The Discovery of France (23 page)

In the highland half of France, the trade in human beings took more dramatic forms. Well into the second half of the nineteenth century, travellers heading east in the autumn would see large bands of little boys – and some girls in disguise – dressed in coarse brown cloth and wearing broad-rimmed hats and hobnail boots, marching towards Paris from Dauphiné, Savoy and Piedmont. Some were only five years old. In the capital, they were known as ‘winter swallows’ because they appeared in the streets just as the birds were flying south and the weather was turning cold.

A month before, children from different villages had gathered in the plains below the Alps. Their parents gave them a little money, two or three shirts wrapped in a handkerchief, some stony black bread, a passport and sometimes a crude map showing the location of relatives or friends along the route. They walked up to fifty miles a
day, sleeping in barns and supplementing the everlasting loaf with stolen eggs and apples. On the long route from Savoy to Lyon and on to Paris and the north, they had time to rehearse their songs and street cries and perhaps some conjuring tricks. The boys from Piedmont often had a triangle or a hurdy-gurdy; others carried a marmot in a cage or a ferret for catching rats. Most of the boys from Savoy were destined to spend the next ten years scraping soot from Parisian chimneys or carrying water up to apartments in tin buckets. Many of them would also work as messengers, boot-blacks and shop-boys.

Child migration came to be seen as a form of slavery and a threat to public order, though there was no effective legislation until the 1870s. To the people themselves, it was a highly organized, respectable and necessary activity. In Dauphiné villages where land and resources were scarce, many children were rented out to employers who paid the parents between fifty and eighty francs a year. The boys had to deliver themselves to the city – Paris, Lyon or Marseille, sometimes Turin or Milan. In Paris, they found their way to the squalid area around the Place Maubert in the Latin Quarter or to the Rue Guérin-Boisseau near the Porte Saint-Denis. There, they were given a bed and instructed in the art of begging. Next morning, they went out with their marmots and begging bowls in groups of three or four. This was their life for the next three or six years, depending on the contract signed by their parents. If they returned at night to the hostel with less than a franc, they were given nothing, but for anything over a franc, they received a commission of 10 or 20 per cent. As part of the deal, every afternoon, they were given reading and catechism lessons. These arrangements were well known to middle-class Parisians who generally considered it the done thing – until immigrant workers became a political issue – to help these little creatures from the furthest corners of France.

The Savoyard chimney sweeps lived under a slightly different regime. On reaching the city, they split up into village groups. Each had its own dormitory and canteen. A spartan building in a particular street might look like a part of Paris when in fact it was a colony of Savoy controlled by a Savoyard sweep-master. The master might also sell pots and pans or rabbit-skins and keep an eye on the boys as they
went about the city shouting, ‘
Haut en bas!
’ (‘Top to bottom!’) If a boy stole money or misbehaved, he was punished according to Savoyard tradition. Boys who fled into the back streets were always found: chimney sweeps knew the city as well as any policeman and better than most Parisians. In severe cases, the culprit was expelled from the community.

A boy who suffered this banishment within exile might be able to find work if he stood with his kneepads and scraping tool in the crowd of unemployed urchins who gathered at the Porte Saint-Denis and the Rue Basse-du-Rempart, on the site of the future Place de l’Opéra. If he was lucky, he might be adopted by a benevolent society and given a proper apprenticeship. If not, he might be trained and dressed by a pimp and turned into one of the hundreds of ‘
petits jésus
’ (rent-boys) who worked on the Champs-É lysées and other parts of the city’s perimeter.

The sweeps who avoided asphyxiation, lung disease and blindness, and who never fell from a roof, might one day set up on their own as stove-fitters. Nearly all of them returned home to marry. Their tie to the homeland was never broken. When he emerged from the chimney onto the roof of a Parisian apartment block, a Savoyard sweep could always see the Alps.

*

THE BANDS OF HARVESTERS and the armies of children account for something like 15 per cent of the half million or so people who moved about the land. Theirs was a relatively concentrated and gregarious form of migration. Other migrants, like the pedlars and smugglers mentioned by the army handbook, covered the ground more thoroughly, moving through the labyrinth like sap through a tree.

Every year, until the 1870s, thousands of
colporteurs
(pedlars) left mountain villages with hundred-pound baskets or pine-wood chests strapped to their backs. A stick at the rear allowed them to rest without removing the load. Inside, the merchandise was arranged in smaller baskets and covered with spare clothes. Weight was obviously critical. The pedlars’ baskets were masterpieces of packing. One man’s basket in 1841 contained 9,800 pins, 6,084 bobbins, 3,888
buttons, 3,000 needles, 36 thimbles, 36 combs, 24 lengths of cotton, 18 snuffboxes, 96 pens and pencils, 200 quills, 40 pairs of scissors and an assortment of hooks-and-eyes, knives, notebooks, suspenders and cakes of soap. Other popular items included religious trinkets, herbal remedies, anything made of silk and, once botanizing tourists had shown there was a market for them, Alpine plants and seeds. A
colporteur
from lower Normandy who died at Longpont in the Perche in 1788 had left his trunk with the curé for safe keeping. It measured three foot by one and a half and was fitted with leather backstraps. The trunk was divided into seven boxes and seven drawers, containing three hundred and eighty-two samples of forty-one different items (two of the drawers were empty), including watch-chains, scissors, seals, earrings, spectacles, razors, knives, ribbons, gloves, stockings and an IOU for a silver watch.

Some of the most profitable merchandise weighed nothing. Longdistance pedlars took advantage of a belief that mountain folk had magic powers. A spell uttered in a strange and incomprehensible dialect could be very convincing. Some pedlars offered medical and veterinary services. They pierced ears, extracted teeth and told fortunes. Even after the practice was outlawed in 1756, Bearnese pedlars in Spain castrated boys whose parents hoped to secure them a place in a cathedral choir. On the return journey, if they followed the routes from Santiago de Compostela to Rocamadour and Le Puy-en- Velay, they could pretend to be pilgrims and beg their way home from one abbey to the next.

Deceit was a particular speciality of pedlars from the Auvergne. A single piece of cloth could be made to last a whole season if it was sold with the promise that a tailor would come the next day and make up the clothes for nothing. The tailor would arrive, measure the customer, take the cloth and never return. The drawback was that a dishonest salesman had to cover vast areas compared to a pedlar who earned the trust of his clientele.

One form of deceit, known as ‘
la pique
’, was a major industry. A sympathetic village priest would sign a letter explaining that the bearer had suffered terrible calamities and was a worthy object of charity: his farm had burned down, his animals were diseased, his wife was on her deathbed and someone had stolen all their money

The person who wrote the letter took a share of the proceeds. Apparently, old women made the best
pique
writers. A priest who was questioned after the arrest of two pedlars on the
pique
freely admitted that he had signed the bogus document. Even if the details were false, the poverty was real, and a man who was prepared to walk hundreds of miles to make a living from sympathy was at least relieving pressure on village resources.

*

W
ITH AN ENTIRELY
law-abiding population, much of France would have been cut off from the outside world. Smuggling, too, was a major industry that kept the tiny channels of communication open. In some parts, it was practically the only industry. The inhabitants of frontier towns such as Le Pont-de-Beauvoisin, which straddles the France-Savoy border, did little else. Some Provençal villages abandoned agriculture for contraband, and some monasteries had suspiciously large stores of alcohol and tobacco. Nice, which was a separate state until 1860, could export east into Italy and west across the river Var into France.

The frontier between France and Spain was like a sieve. In the west, the hills of the Basque Country were criss-crossed by the smugglers’ paths that were later used by guerrillas, Résistants and Basque terrorists. In the east, Catalans and Roussillonnais ran a thriving criminal economy. A report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1773 complained that ‘you can’t put one foot in front of the other without running into a band of armed smugglers’. These were not furtive figures creeping about in the undergrowth. They moved in platoons of fifty, with another platoon behind to provide backup. They were fed, paid a salary and divided into ranks like soldiers.

In Brittany, thousands of heavily laden women carrying cakes of salt and over-salted butter poured into Maine, pretending to be pregnant. More than twelve thousand children were tried for smuggling at the salt court in Laval in 1773. This figure included only children who were caught with contraband weighing fifteen pounds or more. When they grew up, some of them would join what was practically an Anglo-French common market. Breton sailors carried brandy to Plymouth while Cornishmen brought tobacco to Roscoff.

The sea lanes used by Gallo-Roman traders and Norman invaders remained as busy as ever, especially when Napoleon imposed the Continental System (1806–13). A smugglers’ slang is said to have been in use on both sides of the Channel. Smugglers from Saint- Malo and Granville could converse with Channel Islanders in Norman French. An American visitor to northern France in 1807 found suspicious signs that, despite Napoleon, Calais and Boulogne were still on excellent trading terms with Dover and Hastings:

All this suggests that, while customs barriers stifled trade, they did not necessarily increase isolation. The ‘fortress’ of France was remarkably porous. Any commemoration of European unity should remember the smugglers and pedlars who helped to keep the borders open.

*

I
F THE WELL-BEING
of a nation is defined by industrialization and investment, the to-ing and fro-ing and scrimping and saving of half a million migrant workers and petty criminals looks like the feeble activity of a backward economy. But if the entire land mass is taken into account, it seems to indicate a state of health that France has never completely recovered. Maps of the population by
département
seem to show the country entering a new Dark Age in the late nineteenth century. Between 1801 and 1911, when the total population of France increased by more than ten million, the population of nineteen
départements
fell, including several
départements
close to Paris. In another fourteen de´partements, it increased by less than fifty thousand. Today, thirty-six
départements
, representing 40 per cent of the surface of France, have fewer inhabitants than they did a century and a half ago. Seasonal migration may have involved less than 2 per cent of the population but it had a vital effect. It prevented the
haemorrhaging of the land by allowing wealth to reach less productive parts.

The results can still be seen in some parts of France: the twostorey ‘
maisons de lait
’ (milk houses) in Burgundy villages that were built with money earned by wet-nurses; the summer villas of retired water-carriers in the remote Cantal; the incongruously grand mansions that began to appear in Barcelonnette and Aiguilles when umbrella salesmen returned to the Alps from South America and when local cheeses began to reach the Mediterranean and even crossed the Atlantic in lead-lined boxes.

The ant-like movements of the migrant minority not only spread wealth but also delayed the growth of the cities. Until permanent migration became the norm in the late nineteenth century, Paris was not the all-consuming gravitational centre of France. The capital was well served by the major rivers of north-eastern France – Yonne, Seine, Marne, Aisne and Oise – but not by the rivers that rise in the Massif Central. The best roads out of the Auvergne all led south. A trade route to Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier or Marseille, busy with mule trains and pilgrims, was preferable to an obscure track that led north into lands where people spoke a different language. Even in the early twentieth century, many villages in the southern Auvergne and Périgord had closer ties with Spain than with the northern half of France. Basque families were just as likely to have relatives in Buenos Aires and, eventually, Manhattan, as in Paris.

If all these routes could have been plotted on a map, the picture would have looked more like Roman Gaul than the Paris-centric road and rail systems of the twenty-first century. Early maps of literacy show the same unexpected pattern. Some regions that were supposed to be far from the light of civilization turned out to have surprisingly high rates of literacy: the Cantal, the Isère, the Drô me, the Alpine
départements
and Savoy. When Balzac described a cultural missionary in
The Country Doctor
(1833), ‘improving an uncultivated corner of the world [in the Dauphiné] and civilizing its inhabitants who have been deprived of intelligence’, he was transposing his largely illiterate native province of Touraine to the Alps, about which he knew very little. Many Alpine villages had been running their own schools for decades, not to provide a general education but to train the next
generation of pedlars. They taught arithmetic, account-keeping and business French. Children in the Oisans region east of Grenoble copied out and memorized model letters. The following example was supposed to be sent by a successful pedlar who had escaped the drudgery of home and was living it up in the capital: