The Discovery of France

"great liking to hear speak of strange things of diverse countries"


Off the autoroute

Eric Griffiths
Published 06 September 2007
newstatesman

A "historical guidebook" uncovers the stranger side of French history, complete with beetroot brandy, whistle languages and fearsome sheep.

The Discovery of France
Graham Robb Picador, 400pp, £18.99

Before leaving their mountain villages to cross the expanse known for short as "France" on a mission to give 19th-century housewives what they wanted, pedlars would load up with as many as 23,222 items, including 36 thimbles plus "an assortment of hooks-and-eyes, knives, notebooks, suspenders and cakes of soap". Their baskets were, as Graham Robb says, "masterpieces of packing". So is his new book. It bulges with tasty and thought-provoking facts.

For example : did you know that "in the Jura, villages without a water supply used wheel-spinning dogs to run machines . . . bitches suckled their puppies as they skittered inside the wheel" and pupils were delivered to school by dog-carts, so much more economical and eco-friendly than a Chelsea tractor because they run on scraps? Outbreaks of road-rage were few. Or that women used to work as human alarm-clocks in Paris, where a presidential candidate in the 1920s suggested extending the Boulevard Saint-Michel to the sea and "furriers from Saint-Oradoux . . . walked the streets under a mountain of rabbit-skins, frightening children and skinning stray cats"? Or that miners in the Rouergue drank beetroot brandy, while shepherds pranced on stilts through the rock-roses of Les Landes at speeds that could outpace the carriage of an empress ? Incroyable, mais vrai!

Robb provides an eye-opening guide to the variety of Frances in the century or so after the Revolution with its implausible, tidy schemes for the patrie. This was a land where men were men, women "could exterminate several hundred birds in a few minutes by biting their necks", and even the sheep were not the "aimless, skittish creatures of today", but fought strenuously over pasture, like the peasants of the Lot with their fondness for "bloody scenes, combats . . . serious wounds"(mistakenly believed by some etymologists to be the origin of the phrase "a bad lot").

He is especially good on the realities of travel, as you would expect from so keen a cyclist: "Until the invention of cheap bicycles, the known universe, for many people, had a radius of less than 15 miles and a population that could easily fit into a small barn." Pundits sometimes talk as if what makes the remote past tricky to understand is that long ago our ancestors held weird beliefs, such as that royals are supernatural beings or that the BBC is 100 per cent trustworthy, but weird beliefs, including those just mentioned, are still plentiful among us.

It is not how our minds have changed that estranges us from our yesterdays but the altered physique of daily life and our infatuation with our own technologies. If you haven't grown up in the arms of ring-roads and to the incessant lullaby of traffic-noise, of course you gawp, as children near Châteauroux (now a mere two hours south of Paris) used to gawp, at the sight of "a four-wheeled carriage lurching through the countryside like an enchanted house".

Those who carry with them everywhere a chirping, umbilical mobile phone suppose there was something odd about the humanoid creatures in the Pyrennees who used to communicate in a language of whistles, audible over a distance of up to two miles and "versatile enough in the early 20th century to convey the contents of the local newspaper". Perhaps they had cross-bred with marmots, rodents of the zone, which whistle when alarmed and hibernate so deeply they can be '"harvested rather than hunted, tossed into a rucksack and . . . boiled while still asleep"? But these Pyrenneans were simply keeping in touch, as social animals need to do. The only odd thing about them is how well they had learned from auditory features of their environment rather than gliding impercipiently through it, deafened by gadgets they had stuck in their ears.

The Discovery of France stands in the ancient and delightful line of compilations that cater to our "great liking to hear speak of strange things of diverse countries", as one of Robb's predecessors, Jehan de Mandeville, put it in his 14th-century book of Mandeville's Travels. Robb's facts are likely to stay facts for longer than the tales about the Cynocephali, the incorruptibility of peacock meat and the toxic plant that caused those who ate it to die laughing, which figured in earlier such works (described by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park in their genuinely marvellous Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 from Zone Books). His explanations, too, ring true - as when he points out that the glorious tree-lined roads all over France, radiating dappled light around Saint-Rémy-de-Provence or shading the way down into Aulnay, were designed "not, as legend has it, to provide shade for marching troops, but because they looked nice". He has an alert eye and a matching gift for alert phrases, which alight on spas "full of grand museumy hotels, softened by neglect" and illuminate the "orrery of disparate, concurrent spheres" whose orbits combine to give the appearance of a unified "nation". Though he sometimes gets ahead of the English language where "footpad" still means a highwayman without a horse and not what Robb imagines when he specifies, among the furniture of old-style, squatting latrines, "porcelain footpads on either side of a small dark hole".

Robb had a literary education and has passed that education on through his acclaimed biographies of 19th-century authors (the best, if you haven't tried them, is of Victor Hugo). Literary folk suffer from the occupational disease that Sartre diagnosed in himself - "for a long time I mistook language for the world" - where "language" means the dialect of literature and officialdom, anciently called "the French of Paris" and now misleadingly abbreviated to "French". In return, the world mistook Sartre: 42 per cent of French provincials in the 1950s were not sure whether "Sartre" was the name of a dress- designer or of a street.

The educated are prisoners of their own expert diction, as Voltaire was in 1753 when he described Lorraine as "half German, half French and totally Iroquois", and as Roland Barthes remained when, in 1953, he claimed that the passé simple tense was "obsolete in spoken French", though he could have heard that tense spoken throughout the Midi and in Pau, where he lived until moving to Paris at the age of nine. Robb knows better: he bangs on about such delusions of uniformity with the amused self-righteousness of someone who has only recently given up a bad habit that the decently informed abandoned decades ago. He has a fine chapter on the discrepancy of tongues within France, but his tone constantly implies his naïf readers will be astonished that what he calls "'French' culture" should be so partial a model of the land's disparities. He himself sounds nettled that an "official government map" turns out to be "more coherent than the country itself", whereas a map, official or otherwise, which wasn't more coherent than what it mapped would be of no use at all. I can't think why he doesn't put "culture" in inverted commas, too. A system of representation, whether cartographic or literary, is not a mirror, and even mirrors flatten and transpose what they reflect.

The French are less special than either Graham Robb or they like to believe. This sumptuously entertaining book misses a great opportunity for comparisons between France and other countries, and so it shrinks its own data down to callow and vivacious curios - whereas they are actually clues to the turbid story of state- formation. The French, for instance, perceived the state as a "dangerous nuisance" and prayed "for deliverance from Satan, sorcerers . . . and 'Justice'"; in our pokier, more boisterous realm, fire-fighters are stoned when they venture to assist some estates. Burke warned in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that not even the "terrorisme" the would-be regime-changers were then inventing (the word was coined in 1795) would bring the multiple terroirs of the land quickly into neat and equal line. But the powerful rarely care to hear about the limits of their own power, and their successors are now presiding, shocked and maybe awed, over the debacle of Iraq.

Thirty years ago, Theodore Zeldin, whose incomparable work on what he called the "discovery of France" is bizarrely absent from Robb's bibliography, drew broader morals from a denser study than Robb's of the country's many facets and why they are so often discounted, writing that "the history of nationalism is still in the state that the history of religion was before the sociology of religion was invented". He put this down to the sad, persisting fact that "the self-flattery of governments has been accorded the status of accepted truth".

Eric Griffiths is a Fellow in English at Trinity College, Cambridge

http://www.newstatesman.com/200709060043