The Discovery of France (26 page)

In many parts of France, dog-power was vital to the early industrial revolution. In the Ardennes, where nail-making was a major domestic industry, a passer-by who peered into one of the nail-makers’ low stone cottages would see a small dog scampering inside a wheel to keep the bellows blowing. In the Jura, villages without a water supply used wheel-spinning dogs to run machines. The usual stint was two hours, after which the dog, slightly singed by flying sparks, went to wake its replacement and could then do as it liked. The humans worked for up to fifteen hours a day and were often stunted, myopic and claw-fisted. The dogs seem to have been better adapted to the work. Like a hired labour force, they took responsibility for their own training. Old dogs taught young dogs the trick. Bitches suckled their puppies as they skittered about inside the wheel and learned the family trade. These working dogs were valued members of the family and were often included in family photographs.

The other main canine industry was carting. Long after dog traction was banned in some
départements,
milk, fruit and vegetables, bread, fish, meat, letters and sometimes schoolchildren were delivered by dog-cart. The dog-cart was the poor man’s bicycle and motor car. As late as 1925, well over a thousand dogs in harness were still running about the Loiret
département,
south of Paris. The flatter the terrain, the more dog-carts there were (the practice had spread from the Low Countries), though they also managed to take machine-guns to the trenches and bring back the wounded in the First World War. Like other quiet forms of transport, the dog-cart was driven off the roads by the motor car. The sudden roar of an engine was too much for a responsive dog.

City dogs today are thought of mainly as an excremental menace: over eight million dogs in France – two hundred thousand in Paris –
produce eighty tons of excrement a day and cause thousands of broken limbs. In the days when manure was gold, this was not a major complaint. The dogs themselves were a cheerful part of city life. Even that cat-worshipping aesthete Charles Baudelaire loved the sight of working dogs going about their business, ‘driven by fleas, passion, need or duty’: ‘those vigorous dogs hitched to carts . . . show by their triumphant barking how pleased and proud they are to rival horses.’ The ‘heroism of modern life’ was not peculiar to the human race:

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T
HAT DELICATE KIND
of happiness was more common then than it is in the age of production-line livestock. Cows and horses lived next door to their owners. Sometimes large holes were cut in the wall between the stable and the house so that the animal could see what was going on and the humans could converse with their workmates. The tall and bristly pigs of Brittany played with children and were given names. In 1815, in central France, the Scottish writer Sir Archibald Alison was surprised to find in every cottage ‘a very motley and promiscuous set of beings’: ‘The pigs here appear so well accustomed to a cordial welcome in the houses, that when by chance excluded, you see them impatiently rapping at the door with their snouts.’

Animals that were christened, dressed for church and welcomed into the home were, not surprisingly, well treated, or at least treated no more roughly than their owners treated themselves. Many animals that had outlived their usefulness in the fields were fed until they died. Manure, in any case, was more valuable than meat. Their owners talked to them and sang to them. In some parts, a strange chanting could be heard when the fields were being ploughed. To keep the oxen at a steady pace, a good ploughman would sing songs so old they sounded out of tune: each phrase ended with a very long, quavering note that rose a quarter tone.

Though the singing was very similar in different regions, there were many different words for it. None of these words appear in dictionaries:
kiauler
,
tioler
,
brioler
,
hôler
,
roiler
,
bouarer
,
arander
. By the end of the nineteenth century, the singing was confined to ‘backward’ regions like the Berry and the Morvan, and the word
quiaulin
(from
kiauler
) had come to mean a country bumpkin. All this suggests a very ancient origin. Perhaps these were the last surviving human sounds of pre-Roman Gaul. The popular notion that there was once a time when animals conversed with humans was not as fantastic as it seems.

The most spectacular creature to share the lives of human beings was the Pyrenean brown bear. Visitors to the remote valleys of the Couserans region were often alarmed to see children playing with bear cubs. The cubs were always orphans. The hunter would wrap himself in a triple layer of sheepskins and arm himself with a long knife. When the bear reared up and hugged the woolly human, the hunter pushed its jaw aside with one hand and stabbed it in the kidneys with the other, remaining locked in the embrace until the bear collapsed. The cubs were taken to the village where they grew up with the children and the livestock until they were old enough to be trained. A captive bear never hibernated but it ate surprisingly little and was cheap to maintain.

The bears in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, having been trained by a cosmopolitan crowd, performed an amazing variety of tricks. The Pyrenean dancing bears had a smaller repertoire. They danced with the aid of a staff and sometimes acted out little scenes: a military parade or a firing squad. The peasants of the Couserans valleys had probably learned from gypsies how to make a bear respond to the sound of a flageolet (the small, high-pitched flute) and then made minor improvements to the original trick. There was even a village school for bears at Ercé, where an older bear acted as ‘monitor’. The process lasted about a year. On the day of its graduation, the bear was strapped to a tree while an iron ring was passed through its jaw behind the teeth.

Some of these shambling, muzzled parodies of human beings made horrendously long journeys – to Germany and Britain, and even to

South America. For the people who watched these sad performances, part of the attraction was undoubtedly the handler himself: an example of a primitive species from the edges of France. ‘Built like a bear-handler’ was a proverbial expression for a weak and shabbily dressed little man.

These one-sided feudal relationships were more important to the humans than the tiny income provided by the bear. In towns and villages that were cut off for part of the year, cowering from the threat of avalanches and the crushing weight of boredom, even a dangerous wild animal was welcome company. An official who visited a mountain village in the Pyrenees was taken to see an old woman in need of charity. She and her husband had raised a dancing bear, but bears are prone to fits of anger and the husband had been mauled to death.

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A
SENTIMENTAL
, pet-centred view of the animal kingdom began to prevail in the mid-nineteenth century. With it came the notion that peasants who depended on animals in daily life were always cruel to them. Routine cruelty was certainly common. Hens and geese were used in bloody games of target practice. Poultry in general seems to have been treated as insects are treated today. Some horses were used in coal mines, like those of Rive-de-Gier, in the black valley north-east of Saint-É tienne, which was known as ‘the purgatory of men, the paradise of women (because the women stayed at home) and the hell of horses’. The smuggler dogs of Brittany and Maine were not treated as kindly as their Picard counterparts. A family in Maine, where salt was taxed, would leave its dog with a family in Brittany, where salt was free of duty. The dog was tethered, starved and then released with a pack of salt. Only the most intrepid excise man would try to stop an angry, famished dog heading for home. Until 1850, on the Place du Combat in Paris, on the seedy side of the Canal Saint-Martin, every Sunday and holiday afternoon, dogs
were pitted against any animal that could be found – bulls, bears, wolves, stags, wild boars, donkeys and other dogs – while savage human beings placed bets and revelled in the gore. At the Saint-Germain market – the roughest of Paris’s dog markets – mongrels were bought for experiments at the nearby É cole de Médecine.

Perceptions of suffering change with every generation and from one country to the next. Many foreign visitors were struck by the gentleness of French coach drivers and sometimes cursed them for not whipping their horses into a gallop. Horses suffered more from stupidity, ignorance and inefficiency than from deliberate cruelty. As long-distance coaches travelled south, the sturdy Percheron horses for which the coaches were designed were replaced by spindly nags who found the lumbering vehicle a cruel burden. The same fate befell the little Cossack horses left behind after the Allied invasions of 1814 and 1815. Horses were expected to share their owners’ discomfort. The patient mares of market-gardeners from Roscoff on the Breton coast were known as ‘thirty-league beasts’ because they carried the cauliflowers and artichokes for thirty leagues (eighty-three miles) without stopping, just as their owners went without food until the load was sold at Rennes or Angers.

The brutal, horse-torturing peasant was more common in bourgeois moral myth than in reality. From the mid-eighteenth century, being kind to animals was a standard injunction in books for children. The object of concern was not the welfare of the animal but the social status of the child. The implication was that a well brought-up child did not behave like a vulgar peasant who slept with his animals and made them work for a living.

The animals themselves were depicted as saintly creatures who existed for the moral benefit of Man. Popular journals like the
Le Magasin pittoresque
published heart–warming tales of philanthropic beasts: ‘The Skill of a Goat’ (1833), ‘Animals’ Affection for the Poor’ (1836), ‘Human Beings Fed By Animals’ (1841), ‘Maternal Love in Cats’ (1876), ‘The Language of [Mules’] Ears’ (1884), etc. ‘To moralize the working classes’ was the aim of the Society for the Protection of Animals, founded in 1848, sixteen years before the Society for the Protection of Children. The first law against cruelty to animals, the Grammont Law of 1850, outlawed animal fights in
towns and cities, not primarily because the animals suffered but because violent sports were thought to give the proletariat a taste for bloody revolution.

Just as a World Wildlife Fund sticker on a car window does not prevent it from leaving a trail of flattened corpses on the tarmac,
²¹
so was sentimental concern able to coexist quite happily with unconscious cruelty. Bourgeois passengers on Mediterranean ships amused themselves by shooting dolphins. Hunters on holiday could be indescribably sadistic in disposing of their prey. The idea that hunters had a special understanding of the animals they killed is extremely dubious. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, some hunters believed that marmots pulled each other along like carts and that chamois and bouquetins (ibex) swung themselves headlong down sheer cliffs by stabbing their horns into the earth. Many of the wild inhabitants of France were no better known than the human inhabitants of the French colonies.

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R
OADKILL AND URBAN SPRAWL
are modern innovations, but even two centuries ago there were signs that the discovery and colonization of France would bring devastation and death to animals. Domestic animals in towns were protected by the Grammont Law, but the only protection for animals in the wild was provided by occasional hunting restrictions, and most hunters found that these only enhanced the thrill of the chase.

In the early 1780s, while ominous rumblings were threatening the monarchy, the geologist Horace–Bénédict de Saussure became one of the first people to notice a quiet catastrophe in the animal kingdom. In the 1760s, he had made a series of daring expeditions into the
Alpine massifs. Twenty years later, he returned to find that the ubiquitous furry spirit of the mountains was now a rarity:

This is one of the earliest signs that anyone was saddened by the disappearance of a species. For a long time, the seemingly obvious idea that a species could become extinct, first proposed by Georges Cuvier in a paper on the mammoth in 1796, was an obscure, scholarly notion. In 1825, at the age of twenty-one, George Sand showed no particular concern when she wrote in her Pyrenean diary, ‘We are living on bear and chamois, but we see hardly any’. (In fact, she was probably eating disguised goat.) The chamois had played an unwitting role in the exploration of the Alps. In 1844, a chamois disappearing over a distant ridge revealed to a botanist the existence of an unknown pass between the Simplon and the Great Saint Bernard.
²²
A hundred years before, herds of chamois were a common sight. Now, like the izard (the Pyrenean chamois), they were seen only in summer, through telescopes, on the edge of glaciers and snow-fields. The bouquetin was almost extinct in the Pyrenees by the mid-nineteenth century and confined to the slopes of the Maladetta. Sightings of the mouflon – the wild sheep with huge curly horns – were increasingly rare, except in Corsica. Bears were practically extinct in the Jura by 1800. By the end of the nineteenth century, Pyrenean showmen were importing their bears from Russia and the Balkans.