The established church too, had little real hold, Robb contends. The “pagan” gods - from pagus or pays - were still around, and saints were regarded much as they had been: “the Church was important in the same way that a shopping mall is important to shoppers: the customers were not especially interested in the creator and owner of the mall; they came to see the saints, who sold their wares in little chapels around the nave”. And the idea of hierarchy among the “congregation” may well not have matched that of the priest. Robb quotes a lovely case from 1872 in Chartes of a woman asked to move out of the way of “le bon Dieu” in a procession. “She retorted, ’Huh! I didn’t come here for him, I came for her, pointing at the Virgin.’”
The Discovery of France is filled with such delightful asides and anecdotes. There’s a thesis here, and a coherent account of a whole world that is invisible in traditional political and social histories centred on Paris. But that never gets in the way of delightful tale-telling.
And in the great divide of France - between the “snooty” Parisiens and the French (still alive today - I’ve had many French people in Burgundy say they prefer “real” foreigners — Dutch, English etc, to the Parisiens) there’s no question on which side Robb’s sympathies lie. With the brave, poor, unknowns who made such incredible journeys now mostly lost to history. He says: “It seems to be a law of social history that the greater the number of people with a particular experience, the less evidence remains of it. There are hundreds of pointlessly detailed accounts of banal coach journeys made by tourists, but the odysseys undertaken by migrants have vanished like most of the routes they walked.” (Although Robb does outline the account of Martin Nadaud, who left a Limousin hamlet in 1830 at age 14, dressed by his tearful mother in a top hat, new shoes, and a stiff sheep’s wool suit — the type of wool is now used for rough rugs. When he lost sight of the “Druid stones” that stood near his village, he’d left his payes.)
Robb makes the important point — something still very often ignored today — that curiosity was one of he main forces behind even the poorest people‘s travel, even though “the desire to discover the country is usually associated with explorers, scholars and tourists, not with migrant workers”. He explains how the first “Tour de France” was that of apprentices. The phrase originated in the early 18th century, but Robb says the practice was much older. Starting in Provence and Languedoc but eventually spreading in a rough hexagon around the Massif Central, it had a network of “Mothers” who provided lodging and arranged jobs. So would apprentices learn different techniques, different materials, different skills, over a period of four or five years. “An Ordinary Route of the Tour of France”, published by a baker in 1859, included 151 towns.
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