The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

by Graham Robb

While Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris, large parts of France were still terra incognita. Even in the age of railways and newspapers, France was a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks, and pre-Christian beliefs. French itself was a minority language.Graham Robb describes that unknown world in arresting narrative detail. He recounts the epic journeys of mapmakers, scientists, soldiers, administrators, and intrepid tourists, of itinerant workers, pilgrims, and herdsmen with their millions of migratory domestic animals. We learn how France was explored, charted, and colonized, and how the imperial influence of Paris was gradually extended throughout a kingdom of isolated towns and villages.The Discovery of France explains how the modern nation came to be and how poorly understood that nation still is today. Above all, it shows how much of France—past and present—remains to be discovered.

Genres: History, France, Nonfiction, Travel, Geography, European History, Cultural

480 pages, ebook

Published September 4, 2008

About the author

Graham Macdonald Robb FRSL (born June 2, 1958) is a British author.

Robb was born in Manchester and educated at the Royal Grammar School Worcester and Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied Modern Languages. He earned a PhD in French literature at Vanderbilt University.

He won the 1997 Whitbread Book Award for best biography (Victor Hugo) and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Rimbaud in 2001. In 2007, he won the Duff Cooper Prize for The Discovery of France.

On April 28, 2008 he was awarded the £10,000 Ondaatje Prize by the Royal Society of Literature in London for The Discovery of France.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

This isn't an armchair travel book, it's an armchair time travel book. The use of the singular in the title is potentially misleading. It is the result of the author's discovery of France on bicycle and in the archives (but not both at the same time I hasten to add to reassure any anxious library lovers). It is also a book about how many times and how many ways France has been discovered.

So we have the two men who tried to discover the boundary between the Langue d'Oc and the Langue d'Oil, one died and the other lost an eye in the process (I'm not sure if the discovery of the Benrather line was quite so dangerous). We have the explorers of caves and caverns, Cassini's mapmakers (one of whom is murdered while surveying in the first pages of the book), the first tourists and the sudden attention of the Parisian anthropologists to the supposedly backwards and primitive types to be found in the countryside, though to their chagrin they found that Breton skulls were larger than supposedly superior Parisian types.

Then there are other discoveries. The discovery of the world beyond their villages made by generations of migrant workers who spent years working in different cities with people from particular areas dominating certain trades, and the discovery of a notion of being French thanks to universal education, mass literacy and the bicycle.

The most profound discovery is that of the pre-modern ways of life that existed. A town's bread baked once a week, or harder yet all the year's baking done at once with the hard loaves softened in water, milk or wine throughout the year. People living a subsistence lifestyle slowing down into a semi hibernation during the winter months, the lives of those for whom going barefoot was a more sensible way of crossing fields than wearing shoes or the stilt wearing shepherds whose way of life disappeared with the coming of modernity.

Tying the book together is the discovery of long standing prejudices. The book opens with the still mysterious persecution of the Cargots and ends with that of people of North African descent stuck in high rise suburbs.

You are left with a sense of the mass of differing ways of life, habits of speech and economic networks that is hidden by the neatness and precision of a modern map.

Please note: as pointed out below by Antonomasia in the comments that that the reception of this book has been most enthusiastic among those of us who know least about the social history of France. So I might offer that although this is a fun read, it would be wise not to take it too seriously, caveat lector (or auditor as applicable).

[Sense of History]

It is clear to me that Robb with this book wanted to offer a correction on the image that the French put up of themselves as a nation that already in the 18th century laid the foundations of modernity, that during and after the French revolution this modernity penetrated in all sections of French society, and that France spread this light of modernity across the world. This myth has been punctured long ago, not least by French historians themselves, both by the Annales-school as by the school of social historians in the years 1950 and 1960. But that picture apparently still is not adjusted outside of France.

And so Robb can do his thing and show that France in the 19th century and early 20th century was not that unified and centralized country and, above all, was not that modern state-of-the-art country it liked to present itself. I have to say: Robb does so with much gusto. He quotes elaborately from travel reports and other ego-documents and astounds us with lots of gasping examples and some surprising photographs. This book is another illustration that the history of 'ordinary' people can offer a very different perspective than that of great personalities and institutions.

But there also is some comment to make on Robb's view. I certainly have the impression that he strictly selected his sources in compliance with his intent, and consequently that he deliberately opted for a tunnel vision. As said, his method supplies a nice picture of the pre-modern France (an image that may not be so much different from the situation in other West European countries around the same period), but nevertheless we must keep in mind that this is a distortion. The reality probably was much more complex and dynamic, an interactive combination of pre-modern and modern trends. I'm not going to claim that Robb ignores this, certainly not, but his focus lies on just one end of the spectrum.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Graham Robb brings a wonderful tour d'horizon of France between 1750 and 1914. Not the France that we usually know with its Sun Kings, Enlightened Philosophers and Corsican Emperors, but quite the contrary: a collection of closed village communities, with their incomprehensible dialects, their superstition and their distrust of all that is strange, and with their precarious survival economies.

Robb stresses that France in this period was no unity; French - as we know it - was only spoken in a limited area and by a limited group of people; the enlightenment and modernity were still not so far penetrated and the residents of most regions not saw themselves as Frenchmen. But he also outlines how very gradually modernity broke through, 'discovered' the country (hence the title), conquered and colonized it. It is clear that Robb wanted to correct the glorious image that the French present of themselves. Thus this is truly revisionist historiography, and he may have exaggerated a bit in the other direction. Anyway, the French blamed him for that: this book was only published in French in a very limited edition, and French editorialists crushed Robb mercilessly. As it goes, the truth probably is somewhere in between.

[Paula Koneazny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Francophile that I am, I will never see France quite the same way after having read Robb's fascinating historical geography (or geographical history)of France up to WWI. Almost every page, in fact, almost every paragraph proves chock-full of interesting "facts" and authorial observations. There are chapters on languages (French having been a minority, i.e., "foreign" language a mere hundred years ago); animals (the "60 million Others" who also inhabited the Hexagon); maps, roads, travel in all its dimensions, "colonization" of the nation, tourism and more. I am already rereading this book with a map of France spread out on the dining room table in front of me as I do so (bearing in mind that to "find" all the locales Robb references really requires a palimpsest of old and new, large and small scale, linguistic, ethnographic & topographic maps, some of which may not even exist.
A few anecdotal gems:
"But if all the nicknames had been adopted, the map of France would now be covered with obscenities and incomprehensible jokes." (36)
"Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies . . . Slowness was not an attempt to savour the moment." (76)
"The Virgin Mary was always more important than God . . . . He was no more important than a bishop." (130)
"The century's greatest expert on gossip and pre-industrial telecommunications, Honore de Balzac, suggested that rumour could travel at about 9 mph." (141)
"Any commemoration of European unity should remember the smugglers and pedlars who helped to keep the borders open." (152)
"Three years later the dogs of Paris had their own ambulance." (179)
"The shepherds of the Landes spent whole days on stilts, using a stick to form a tripod when they wanted to rest. Perched ten feet in the air, they knitted woollen garments and scanned the horizon for stray sheep. People who saw them in the distance compared them to tiny steeples and giant spiders." (243)
"France was repeatedly reconquered by French forces." (256)
"it is quite possible to travel from one end of the country to the other without . . . realizing that many of the landscapes that seem typically and eternally French are younger than the Eiffel Tower." (268)

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fantastically fascinating and so just my thing. Review posted in roundup of fantastic books I've read in the last few months on my blog: https://shouldacouldawouldabooks.com/...

[Elizabeth Theiss Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

My deep love for France and the French is not based on deGaulle's France as a great nation but rather on its profound diversity of its language, culture, cuisine and mode de vie. Every region, every village, is unique because of its soil, what it grows, the history of its people. While the blender of globalization has been homogenizing culture in larger cities, one can still find villages that build the Feu de St. Jean at midsummer and watch the young men leap over the flames. Ancient dances, regional costumes and traditional dishes have not yet been forgotten.

Robb has given a depth of understanding to the people of France in historical and geographic context. He introduces old languages, transportation routes and customs borne of economic and religious necessity. How ancient pagan spirits were transformed into local saints was especially fascinating. In Plestin-les-Greves, a town in Brittany where I have spent considerable time, we had always wondered about St. Efflam, whose primitive likeness adorns a tiny local chapel in the woods (or "coat," in the local Breton language). Reportedly, Efflam left his wife on their wedding day to become a priest. He is not a Church-sanctioned saint but more on the order of a local saint, as is the case in rural areas across France.

Robb is a fine writer and an indefatigable researcher. His book is pure pleasure.

[Djewesbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book, full of the perfectly unexpected. It is possibly the best piece of social history I've ever read. The accepted version of modern French history relies on a linear story of gradual and natural centralisation: the organic creation of a nation conceived of, in its essential form several hundreds of years ago, and striving ever since towards its own self-realisation. Robb overturns this view and demonstrates again and again that it is a miracle that modern France ever came into existence at all. Little more than a hundred and fifty years ago, the vast majority of the 'French' were quite unaware that they were French at all, did not speak the French language and had never travelled outside their region. The latter is hardly unusual, but when one adds to this the fact that large areas of France remained unmapped, and completely unknown to outside eyes, until the mid-nineteenth century; that official knowledge of some regions did not extend fifty metres from the side of the main coach road; and that travel of any kind was tortuously slow and uncomfortable, we can start to see the French state as a rather more modern invention than we would ever have supposed. Indeed, it would be fair to say that it didn't really begin to emerge in a recognisable form until the educational and other reforms of the Third Republic, in the 1870s.

Robb treats his subject in themed chapters which are not straightforwardly arranged in an overarching chronology, although that chronology does frame the book as a whole (and the contemporary conclusion provides a fitting point of departure for further investigation). Unlike other 'themed' histories (I'm thinking particularly of Peter Ackroyd's long, dry 'biography' of London, which often reads like an unedited, self-indulgent list of lists) Robb's succeeds in giving life to the many dimensions of his subject, in order that we might start to view it more convincingly as a whole. He considers the many cultural, social and technological changes that might be thought of as central to a history such as this - innovations in cartography and in transport, regional identities, linguistic and topographical diversity, and so on. But he is also keen to reclaim those dimensions that often pass out of the record, the historiographical gaps and silences: in a chapter describing the passage of the year in pre-mechanised rural France, he asks his modern readers to try and comprehend the inactivity that dominated more than half of the agricultural year. How, he wonders, can history-writing describe the sheer boredom of these months? To eke out provisions between the reaping of one harvest and the sowing of the next, ordinary people would, more or less literally, hibernate, and the countryside would fall quiet throughout the whole of winter, but nowhere in existing literature is this really adequately described. In his desire to make tangible the pace of actual life, Robb evokes both Henri Lefebvre and E.P. Thompson, whose 'Making of the English Working Class' sometimes seems to be a template for this book (and who also famously concentrated on the birth of modern conceptions of time).

Other reviews have quoted at length the startling facts that Robb excavates, and which he stitches through his narrative: the stilted shepherds of the Landes, the whistling language of the Pyrenees, and so on. All these certainly provide colourful illumination but the book is ultimately far more than just a collection of wonderful details. Robb is a sensitive and rigorous investigator, but whilst he makes the synthesis of hundreds of sources appear effortless, he never takes his eye off the larger story - the emergence of a contemporary France which is as much made by this collection of neglected, intimate, disparate and often suppressed histories, as by the epic, forward-thrusting narrative it more often tells of itself.

[Kirsten · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me some time to finish this nonfictional book, all the while my rating going from 2 to 4 stars, but finally settling on 3. it is rewarding in places, a deep and knowledgeable study of French history and culture and politics, but it also seems to me to be condescending and patronizing towards the French people. I may be biased now that I have been living in France for 5 years, but I can’t help thinking, who are you (the author) to judge the French? Were you any better in Britain? I’m pretty sure we weren’t in Denmark, I don’t know about the UK or France, but school for everyone wasn’t compulsory until 1814, and then only every other day in rural districts. Which means that the educational level understandably wasn’t very high and only after WW2 did every child in Denmark have to attend School on a more regular basis, but they were still able to leave School after only 7 years, which, of course, is not possible today, you have to do at least 9 years or 10 if you include the obligatory kindergarten.

I’m digressing, what was interesting in this book was to learn about all the departements, and about the huge differences between north and South and east and West, but most of all of central France with Paris as the absolute center and the rest as the lesser important periphery. It gave me an understanding of why the yellow vests could gain momentum and the despair they must have felt, not that I in any way sympathize, I roll my eyes whenever there is another new demonstration and the constant strikes, so different from how we do things in Denmark, but then again, they have the incentive and the motivation and they join forces and get the attention from the media that they crave whereas in Denmark people tend to duck their heads and just get on with their lives and notably their jobs and think it is their own fault if they are not as happy as the international surveys usually claim they are. And they are not in any way helped by the current Danish prime minister who constantly reminds people that they should work more and work harder for the greater good. In Denmark everyone is compelled to work, whether they are sick or not or even capable of understanding the language, and though I applaud the idea of work as a great base for creating a community and the feeling of belonging to a place, I think it has gone too far. The overall vibes I pick up whenever I am in Denmark is that a lot of people suffer from a guilty conscience if they are not doing something meaningful, be it work, learning something new, preparing for something or doing something for others. Everything has to be done for a purpose, you can’t just sit staring out the window, you have to be proactive and contribute to society, it is Max Weber’s work ethics taken too far, I think.

Oops this ended up as a political rant about my own country, which I actually miss a lot though I don’t approve of the current government..

[Henri Tournyol du Clos · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is to French history very much like what British tabloids are to journalism: implicit or explicit generalizations from a collection of out of context senstionalist anecdotes, with a nearly total disregard for established facts and statistics.

The main thrust of this book is that the French are not French but a collection of isolated tiny tribes (the word "tribe" itself is repeated over and over again, occurring a good thirty times in the text) of violent, illiterate and dirty peasants, nearly none of which spoke French.

To anyone that has even remotely studied the European Middle Ages, this "tribal" thesis is utter nonsense, as the main action of the Church in the dark ages, which indeed founded European civilization, was the break-up of tribal ties via the interdiction of marrying one's cousins, even remote ones. In the ninth century, the Church even went as far as prohibiting weddings between seven times removed cousins. Waves of Germanic and other Eastern invaders were thus assimilated and tribes made way for families, which did not hinder the rise of modern states as tribes would have.

[Rick Skwiot · Rating 5 out of 5]

According to author Graham Robb, a scant few hundred years ago France consisted largely of suspicious and superstitious pagan peasants who spoke discrete tongues (none of which was French), ate unpalatable and malnutritious food, and seldom ventured beyond a day’s walk of their homes. (Even today, Robb notes, some 86 percent of French people have never flown on an airplane.)

However, in the intervening years France has somehow come to be known as a rational, monolinguistic land of art, sophistication, learning, the highest gastronomic achievement and a chic worldliness, all to the delight of tourists. That is, the world has adopted a limited Parisian view of the nation—which, as Robb documents, still deviates from the provincial reality.

In “The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War” (though the book extends beyond those two events), Robb presents a witty and well researched exposé of our misapprehensions about France. That research includes his bicycling some 14,000 miles along the back roads that crisscross the country and “four years in the library” delving into its art, artifacts, folkways, physical history and literature. The result is a compelling portrait of the daily lives of the French before the advent of high-speed trains, superhighways, cinema verité and tourisme.

[Mackay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three point five stars, really, because I have the same sort of love/irritation with this book that Robb himself seems to feel for France.

This is not a traditional history--it's not the story of grand men doing great and terrible things, thinking new and surprising thoughts, or inventing the Culture of the West that France, in large part, created from the 17th century onward.

In some ways, it's a folk history, told through the small places in the heart of la France profonde. As such, it's a necessary and timely work. But often, Robb makes sweeping statements, which seem unsupported by the text (despite extensive, erudite notes and a full bibliography). He tends to let one example, one incident, speak for too much he is trying to explain ... which bends history as much as concentrating only on, say, Louis XIV or Napoleon or Jean Jacques Rousseau.

From reading this, I found I learned quite a bit, and the prose is beautiful and compulsively readable. But if this were the only history of France one read, one would be hard-pressed to figure out why France matters, how it led the Enlightenment, how it was the pivot of so much European history. Indeed, one would be staggered to learn that France mattered so much in fact as it has.

Yet, just reading about Cassini the Third's tremendous effort to map the whole of the Hexagon is a thrilling and moving story, and it's not the only one; the chapter that traces some legends and folktales is wonderful, too. So, love/irritation, because this book's story, and the story of France-in-the-World, seem nearly irreconcilable.

(As an aside, I wondered, at reading the encomiums from the press and reviews in the front of the volume, if the book won such praise, such awards, from the British because it made them feel so superior to their old enemy. Hmm.)

[Karen E Carter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some good anecdotes, but an example of bad history.

[peg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winner of the 2008 Royal Society Ondaatje Prize, an Award given annually to the written work that best evokes the spirit of place. I went from knowing absolutely nothing about the French countryside and history to feeling like I had taken a trip on foot through time in French small towns!

[Nathan Albright · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Discovery Of France: A Historical Geography From The Revolution To The First World War, by Graham Robb

While I must admit that I did not like the pro-socialist and pro-pagan bias that the author showed when it came to discussing matters of politics and religion, there is a lot to appreciate about this book when it come to the idea of how it is that a country is discovered. While we take it for granted that a country like France would be easy to discover, our knowledge of other countries and even our own is especially limited, and this is true most of all for urban elites whose familiarity is only with an extremely small albeit politically important major cities within a given country. If all you know is Washington DC, Los Angeles, and New York City, do you really know the United States? Not at all. If all you know is highways, railways, and big cities, your knowledge of areas is particularly shallow and not very broad at all, and this book does a good job in looking at how it is that France was recognized and understood and even discovered, in a fashion, over the course of the 19th century. Whether or not that interests you is something you need to figure out for yourself.

In terms of its contents, this book is about 360 pages or so of solid material that is divided into seventeen chapters. The book begins with a list of illustrations, maps, and an itinerary. After that the author talks about Europe as being an undiscovered continent in that most people lived far out of awareness of what was going on in main areas (1). A couple of chapters discuss the various tribes of France when looked at in terms of cultural and linguistic methods (2, 3). Another chapter looks at the many ways that yes could be said as a way of showing the immense diversity of France during the 18th century (4). The author gives a couple of examples of life in France during the period when people started wanting to have a better understanding of the country (5, 6). A chapter follows on the religious life of French, much of which had a large degree of pagan admixture (7), as well as the influence of migrants and commuters on the trade and spread of information that took place outside of traditional channels (8). An interlude covered the lives of animals, like dogs involved in smuggling. The second part of the book then looks at life after the revolution, with chapters about the maps (9) that tried to show France in increasing detail as well as the mobilization of France for empire (10). The author contrasts travel in France between the life around Paris (11) as well as the frequently slower nature of travel outside of the major arterial routes (12). There is a chapter about colonization (13) that reminds the reader that this process was involved inside of France as well as outside. There is a humorous chapter on the wonders of France (14), a look at life for the provincial French (15), the influence of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine on French identity (16), and then a discussion of the center of France (17), after which there is an epilogue, chronology, notes, works cited, general and geographical index, and acknowledgements.

In some ways, this author wants to have his cake and eat it too. Most of his books are about the lives of French elites, and he is clearly very comfortable in talking about literary and cultural elites, many of whom came from peripheral regions but made their fame after having acculturated to Parisian ways and language. The author wants to celebrate life in remote and isolated regions, but at the same time wants to show himself off to be cultured at the same time. There is a real problem that the people of the neglected and isolated regions that needed to be discovered often did not write their own stories, only having their own thoughts and behaviors and ways recorded by outsiders, with few exceptions. The author wants to write a history from the ground up, but does not really have the material to do so, and so this book is less a systematic history of the peripheries of France than a series of sometimes entertaining and sometimes frustrating impressionistic sketches told from the point of view of someone with a clear anti-clerical leftist view of history and an agenda that works in accordance with this. Such people as this author is, and those of his political side in general, have long celebrated the common man only as they were in the process of destroying his culture and his ways and leaving him to be dependent on their largess and education about themselves and the world around them. This book is therefore simultaneously revelatory but also frustrating in that the worldview of the author hinders one from getting a better sense of those people who were left behind by efforts to develop and modernize France.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable book. We have come to see nation states as monolithic entities, unified by language, culture, and history. Regional variations exist, but appear just as local color. The process of unification was in fact much messier, and bringing order out of chaos, sometimes by economic manipulation, sometimes by force, was a long and fraught process. In the United States we see the strong regional accents fading, and everyone seems to use a kind of homogenized Midwestern-speak, as if we all grew up in Minnesota. However much the early politicians might have dreamed of unifying all parts of their countries, it was only with the advent of radio, television, and overarching educational policies that it became possible.

France’s journey into modernity can be seen as one long process of extending Parisian language and culture to the farthest ends of the country. Considering their starting point, it is not surprising that the job took a century and a half. The hinterlands of France might as well have been not just another country, but from another millennium as well. Since most people never traveled far from their village of birth, it was not surprising that a single day’s journey could take a person to a region where the language, and perhaps the culture and religious practices as well, were completely incomprehensible. France may have been nominally a Christian nation, but away from the cities it was far from orthodox. Out there Christianity was just an overlay on top of ancient pagan beliefs.

The book is full of strange and amazing stories largely lost to history. There were dogs that acted like homing pigeons, ferrying packs of smuggled goods back and forth across the borders. There were young children from the rural areas who made long journeys to Paris to work for a few years as professional beggars. Their handlers provided them room and board, gave them some nominal bits of religious education, and allowed them to keep any money they took in over their required daily minimum. There is the reminder that up until a hundred years or so, the vast majority of people living in France did not speak French (meaning Parisian French); some of what was spoken was more or less intelligible, like English and Scottish, and some were entirely different languages. We tend to think of Germany and Italy as emergent nations, only taking shape in the mid nineteenth century, but France was no less fragmented, it just had a central government that outshone all the regional districts.

There is something to learn on almost every page of this book. It is an amazing story of a country slowly coming together, of ancient, almost stone age villages entering the modern world, of cultures being suppressed and then re-emerging as what is recognizably modern France.

[The Sporty Bookworm · Rating 4 out of 5]

D'habitude quand vous lisez une histoire de France du XIXème siècle, vous avez droit à un cours sur l'alternance politique entre Empire et restauration puis république et de nouveau une dictature pour finir avec la Commune et la Seconde République. On vous parle de grands hommes, de l'émergence des nationalismes ainsi que d'industrialisation, de colonies et d'avancées technologiques.

Dans cette histoire de France, on sort des sentiers battus. On arpente les petits villages où l'on ne parlait pas encore le français. On découvre l'émergence du tourisme thermal dans les Pyrénées. Nous sommes contés les stratégies familiales pour gérer les bouches trop nombreuses dans les régions typiques. On prend connaissance de la découverte d'un pays par un peuple qui n'avait pas les moyens de quitter son canton et qui s'ouvre à la France en l'espace de quelques décennies.

Bref, c'est le XIXème siècle comme vous ne l'avez jamais lu.

[Andrew Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this from start to finish. It was very rich and every paragraph was engaging and full of information. Learnt a lot about the formation and fragmentation of modern France.

[Hester · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite books ever. It changed the way I viewed history and the way I viewed France. Every page was surprising and exhausting. Did you know they had dog-powered machinery in France? Where the dogs trained other dogs how to use it? That one of the first geographers of France was killed as a sorcerer? That there were orgies in Notre Dame? That Paris has always been a polyglot city, since people from different provinces did not speak the same language? That the government did not know about France's largest canyon until a little before the turn of the century?
A beautifully written, important book that covers French history ignored by the Parisian elite. Fantastic.
This book also has a special place in my heart since this was the last Christmas present my father gave me and the last book we really discussed before he died. My brother and I took turns reading it to him in the hospital.

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very nteresting book, but it is not at all how I imagined it after reading the Barnes & Nobles review. So beware! The facts presented in the book do NOT seem to be collected from the author's extensive bicycling throughout France, but rather reaped from extensive library research. It is primarily a history book, albeit filled with lots of interesting information. Lots of information on mapping. At times I was drowned by all the facts - a bit of editing would have definitely helped. You do NOT travel around France from area to area. The book does NOT systematicly study different regions. It does NOT attempt to point out the particular cultural characteristics of different regions nor how these characteristics differ from region to region. That is what I thought I would be getting! So yeah, I am a bit disappointed.

[Tim Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This was the period when people began to say, as they still do, that ‘the land least known in France is France itself’…France had colonized North Africa and Indo-China but had failed to colonize itself.” This book is very true to the title _The Discovery of France_, as Graham Robb wrote about the process by which the outside world but most of all the French themselves came to discover their own country. It could be literal discovery, as in producing accurate maps, with a lot on the fascinating Cassini scientific mapping expeditions of France, and plumbing the depths of France’s canyons and caverns and climbing its mountains, with the author writing about the now famous Verdon Gorge, 15 miles long and .4 miles deep, wasn’t well known outside of a few locals in southeastern France until astoundingly late, 1906.

It could be cultural discovery, as in coming to know the various regions of the country and of France as a whole, with the author discussing at length how for a good portion of the book’s focus, late 17th century up until World War I, it wasn’t unusual at all to think of a neighboring village as being foreign and many people across the country outside of Paris not regarding themselves as French, as arguably many weren’t, with the author discussing not only regional cultures and dialects of French but altogether different languages like Occitan, Francoprovencal, Catalan, Flemish, Breton, Alsatian, and Euskaric (Basque), though the author also wrote how the process of making travel easier and encouraging people to adapt a national identity of French both weakened if not eliminated local and regional identities even as early as the early 19th century but also at the same time increased some aspects of regional identity, as regions stopped thinking of themselves as much as villages and seeing they had more in common with everyone else in their region.

It could be the discovery of things of value, whether wildlife, natural landscapes, or ancient and medieval artifacts, things as the author showed often shockingly taken for granted if not outright wasted on many occasions, with the author discussing heartbreaking things like the “ecocidal propensities of the rural population,” discussing how for instance it came to be realized that “the deforestation of the Alps had caused the droughts, the late frosts and ‘the unknown winds’ that had been decimating the olive groves of Provence and the vineyards of Burgundy,” of how overuse and poor land stewardship was found by the 19th century, entirely separate from industry, had reduced many once fertile grazing areas to lands of “naked rocks” with what vegetation that did grow in the cracks “ripped out for fertilizer.” Not confined to the land itself, the author talked about decimation of wildlife (quoting a traveler in 1764, in reference to the decimation of birds for the dinner table and due to the belief they devoured crops, not harmful insects, “You may pass through the whole South of France, as well as the county of Nice, where there is no want of groves, woods, and plantations, without hearing the song of blackbird, thrush, linnet, gold-finch, or any other bird whatsoever.”). Even the human history was subject to wasteful destruction, the author discussing how swarms of “scrap merchants and antique dealers” snatched up treasures from the Church and the aristocracy, though also noting that most of the damage to the nation’s art, statues, cathedrals, bridges, and castles “was caused, not by cynical dealers, but by casual theft, negligence, emergency repairs and ignorant restoration” when it wasn’t gleefully being destroyed as part of “progress” by a nation eager to put a medieval past behind it. Happily, the author talks about land restoration, reforestation, conservation, and preservation programs, about people like Prosper Merimee, Inspector General of Historic Monuments, of how historic sites were preserved and animal numbers increased. Too late for some, but not for others.

Sometimes the discovery could be the actual methods of how people and especially the French came to discover France, whether accurate maps or better transportation such as canals, railroads, and bicycles, or even advertising campaigns (I was shocked to find out how recent some of the names of different regions were and how they were created to attract tourists; “the coast of Provence became the Cote d’Azur in 1877,” one of several regions “unofficially renamed to make them sound more attractive”) and how not only were some region’s of France famed foods comparatively recent, but might have very thin roots: referring to say how mustard and cassis might make Dijon famous or maybe chocolate from Bayonne, the author wrote “Far from representing the essence of a region, some of these specialties simply reflected the advertising skill of a single grocer”). It was interesting to learn about how faster transportation both made travel easier and connected many areas to all-important Paris, but in bypassing many areas once necessary stops for travelers and by the increase in speed, simultaneously isolated many once at least somewhat connected areas of France.

The reader does learn about many things peculiar to France, such as the history of the Tour de France, a little about bastidous or cabanons (tiny houses built in the hills of southern France), bougnats (Auvergnat coal merchants who famously also sold wine and founded some of the most famous cafes in Paris), colporteurs (pedlars who left their mountain villages with “hundred-pound baskets or pine-wood chests strapped to their backs” and who might sell anything from notebooks to knives to combs to religious trinkets to Alpine plants for botany loving tourists), to the use of dogs in pre-automobile France for smuggling and spinning wheels to power industry, drailles (or drove roads, “probably the oldest routes in France,” they were “zones of transit rathe than roads” and were where sheep were herded in their thousands as part of annual migrations), and cantonniers (or road-menders, especially important in high mountain passes, who according “to nineteenth-century regulations…had to be present on the road for twelve hours a day from April to September and from dawn to dusk during the other six months,” who in their little “round stone huts and lonely houses marked CANTONNIER” were “a colonist of remote areas”).

Includes two sections of black and white images, extensive maps, a chronology, end notes, a lengthy works cited section, and an index.

[Amelia Halgren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Physical book/audiobook, 3.5 stars rounded up

I’d recommend this to anyone interested in the history of France, mapping, roads, or transportation.

The nation of France is just slightly smaller than the state of Texas but with twice the elevation gain, and I was surprised to learn how recently it was finally completely mapped. All roads may “lead to Rome,” but for a period in France, all roads led to Paris. This meant that many communities adjacent to one another had no “roads” connecting them. Many communities were serviced only by donkey tracks or rivers. The consequences of this isolation are the entertaining and enlightening subject of this book. I was delighted how many insights this book provided into a myriad of historical subjects that have occasionally confused and bemused me. I particularly enjoyed sections on culture, living with livestock, religious beliefs/superstitions, development, and changing perspectives on deforestation.


Interesting quotes:

“The host is never satisfied unless at the end of the meal, on rising from the table, the locomotive faculties of his guests are seriously impaired.”

“Awareness of the eco-cidal propensities of the rural population coincided with the first reckless surge of modern industry. In fact, the idea that the idea that axe-wielding, pyromaniac peasants erased their own environment, was dangerously simplistic.”

“Few people knew what a mountain was… to those who gave the matter any thought, mountains and the people who lived there were remnants of the primitive world.”

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 4 out of 5]

My takeaway from this book is that there is more to France than Paris. As true as that is today, it was even more the case in earlier times, when in vast regions people spoke in Basque, Breton, Catalan, Alsatian, Flemish, and other non-French languages and had no concept of living in a country called France. The land was a quilt of a thousand or more pays.
Graham Robb chronicles this neither with a sense of nostalgia nor of being a collector of the quaint. Before writing this book, he was already acclaimed for his biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Rimbaud. He counted as an expert.
His bicycle tours of the countryside revealed to him much he didn’t know. He supplemented the first-hand knowledge his trips gave him with years of research in many libraries and archives. This combination of first-hand observation and digesting hundreds of old guidebooks, maps, and postcards yields the insight that “the more accurate the map, the more misleading the impression” (p. 6). This sentence is an example of his love of tersely antithetical sentences. Here is another: “Even before it was finished, it was clear that the map of France, with its standardized spellings and consistent symbols, would be considerably more coherent than the country itself” (p. 196).
At times the narrative threatens to become a collection of oddities, but even then, the reader is sustained by the author’s taut, lively prose.
The book is organized more carefully, however, than readily apparent. The first half uncovers a France that has disappeared, the second deals with “forms of life that are more recognizably modern” (p. 138). I especially enjoyed the interlude between parts 1 and 2, on the animal population of France in the 18th and 19th centuries. Merely to conceive of writing such a chapter shows the imagination of the author.
The material Robb integrates into his narrative could have easily bloated to a book twice the size in the hands of a less-disciplined writer. This is a book that repays attentive reading. A very good read.

[Carrie Chappell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robb's theory, so far as I can see it, turns on the notion that in the process of discovery one eventually knows destruction as well. As soon as an area is mapped, charted, understood by its resources, then there are the people wanting to move to it, use it all up, and charge others to see it. Then, it becomes a politic, and whether it's tourism or daily life, a whole space is lost to what was either found by people looking to expand their reach or some gentle ego wishing to understand better his/her world.

In addition, so much of this book for me was connected to larger concerns around history-telling, the differing spaces that scholars, politicians, and the public inhabit in thinking of their past and present. For me, the book clarified a sense I had already—that history is usually more laden with stories of erasure than preservation. But then also the reminders that 'erasure' and 'preservation' are necessary to progress but dangerous to our senses of origin, to the life of certain populations. I guess now I want to think about what is important, as we look at the U.S. and the history she wants or needs to preserve or erase to make room for truer accounts, a long history of 'undiscovered' (<--no, that's not right?), of suppressed voices.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't have much to add to all of the reviewers who have praised this book. It's a fascinating exploration of a country you think you know, which proves how little you really know about it, and by extension how little you really know about anywhere.

It's also an insight into the trillions of human lives that have gone unrecorded because they are simply too ordinary. What is remarkable is just how extraordinary the ordinary can be. Indeed, the world described in the book, of scattered communities frequently living at odds with each other and with very little sense that they formed a nation at all, feels completely alien - but the book is rich in interesting and touching human details that bring this strange world to life. If you haven't read it yet, I hope you enjoy the adventure.

[Daniel Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very cool overview of how culturally diverse and disconnected France was through the early 19th century and the processes that brought it together. Good coverage of language, religion, travel, work, and quality of life in different areas. Very good focus on how awful peasant life was. The only real disappointment I had was a general lack of comparison with France’s neighbors. Some comparisons were drawn to England, but a more extended comparison on a few key points (linguistic diversity and consolidation, religious practice, etc) would have been useful for seeing how much of this is the story of all of industrializing northern/western Europe in these years rather than a uniquely French path.

[Beth Cato · Rating 5 out of 5]

This effortlessly-flowing narrative explores the historical geography of France with fascinating anecdotes and enlightening facts. I learned so much from this book--it's the kind of thing I can really geek out over. Topics range from regional dialects to historical side hustles (get paid to be an alarm clock!) to how to fake injuries for begging to fairy lore and saints galore to the evolution of transportation in the past few hundred years to the 'lost territories' in the 19th century and how they became part of an escalation in national identity. This is a book I'll keep on my shelf for reference from here onward.

[Luc De Coster · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history of France from roughly 17th century to 20th century with battles, Kings and politics rather as a background. France discovering itself, its landscape, its population and finally its own unity. The birth of a nation stretched over three centuries. The story of map makers, road builders, canal diggers and railway engineers. The evolution of travelling and the origins of French Tourism as a patriotic duty. The tension between Paris and the Province, patois and French. Great story teller, no linear timeline but back and forth according to theme.

[Tamara]

This is a delightfully eclectic book, with piles and piles of surprising information about just-pre-modern daily life. The way distance shifted between eras and technologies, the way food and work and money functioned or didn't in this vast landscape before the state came along to make sense of them, the oddness and diversity of the way people moved and lived before, well, more practical universal solutions became available. It's a bit meandering and tended to lose my attention for weeks at a time, but overall perfectly fascinating.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book recommended to me by my BFF Frannie! If you're at all interested in France I would tell you to get and read this book - Aubri, are you listening? I was amazed reading about France. It wasn't anything like I had ever imagined. Thanks for the reference Frannie.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

On my most recent trip to France, my friends and I decided to spend our last night in Tours at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant-- where one could get home-cooked meal. There we were feted by a local man, who had already seen the bottom of a wine barrel and who was happy to hear that we loved Tours but baffled by our love of Paris. "Paris is shit!" he repeated. We argued about charms, or lack thereof, of the City of Light throughout the evening, but he also graciously offered to pay for our meals. The next day my friends and I left, taking two trains to Gare de Montparnasse and hiking what seemed to be five miles of tunnel to catch a Metro to Gare du Nord to board the EuroStar to London. Both were interesting events to note in a travel journal: Why did the man hate Paris so much? Why do all of the main train lines go through Paris (if you ever tried to map an east-west route, no matter what you try, you end up going though Paris) and why in the bloody hell it doesn't have one main station?

These questions, plus many more that I didn't even know I had, were answered by Graham Robb's "The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography". Boring title? Yes. Wildly informative, enlightening, interesting, and entertaining? Absolutely. Robb lets his readers discover the France that none of us knew existed. It turns out that what we typically know of French history and culture is not reflective of the country and its people, but rather it is Parisian history and culture that we learn. What lay outside of that city's walls is a different story all together. This is best represented when he discusses the poet Alfred du Vigny in 1844, "He lived in metropolitan France whose express roads and canals were universally admired as engineering marvels, but not in the other France, which was still recovering from the fall of the Roman Empire" (216). In another well-placed jab against the National Front, he explains how there is no "pure" Frenchman and how France was invaded by numerous groups such as the Romans, Gauls, Celts, Vikings, and Normans, all who helped shaped the different regions. Culture and language, like the terroir of wines, varied within short distances. Someone from a village three miles away could have a completely different language and would be seen as a foreigner. Robb explains how much of France was terra incognita even up to WWI, when most citizens did not know what Alsace-Lorraine was or that it had been taken by the Germans.

Robb shows what regular life was like in France and how "France" was discovered by traders, mapmakers, canal and railroad builders, migrants, adventurers, and the monarchy who made sure that all roads (and eventually trains) lead to Paris. He explains how most regions did not know what made them "regional" until they went to Paris and tasted their "regional cuisine" for the first time. How Parisians viewed each region was very different from the reality, and the idea of regional culture was exported from that city. Paris also exported its arrogance and snobbery. Part of their snobbery was tied to how most French people did not know how to speak to French, using a local patois instead. Robb describes this process as colonization; at the same time as Paris colonized Algeria and Indochina, it slowly took over its country and unknown regions. It wasn't until the late 19th century that a complete map was finally made.

Robb's research is impeccable and extensive. Much of the fun that comes from reading this is all of the journal, diary, and travelogue entries he includes. Couple that with his storytelling, wry wit, and obvious love of France, this is the perfect book for any Francophile or anyone who is interested how culture is made. It will enliven my next trip to France and, yes, even shitty Paris.