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Monday, 10 December 2007 |
By Graham Robb, Picador, 2007
427 pp. soft cover, Village Voice €28, French News price €26
Imagine a country it takes three weeks to
cross north to south, and three weeks east
to west; a country split into half-a-dozen
languages, over 50 dialects and hundreds of
sub-dialects; a country unknown to most of
its inhabitants, who are only dimly – and
usually unhappily – aware of the existence of
a central government that makes its authority
felt by sending them labour recruiters, taxcollectors
and map makers. (At least one
cartographer is hacked to pieces by the
suspicious population of a village where the priest, the local
chief and a sorcerer or healer represent authority). A Gothic
fantasy kingdom? A literary allegory of loneliness, isolation
and benightedness such as a Kafka or a Buzzati might have
written?
No, this was France – and not so long ago either. After
writing biographies of Hugo, Balzac, and Rimbaud, Graham
Robb, a scholar who combines a lively prose style with a
passion for the small, hard facts that tell us more about the lives
of ordinary people than the statistics of social historians, has
now given us a remarkably well-informed and well-told history
of the human geography of France from the ancien régime to
the 20th century. This may sound dry, yet though Robb did
spend four years doing research for the book in libraries, he
also covered some 14,000kms of the French countryside on a
bicycle, poking into places that would seem exotic to even the
average Frenchman. The discovery in his title is both personal
and factual. It has as much to do with where the author went
and who he talked to as, for example, the number of pins and
bobbins in peddler's backpack.
The story that Robb tells, how France discovered itself
physically as distinct from nationally, is by and large one of
loss – inevitably so, given that opening up to the rest of the
country meant surrendering local particularism. Patois, age-old
customs and prejudices died out like candle flames in the
bright light of the modern world and its devastating ‘t’s: trains,
the telephone, television and tourism. And yet progress is not
quite the one-way road it is often assumed to be: local
exceptions vanish, only to be replaced by new exceptions.
Where there were once remote mountain villages hostile to
outsiders (Robert Louis Stevenson, hardly a paranoiac, packed
a pistol during his donkey trek through the Cévennes in 1878),
there are now suburbs where few save their own inhabitants
dare set foot. And if every French citizen remains attached to
the concept of “l'exception française”, President Sarkozy's
France is starting to pitch and creak alarmingly as it sails into
the choppy waters of increasingly clamorous
“exceptionalisms”. Someone ought to send him a copy of this
book. There isn't a better – or more readable – guide to why
France is the way it is.
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