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A narrative of exploration--full of strange landscapes and even stranger inhabitants--that explains the enduring fascination of France. 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.A New York Times Notable Book, Publishers Weekly Best Book, Slate Best Book, and Booklist Editor's Choice.… (more)
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Robb says that his book can be read as a social and geographical history as a collection of tales and tableaux. This is most certainly the case however he achieves more than this. He carefully builds a picture for us English speakers of what it means to be french. He demonstrates how and why they think the way they do; he attempts to get into their psyche and in this he is largely successful. The majority of the book focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries and is organised by themes rather than a linear account of the social and geographical history. It is underpinned with Robb's contention that France is not a homogeneous nation; it never was and is not so today.
Robb says that France is more a collection of individual pays, which in the past were separated by customs and toll barriers as well as language and today theses pays still lie just beneath the surface. In 1880 there were still only one fifth of Frenchman comfortable with speaking french and today there are still over 20 regional dialects recognised. France is shown until quite recently as an undiscovered country, undiscovered that is by the French. Huge difficulties were encountered in producing reliable maps with the Parisians largely unconcerned with the countryside away from the main arterial routes or beyond the suburbs of Paris. Transport is explored and again there was difficulties right up to the coming of the railways. France did not have an industrial revolution quite like that experienced in England. Any industry was fueled largely by migrant workers anxious to return to their pays as soon as it was financially viable. There were few heavily industrialised towns and where there were the local population were keen to move out to the countryside, their quality of life being much more important than amassing vast amounts of money.
Robb is very good at highlighting local customs and has plenty of fascinating stories to tell; the stilt walking shepherds of les Landes, the search for the primitive Frenchmen in the new fashionable seaside resorts in Brittany, the child migrations to the cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. The darker side of the french Psyche is also explored; the tribalism that resulted in the pitched battles between villages, the fear and hatred of the Cagots in S W France, the actions of the Vichy government and more recently the massacre of the Algerians in Paris.
The book is well written but it is not always easy to read. Robb's themed approach means that it is not always clear what links the thoughts and ideas and what period of history Robb is discussing. I would also suggest it is advisable to have a map of France handy if your geography is not up to scratch. I soon got used to the writing style and became enthralled with the main ideas and the many deviations that seemed to occur almost naturally. An invaluable book for those wishing to explore France and the french in more detail. The differences between French and English social history are used to great effect to demonstrate why the two races are so different. As an Englishman living in France I learned a great deal and some of the fog of local behaviour and customs have been lifted.
This could have been a fun book and it could have provided a really nice introduction into France and its geography and culture. It does bring some times and places to life, and it will certainly leave you with an appreciation for the geographic variety in France. The linguistic map is wonderful (although the text on linguistics put me to sleep - several times). The significance of the Pays is fascinating.
But, it’s not fun, more of a discursive lecture. And, it’s not a good introduction. The author seems to assume his readers are already pretty familiar with France and its basic geographic layout. The writing often gets bogged down in the details – and I would get lost. For example, the book constantly mentions different regions and locations; but, without a good reference as to where they are located and maps designed for the text, it all just washed over me, forgotten.
Overall I found the book disappointing and a struggle to read. I didn’t get much concrete from the book, just a bunch of muddy ideas. A reader familiar with France will probably find this a much nicer book.
What
The only way it is 'heavy' is the 400 good-size pages, 100 of which are notes & index, etc. It seems rather to have fallen between two purposes; clearly designed to be academic, as shown by the exhaustive referencing; yet aimed at the general reader who might have been better served if the many years of extensive traveling were brought to the fore, to ground the knowledge in the country we find today. And a fiercer editor might help - not that it is long winded, but I feel the same picture of France could have been painted in half the words. Starting with 50 pages on how dismal life was in rural France 100 years ago does not make for the easiest start to the book.
But I am not sorry I persevered, it is a good book, now that I have got used to the sort of book it is.
Graham Robb has written a
Parts of the book were fascinating, but others were mind-numbingly dull. But, it's the kind of book where you can skip parts without missing information vital to the next section, which I didn't do because I read it for a book club discussion.
I learned some interesting facts, but not enough to make me glad I struggled through the full 358 pages of text.
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)
I was looking for reading a book about the... geography of France. Instead, for the first 40 pages, all I read is how French (or soon-to-be) were uncivilized, wild and savage beast-like people who considered people only a few
I am French, and whether this is true or not is not the point, or what bothers me. The point is.. what is Robb Graham's point?? If all he wanted to do was to press upon the readers how illiterate, (and dirty), unpatriotic, and ignorant French people were in the 1700's, he's succeed.
I might pick up the book again, but not likely.
Robb does have an engaging narrative style, but his prose tends to wander rather more than I would prefer, especially since his epilogue really doesn't do too much in the way of tying together the myriad of threads he introduces over the course of the book.
For those interested in learning more about France and less about the perception of France over the centuries, pick another book. If you'd enjoy a meandering, meta-anthropological treatment of France that feels almost as aimless as a Sunday afternoon stroll through a park, pick it up.
Example: Robb has a long string of anecdotes about how the peasantry relied on local saints to cure specific diseases, and punished them by flogging (the images were the saints, not representations of them)
> This was the puzzle of micro-provinces that General de Gaulle had in mind when
> Dialect terms such as ‘affender’ (to share a meal with an unexpected visitor), ‘aranteler’ (to sweep away spiders’ webs), ‘carioler’ (to cry out while giving birth), ‘carquet’ (a secret place between breast and corset), ‘river’ (to strip off leaves by running one’s hand along a branch) and a thousand other useful gems were like trophies brought back from foreign parts and cleansed of their original context. None of them were admitted to the dictionary of the French Academy
> … common throughout much of Europe until the end of the nineteenth century. In some parts, especially Gascony and the Auvergne, babies were strapped into shallow cradles with their heads in a wooden hollow. The skull grew into the shape of its container and by the time the baby could walk, it had a wide head and a high, flat forehead. Since babies instinctively turn to the light on waking, the result was often startlingly asymmetrical. Later, to prevent the growing brain from cracking open the skull (according to midwives interviewed in the 1900s), the head of the child was compressed with a scarf or, in wealthier households in Languedoc, with a band of strong cloth called a sarro-cap. Many men and women wore these head-constrictors all their lives and felt naked without them. … More than half the men and women in Rouen hospices in 1833, and nearly everyone in some parts of Languedoc had a modified head and some other deformity: an aquiline nose produced by crushing the cartilage and pulling out the nose, or ears squashed and notched by tight bands until they looked like pieces of crumpled linen that had been severely ironed.