A Frenchman I happen to know has lived all of his 73 years in one small hamlet of around 100 houses, except for a couple of unhappy years of national service in North Africa. He’s now half surrounded by the holiday homes of assorted Dutch, English, and other nationalities, which he tries very hard to adjust to by trying to educate those who are amenable into the ethos and behaviour that he considers appropriate, and traditional. He’s friendly and keen to chat, but loses interest as soon as the topic moves beyond the hamlet.
Having read Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France, I now understand him a great deal more — for its thesis is that France, at least until the First World War, was not a nation, or at least was many, many nations, payes, which might be best defined as an area in which you could hear one church bell. Anyone with an interest in history knows that Germany was very late in European terms in forming as a “nation”, yet in Robb’s account France was scarcely more of one.
To set the scene he looks at the experiences of a series of intrepid mapmakers, some of whom paid with their lives for their efforts, not because of natural accidents but because their “foreign” status and “strange” tools made them targets. So the first mapster to see Le Gerbier de Jonc, 350 miles south of Paris on the watershed dividing the Med from the Atlantic, after trekking for three days through rugged, bare rock, in the early 1740s met his end: the locals took him for a sorcerer, and hacked him to death. Even in Murray’s Handbook for Travellers (1854), while it was suggested that this was a fine region for viewing by balloon, the writer added that this was “only if the aeronaut can remain out of range of a rifle”.
Beyond the main roads, there was wilderness and total isolation. So a girl of eight could get lost in the Issaux Forest, in the Basque Country, and only be found eight years later by shepherds in 1730, having lost her speech. In the mid-18th century a 300-strong band of smugglers roamed one-fifth of France, evading three regiments for a year and half, only captured when the leader, Louis Mandrin, was betrayed by his mistress. It was a land of tiny communities. In the late 18th and early 19th century, almost a third of the population, about 10 million people, lived in isolated farms, or hamlets with fewer than 35 inhabitants. “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.”
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