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The Discovery of France (Paperback)

by Graham Robb (Author) "ONE SUMMER IN THE EARLY 1740s, on the last day of his life, a young man from Paris became the first modern cartographer to see..." (more)
4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
RRP: £9.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 454 pages
  • Publisher: Picador (4 Jul 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 033042761X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0330427616
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.4 x 3.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,617 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #7 in  Books > History > Social & Economic History
    #11 in  Books > Travel & Holiday > Countries & Regions > Europe > France
    #15 in  Books > History > Cultural History

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Product Description

Review
'Robb is a compellingly and hugely knowledgeable guide to a country that we only thought we knew.' --London Review of Books

Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
'Superlative history of la France profonde'

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First Sentence
ONE SUMMER IN THE EARLY 1740s, on the last day of his life, a young man from Paris became the first modern cartographer to see the mountain called Le Gerbier de Jonc. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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The Discovery of France
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The Discovery of France 4.7 out of 5 stars (25)
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Customer Reviews

25 Reviews
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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Unification and what was lost along the way, 8 Oct 2008
By Earthshaker (London, UK) - See all my reviews
Visiting relatives in France, I often drive down the A26 autoroute over the plain of Champagne: mile after mile of chalk plateau, with never a village or house in sight. I've often wondered how this landscape looked before motor transport, when getting from your house to work the fields involved horse-power or your own feet: was the settlement pattern denser, with hamlets and villages now swept away by the depopulation following agribusiness, or has it always been this empty? Graham Robb answered this for me in this splendid study of the making of modern France: it always was empty, to the extent that in early cartographic surveys of the country the need to record landmarks on this featureless plain led particularly conspicuous trees to find their way onto national maps.

Robb is both a historian and expert on France, and someone who has cycled extensively in the country, and he brings to his writing a grounding in the sheer physicality of the land that I don't remember encountering in a comparable historical work before: he is intensely aware of the distances, the physical effort involved in traversing them, and the network of minor roads and tracks that form a network below the sightline of the motorway driver. He is equally good on the sights, sounds and smells of the French landscape. This appreciation of the physical landscape informs his discussion of how, at the start of the early modern period, much of France was a foreign country to its rulers and the citizens of its capital: remote, difficult to reach, self-sufficient, perhaps only recently added to the kingdom, living according to customs and rituals remote from Parisian practices, and speaking at best a patois of French that the cultivated metropolitan found incomprehensible (and in many cases a completely different language: Occitan, Flemish, German, Basque).

Melding this vast and remote landscape into a unified nation-state involved, Robb indicates, great acts of state-enforced forgetting, with regional differences ironed out by a centralising state (having seen my nieces go through the rigid centralised French school curriculum, I won't argue with that). Huge riches of local peculiarities, many vanished, are brought together by Robb in this volume: be prepared to bore anyone you live with by reading out a snippet every other page. (Cafés in Paris, for example, were - and still are - disproportionately run by immigrants from the Auvergne. Want to know why? - read the book.) It's a lively read, a chance to wallow in the particularities of the French landscape, a study that raises all sorts of questions about the nation-state, its relationship to "minorities" and the extent to which it has to enforce homogeneity; my only complaint was that even at 450+ pages it was over too soon for me.
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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Discover the real France, 1 Feb 2008
By Ian David Curry "Legal Eagle" (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
This review is from: The Discovery of France (Hardcover)
Graham Robb is a serious scholar. He has written books on Balzac, Rimbaud, Victor Hugo and Baudelaire. This list also suggests another academic and personal passion - France. He earned a PhD in French literature at Vanderbilt University after his degree in modern languages at Oxford, and has since excelled as a writer. This is a rare fusion of scholarly research and revelatory fact, written in an accessible but highly literate and engaging style.

The book is quite difficult to pigeonhole. It is at times a travel book, based on Robb's own personal experience of cycling around France and getting a feel for the immensity of what the pre-industrial nation would have been. It is also an anthropological study of the French, and the development of the nation through history. In fact the central thesis, that the idea of a French nation is a purely modern conceit, occupies much of the book. Robb then sets out to describe what the modern republic replaced. The migrations of peoples, the intricate network of towns, villages and regions, the Babel tongued array of languages and dialects, the cast of untouchables and the tenuous attachment to Paris and royal control.

It is a biography of the French people, an erudite, if potted, ramble through folklore, local history, linguistics and sociology. Perhaps most startling is that the book manages to amaze on every page with facts that even those conversant with French history would be intrigued with. This is a history of the ordinary people, of the rhythms and nature of everyday life. It is an account of a nation held together by the loosest of binds, where the Paris elite could barely travel and expect to be understood outside the Ile de France.

This is at the heart of the book. Robb considers that the bulk of history written on France starts from the central conceit that Paris, king and court were somehow representative or integral to the rest of France. He demonstrates this falsehood with startling stories, from the existence and experience of an outcast group, the Cagot to the original `tour de France', conducted on foot by the apprentice bands of craftsmen and covering the vast internal migrations of workers, the daily grind and difficulty of peasant life, and the experience of those `explorers' who ventured into this misunderstood hinterland, are revealed in a delicious and gripping text.

If I was to be glib I could say this was a Bill Bryson for the literary set, but this would diminish both Robb and Bryson's work. It is a unique and fascinating ramble through French history, with a strong central argument that modern France, and with it the modern French, are a singularly modern creation. This was built over the rich and intricate patchwork of local and regional identities, which, Robb manages to argue with an erudite conviction, were far more interesting and noteworthy entities.

Robb won the 1997 Whitbread Book Award for best biography with Victor Hugo and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Rimbaud in 2001. I expect this book to win even greater praise. This was easily my non-fiction book recommendation of the year for 2007, and is a book I will return to. It was revelatory, lucid and vivid. Anyone with an interest in France, or in history, will be well served by getting this book as soon as possible.
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110 of 114 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Discover the real France, 30 Jul 2008
By Ian David Curry "Legal Eagle" (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
Graham Robb is a serious scholar. He has written books on Balzac, Rimbaud, Victor Hugo and Baudelaire. This list also suggests another academic and personal passion - France. He earned a PhD in French literature at Vanderbilt University after his degree in modern languages at Oxford, and has since excelled as a writer. This is a rare fusion of scholarly research and revelatory fact, written in an accessible but highly literate and engaging style.

The book is quite difficult to pigeonhole. It is at times a travel book, based on Robb's own personal experience of cycling around France and getting a feel for the immensity of what the pre-industrial nation would have been. It is also an anthropological study of the French, and the development of the nation through history. In fact the central thesis, that the idea of a French nation is a purely modern conceit, occupies much of the book. Robb then sets out to describe what the modern republic replaced. The migrations of peoples, the intricate network of towns, villages and regions, the Babel tongued array of languages and dialects, the cast of untouchables and the tenuous attachment to Paris and royal control.

It is a biography of the French people, an erudite, if potted, ramble through folklore, local history, linguistics and sociology. Perhaps most startling is that the book manages to amaze on every page with facts that even those conversant with French history would be intrigued with. This is a history of the ordinary people, of the rhythms and nature of everyday life. It is an account of a nation held together by the loosest of binds, where the Paris elite could barely travel and expect to be understood outside the Ile de France.

This is at the heart of the book. Robb considers that the bulk of history written on France starts from the central conceit that Paris, king and court were somehow representative or integral to the rest of France. He demonstrates this falsehood with startling stories, from the existence and experience of an outcast group, the Cagot to the original `tour de France', conducted on foot by the apprentice bands of craftsmen and covering the vast internal migrations of workers, the daily grind and difficulty of peasant life, and the experience of those `explorers' who ventured into this misunderstood hinterland, are revealed in a delicious and gripping text.

If I was to be glib I could say this was a Bill Bryson for the literary set, but this would diminish both Robb and Bryson's work. It is a unique and fascinating ramble through French history, with a strong central argument that modern France, and with it the modern French, are a singularly modern creation. This was built over the rich and intricate patchwork of local and regional identities, which, Robb manages to argue with an erudite conviction, were far more interesting and noteworthy entities.

Robb won the 1997 Whitbread Book Award for best biography with Victor Hugo and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Rimbaud in 2001. I expect this book to win even greater praise. This was easily my non-fiction book recommendation of the year for 2007, and is a book I will return to. It was revelatory, lucid and vivid. Anyone with an interest in France, or in history, will be well served by getting this book as soon as possible.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous Book
This is an absolute must read for any one interested in the real France,a very well written book full of the most fascinating facts. Read more
Published 3 days ago by Christine Marryat

5.0 out of 5 stars For your eyes only
This book is everything you expect from the title of the book.

If you have eyes which are beginning to fail, the larger hard back version is easier to read. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Lynda Perry

5.0 out of 5 stars Why no French edition
Having thoroughly enjoyed this fascinating book which is brimming over with unforgettable facts (such as the fact that in the eighteenth century when France was arguably the most... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Telletubby

5.0 out of 5 stars France, but not as you know it
Graham Robb's book is crammed with incredibly surprising facts about the French nation.

It is best non-fiction book on the French State, its people and history that I... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Jerrold Baldwin

5.0 out of 5 stars Astoundingly good
This is one of the best books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Gripping, simply and engagingly written, and with revelations on almost every page, I had to ration myself... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Antonin Artaud

4.0 out of 5 stars The Discovery of France
On the whole a very informative and interesting book. One into which it is easy to dip without necessarily reading from cover to cover. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Paulli Taylor-Lewis

5.0 out of 5 stars That explains everything!
Well, perhaps not EVERYTHING, but such a lot. I have lived in France for 14 years. When I first arrived, having moved from one rich occidental country to another, everything... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Josquine

4.0 out of 5 stars What a discovery!
A good informative read, well written and most enjoyable. Full of information my French relatives don't know.
Published 5 months ago by Quiet Paul

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, absorbing easy read
I cant praise this enough, The writing is excellent. You are carried along by the well structured fascinating facts about France which gives so much insight into the character of... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Sean Higgins

5.0 out of 5 stars Much better than you might think!
This book looks and sounds like it may be a little dry for a casual reader interested in France and the French, but it really is easy to dip into and I found myself reading bits... Read more
Published 5 months ago by N. Royle

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