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

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By Graham Robb

Picador, 2007

Reviewed by Tony Langley

Until 1 August 1914, no piece of news [in France] had ever reached the entire population on the same day.

That afternoon, in the Limousin, people heard the alarm bells that usually signified a hailstorm and looked up into a clear blue sky. In villages from Brittany to the Alps, firemen rushed out at the sound of clanging bells, looking for the fire. In the little town of Montjoux in the arrondissement of Montelimar, a car screeched to a halt in front of the mairie. A gendarme jumped out and delivered a package. A few moments later, people in the fields were intrigued to see cyclists whizzing past carrying bundles of posters. Near Sigottier, a man called Albert R. . . .met a young lad heading for his village. The boy claimed to be on his way to announce the outbreak of war and round up all the men of the village. On hearing this, Albert R. . . .collapsed in tears of laughter and wished him luck with his practical joke.

In places where newspapers were scarce and the main source of news was the weekly market, war came as a complete surprise.  According to a survey conducted in 1915 by the rector of Grenoble University, people were 'thunderstruck' and 'stupefied'. The first inkling they had at Motte-de-Galaure, two miles from the busy Rhone corridor, was the order given on 31 July to have all the horses ready to be requisitioned. Some men sang the 'Marseillaise' and looked forward to coming home a few weeks later with tales of  glory, but most were silent and dismayed. There was talk of hiding in the woods. At Plan in Isere, "the men of our peaceful locality who were mobilized did not leave with the same enthusiasm as their comrades from the cities. Rather, they were resigned and went out of patriotic duty."

In some parts of the Alps, men were making hay in the high summer pastures when messengers brought the news. Some had to leave for the station in the next valley before saying farewell to their families. 

This excerpt from Graham Robb's The Discovery of France is from the very last part of the book, as it closes with the great watershed of the Great War in 1914. In general the book is about the history and discovery of France outside of Paris in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's a very comical book in a British sense (understated, that is) but factual to a high standard and full of interesting, intriguing, endearing, and puzzling facts about French history, local languages and dialects, customs, clothing, cuisine, and whatnot seen in the regions in France outside of Paris.

Paris Long Before the Great War

I found it charming, and it gave me a sort of remembered recollection of the France my wife and I came to travel through and discover during the 1970s and '80s. That was of course long after the time period in the book, but the echoes of the 19th century were never far away in rural France in those days. 

It's also a haunting book; the ghosts of the past flicker throughout the telling, and the author recounts quite factually how the agreed-upon history of France as told in schools, institutes, and the collective memory is mostly a (polite) fiction and far from what even a cursory reading of old books, memoirs, tracts, and writings can tell us.

Anyway, I found the part about the spreading of the news of the outbreak of war in rural France to be very evocative—certainly at odds with what some books would have us believe. Ever so sad, yet quite likely accurate. I can readily believe farmers being called from their high pastures in the mountains, without being given time to pass by their homes first. It strikes me as just the thing to have happened in the Pyrenees, for instance, where Paris is far off and the rest of the world even farther away.

Tony Langley