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.
Even for the rich and well-connected, however, travel was far from easy. Robb quotes from Mme de Genlis’s phrasebook for travellers of 1799 such gems as:
Your carriage is heavy and overloaded.
The horse is worthless. It is restive. It is skittish…. Please give me a different one.
What kind of road is it?
It is very sandy.
It is strewn with rocks.
It is full of mountains, forests and precipices.
One must avoid passing through forests at dusk or at night.
And even those who could pay would not necessarily eat well. Robb explains how the French tradition of fine dining has its roots not in tradition, but 19th-century development. Most people lived on a monotonous basic diet that could apparently barely sustain life, and stale bread was the staple. In the Alps bread was baked once a year or even less often, then hung in the sun to dry or smoked in the eaves. It was softened with buttermilk or whey - or for rich people, wine. Anything that could be eaten was: in the Alps marmots, in the Morvan red squirrel.
It barely sounds survivable as a staple diet - but Robb explains how it was, quoting from the memoirs of the socialist Proudhon, who while he described meals of roasted cornmeal, potatoes, and vegetable soup also “grazed” in the fields on poppy seeds, peas, rampion, salsify, cherries, grapes, rosehips, blackberries, and sloes. And there were in 1862 more than 3 million beehives in France, one for every 13 inhabitants.
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