The Discovery of France (6 page)

Secret army reports of the 1860s and 70s show that ‘patriotism’ on a national level meant very little to natives of a
pays
. In most of the Auvergne, the army could obtain help only ‘by payment, requisition or threats’ (1873). In a town near Angers, the men would fight only if they were close to home: ‘They are still Angevin, not French’ (1859). ‘The peasants of the Brie are timorous and have little guile, and all resistance on their part would be easily put down’ (1860). Spies returning to Caesar’s camp on the banks of the Saône in 58
BC
must have delivered very similar reports.

*

W
ITH DIFFERENT MAPS
and sensors, it is still possible to explore the labyrinth of tiny regions without getting lost. At certain times of day, even if the boundaries are invisible, the approximate limits of a
pays
can be detected by a walker or a cyclist. The area in which a church bell can be heard more distinctly than those of other villages in the region is likely to be an area whose inhabitants had the same customs and language, the same memories and fears, and the same local saint.

Bells marked the tribal territory and gave it a voice. When the bell was being cast by a travelling founder, villagers added heirlooms to the metal – old plates, coins and candlesticks – and turned it into the beloved embodiment of the village soul. It told the time of day and announced annual events: the beginning and end of harvest, the departure of flocks for the high pastures. It warned of incursions and threats. In the 1790s, recruiting sergeants marched across the Sologne through overlapping circles of sound to find, when they arrived in each village, that all the young men had disappeared. Bells were thought to dispel the thunder and hailstorms that destroyed the crops, which explains why so many people were electrocuted at the end of a bell-rope. They chased away the witches who piloted storm clouds and summoned angels so that prayers said while the bell was ringing – as in Millet’s painting
L’Angélus
– were more effective than at other times. In foggy weather, rescue bells were rung to guide travellers who might be lost.

The number of bells and the size of the bell tower often give a fairly accurate measure of population density. Hardly anyone complained about excessive ringing, but there were countless complaints about bells that were too faint to be heard in the outlying fields. When migrants talked nostalgically of their distant native
clocher
, they were referring not only to the architectural presence of a steeple in the landscape but also to its aural domain.

A map of these spheres of audible influence would show the tiny size of tribal domains far more accurately than a map of
communes
. A study of
communes
in nineteenth-century Morbihan (southern Brittany) appears to show that the population was quite adventurous. By 1876, more than half the married people in Saint-André had been born in a different
commune
. In almost every case, however, the
commune
in question was adjacent. According to the study, ‘sentimental determinants’ (love) might have played a role, but most people married in order to consolidate inherited land rights, even if it meant marrying a first cousin. The choice of partners was guided by the ancient system of hamlets whose frontiers – banks of earth, ditches and streams – have either disappeared or become unnoticeable. Official boundaries were scarcely more significant than garden fences in the territories of birds.

The same agoraphobic settlement of the open spaces of France can be seen all over the country. As late as 1886, over four-fifths of the population were still described as ‘almost stationary’ (living in the
département
where they were born). Over three-fifths had remained in their native
commune
. But even the expatriates in other
départements
had not necessarily strayed from the local group of hamlets: the neighbouring hamlet may simply have lain on the other side of a departmental boundary.

Some communities were forced by low numbers or by local feuds to look further afield, but even they were unlikely to travel far. The widowed ploughman in George Sand’s
The Devil’s Pond
(1846) is appalled at the thought of finding a new wife three leagues (eight miles) away in ‘a new
pays
’. In an extreme case, the persecuted cagots, most of whom lived in scattered hamlets (see p. 43), might find a husband or a wife more than a day’s walk from home, but this was very unusual. Records of six hundred and seventy-nine cagot couples from 1700 to 1759 show that almost two-thirds of the brides came from within shouting distance of the bridegroom. The others were close enough to cause little inconvenience to the wedding guests. In Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, all but four of the fifty-seven women had married less than five miles from home. Only two of the six hundred and seventy-nine were described as ‘foreign’. This was not a reference to another land. It meant simply, ‘not from the region’.

*

E
VEN WITH STATISTICS
and a proper sense of scale, descending into the land of a thousand
pays
is a disconcerting experience. The broader patterns that will eventually appear are not much in evidence, but nor is the expected anarchy. Many places turn out to be fully
functioning jurisdictions with their own parliaments and unwritten constitutions. Nearly every village had a formal assembly of some kind, especially in
pays d’état
such as Burgundy, Brittany and Provence, where royal influence had always been weak. In the south, where taxation was based on land, the need to measure and record holdings had given rise to some quite sophisticated village institutions that not only regulated the use of common land but also managed assets and ran a budget. When agents of the Revolution came to administer the kiss of life to the supposedly moribund towns and villages of provincial France, they found the body in surprisingly good health.

Some of these towns and villages were flourishing democracies when France was still an absolute monarchy. François Marlin ran into such a place on his journey through Picardy in 1789. The conspicuously clean and tidy village of Salency, he learned, was governed by an old priest. The children were never sent away to become servants, and they were not allowed to marry outside the parish. There were six hundred people with only three surnames between them. All were considered equal, and everyone worked the land, using spades instead of ploughs. As a result, their harvests were abundant, their children – even the girls – were taught to read and write by a salaried schoolmaster and his wife, and everyone was healthy, peaceful and attractive. ‘The very notion of crime is unknown to them . . . The story of a girl who sinned against modesty would sound to them like a tale invented by a liar.’

This is a fairly typical account of a self-governing village. The chief, as in Salency, was often a priest, acting as an administrator rather than as an agent of the Catholic Church. On the Breton islands of Hoedic and Houat, the priest, mayor, judge, customs officer, postal director, tithe collector, teacher, doctor and midwife were all the same man. The arrival of two deputy mayors in the 1880s – one for each island – made no difference whatsoever. Some places were run by councils that were perfect miniatures of a national administration. The town of La Bresse, in a valley of the western Vosges, had its own legislature and judiciary until the Revolution. According to a geographer writing in 1832, ‘the judges of this town, though clumsy and common in appearance, showed a great deal of common sense’. A
visiting lawyer who quoted in Latin in his speech for the defence was fined by the court ‘for taking it into your head to address us in an unknown tongue’ and was ordered to learn the law of La Bresse within a fortnight.

Some village states covered many square miles. A clan called Pignou occupied several villages near Thiers in the northern Auvergne. They even had their own town, which apparently boasted all the comforts of modern civilization. A leader was elected by all the men over twenty years of age and titled ‘Maître Pignou’. Everyone else was known by their Christian name. If the Maître Pignou proved inept, he was replaced. There was no private property, and all the children were brought up by a woman known as the Laitière because she also ran the communal dairy. Girls never worked in the fields but were sent instead to a convent at common expense. People who married outside the clan were banished forever, though they all eventually begged to be readmitted.

If so many tiny places declared independence at the time of the Revolution, it was because they were already partly independent. Their aim was not to develop the local economy and become part of a larger society. Change of any kind generally meant disaster or the threat of starvation. The dream of most communities was to sever ties, to insulate the town or village, which is partly why measures varied from one village to the next: standardization would have made it easier for outsiders to compete with local producers.
³
They wanted to refine and purify the group. The boast that no one ever married outside the tribe was as common in France as it is in most tribal societies. Local legends often referred to a special dispensation granted by the Pope (or, more likely, the local bishop) that allowed them to marry close relatives. Prudent management of village
resources could prevent the population from abandoning the tiny fatherland. Sometimes, daughters as well as sons were paid to remain. The ‘Chizerot’ tribe on the banks of the Saône in Burgundy had a communal fund that was used to give poor girls a dowry so that they would not have to look for a husband elsewhere.

Self-government was not an idle dream. It was the unavoidable reality of daily life. People who rarely saw a policeman or a judge had good reasons to devise their own systems of justice. Hard-pressed provincial governors had equally good reasons to turn a blind eye. By most accounts, local justice was an effective blend of psychological manipulation and force. In Pyrenean villages from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, claims were settled in a series of three meetings, at the first of which both parties had to remain silent. Cases rarely reached the third meeting. In Mandeure, near the Swiss border, when something had been stolen, a meeting was called on the main square. The two mayors held a stick at either end and the entire population of several hundred people would pass underneath to prove their innocence. No thief had ever dared to pass under the stick. ‘Had he done so, and was later found out . . . he would have been shunned like a wild animal and the dishonour would have redounded on his family.’

*

T
HESE LOCAL SYSTEMS
of justice might explain the apparently bizarre fact that, according to some nineteenth-century criminal statistics, France had an almost entirely law-abiding population. Crime in some
départements
seemed to have died out altogether. Sometimes there were ‘white sessions’, when courts sat but heard no cases. In 1865, in the Aveyron
département
, where the Battle of Roquecezière took place, there were eight convictions for crimes against the person and thirteen for crimes against property. In the Cher
département
(population: 336,613), the figures were three and zero. Nationally, excluding Paris, the 1865 figures suggest that it took eighteen thousand people to produce one criminal.

It does not take a cynic to suspect that most descriptions of village republics are a misty image of the truth. Thieves, murderers and rapists did, of course, exist. François Marlin had picked his way
through too many dung-obstructed, priest-forsaken places not to be impressed by Salency, but its cleanliness and the absence of crime were the public face of a necessarily despotic government. The self-proclaimed virtue of the people of Salency must have wrecked the lives of many people – ‘foreigners’, homosexuals, ‘witches’ and, perhaps more than any other category of undesirable, unmarried mothers. About ten times as many illegitimate children were born in Paris than anywhere else, not because Parisians were more promiscuous but because girls who ‘sinned against modesty’ were often forced to leave their
pays
.

Village justice was not always benign or fair. Slight deviations from the norm – a man or a woman who married a younger person or who married for a second time, anyone who married a stranger, a man who beat his wife or allowed himself to be beaten by her – was likely to be punished with a ‘charivari’: a noisy, humiliating and often bloody serenade or procession. According to an anthropologist, adulterers in Brittany were ‘the object of insulting vegetable bombardments’. A cart containing the victim would make the rounds of neighbouring villages, turning him into an object of ridicule throughout the known universe. Bad roads prevented produce from leaving the region, but they also prevented fear and envy from evaporating into a wider world.

In the eyes of the educated minority, there was no real difference between village justice and mob rule. When a ‘witch’ was burned to death in 1835 at Beaumont-en-Cambrésis, in the industrial Nord department, with the collusion of the local authorities, it seemed as though the Middle Ages had never ended. But to people who lived their whole lives in a small town or village, French imperial justice could be just as shocking and incongruous as it was to the people of colonial North Africa.

3

The Tribes of France, II

T
HE SENSE OF IDENTITY
attached to these little
pays
was more potent than any later sense of being French. The
paysans
had no flags or written histories, but they expressed their local patriotism in much the same way as nations: by denigrating their neighbours and celebrating their own nobility.

The vast and vulgar repertoire of village nicknames is the best surviving evidence of this sub-national pride. A few flattering names have been officially adopted, like Colombey-les-Belles – now said to refer to the local women but perhaps originally applied to cows. But if all the nicknames had been adopted, the map of France would now be covered with obscenities and incomprehensible jokes. In one small part of Lorraine, there were the ‘wolves’ of Lupcourt, whose local saint was Saint Loup, the ‘greencoats’ of Réméréville, whose tailor had once produced a batch of jackets in green cloth that never wore out, and the ‘big pockets’ of Saint-Remimont, whose tailor cut his coats much longer than anyone else. There were the ‘shit-arses’ (
culs crottés
) of Moncel-sur-Seille, whose mud was unusually clingy, the ‘hoity-toitys’ (
haut-la-queue
) of Art-sur-Meurthe, who lived near the big city of Nancy, and the ‘sleepers’ of Buissoncourt-en-France, who dug a mighty moat around their village and lived in happy seclusion behind a drawbridge.