The Discovery of France (34 page)

Flanders, too, had some lovely smooth roads, partly because tax concessions encouraged the use of vehicles with broad-rimmed wheels. In Alsace and Lorraine, where the economy was largely dependent on haulage, light chariots went racing towards Strasbourg at over 8 mph. But the model for the rest of the country was the Limousin, where the free-trade economist Turgot and his chief engineer Trésaguet created the roads which Arthur Young found ‘incomparably fine, and more like the well-kept alleys of a garden than a common highway’. Travellers who passed through the poverty-stricken province were amazed to find themselves skimming along a beautiful road on which even the smallest ruts had been filled with
nut-sized bits of marble. In 1789, François Marlin found the contrast exasperating:

When he became Finance Minister in 1774, Turgot urged the abolition of the
corvée
. (It was finally abolished throughout the kingdom in 1787.) In 1775, he allowed public coaches – but not private carriages – to use the system of staging posts, which until then had been reserved for the royal mail. The cost of a journey could now be worked out in advance and travellers could be certain that they would never be more than twenty miles from a fresh team of horses. The resulting small increase in the average speed of long journeys was the first significant acceleration since the Middle Ages.

*

B
EFORE HE WAS FORCED
out of office, Turgot also oversaw the two most telling advances in road engineering. His chief engineer in the Limousin, Pierre Trésaguet, had insisted that a limit should be placed on gradients. Impressively boring in the plain, the relentlessly straight roads of the earlier eighteenth century were a nightmare in the hills. The old road east from Morlaix still includes a needless climb of 15 per cent (1 in 7) because the blundering military Governor of Brittany, the Duc d’Aiguillon, preferred straight lines to the more accommodating curve of the older road that ran alongside. Thanks in part to Trésaguet, it is unusual now to find a climb in excess of 8 per cent (1 in 12). This was thought to be the steepest gradient that a fully laden mule could manage.
³¹
British mountain
roads tend to rise in fits and starts like step pyramids. French mountain roads go much higher, but more steadily, and can comfortably be climbed for hours by a fully laden cyclist.

This simple innovation revolutionized travel. The names of certain hills crop up again and again in travellers’ accounts like monsters in
The Odyssey
: ‘the famous Reventin slope [near Vienne], which used to stop the big Provençal carts for hours’; ‘the terrible Laffrey incline’ near Vizille where Napoleon addressed the regiment that was sent to stop him on his return from Elba and which is still marked ‘dangerous’; and the fearsome Tarare hill which lay on the shortest of the main routes from Paris to Lyon and the south. It took two hours to climb the Tarare and just as long to descend. Even the smallest carriages had to be emptied out and pulled up the hill by oxen. For centuries, travellers endured a baptism of mud as they entered the Rhône valley. The engineers who flattened these monsters were hailed as national heroes. Though all its seventeen bridges were invisible from the carriageway, the road that zigzagged over the Col de Saverne on the main route from France to Alsace became a tourist attraction in its own right:

The biggest of these ‘obstacles’ was the Alps. The route taken by Hannibal and his elephants in 218 bc was one of the commonest subjects of archaeological speculation, for the purely practical reason that, until 1810, the only Alpine crossing for wheeled vehicles was in the far south, over the Col de Tende, where mules and their drivers were sometimes blown over the edge by the howling Mistral. In 1800, losing a great deal of equipment on the way, Napoleon had crossed the Alps by the Great Saint Bernard – not on the prancing white charger shown in David’s painting (1801) next to a stone carved with the names ‘Napoleon’ and ‘Hannibal’, but on a mule borrowed from a local peasant. After the Battle of the Nile, when the Mediterranean
ports were blockaded by the British fleet, the main route into Italy was the Mont Cenis Pass. In 1810, a new road was opened and the cavalcade of sedan chairs, stretchers and mules was replaced by carts and carriages. Until the end of war reopened the sea route, about fifty vehicles a day wound their way up to the 6,800-foot summit of Mont Cenis en route from Lyon to Turin – a climb of six miles on a gradient of 7 per cent. The official bulletin,
État général des routes de poste de l’Empire Français
, announced the opening of the pass to encourage merchants to use it:

The later painting by Delaroche of a bedraggled mule carrying Napoleon across the Alps (figure 19) is hardly less heroic than David’s mythical horse, but an Alpine scene of snack bars and souvenir shops with regulated price lists would have ruined the glamour completely. Napoleon himself knew the economic value of natural beauty and would not have been surprised by the spreading ski-stations of the modern Alps. One of his first instructions to the Prefect of the Hautes-Alpes
département
was ‘to have drawings made of the most beautiful views of your Alps for the porcelain factory at Sévres’. Once the war was over, Italian pedlars and beggars would flow over the pass to pester foreign tourists and thus ensure that commerce kept the arteries of the empire open.

The
cantonniers
or road-menders who patrolled the pass represented the other main innovation of Turgot and Trésaguet. Each road-mender was responsible for about three miles of road. According to nineteenth-century regulations, he had to be present on the road for twelve hours a day from April to September and from dawn to dusk during the other six months. Meals were to be taken on the road at set times. ‘Rain, snow and other bad weather’ did not excuse
absence, though the
cantonnier
was allowed to make himself a shelter ‘provided that it not obstruct the public highway and be visible from the road, so that the worker’s presence might be registered at all times’. He had to supply his own tools but he was given a special steel ring with which to check that the stones spread on the road had been smashed to the regulation size. The ring had a diameter of six centimetres, which roughly corresponds to McAdam’s rule that no stone should be too big to fit inside the mender’s mouth.

Apart from its obvious value, the creation of the
cantonnier
had an invigorating effect on daily life in rural France. Like a hermit with shovels and a wheelbarrow, the
cantonnier
was a colonist of remote areas. Little round stone huts and lonely houses marked
CANTONNIER
in fading paint can still be seen on many roads. As salaried workers, they helped to generate village economies. They served as messengers and relayers of gossip. Bourgeois travellers and social reformers saw the rain-soaked man at the roadside fighting Nature with a bucket and spade as the personification of proletarian misery, but for the road-menders themselves, security and self-respect, not to mention the blue jacket and the brass hat-badge punched with the word ‘Cantonnier’, were priceless assets. A grenadier from the Vivarais who distinguished himself at the crossing of the Beresina during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was asked by Napoleon to name his reward. ‘Well, sire,’ he replied, ‘since you have it in your power, after the war I’d like to be made
cantonnier
for life in my
pays
.’ Unlike his officers, Napoleon did not find the man’s request amusing.