint Lazarus with its marble miniature of the original church and amputated the head of Christ from the tympanum, which is now considered to be a masterpiece of Romanesque sculpture. In 1825, stone figures on the facade of Reims Cathedral were hacked off in case they fell on the King during his coronation. The state itself was a crude and clumsy landlord: it used Mont-Saint-Michel as a prison, the Palais des Papes as a barracks and, after overseeing most of its demolition, the abbey of Cluny as a national stud. Later, it allowed a canal and a railway to smash their way through the ancient necropolis at Arles.
No sooner did poets and art lovers learn of the existence of this magical land than they found it in ruins. However, the ruins had a peculiar charm. For the generation that had grown up in the shadow of the Revolution, cathedrals and chaˆteaux were touched with the mystery of ancient times and the imagined certainties of childhood. They came from the other side of a historical abyss. Charles Nodier, who collaborated on a highly successful series of Voyages pittoresques36et romantiques dans l’ancienne France ((from 1820), described himself as ‘an obscure but religious traveller through the ruins of the fatherland’, a ‘pilgrim’ in search of a god. Each volume contained beautiful engravings of bat-infested, ivy-smothered ruins under stormy skies: the tattered tracery of Jumie`ges Abbey, which was still being dismantled and sold piecemeal, seemed to belong to the same forgotten age as the crumbling Roman ruins of Orange.
The book’s intended audience was not scholarly but ‘artistic’: ‘This is not a voyage of discoveries but a voyage of impressions.’ Thankfully, scholarship prevailed. To Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo and other modern writers, the ruins were not just sounding boards of the Romantic soul, they were clues to the national identity that should be studied and preserved. The saviour of many of the churches and monuments that are now fixtures on the tourist trail was Prosper Mérimée, the author of Carmen. In 1834, he was appointed to the recently created post of Inspector General of Historic Monuments. Between 1834 and 1852, Mérimée spent almost three years on the road, discovering what is now called ‘the patrimony’ and arguing with local authorities who saw demolition hammers as the instruments of progress. He endured long, boring evenings in ‘wretched holes’ and attended ceremonial dinners that prevented him from appraising the beauties of the local women. He travelled to the Auvergne and Corsica. He badgered politicians in Paris and eventually had almost four thousand buildings classified as historic monuments. Without Mérimée, the bridge at Avignon would have been demolished by a railway company. The basilicas of Vézelay and Saint-Denis, the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Laon and large parts of many medieval towns would have disappeared forever.
Since everyone now agrees with Mérimée, it is hard to imagine what a lonely path he trod. As late as 1870, a popular magazine noted that medieval houses with pointy gables and timber frames could still be seen in many Norman towns but that very few ‘merit conservation’:
They no longer suit the needs of modern life. . . . True, they provide relief from the platitude of plaster and the monotony of masonry, but they bring to mind periods of history that were less than happy and lives that were shrivelled and wizened.
Most of those old houses would be destroyed in the Allied bombing raids of the Second World War. The few that remain are objects of almost fetishistic veneration. But some even older buildings identified by Mérimée are still neglected and abused: the ancient stone chambers that look down from the plateaux of the Causses like abandoned sentry boxes are paved with litter; the huge dolmen of Bagneux sits behind solid metal gates like a great caged bear. Prehistoric stones were more popular with Romantic travellers than they are today, perhaps because their beauty lies in a subtle alliance with the landscape rather than in architectural details. In his notes on western France, Mérimée recalled the destruction wrought by the Catholic Church on these symbols of pagan worship, but he also observed a more recent form of iconoclasm which had a long, inglorious career ahead of it:
The Highways and Bridges department has persecuted them more rigorously than the synods. Since my journey to the Morbihan, the beautiful menhirs of Erdeven have been smashed to pieces so as not to force a road to take a detour of a few metres.
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AFTER SPENDING so much time in the provinces, lying awake in sleepy towns and pining for Paris, Mérimée could probably have written an equally devastating report on the new industry of tourism and the main obstacles to its development: bad hotels and local food.
There had been huge improvements, of course, since the Revolution: more reliable coach services, faster roads and bridges where none had existed before. Fewer bandits lurked in forests, and their tarred, weather-proofed corpses no longer hung from roadside gibbets to terrify the travellers they had terrorized in life. Barely a generation before, even a member of the royal family had found touring France intolerably irksome. In 1788, the thirteen-year-old Duc de Montpensier was sent on an educational visit to the Trappist monastery in the Perche. Despite being provided with an artist, a botanist and his tutor Mme de Genlis for historical information, he was not a happy tourist:
We left Versailles at half-past 9 and arrived here [Mortagne] at 6. This evening we saw the whole town, which is horrid. We were made to remark an abominable old well which is supposed to be one of the finest th
ings in the town. We are staying in a very bad inn. However, the beds and the sheets are clean.
For the clean sheets, he probably had to thank his tutor Mme de Genlis, to judge by the section of her phrase book devoted to inns:
There is a very bad smell in here.
The room must be swept and some sugar or vinegar must be burned.
This precaution should be taken whenever one enters a room at an inn.
Bring us some sheets. Some nice, white sheets. I warn you that I shall examine them carefully.
I have my own sheets, but I always take the inn’s sheets so that I can place them on the mattress, and then I place my own sheets on top.
Until foreign tourists arrived with their money and expectations, most hotels were simple inns at staging posts. They offered meals at the common table and a spartan room, sometimes just a bunk bed in the kitchen or the dining room. The table was usually occupied by travelling salesmen who helped themselves to the stew before the ladies and appeared to need very little sleep.
Single bedrooms were usually available only in grand hotels. Many travellers found themselves climbing into bed with a member of the innkeeper’s family or one of the passengers from the stagecoach. A book on etiquette published in 1728 devoted several paragraphs to this delicate situation: ‘If poor lodging oblige one to sleep in the bedroom of a person to whom one owes respect’, allow the person to undress first, then slip into the bed and ‘sleep without making a sound’. In the morning, do not allow yourself to be seen naked, do not use a mirror and do not comb your hair, especially if the bed is in the kitchen, ‘where hair may fly into the plates’.
Away from the main roads, the ‘inn’ might be nothing more than a farmhouse whose owner had been asked for shelter so often that he had installed a few flea-infested beds in an outbuilding. Well into the nineteenth century, travellers were often forced to accept free food and hospitality and caused great offence if they tried to pay. Tourists – especially French tourists – in the wilder parts seem to have expected their adventurousness to be rewarded and complained bitterly about innkeepers who tried to make a profit. The ‘two friends’ who published an ‘artistic’ guide to the Pyrenees in 1835 warned against ‘typical mountain people, who are inquisitive, greedy, selfish, crude and ignorant’. To their disgust, the people of Sainte-Marie-de-Campan claimed to be too poor to take them in. The cobbler who kindly let them sleep on the floor of his shop must have been surprised by the growing numbers of people who knocked at his door after the visit of the ‘two friends’: the guide gives his name and address in the list of hotels, along with Don Farlo at Panticosa, just across the Spanish border, who, ‘without exactly being an innkeeper, is generous and hospitable and asks only that visitors pay the cost of their board and lodging’.
When trade and tourism picked up after the fall of Napoleon, the number of tolerable hotels increased. Names such as Hôtel des Alliés, des Anglais or des Américains were usually a sign of comfort (the word ‘comfort’, in this sense, was borrowed from English). In the larger towns, hoteliers sent servants to meet the coach. As soon as they arrived in Auxerre in 1812, George Depping and his fellow passengers were surrounded by servants singing the praises of their respective hotels:
Beauty won the day. All the travellers spontaneously placed themselves at the side of the prettiest petitioner, to the vexation of the others, who were still trying to carry off those who lagged behind; but the former, like a good shepherdess, took care to keep them from her flock and successfully led it in its entirety to the Auberge du Léopard.
The innkeeper might also be the postmaster, wood merchant, tobacconist and mayor. Despite these monopolies, prices stabilized remarkably quickly throughout the country, to the irritation of French travellers whose money was worth much less than pounds or dollars. Victor Hugo defined the innkeeper’s duties in Les Misérables: ‘bleed the man, fleece the woman, skin the child’; ‘know how much wear and tear a shadow causes the mirror and fix a rate for it.’ The usual cost of dinner was three francs, including wine if the hotel was in a wine-growing region; full board was six to eight francs a day at a time when the average daily wage of a worker was one and a half francs.
American and British tourists rarely complained about the cost but were often appalled by the lack of hygiene. ‘Fail not to take a piece of soap with you’, advised Murray’s guide: ‘the provisions for personal ablution are very defective’. Meals were commonly served in the bedchamber, the walls and floor of which might be ‘black with the accumulated filth of years’ and teeming with fleas. Mrs Cradock’s maid killed four hundred and eighty in a single room. Dogs were seen wrestling with intestines in the kitchen. In the courtyard of an inn near Lyon, Philip Thicknesse was surprised to see spinach being laid in a flat basket, apparently for the dogs to eat. Later that day, he saw the serving girl deliver it to his table. (‘I turned it, dish and all, upon her head.’)
For many tourists, the most harrowing expedition was not the crossing of an Alpine pass or a night-time ride on a bad road but the unavoidable visit to the cabinet d’aisances. British expectations gradually turned hotels into the efficient, impersonal establishments that the French found soulless and intimidating, but the results were not always to the liking of the foreigners. At Nîmes in 1763, Tobias Smollett found ‘the Temple of Cloacina’ ‘in a most shocking condition’:
The servant-maid told me her mistress had caused it to be made on purpose for the English travellers; but now she was very sorry for what she had done, as all the French who frequented her house, instead of using the seat, left their offerings on the floor, which she was obliged to have cleaned three or four times a day.
Later tourists would be baffled by bidets and daunted by the porcelain foot-pads on either side of a small dark hole, but even in simpler days there were mysteries to solve. A traveller in Béarn in 1812 who slept on the third tier of a four-tier bunk bed was woken in the night by a smell and a noise of ropes and pulleys. A voice in the darkness whispered, ‘Don’t worry, sir, it’s just the vicar going up.’ ‘Vicaire’ turned out to be a local name for ‘chamber pot’. Little fuss was made about the matter in a country which still respects the right to relieve oneself, if necessary, in public. Anyone was welcome to use the designated corner of a farmyard. In villages, sheltered areas such as bridges and covered alleys were ‘the water closets of several generations, with the open air as disinfectant’ (‘Fosse d’aisances’,Grand Dictionnaire universel).
In towns, public facilities could be surprisingly pleasant. Richard’s 1828 guide to Paris made a special point of mentioning ‘the cabinets d’aisances that are most in vogue’. Some of these cabinets, like the toilet at the entrance to the Louvre museum, were cleaner than toilets in private apartments and cost only fifteen centimes. One shining example, in the Rue du Faubourg du Temple, ‘[deserved] to be seen from a technical point of view’. Doors to conceal the occupant of the cabinet became increasingly common, often marked simply ‘100’ (from a feeble pun on ‘cent’ and ‘sent’, ‘smells’). In Provence, town dwellers sometimes opened a convenient little cubicle in the corner of the house and sold the contents to a manure collector. By the 1860s, this mutually profitable arrangement had spread along the stony roads around Nice, Antibes and Saint-Raphae¨l. Coach travellers who had once had to duck behind bushes found little huts adorned with climbing plants and notices written prettily in French or Nissard by peasants competing for fertilizer: ‘Ici on est bien’ (‘It’s nice here’), ‘Ici on est mieux’ (‘It’s nicer here’), or ‘Ma questo è necessario’.
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THE OTHER MAIN NECESSITY of life is such a vast subject that an encyclopedia would barely cover it. However, most of that encyclopedia would be devoted to rarities and exceptions. The standard fare was usually too dull to be mentioned, unless it was spectacularly bad, which is why, in early nineteenth-century novels, great meals are usually on a par with outstanding events like orgies, with which they often coincide.
Few people
would have guessed that France would one day be the goal of gastro-tourists. Beyond the homes of the rich and a few restaurants, recipes were unusual. The word ‘recette’ referred primarily to the preparation of pharmaceutical remedies. Most popular ‘recipes’ were magical cures – ‘Slice a pigeon down the middle; remove the heart; place it on the child’s head’, etc. – or snippets of peasant wisdom. In Roussillon, ducks were thought to say ‘Naps! Naps!’ because they were best served with turnips (‘nap’ in Catalan). Interesting combinations of food appear not to have exercised the minds of people for whom the height of culinary pleasure was a full stomach. A story was told of four young men from Saint-Brieuc in Brittany discussing what they would eat if imagination was the only limit. One suggested an unusually long sausage, another imagined ‘beans the size of toes’ boiled with bacon, the third chose a sea of fat with a giant ladle to cream it off and the fourth complained that the others had ‘already picked all the good things’.
Many towns now promote themselves with a ‘traditional’ speciality which, more often than not, is a form of andouille (‘charcuterie composed of pig or boar intestines, chopped, strongly spiced and enclosed in another intestine’). Most modern versions of the andouille, like the Scottish haggis, are deceptively refined versions of their rugged ancestors. The pungent andouille was a rare treat in any case. For tourists who ventured beyond Paris, the true taste of France was stale bread. The degree of staleness reflected the availability of fuel. A manual of rural architecture published in Toulouse in 1820 stated that the public oven should be large enough to allow the week’s bread to be baked in a single twenty-four-hour period. In the Alps, enough bread was produced in a single batch for a year and sometimes two or three years. It was baked, at least once, then hung above a smoky fire or dried in the sun. Sometimes, the ‘loaf’ was just a thin barley and bean-flour biscuit. To make it edible and to improve the colour, it was softened in buttermilk or whey. Rich people used white wine.
