The Discovery of France (15 page)

DECREE OF THE NATIONAL CONVENTION

[Paris, 12 October 1793]

The nation’s most successful foreign ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte, did not see ‘France’ as a foregone conclusion. When he crossed the country as a prisoner of the Allies in 1814, he was cheered as far as Nevers, booed at Moulins, cheered again at Lyon and almost lynched in Provence, where he disguised himself as an English lord and then as an Austrian officer. In Napoleon’s view, the restored king, Louis XVII I, should rule the country as a conquering despot, ‘or he’ll never be able to do anything with it’. Something called French society might have existed, but its features are hard to distinguish in the history of the state.

A more convincing definition of French identity might be found by settling in a French town or village when it comes to life again in spring, watching the comings and goings of the people and listening to their conversations.

At first, the process of selecting a particular place would only emphasize the confusion. Rural France can be divided roughly into three zones: the open-field country of the north and north-west where cultivated strips of land radiate from the compact village; the patchwork bocage of the west and centre, where the fields are enclosed by hedges and paths; and the stony tracts and sparse settlements of the south and south-east. But within each zone, there are many different shapes of town and village. It might be a winegrowing town like Riquewihr in Alsace, walled in by its vineyards and hoarding shade for its cellars; a Provençal village like Bédoin, curled up like an ear against the shock-wave of the mistral; or a ‘street village’ like Aliermont, whose houses line the former main road from Neufchâtel to Dieppe for ten miles to catch the passing trade like fishermen on a riverbank. If the settler had time to become acquainted with the peculiar geometry of the place, he might choose one of the silent outposts of the Beauce, a patch of brown roof tiles in the plain, where farmyards alternate with houses and sudden glimpses of vast fields beyond; or even one of the scattered colonies of the Forez and the eastern Auvergne, where the separate parts of the village seem to have sprouted in ancient forest clearings and are still more closely tied to the field at the door than to the arbitrary church and indifferent town hall.

These various types of settlement imply different, but not profoundly different, ways of life. All are moulded by the immediate countryside and only marginally by their nearest trading partners. Many still have a defensive air, though their sphere of activity now extends far beyond what were once the concentric rings of the customs barriers, the perimeter zone of gardens and cornfields and the forested horizon. Today, the only traces of defence, apart from restored town gates and fortifications, are barking dogs, speed-bumps and signs asking drivers not to kill the local children. Nearly all these places have become porous and suburban. Between seven and nine o’clock, Aliermont is emptied out by Dieppe and the local
engineering factory; the tourist ‘Route des Vins’ on which Riquewihr stands is thick with traffic bound for Colmar and Mulhouse; Bédoin’s schoolchildren migrate for the day to Carpentras on a high-speed coach that tears along the back roads. Two centuries ago, most of the traffic came from the other direction, on market days, with tiny loads of vegetables or fuel, an animal to sell and a thirst for news and gossip. The morning rush-hour began before dawn. At Mars-la-Tour, on the road to Metz, Arthur Young heard the village herdsman sound his horn at four in the morning, ‘and it was droll to see every door vomiting out its hogs or sheep, and some a few goats, the flock collecting as it advances’.

Whenever he saw the swarms of market-goers entering a town with their ‘trifling burthens’ – a basket of apples, a tray of grubby cheeses or a lone cabbage – Arthur Young knew that he was looking at the effects of the national disease: ‘a minute and vicious division of the soil’. Yet this fragmentation of the land was also its unifying feature. Even after the Revolution had taught these tiny worlds that they belonged to the same fatherland, this ‘vicious division of the soil’ might prove to be their salvation.

*

P
ERHAPS THE BEST PLACE
in which to observe the effects of fragmentation – because the creator of the place intended it to be typical – would be a small market town on the eastern borders of Normandy. Yonville-l’Abbaye, in Gustave Flaubert’s novel of ‘provincial life’,
Madame Bovary
, lies along its little river ‘like a cowherd taking a siesta’. It has a tiny conurbation of thatched cottages and courtyards cluttered with cider presses, cart sheds and straggly fruit trees. The town centre has a smithy, a wheelwright’s workshop, a white house with a circle of lawn (‘this is the notary’s house, the finest in the pays’), a musty church, a town hall ‘designed by a Paris architect’, a tiled roof on pillars that serves as a market hall, the Golden Lion inn and a few shops. The draper and the chemist have pretensions to elegance; the other businesses are probably little more than workshops and doorsteps.

The new doctor lives in ‘one of the most comfortable houses in Yonville’: it has its own wash-house, a kitchen with a pantry, a sitting
room, an apple loft and an arbour at the foot of the garden. The person who designed this remarkable residence was a Polish doctor with ‘extravagant’ ideas who ran away and was never seen again. The new doctor’s wife, Emma Bovary, is the granddaughter of a shepherd and the daughter of a farmer, but her convent education has given her ideas above her station and she finds the house small and depressing.

Since 1835, Yonville has been joined to the outside world by a road. Carters who ply the route from the port of Rouen to Flanders sometimes use it as a short cut. There is even a daily coach to Rouen – a ‘yellow trunk’ slung on huge wheels that spoil the view and spatter the passengers with mud. The driver of ‘L’Hirondelle’ (‘The Swallow’) supplements his wages by running a rudimentary freight service from the city: he brings rolls of leather for the cobbler, hats for the draper, iron for the blacksmith and herrings for his mistress. Despite these signs of progress, the town is still a willing prisoner of its setting. It lies between arable land and pasture,

A progressive bourgeois like the town chemist, M. Homais, who is not directly dependent on the land, can afford to revel in the stupidity of peasants: ‘Would to heaven our farmers were trained chemists or at least lent a more attentive ear to the counsels of science!’ But improving land is expensive and animals are a comfort. A peasant might invest in fertilizer and increase the yield of grain, but why should she risk her livelihood in a volatile market? Grain prices are even less reliable than the weather. A pig in the paddock is worth more than the promise of a merchant in the city.

Only people who have more than one source of food would use the expression ‘stuck in their ways’ as an insult. The smallholders of Yonville had good reason to be cautious. At about the time when the novel takes place, in the little market town of Ry, which Flaubert appears to have used as a model for Yonville-l’Abbaye, a woman complained to the authorities that she and her children were starving to death.

If Yonville or Ry had been better connected to the city of Rouen, which in turn was connected by the river Seine to Paris and the Channel ports, they would have suffered more from shortages and unrest. In troubled times, towns and villages that lay within the supply zone of cities were sucked dry by military commissioners and the civilian population. Agricultural progress might create a surplus and encourage investment, but it could also create excessive demand and a transport network that could quickly pump out the region’s produce. Wheat growers and wine growers were more worldly but also more vulnerable to change. In the poorer parts of southern France, where the staple crop, the chestnut, was expensive to transport and not much in demand, winter supplies remained safely in the region. Townships in isolated areas like the Gâtine in Poitou were not as idiotic as they seemed to government officials when they came to rebuild their infrastructure after the Revolution and found that, ‘as soon as a
bourgade
[a large village] and even a town felt itself under threat, it destroyed all its bridges’.

Until the advent of the railways, economic isolation was both a weakness and a strength. The fragmented, tribal state of the country allowed it to survive its partial, periodic disintegration. Flaubert himself lived in a grand house in Croisset by the banks of the Seine, three miles downstream from Rouen. Croisset lay on one of the major highways of European history. It had seen Christian missionaries, Viking invaders and Norman pirates. It saw the ship that returned Napoleon’s ashes to France in 1840. From his riverside pavilion, Flaubert could watch tourist boats on the Seine and the steamships and barges bound for Paris and Le Havre. And one day in the winter of 1870, he saw ‘the spike of a Prussian helmet glittering in the sun on the towpath at Croisset’. For a month and a half, Prussian soldiers occupied his house, drank his wine and read his books. For Flaubert, the Franco-Prussian War was a personal and financial disaster. He ended his life almost bankrupt, having lent most of his inheritance to the husband of his niece, a Rouen timber importer whose business suffered badly from the war.

Meanwhile, in the little town of Ry, life went on much the same as before. By the time Flaubert’s home was invaded by Prussians, Ry had a post office, a small cotton mill and a
bureau de bienfaisance
for
distributing alms to the poor. It even had a ‘Rural Institution’, founded by the local chemist, M. Jouanne, where local children were taught the rudiments of agriculture: ‘The man of the fields knows nothing of the composition of fertilizer’, declared M. Jouanne in a progressive social science journal. ‘The most elementary notions of agricultural physics and chemistry are completely foreign to him.’ But progress would leave the little town in peace. There would always be people like the old peasant woman in
Madame Bovary
who could look back on more than half a century’s service on the same farm and whose idea of a wise investment was giving money to the curé to say masses for her soul.

*

N
OW THAT MANY
small communities are trying to protect themselves from the effects of global trade and economic migration, there is nothing obviously implausible about the idea that France was held together by the ant-like activity of smallholders rather than by the grand schemes of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I I I or François Mitterrand. Long before the lofty reclamation projects of the Second Empire (p. 268), the land was being cleared and colonized, step by step, by the majority of the population who lived as farmers, sharecroppers, hired hands and gleaners.

The millions of people who seemed so stubbornly inefficient to administrators were engaged in the mysterious activity known as ‘muddling through’. The closest economic term is probably ‘cross-subsidizing’. Few people, apart from blacksmiths, could earn a living from just one trade. A farmer might own a plot of land but also work as a day-labourer for someone else. A wine grower might also be a weaver. In the Alps, a single peasant, working on small plots at different altitudes at different times of year, could be a market gardener, a fruit farmer, a wine grower, a sheep farmer, a timber merchant and a dealer in hides and horns. Shepherds and shepherdesses had time for all sorts of other industries: making cheese (as some still do), weaving straw hats, knitting clothes, carving wood, hunting, smuggling, dog-breeding, searching for precious stones, serving as a guide to soldiers, explorers and tourists, making up songs and stories, playing musical instruments (which ‘amuses the sheep
and keeps away the wolves’) and, like Joan of Arc and Bernadette of Lourdes, acting as messengers between this world and the next.

Every town and village was a living encyclopedia of crafts and trades. In 1886, most of the eight hundred and twenty-four inhabitants of the little town of Saint-Étienne-d’Orthe, on a low hill near the river Adour, were farmers and their dependents. Of the active population of two hundred and eleven, sixty-two had another trade: there were thirty-three seamstresses and weavers, six carpenters, five fishermen, four innkeepers, three cobblers, two shepherds, two blacksmiths, two millers, two masons, one baker, one
rempailleur
(upholsterer or chair-bottomer) and one witch (potentially useful in the absence of a doctor), but no butcher and no storekeeper other than two grocers. In addition to the local industries and the services provided by itinerant traders (see p. 146), most places also had snake collectors, rat catchers with trained ferrets and mole catchers who either set traps or lay in wait with a spade. There were
rebilhous
, who called out the hours of the night, ‘cinderellas’, who collected and sold ashes used for laundering clothes, men called
tétaïres
, who performed the function of a breast-pump by sucking mothers’ breasts to start the flow of milk, and all the other specialists that the census listed under ‘trades unknown’ and ‘without trade’, which usually meant gypsies, prostitutes and beggars..

As the Breton peasant Déguignet discovered to other people’s cost, begging was a profession in its own right. Beggar women sold their silence to respectable people by making lewd and compromising remarks about them in the street. They borrowed children who were diseased or deformed. They manufactured realistic sores from egg yolk and dried blood, working the yolk into a scratch to produce the full crusty effect. A judge at Rennes in 1787 reported ‘a bogus old man with a fake hump and a club foot, another man who succeeded in blacking out one eye to give a terrible, dramatic impression of blindness, and yet another who could mimic all the symptoms of epilepsy. ‘Idle beggar’ was a contradiction in terms. As Déguignet insisted in his memoirs, it was no simple task to hide behind a hedgerow and to fabricate a stump or ‘a hideously swollen leg covered with rotten flesh’.