The Discovery of France (32 page)

A series of circular journeys from the capital confirmed his theory. Guettard’s
Carte minéralogique
of 1746 was a partial description of this unexpectedly coherent subterranean world. It showed two broad belts labelled ‘Bande marneuse’ and ‘Bande sablonneuse’ (marly and sandy) that crossed the English Channel between Bayeux and Boulogne. On Guettard’s map, Paris looks like the capital of an underground kingdom with London at the extreme northern tip.

It so happens that Paris really does lie at the heart of concentric bands of sedimentary rocks and escarpments, but it is significant that Guettard formed his Paris-centric hypothesis at such an early stage. It is also significant that the achievements of the Belgian geologist Omalius d’Halloy, who spent six years mapping the subterranean French Empire at Napoleon’s request, were largely ignored. Geological formations might have disregarded political boundaries, but the map itself had national implications. The École des Mines in Paris finally agreed to support the project, not because it might show where the valuable coal seams of Belgium and Saarland extended into French Flanders and Lorraine, but because it had become a matter of patriotic pride. In 1822, Britain produced the first reliable geological map of a whole country. It was only then that the eleven-year-old proposal of the Professor of Geology Brochant de Villiers was approved and the fifty-six-thousand-mile expedition could begin.

In the introduction to their twenty-four-foot-square, colour-coded
Carte géologique de la France
(1841) – ‘‘one of the finest scientific monuments on which our country prides itself ’, according to the Larousse encyclopedia – Dufrénoy and Élie de Beaumont drew some comforting conclusions. The old provinces and
pays
were not arbitrary divisions but ancient, ineradicable truths. To generations that had seen the end of the monarchy and the fall of the empire, it was a consolation to know that France and its capital would always exist:

As roads and railways spread across the land, ‘the suburbs of Paris would extend to the very frontiers of the kingdom’ and ‘make it possible to gain a firmer grasp of the peculiarities’ of each
pays
. This was to be an increasingly common theme in the development of a national identity: the celebration of home-grown diversity and the supreme importance of Paris as the guardian and regulator of that diversity.

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T
HE CHARTING OF
France had turned out to be a much bigger task than anyone had supposed: seventy years for the Cassini map and then another seventy years to produce a map that was notoriously incomplete. Half a century after the first lines were drawn, the
Carte de l’état-major
still lacked basic information. Railways were drawn onto it in a haphazard fashion, roads were misplaced, missing details were slotted in from cadastral surveys which had followed different conventions. Heights were shown, often inaccurately, with rough hatchings instead of contour lines. By 1865, levelling (the operation that determines the heights of objects and points) had been carried out in only two
départments
: the Cher and the Seine. Civil engineers were forced to conduct their own local surveys, and sometimes, inevitably, chose the wrong course for a new road or railway.

Even when the hexagonal shape of France had become a familiar sight, few people had a clear impression of the topography of the country. In 1837, in an attempt to form a coherent picture in his mind, Stendhal wrote a description of ‘the five mountain ranges of France’. ‘It was only after writing these pages for myself that I understood the soil of France.’ But if his mountain ranges are plotted on a map of France, the result is about as accurate as a medieval chart.

Such was the state of geographical knowledge in 1838 that the Société de Géographie thought it worth sending a learned deputation to no. 8, Chaussée du Maine, on the southern edge of Paris. A retired teacher, M. Sanis, had painstakingly created a three-dimensional
model of France on an acre of land. Apart from relief models of the Alps commissioned by wealthy British tourists, nothing like it existed anywhere else. This forerunner of the ‘France Miniature’ theme park boasted riverbeds carved in stone and a complicated irrigation system. Two flat-bottomed boats holding six passengers each plied the three-foot- deep Mediterranean and sometimes realistically ran aground on the rocks of the Breton coast. There were pieces of apple tree in Normandy and pine tree in the Landes. Geology was represented by thumb-sized cavities into which M. Sanis had pushed a piece of coal, a cube of peat or some other appropriate specimen. The mountains were made of earth and had to be remoulded after rainstorms. As the Society’s report rather needlessly pointed out, ‘The Vosges, the mountains of the Auvergne, the Pyrenees and the Alps lose their picturesque effects when reduced to miniature proportions’. M. Sanis was intending to remodel them in asphalt and to add roads, boundaries and street plans. The Society suggested that this proliferation of detail might ‘obscure the overall picture’, but praised him for showing such ‘zeal for the advancement of science’.

M. Sanis, whose heroic retirement project now lies somewhere beneath the Gare Montparnasse, showed considerably more zeal than the surprisingly incurious governments of the nineteenth century. The urge to discover seemed to be countered by an equal and opposite force. It was not until 1857 that another epic expedition began to dot the entire country with the circular metal plaques that appear like numerical clues in a gigantic treasure hunt, embedded in the parapet of a bridge, the wall of a church or the plinth of a roadside cross. These were the points required for a complete geodesic survey. The expedition was led by the surveyor of the Suez Canal, Paul-Adrien Bourdaloue. Within eight years, survey points 1,000 metres apart formed a preliminary network of 15,000 kilometres, at which point the French government withdrew 50 per cent of the funding.

Napoleon would not have been surprised to learn that this official indifference to geographical truth had disastrous consequences. On the misty morning of 1 September 1870, French troops commanded by General Ducrot were retreating under heavy fire along the road where Empress Joséphine’s coach had come to grief in 1804.
Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, had lost the Battle of Sedan even before the first shots were fired. One of the reasons cited for the humiliating defeat of France by Prussia was a shortage of maps and the inadequacy of the
Carte de l’état-major.
It was impossible to tell, for instance, by looking at the map, whether the woods that the Prussian artillery was reducing to a wasteland of mud had once been scrubland or plantation, evergreen or deciduous.

Twelve years later, the lessons had still not been learned. A correspondent of the Bordeaux Geographical Society was walking through the hills of the Entre-Deux-Mers region north of Saint-Émilion. The French army was conducting a training exercise. Through the gun smoke that drifted across the countryside, the geographer could see men in red trousers and képis wandering about in confusion, trying to identify hills and valleys from the map. Only the soldiers who came from the region could find their way. Others were trying to navigate by roads, but years had passed since the original survey, and even a simple training exercise was likely to turn into a journey of discovery. ‘In this respect’, said the geographer, ‘the map is absolutely incomplete. It has not changed at all.’

11

Travelling in France, I:
The Avenues of Paris

E
XCEPT FOR FUGITIVES
, armies and professional explorers, discovering France – with or without a map – was largely a matter of negotiating the network of roads, rivers, canals and railways. From the distant present, this looks like a tale of steady progress: the speed of travel increased, people and merchandise moved about the country with growing ease and social and economic change arrived by carriage and locomotive instead of on the back of a pedlar or a mule. In the century that followed the Revolution, the national road network almost doubled in size and the canal network increased five-fold. There were fourteen miles of railway in 1828 and twenty-two thousand in 1888. By the mid-nineteenth century, a high-speed goods vehicle could cover fifty miles a day. On well-maintained surfaces, working animals became more efficient by the year: the average load pulled by one horse in 1815 was fourteen hundred pounds; in 1865, it was three thousand.

Roads improved more quickly than at any time since the conquest of Gaul. Tracks that had wandered across country like a peasant returning from a feast were straightened, steep hills were flattened by hairpin bends, violent rivers were tamed or bypassed by imperturbable canals. One day, people would have to travel hundreds of miles to have the thrill of crossing a rickety plank bridge or seeing a carriage wheel skittering on the brink of a precipice. When the poet Alfred de Vigny watched the plume of a steam engine crossing a landscape at more than 10 mph, he dreaded a future of endless, predictable change where ‘everyone will run smoothly on a line’ and the world would be reduced to a monotonous blur: ‘Farewell, slow journeys and distant
sounds’, ‘the twists and turns of varied hills’, ‘the axle’s delays’, ‘a friend encountered and the hours that slipped away’, ‘the hope of arriving late in a savage place’.

When Vigny wrote his poem, ‘La Maison du berger’, in 1844, he was living in a Paris apartment, a few minutes’ walk from several omnibus lines, three railway stations
²⁹
and one of the busiest rivers in France. He had to be careful when crossing the road. The fact that he imagined himself travelling with his mistress in a ‘fragrant’, four-wheeled shepherd’s hut suggests that he had already lost sight of the world beyond the city. He lived in the metropolitan France whose express roads and canals were universally admired as engineering marvels, but not in the other France, which was still recovering from the fall of the Roman Empire.

The changes in French society described in the second part of this book were accelerated by the expanding infrastructure, but the experience of individuals was not arithmetically linked to increasing road length and diminishing journey times. Historical dramas usually show the most efficient technology of the period – healthy horses pulling shiny carriages on slightly bumpy roads – but not the most ordinary scenes of daily life: a cow munching peacefully on a main road near a city; two carriages stuck facing each other for hours on a road so narrow that the doors could hardly be opened; a horse, with wooden planks placed under its belly, being hoisted out of a mud-hole; a farmer ploughing up the road to plant his buckwheat and potatoes.

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O
NE OF THE BEST
short guides to the experience of travelling in post-Revolution France is a French–German phrase book published in 1799 by Caroline-Stéphanie-Félicité Du Crest de Saint-Aubin, who is usually known as Mme de Genlis. Her pedagogical bent became apparent when, at the age of six, she delivered a series of lectures to local peasants from the balcony of the family château near Autun. She later became a governess of the future King Louis-
Philippe. She was an accomplished seamstress, surgeon, horse rider, harpist and billiards player. Her historical novels are resolutely inaccurate, but her
Traveller’s Manual for French Persons in Germany and German Persons in France
is a first-rate historical document. The following phrases are taken from the sections on ‘Planning the journey’, ‘Speaking to postilions during the journey’ and ‘Talking at staging posts while the horses are being harnessed’. They may sound slightly melodramatic, but similar phrases were used every day on the roads of France.