The Discovery of France (43 page)

Apart from its eccentric but theoretically rational itinerary, the book was unusual in several respects. First, Lavallée and his team appear to have actually undertaken the journey. (The drawing of Valenciennes shows the town at a great distance because the artist was in danger of being shot as a spy. The Loire-Inférieure chapter misses out most of the
département
because the roads were impassable and wind prevented the boat from landing at Quiberon.) Second, the book was to be sold all over the country, in every town that had a postmaster. Third, it redefined the sights that a patriotic tourist should want to see. Instead of gloomy old cathedrals, it praised factories, public promenades and new housing developments. The remarks on Nancy are typical:

Most unusual of all, the guide was complimentary about provincials, though, even here, Bretons were the exception: those benighted victims of aristocratic oppression were said to drink themselves into a state of suicidal fury, ‘and the air oftentimes reverberates with the frenzied blows of a delirious head being bashed against insentient walls’.

Despite the delirious rhetoric, Lavallée’s
Voyages
helped to establish a notion that now seems almost synonymous with civilization: the belief that natural beauty and historical interest are part of a nation’s wealth. This was still a novel idea when some of the administrators posted to the new
départements
included picturesque sites in surveys of their
département’s
resources. Jean-Baptiste Mercadier’s description of the Arie`ge in 1800 is one of the first official documents to describe the economic potential of tourist attractions.
He mentioned grottos crammed with stalactites, fossil beds, mineral springs and the fountain of Bélesta, which had narrowly escaped being turned into an industrial eyesore by the owner of a sawmill. He also mentioned the ruined castles that stand on the hilltops of the Ariège and in particular Montségur, ‘famous for the defeat of the Albigensians [the Cathar heretics], who were massacred there’. This is the earliest sign of the ‘Cathar tourism’ that is now a vital source of income for the region.

Here again, the nation invariably referred to as ‘England’ played a vital role. After the fall of Napoleon, curiosity and exchange rates brought huge numbers of British tourists to France. As Morris Birkbeck explained in his
Notes on a Journey through France
(1815), ‘twelve years have elapsed since an authentic account has been given of the internal state of France, therefore it is, in some sort, an unknown country’. Foreign accounts were translated into French and revealed a magical world of unsuspected treasures to the people who lived in their midst. For lack of information, Walter Scott had had to invent much of the France he described in
Quentin Durward
(1823), but in France itself the novel created real interest in the Loire Valley. Stendhal hated Brittany but found that Scott’s descriptions made it possible for him to enjoy its poverty and ugliness. A pigsty in a swirling mist was suddenly an object of endless fascination.

The effects of this post-war invasion are impossible to quantify but easy to imagine. Those ‘buttoned-up clergymen’ and ‘old ladies equipped with albums’ who landed at Calais and Boulogne were a strange enough sight to be noticed by everyone along their route. In the 1820s, the populations of entire villages would have seen the painter J. M. W. Turner sketching scenes along the Seine and the Loire, descending from the diligence to walk the last few miles to town. They would have seen Henry Wadsworth Longfellow striding along the banks of the Loire from Orléans to Tours, talking to peasants in the vineyards and appearing to exist in a different universe:

British and American visitors not only travelled along the trade routes like salesmen with nothing to sell, they also colonized neglected regions. Calais was practically bilingual by the end of the eighteenth century. The population of Tours and the Touraine almost doubled after Waterloo. Pau had been discovered by the British during the Peninsular War. They returned in peacetime to enjoy the bracing air, the view of the Pyrenees and, eventually, their own villas, bowling greens and the first golf course on the Continent. In a country where people from neighbouring
pays
could still view one another as foreigners, tourists who strolled across the entire land as though it was an enormous village green were more effective than patriots like Lavallée in creating a sense of national pride.

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U
NFORTUNATELY, APPRECIATIVE FOREIGNERS
were not the first to follow the trail of national treasures. They were preceded by a swarm of scrap merchants and antique dealers who profited from the sale of estates confiscated from the Church and the aristocracy. Collectively, they were known as the ‘Bande Noire’. Balzac described one of these parasitic speculators in his novel
The Village Priest
– a hard-working tinker called Sauviat who had once roamed the Auvergne, exchanging pots and plates for old iron:

Enterprising wreckers like Sauviat identified the architectural treasures of France as surely as though they had come into possession of a modern guidebook with a list of three-star sites. Meanwhile, French guidebooks were still being written in total ignorance of the treasures that were being destroyed. Carcassonne was cited for its cloth factories but not for its medieval walls. In the Gers, in 1807, a report claimed that priceless sixteenth-century books were being sold as wrapping paper and only English tourists were saving them. ‘If this destruction continues, we shall no longer be able to study our nation’s literature and history in our country.’ In 1827, on a visit to Orange, the novelist Pigault-Lebrun observed, with no obvious sign of concern, that ‘one can hardly put one foot in front of the other without trampling on something that once belonged to the Romans’.

The destruction of national treasures is usually blamed on certain groups with well-defined aims: Huguenots, priest-bashing
sansculottes
, Prussian invaders or the scavenging Bande Noire. But the Bande Noire never existed as an institution. Some of its more sophisticated members may even have slowed the process of destruction by finding a market for the treasures. The cloisters of the abbey of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa near Prades in the eastern Pyrenees can now be seen at the Cloisters Museum of Manhattan, along with those of four other French medieval churches. Without the Bande Noire, they might have gone the way of the saints’ heads and carved lintels that adorned the hovels of any local peasants who could be bothered to push a wheelbarrow up the hill. (Evidence of pilfering can still be found. A section of column from the basilica of Saint-Denis, for instance, now serves as a decorative door stop in a nearby cafe-restaurant.)

Most of the damage was caused, not by cynical dealers, but by casual theft, negligence, emergency repairs and ignorant restoration. A blacksmith had his forge in what remained of Mâcon cathedral.
The church at La Charité-sur-Loire was overrun by hens and children. Notre-Dame-de-la-Grande at Poitiers sheltered a salt merchant’s store, the residue of which is still eating away at the stone. The walls of the Gothic church of Saint Gengoult in Toul are still encrusted with an estate agent’s office, a cobbler’s shack and the Marie-Jo boutique.

The Church conspired in its own dilapidation. The canons of Autun demolished the lovely tomb of Saint Lazarus with its marble miniature of the original church and amputated the head of Christ from the tympanum, which is now considered to be a masterpiece of Romanesque sculpture. In 1825, stone figures on the facade of Reims Cathedral were hacked off in case they fell on the King during his coronation. The state itself was a crude and clumsy landlord: it used Mont-Saint-Michel as a prison, the Palais des Papes as a barracks and, after overseeing most of its demolition, the abbey of Cluny as a national stud. Later, it allowed a canal and a railway to smash their way through the ancient necropolis at Arles.

No sooner did poets and art lovers learn of the existence of this magical land than they found it in ruins. However, the ruins had a peculiar charm. For the generation that had grown up in the shadow of the Revolution, cathedrals and chaˆteaux were touched with the mystery of ancient times and the imagined certainties of childhood. They came from the other side of a historical abyss. Charles Nodier, who collaborated on a highly successful series of
Voyages pittoresques
³⁶
et romantiques dans l’ancienne France
((from 1820), described himself as ‘an obscure but religious traveller through the ruins of the fatherland’, a ‘pilgrim’ in search of a god. Each volume contained beautiful engravings of bat-infested, ivy-smothered ruins under stormy skies: the tattered tracery of Jumie`ges Abbey, which was still being dismantled and sold piecemeal, seemed to belong to the same forgotten age as the crumbling Roman ruins of Orange.

The book’s intended audience was not scholarly but ‘artistic’: ‘This is not a voyage of discoveries but a voyage of impressions.’
Thankfully, scholarship prevailed. To Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo and other modern writers, the ruins were not just sounding boards of the Romantic soul, they were clues to the national identity that should be studied and preserved. The saviour of many of the churches and monuments that are now fixtures on the tourist trail was Prosper Mérimée, the author of
Carmen
. In 1834, he was appointed to the recently created post of Inspector General of Historic Monuments. Between 1834 and 1852, Mérimée spent almost three years on the road, discovering what is now called ‘the patrimony’ and arguing with local authorities who saw demolition hammers as the instruments of progress. He endured long, boring evenings in ‘wretched holes’ and attended ceremonial dinners that prevented him from appraising the beauties of the local women. He travelled to the Auvergne and Corsica. He badgered politicians in Paris and eventually had almost four thousand buildings classified as historic monuments. Without Mérimée, the bridge at Avignon would have been demolished by a railway company. The basilicas of Vézelay and Saint-Denis, the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Laon and large parts of many medieval towns would have disappeared forever.

Since everyone now agrees with Mérimée, it is hard to imagine what a lonely path he trod. As late as 1870, a popular magazine noted that medieval houses with pointy gables and timber frames could still be seen in many Norman towns but that very few ‘merit conservation’:

Most of those old houses would be destroyed in the Allied bombing raids of the Second World War. The few that remain are objects of almost fetishistic veneration. But some even older buildings identified by Mérimée are still neglected and abused: the ancient stone chambers that look down from the plateaux of the Causses like abandoned sentry boxes are paved with litter; the huge dolmen of Bagneux sits behind solid metal gates like a great caged bear. Prehistoric stones were more popular with Romantic travellers than they
are today, perhaps because their beauty lies in a subtle alliance with the landscape rather than in architectural details. In his notes on western France, Mérimée recalled the destruction wrought by the Catholic Church on these symbols of pagan worship, but he also observed a more recent form of iconoclasm which had a long, inglorious career ahead of it:

*

A
FTER SPENDING
so much time in the provinces, lying awake in sleepy towns and pining for Paris, Mérimée could probably have written an equally devastating report on the new industry of tourism and the main obstacles to its development: bad hotels and local food.

There had been huge improvements, of course, since the Revolution: more reliable coach services, faster roads and bridges where none had existed before. Fewer bandits lurked in forests, and their tarred, weather-proofed corpses no longer hung from roadside gibbets to terrify the travellers they had terrorized in life. Barely a generation before, even a member of the royal family had found touring France intolerably irksome. In 1788, the thirteen-year-old Duc de Montpensier was sent on an educational visit to the Trappist monastery in the Perche. Despite being provided with an artist, a botanist and his tutor Mme de Genlis for historical information, he was not a happy tourist: