The Discovery of France (22 page)

Despite this, there are several well-attested examples of news travelling at much higher speeds. The arrest of the royal family at Varennes in the Argonne was known on the other side of France in Quimper at 7 a.m. on 24 June 1791. On post-roads, Quimper was five hundred and forty miles from Varennes, which means that the news reached this remote and poorly served part of France at an average speed of almost 11 mph, maintained for two days and two nights. This is faster even than the news of the Battle of Waterloo brought by fleeing soldiers. At Villers-Cotterêts, the young Alexandre Dumas found their speed of a league and a half an hour (just over 4 mph) quite extraordinary: ‘It seems that the messengers of misfortune have wings.’

The century’s greatest expert on gossip and pre-industrial telecommunications, Honoré de Balzac, suggested that rumour could travel at about 9 mph. The following passage from
Les Marana
refers to the sleepy provincial island in the heart of Paris, whose silence was preserved by toll bridges until the mid-nineteenth century:

These speeds were effectively unattainable by conventional transport over long distances. Until the mid-nineteenth century, longdistance speeds over 10 mph usually indicate some form of remote transmission, such as the pigeons used by a few stock-market speculators to transmit share prices, or the stationary messengers who shouted the news of Caesar’s victory at Cenabum (Orléans) all the way to the land of the Arverni, a hundred and fifty miles away – a speed in excess of 12 mph. (An experiment conducted in the nineteenth century showed that, using this method, only three hundred and fifty-two people were needed to transmit a message from Orléans to the frontiers of the Auvergne.)

With an inexhaustible supply of data, logical explanations could be found for exceptional speeds. To bring the news of the King’s arrest to Quimper, a fast rider must have set off from Paris as soon as word came from Varennes. He must have ridden through the night twice or been relayed by other night-riders. The roads, for once, were presumably all passable and all the bridges intact. Relay horses other than the small Breton breeds must have been available, fed and harnessed at every stage.

This is not beyond the bounds of possibility. The truly remarkable thing about the dissemination of news is its unpredictability and its apparent independence from known transport networks. In 1932, Georges Lefebvre studied the spread of the ‘Great Fear’ that gripped two-thirds of the country in late July and early August 1789. The Revolution sparked rumours in half a dozen places of invading foreign troops and bandits paid by vengeful aristocrats to destroy the harvest. It was the sort of panic that could – and did – make a rational person mistake a herd of cows for a marauding gang of cut-throats. When Lefebvre charted the course of each rumour, he exposed the previously unsuspected arteries of a gigantic ants’ nest.

Maps of the Great Fear seem to show a communication system that was strangely unreliant on any infrastructure. Paris played no role in the rumour network, nor did natural routes like the valleys of the Rhône and the Garonne. Even the road system was irrelevant. In the Languedoc hills, on a single day, the same rumour appeared in places twenty miles apart that were unconnected by road. The Great Fear spread through the Vendée and Normandy, through Picardy and Champagne with the same inexplicable speed. Riots broke out and châteaux were burned to the ground. Leaving the region of Troyes, the rumours ignored the river Saône and entered the Franche-Comté instead by the mountains of the Jura. The Vercors, perched on its plateau like a Lost World, a on the map of human migration, suddenly seemed to have lively connections with the outside world.

Higher ground slowed the rumours but did not stop them. The lofty Massif Central, bypassed by travelling apprentices, kings and theatre companies on tour, Napoleon Bonaparte, several epidemics and, until 1951, the Tour de France, was infiltrated from the north,
the east and the west. From one day to the next, a rumour that the King of Sardinia had launched an invasion left Briançon and crossed the 8,000-foot Col d’Izoard into the Queyras and the Ubaye before rushing down into Mediterranean Provence and, incredibly, across the tight, plunging valleys to the west. The rumours died out only when faced with the combined passive force of sparse population and difficult terrain (the Plateau de Millevaches, some of the highest Alpine massifs, the Sologne, the Dombes and the Landes).

This mysteriously efficient network was still functioning after the fall of Napoleon. In 1816, the deposed emperor was rumoured to have escaped from St Helena and returned to Paris. One such rumour sprang up – simultaneously, it seemed – in Nemours and parts of Burgundy and the Bourbonnais. The authorities understandably suspected a well-organized plot. Agents provocateurs were active, but not necessarily in this case. News that spread like a stain instead of travelling from A to B could cover vast areas in very little time. The scattered sources of rumours reaching the little market town of Charlieu, in the hills between the Forez and the Beaujolais (reported at a public meeting on 28 July 1789), indicate a rumour catchment area of three thousand square miles. This particular area included five or six major dialects and the three main language groups of France. No pigeon, horse or locomotive could have disseminated news so quickly.

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A
PARTIAL EXPLANATION
of these coincidences and connections could be found by following some of the thousands of migrant workers who ranged across the land.

The aspect of their world that now seems most conspicuously exotic was not officially discovered and described until the early nineteenth century. When Napoleon’s statisticians first surveyed the westernmost Breton
département
, Finistère, they were startled to find that almost one-fifth of the total surface was taken up by ‘roads and byways’ – ruts, paths, cartways and great trampled swathes of land that were lost to agriculture and often unusable even as tracks. Paradoxically, this inaccessible part of France was riddled with routes. Further studies confirmed the incredible figures. Finistère was an extreme case, but many other départements turned out to be crazed
with tiny roads: 12 percent of the Bas-Rhin, 4 percent of the Vienne, 3 per cent of the Nord, just under 2 per cent of the Haute-Marne, 1.4 per cent of the Pas-de-Calais. The effect can still be pictured in some parts of France. So many different roads once ran from Beauvais to Amiens that six of them still exist, all more or less the same length (thirty-five to thirty-nine miles) and sometimes close enough for a person on one road to wave to someone on the other.

The huge discrepancy between the trifling amount of traffic on main roads and the quantities of goods delivered to markets and ports suggests that three-quarters of all trade in the early nineteenth century passed through this all-encompassing web. This was the system of fragile capillaries that carried the rumours and news. Many of these paths had no visible existence, even to a person standing on one. The French word
route
, which means both ‘route’ and ‘road’, preserves the ambiguity. Some
routes
, like smugglers’ paths in Brittany and the Basque Country, were little more than memories passed on from one generation to the next. A featureless meadow on the high plains of Provence where a stranger would see nothing but grass blowing in the wind might be a major European crossroads between the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Rhône Valley and northern Italy. When he was trudging south through the Cévennes from Le Monastier to Saint-Jean-du-Gard in 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson imagined himself a hundred miles from civilization:

In fact, much of the ‘Stevenson Trail’, as it is now known, runs along the 140-mile route known, for part of its length, as the Voie Regordane (the origin of the name is obscure). This had been a major north–south route since pre-human times, when a fault line opened up a succession of passes linking the Massif Central with the Mediterranean. In the mid-eighteenth century, a hundred mule drivers regularly plied the Voie Regordane with their clanging mule trains, taking metals and materials down to the inland port of Saint-Gilles
and returning with produce for the Auvergne and the main road to Paris in baskets and goatskins. In some of those desolate highland towns, Stevenson could have bought wine, olive oil, salted fish, almonds, oranges, figs and raisins, not to mention salt, soap, paper and a proper packsaddle for his donkey.

Stevenson actually saw a relatively dynamic part of the Auvergne. He was able to pay for things with money and stayed in inns that had ticking clocks. He enjoyed luxurious breakfasts of chocolate, brandy and cigarettes. When he walked along the road, he heard the sound of the wind in telegraph wires. Bands of harvesters watched him pass as they walked across the fields. On the high road, for the twelve miles between Le Bouchet-St-Nicolas and Pradelles, the only other travellers he saw were ‘a cavalcade of stride-legged ladies and a pair of post-runners’, but he also saw some of the million tendrils of the other network that carried most of the traffic:

This labyrinth is the reason why the towns and villages of France were both cut off and connected. Wares and produce travelled through the system of tracks and tiny roads by something akin to Brownian motion, changing hands slowly over great distances. When the main roads were improved and railways were built, trade was drained from the capillary network, links were broken, and a large part of the population suddenly found itself more isolated than before. Many regions today are experiencing the same effect because of the TGV railway system.

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I
T WOULD TAKE
a thousand separate maps to show the movements of the migrant population through this labyrinth of tracks, but an excellent overall view can be gained from any large–scale relief map or satellite photograph.

At this height above the land, a diagonal line can be seen running from the western Pyrenees to the Vosges, marking off the highest ground and dividing the country roughly into two. Migrants originating south and east of the line flowed from the highlands like melting snow while transhumant animals headed for the mountains. A saying in western Languedoc described it nicely: ‘
Crabas amont, filhas aval
’ (‘Goats go up and girls go down’). In this half of France, the main watershed was the ancient collapsed volcano called the Cantal. It covers an area of almost a thousand square miles, which makes it the largest volcanic structure in Europe. From the to
département
which the Cantal gave its name, thousands of men, women and children descended every year to the plains of Gascony and Spain, to the Mediterranean and Marseille, to Lyon and the Rhône valley and to Poitou and the Paris Basin

This was the zone of long-distance migration. North and west of the line, seasonal migration tended to be shorter. In this half of France, people were more likely to die within sight of their village steeple, and their knowledge of the outside world was more likely to be passive. They heard about events from the semi-nomadic individuals who moved about the country: bell-founders, knife-grinders, distillers and pedlars; wine- and corn-brokers; wandering singers, circus acts and quack doctors; hair-harvesters who collected raw material for wig-makers, clog-makers who set up temporary villages in forests, and beggars who made themselves welcome by bringing news and gossip and sometimes love letters. Some of these shortrange nomads were listed in an army handbook of 1884 as a vital source of information on a region:

Mass movements in this lowland half of the country were comparatively modest, though they were still great odysseys to the people who undertook them. In spring, long processions of young girls followed by pack donkeys carrying luggage and the weary headed for the Brie, the Beauce and the Gâtinais, where they hoed the fields
before returning to Burgundy in time for the wine harvest. The wheat fields of the Paris Basin also drew huge bands of farmworkers from northern France. Groups of migrant harvesters still appear in late summer and early autumn, travelling in trucks or living in caravans, attaching little suburbs of washing lines and satellite dishes to the edges of vineyards. Occasionally, a family of migrant agricultural workers can be seen walking one behind the other, intent on the road ahead, and moving at a pace that seems slow only at a distance.

These seasonal migrants were once a more obvious presence, in towns as well as in the countryside. On certain days, the main squares of towns and cities filled up at dawn with hundreds of families who had walked through the night with their sickles wrapped in spare clothes. The markets were known as
loues
or
louées
. Harvesters wore ears of corn, shepherds sported tufts of wool and carters hung whips around their necks. Domestic servants wore their best clothes and carried a distinctive bouquet or some foliage to serve as identification. The employer would make them walk up and down to prove that they were not crippled and inspect their hands for the calluses that showed that they were hard workers. A coin placed in the hand sealed the contract. As the day wore on, the crowd of hopefuls became smaller, older and more decrepit. Those that remained at the very end of the day might follow the harvest anyway as gleaners, covering hundreds of miles in a month or two before returning home.