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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 Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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 Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A Francophile with a penchant for learning about France while taking cycling holidays there, Robb has written a brilliant evocation of a lost world, when most inhabitants of France from outside the Paris region did not speak French and did not think of themselves as being French, and then an equally fascinating story of how the railway and the bicycle allowed the French state to impose "Frenchness" on the country. The book draws on evidence mostly from pre-revolutionary France, but with enough from the nineteenth century to support the thesis that it was late nineteenth century technology that made the difference. The storied are fascinating - I was particularly amused to read of a (mildish) torture called "putting on pressure" that Breton women visited on men that they caught alone, and of the fact that in creating the shrine at Lourdes that village put another local place of pilgrimage out of business. You also discover that the original Tour de France was a series of circuits by artisan journeymen and that France had its own caste of "untouchables", the cagots.
If I think that there is any deficiency it is that there is no sense of connection between these simple, sometime primitive, often poor people and any kind of larger society. Most of these people would have had landlords, and not all would have been absentee ones. Even if they did not think of themselves as French, they would have known, and have had mutual bonds of obligation to, people who did. France, after all, produced enormous armies of conscripts throughout the revolutionary wars, and France was generally regarded as the richest country in continental Europe.
As an Brit reading this book one is bound to wonder whether the same could have been said of the British population at the same time, or whether Britain changed earlier, perhaps, because it is smaller and because enclosure changed the nature of agricultural society more even than industrialisation. Perhaps Mr Robb ought to start taking cycle touring holidays in Britain?
If I think that there is any deficiency it is that there is no sense of connection between these simple, sometime primitive, often poor people and any kind of larger society. Most of these people would have had landlords, and not all would have been absentee ones. Even if they did not think of themselves as French, they would have known, and have had mutual bonds of obligation to, people who did. France, after all, produced enormous armies of conscripts throughout the revolutionary wars, and France was generally regarded as the richest country in continental Europe.
As an Brit reading this book one is bound to wonder whether the same could have been said of the British population at the same time, or whether Britain changed earlier, perhaps, because it is smaller and because enclosure changed the nature of agricultural society more even than industrialisation. Perhaps Mr Robb ought to start taking cycle touring holidays in Britain?
139 of 143 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
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.
41 of 42 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
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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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Very enjoyable
I really, really enjoyed this book. It does assume some knowledge of French history, and French geography, but it really does take you on a journey through the culture of the... Read more
Published 1 month ago by JonP
Captivating
Some topics just captivates you by surprise. It helps with a skilful writer too. The book is about the people living in the French countryside during the 19th century. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Jackal
Comme çi, comme ça
Rather long and wordy, this book blows hot and cold in its ability to hold the reader's interest, with some chapters such as those on the variance of French language, Cassini's... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Andrew Ives
A welcomely different portrait of France
I've lived in France for nearly 40 years now and this is the first book, in English or in French, that I've read which has actually looks at the country from a determinedly rural... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Graham
Discover a great book!
I really love this book. I borrowed it from my local library, and renewed it so many times,it seemed a good idea to buy a copy for myself. Read more
Published 8 months ago by F. M. Callaghan
Just couldn't enjoy it
I became increasingly depressed by the accounts of rural life and I was finding it hard to see the vast majority of the French population as a largely undifferentiated, squalid... Read more
Published 9 months ago by Barbara A. Baker
Font size
It looks interesting, but as yet it is unopened. When will retailers add the font size to their blurbs. It is in such a small foint that it will be difficult to read. Read more
Published 11 months ago by D. B. Horsfall
France explained
A very interesting book and I can't remember how many times I elbowed my almost sleeping husband saying 'Listen to this' or 'Did you know that'. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Jackie R
Utterly fascinating
I suppose there are always things you can criticise about a book, but I thought it was amazing, riveting, and I bought copies for friends who I know like going to France.
Published 14 months ago by Helen
The Discovery of France
This book is like a gold prospector, panning gravel until the sought after nugget gleams in the bottom of his pan, it contains more than sufficient nuggets to justify wading... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Roamer.
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