A French connection built from reading, riding, researching

'The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War'

by Graham Robb

Norton, 454 pp., $27.95

Most of us have a reasonably clear sense of France and its history. Invaded by the Romans and ruled by a series of royal families, France was rocked by a bloody Revolution, ruled by an emperor named Napoleon and made home to the Eiffel Tower, ultimately becoming the classic tourist destination (before the Euro made it too expensive to visit). But this modern conception of France is not only incomplete, but fundamentally misconceived.

Almost everything that makes France "French" is a more or less modern invention. French as a language, for starters, was not widely spoken throughout France itself until well after the French Revolution. Instead, peasants throughout the countryside spoke a hodgepodge of differing languages and dialects. Even in the late 1700s, a traveler leaving the city limits of Paris typically required a translator to be understood and, farther south, would have difficulty even identifying the language he or she was hearing. Indeed, just over 100 years ago, French was a foreign language to nearly 80 percent of the population.

Graham Robb, a historian and author of several acclaimed biographies, provides a ground-level historical geography of France from the Revolution through the First World War. An avid bicycle rider, Robb researched the book by riding more than 14,000 miles throughout France and spending four years in the library. What he discovered was how little of what one might consider "France" existed only a couple of centuries ago.

Indeed, authorities didn't even attempt to map the country until the mid-18th century. Even then, the cartographers encountered stiff hostility from villagers suspicious of "foreigners" with strange devices.

Large parts of France weren't even part of the country until relatively recently. Brittany, for example, didn't become part of France until 1532, when Queen Anne of Brittany married into the Royal family and brought the Celtic province as her dowry. France, similarly, didn't acquire Alsace and Lorraine until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Nice and Savoy didn't become part of France until 1860. As Robb notes, "the propaganda of French national unity has been broadcast continuously since the Revolution, and it takes a while to notice that the tribal divisions of France were almost totally unrelated to administrative boundaries."

The Revolution, together with the introduction of modern transportation and communication systems, brought enormous pressures to bear on provincial culture. In the provinces, being "patriotic" or "educated" often meant denigrating one's own culture, language and customs.

Little of what once existed survives to this day. On the marsh lands of southwest France, shepherds on 10-foot stilts once covered dozens of miles of heath in a day. Deserts covered portions of the interior. Seasonal migrations of masons and other skilled workers traveled the footpaths toward Paris and employment. Highly trained dogs in the north smuggled goods to evade taxes.

With much of the country transformed by modern agriculture, the French language imposed from above and modern transportation leaving villages to collapse into neglect, many of the curiosities of ancient France simply vanished into the slipstream of history.

Robb's book offers a glimpse into that forgotten past, from evidence found at bike level in obscure corners of the country most of us are unlikely to visit. And for that meticulous research, he deserves a standing ovation. He could, however, have benefited greatly from a strong editor with an ample supply of red pencils, as the book suffers from occasional numbing detail, arcane asides and a less-than-transparent organization. But for those in search of a remembrance of things past, to paraphrase Proust, this is a priceless glimpse into history.

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