The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  The Arcachon disaster had occurred on the open sea, out beyond the sandy spit of land called Cap Ferret, where fishermen cast their nets, watching for signs of a storm before rowing smartly back into the basin towards the towering Dune du Pyla. Most ships that sank went down within sight of the shore. Holidaymakers had been known to observe the ‘curious and gripping spectacle’ from the beach. At Ostend, in 1845, people attending a dance at the bathing establishment watched two ships go down in the harbour. They stood outside in their ball gowns trying to catch the sound of cries of distress on the wind.

  A cartoon published in 1906 shows a middle-class couple talking to a Breton peasant woman on the hill above her seaside hovel: ‘So you lost your husband and two sons in a shipwreck? How interesting . . . You must tell us all about it.’ By then, blatant voyeurism was going out of fashion, but scoffing at the natives remained a popular activity at the seaside and in spas. People who felt socially out of their depth at the Grand Hotel could measure their sophistication against the locals. Conty’s guide recommended a variety of farcical pilgrimages and pardons, and a visit to the beach at Le Tréport, where brawny fishwives pulled the trawlers in on ropes: ‘Just imagine the spectacle when the rope breaks!’ When picture postcards began to circulate in the late 1880s, photographers came from cities to persuade the locals to act out ‘typical’ activities. Women would rummage in chests and put on their grandmothers’ ancient costumes. Men with wily features and scary hair would sit around a bottle and pretend to be drunk. Peasants in the Auvergne posed in petrified simulation of the lively dance called the bourrée. Most of these scenes look so implausible because they depicted a world that was already long dead.

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  NO ONE KNOWS EXACTLY what this condescending interference meant to the people in the postcards. Nosy tourists were probably less irritating than local councils who tried to sanitize the populace and prevent it from frightening away tourists. In Dieppe, women and children were told to wear shoes in public. In Arcachon, once the railway had made it the favourite resort of Bordeaux, men were instructed to wear ‘roomy trousers’ and women to cover their legs with ‘a large gown reaching their heels’, which must have made cockle-picking almost impossible. Children were to stop bathing ‘immodestly’ ‘where respectable people walk at all times’. The beach was supposed to be natural, which meant that all signs of work had to be removed, as well as seaweed, dead fish, huts and local humans.

  Not all these measures would have been to the liking of the tourists. Staring at naked bodies, sometimes through telescopes sited at strategic points above the beach, was a major attraction of the seaside resorts. Some men went on holiday, not to explore a new part of the country, but to see previously undiscovered parts of the female anatomy. Further down the coast, near the border with Spain, Biarritz was a fishing village of red roofs and green shutters. Basque people came down to bathe in the ocean and to meet their lovers in the grotto called the Chambre d’Amour. For male tourists, the highlights of Biarritz were the ride from Bayonne, when they sat beside a pretty Basque girl (they were always pretty) in a contraption called a cacolet (two wicker chairs slung on either side of a horse), and then the sight of shop-girls from Bayonne splashing about in the surf with next to nothing on. Victor Hugo spent one of his happiest days in Biarritz examining the short skirts and tattered blouses.

  My only fear is that Biarritz will become fashionable. . . . It will put poplars on its hills, banisters on its dunes, stairways on its cliffs, kiosks on its rocks, benches in its grottos and trousers on its bathing women.

  Ogling was quite acceptable, but not everyone was content with aesthetic appreciation. Sex tourists were on the prowl long before cheap flights to the Philippines. The Frenchman who repeatedly bought milk and cream from girls in the valley of Chamonix so that he could ‘feel his somewhat withered mouth brush against the appetizing lips of those young Alpine nymphs’ no longer seems thejolly bon viveur he did to his companions. In 1889, two men from Paris on a walking holiday near the Pyrenean spa of Vernet-les-Bains became excited by the dark eyes and ‘delicate smile’ of a young gypsy girl and were bitterly disappointed when her parents refused to sell her to them as a living souvenir.

  Though fishermen and peasants who left no written record inevitably appear as passive victims, there are signs that local people knew how to defend their honour. At Pont-Aven – a little flour-and-cider port in southern Brittany, which was already famous when Paul Gauguin went there in 1886 in search of ‘the primitive’ – an Englishman was roughed up by locals and forced to behave in a civilized manner when he refused to remove his hat for a religious procession. Another Englishman, who was being carried by a fisherwoman from his boat to the shore at Boulogne-sur-Mer, decided to test the firmness of her thighs and was dumped into the sea, flat on his back, ‘to the great entertainment of all’.

  Local people, too, enjoyed making ethnological discoveries. At the Grand Hotel in Cabourg, when electric light flooded the dining room and fishermen and tradesmen, with their wives and children, pressed their noses against the glass and peered at the luxurious scene within, Marcel Proust felt uneasily like an exotic creature in ‘an immense, enchanted aquarium’. Comical strangers were not just a welcome distraction, they also provided new jobs: bath attendant, lift boy, chambermaid, shop assistant, waitress and cook. Men and women who had once been dependent on the fickle sea could hire out boats and fishing tackle, deckchairs and donkeys. They could manufacture rustic antiques and sell fake local paintings supplied by a wholesaler in Paris. The ancient profession of begging had never been so lucrative. Tourists bound for the Pyrenean spas were besieged by flocks of girls who sold bunches of flowers through the carriage window, then snatched the flowers away to sell to the next group. In the Ossau valley, Hippolyte Taine was more troubled by beggars than by fleas:

  You see tiny little girls who can scarcely walk sitting on their doorstep eating an apple, and they come tottering up to you with their hand held out. . . . If you are sitting on a hill, two or three children suddenly descend from a clear blue sky bearing stones, butterflies, curious plants and sprigs of flowers. If you approach a stable, the owner comes out with a bowl of milk and tries to make you buy it. One day, as I was looking at a bullock, the cowherd offered to sell it to me.

  To some tourists, this might have seemed the ultimate degradation of a proud and ancient people, but to the cowherd himself, it was a business opportunity. Many of his compatriots had emigrated and some villages were disappearing. A peasant who was lucky enough to live on a tourist route was more likely to be able to stay in the land of his birth.

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  THE MORE SINISTER ASPECTS of this meeting of two worlds were more apparent in laboratories and offices than in spas and resorts. Some anthropologists, misled by postcard photographers with an eye for the outlandish, had noticed what seemed to be Neanderthal types living in rural Picardy and on the Breton coast. Flattened brows, thick lips, dark skin and ‘a sinister expression’ were unusual, but this only proved – according to an article in the journal of the Paris Anthropological Society in 1872 – that the individuals in question belonged to an ancient race now on the verge of extinction. Perhaps these had been the inhabitants of Europe in the Quaternary period? ‘If so, this would be one of the great discoveries of our time. An exhaustive search should be conducted for this extremely rare and sporadic type.’

  Some of these early anthropologists could be just as insensitive as the tourists who sauntered into people’s houses uninvited. Sixty skulls taken from a cemetery in the Aveyron in the 1870s belonged to corpses that still had living relatives. The scientists, too, were interested in naked bodies and persuaded native people to expose their atavistic features to the camera. While tourists flocked to unspoilt parts of France before they were spoilt by other tourists, scientists rushed to faraway places, such as Provence, Savoy, Corsica and the forested Thiérache near the Belgian border, to buy postcards and to measure skulls, even though, as one researcher warne
d, ‘anthropometrical research may prove difficult and even dangerous’. In this respect, the colonies were better known than France itself. The founder of the Anthropological Society, Pierre Broca, reminded his colleagues in 1879 that, ‘until now, anthropologists have described and measured more Negroes than Frenchmen’.

  In France, the fledgling discipline was dominated by two contradictory ideas. The first idea was that the suburban savages in industrial cities, the ‘dangerous classes’ who frightened middleclass people, were dark and stunted, not because of poor living conditions but because they belonged to very primitive races. The second idea was that the vanquished Gauls were the backbone of the nation and that, despite several centuries of invasions and intermingling, the population of France embodied something continuous and profound.

  Most anthropologists realized that there was no such thing as a ‘pure’ Frenchman. They also knew that ‘Gaul’ and ‘Celt’ were flimsy terms veiling a huge body of ignorance. Unfortunately, some of their premature theories were highly seductive. Napoleon I I I and, later, Maréchal Pétain and Jean-Marie Le Pen, used the myth of the impetuous, vain but fundamentally decent Gaul to bolster their image of the state: Gauls were the proud antithesis of the sponging, dark-skinned Mediterranean races, but different from the regimented barbarians across the Rhine. It was especially important to show that the people of Lorraine, who lived under the threat and then the reality of German invasion, were essentially Gallic.

  It was partly because it told such captivating tales of ancient beings alive in the modern world that the new discipline struck a chord. A science that could identify the man who delivered the coal as a prehistoric relic was bound to find an audience. It also seemed to corroborate the evidence from other disciplines. Statistics had suggested that the ‘extremities’ of France – which meant almost anywhere that was closer to the sea than to Paris – were effectively a different land. Baron Dupin’s celebrated ‘Map of France Enlightened and Obscure’ (1824) had illustrated the degree of education or ‘civilization’ in each département in several shades, from pure white for the most advanced (Paris and the Île-de-France) to pitch black (the Auvergne). Later versions appeared under the crude title, ‘Map of Ignorance’. In 1837, Adolphe d’Angeville’s charts of education and illiteracy, tallness and shortness, conformity and criminality, drew a line across the country from Saint Malo to Geneva. It was some time before these geographical differences were shown to be circumstantial and temporary rather than genetic.

  When the evidence failed to fit the pattern, it could always be adjusted. Pierre Broca based his conclusions on skulls, divided into brachycephalic (literally, short-headed) and dolichocephalic (long-headed). Parisian skulls supposedly showed that racial superiority was reflected in social class and that, therefore, the Parisian bourgeoisie was at the very apex of the socio-anthropological pyramid: ‘The cranium of a modern bourgeois is more voluminous than that of a proletarian.’ Basque skulls, however, were worryingly larger than Parisian skulls, despite the fact that the skulls used as evidence had been dug up from the cemetery of an ‘ignorant and backward’ village that had only recently been roused from its ‘vegetative’ state by trade and industry. However, as a reviewer of Broca’s work added, chortling at the very thought, ‘M. Broca is far from concluding that the Basques are more intelligent than Parisians!’

  Like most of their academic colleagues, anthropologists marketed their findings with the interpretations attached, but they still managed to amass a great deal of valuable information about life in nineteenth-century France: tools, carvings, devotional objects and love tokens; the ideograms and counting systems used by otherwise illiterate Breton farmers; the linguistic peculiarities of the Basque language, the prehistoric origin of which was demonstrated by the fact that the names of all domesticated animals and cultivated plants were imported from other languages. Some of the arresting traits noted by anthropologists as racial features were the result of a practice that was common throughout much of Europe until the end of the nineteenth century. In some parts, especially Gascony and the Auvergne, babies were strapped into shallow cradles with their heads in a wooden hollow. The skull grew into the shape of its container and by the time the baby could walk, it had a wide head and a high, flat forehead. Since babies instinctively turn to the light on waking, the result was often startlingly asymmetrical. Later, to prevent the growing brain from cracking open the skull (according to midwives interviewed in the 1900s), the head of the child was compressed with a scarf or, in wealthier households in Languedoc, with a band of strong cloth called a sarro-cap. Many men and women wore these head-constrictors all their lives and felt naked without them.

  Skull-measuring anthropologists recorded a geography of France that has now completely disappeared. More than half the men and women in Rouen hospices in 1833, and nearly everyone in some parts of Languedoc had a modified head and some other deformity: an aquiline nose produced by crushing the cartilage and pulling out the nose, or ears squashed and notched by tight bands until they looked like pieces of crumpled linen that had been severely ironed. Gaits and gestures marked the population just as agriculture coloured the land. The way in which people walked and looked out at the world could reveal their origin as clearly as their accent. A backward elongation of the skull shifts the body’s centre of gravity; the neck muscles try to compensate and the angle of the eye is altered, especially when the process has warped the eye socket.

  These physical differences disappeared within a generation, but the scientific prejudice that interpreted them as signs of inferiority would survive like the relic of an ancient society.

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  OF ALL THE ARTEFACTS collected for museums and depicted on postcards, the most spectacular were local costumes. Once, it seemed, costumes had varied from one little pays to the next, like dialects and domestic architecture. But local styles were already disappearing before the Revolution. The amazing pyramidal headdresses of lace worn by women in the Pays de Caux were a rare sight by the 1820s and are probably more common today in the age of folklore festivals and heritage tourism. ‘There are no more national costumes in France’, Mérimée wrote in 1834: ‘Wesserling dresses everywhere [printed frocks from factories in the Vosges], and bonnets just like those worn by cooks in Paris.’ His comment was echoed by hundreds of disappointed travellers who had seen colourful engravings in books. Brittany was still a patchwork of different local styles, but even Bretons were beginning to shed their old clothes as softer, brighter dresses and shirts became available from the shop in the nearest town or a department store in Paris.

  Ethnologists hoped that regional dress would provide a magical glimpse of the Celtic and Druidic past. It turned out that even the fashions that seemed indigenous to Brittany had come from Paris. The round hats of the Bretons had once been common throughout Europe and simply lasted longer in parts where time passed more slowly and tailors worked from ancient patterns. The glazig (‘blue’) style of Quimper originated in the sale of blue material that had been used for uniforms in the Napoleonic Wars. The doublets and cocked hats that were worn in parts of the southern Auvergne until the 1820s had been seen in the streets of Paris a generation before. Most local styles were less than a century old. The velvet headdress of the women of Arles had nothing to do with ancient Greek colonists: it dated from the 1830s. The characteristic black butterfly bows of Alsace were only ten years old when they became a patriotic symbol of the lost provinces after the defeat by Prussia in 1870.

  Parisians had a chance to see some of these provincial curios at the 1878 Exposition Universelle. The Third Republic was celebrating the nation’s recovery from the Franco-Prussian War and the capital’s survival of the anarchist Commune. Clothes were a vital part of the Exhibition: they embodied the rich diversity of France and proved that fashion and frivolity were a serious source of wealth. Modern urban fashions could be seen at the Palais du Champ de Mars, near the site of the future Eiffel Tower. Regional costumes were exhibited across the Sein
e in the Palais du Trocadéro. A new Museum of Ethnography was soon to be installed in the Trocadéro and some of its treasures were already on display.

  French explorers had brought back some beautiful examples of tribal dress from North Africa, New Caledonia, the Americas and the Arctic Circle, but traditional French costume had proved surprisingly elusive. A suit from the Montagne Noire had been made for the museum from memory by an old weaver because no authentic example could be found. Five towns and the département of Savoie had sent some ‘costumes populaires’. The other five exhibitors were Parisian. One of them was the department store La Belle Jardinière, which had been selling ready-made clothes since 1824. Its regional costumes were more likely to be worn at a fancy-dress ball than in a provincial village, but no one would have accused its tailors of inauthenticity. The role of the costumed dummies was to represent the quaint and colourful world of the provinces – a land that was half remembered and half invented, in which tribal divisions had been marked as clearly as they were in the crowd of black suits and proletarian smocks that flowed through the exhibition halls.

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  Lost Provinces

  IN 1882, THANKS TO the extraordinary efforts of a thirty-fouryear- old primary-school teacher called François-Adolphe Blondel, no one in the little Norman village of Raffetot (population, 650) could possibly be ignorant of the fact that they belonged, not just to a village, a pays and a province, but also to a great nation called France. After leaving his native hamlet near Dieppe, M. Blondel had worked hard to qualify as an instituteur and took his job as seriously as the Republic expected him to do. Even after the Guizot Law of 1833, which required every commune of at least five hundred inhabitants to have a school for boys,39 many village teachers had been little more than skivvies: they helped the priest at mass, rang the bells, sang in the choir and were paid the same as a day-labourer, sometimes more if they could read and write. Now, they were properly trained and had salaries and pensions.