Robb reports how women in many areas were subject to horrible abuse and treated as little more than working animals, but he also makes it clear that they didn’t always accept this, and that female solidarity could go to considerable lengths. He quotes the Breton peasant Deguignet on a custom in Brittany (an area known for its strong patriarchy) about a game played by women at midday, when the men were asleep. Four or five women would find a man on his own, pin him down, and stuff his pants with mid or cow dung. Furthermore, if the game got rougher, “the woman left free would split the end of a thick stick, then with her two hands she would pry it apart the way you open a trap, and fit it onto the organis generationis ex pace par hominis… It was done in full daylight and right out in the fields in front of everyone, in front of gangs of children clapping and screaming with laughter.”
But of course change had to, we now know, arrive. The tourists, local and foreign, did start arriving in the 19th century, with the usually messy results. “Two friends” published an artistic guide to the Pyrenees in 1835 - they noted in one village that a hospitable cobbler let them sleep on the floor of his shop. The book gave his name and address, with the results familiar to any user of a Lonely Planet guide. Sometimes, though, the benefits could be mutual: around Provence town dwellers would open a little cubicle in the corner of their house and sell the leavings to the manure collector. This spread to the countryside, where competitive signs would draw coach travellers to little huts adorned with flowers: “Ici on est bien (It’s nice in here”), Ici on est mieux (It’s nicer here).”
Robb credits the bicycle, however, for the real revolution in France, noting the popular figures showing how the height of the population increased by several centimetres as a result of the reduction in the number of marriages between blood relatives. Before the First World War there was officially one for every ten people. (But since these were taxed, there were probably a lot more unofficial ones.) So change was coming, fast, and Robb notes that with it arrived nostalgia for a past that never really was. One of the most successful books of 1913 was Alain-Fournier’s novel Le Grand Meaulnes (translated as The Lost Domain and The End of Youth), which spoke of a simple, small world in the rural Bourbonnais - clod-wearing school pupils smelling of hay, the beaten-earth floor of the general store, the silence of the countryside. The Discovery of France effectively explains how this was both true, and not true, and for anyone who wants to understand the nation beyond the streets of Paris, it is essential reading. That it’s so immensely entertaining can only be considered a bonus.
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