The Discovery of France | Graham Robb | Review by The Spectator

The very landscape of France is in many places the confection of lawmakers and bureaucrats. Enlightened agriculture, disafforestation and officious replanting with imported species, mining, the pressures of mass tourism, and the elimination of much rural industry with the growth of the cities and the arrival of the zoners and planners, all of these have contributed to the creation of a landscape which travellers often assume to have existed from time immemorial. With the growing role of the state in daily life, wide dissemination of print and products and the onset of mass internal migration, the tribal rules and local gods of French provincial life have lost their appeal, to be replaced by the impressive confection represented by modern France.

Language is the great symptom. The French state decreed that its servants should speak the dialect of Paris as early as 1539. The revolutionaries regarded a uniform language (inevitably Parisian) as an essential condition of national solidarity. Yet the gradual adoption of French by the whole population owed less to official intervention than it did to snobbery and ambition. People will always learn to speak the language of the bosses, and the bosses come from Paris. The same thing happened spontaneously in England long before Lord Reith laid down that the only true English was spoken by the upper classes of London and the south-east.

Graham Robb is by background a literary historian, the author of biographies of those quintessentially Parisian writers Balzac and Hugo. He is a natural metropolitan. By his own account, it was not until he was in his late thirties that he ‘began to explore the country on which I was supposed to be an authority’. He did it on a bicycle, whose leisurely speed, he says, offers the best way of observing the variety of the country. But do not be deceived. Observation has its place, but this is not a guide book or a travelogue. Robb’s cycling tours of France have contributed more questions than answers to his work. The Discovery of France is a thoughtful book, the fruit of much research into some compelling but little-known byways of French history, and a reminder that what the tourist sees is only a fraction of the story.