The Discovery of France (24 page)

The idea that the salvation of communities depended on smallscale, individual efforts is still apparent in French agricultural policies. Some attitudes that seem parochial and protectionist reflect an accurate perception of French rather than Parisian history. In Victorian Britain, the catastrophic coincidence of urbanization and industrialization created vast polluted zones of misery and disease. In France, most industrial workers were either domestic, like the weavers of Normandy and Lyon, or seasonal, like the mountain people who sweated for six or seven months in the oil-, soap- and perfume factories of Aix and Marseille before returning home to buy a plot of land. Most mills and factories were small enough to ignore the law on child labour that, until 1874, applied only to workshops employing more than twenty people. Unlike British industry, French industry was devoted predominantly to the production of so-called
articles de Paris
– luxury goods such as clocks, jewellery, furniture, fashion accessories, domestic utensils and artificial flowers. As the Larousse dictionary boasted in 1872, France may lag behind Britain and Germany in heavy industry, ‘but it has no equal in all industries which demand elegance and grace and which are more concerned with art than with manufacture’.

Apart from a few industrial boom towns like Roubaix and Montluc ¸on (pp. 264, 346), French cities remained within their old walls. In 1860, when the boundaries of Paris were extended to include some outlying villages – Montmartre, Grenelle, Vaugirard, etc. – Honoré Daumier published a caricature of a clumpy peasant couple in clogs and smocks standing in a ploughed field with a Paris skyline in the distance, saying, ‘To think we’re now Parisians!’ The suburban ocean
of mud and the tiny island-city were just a slight exaggeration. In most parts, a migrant worker entering a town would be announced by the echoing clatter of his hobnail boots on the cobbles. In 1839, Balzac described a sixteen-year-old travelling apprentice arriving one October morning in the town of Provins (Seine-et-Marne). Provins stood on one of the main roads to the east and had mills, tanneries, brickworks and a sugar-beet distillery. It produced roses for nurseries and chemists (the petals were used in cordials and lotions) and had a healthy trade in grain, flour, wine, wool and mineral water. It held four big fairs a year and was just seven hours from Paris on the mail coach.

Most French towns and cities effectively had huge, sparsely populated conurbations of several thousand square miles from which people commuted for several days, weeks or months. Even if the working ‘day’ lasted several years, it almost always ended with a return to the
pays
. Nîmes and Lyon both drew textile workers from very distant mountain villages. Most migration was rural, and most of the migrants who went to cities were not fodder for satanic mills: they provided services and were self-employed. In 1838, of almost twenty-three thousand Savoyard migrants in France, only two thousand worked in factories, which is to say, from their point of view, in warm, dry places with food and lodging and a steady wage.

Foreigners who go to live in French towns today usually hope to be integrated and accepted by the community. This was not usually a preoccupation of the French inhabitants. By the mid-nineteenth
century, half the inhabitants of Paris came from the provinces and most of them did not consider themselves Parisian. Migrants spent as little money as possible while away from home. Mentally, they never left their
pays
. They were insulated from the lands through which they passed and, once they reached the city, they lived, like the chimney sweeps, in miniature versions of home. In certain Paris streets, the sounds and smells of villages and provincial towns drowned out the sounds and smells of the capital. For many, their street cry was the only French they spoke. Tinkers and scrap-metal merchants from a particular valley of the Cantal were concentrated around the Rue de Lappe near the Bastille. Water-carriers and labourers from the neighbouring valley lived in the same
quartier
, divided from their compatriots by a street instead of by the river Jordanne. All the people involved in the conspiracy on which Alexandre Dumas based
The Count of Monte Cristo
came from the same part of Nîmes and lived in the same
quartier
of Paris, between the Place du Châtelet and Les Halles. They met and exchanged news of home in a cafe run by a compatriot in the Place Sainte-Opportune. Traces of these urban villages are still visible, especially near the big railway stations: the name of a cafe or restaurant, a regional dish, a waiter’s accent or a photograph of a cow in a mountain meadow.

France itself was like a giant city in which every district had its own speciality. Horse-dealers came from Normandy, mole-catchers and their apprentices from the Orne, lace-makers from Caen and Beauvais. Chambermaids came from Brittany and Guyenne. In the eighteenth century, the sculptural, starched head-dresses of Norman women were a common sight around the Bureau of Wet-Nurses in the Rue Sainte-Apolline in Paris; in the nineteenth century, they were replaced by the black hoods of Burgundian women who followed the timber that was floated down from the Morvan..

Most of these migrants could reach Paris in a few days. Others trekked across the country for weeks: porters and locksmiths (and, supposedly, lock-pickers) from Lyon, second-hand-clothes dealers from Alsace, singers from the Haute-Marne, doormen (known as ‘
suisses
’) from Switzerland, glaziers from Piedmont, cooks from Montpellier, bear-handlers and knife-grinders from the Pyrenees. The Auvergne sent hatters and sawyers from the Forez, rag-and-bone
men from Ambert and Le Mont-Dore, and furriers from Saint–Oradoux who walked the streets under a mountain of rabbit-skins, frightening children and skinning stray cats. The Auvergnat coal merchants called
bougnats
sailed down the Allier and the Canal de Briare. Most of them also sold wine. Some of the best-known cafes in Paris were founded by
bougnats –
Le Flore, Le Dome, La Coupole, Les Deux Magots. There are still a few coal-selling barkeepers, and almost three-quarters of the
cafés-tabacs
in Paris are still run by Auvergnats and their descendants.

There is no apparent logic to the map of migrations. Once a route had been pioneered, a colony established and a clientele created, these trades had a momentum that ensured their long-term survival. Customers came to associate the product or the service with a particular style of regional dress and a particular accent. But there are few signs of sensitivity to economic change. In the late eighteenth century, cities on the edges of Lorraine – Strasbourg, Troyes and Dijon – were inundated with starving cobblers, most of whom had no raw materials and few skills. Poor regions like the Vercors and the ‘pré-Alpes’ from Digne to Grasse, which might have benefited from migration, remained cut off until the late nineteenth century, when their populations suddenly began to flow away forever. No one knows why thousands of stonemasons and building labourers left the Limousin every year. There was no shortage of land and their skills were needed in the region. The only obvious reason is that men who had lived away from home made better husbands: they had more money, more prestige and, above all, more interesting stories to tell.

*

T
HE DESIRE TO DISCOVER
the country is usually associated with explorers, scholars and tourists, not with migrant workers. Yet curiosity was clearly one of the main forces behind migration. At a time when most people were afraid to set foot out of doors after dark, the routes forged by migrants provided a comparatively safe passage to the world beyond the
pays.

The classic example of this organized discovery of France is the apprentice’s Tour de France. The expression dates from the early-eighteenth century, though the practice is much older. It was
once confined to Provence and Languedoc but eventually included the Loire Valley, Paris, Burgundy and the valley of the Rhône. Avoiding Brittany (apart from Nantes), Normandy, the north and north-east, and the mountains, it described a rough hexagon around the Massif Central. Each trade had its own society with a network of ‘Mothers’ who provided lodging and employment opportunities in each town on the itinerary.
¹⁹
The apprentice was renamed after his
pays
– ‘Libourne’, ‘Bordelais’, ‘Landais’, etc. He then spent a few weeks or months in the town, working long hours, acquiring local techniques and learning to work with local materials. He also had to learn the secret laws of the Order or ‘Devoir’ to which his guild belonged. When the time came to leave, a noisy procession with drums and fiddles accompanied him to the edge of town.

A typical tour lasted four or five years, covered more than fourteen hundred miles, usually in a clockwise direction, and included a hundred and fifty-one different towns (to judge by an ‘Ordinary Route of the Tour de France’ published by a baker from Libourne in 1859). Certain towns were obligatory and, for masons and carpenters, certain works of art in abbeys and cathedrals. During the Tour, the apprentice was inducted into the guild. He then became a ‘Compagnon du Tour de France’ and was given a second name which reflected his official worthiness: ‘Lyonnais-la-Fidélité’, ‘L’Estimablele-Provençal’, ‘Angoumois-le-Courageux’, etc. Agricol Perdiguier, a cabinetmaker from the suburbs of Avignon who published his memoirs of the Tour in 1854, was named Avignonnais-la-Vertu. The Compagnon was also presented with a special walking stick festooned with ribbons to make him recognizable on the road. When he completed his Tour and returned home, he was awarded a certificate and remained a Compagnon for the rest of his life.

With the Tour de France, village rivalries and feuds took to the
road. Members of the different orders would try to beat each other senseless when they met on the road or when one guild tried to set up a new ‘
Mére
’ in a town. Apprentices quickly learned to use their tools as weapons. A handbook of laws and regulations for workers, foremen and Compagnons published in 1833 devoted seven of its thirty pages to seditious assemblies, insults and defamation, perjury, threats, bodily harm and homicide. When the baker from Libourne interrupted his tour in 1840 to visit the venerable bearded hermit on the Sainte-Baume massif, the hermit understandably had a few sharp words to say on the subject of the Tour de France.
²⁰
He saw this sectarian aggression as a sign of backwardness and cited the fact that three out of every four Compagnons who had visited his grotto had been unable to sign his visitors’ book.

Still, these bloody battles, like the songs that were written by Compagnon poets, created a powerful sense of community. One day, the workforce would be concentrated in factories and cities, confronted with the faceless enemy of economic change and political repression. In those circumstances, solidarity would be a precious weapon. The population in general would come to adopt a view that was once peculiar to police ministers: ‘winter swallows’ would be seen as aliens and subversives. The village mentality that set one tiny
pays
against another would be applied to entire nations – Italy, Spain, Portugal and Algeria – and some migrant workers would make journeys that would have appalled their nineteenth-century predecessors, crossing the Mediterranean in rowing boats, riding in refrigerated trucks or clinging to the underside of high-speed trains.

*

I
T SEEMS TO BE
a law of social history that the greater the number of people with a particular experience, the less evidence remains of
that experience. There are hundreds of pointlessly detailed accounts of banal coach journeys made by tourists, but the odysseys undertaken by migrants have vanished like most of the routes they walked.

The account written by one of the thousands of stonemasons who left the Limousin every year is a priceless exception. Martin Nadaud, who later became a socialist politician, described the gruelling journey to Paris in his memoirs. His account is brief, especially after Orléans, but the scenes he saw along the way can be recreated from other sources.

Nadaud was born in a Limousin hamlet called Martineiche. He was fourteen years old when he left home with his father and uncle. On the day of departure (26 March 1830), his tearful mother dressed him in a top hat, new shoes and a sheep’s-wool suit as stiff as cardboard. The suit was made from drugget, which is now used for coarse rugs. Martin was going to walk most of the way to Paris, but he had to look respectable, marching down a main street two hundred and forty miles long.

At the first stopping point, Pontarion, they were joined by other migrants from all over the Creuse. They drank some wine and then the old men who had walked with them on the first part of the journey turned for home, ‘telling us always to be well behaved and to keep a fond memory of the
the pays’.

Soon, they lost sight of the ‘Druid stones’ that stood on a hill behind the village. For Nadaud, these stones stood for his
pays
and the Gallic masons who had ‘reconquered the fatherland’ from the Romans. Since there was still no road to Guéret, the route ran through the forest on muddy tracks. Raindrops sprang from the branches and soaked them to the skin. By the time they reached Bordessoule on the borders of the
département
, the young masons’ feet were sore and bloody: Nadaud’s father helped him peel off his stockings and rubbed his soles with fat. The inn was a typical migrants’ dosshouse – cheap, hospitable and filthy. The innkeepers along the route put fresh sheets on the beds in November and changed them in March. The trick was to slip into the envelope of grime, fully clothed, and to wrap one’s head in a cloth. Sleep came quickly, despite the fleas.