The French nation is the creation of the state to a degree which is unique among European nations. It owes its existence to imperial notions of central authority preached to an indifferent population by the servants of the medieval monarchy and transmitted intact through generations of public servants. The revolutionaries, bent on eliminating older and more intimate loyalties and on mobilising the full resources of the country for war, imposed a rapid and forcible programme of integration and bureaucratic centralisation to which the population did not take easily. Nineteenth-century historians, like Michelet and Lavisse, added the great national myths and that sense of historical destiny which is peculiarly French. Roads, railways and broadcasters have done the rest. In spite of a growing interest in local history, dialects and folklore, modern France has become a remarkably homogeneous society.
Graham Robb claims to have discovered an older and more variegated France still living beneath the uniform exterior. Readers who know the country will be sceptical about that. But what he has actually written is something far more interesting, namely the story of how these ancient differences were gradually extinguished in the name of enlightenment and national unity. This is not the tale of wars and annexations which provides the stuff of standard histories. It is a story of language, geography and the daily experience of provincial life, of the loss of innocence and sinfulness in favour of a generalised correctness which is much the same whether you are in Paris, Lyon or the middle of the Ardèche.
The first condition of local particularism is ignorance. Robb is surely right to say that the first stage in the process of averaging out the differences among Frenchmen was to map out the country, thus providing its citizens with some knowledge of the next valley, and the state with the ability to find all of them. France was the first European country to commission comprehensive national maps, a process begun in the 1740s and only completed in the time of Napoleon. The Cassini maps, so called after the hereditary dynasty of official mapmakers which made them, are still among the most beautiful maps ever made. The surveyors were often assaulted and even murdered by villagers suspicious of the whole enterprise, and perhaps they had a point. For after the mapmakers came the roadbuilders. And after those the regulators, census-takers and battalions of official busybodies and, in the opposite direction, the tides of migrants in search of employment and an escape from the cramped horizons of village life.
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