The Discovery of France (21 page)

Concrete evidence of these local cults can be found in hundreds of devoutly mutilated stone figures. The effects of centuries of rubbing and scraping are usually quite easy to distinguish from vandalism, though many churches blame the damage on the French Revolution. The parts most often atrophied or missing are the nose, the hands and the feet. At Le Vigeant, in the valley of the Vienne, the figure of a knight has lost most of its feet to mothers who put the dust in their toddlers’ shoes to help them learn to walk.

The saints performed miraculous cures, but they had to be cajoled and bullied like lazy public servants. In Tréguier, according to Ernest Renan, prayers to Saint Yves took the form of a challenge: ‘You were a just man when you were alive; prove to me that you still are.’ In this way, ‘one could be sure that one’s enemy would be dead within the year.’ When he was a child, Renan’s father had been taken to the chapel of the saint who cured fever.

If the saint refused to cooperate, he was liable to be punished. In Haudiomont, when the vines froze on Saint Urban’s day (25 May),
his effigy was dragged through the nettles that grew around the church. When the phylloxera epidemic wiped out their vines, the people of Mouzon in the Ardennes threw the statue of their saint into the river Meuse. Even in some religious communities, saints were humiliated if they failed to answer prayers. In 1887, a visitor to a convent in a large Provenc¸al town noticed that Saint Joseph had been turned to face the wall. It was explained that Saint Joseph was ‘doing penance’ for having failed to persuade a landowner to leave a certain piece of land to the convent in his will. If he failed again, he would be taken down to the cellar and thrashed.

The Virgin of Lourdes was never treated in this way, but even she had to pass a test. On the Virgin’s second appearance, Bernadette threw holy water at the figure until the bottle was empty, saying, ‘If you come from God, you can stay; if not, go away.’ Since the Virgin appeared high up on the cave wall, this was not a gentle, ritual sprinkling. It was a sensible experiment conducted by a girl who lived in a world where spirits were as real as policemen, priests and debt collectors.

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P
AGAN SAINT–WORSHIPPERS
did not suddenly die out and disappear like fairies. They turned into the population of modern France. It is worth remembering that while the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century always took the side of authoritarian regimes, the governments that are supposed to have secularized France were democratically elected. They represented a population whose concerns were overwhelmingly practical and whose beliefs had a firmer basis in reality than upper-class infatuations with mesmerism, astrology and Ouija boards.

Common experience showed that prayer had no effect on the physical world. Sickness was real and demanded a real remedy. ‘Miraculous’ cures were based on notions that were a better mental preparation for the scientific age than the airy abstractions of theology, which many priests, let alone parishioners, found impossible to fathom. Everything was believed to have a particular cause, which was either known or knowable. The cure itself nearly always involved
a physical activity or a real substance. This is why quack doctors and their customers adapted so easily to the new world of scientific medicine and why education so quickly eradicated misconceptions without plunging the population into an abyss of religious doubt. The difference between the generations that swallowed saints’ dust and the generations that visited a qualified doctor was not mental capacity but information.

Of course, an endless list of ridiculous beliefs could be drawn up. Many thought that sick people should not wear clean clothes and that lice helped children to grow. Hedgehogs were burned to death in Brittany because they were thought to suck the milk from cows and to eat ducks. Sacrificing animals to cure an illness was a common practice, which shows that magic remedies were not used only by the poor. A popular cure for pneumonia was still being tried in some upper-class households at the end of the nineteenth century: slice a living white dove down the middle and place the two palpitating halves on the patient’s chest. Cruelty to humans was just as common. A belief in magic was often an excuse for persecuting strangers and eccentrics. After 1862, there are no more reports of witches being burned to death, but there were still attempts to prosecute people who supposedly blighted cattle with the evil eye. The combination of misery and ignorance was also a gold mine for swindlers. A pedlar could make a fortune selling useless secrets, such as how to find the magic luminescent herb which prevented its possessor from ever being fooled.

Yet there was more sense in ‘magic’ than met the educated eye. By 1876, there was one doctor for every 2,700 people in France, but most doctors had to be paid in money rather than in produce, and medicines were expensive. Since many people called the doctor only as a last resort, this tended to confirm the belief that doctors brought death. In the circumstances, gullibility had a therapeutic value. Some cures clearly had a beneficial, psychosomatic effect. Two scholars who are compiling a list of every folk remedy used in France in the nineteenth century expect to find between twenty and thirty thousand different remedies. If most fatal poisons were excluded by a process of elimination, some of these remedies were bound to be either effective or harmless enough to allow wishful thinking to work its
wonders. The more violent cures, such as scraping the mouth of a paralysed person with a razor and rubbing it with salt, would at least have rooted out the malingerers and hypochondriacs.

Faith in magic was not always misplaced, even by scientific standards. The healers of the Auvergne known as
rabouteurs
(bone-setters) and
metzes
(doctors or magicians) had an excellent grasp of basic medicine. They could heal burns, extract bullets and stop haemorrhaging (a common problem when vines were being pruned). Some were able to diagnose illness by inspecting urine. Unlike most doctors, they did not always ask for payment. Many were also blacksmiths – a trade traditionally associated with magic – and ran antenatal clinics. Some women found childbirth less painful after regular sessions in the smithy, lying on a vibrating anvil while the blacksmith swung his hammer and sparks flew about. Terrified neurotics were released from evil curses and found themselves for a time the centre of attention. At the end of the nineteenth century, eight thousand people a year were still arriving at Aumont railway station to visit a road-mender at Nasbinals who performed miraculous cures in his spare time.

Away from the noisy, carnage-strewn main roads of French history, the picture is unexpectedly calm. It suggests compromise and tolerance rather than hatred and fear: priests led pilgrimages to Gallo- Roman shrines, parishioners performed pagan rites under the eyes of the village priest. The best-known images of French religious history are bloody and violent: the Saint Bartholomew Day’s massacre, the smashing of the west facade of Notre-Dame, the guillotining of priests and the removal of the word ‘saint’ from every street and town in France. A thousand other images, too quaint and unlike modern times to be easily remembered, give a more truthful impression of the recent pagan past: a milkless mother in Clermont d’Excideuil (Dordogne) holding a soft cheese to her breast while the curé reads a Gospel passage, and then leaving the cheese as payment; rheumatic pilgrims at the church of Darnac in the Limousin throwing balls of wool at a saint behind an iron cage, trying to hit the part of the saint that corresponded to the rheumatic limb, and the priest of Darnac gathering up the wool and knitting himself some warm clothes for the winter.

The lasting changes to the world of saints and fairies came when people were no longer exposed to the frightening, isolated little worlds where unknown creatures lived complex lives of their own. The great symbol of secularized France is not the operating theatre or the ballot box but the vast megalithic alignments of autoroutes that bypass towns and villages and offer just an occasional glimpse of a cathedral spire fleeing across the landscape. New, high-speed roads erased the pagan spirits by removing knowledge of the spaces where they lived. The spaces themselves are still there, and when the small road on the map turns into a track and the sky defies the weather forecast, it takes an act of faith to believe that their sacred inhabitants never existed.

8

Migrants and Commuters

E
VEN THREE OR FOUR DECADES
after the Revolution of 1789, the empty spaces and silent towns with which this book began seemed to represent the normal state of affairs. Returning from Madrid to Paris in 1826, the economist Adolphe Blanqui passed through cities where life was either ‘languishing for lack of momentum or actually going backwards’: Angoulême, with its paltry river that only small boats could negotiate, Poitiers, with its twisted medieval streets, and Tours, where convents and seminaries outnumbered factories. The only real signs of life, as far as Blanqui could tell, were ‘in the centre, by which I mean Paris, and at a few points on the perimeter’: Rouen, Bordeaux and Marseille. All the other towns were like tiny asteroidal systems in the early universe:

Forms of life that are more recognizably modern will dominate the second part of this book. The towns of France will stir with new activity. The advent of compulsory education, industrial investment, canals, railways and roads that remained open for most of the year produced changes so dramatic that the older France seems by comparison to have been almost entirely inert, waiting in its mud-clogged villages and unmapped wastes for administrators, doctors, teachers
and busybodies to hack their way through the thicket and release it from an ancient spell. Soon, it would be hard for city-dwellers to believe that there was once a time when the bourgeoisie was almost stationary, rooted in its bourgs and walled into its houses, ‘like Robinson Crusoe on his island’, while large numbers of peasants and workers moved about the land.

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S
OME OF THE LARGE
minority that ranged over the uncharted country has already been seen in passing: the unstoppable pilgrims, the pedlars, beggars and bandits. Many more remain invisible. Their movements are hard to detect with sensors that were devised for a later world, when all roads led to Paris, when trade followed routes that could be found on maps and when almost no one travelled without a ticket.

Standing by a main road and waiting for these migrants and commuters to appear in a statistically convenient form would be a long and fruitless task. A better starting point can be found in the common surprises of a traveller’s life, especially in those that seem either inexplicable or unimportant. Two facts in particular come to mind. The first concerns the curiously novelistic nature of pretwentieth- century travel.

In the autumn of 1834 (to take one example among many), the art critic Auguste Jal was sitting with his wife in a public coach, bumping and swaying down the valley of the Rhône towards Marseille. It was raining, but the summer drought had just ended and the river was still too low for the steamboat, which was faster and more comfortable than the coach. Five other people were crammed into the coach: a member of the Académie de Marseille, a lawyer from Paris and his two young friends who were going to visit the dockyards at Toulon, and a simple-minded dealer in silks who, ‘from 11 to 13 October – the time it took to travel from Lyon to Marseille – returned a little too often to his favourite subject: the vat in which the scarves are dyed’. For much of the journey, the road was deserted except for ‘a few peasant carts pulled by an ox or a cow in horse’s harness’.

In Orange, Jal was appalled by the botched restoration of the Roman arch. He wrote in his diary, referring to the new government
inspector of historic monuments, Mérimée, and the polymath historian and critic, Claude Fauriel: ‘What must be the opinion of M. Prosper Mérimée, who has just passed us in the stagecoach, chatting with M. Fauriel?’

The significance of this trivial encounter is its triviality. Jal thought nothing of seeing two familiar faces passing in a carriage window, four hundred and fifty miles from Paris. He mentioned it only because he happened to be thinking of historic monuments. The coincidences that novelists devised to stitch together their plots and sub-plots were not necessarily implausible to their original readers: coincidences were a normal part of life. While the average peasant’s world rarely had a diameter of more than a dozen miles – about twice the size of nineteenth-century Paris – the world of a wealthy traveller was, in effect, not much bigger. A peasant might move in circles, radiating from a single point. A bourgeois – if he moved at all – was more likely to move in straight lines along fixed corridors. If he wanted to disappear, he could simply leave the system of corridors and slip away into a different dimension.

The second fact of life on the road is harder to explain. Long before railways and the modern telegraph (p. 252), news of important events could spread across the country at amazing speeds. The usual speed for an earth-shattering piece of news travelling over a hundred miles was between 4 and 7 mph. Le Havre heard about the fall of the Bastille (late afternoon, 14 July 1789) in the ea rly hours of 17 July. In good conditions, Brest, at the tip of the Breton peninsula, was fiftyfour horse-hours from Paris. Average speeds fell drastically on longer journeys, even on post roads, where horses and riders were relayed. Béziers – five hundred and twenty miles on post roads from Paris – heard about the fall of the Bastille almost seven days after the event (an average speed of less than 4 mph). Smaller towns might be closer in space but further away in time, unless a local inhabitant happened to bring the news. Vitteaux – a hundred and sixty-five miles from Paris in the Auxois region east of Dijon – heard about the Bastille from a local tailor who travelled without stopping for two days and two nights at an average speed of 3 1/2 mph. Even the high–speed messengers employed by groups of traders averaged only 7 mph over long distances.