The Discovery of France by Graham Robb Read Free Book Online Page A

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’.
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    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 fullyfunctioning 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’. Avisiting 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