The Discovery of France (53 page)

They could hardly have been further from home without leaving the country altogether.

Maps of this sector changed almost every day. Even someone who had spent a lifetime in the forest would have been lost. Without knowing it, Lieutenant Fournier’s patrol passed behind enemy lines. A sergeant remembered the moment:

The German soldiers buried the bodies in the regulation manner: two rows of ten, head to toe, with the twenty-first laid on top.

The leaves of four autumns fell on the grave, and then the soil was churned up again in the Meuse–Argonne Offensive of 1918. After the Armistice, when old people with long-handled spades were filling in the gun-pits and the trenches, no one knew where to look for the dead of 1914.

*

V
ISITORS TO THE
Argonne once came to see Varennes, where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were arrested and sent back to Paris. Now, they come to see the vestiges of the First World War. Excerpts from the diaries of French, German and American soldiers can be read on information panels. Tunnels and trenches can be explored. But the forest itself exists in several different time zones. Away from the sites of commemoration, it is not always possible to distinguish bomb craters and trenches from the dells carved out by roots and rainwater, the eighteenth-century road embankments and ditches, and the earthworks of more recent foresters who negotiate
the craters and the unexploded shells with mechanical excavators and horses for the more difficult terrain.

South of Verdun, the forest is bisected by a Loch Ness Monster of a road: thirteen miles of steep descents followed almost immediately by steep climbs. It gives a cyclist the impression of fleeing, being prevented from flight by the sudden tug of leg muscles, then fleeing again. This is the Tranchée de Calonne, named after the Finance Minister of Louis XVI who built the road to connect his château to the outside world. Between 1914 and 1918, the Calonne Trench was effectively the eastern frontier of France.

Near the bottom of one of the hills, a narrow track leads off into the woods. After five hundred yards, it reaches a small clearing and something that looks like a prehistoric burial protected by a glass pyramid. In the spring of 1991, after a search that lasted fourteen years, a local man who knew the woods as a hunter found some cartridge cases from a French revolver and then some cartridges that had never been fired. Scattered all around the glade was the antiquated equipment of a 1914 reserve regiment: a water bottle made in 1877, boots that were older than the men who had worn them, and the bright-red trouser material that was part of the French uniform until 1915. In a rectangular pit he discovered the bones. The lower part of one of the arms still bore the stripes of a lieutenant.

The site is now marked on the Michelin map with the small black triangle that signifies ‘
curiosité
´ ’. A French flag flies above the grave. Naturally, there is nothing symbolic about the location itself. The author of
Le Grand Meaulnes
had died close to the road that leads south to the centre of France, but a long way from the magical land of his novel. Almost three hundred miles separate the Argonne forest from the foothills of the Massif Central. But with a favourable wind, the bicycling narrator of his novel could easily have covered the distance in half a week, ‘plunging into the hollows of the landscape, discovering the distant horizons of the road that part as one approaches and burst into bloom, passing through a village in an instant and gathering it all up in a glance’. The sense of discovery and escape would have made the long journey home seem all too short.

Secrets

S
OME TRAVELLERS NOW GO
to France in search of places that lie beyond what can be discovered. The volcanic cone of the Gerbier de Jonc attracts a number of new-age travellers whose sense of mystery would have meant more to the earlier inhabitants of the region than the inexplicable activities of the map-makers. The scaly columns of the Gerbier de Jonc lie at the centre of France’s Bermuda Triangle. The magnetic rocks are said to disrupt the navigation systems of aeroplanes. More than twenty planes have crashed or disappeared in the area since 1964. Centuries before, strange crosses appeared in the sky and balls of fire were seen dancing over the grasslands. The demons have changed with the times, but their habitat is almost the same.

The Gerbier de Jonc itself has lost some of its mystique and over five hundred feet in height since the summit collapsed in 1821. A travelling market sometimes materializes at its foot to catch the trade from tourists who come to see the farm that claims to be the ‘traditional’ source of the Loire, the restaurant that claims to be the source of the Loire according to a cadastral survey and the information panels on which it is explained that, since the Gerbier de Jonc is like a sponge on a bed of granite, there is no single source of the Loire.

These days, the most popular portal to other worlds is the Pech de Bugarach in the south-western Corbières. Like the Gerbier de Jonc, Mount Bugarach is a geological personality with a strangely telephotographic presence. Even at a distance, it seems to belong to another landscape. Its Jurassic limestone reef surges out of the
sparsely populated hills like the back of a gigantic dinosaur. From the air, it is thought to resemble a question mark. The Paris meridian passes within a few metres of its summit. The Ark and various transdimensional vessels are said to have landed on it, though the summit is such a slender plateau that Pierre Méchain, who spent several days in 1795 sheltering from gales in a farmhouse on its slopes, could barely find room for the buttresses that supported his triangulation signal.

Outsiders live among the small local population, searching the caves inside the mountain for traces of Cathar treasure, the Holy Grail, the last earthly home of Jesus Christ and the underground river that flows either to the Mediterranean thirty miles to the east or, according to some, to the centre of the Earth. An old woman in a miniskirt who lives by begging believes herself to be Mary Magdalene. In villages around the mountain – Rennes-les-Bains, Rennes-le-Château and Bugarach itself – new-age pilgrims and harmless neurotics, infatuated with the ghosts of logical reasoning, pore over scraps of mystical intelligence: local legends taken out of context, misconstrued Latin inscriptions, tales of a greedy priest who was rumoured to have struck a deal with Satan. The people who killed Cassini’s geometer two hundred and sixty years ago might have been similarly fascinated by the hieroglyphic calculations in his satchel. Graves in the cemetery at Rennes-le-Château have been disturbed and occasionally dynamited by people in search of ancient secrets. The mayor of the village, a retired paratrooper, has learned to live with the seekers of truth. Their money has paid for new public toilets and there are plans to extend the village down the mountainside. Undiscovered secrets are a vital economic asset.

*

A
S THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
map-makers knew from painful experience, discovering is not the same as knowing. After the meridian expedition, the exotic name of Bugarach appeared on maps, precisely located on the same line as Paris and traversed by triangulation lines like a busy terminus. Yet the region itself was almost completely unknown to the outside world.

For that matter, how much was known about the other
pays
on the
same line of longitude? A century after the Cassini expedition placed the first triangulation signal on Mount Bugarach, on the part of the meridian now occupied by the glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre, a dark, decaying
quartier
of medieval slums lay just below the level of the square. Someone who squeezed past the planks of wood that closed off the
quartier
would find a ruined church, some overgrown gardens and boarded-up doors, an arch from a vanished building and wasteground strewn with blocks of stone waiting to be used for the new Louvre. A few figures might appear amongst the wreckage – squatters and beggars, some of the artists and poets who lived in a small colony or the furtive customers of a homosexual brothel. Few Parisians knew anything about the Quartier du Doyenné. ‘Our descendants’, wrote Balzac in 1846, ‘will refuse to believe that such barbarity existed in the heart of Paris, in front of the palace where three dynasties received the elite of France and Europe’:

Thirty years later, when the Louvre had been rebuilt and the Doyenné slums were buried under asphalt, a walk north along the meridian would lead past the Comédie Française and the Bibliothèque Nationale, across the new Boulevard Haussmann to the windmills of Montmartre and then, beyond the fortifications and the customs barriers, to a squalid, windswept perimeter of factories and shacks where the city streets ended before the country roads began. This was the so-called ‘Zone’, where criminals and degenerates were thought to lurk, plotting the overthrow of the government. Long before the
bidonvilles
of modern France, the suburbs had become a dumping ground.

Most large cities had an underclass and a slum belt, but few were so aware of the ‘dangerous classes’ on the city’s horizon and so reluctant to bring them into the fold. Paris, the cultural and commercial nucleus of the nation, was full of memorials to battles, dynasties and regimes, but while some events were commemorated with blinding
brilliance, many others were erased from memory. Even now, scholars of French history can be surprised by obscure catastrophes which, like the Verdon Gorges, lay hidden in a landscape that seemed to have been thoroughly mapped. Very few have heard about the rounding up of the gypsies in 1803, when thousands were separated from their children and sent to work in labour camps. Fewer still have heard of the persecution of the cagots.

Certain regions of French history have come to light only to be reburied. There is now a little Cagot Museum in the Pyrenean town of Arreau, but no one who visits the museum would guess that violent discrimination had ever been a problem in south-western France. The exhibition revives an ancient prejudice in order to equate the supposedly diminutive cagots with the ‘little people’ of the mountains who were exploited by the ‘big people’ (lords and clerics). In this view of history, the cagots were not a persecuted caste but the cute, hobbit-like inhabitants of the picturesque Pyrenees.

France has often discovered its own past like a traveller forced to cross a remote and dangerous region without a map. Decades passed before the savage extermination of Paris Communards by government troops in 1871 was recognized as historical fact. It took even longer for the state to acknowledge the fact that the Vichy regime had rounded up Jews even more enthusiastically than the Nazis demanded. While memorials to heroic Résistance members killed by ‘the Germans’ are a common sight all over France, there is nothing in Vichy to remind a visitor of the genocide.

Now and then, a secret comes to light like an old convict emerging from prison long after the demise of the regime that locked him away. On the night of 17 October 1961, thousands of French Algerians, protesting peacefully against the curfew that had been imposed on them, were rounded up by the Paris police. Though records have disappeared and though official figures still disagree with scholarly estimates, it is certain that many Algerians were tortured, maimed and stuffed into dustbins, and that about two hundred were beaten up by policemen and thrown into the Seine, where they drowned, in the tourist heart of Paris. In 2001, despite the furious opposition of right-wing parties and the Paris police, a discreet commemorative plaque was attached, at knee level, to a
corner of the Pont Saint-Michel. Four-fifths of the French population are still completely ignorant of the events of 17 October 1961.

As these pages are being written, towns and cities on the meridian are being discovered by the rest of the country. Cars are burning in the ugly, overpopulated Parisian suburbs of Aubervilliers, Saint-Ouen and Saint-Denis. Amiens and Orléans have been placed under a curfew. A law passed during the colonial war in Algeria in 1955 has been invoked to impose a state of emergency. Newspapers report online conversations from the
terrae incognitae
at the end of the Métro line, with explanatory footnotes to render their form of French comprehensible. A Minister of the Interior calls the rioters
racaille
(‘scum’). More insulting names are used in private conversations.

The ‘scum’ are the children and grandchildren of immigrants. The immediate cause of what the authorities call ‘riots’ is the death of two boys, who accidentally electrocuted themselves while running away from a group of policemen. Everyone in the suburbs knows that non-whites are routinely harassed and humiliated by the police. The French Republic makes no official distinction between ethnic groups, but many of its citizens do, and most employers prefer white faces. Like earlier immigrants from Brittany, Burgundy, the Auvergne, Savoy, Italy and Spain, Africans and Arabs were encouraged to come and help feed and clean the cities. Once, they lived in shanty towns; now, they live in neighbourhoods dehumanized by cars. They have failed to ‘integrate’ themselves into the French Republic.