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

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 villageresources 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.’
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    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 waythrough 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