The Discovery of France (40 page)

These factories should not be imagined suddenly implanting themselves on a pristine landscape. The thumping cotton mills of Sotteville and Saint-Sever on the outskirts of Rouen and the blast furnaces and silhouette-black villages along the Belgian river Meuse concentrated earlier scatterings of local industries. The countryside in many parts of France became ‘unspoilt’ only as a result of government- funded conservation projects in the twentieth century. A typical pre-industrial landscape in Picardy or the Ardennes was a mess of smoky forges, stinky black fields where the hemp was laid out to dry
and slum colonies of wobbly windmills, compared to which modern wind turbines that seem to cartwheel across the hilltops are an exhilarating sight. Workers in these traditional industries were more likely to die young. For various reasons, it was unusual to find elderly people in the following trades: hemp-carding (stagnant, freezing water), weaving (damp cellars, smoky lamps and long hours), threshing and winnowing (dust), woodcutting (accidents and sweating in the cold) and charcoal-burning (malnutrition and lack of light).

The full horror of industry was hidden away in remote rural areas, where no town had ever existed and which few outsiders ever discovered. In the eighteenth century, the village of Aubin was a row of hovels in the chestnut forest of the Aveyron. Two miles to the north, above the valley of the Lot, was one of the natural wonders of southern France: the Burning Mountain of Fontaygnes. At night, a person peering down into one of the little craters that pocked the mountain would see the glow of a great fire. Coal deposits burned continuously, filling the cellars of the nearest hamlets with smoke. Under its black cloud, Aubin was like an industrial town with no industry. The air stank of sulphur, and the houses, people and pigs were soiled with soot; but the abundance of coal meant that the villagers could stay up after dark without counting the cost, spinning, singing and telling tales of the English invaders who, according to local legend, had set fire to the mountain many years before, or the soldiers who, one day in the 1780s, had come to claim the coal deposits for the King but been driven away by the wine growers and charcoal burners, ‘armed only with their ire’.

In 1826, the Duc Decazes, a former Minister of Police, Prime Minister and Ambassador to Britain, bought a mining concession near the hamlet of La Caze, two miles north of Aubin. The river Lot was unnavigable for much of the year and there was no railway, but Decazes had realized that the coal could be used to smelt the iron ore that was also found in the region. Modern industry succeeded where the King’s soldiers had failed. Within five years, a workers’ town sprouted in the valley. It was named Decazeville, though Decazes himself showed little interest in town planning. Several years passed before Decazeville had ‘free schools’ (funded by a tax on the workers’ wages) and another half a century before it had a hospital.

The miners of Decazeville worked in a maze of collapsing tunnels and burning coal seams. After day-long shifts, they emerged into a landscape of blast furnaces and rolling mills where birdsong and the wind were drowned out by the screech of trucks on iron rails and the incessant pounding of steam hammers. The miners and foundry workers were paid in company tokens stamped with the image of a brick chimney half-obliterating a landscape of hills. With no one to farm the land, stale, overpriced food was imported from distant places. Aubin began to merge along the black valley road with its neighbour Cransac. By the middle of the nineteenth century, there were pawnshops and garish cafes selling beetroot brandy and absinthe to bleary, black-eyed miners and women who were better dressed and worse behaved than their peasant mothers.

In 1865, the company collapsed and Decazeville discovered the modern scourge of unemployment. A new company was founded in 1868 by the Schneider family, which owned the iron foundries of Le Creusot. Its three thousand workers could apparently ‘find at Decazeville all the resources that might be necessary from a material, moral and religious point of view’ – a phrase which efficiently evokes the misery of a population provided with everything a meeting of shareholders had identified as ‘necessary’. In 1869, a strike at Aubin showed that the factories had also been forging a new breed of worker. Fourteen strikers, including one child, were shot dead by troops.

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T
HE NEW AGE
of industrial slavery and proletarian solidarity has its conspicuous monuments in the giant crater of the ‘Découverte’ open-cast mine at Decazeville (closed in 1965), the slag heaps of the Pas-de-Calais and the abandoned collieries of Flanders and Lorraine. Some of these industrial monsters have been preserved by eco-museums and will probably have a retirement much longer than their working life. But the other great industrial transformation of France is now almost indistinguishable from the landscape.

The mulberry trees that brighten the countryside all over Provence, the Cévennes and Corsica are picturesque memorials of the agricultural gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century when better
communications and the availability of credit made it possible for a peasant to grow a single crop for cash instead of a variety of plants for food and fertilizer. The mulberry trees were stripped of their shiny green leaves every spring to feed the silkworms; the second, tougher growth was fed to goats. The effect, apparently, was hideous: acres of leafless trees that looked like shaggy brooms stuck in the ground. Apart from the overgrown, collapsing terraces that were cut into the hillsides and the almost windowless tenements where the heated silkworms munched the leaves and made the sound of heavy rain, there is nothing in the verdant scenery on either side of the Rhône to show that life in the land of industrial vegetation was just as hard and unpredictable as it was in the foundries and coalfields.

In 1852, a disease called pébrine began to spread among the silkworms. By the time Louis Pasteur discovered the cause and a cure in 1869, the industry had collapsed, the Suez Canal had opened and cheaper silk was being imported from the East. A worm had brought prosperity and a micro-organism took it away. At about the same time, the vines that smallholders had rushed to plant on their plots of rye and wheat were attacked by a peppery mildew called oidium. American vines were imported to replace the diseased stock. Then, in 1863, some wine growers in the Gard noticed the leaves and roots of the new vines turning brown and black. The phylloxera aphid eventually destroyed more than six million acres of vineyard from Nice to Burgundy and from Narbonne to the Loire. For many peasants, it confirmed their belief that they should never have abandoned the old ways. This imported parasite did more than anything else to speed up the French colonization of Algeria. Thousands of people left the country or threw themselves on the mercy of northern industry, leaving behind a stony land that was greener and more pleasant to the eye than ever before.

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C
ONCRETE, LEGIBLE EVIDENCE
of political and economic change is not hard to find. Many nineteenth-century factories are still in use, and almost every town and village has at least one war memorial, a street named after a general or a battle, and a building bearing the insignia of one of the two empires and five republics.

Far more momentous changes to the face of France occurred in the nineteenth century, but on such a large scale that it is quite possible to travel from one end of the country to the other without noticing them, and without realizing that many of the landscapes that seem typically and eternally French are younger than the Eiffel Tower. Everyone knows that the nineteenth century was an age of change, but for many people of the time, roads, railways, education and sanitation were trivial innovations compared to the complete and irreversible transformation of their physical world. The only obvious points of comparison are the eradication of the Argonne forest in the First World War, the levelling of Normandy in the Second World War and the annual destruction by fire of large parts of the Mediterranean and Atlantic forests. But even these catastrophes belong to a different category of change. Perhaps the people whose experience was closest to that of the nineteenth-century inhabitants of France were the Stone Age people who saw their mountains being remoulded by the volcanoes of the Massif Central.

The transformation had begun with tiny, individual acts of conquest over briar patches and mires. It continued with the creation of monastic domains and royal estates and then the gigantic projects funded by entrepreneurs and the state. By the mid-nineteenth century, huge tracts of land were being reclaimed at a rate of several thousand acres a day. Half the moorland in Brittany disappeared in half a century, dug and fertilized by nomadic gangs of labourers and by colonies of orphans and abandoned children employed by big landowners. To northerners who were used to seeing symmetrical fields crammed with crops and plumbed into the supply lines of cities, a trackless heath dotted with a few mangy sheep looked like a waste of space rather than the shared resource of a pastoral economy. Soon, only a few people would remember that the moorlands themselves had been agonizingly reclaimed from swamps and thickets.

The national obsession with ‘wasteland’ was reflected in government policy and private initiatives. Watery wastes were drained and arid deserts were irrigated. For thousands of people, the quality of life improved. The Dombes in mid-eastern France was once ‘a damp hospital hidden in the fog’ where four-fifths of the population suffered from malaria. Twenty years after the draining and forest
planting began in the 1850s, average life expectancy had increased from twenty-five to thirty-five years. The sandy Sologne was dredged, drained and forested by big landowners, including Napoleon I I I. By the early twentieth century, the Solognots, who had once considered themselves healthy if they only had swamp fever, were living longer lives and stood several inches taller than their parents. In the Double, an agricultural black hole of bracken and swamp between the wine-growing Libournais and the pastures of Charente, missionary Trappist monks settled on a hill near the fever-stricken village of Échourgnac in 1868. They drained the land and planted trees. Today, the old Double can only be imagined from the dusty white earth, the well-tended fish ponds and the road subsidence.

Large parts of Mediterranean France were transformed within a generation. The fields of artichokes and strawberries in the Carpentras Plain survive under the summer sun because the old canals of Craponne and Pierrelatte were extended in the mid-nineteenth century, and because there is still a plentiful supply of cheap immigrant labour. It now takes a long, hot ride south to see the original stony desert of the Crau, though a boot scraped across the soil almost anywhere will reveal the underlying steppe, the ‘untilled and arid Crau, stony and immense’ (Frédéric Mistral). In the Roussillon plain, where medieval irrigation canals were renovated and artesian wells were drilled, the land seems ready to return to its desiccated state within days of the humans’ departure. Below the Peira Dreita col, where the Corbières hills drop down to the Mediterranean, clouds of dust sweep across the plain, obscuring Perpignan and the snow-capped Canigou. On the plain itself, in the noise-storm of jet planes and mining trucks, the Catalan Death Valley is still apparent among the ruined barracks of the Rivesaltes military zone where twenty thousand Spanish Republicans, gypsies, Jews and their children were interned by the French authorities in 1941 and spent the last months of their lives helping to fertilize the desert.

The biggest intentional change was the creation of a new geographical zone in the south-west. Less than two centuries ago, most of the Landes was a two-million-acre heath, five days long and three days wide. Almost nothing grew there but gorse, broom, heather, moor grass, helianthemums and lichens. On a clear, dry day, the
white line of the Pyrenees could be seen a hundred miles away. In winter, the reflections of clouds sailed over vast stagnant pools of rainwater. With its impermeable layer of sandstone, the Landes was like a flower-pot without a hole, tilted very slightly towards the great barrier of dunes on the Atlantic coast. It took about ten sheep on thirty acres of
lande
to fertilize a single acre of oily black soil. With a hundred sheep, a family of ten could live like castaways in their low wooden houses.

Not a single patch of the original Landes remains. The beautifully preserved village of Marquèze, which stands at the end of a small railway line near Sabres, is an exact, reverse image of the original settlement. Once, it was an oasis of trees in a boundless moor; now, the village is a clearing in the largest artificial forest in Europe. In 1857, a law on ‘the Purification and Cultivation of the Landes of Gascony’ accelerated the draining and tree-planting that had been carried out in a desultory fashion since prehistory. The bill was championed by Napoleon III, who bought twenty thousand acres of the Landes and created an experimental farming community called Solférino, in honour of his victory over the Austrians. A hundred and sixty-two
communes
in the Landes and Gironde
départements
were forced to turn their common land into pine plantations or, failing that, to sell it to developers. Thousands of acres were sold at auction. All but 7 per cent of the Landes is still in private hands. In the time that it takes for a seed to become a sapling, the agro-pastoral way of life was dealt a fatal blow. Iron foundries, refineries and paper factories sprang up in the forest. The ancient art of collecting resin from pine trees with an
hapchot
(a little axe) and a ceramic cup became a lucrative industry. Rosin, pitch and turpentine flowed from the forest and returned in the form of money, which destroyed the intricate hierarchy of farmers, tenants and labourers.

In 1889, a traveller arriving in Biarritz on the train from Bordeaux was asked by an old man if it was true that the Landes had changed since he last saw them forty years before: