The Discovery of France (35 page)

It was Napoleon who consolidated the advances of the eighteenth-century engineers by placing all two hundred and twenty-nine
routes impériales
under the control of central government. Later, in 1836, the state would assume responsibility for the upkeep of the meandering
chemins vicinaux
that ran between villages. There was little fundamental change in this road system until the 1960s. A dynamic map of the network over two centuries would show a gradual thickening of the main inter-city routes and a flickering mass of smaller lines between. Fourteen ‘first-class’ roads ran from Paris to the frontiers and were numbered clockwise as they radiated from the capital. These were the great ‘avenues’ that helped Paris to grow more quickly than any other city in France. They spread the Parisian
empire through France and the French Empire through Europe. They also helped the Allies to overrun the country in 1814 and to rush the deposed emperor by carriage to the Mediterranean port of Fréjus in exactly seven days. From Fréjus, Napoleon sailed to his tiny island kingdom of Elba, where, shocked to find hills that even mules could barely climb, and determined to turn the island into ‘the warehouse of universal commerce’ and ‘a point of contact for all nations’, he immediately launched a sixty-thousand-franc road-building programme.

12

Travelling in France, II:
The Hare and the Tortoise

E
VEN THE MOST ENTHUSIASTIC
road-builders would have been surprised to see how much roads came to dominate and overwhelm the country. Until the advent of railways, the key to national prosperity was thought by many to lie with canals and canalized rivers. In the first century
BC
, Strabo had written of ‘the harmonious arrangement’ of the rivers of Gaul. This famous passage of his
Geography
haunted progressive minds. It seemed to describe a super-efficient France of the future, and it suggested that after almost two millennia the country had still not fulfilled its destiny:

France had over four thousand miles of navigable river. It also had six hundred miles of canals by the time of the Revolution and over three thousand before the end of the nineteenth century. Another six hundred miles of river were considered navigable at certain times of year, if only in one direction. Much of the wood that was used to build and heat Paris had been floated down from the Morvan by wild-looking
flotteurs
in straw hats and wolfskin coats who spoke a
dialect peculiar to the river. From the Auvergne, wood bound for Bordeaux was loaded onto plank boats which were caulked with moss and survived the spring torrents just long enough to reach Libourne, where they were sold as firewood.

Tiny rivers that are now used only by anglers and timid canoeists carried flat-bottomed boats in water so shallow that the boatmen could walk alongside them in the river. A report on the Dordogne
département
in 1810 described the course of thirty-eight rivers but added that there were also five hundred and sixty other ‘principal streams’ and eight hundred and fifty ‘little streams’. Even some scarcely visible
riviérettes
were treated as valuable trade routes and had their banks repaired and strengthened. Many quiet streams in rural parts are still cluttered with brickwork and stone facing, as if they had once flowed through industrial towns. In the Lot and the Tarn, the river was the only lifeline of many villages. Their tiny harbours and landing stages were strung out along the banks like trading posts in the Amazon. Some medium-sized rivers like the Vienne are like the deserted autoroutes of an earlier civilization. Little lanes run down to them like sliproads, leading only to the river and a clutch of houses often called ‘Le Port’.

The fact that sixty-one of the original eighty-three
départements
were named after rivers – even if the river was destructive and torrential or obstructed by boulders and cataracts – shows how much importance was attached to water transport. Statistical studies of the new
départements
typically devoted ten times as much space to watercourses as to roads. Great hopes of wealth and vitality were placed in rivers and canals, and there were some astounding examples to inspire the engineers: the Roman Pont du Gard and the aqueduct system that had watered Nîmes until the ninth century, or the unfinished Maintenon aqueduct (1685–88), which was designed to take the waters of the river Eure fifty miles to feed the fountains of Versailles.

With its hundred and twenty miles of water channels, Versailles itself was a showcase of hydraulic marvels. While the townspeople made do with brackish ponds, expensively imported water created glassy parterres that prolonged the mirrors of the Galerie des Glaces, and fountains that decorated the air with musical arabesques. Nature was made to recognize the political centre. The Seine was diverted
by the gigantic pump at Marly known as ‘the Machine’; the Eure was to be brought from Maintenon. There was even a plan to bring the waters of the distant Loire to Versailles. Statues in the palace gardens represented the great rivers of France as calm, recumbent giants accompanied by cherubic little affluents.
³²

The grandest project of all was the Canal du Midi, which is now the oldest functioning canal in Europe. It runs for a hundred and fifty miles, through sixty-three locks and under a hundred and thirty bridges, from Sète on the Mediterranean, via Béziers, Carcassonne and the geological gap between the Pyrenees and the Montagne Noire known as the Seuil de Naurouze, all the way to the heart of Toulouse. This beautiful open-air museum of engineering masterpieces was the brainchild of a retired tax-farmer from Béziers, Pierre-Paul Riquet, who spent on it the entire fortune he had made collecting salt tax and died of exhaustion eight months before it was opened in 1681. It employed up to ten thousand men and women at a time and brought forty-five thousand cypresses and plane trees to the Lauragais plain, as well as millions of irises to protect and beautify the banks. This was one of the biggest movements of population and plant life in peacetime history.

Horse-drawn barges carrying oranges, wine and oils from Italy and Spain, grain and cotton from Languedoc, and drugs and spices from the Levant and the Barbary Coast were unloaded at Toulouse onto smaller river boats that negotiated the watermills and shoals of the lower Garonne. At Agen, they took on prunes and other dried fruit for the Atlantic ships at Bordeaux. They returned from Bordeaux with sugar, coffee and tobacco from the Americas. The dream was that, one day, the French isthmus would enjoy the advantages of an island. If the Garonne could be cleared and canalized, ocean-going vessels could sail directly from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic without having to round the Iberian Peninsula. Languedoc and Aquitaine would lie at the centre of a global river of trade and
Strabo’s description of a naturally efficient, inter-oceanic river system would come true.

Work finally began on the unexcitingly named Canal Latéral à la Garonne in 1839 during the July Monarchy (1830–48), when more canals were built than in all other periods combined. The Canal des Deux Mers – the name given to the entire stretch from Sète to Bordeaux – was completed just as the new Bordeaux–Sète railway opened for business in 1857. The railway company acquired the lease on the Garonne canal and stifled the canal and river trade with extortionate taxes. The Canal du Midi had turned the Lauragais and Toulousain regions into the bread-basket of the south. It had eliminated the devastating annual floods and, in conjunction with the road system, opened up vast new markets. Grain speculators had covered the land with wheat fields and châteaux. But when the railway arrived, wheat from the Paris Basin was suddenly cheaper than the local grain. For centuries, invaders had passed through the Seuil de Naurouze. Now, after the Celts, the Romans, the Visigoths, the Arabs, the Albigensian crusaders, the Black Prince and the Duke of Wellington, came modern capitalism, the unconscious hypocrite, which took away with one hand what it gave with the other.

*

C
ANALS
,
WHICH WERE
once seen as the highways on which civilization would reach remote parts, came to be associated with sluggishness and constraint. The drunken boat of Rimbaud’s poem ‘Le Bateau ivre’ (1871) begins its adventure only when its haulers have been slaughtered and it leaves the ‘impassive rivers’ for the open sea. Many tales of the heroic age of canal building and the taming of rivers will never be told. Even the pioneering voyage of Baron Boissel de Monville has passed into almost total obscurity, though he was the first person in history to descend the Rhône from the Swiss border to the point where the river becomes clearly navigable again. He wanted to show that the Rhône could be a major trade link with Savoy and Switzerland. During the Terror, in the autumn of 1794, disguised as a peasant, the Baron passed the cataracts with his ironclad boat and a jittery crew, who baled out before the boat reached the Perte du Rhône, where the river used to disappear through a
fissure into a subterranean cavern. The boat was wrecked and spat out by the resurgent river three hundred and fifty feet downstream. Two weeks later, the Baron rebuilt his boat and sailed it all the way to Surjoux.

This inspiring but ultimately futile exploit
³³
belonged to an age when long-distance travellers took to the water whenever they could and expected the voyage to be an interesting adventure. It was quite usual for a person touring France to make half the tour on rivers and canals: carriage from Paris to Chalon-sur-Saône; passenger boat to Lyon, then down the Rhô ne to Avignon; post road to Montpellier and Béziers; canal boat to Toulouse, river boat to Bordeaux and another boat to Blaye on the Gironde; diligence or private carriage via Saintes and La Rochelle to Nantes; sailboat or steamer up the Loire to Tours, Blois or Orléans. The tourist could then travel back to Paris by road or by a series of canals to the Seine at Montereau: from there, the daily passenger boat from Nogent-sur-Seine reached Paris in a day and a night. This was the service on which the fifteen-year- old Napoleon first arrived in Paris and on which Frédéric Moreau leaves the city at the start of Flaubert’s
L’Éducation sentimentale
. Compared to the jolting road and the clutter of slums and beggars on the edge of Paris, the river was a royal avenue, flowing majestically towards the towers of Notre-Dame.

Better still, the accommodation was cheaper and more comfortable. Diligences – sometimes optimistically called
vélocifères
– were lumbering contraptions composed, like giant beetles, of three sections. The
coupé
in front was protected by thick curtains of foul-smelling, oily leather; the interior was padded and crammed with little pockets and nets for hatboxes and sundry possessions. The
impériale
above the
coupé
was exposed to the wind and the rain, but passengers could at least make sure that the postilion, perched on the nearest horse in his gargantuan jackboots of wood and iron, was still awake. (These were the original ‘seven-league boots’ of the fairy tale, because seven
leagues was once the common distance between two staging posts.) Suspension was provided by leather thongs nailed to blocks of wood. Even rich travellers who were equipped with inflatable waterproof cushions and lambswool foot-warmers found the diligence an ordeal. The American writer Bayard Taylor described the horrors of the Auxerre–Paris service in his
Views A-Foot
,
or Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff
(1846):

The same journey, by the green-painted
coche d
’
eau
on the river Yonne, offered a large room lined with benches, prettily decorated compartments, better views and more cheerful passengers. Though the Rhône riverboats were more cramped and dirty, people entering Provence by the river usually had nicer things to say about it than those who had entered it by road. The sniffy Countess Gasparin, in her
Voyage of an Ignoramus in the South of France
(1835), found that the lovely views made up for ‘the incommodious throng’ that blocked the passageways with its luggage and ignored the distinction between first and second class. Boat passengers enjoyed an unfurling tableau of hilltop castles, vineyards, country homes and people waving from the banks. They smelled the warm air of the Mediterranean; they saw the white summit of Mont Ventoux in the east and the towers of the Palais des Papes at Avignon; and when the boat docked beneath
the Pont Saint-Bénezet, they invariably sang a chorus of ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’.