This fascinating book is subtitled 'A Historical Geography From The Revolution To The First World War' and is somewhat hard to characterize. I suppose it's a wandering sort of social history. The startling ( at least to me) premise is that as recently as the Revolution, the state we know/perceive of as France did not exist. It may have existed on maps and national taxes were exacted, but only the folks in and around Paris considered themselves Frenchmen. The geographic diversity was substantial, villages were isolated from each other, there were hundreds of dialects, few people knew about the nation and according to the author, the tribal divisions were such and there was so much self-sufficiency that folks seldom ventured more than a few miles from where they were born and they married locally. France was still a medieval country. Indeed, the Revolutionaries initiated a report on 'The Necessity and Means of Exterminating Patois and Universalizing the Use of the French Language', as they were fed up with the expense of translating their decrees into Catalan, Picard, Basque, Provencal, Alsatian, Occitan, Flemish and Breton. The linguistic divide was so substantial that ninety years later, in 1880, only one-fifth of the nation was "comfortable" with French. Linguistic differences were indicative of social ones, as well as political and legal ones. The author spends a great deal of time discussing the pre-Industrial Revolution countryside that was certainly agrarian and rooted in the distant past. On more than one occasion, he points out that Caesar, who conquered it and Pliny, who wrote about it, could easily wander about 19th century Gaul and think that not much had changed. However, change did arrive." In the century that followed the Revolution, the national road network almost doubled in size and the canal network increased fivefold. There were fourteen miles of railways in 1828 and twenty-two thousand in 1888." Mapping the country became something continuously pursued, but without effectiveness or vigor. Napoleon III was defeated at Sedan in 1870 for number of reasons, not the least of which was that the French had inadequate maps and were not sure where they were going or what was there. The Third Republic that followed the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War began to build a nation around compulsory education, the eradication of patois as a first language, and revenge and recovery of Alsace and Lorraine. The author contends that August 1, 1914 was the first time in the history of France that the entire country simultaneously learned of an important event - war. Essentially, France became a modern nation only to be irrevocably torn asunder.
This has been a thoroughly enjoyable, yet challenging read. I clearly do not know enough about France to fully comprehend this book. The country he presents is so unlike the American or the immigrant-American world I know. The colonists came to Virginia and kept going to Kentucky, Ohio and Illinois. The Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, Italians and Jews came to America and again, they kept going west. Our national story is one of near-constant motion. This is about a country, society and culture where people stay in their own villages and towns for hundreds and hundreds of years. The land is prosperous enough and safe enough that the need to keep migrating is not present. That stasis leads to change 'in situ', a sort of organic evolutionary process.
No comments:
Post a Comment