The Discovery of France (47 page)

The effect of all this on the local population is easy to imagine but hard to determine. The arrival of mass tourism in a previously unspoilt area – or in an area spoilt only by small-scale activities – was certainly traumatic. In resorts along the Channel coast, land was expropriated, people were displaced and the price of everything went up. Building workers erected their own temporary villages with their own supply of food. Sometimes, while the resort was being built, the only jobs for local people were rubbish collection and toilet cleaning. As in the old days, there were battles between the natives and the migrant workers who despised the peasants and the ‘filthy Bretons’. Just as new plants and flowers from other parts of France and Europe were sprouting along the coast and the railway lines, prostitution spread syphilis along the tourist trails.

Some towns were building sites for the best part of a century and were still quite fresh when they were flattened again in the Second World War. Cabourg-les-Bains, founded in 1855, was a cement-and-asphalt wasteland for several years before it acquired its crescent of elegant villas and its gas-lit promenade. New towns such as Berck, Berneval, Deauville and Le Touquet-Paris Plage were developed by speculators, advertised by shareholding journalists and prepared as if for a mass evacuation organized according to social rank. Conty’s guide to the Normandy coast (1889) was careful to define the clientele of each resort to avoid embarrassment: Mers was ‘an informal bathing-place’ for petits bourgeois and their families; Agon-Coutainville was for well-to-do shopkeepers and tradesmen (its beach was called ‘the booksellers’ beach’, where ‘booksellers come to forget that they are booksellers’); Landemer-Gréville was for ‘artists’ and
Étretat for ‘famous artists’; Houlgate was the resort of ‘aristocratic families’, its ‘soft, fine sand’ being ‘worthy of the most elegant and delicate feet’; while Arromanches was ‘recommended to bathers who like to live in patriarchal simplicity’ (i.e. who don’t have much money). Some unfashionable resorts, not mentioned in the guide, received the children of paupers sent to sanatoriums by the Assistance Publique.

Nothing of this magnitude had happened to the coast of Normandy since the Viking invasions and the Hundred Years War. Of all the places mentioned in the previous paragraph, only one – the ‘fishing village’ of E´ tretat with its rocky road and its cheap little inn – had appeared in Murray’s comprehensive guide of 1854.

When the building crews had gone, the native population found itself in a new world full of strange surprises. Bourgeois families walked into cottages uninvited and poked their noses into the upturned boats in which, they supposed, the fisher folk lived all year round. The model ships and crude paintings that were hung in chapels to thank the Virgin were examined as quaint curios by tourists who treated the chapel as an ethnological museum.

From Brittany to Provence, people who had seen their
pays
modernized and urbanized, who worked in canning factories and understood the tidal effects on their industry of distant markets, were suddenly asked to play the role of primitive stereotypes. No trip to the seaside was complete without a first-hand account of wreckers parading lanterns on the oxen’s horns to imitate the lights of ships, luring vessels onto the reef and pulling rings from the fingers of the drowned. Hardy travellers visited the hulks at Brest and Rochefort to watch the convicts being thrashed. Decent families were content with tales of terrible hardship. On a walking tour of Brittany in 1847, the young Gustave Flaubert attended the funeral of a drowned fisherman at Carnac and observed the candlelit features of the widow, ‘her cretinous, contracted mouth, shivering with despair, and all her poor face weeping like a storm’. There are dozens of similar accounts of picturesque suffering. In 1837, on the shores of the Arcachon Basin, which is the only sheltered sea along the razor edge of the Atlantic coast, a town councillor on holiday found the recent shipwreck a source of inspiration and edification:

The Arcachon disaster had occurred on the open sea, out beyond the sandy spit of land called Cap Ferret, where fishermen cast their nets, watching for signs of a storm before rowing smartly back into the basin towards the towering Dune du Pyla. Most ships that sank went down within sight of the shore. Holidaymakers had been known to observe the ‘curious and gripping spectacle’ from the beach. At Ostend, in 1845, people attending a dance at the bathing establishment watched two ships go down in the harbour. They stood outside in their ball gowns trying to catch the sound of cries of distress on the wind.

A cartoon published in 1906 shows a middle-class couple talking to a Breton peasant woman on the hill above her seaside hovel: ‘So you lost your husband and two sons in a shipwreck? How interesting . . . You must tell us all about it.’ By then, blatant voyeurism was going out of fashion, but scoffing at the natives remained a popular activity at the seaside and in spas. People who felt socially out of their depth at the Grand Hotel could measure their sophistication against the locals. Conty’s guide recommended a variety of farcical pilgrimages and
pardons
, and a visit to the beach at Le Tréport, where brawny fishwives pulled the trawlers in on ropes: ‘Just imagine the spectacle when the rope breaks!’ When picture postcards began to circulate in the late 1880s, photographers came from cities to persuade the locals to act out ‘typical’ activities. Women would rummage in chests and put on their grandmothers’ ancient costumes. Men with wily features and scary hair would sit around a bottle and pretend to be drunk. Peasants in the Auvergne posed in petrified simulation of the lively dance called the
bourrée
. Most of these scenes look so implausible because they depicted a world that was already long dead.

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N
O ONE KNOWS EXACTLY
what this condescending interference meant to the people in the postcards. Nosy tourists were probably less irritating than local councils who tried to sanitize the populace and prevent it from frightening away tourists. In Dieppe, women and children were told to wear shoes in public. In Arcachon, once the railway had made it the favourite resort of Bordeaux, men were instructed to wear ‘roomy trousers’ and women to cover their legs with ‘a large gown reaching their heels’, which must have made cockle-picking almost impossible. Children were to stop bathing ‘immodestly’ ‘where respectable people walk at all times’. The beach was supposed to be natural, which meant that all signs of work had to be removed, as well as seaweed, dead fish, huts and local humans.

Not all these measures would have been to the liking of the tourists. Staring at naked bodies, sometimes through telescopes sited at strategic points above the beach, was a major attraction of the seaside resorts. Some men went on holiday, not to explore a new part of the country, but to see previously undiscovered parts of the female anatomy. Further down the coast, near the border with Spain, Biarritz was a fishing village of red roofs and green shutters. Basque people came down to bathe in the ocean and to meet their lovers in the grotto called the Chambre d’Amour. For male tourists, the highlights of Biarritz were the ride from Bayonne, when they sat beside a pretty Basque girl (they were always pretty) in a contraption called a
cacolet
(two wicker chairs slung on either side of a horse), and then the sight of shop-girls from Bayonne splashing about in the surf with next to nothing on. Victor Hugo spent one of his happiest days in Biarritz examining the short skirts and tattered blouses.

Ogling was quite acceptable, but not everyone was content with aesthetic appreciation. Sex tourists were on the prowl long before cheap flights to the Philippines. The Frenchman who repeatedly bought milk and cream from girls in the valley of Chamonix so that he could ‘feel his somewhat withered mouth brush against the appetizing lips of those young Alpine nymphs’ no longer seems the
jolly bon viveur he did to his companions. In 1889, two men from Paris on a walking holiday near the Pyrenean spa of Vernet-les-Bains became excited by the dark eyes and ‘delicate smile’ of a young gypsy girl and were bitterly disappointed when her parents refused to sell her to them as a living souvenir.

Though fishermen and peasants who left no written record inevitably appear as passive victims, there are signs that local people knew how to defend their honour. At Pont-Aven – a little flour-and-cider port in southern Brittany, which was already famous when Paul Gauguin went there in 1886 in search of ‘the primitive’ – an Englishman was roughed up by locals and forced to behave in a civilized manner when he refused to remove his hat for a religious procession. Another Englishman, who was being carried by a fisherwoman from his boat to the shore at Boulogne-sur-Mer, decided to test the firmness of her thighs and was dumped into the sea, flat on his back, ‘to the great entertainment of all’.

Local people, too, enjoyed making ethnological discoveries. At the Grand Hotel in Cabourg, when electric light flooded the dining room and fishermen and tradesmen, with their wives and children, pressed their noses against the glass and peered at the luxurious scene within, Marcel Proust felt uneasily like an exotic creature in ‘an immense, enchanted aquarium’. Comical strangers were not just a welcome distraction, they also provided new jobs: bath attendant, lift boy, chambermaid, shop assistant, waitress and cook. Men and women who had once been dependent on the fickle sea could hire out boats and fishing tackle, deckchairs and donkeys. They could manufacture rustic antiques and sell fake local paintings supplied by a wholesaler in Paris. The ancient profession of begging had never been so lucrative. Tourists bound for the Pyrenean spas were besieged by flocks of girls who sold bunches of flowers through the carriage window, then snatched the flowers away to sell to the next group. In the Ossau valley, Hippolyte Taine was more troubled by beggars than by fleas:

To some tourists, this might have seemed the ultimate degradation of a proud and ancient people, but to the cowherd himself, it was a business opportunity. Many of his compatriots had emigrated and some villages were disappearing. A peasant who was lucky enough to live on a tourist route was more likely to be able to stay in the land of his birth.

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T
HE MORE SINISTER ASPECTS
of this meeting of two worlds were more apparent in laboratories and offices than in spas and resorts. Some anthropologists, misled by postcard photographers with an eye for the outlandish, had noticed what seemed to be Neanderthal types living in rural Picardy and on the Breton coast. Flattened brows, thick lips, dark skin and ‘a sinister expression’ were unusual, but this only proved – according to an article in the journal of the Paris Anthropological Society in 1872 – that the individuals in question belonged to an ancient race now on the verge of extinction. Perhaps these had been the inhabitants of Europe in the Quaternary period? ‘If so, this would be one of the great discoveries of our time. An exhaustive search should be conducted for this extremely rare and sporadic type.’

Some of these early anthropologists could be just as insensitive as the tourists who sauntered into people’s houses uninvited. Sixty skulls taken from a cemetery in the Aveyron in the 1870s belonged to corpses that still had living relatives. The scientists, too, were interested in naked bodies and persuaded native people to expose their atavistic features to the camera. While tourists flocked to unspoilt parts of France before they were spoilt by other tourists, scientists rushed to faraway places, such as Provence, Savoy, Corsica and the forested Thiérache near the Belgian border, to buy postcards and to measure skulls, even though, as one researcher warned, ‘anthropometrical research may prove difficult and even dangerous’. In this
respect, the colonies were better known than France itself. The founder of the Anthropological Society, Pierre Broca, reminded his colleagues in 1879 that, ‘until now, anthropologists have described and measured more Negroes than Frenchmen’.

In France, the fledgling discipline was dominated by two contradictory ideas. The first idea was that the suburban savages in industrial cities, the ‘dangerous classes’ who frightened middleclass people, were dark and stunted, not because of poor living conditions but because they belonged to very primitive races. The second idea was that the vanquished Gauls were the backbone of the nation and that, despite several centuries of invasions and intermingling, the population of France embodied something continuous and profound.

Most anthropologists realized that there was no such thing as a ‘pure’ Frenchman. They also knew that ‘Gaul’ and ‘Celt’ were flimsy terms veiling a huge body of ignorance. Unfortunately, some of their premature theories were highly seductive. Napoleon I I I and, later, Maréchal Pétain and Jean-Marie Le Pen, used the myth of the impetuous, vain but fundamentally decent Gaul to bolster their image of the state: Gauls were the proud antithesis of the sponging, dark-skinned Mediterranean races, but different from the regimented barbarians across the Rhine. It was especially important to show that the people of Lorraine, who lived under the threat and then the reality of German invasion, were essentially Gallic.