Lingua Franca

At the time of the French Revolution of 1789, only about half of the population of that country knew French, and bilingualism was common. France continued to accommodate a myriad of tongues right through the 19th century: Flemish, Provençal, Gascon, Catalan, Basque, and so on, and many dialects and patois, as well as extraordinary variation in spoken language within regions. The diversity wasn’t merely lingual: A variety of pre-Christian religious beliefs and superstitions, worldviews and ways of life flourished simultaneously in the more provincial countryside beyond Paris. Even the legal order varied greatly: In addition to the difference between regions influenced by customary law — essentially northern France — and Roman law, a variety of local systems of justice survived intact, each system bringing along with it a strong sense of belonging to one of the myriad petites patries of the hexagon.Graham Robb’s new history, “The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War” (W.W. Norton, 455 pages, $27.95), is a wonderful place to start to understand the cultural mosaic of 19thcentury France and the modern-day diversity that is its descendant. Mr. Robb, a journalist, conceived of the book as he bicycled through rural France along Gallo-Roman roads, pilgrimage routes that ended in St. Jacques de Compostela in Spain, and transhumance trails. One of the book’s considerable merits is that it is written from the ground up, which is the way it should be. Mr. Robb loves continuities in French landscapes, some of which have hardly changed in two thousand years and can be read by the careful explorer. Mr. Robb knows France well and has read widely, although he has, inevitably, missed some things that would have saved him from errors (such as drastically underestimating the amount of “economic cohesion” in France before World War I). But one can’t read everything.One of Mr. Robb’s fascinating themes is how French elites — principally Parisians — “discovered” their country and its “hidden” populations, what he calls the “tribes of France,” living in obscure pays. The sections on mapmaking, roads (which improved greatly in the 18th and first half of the 19th century), and the often-daunting challenges of travel on roads, rivers, and canals as French travelers discovered the wonders of their country, are spectacular. Mr. Robb contends, however, that the French state “showed little interest in charting its domain,” which is not really accurate. Instead, much of the most aggressive mapmaking was by military figures. During the first half of the century, junior officers seeking promotion in the French army made useful maps (reconnaissances militaires) of much of the country, including, for example, plans for defending Angoulême against the British, Turks, Chinese, anyone, found today in the archives of the Minister of War in Vincennes. The centralizing French state did truly want to know what was out there.Mr. Robb’s book is a true pleasure to read, informative and entertaining, a veritable treasure trove presenting the beauty of the small. You can read about the smuggling dogs of northern France, the dog cemetery of Asnières-sur-Seine, and the “whistling language of Aas.” If anyone reading this is trying to woo someone, they might want to borrow the line Mr. Robb finds on a postcard sent by a peasant from the Vendée to his fiancée: “You’re so fresh and lovely the only thing I can compare you to is fields of young cabbages before the caterpillars have got to them.”Beyond its picaresque charms, “The Discovery of France” offers something of an update of a now-classic — though highly contested, including by this reader — account of “the modernization of France,” presented in the mid-1970s by the late, wonderful historian Eugen Weber, whose influence it would have been proper — trade book or no trade book — to acknowledge in the text. In “Peasants into Frenchmen” (1976), Weber insisted on the relative isolation of rural life throughout most of the 19th century. For Weber, savage, backward, isolated France awaited, passively, the arrival of change in the form of railroads, mass military conscription, and obligatory primary schooling in French, so that peasants could be transformed into Frenchmen. By 1914, the story goes, Bretons, Gascons, Provençaux, Auvergnats, Limousins, Corsicans, and so many others could march off to the slaughter at the front singing the “Marseillaise” in reasonably good French. As it has been said with considerable accuracy, a language is a dialect with a powerful army.“The Discovery of France” offers a more nuanced view but, like Weber, presents as the central story of the period the colonialization of provincial France by the powerful centralized state and elite upper-class Parisians and other urban types in the 19th century. Like Weber, Mr. Robb can be faulted for falling for a very Parisian stereotype of provincial France in the half-century that followed the revolution. His bias is clear when he contends that “empty spaces and silent towns… seemed to represent the normal state of affairs.” Statements like these are plain exaggerations and simplifications, which become particularly striking when one remembers how terribly, and nationally, important were the revolutions of 1830 and 1848-51.Mr. Robb is terrific on patterns of geographic mobility that were timeless through most of the 19th century. These included the centuries-old seasonal migration of Limousin, Alpine, and Pyrenees males to cities, particularly Paris, to work for nine months a year in the building trades or as chimney sweeps, the itineraries of peddlers (many of whom came from the Alpine Isère, Cantal in Auvergne, and the Haute-Garonne, Toulouse’s département, in the shadow of the Pyrenees), and the compagnonnage — that combination of craftguild and religious confraternity which emerged from the time of the construction of the great Gothic cathedrals. The original Tour de France was the trek of young artisans from town to town, perfecting their skills over a period of about four years. The name became that of the annual Tour de France bicycle race, now so corrupted by the rampant use of illegal drugs.Mr. Robb’s “Discovery of France” is also very strong on the sense of place so essential to both life in France and to the writing of good history. This particular reader resides and spends much of his time in a village in Ardèche about an hour’s drive from the Gerbier de Jonc, that looming “mountain” where Robb begins his book. Near us lives a woman from an adjacent commune, the center of which is but several kilometers from where she now lives. She married a man from our village about 50 years ago. A friend not long ago asked her, in jest, how she liked living in her “new” village. She sighed and replied, “Sometimes I get homesick.” And she meant it.Mr. Robb finished “The Discovery of France” at the time of the riots in the suburbs in October and November 2005. He concludes his book by wondering how France’s Muslim population (about five million people) will be integrated into the country. At present, they have been relegated to the margins of urban life in the grim suburbs of Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, and lots of other places by the lack of economic opportunity, isolation — some self-imposed — and discrimination. Like many other peoples who were part of what Robb calls “tribal France,” they speak another language, or are bilingual, and face the condescension of well-heeled urban elites, including President Nicolas Sarkozy. But they, too, have a place in the French hexagon.Mr. Merriman is the Charles Seymour professor of history at Yale University. His recent books include “The Stones of Balazuc: A French Village in Time” (2002); “A History of Modern Europe from the Renaissance to the Present,” 2nd edition (2004), and “Police Stories: Making the French State” (2006).

Lingua Franca

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