The Discovery of France (48 page)

It was partly because it told such captivating tales of ancient beings alive in the modern world that the new discipline struck a chord. A science that could identify the man who delivered the coal as a prehistoric relic was bound to find an audience. It also seemed to corroborate the evidence from other disciplines. Statistics had suggested that the ‘extremities’ of France – which meant almost anywhere that was closer to the sea than to Paris – were effectively a different land. Baron Dupin’s celebrated ‘Map of France Enlightened and Obscure’ (1824) had illustrated the degree of education or ‘civilization’ in each
département
in several shades, from pure white for the most advanced (Paris and the Île-de-France) to pitch black (the Auvergne). Later versions appeared under the crude title, ‘Map of Ignorance’. In 1837, Adolphe d’Angeville’s charts of education and
illiteracy, tallness and shortness, conformity and criminality, drew a line across the country from Saint Malo to Geneva. It was some time before these geographical differences were shown to be circumstantial and temporary rather than genetic.

When the evidence failed to fit the pattern, it could always be adjusted. Pierre Broca based his conclusions on skulls, divided into brachycephalic (literally, short-headed) and dolichocephalic (long-headed). Parisian skulls supposedly showed that racial superiority was reflected in social class and that, therefore, the Parisian bourgeoisie was at the very apex of the socio-anthropological pyramid: ‘The cranium of a modern bourgeois is more voluminous than that of a proletarian.’ Basque skulls, however, were worryingly larger than Parisian skulls, despite the fact that the skulls used as evidence had been dug up from the cemetery of an ‘ignorant and backward’ village that had only recently been roused from its ‘vegetative’ state by trade and industry. However, as a reviewer of Broca’s work added, chortling at the very thought, ‘M. Broca is far from concluding that the Basques are more intelligent than Parisians!’

Like most of their academic colleagues, anthropologists marketed their findings with the interpretations attached, but they still managed to amass a great deal of valuable information about life in nineteenth-century France: tools, carvings, devotional objects and love tokens; the ideograms and counting systems used by otherwise illiterate Breton farmers; the linguistic peculiarities of the Basque language, the prehistoric origin of which was demonstrated by the fact that the names of all domesticated animals and cultivated plants were imported from other languages. Some of the arresting traits noted by anthropologists as racial features were the result of a practice that was common throughout much of Europe until the end of the nineteenth century. In some parts, especially Gascony and the Auvergne, babies were strapped into shallow cradles with their heads in a wooden hollow. The skull grew into the shape of its container and by the time the baby could walk, it had a wide head and a high, flat forehead. Since babies instinctively turn to the light on waking, the result was often startlingly asymmetrical. Later, to prevent the growing brain from cracking open the skull (according to midwives interviewed in the 1900s), the head of the child was compressed with a scarf or,
in wealthier households in Languedoc, with a band of strong cloth called a
sarro-cap
. Many men and women wore these head-constrictors all their lives and felt naked without them.

Skull-measuring anthropologists recorded a geography of France that has now completely disappeared. More than half the men and women in Rouen hospices in 1833, and nearly everyone in some parts of Languedoc had a modified head and some other deformity: an aquiline nose produced by crushing the cartilage and pulling out the nose, or ears squashed and notched by tight bands until they looked like pieces of crumpled linen that had been severely ironed. Gaits and gestures marked the population just as agriculture coloured the land. The way in which people walked and looked out at the world could reveal their origin as clearly as their accent. A backward elongation of the skull shifts the body’s centre of gravity; the neck muscles try to compensate and the angle of the eye is altered, especially when the process has warped the eye socket.

These physical differences disappeared within a generation, but the scientific prejudice that interpreted them as signs of inferiority would survive like the relic of an ancient society.

*

O
F ALL THE ARTEFACTS
collected for museums and depicted on postcards, the most spectacular were local costumes. Once, it seemed, costumes had varied from one little
pays
to the next, like dialects and domestic architecture. But local styles were already disappearing before the Revolution. The amazing pyramidal headdresses of lace worn by women in the Pays de Caux were a rare sight by the 1820s and are probably more common today in the age of folklore festivals and heritage tourism. ‘There are no more national costumes in France’, Mérimée wrote in 1834: ‘Wesserling dresses everywhere [printed frocks from factories in the Vosges], and bonnets just like those worn by cooks in Paris.’ His comment was echoed by hundreds of disappointed travellers who had seen colourful engravings in books. Brittany was still a patchwork of different local styles, but even Bretons were beginning to shed their old clothes as softer, brighter dresses and shirts became available from the shop in the nearest town or a department store in Paris.

Ethnologists hoped that regional dress would provide a magical glimpse of the Celtic and Druidic past. It turned out that even the fashions that seemed indigenous to Brittany had come from Paris. The round hats of the Bretons had once been common throughout Europe and simply lasted longer in parts where time passed more slowly and tailors worked from ancient patterns. The
glazig
(‘blue’) style of Quimper originated in the sale of blue material that had been used for uniforms in the Napoleonic Wars. The doublets and cocked hats that were worn in parts of the southern Auvergne until the 1820s had been seen in the streets of Paris a generation before. Most local styles were less than a century old. The velvet headdress of the women of Arles had nothing to do with ancient Greek colonists: it dated from the 1830s. The characteristic black butterfly bows of Alsace were only ten years old when they became a patriotic symbol of the lost provinces after the defeat by Prussia in 1870.

Parisians had a chance to see some of these provincial curios at the 1878 Exposition Universelle. The Third Republic was celebrating the nation’s recovery from the Franco-Prussian War and the capital’s survival of the anarchist Commune. Clothes were a vital part of the Exhibition: they embodied the rich diversity of France and proved that fashion and frivolity were a serious source of wealth. Modern urban fashions could be seen at the Palais du Champ de Mars, near the site of the future Eiffel Tower. Regional costumes were exhibited across the Seine in the Palais du Trocadéro. A new Museum of Ethnography was soon to be installed in the Trocadéro and some of its treasures were already on display.

French explorers had brought back some beautiful examples of tribal dress from North Africa, New Caledonia, the Americas and the Arctic Circle, but traditional French costume had proved surprisingly elusive. A suit from the Montagne Noire had been made for the museum from memory by an old weaver because no authentic example could be found. Five towns and the
département
of Savoie had sent some ‘
costumes populaires
’. The other five exhibitors were Parisian. One of them was the department store La Belle Jardinière, which had been selling ready-made clothes since 1824. Its regional costumes were more likely to be worn at a fancy-dress ball than in a provincial village, but no one would have accused its tailors of
inauthenticity. The role of the costumed dummies was to represent the quaint and colourful world of the provinces – a land that was half remembered and half invented, in which tribal divisions had been marked as clearly as they were in the crowd of black suits and proletarian smocks that flowed through the exhibition halls.

16

Lost Provinces

I
N
1882,
THANKS TO
the extraordinary efforts of a thirty-fouryear- old primary-school teacher called François-Adolphe Blondel, no one in the little Norman village of Raffetot (population, 650) could possibly be ignorant of the fact that they belonged, not just to a village, a
pays
and a province, but also to a great nation called France. After leaving his native hamlet near Dieppe, M. Blondel had worked hard to qualify as an
instituteur
and took his job as seriously as the Republic expected him to do. Even after the Guizot Law of 1833, which required every
commune
of at least five hundred inhabitants to have a school for boys,
³⁹
many village teachers had been little more than skivvies: they helped the priest at mass, rang the bells, sang in the choir and were paid the same as a day-labourer, sometimes more if they could read and write. Now, they were properly trained and had salaries and pensions.

M. Blondel was a shining example of the new kind of teacher. He had already won bronze and silver medals for giving free lessons to local adults. Next door to his little classroom in the town hall, he had organized the municipal archives and inscribed on a board of honour the names of all his predecessors since 1668. (Like hundreds of villages all over France, Raffetot had not waited for the dawn of democracy to equip itself with a teacher.) In M. Blondel’s classroom,
the tight horizons of the
pays
seemed to open onto a new dimension: when they looked up from their wooden desks, the pupils could see the flags of foreign countries painted brightly on the ceiling.

One day, M. Blondel had been contemplating the patch of ground that passed for a school garden when he spotted a pedagogical opportunity. He gathered together some rocks, a few clumps of boxwood, some tent pegs and some lengths of rope. Then he set about transforming the garden into a political map of France, as he explained in the local paper,
Le Progrès de Bolbec
:

After carving rivers into the soil with a stick, he completed his interactive landscape with a sea of red sand and boxwood borders. M. Blondel was then able to rehearse his patriotic infant army for the war which, one day, would avenge France and restore Alsace-Lorraine to the fatherland:

Many of those pupils and their children would retrace the route to Strasbourg in reality. Thirty of the names that M. Blondel marked in the register every morning were later inscribed on Raffetot’s memorial to the dead of the First World War.

*

T
HE CHILDREN WHO MARCHED
across the school garden at Raffetot were growing up in a republic that used the military defeat of the preceding regime in 1870 as a means of inspiring its citizens with love of the fatherland. The ‘lost provinces’ and ‘lost towns’ of Alsace and Lorraine were the missing pieces that would give the new
generation a yearning for national unity and, according to the teachers’ manuals produced by Ernest Lavisse (Sorbonne professor and former tutor of the imperial prince), ‘provide the Republic with good citizens, good workers and good soldiers’. In the new Republican catechism, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost were replaced by Vercingetorix, leader of the Gauls, Joan of Arc, Turgot, Vauban and other figures too old to be controversial. ‘The fatherland is not your village or your province’, wrote Lavisse. ‘It is all of France. The fatherland is like a great family.’ Compared to similar homilies in British and German schools, French pedagogical nationalism was remarkably untriumphalist, not to say rueful: ‘The defeats at Poitiers, Agincourt, Waterloo and Sedan are painful memories for us all.’

In 1907, Professor Lavisse travelled to Le Nouvion-en-Thiérache (this was the
pays
where, not long before, anthropologists had feared to tread) to speak at the annual prize-giving. Lavisse was a native of Le Nouvion but had long since transcended his origins. As he told the children in a confusing mixture of bourgeois prejudice and political rhetoric, they, too, would cease to be stereotypical peasants and become citizens of that vague and glorious thing, the fatherland:

The children would not necessarily remember or understand the lesson in national unity. On the eve of the First World War, about half of all recruits, and quite a few future officers, were unaware that France had lost territory to Germany in 1870. Alsace and Lorraine might as well have been foreign countries.

A sense of national identity was not, in any case, what most people
wanted from a school. The need for education had first become apparent in many places as a result of conscription. Parents suddenly felt the burden of illiteracy when their sons left home and letters arrived from the regiment, written by a comrade – with rude words and dirty stories if the comrade had a nasty sense of humour – and were read out on the doorstep by the postman.