The Discovery of France (38 page)

Since then, her country had behaved as though it was blind to its divine destiny. Ignoring the Revolution and the reign of the Corsican usurper, Napoleon Bonaparte, France had been ruled since 1774 by three brothers: Louis XVI, who was guillotined in 1793, Louis XVII I, who dated his reign from 1795, when the little Dauphin had died in prison, and Charles X, the Duchess’s father-in-law, who had been forced into exile by a three-day riot of intellectuals and workers. The 1830 Revolution had created a constitutional monarch, Louis-Philippe, who, in the eyes of royalists, was little more than a glorified civil servant. Censorship and the hereditary peerage were abolished, and there were tentative electoral reforms that had increased the electorate to almost 3 per cent of the male population over the age of twenty-one. The Duchess had followed Charles X into exile.

That morning on the cold Mediterranean coast, the news was
conveyed to the leader of the royalist invasion in tactful euphemisms as she sheltered in an inn at the hamlet of La Folie. The promised uprising had taken the form of a feeble demonstration in the streets of Marseille. Despite this disappointment, the Duchess and a small band of supporters and admirers set off into the land that she loved and seemed to know better than anyone else of her class. Four hundred miles to the north, the vast Vendée, hiding behind its natural moats and leafy fortifications, was swarming with the God-fearing, royalist peasants the Duchess had read about in romantic histories and novels. When she was a child, the Vendée had been reconquered by the Revolutionary army from the rebel Chouans after a four-year war during which whole towns were destroyed and the populations of entire
pays
were massacred. The ‘Vendée’, in fact, was most of the west of France: the war affected eight
départements
, from the Atlantic coast to the heart of the Loire Valley, and from Poitou to the English Channel. The region was still considered a political threat and was still occupied by troops.

The Duchess had toured the Vendée in 1828. She had seen with her own eyes the scars of war and thought of romantic Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. She saw ruined buildings, squalid villages and the orphans of the ten thousand ‘martyrs’ who had attacked artillery regiments with pitchforks, secure in the belief that their suicidal mission would end in heaven. She had sailed down the Loire to Nantes in the pouring rain and seen the battlements of riverside châteaux thronged with cheering people. She was welcomed with garlands, cardboard
arcs de triomphe, fleurs de lys
and choirs of little children. She had met men of rank and talent who were excluded from public office because of their royalist sympathies.

Now, as she travelled west towards Toulouse, at first on foot and then in an open carriage, spurning the advice of the royalists who gave her shelter, the Duchess must have thought of the hated Napoleon, who, seventeen years before, had landed further down the coast, near the fishing village of Cannes. Napoleon had reached Gap and perhaps Grenoble before news of his return from Elba reached Paris. In those days, the telegraph line ended at Lyon; a horseman had galloped with the news all the way from the coast. Now, the spindly arms of the telegraph could be seen in over five hundred
places, gesticulating like giant insects from towers and cathedral spires. Since the operators had to distinguish the signals through telescopes, the world’s first telecommunications system was still subject to interruptions. Eight years before, because of bad weather over Burgundy, news of her own husband’s death had reached Lyon from Paris as though it was written on a torn scrap of paper:

Unfortunately for the Duchess, the April weather was fine. By the time she woke up next morning in a shepherd’s hut somewhere north of the coast, people all over France were discussing the interesting news over breakfast.

The Duchesse de Berry reached the Vendée in May and sent out a proclamation to ‘the inhabitants of the loyal provinces of the west’:

In the event, the civil war in the Vendée consisted of a few desperate attacks on army posts. Small bands of peasants led by old, nostalgic officers, armed only with antique muskets and wishful thinking, were easily shot down by the occupying troops. A few more martyrs were created and a large part of western France was placed under martial law. The Duchess left the lanes and hedges of the bocage and headed for Nantes, dressed as a peasant. The soldiers, she thought, would never look for her in a prosperous modern city of a hundred thousand inhabitants who had no interest in overthrowing the government in Paris. It was market day and people were flowing into the city from all directions. No one noticed the bogus peasant woman, except perhaps when she removed her painful clodhoppers and rough woollen stockings and revealed a pair of perfectly white feet. She quickly rubbed them with black earth and found her way to the home of two royalist ladies in the centre of Nantes.

For five months, she hid in the house at number 3, rue Haute-du-Château,
which overlooked the castle gardens and the meadows by the Loire.

One day at the end of autumn, the building was searched. The Duchess had been betrayed by a double agent. The soldiers failed to find her, but two gendarmes stayed behind to guard the house. They lit a fire in the attic room where the Duchess was wedged into a priest-hole behind the hearth. When the peat burned low, they threw on some old copies of
La Quotidienne
, the royalist daily paper. The Duchess’s dress caught fire and she tumbled out.

A few moments later, a telegraph message was heading north from Nantes to Mont-Saint-Michel, then east across Normandy to Montmartre, from where it was relayed to the telegraph station on the roof of the Louvre and transcribed for the Minister of the Interior:

Later that year, when the Duchess was moved south to the prisonfortress of Blaye on the Gironde estuary, she was found to be pregnant. During her time in Italy, she had secretly married an obscure Italian count. This effectively ended her claim to be the living incarnation of the Bourbons and made a mockery of the Vendée rebellion. This time, no one attributed the birth of her child to a miracle.

*

F
ROM ONE POINT OF VIEW
, the Duchesse de Berry was a lone heroine trying to save a vanquished people from its oppressors; from another, she was the deluded representative of a feudal dynasty that was prepared to sacrifice thousands of lives to satisfy its thirst for power. In the damp depths of the bocage, it was hard to gain an overall view of the situation, but as the government re-established control over the Vendée in the following months, it became clear that the Duchess belonged to the same Parisian system of power that quashed her attempted coup.

The effect of her invasion was to complete the pacification and colonization of the west of France. The troubles in the Vendée rreminded the government that a region with few towns and poor
connections with the capital was a political threat. A huge road-building programme was launched: thirty-eight ‘strategic roads’ with a total length of over nine hundred miles were built. They criss-crossed the region from Poitiers to Nantes and from La Rochelle to Saumur. Forests were felled and the deep lanes filled in. Almost every trace of the Vendée war was expunged within a decade. The only comparable road-building scheme in French history was the web of military routes built along the ridges of the Cévennes in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These beautifully engineered war paths, some of which have since been restored as tourist routes, made it possible for artillery regiments to penetrate the chestnut forests and bombard the remote hamlets where the Protestant ‘fanatics’ hid from their persecutors. Raiding parties could then descend on the hamlets to massacre what remained of the population. Like the military occupation of the royalist Vendée, this was not a religious crusade but a security operation designed to reinforce the central power.

On 6 June 1832, newspaper readers might have noticed a significant conjunction of events. The biggest skirmish in the Vendée uprising, at the village of Le Chêne, had just ended with the defeat of four hundred peasants by a full battalion. That night, in the centre of Paris, eight hundred rioters were massacred by troops in the narrow streets around the church of Saint-Merry. (This was the popular revolt that forms the climax of Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
.) The government that was supposed to defend the liberal principles of the 1830 Revolution had shown itself to be as ruthless as the former monarchy. The third piece of news concerned the colony of Algiers, which had been conquered in 1830 in the last days of the reign of the Duchesse de Berry’s father-in-law, Charles X. On 4 June, battalions of African Light Infantry were formed. All the recruits of the ‘Bat’ d’Af’ had been convicted of serious crimes by civil and military courts. They proved to be brutally effective in stamping out the nationalist revolt of Algerian tribes.

A historian interpreting the broader significance of these events is in the position of a passer-by on a lane in Montmartre, looking up at the twitching arms of the telegraph as it transmits the coded news to the city below. Should they be construed as acts of state violence perpetrated against colonial populations that might otherwise have
lived in peace? Or were they a political expression of deep divisions in the population? Were the provinces of France unable to coexist without domestic enemies? Citizens of modern France who have suffered official persecution may find it significant that, after the Vendée uprising, both sides agreed that the true villain was the converted Jew who betrayed the Duchesse de Berry.

Perhaps it was simply that the centralization of power made the nation vulnerable to invasion. France was repeatedly reconquered by French forces. French governments crushed revolutions in 1832, 1848, 1871 and 1968. They conducted coups d’état or, euphemistically, enacted emergency legislation, in 1851 and 1940. The Duchesse de Berry’s small invasion was not unique. It seemed ridiculous only because it failed. Eight years later, in August 1840, Napoleon’s nephew also made himself a laughing-stock by chartering a pleasure boat in London and sailing to Boulogne-sur-Mer with sixty men and a caged vulture masquerading as an imperial eagle. He proclaimed himself the new head of state, was arrested after accidentally shooting a man in the face and sent to prison at Ham, in the swampy part of the Somme. Yet two years after escaping from prison disguised as a labourer with a plank of wood to hide his face, Louis-Napoléon was elected President of France. Three years after that, he conducted a coup d’état and, as Emperor Napoleon III, founded the Second Empire, thus proving, according to Baudelaire, that ‘the first person to come along can, by seizing control of the telegraph and the national printing works, govern a great nation’.

At certain moments, the Duchesse de Berry herself might have glimpsed a pattern of events that stretched far beyond the field of politics and personal ambition. She had slept in the thyme deserts of Provence and hidden in the ditches of the Vendée.She had rubbed the earth of the Loire estuary on her bare feet and seen the weather appear to collude with her plan or to conspire with her enemies. On the scale that was marked by standing stones and transhumance trails as well as cathedrals and highways, the twists and turns of political history were a tiny track in a vast, changing landscape.

*

T
HE PACIFICATION
of the west of France was part of a much longer process of colonization, both in the political sense and in the original sense of the word (from the Latin
colere
, to till or cultivate). The unruliness of a population was not, on its own, an insoluble problem. Combined with the intractability of the land, it was an obstacle to development that only economics would overcome. Outposts of French power had been set up in the west of France and had fallen prey to climate, terrain and irreversible natural changes. Brouage, on the edge of the Poitevin marshes, had been redesigned by Richelieu in the 1620s to give France a major naval port on the Atlantic and a base from which to besiege the Protestant town of La Rochelle. From its ramparts, Mazarin’s niece had surveyed the fleet of warships and the lonely coast, thinking of her sweetheart, the young Louis XIV, who was being forced to marry the Spanish Infanta.

Protestant La Rochelle and its English supporters were defeated and the fortifications were razed to the ground. But all along, a more persistent and devious enemy had been attacking the coast of France, undermining the cliffs of Normandy, blockading the Mediterranean ports and redrawing the map of the Atlantic frontier. The port of Brouage silted up and the salt trade moved away. The citadel from which ships had sailed to Louisiana and Quebec became an island of low white houses in a marshy moor. Later, Brouage was used as a prison. When François Marlin saw Brouage in 1772, the ocean had retreated two miles to the west and left behind a plain of rotting vegetation and a dwindling colony of soldiers who had been bribed to go and live there. According to the local priest, who had banished himself to this Atlantic Siberia for his sins, the inhabitants were old and decrepit by the age of forty, sapped by the pestilential miasma that rose from the mudflats into which the battlements were slowly sinking.

Even Napoleon Bonaparte struggled to make a lasting impression on the west. In 1804, he ordered the capital of the Vendée
département
to be moved from the town of Fontenay-le-Peuple (the revolutionary name of Fontenay-le-Comte) to the paltry settlement of La Roche-sur-Yon, most of which had been eradicated in the Vendée war. A
new town called Napoléon or Napoléonville
³⁴
was laid out and a fresh population of soldiers and civil servants brought in. The idea was that the new, imported ruling class would be unconstrained by any personal loyalty to the region. For the next four years, ‘the dullest town in France’ (Murray’s guide, 1854) slowly rose from the vacant site. Napoléonville was designed to accommodate fifteen thousand people, but the land imposed its own conditions and the population of the bocage refused to coalesce.