Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #564 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 454 pages

Publishing News
'Oh, this is very good indeed! So much to discover, so beautifully written and compiled.'

Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
'Superlative history of la France profonde'

Guardian
'Captivatingly full of the author's own discoveries - exotic landscapes, weird customs, remarkable individuals and events overlooked by history'

Customer Reviews

Peasant France
This is a superbly written history-cum-travelogue. Robb is known for his books on French writers (Balzac, Hugo and Rimbaud) but here he ventures into peasant France, riding on his bicycle to make the time for the small details of life in rural France. He writes extremely well about landscape, an the book throughout is enjoyable to read. Drawing on travelogues of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Robb accentuates the backwardness of peasant France - mainly for effect, it seems. I found this increasingly annoying. It is an imbalance in the book. The French peasants come across as a nation of troglodytes. The second half of the book is more conventional history on the theme of nation-building in the nineteenth century. This is perhaps better covered in Eugene Weber's masterpiece, Peasants into Frenchman. Overall, a good book indeed, but not without its weaknesses.

Unification and what was lost along the way
Visiting relatives in France, I often drive down the A26 autoroute over the plain of Champagne: mile after mile of chalk plateau, with never a village or house in sight. I've often wondered how this landscape looked before motor transport, when getting from your house to work the fields involved horse-power or your own feet: was the settlement pattern denser, with hamlets and villages now swept away by the depopulation following agribusiness, or has it always been this empty? Graham Robb answered this for me in this splendid study of the making of modern France: it always was empty, to the extent that in early cartographic surveys of the country the need to record landmarks on this featureless plain led particularly conspicuous trees to find their way onto national maps.

Robb is both a historian and expert on France, and someone who has cycled extensively in the country, and he brings to his historical work a grounding in the sheer physicality of the land that I don't remember encountering in a comparable historical work before: he is intensely aware of the distances, the physical effort involved in traversing them, and the network of minor roads and tracks that form a network below the sightline of the motorway driver. He is equally good on the sights, sounds and smells of the French landscape. This appreciation of the physical landscape informs his discussion of how, at the start of the early modern period, much of France was a foreign country to its rulers and the citizens of its capital: remote, difficult to reach, self-sufficient, perhaps only recently added to the kingdom, living according to customs and rituals remote from Parisian practices, and speaking at best a patois of French that the cultivated metropolitan found incomprehensible (and in many cases a completely different language: Occitan, Flemish, German, Basque).

Melding this vast and remote landscape into a unified nation-state involved, Robb indicates, vast acts of state-enforced forgetting, with regional differences ironed out by a centralising state (having seen my nieces go through the rigid centralised French school curriculum, I won't argue with that). Vast riches of local peculiarities, many vanished, are brought together by Robb in this volume: be prepared to bore anyone you live with by reading out a snippet every other page. (Cafés in Paris, for example, were - and still are - disproportionately run by immigrants from the Auvergne. Want to know why? - read the book.) It's a lively read, a chance to wallow in the particularities of the French landscape, a study that raises all sorts of questions about the nation-state, its relationship to "minorities" and the extent to which it has to enforce homogeneity; my only complaint was that even at 450+ pages it was over too soon for me.

Fascinating insight into the lost tribes of France
A Francophile with a penchant for learning about France while taking cycling holidays there, Robb has written a brilliant evocation of a lost world, when most inhabitants of France from outside the Paris region did not speak French and did not think of themselves as being French, and then an equally fascinating story of how the railway and the bicycle allowed the French state to impose "Frenchness" on the country. The book draws on evidence mostly from pre-revolutionary France, but with enough from the nineteenth century to support the thesis that it was late nineteenth century technology that made the difference. The storied are fascinating - I was particularly amused to read of a (mildish) torture called "putting on pressure" that Breton women visited on men that they caught alone, and of the fact that in creating the shrine at Lourdes that village put another local place of pilgrimage out of business. You also discover that the original Tour de France was a series of circuits by artisan journeymen and that France had its own caste of "untouchables", the cagots.

If I think that there is any deficiency it is that there is no sense of connection between these simple, sometime primitive, often poor people and any kind of larger society. Most of these people would have had landlords, and not all would have been absentee ones. Even if they did not think of themselves as French, they would have known, and have had mutual bonds of obligation to, people who did. France, after all, produced enormous armies of conscripts throughout the revolutionary wars, and France was generally regarded as the richest country in continental Europe.

As an Brit reading this book one is bound to wonder whether the same could have been said of the British population at the same time, or whether Britain changed earlier, perhaps, because it is smaller and because enclosure changed the nature of agricultural society more even than industrialisation. Perhaps Mr Robb ought to start taking cycle touring holidays in Britain?