The Discovery of France (78 page)

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Authors: Graham Robb

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5. ‘Intérieur dans les Landes (lou pachedeuy)’. Oxen were a source of traction, fertilizer, warmth and company.
‘Pachedeuy’
was a mixture of hay and bran used as forage.

6. Chimney-sweeps on the banks of the Seine in central Paris. Photograph by Charles Nègre, c. 1851.

7. ‘A sombre desert where the cicada sings and the bird is silent, where all human habitation disappears’ (V. Hugo). Shepherds in the Landes, at La Mouleyre, near Commensacq, on one of the few surviving patches of the original Landes. The encroaching forest of oak and pine can just be seen on the horizon. A shepherd on stilts could travel at the speed of a trotting horse.

8. Road-building in the Oisans (French Alps), c. 1918. The first surfaced road to cross the region (by the Col du Lautaret) was completed in 1862. The slopes had already been cleared by soil erosion and avalanches. Most of these roads were built for the tourist trade by Italian workers.

9. A Vendée peasant dressed up as a royalist rebel. The caption explains that ‘Old Jean’ lives in a tumbledown cottage at Moulins near Châtillon (now Mauléon), with his indescribably chaotic collection of old clothes. ‘Old Jean is superstitious’ but ‘takes a philosophical view of the future. He is one of a kind and must be seen to be believed.’ The Chouan guerrillas had fought the republican government in the west of France in the days of this man’s great-great-grandfather.

10. ‘Types d’Auvergne. La Bourrée’. The bourrée was a lively dance from the Auvergne. It was sometimes fashionable, in less boisterous forms, in Paris. The Church associated it with pagan revelry. When this scene was staged, c. 1905, few people agile enough to dance it could remember the steps. The violinist and his sheet music have replaced the hurdy-gurdy man. The unidentified town in the valley is the spa of La Bourboule.

11. Shanty town in Belleville, in the eastern suburbs of Paris, previously an area of vineyards and quarries. Photograph by Charles Marville, c. 1865.

12. An assistant of the anthropologist Hippolyte Müller, founder of the Musée dauphinois in Grenoble, collecting ethnological artefacts in 1917. Müller cycled all over the region seeking out prehistoric sites to ‘connect the earliest inhabitants of a
pays
with those who live there now’. This photograph was taken in July 1917 at Le Coin (6,600 feet), one of the hamlets of Molines-en-Queyras in the Alps.

13. ‘Les Montagnes des Sevennes ou se retirent les Fanatiques de Languedoc’, 1703. The ‘Fanatics’ hiding in the Cévennes were Protestants persecuted after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Louis XIV’s order to turn the ‘fox tracks’ into highways suitable for cannon launched the biggest road-building programme since the Romans. This map (fifty miles across, west at the top) was used in the military ‘cleansing’ operation and also served as propaganda. ‘Mont Causse’ is the Causse Méjean. Robert Louis Stevenson’s route through the Cévennes in 1878 ran from the top right (Florac) to the centre (Saint-Jean-du-Gard). The road heading north-west from Nîmes follows the prehistoric Voie Regordane.

14. Jules Breton,
The Song of the Lark
, 1884. The girl holds a sickle of the kind that had been used since the time of the Gauls. The landscape, and a poem by Breton on the same subject, suggest a field near his native town of Courrières (Pas-de-Calais).

15. ‘Ex-voto, 22 July 1855.’ A votive offering hung in a chapel to thank John the Baptist for saving the victim of a cart accident. The setting is probably the Var in eastern Provence.

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