The Discovery of France

Graham Robb

Norton

Every Francophile worth their sel de Guérande will enjoy The Discovery of France (Norton), Graham Robb’s fas­ci­nat­ing exam­i­na­tion of the processes by which the France of two cen­turies ago became the France of mod­ern times. At the Revolution, much of provin­cial France was unknown and effec­tively inac­ces­si­ble to the cit­i­zens and admin­is­tra­tors of Paris. Those who ven­tured out of the major urban cen­tres — Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux — and into the country’s inte­rior had great dif­fi­culty under­stand­ing the local dialects; strangers were greeted with sus­pi­cion and some­times with vio­lence. Robb, a biog­ra­pher and his­to­rian, makes excel­lent use of both pri­mary and sec­ondary sources, and knows how to bal­ance the schol­arly with the anec­do­tal (you can detect a novelist’s plea­sure in his account of how, on “a summer’s day in the early 1740s … a young geome­ter on the Cassini expe­di­tion [to pro­duce the first accu­rate map of France] was hacked to death by natives”). Robb is also an enthu­si­as­tic cyclist and claims that this book “is the result of four­teen thou­sand miles in the sad­dle and four years in the library.” In a lyri­cal pas­sage near the begin­ning of the book, he extols the many virtues of the bicy­cle, includ­ing its abil­ity to re-create, “as if by chance, much older jour­neys: tran­shu­mance trails, Gallo-Roman trade routes, pil­grim paths, river con­flu­ences that have dis­ap­peared in indus­trial waste­land, val­leys and ridge roads that used to be busy with pedlars.”