The Discovery of France Graham Robb Book Review

The Grand Canyon of the Verdon, a deep, narrow incision in the Alps of Provence, is one of the great wonders of France. The Verdon River, fast and wild, races for 13 miles between sheer limestone cliffs before emptying into the Lac de Ste. Croix, a delight for thousands of kayakers, hikers and camera-toting tourists. Yet until 1905, this natural wonder, located only 60 miles from Marseille, was known only to a few local woodcutters who descended into the canyon on ropes to cut boxwood, which they carved into high-quality balls for boules. Somehow the second-largest gorge in the world managed to hide in plain sight until the age of the automobile.

THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE

A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War

By Graham Robb

Illustrated. 455 pages. W. W. Norton. .95.

In “The Discovery of France” Graham Robb describes a land of secrets slowly divulged, a nation in name only for most of its history, fragmented by mutually incomprehensible dialects and deeply rooted regional cultures. France, in this brilliant work of history seen from the margins, dissolves under close inspection into a vast cabinet of curiosities, an endless series of counterexamples to the myth of a culturally unified nation and people.

Mr. Robb, the author of biographies of Zola, Hugo and Balzac, writes in his introduction that he traveled 14,000 miles by bicycle all over France in the course of researching his book. Quite naturally, he devotes several pages to the Tour de France. There are two, one well known, the other not. The original Tour de France was an itinerary followed by apprentices for centuries, a four- or five-year trek, organized by the trade guilds, that sent young masons and bakers and carpenters on a 1,400-mile journey to more than a hundred towns, where they served under local artisans, learning local techniques and working with local materials.

The roads of France, often little more than ancient ruts and trails, teemed with people on the move. Peddlers, shepherds, beggars, migrant workers and petty criminals made their way from tiny villages to large towns and back again, taking their goods and their labor to the markets where they commanded the highest prices, clustering in neighborhoods dominated by fellow residents of their native regions. Ebb and flow was the norm, not assimilation.

“By the mid-19th century, half the inhabitants of Paris came from the provinces, and most of them did not consider themselves Parisian,” Mr. Robb writes.

Many of the migrant workers in Paris knew only enough French to shout their street cries. Mr. Robb begins his survey of French disunion by mapping the linguistic disarray that prevailed until the very recent past. A survey carried out in the 1790s revealed that French, the language of civilized Europe, was spoken by no more than three million people, or 11 percent of the population, in France itself. More than six million French citizens spoke no French, and an equal number could barely sustain a French conversation. A century later, only about a fifth of the population said it was comfortable speaking French.

Who were these people? Where were they? How did they live? Most Parisians did not have the faintest idea. The government did not get around to mapping the country until the middle of the 18th century. Guidebooks were of no help in unraveling the mysteries of the provinces, since their authors simply repeated the errors of previous writers.

“Many writers clearly never expected anyone to follow their directions and painted detailed pictures of imaginary provincial towns,” Mr. Robb writes. For a clearer picture the curious could visit a model France, created on an acre of ground in 1838 by a retired schoolteacher who carved riverbeds in stone and let passengers cruise his three-foot-deep Mediterranean in a flat-bottomed boat.

Anyone with the pluck to travel could expect to see marvels. On the vast heath of the Landes, in southwestern France, shepherds walked on 10-foot stilts that allowed them to cover up to 75 miles a day. Along the River Somme, smugglers trained teams of dogs to carry contraband strapped to their backs and evade tax collectors along the border between Picardy and Artois. In the Marais Poitevin, a vast marsh along the Atlantic coast, a people known as the Colliberts plied the reeds in plank boats light enough to carry under one arm.

France was a land of marvels, with each region, and each village within each region, culturally and linguistically isolated from the rest of the country but interconnected economically by an ancient network of trails and commercial ties. Mr. Robb, who writes beautifully, unravels these connecting threads, highlights differences and traces the long, slow process of centralization that has erased most of the cultural differences he describes and changed the very landscape itself.

The France that Mr. Robb describes in his opening pages, and that its first cartographers mapped, no longer exists.

“From the red, stony wastes of the Esterel in southeastern Provence, to the ocean of gorse, broom and heather that covered much of Brittany, France was a land of deserts,” he writes.

All are gone now, reclaimed for agriculture. These sweeping changes took place, Mr. Robb writes, “on such a large scale that it is quite possible to travel from one end of the country to the other without noticing them, and without realizing that many of the landscapes that seem typically and eternally French are younger than the Eiffel Tower.”

France is not what it seems, least of all to its own citizens. Mr. Robb has accomplished quite a feat. He has reintroduced France to itself.