France will always be divided (and that's why we love it)

It ‘is not a synchronised country: it is like a horse whose four legs move in a different time’

A few years back I read The Discovery of France, Graham Robb’s marvellous travelogue/history chronicling the subcultures and curiosities of that great country.

An absorbing book can define a holiday, make the memories sweeter and sunnier. We were staying at one of those Eurocamp sites in the Vendée, our plot opposite a very blond Belgium family with a dad who looked thoroughly worn out by his three blond sons.

It wasn’t the most glamorous place on earth, although perfectly pleasant, but I was far off in the world of France, its rivers and fields, vineyards, boulangeries and markets, its chateaus, churches and castles, military glory and general magic. No country can enrapture in quite the same way; nowhere else does life feel so immersive. No wonder that the Germans and Dutch say ‘to live like God in France’, to mean as good as life gets.

Robb, an Englishman thoroughly immersed in French literature and history, has viewed the country over many years with a cyclist’s eye view, noting the byways as well as highways. His most recent book also covers his wheels-based experiences of the country.

But it would take several lifetimes to see it all. France is gigantic, like a continent in itself, and the most visited country on earth. It is four times the size of England and until the 17th century had a population four to five times as big (today it is 67 million v 56 million). Yet ‘France’ until relatively recently extended not much further than Paris, in the area under the king’s direct control called the Île-de-France — beyond that, regional identity was distinctive and dialect pre-dominated.  

As Robb writes, at the time of the Revolution just 11 per cent of the population, or 3 million people, spoke ‘French’; by 1880 still only one in five could communicate in the national language. Even with decades of centralisation, today there are still 55 distinct dialects in France; most are Romance, but the country is also home to Flemish, Alsatian, Breton and Basque-speaking communities. (Tintin has been translated into at least a dozen French dialects.) No regional identity in England, except the north-east, is as distinctive.

Many famous French historical figures wouldn’t have even understood ‘French’, among them St Bernadette, living in the then obscure village of Lourdes. She described the figure she saw as un petito damisela (or in French une petite demoiselle), the name for the local forest fairies in the Pyrenees. The Demoiselles dressed in white, lived in caves and grottos and were associated with water. They were also seen as being on the side of the poor, Robb points out, because here as is often the case there was a political underside to this folk belief. Indeed, a peasant conflict with the authorities from the 1830s to the 1870s had been called The War of the Demoiselles. But then conflict with the authorities — with Paris — almost defines French history.

The City of Light, which from the 12th to the 18th century was preeminent in the West, has always dominated, with over a third of major French cultural figures coming from the metropolis, and two-thirds living there. Paris was the epicentre of the nation — only London is comparable in its disproportionate power — but outside of the surrounding region, there is a wider ‘core France’; Robb describes it as a parallelogram stretching from Metz in the east to Nantes in the west, from the English Channel to Clermont-Ferrand, where the south begins. 

Beyond that, across a line that usually stretches from the Gironde to the Alps, and the locals hardly identified as French for most of history; in fact, before the Revolution people in Gascony and Provence called anyone from the north a Franchiman or Franciot. 

The ‘Franks’ were a Germanic tribe (or, more accurately, a confederation) who swept across the Rhine during the later Roman period, although their relations with the Romans were usually good. These barbarians were muscle for hire, and frequently fought alongside the empire, while their leaders often admired and emulated the Romans (Francus ego civis, Romanus miles in armis — ‘I am a Frankish citizen, a Roman under arms’, one tombstone records proudly).

As Gaul collapsed under the strains of the plagues of late antiquity the Franks colonised the north, where their imprint is still visible 16 centuries later. Ethnologists in recent times have divided France along a line from St-Malo on the Brittany coast to Geneva in Switzerland and, Robb writes: ‘At least until the late nineteenth century, it appears with surprising regularity when various sets of data are plotted on a map: south and west of the line, people tended to be shorter and to have darker hair and eyes; they were less literate, lived in smaller places, had less taxable income and were more likely to be employed in agriculture.’ Even the frequency of saints’ names in villages can be plotted along this line, far more common south and west of the St-Malo-Geneva line, where Christianisation occurred earlier.

The Franks came to adopt a variation of Latin and this is what we all learned at school. Yet today there are still 2 million Occitan speakers, 500,000 speakers of Breton, 280,000 of Corsican, 80,000 Basque and 70,000 Franco-Provençal speakers in France. There are such oddities as the ‘Welche’ of the Vosges, a Romance-speaking group surrounded by Germanic speakers (hence the name, cognate with Welsh and Walloon), who are still relatively clannish. 

Even at a more micro level there are countless smaller regional cultures and dialects, often very distinct on a local level; the rural French, Robb writes, have a strong loyalty to their village, or cloche, literally bell-tower, an exact translation of the Italian campanilismo. Your home is defined by the sound of the local church bells.

If you like Robb’s work, you’ll also enjoy Fernand Braudel’s The Identity of France, published in 1986 and supposed to be part one of a series by the great 20th century historian. Unfortunately, Braudel was already dead by the time part one was published, and so the series was never finished. 

Braudel loved his country and believed in a deep and abiding Frenchness, yet he was also fascinated by its divisions, the various different pay — from Gallo-Roman pagus — which translates as land, although it can mean either country or region. Within this, dialects can be very varied: Gascon is ‘quite distinct’ to Languedocien and Provencal, he wrote, but in Gascony ‘two completely different patois’ were spoken. Near to Salins the language spoken in each village ‘varies to the point of being unrecognisable’ and ‘what is more extraordinary’ the town ‘being almost half a league in length, is divided by language and even customs, into two distinct halves’. 

France’s regional identity is defined by language, food — the division between butter and olive, wine and cider — and even roof tiles. Braudel was essentially a geographic determinist and, citing Sartre’s line that France was ‘non-unifiable’, the author lamented that: ‘Every nation is divided, and thrives on division. But France illustrates the rule rather too well.’

To illustrate the rivalry, compare the words of two 19th-century historians: Jean-Bernard Mary-Lafon, who contrasted the ‘refined and freedom-loving’ southerners with ‘brute barbarism’ of ‘knights from across the Loire’, violent, fanatical and pillaging. And Ernest Renan, who wrote in 1872: ‘I may be mistaken, but there is a view derived from historical ethnography which seems more and more convincing to my mind. The similarity between England and northern France appears increasingly clear to me every day. Our foolishness comes from the south, and if France had not drawn Languedoc and Provence into her sphere of activity, we should be a serious, active, Protestant and parliamentary people.’

He was surely mistaken, for it’s the south which is more Protestant and the north more Catholic. Just like in England, where regional and religious identity are intertwined.

Yet it is true that France’s great bounty was also its curse; this western European isthmus forms a natural unit within which the most powerful warlord could dominate, and that man was bound to be based somewhere on the Seine or Loire, close to the continent’s richest wheat-growing area. Yet in the early modern era this unit was far too big to govern effectively — 22 days’ ride from north to south — compared to England or the Netherlands. The author quotes an essayist who suggested that: ‘France is not a synchronised country: it is like a horse whose four legs move in a different time.’

Braudel wrote: ‘The trouble is that all the divisions — physical, cultural, religious, political and social — are piled one on top of another, sowing incomprehension, hostility, misunderstanding, suspicions, conflict and civil war.’ A smaller and more easily governable France would surely have won the global battle for dominance with England and English, which was settled with the Seven Years’ War. 

By that point, however, the future had already been decided by the contrasting rates of migration; huge numbers of English settlers crossed the ocean to make a life in the new world, but few French wanted to make that journey, except for marginalised groups like the Cagots. These were a sort-of caste in western France who were relentlessly persecuted for no real reason: rather like untouchables or perhaps similar to Ireland’s Travellers, except they aren’t really that distinctive in appearance or behaviour or lifestyle. There are all sorts of wacky theories for their origins – that they were descended from Visigoths defeated by the Franks, or of Saracens left over from the failed Arab conquest of the 8th century, or perhaps Cathars. Robb finds all such colour theories ‘unsatisfactory’.

The Discovery of France contains countless such tales concerning the French, and not just its people. One of the finest narratives involves a rebellion by the wild horses of the Landes in the 1840s. As these creatures were threatened with extinction by the cruel march of human expansion, their downfall was heralded by one last glorious act of defiance.

‘A horse who was known to the villagers of the Arcachon Basin as “Napoleon” had spent two years in captivity. He escaped to the land between the sea and the marshes where the fine dune-grass grew and applied the skills he had learned from humans to a herd of his own. Napoleon’s horses watched for invaders from the heights of the dunes. When the hunters approached, the herd moved to a higher ridge which the domesticated horses, weighed down by riders and slowed by sand, could never climb. When the humans encircled the sandy fortresses, the herd arranged itself into a wedge formation, with foals in front and mares behind, and charged downhill towards the weakest point of the circle.’

Defeat, however, was inevitable, and ‘nothing more is known about this animal resistance movement. Napoleon may have died in the dunes, or he may have ended his life in a city. By the middle of the century, there were more white horses working in the army and pulling taxicabs in Paris than living free in the Landes.’

A heroic figure leading a doomed revolt against the inexorable march of modernity and globalisation: can there be anything more beautifully French? I can’t wait for the film adaptation to be made — by Amazon, Disney or Netflix.