The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  M. Blondel was a shining example of the new kind of teacher. He had already won bronze and silver medals for giving free lessons to local adults. Next door to his little classroom in the town hall, he had organized the municipal archives and inscribed on a board of honour the names of all his predecessors since 1668. (Like hundreds of villages all over France, Raffetot had not waited for the dawn of democracy to equip itself with a teacher.) In M. Blondel’s classroom, the tight horizons of the pays seemed to open onto a new dimension: when they looked up from their wooden desks, the pupils could see the flags of foreign countries painted brightly on the ceiling.

  One day, M. Blondel had been contemplating the patch of ground that passed for a school garden when he spotted a pedagogical opportunity. He gathered together some rocks, a few clumps of boxwood, some tent pegs and some lengths of rope. Then he set about transforming the garden into a political map of France, as he explained in the local paper, Le Progrès de Bolbec:

  I had at my disposal a shrub, which I planted on the site of Paris. On the shrub I hung a flag in the national colours. . . . Another flag, in black crêpe, flies over Alsace-Lorraine and reminds the children and passers-by in the street of one of the greatest losses suffered by our Fatherland.

  After carving rivers into the soil with a stick, he completed his interactive landscape with a sea of red sand and boxwood borders. M. Blondel was then able to rehearse his patriotic infant army for the war which, one day, would avenge France and restore Alsace-Lorraine to the fatherland:

  The pupil takes up position in the vicinity of Paris, then heads up the Marne, passes through Châlons and into the Marne–Rhine Canal . . . He reconnoitres Nancy, crosses the new frontier, and, after Sarrebourg and Strasbourg, finds himself on the Rhine. The pupil then returns to Paris by the same route.

  Many of those pupils and their children would retrace the route to Strasbourg in reality. Thirty of the names that M. Blondel marked in the register every morning were later inscribed on Raffetot’s memorial to the dead of the First World War.

  *

  THE CHILDREN WHO MARCHED across the school garden at Raffetot were growing up in a republic that used the military defeat of the preceding regime in 1870 as a means of inspiring its citizens with love of the fatherland. The ‘lost provinces’ and ‘lost towns’ of Alsace and Lorraine were the missing pieces that would give the new generation a yearning for national unity and, according to the teachers’ manuals produced by Ernest Lavisse (Sorbonne professor and former tutor of the imperial prince), ‘provide the Republic with good citizens, good workers and good soldiers’. In the new Republican catechism, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost were replaced by Vercingetorix, leader of the Gauls, Joan of Arc, Turgot, Vauban and other figures too old to be controversial. ‘The fatherland is not your village or your province’, wrote Lavisse. ‘It is all of France. The fatherland is like a great family.’ Compared to similar homilies in British and German schools, French pedagogical nationalism was remarkably untriumphalist, not to say rueful: ‘The defeats at Poitiers, Agincourt, Waterloo and Sedan are painful memories for us all.’

  In 1907, Professor Lavisse travelled to Le Nouvion-en-Thiérache (this was the pays where, not long before, anthropologists had feared to tread) to speak at the annual prize-giving. Lavisse was a native of Le Nouvion but had long since transcended his origins. As he told the children in a confusing mixture of bourgeois prejudice and political rhetoric, they, too, would cease to be stereotypical peasants and become citizens of that vague and glorious thing, the fatherland:

  Little inhabitants of the forests and pastures of the Thiérache, whose minds are quick and practical, who are quarrelsome by nature and whose speech is marked by Picard words and expressions, you are quite unlike the little Bretons who look dreamily on the Atlantic from their rocks and speak the ancient language of the Celts, or the little Provençaux who wave their arms about and shout in a Romance language on the shores of the Mediterranean. The times are gone when Picardy was more foreign to Brittany and Provence than France is to India or America. . . . Our fatherland, children, is not just a territory. It is the work of man, started centuries ago – a work that we continue and that you shall continue in your turn.

  The children would not necessarily remember or understand the lesson in national unity. On the eve of the First World War, about half of all recruits, and quite a few future officers, were unaware that France had lost territory to Germany in 1870. Alsace and Lorraine might as well have been foreign countries.

  A sense of national identity was not, in any case, what most people wanted from a school. The need for education had first become apparent in many places as a result of conscription. Parents suddenly felt the burden of illiteracy when their sons left home and letters arrived from the regiment, written by a comrade – with rude words and dirty stories if the comrade had a nasty sense of humour – and were read out on the doorstep by the postman.

  But education was not automatically associated with school. Literacy rates were already quite high among Protestants and Jews, who read the Bible, and in regions where boys were trained to become travelling salesmen. Many parents were reluctant to send their sons and daughters to school when they needed them for the harvest. Inspectors often found that girls were kept out of school to work as seamstresses in filthy sweatshops where they spent the day with relatives and neighbours, learning the local traditions and values that their mothers considered to be a proper education. Above all, many parents were afraid that once they had learned to speak and write French like Parisians, their children would leave for the city and never come home.

  *

  THEIR FEARS WERE JUSTIFIED. A century after the Abbé Grégoire’s revolutionary report (p. 50), the Third Republic massed its pedagogical army on the wild frontier of language. The eradication of patois as a first language became a cornerstone of education policy. Schoolchildren were punished for using words they had learned at their mother’s knee. A pupil who was heard speaking patois was made to carry a stick or some other token that was then passed on to the next offender. The pupil who had the signum at the end of the day was thrashed, given lines or made to clean the toilets. (The same device had once been used in seminaries to encourage the use of Latin instead of French.)

  The story of how the majority of French people became French-speakers could be told in a dozen different ways. For the non-French speaker on a school bench, the experience was often traumatic and humiliating. The effects were felt most cruelly in regions where the local tongue least resembled French: Alsace, Brittany, the Basque Country, Catalonia, the Flemish-speaking towns of the north and the island of Corsica. There are Bretons still alive who remember the mortifying difficulty of learning French – ‘a language whose words were like half-empty boxes, and you weren’t even quite sure what was inside them’ – and the endless insults from sneering teachers and patronizing newspaper articles. In Brittany, being patriotic seemed to be the same as denigrating one’s pays. The popular cartoon character Bécassine, created in 1905, came to represent the outsider’s view of Brittany: Bécassine was a Breton maid who worked in Paris and got into all sorts of amusing scrapes because she failed to understand even the simplest French. Her silly round face had no ears and sometimes no mouth. Her costume was more Picard than Breton and her pidgin French had not the slightest connection with the Breton language, but her ethnic characteristics were irrelevant. She was Breton because she was stupid and because her relatives were sly and greedy.

  Years later, when education and an ability to speak French were taken for granted, the missionary efforts of the Third Republic’s educators would look to some people like a colonial campaign to erase local cultures. The independence movements that formed in the twentieth century saw the patronizing, parochial ignorance of Parisians as part of a system of organized repression. Bécassine herself was afforded the honours of a paramilitary coup. One Sunday in 1939, three Breton ‘commandos’ entered the Musée Grévin in Paris, where a w
axwork statue of Bécassine was on display, and struck a blow for all the Breton maids who had ever been patronized and exploited by Parisian employers by smashing her to pieces.

  Ironically, unlike the older, anti-colonial struggles in Corsica and Algeria, these regional independence movements were themselves a product of the Third Republic’s education system. Most people who had a sense of being Breton had first learned to think of themselves as French. No separatist was ever monolingual, though he might yearn for the days when most of his compatriots were. ‘Bretonspeaking Bretons’, wrote Pierre-Jakez Hélias in 1975, ‘have never been aware of belonging to an entity called Brittany . . . They call themselves Bretons when they are outside Brittany, but they aren’t quite sure where it begins or ends.’ Breton nationalism was only remotely related to earlier, local rebellions against taxation and conscription. It was modelled on a modern image of the state as a cultural and administrative unit, and it owed its violent nostalgia to a concept of the pays that was disseminated by the national education system.

  In fact, far from being treated as a sign of backwardness, regional pride was widely considered to be a vital aspect of patriotism. Tactful decentralization had been an aspect of official policy since the 1860s. Many teachers were also local historians and were saddened by the disappearance of local languages and dialects. Some taught in dialect as well as French and believed that an ability to speak both languages was an asset. They forced their pupils to use French, not because they wanted to stamp out minority cultures, but because they wanted their pupils to pass examinations, to have the means of discovering the outside world, to improve the lot of their families. Brittany suffered more than most regions, particularly after the anti-clerical laws of 1901 and the subsequent attempt to ban the use of Breton in church services. But the French Republic never led the sort of full-scale linguistic assault on its population that made life so miserable in Alsace-Lorraine after the annexation by Germany in 1870.

  The retreat of Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican and Flemish before the tide of French belonged to a much older, more complicated process of social and material change. Standard French was carried all over the country by conscription, railways, newspapers, tourists and popular songs, which could hardly be sung in dialect without losing the rhymes. The Third Republic may even have prolonged the life of some dialects by promoting the use of French: it presented children with another way of being naughty. In 1887, five years after the introduction of free, compulsory education, a linguistician studying a dialect of the Mayenne noticed a phenomenon that can still be heard today:

  The patois of Montjean is now practically extinct except among old people and children. Old people speak it in earnest and the children enjoy exaggerating their grandparents’ pronunciation because they are taught to speak French at school.

  *

  THE FATHERLAND that children discovered in the classroom can be seen in all its simple variety in the books that were used to teach reading and geography. The main characters were usually children with insatiable appetites for geographical information, accompanied by a pedagogue crammed with uncontroversial facts. In Amable Tastu’s Voyage en France (1846), a father and his children stand in front of the industrial landscape of Le Creusot: ‘You are about to ask me, my children, what a blast furnace and an air furnace are,’ says the father. ‘I shall try to explain in a few words, with the help of some notes that I took in various books.’

  Some of these tales of infant tourists were self-righteously nationalistic, especially after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. In Marie de Grandmaison’s Le Tour de France (1893), two young boys explore the entire country on bicycles (this is the first time that the apprentices’ expression ‘Tour de France’ was associated with cycling). They end up in Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, where they admire the children who are about to escape from ‘the odious German yoke’ by emigrating to France:

  ‘Come, brother, let us follow their example. It is hard to breathe this air that smells of oppression.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marcel, ‘let us leave this beautiful Alsace, but with the hope of returning one day as victors!’

  However, the two boys can be quite odious themselves about the French provinces:

  ‘Ah, the Auvergne! Why are the people of this region so gullible?’ asked Robert.

  ‘Because of their volcanic terrain,’ replied Marcel. ‘When Nature herself looks so incredibly strange, the mind can easily accept the most miraculous things.’

  This ethnic inanity probably reflects the fact that Marcel and Robert come from a wealthy Paris suburb. Usually, the children came from a province and exemplified the virtues of their pays. Three Months Under the Snow: Journal of a Young Inhabitant of the Jura (15th edition, 1886) was a lesson in courage and patience. The petits voyageurs of P.-C. Briand’s ‘picturesque description of this beautiful land’ (1834) came from the ‘little island’ of Corsica but felt themselves to be ‘true Frenchmen’ – which was an improvement on the usual image of Corsicans as hairy bandits permanently embroiled in vendettas.

  Best of all was Augustine Bruno’s wildly popular Le Tour de France par deux enfants, subtitled ‘devoir et patrie, livre de lecture courante’ (1877). The two boys leave Phalsbourg in German-occupied Lorraine and set off to find their uncle Frantz after the death of their father, a carpenter whose dying wish was to emigrate to France. Their realistic adventures take them south to Marseille, on a boat to Bordeaux via the Mediterranean and the Canal du Midi, across northern France from Brittany to Flanders, then home to lay flowers on their father’s grave. From there, they take the train to Paris, whose streets, laid end to end, ‘would make a street nine hundred kilometres long, which is longer than the road from Paris to Marseille’. The orphans fend for themselves and learn about the country, not from a pedant with a library in his pockets, but from local men and women who work for a living. The journey ends, not in Paris, but on a farm in the Beauce that has been ravaged by the Franco-Prussian War but which hard work and patriotism will restore to productivity.

  Adult historians who are condescending about Bruno’s luminous little book should try describing an entire country, along with its people, produce, geography and climate, in a tale that could hold the attention of child. Le Tour de France par deux enfants, which had its 386th edition in 1922, gave millions of people a vivid, factual image of France. Some of the experiences and observations of André and Julien Volden were more famous than major events of French history: the shipwreck in the English Channel, the mistreated carthorse, the amazingly sensitive steam-hammer at the foundry in Le Creusot which could tap a cork into a wine bottle, or the hostelry-farmhouse in the Dauphiné:

  The people who entered the inn all spoke patois amongst themselves.

  The two boys sat in a corner, unable to comprehend a single word of what was being said and feeling quite alone in that foreign farm. . . .

  Finally, little Julien turned to his big brother and, with a look of affection mingled with sadness, said, ‘Why do none of the people of this pays speak French?’

  ‘Because not all of them have been able to go to school. But some yyears from now, things will be different, and people throughout France will be able to speak the language of the fatherland.’

  Just then, the door opened again. It was the innkeeper’s children, back from school.

  ‘André!’ cried Julien. ‘Those children must know French since they go to a school! What joy! We shall be able to talk to one another.’

  *

  WHEN THEY LEFT SCHOOL, the generations that had grown up with these books were encouraged to discover France for themselves by a massive campaign of national self-promotion which is still going strong in the twenty-first century. Newspapers and magazines urged their readers to visit the unknown parts of France that were spurned by wealthy tourists and especially the ‘lost provinces’ of Alsace-Lorraine. Regions that were practically unexplored until the 1880s and which few guidebooks had ever mentioned were promoted as holiday destinations:
the Ardennes, the Argonne and the Morvan, the valleys of the Dordogne and the Lot, the roadless canyon of the river Tarn and the cave-lined Gorges de l’Arde`che, the Vercors massif with its recent infrastructure of death-defying roads and tunnels, and the remote Cantal, where Gustave Eiffel’s soaring Garabit Viaduct (1884) was admired as a wonder of the modern world.

  This was the period when people began to say, as they still do, that ‘the land least known in France is France itself ’. It was as if the loss of part of its territory had alerted the nation to its untapped treasures. France had colonized North Africa and Indo-China but had failed to colonize itself. The rural population was flowing away to the cities, leaving the countryside exposed to the forces of Nature and foreign invasion. It was the patriotic duty of every French citizen to go on holiday to unpopular places, which they would find to be as spectacular as the overrated Alps. The Magasin pittoresque imagined a Parisian holidaymaker, kidnapped and blindfolded and taken to the shores of Lac Chambon in the heart of the Auvergne. When the blindfold was removed, he would find himself in a stunning landscape of cloudlike mountains and glassy lakes and would scarcely believe himself in France.

  The remarketing of France was pioneered by local historians and politicians, provincial academies and geographical societies, railway companies and journalists. Parts of the country were unofficially renamed to make them sound more attractive: the coast of Provence became the Côte d’Azur in 1877. Then came the Côte É meraude (Emerald Coast) of Brittany, the Côte Sauvage of the Vendée, and the Côte d’Argent (Silver Coast) on the Atlantic between Royan and Bayonne. Little Switzerlands sprang up all over the place, beginning with the unfashionable Morvan and the Limousin. It has since become almost obligatory for any region with rolling pastures to call itself Switzerland. At the time of writing, there are ten French ‘Switzerlands’, from the ‘Suisse Normande’ (fifty miles north-west of the ‘Alpes mancelles’) to the ‘Suisse Niçoise’ and the ‘Suisse d’Alsace’.