The Discovery of France by Graham Robb Read Free Book Online

‘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.
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    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