The Discovery of France (49 page)

But education was not automatically associated with school. Literacy rates were already quite high among Protestants and Jews, who read the Bible, and in regions where boys were trained to become travelling salesmen. Many parents were reluctant to send their sons and daughters to school when they needed them for the harvest. Inspectors often found that girls were kept out of school to work as seamstresses in filthy sweatshops where they spent the day with relatives and neighbours, learning the local traditions and values that their mothers considered to be a proper education. Above all, many parents were afraid that once they had learned to speak and write French like Parisians, their children would leave for the city and never come home.

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T
HEIR FEARS WERE JUSTIFIED
. A century after the Abbé Grégoire’s revolutionary report (p. 50), the Third Republic massed its pedagogical army on the wild frontier of language. The eradication of patois as a first language became a cornerstone of education policy. Schoolchildren were punished for using words they had learned at their mother’s knee. A pupil who was heard speaking patois was made to carry a stick or some other token that was then passed on to the next offender. The pupil who had the
signum
at the end of the day was thrashed, given lines or made to clean the toilets. (The same device had once been used in seminaries to encourage the use of Latin instead of French.)

The story of how the majority of French people became French-speakers could be told in a dozen different ways. For the non-French speaker on a school bench, the experience was often traumatic and humiliating. The effects were felt most cruelly in regions where the local tongue least resembled French: Alsace, Brittany, the Basque Country, Catalonia, the Flemish-speaking towns of the north and the
island of Corsica. There are Bretons still alive who remember the mortifying difficulty of learning French – ‘a language whose words were like half-empty boxes, and you weren’t even quite sure what was inside them’ – and the endless insults from sneering teachers and patronizing newspaper articles. In Brittany, being patriotic seemed to be the same as denigrating one’s
pays
. The popular cartoon character Bécassine, created in 1905, came to represent the outsider’s view of Brittany: Bécassine was a Breton maid who worked in Paris and got into all sorts of amusing scrapes because she failed to understand even the simplest French. Her silly round face had no ears and sometimes no mouth. Her costume was more Picard than Breton and her pidgin French had not the slightest connection with the Breton language, but her ethnic characteristics were irrelevant. She was Breton because she was stupid and because her relatives were sly and greedy.

Years later, when education and an ability to speak French were taken for granted, the missionary efforts of the Third Republic’s educators would look to some people like a colonial campaign to erase local cultures. The independence movements that formed in the twentieth century saw the patronizing, parochial ignorance of Parisians as part of a system of organized repression. Bécassine herself was afforded the honours of a paramilitary coup. One Sunday in 1939, three Breton ‘commandos’ entered the Musée Grévin in Paris, where a waxwork statue of Bécassine was on display, and struck a blow for all the Breton maids who had ever been patronized and exploited by Parisian employers by smashing her to pieces.

Ironically, unlike the older, anti-colonial struggles in Corsica and Algeria, these regional independence movements were themselves a product of the Third Republic’s education system. Most people who had a sense of being Breton had first learned to think of themselves as French. No separatist was ever monolingual, though he might yearn for the days when most of his compatriots were. ‘Bretonspeaking Bretons’, wrote Pierre-Jakez Hélias in 1975, ‘have never been aware of belonging to an entity called Brittany . . . They call themselves Bretons when they are outside Brittany, but they aren’t quite sure where it begins or ends.’ Breton nationalism was only remotely related to earlier, local rebellions against taxation and
conscription. It was modelled on a modern image of the state as a cultural and administrative unit, and it owed its violent nostalgia to a concept of the
pays
that was disseminated by the national education system.

In fact, far from being treated as a sign of backwardness, regional pride was widely considered to be a vital aspect of patriotism. Tactful decentralization had been an aspect of official policy since the 1860s. Many teachers were also local historians and were saddened by the disappearance of local languages and dialects. Some taught in dialect as well as French and believed that an ability to speak both languages was an asset. They forced their pupils to use French, not because they wanted to stamp out minority cultures, but because they wanted their pupils to pass examinations, to have the means of discovering the outside world, to improve the lot of their families. Brittany suffered more than most regions, particularly after the anti-clerical laws of 1901 and the subsequent attempt to ban the use of Breton in church services. But the French Republic never led the sort of full-scale linguistic assault on its population that made life so miserable in Alsace-Lorraine after the annexation by Germany in 1870.

The retreat of Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican and Flemish before the tide of French belonged to a much older, more complicated process of social and material change. Standard French was carried all over the country by conscription, railways, newspapers, tourists and popular songs, which could hardly be sung in dialect without losing the rhymes. The Third Republic may even have prolonged the life of some dialects by promoting the use of French: it presented children with another way of being naughty. In 1887, five years after the introduction of free, compulsory education, a linguistician studying a dialect of the Mayenne noticed a phenomenon that can still be heard today:

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T
HE FATHERLAND
that children discovered in the classroom can be seen in all its simple variety in the books that were used to teach reading and geography. The main characters were usually children with insatiable appetites for geographical information, accompanied by a pedagogue crammed with uncontroversial facts. In Amable Tastu’s
Voyage en France
(1846), a father and his children stand in front of the industrial landscape of Le Creusot: ‘You are about to ask me, my children, what a blast furnace and an air furnace are,’ says the father. ‘I shall try to explain in a few words, with the help of some notes that I took in various books.’

Some of these tales of infant tourists were self-righteously nationalistic, especially after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. In Marie de Grandmaison’s
Le Tour de France
(1893), two young boys explore the entire country on bicycles (this is the first time that the apprentices’ expression ‘Tour de France’ was associated with cycling). They end up in Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, where they admire the children who are about to escape from ‘the odious German yoke’ by emigrating to France:

However, the two boys can be quite odious themselves about the French provinces:

This ethnic inanity probably reflects the fact that Marcel and Robert come from a wealthy Paris suburb. Usually, the children came from a province and exemplified the virtues of their
pays
.
Three Months Under the Snow: Journal of a Young Inhabitant of the Jura
(15th edition, 1886) was a lesson in courage and patience. The
petits voyageurs
of P.-C. Briand’s ‘picturesque description of this beautiful land’ (1834) came
from the ‘little island’ of Corsica but felt themselves to be ‘true Frenchmen’ – which was an improvement on the usual image of Corsicans as hairy bandits permanently embroiled in vendettas.

Best of all was Augustine Bruno’s wildly popular
Le Tour de France par deux enfants
, subtitled ‘devoir et patrie, livre de lecture courante’ (1877). The two boys leave Phalsbourg in German-occupied Lorraine and set off to find their uncle Frantz after the death of their father, a carpenter whose dying wish was to emigrate to France. Their realistic adventures take them south to Marseille, on a boat to Bordeaux via the Mediterranean and the Canal du Midi, across northern France from Brittany to Flanders, then home to lay flowers on their father’s grave. From there, they take the train to Paris, whose streets, laid end to end, ‘would make a street nine hundred kilometres long, which is longer than the road from Paris to Marseille’. The orphans fend for themselves and learn about the country, not from a pedant with a library in his pockets, but from local men and women who work for a living. The journey ends, not in Paris, but on a farm in the Beauce that has been ravaged by the Franco-Prussian War but which hard work and patriotism will restore to productivity.

Adult historians who are condescending about Bruno’s luminous little book should try describing an entire country, along with its people, produce, geography and climate, in a tale that could hold the attention of child.
Le Tour de France par deux enfants
, which had its 386th edition in 1922, gave millions of people a vivid, factual image of France. Some of the experiences and observations of André and Julien Volden were more famous than major events of French history: the shipwreck in the English Channel, the mistreated carthorse, the amazingly sensitive steam-hammer at the foundry in Le Creusot which could tap a cork into a wine bottle, or the hostelry-farmhouse in the Dauphiné:

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W
HEN THEY LEFT SCHOOL
, the generations that had grown up with these books were encouraged to discover France for themselves by a massive campaign of national self-promotion which is still going strong in the twenty-first century. Newspapers and magazines urged their readers to visit the unknown parts of France that were spurned by wealthy tourists and especially the ‘lost provinces’ of Alsace-Lorraine. Regions that were practically unexplored until the 1880s and which few guidebooks had ever mentioned were promoted as holiday destinations: the Ardennes, the Argonne and the Morvan, the valleys of the Dordogne and the Lot, the roadless canyon of the river Tarn and the cave-lined Gorges de l’Arde`che, the Vercors massif with its recent infrastructure of death-defying roads and tunnels, and the remote Cantal, where Gustave Eiffel’s soaring Garabit Viaduct (1884) was admired as a wonder of the modern world.

This was the period when people began to say, as they still do, that ‘the land least known in France is France itself ’. It was as if the loss of part of its territory had alerted the nation to its untapped treasures. France had colonized North Africa and Indo-China but had failed to colonize itself. The rural population was flowing away to the cities, leaving the countryside exposed to the forces of Nature and foreign invasion. It was the patriotic duty of every French citizen to go on holiday to unpopular places, which they would find to be as spectacular as the overrated Alps. The
Magasin pittoresque
imagined a Parisian holidaymaker, kidnapped and blindfolded and taken to the shores of Lac Chambon in the heart of the Auvergne. When the blindfold was removed, he would find himself in a stunning landscape of cloudlike mountains and glassy lakes and would scarcely believe himself in France.

The remarketing of France was pioneered by local historians and politicians, provincial academies and geographical societies, railway companies and journalists. Parts of the country were unofficially renamed to make them sound more attractive: the coast of Provence became the Côte d’Azur in 1877. Then came the Côte É meraude (Emerald Coast) of Brittany, the Côte Sauvage of the Vendée, and the Côte d’Argent (Silver Coast) on the Atlantic between Royan and Bayonne. Little Switzerlands sprang up all over the place, beginning with the unfashionable Morvan and the Limousin. It has since become almost obligatory for any region with rolling pastures to call itself Switzerland. At the time of writing, there are ten French ‘Switzerlands’, from the ‘Suisse Normande’ (fifty miles north-west of the ‘Alpes mancelles’) to the ‘Suisse Niçoise’ and the ‘Suisse d’Alsace’.

In 1874, the geographer Adolphe Joanne and a small group of writers and left-wing politicians founded the Club Alpin Français. Its motto, ‘
En avant, quand même!
’, might be translated ‘Forward, come what may!’ or, in a less militaristic tone, ‘Let’s go anyway’. Its aim was ‘to discover France for the greater edification of the French’. It sought out local agents to help it in its campaign and claimed to have ‘discovered, in the remotest provinces, scholars, writers and artists who didn’t even know about themselves’. The following year, the Comité des Promenades in Gérardmer (Vosges), set an example that was followed by tourist offices all over France. These missionary organizations trained guides and porters, persuaded rival villages to work together, laid out signposted walks and organized ‘
caravanes scolaires
’ and ‘
colonies de vacances
’ for schoolchildren. They also encouraged hotels to display their prices and not overcharge tourists. Long before paid holidays for workers were introduced in 1936, a new economic geography of France was taking shape: the Vosges were the Alps of the
petite bourgeoisie
, and the mountains of the Auvergne were the poor man’s Pyrenees.
⁴⁰