I picked up this book and started to read it without really expecting myself to get far. I started it on a whim where it got recommended through some random blog post I came across that I cannot even remember now where that was. I downloaded the kindle preview and started the first chapter. Soon thereafter I found myself enjoying it enough that I just kept on going and kept reading. Usually these kinds of books I find myself having to push through but this I just didn’t really have to at all. Maybe just the way it was written was easy enough for me to understand and read that it was just easy to keep going. Even then, its not a normal book for me to read. Its not like anything else what I’ve read recently or further in the past apart from one book, The History of Thailand which I picked up before an upcoming trip there. Against that, here I just did not have any reason to read it.
I did wonder about this book and what I don’t know is if these characteristics are unique to France or if they are mirrored in many other nations. For sure England industrialised before France but I don’t know were the closed off nature of the French people unique to it. Many people barely left the area they were born in and the dialects of each place meant they practically had a unique language per small region (pays) but was this just a uniquely French thing or did other countries experience this too. It probably is a bit of a mixed bag with most like this but some regions having more integrated economies at certain periods, such as industrial England and the Roman Empire.
Essence of the book
IT SEEMS TO BE a law of social history that the greater the number of people with a particular experience, the less evidence remains of that experience. There are hundreds of pointlessly detailed accounts of banal coach journeys made by tourists, but the odysseys undertaken by migrants have vanished like most of the routes they walked.
This quote sums up the book well. It is about those boring everyday experiences that everyone goes through but nobody talks about. They are there to be endured and then promptly forgotten. It is mostly about the usual un-noteworthy people and events of day to day life that we have otherwise forgotten We know lots about the large events that happened around this time like the revolution and other happenings in Paris but what we don’t know much about is the rest of France and how it reacted. It mentions some of the larger events like revolutions and Napoleon but those are mostly mentioned to give context in time. Many times they had no affect on the everyday life in the rest of France. In fact, in the early years before the revolution, the people of Paris at the time largely knew very little about France and those in the rest of France knew little about Paris.
Given the title of the book, it largely ignores Paris except in the context of the rest of France and how it influenced everywhere else. It largely ignores the “great” people Paris produced except when they ventured abroad to the other parts of France, like Victor Hugo.
Hugo himself had discovered his favourite form of transport in 1821, when he travelled from Paris to Dreux to see the girl he hoped to marry. On the day after arriving, he wrote to Alfred de Vigny to tell him about the vehicle that opened up new vistas and revolutionized his view of the world: So here I’ve been since yesterday, visiting Dreux and getting ready to set out on the road to Nonancourt. I walked all the way here under a burning sun, on roads without a shadow of shade. I am exhausted but very proud of having covered twenty leagues on my legs. I cast a pitying glance at every carriage that I saw. If you had been with me, you would never have seen such an insolent biped. When I think that Alexandre Soumet has to take a taxi to go from the Luxembourg to the Chaussée d’Antin, I am tempted to believe myself a superior form of animal. This experiment has proved to me that it is possible to use one’s feet for walking.
Indeed it is impossible to talk about France without talking about Paris as it grew from 10% to 20% of the entire population in just 50 years and produced far more notable people than the rest. However the author does a good job of minimising it to keep focus on everywhere else.
Rather it talks about how the people would travel to Paris in search of work while explorers, government workers and later on tourists would come from Paris in the opposite direction. Some places were better connected with Paris via infrastructure than with the neighbouring pays due to the road and later rail infrastructure due to the various government policies of connecting Paris with everywhere else rather than local places with each other
Mapping & Infrastructure & Travelling Around
France as a country is made up of lots of small parts and brought together largely in spite of themselves. It is an almost manufactured country. Yes there are largely natural borders that separate them from neighbours like the Pyrenees to the south or the Alps and the Rhine on the east. But within for a large period of time individual places, or pays, which covered no more than a few square kilometers stayed largely independent of each other. Travelling to the next one was almost unheard of and one was effectively a foreigner for doing so. France was manufactured by the elite in Paris and most residence of pays largely did not know or cared about the country to which they belonged. Parisians looked down on the provinces and they in turn looked down on Paris. Some would travel to Paris for work but most would never forget the area they came from and many would return back home to marry
Mapping the country was a huge ordeal, first undertaken by Cassini and that took 70 years to be completed from 1745 - 1815. It was an odyssey that took great lengths
No one who sees a well-filled diagram of France in a confident history of the country would guess that it took almost seventy years to publish the Cassini map and that the last sheets (Brittany and the coastal Landes) did not appear until after the fall of Napoleon in 1815.
It didn’t really industrialise apart from a small few places for a lot of its history. sometimes this was due to the importance placed on craftsmanship where people specialised making a very specific thing in a certain area
infrastructure
In the century that followed the Revolution, the national road network almost doubled in size and the canal network increased five-fold. There were fourteen miles of railway in 1828 and twenty-two thousand in 1888. By the mid-nineteenth century, a high-speed goods vehicle could cover fifty miles a day.
infrastructure
When the main roads were improved and railways were built, trade was drained from the capillary network, links were broken, and a large part of the population suddenly found itself more isolated than before. Many regions today are experiencing the same effect because of the TGV railway system.
infrastructure & travelling around - account of the reality of getting from one place to the next. these are things you don’t think about
Personal accounts of journeys never match the timetables. The following incident took place in 1736, but it could have occurred at any time until the mid-nineteenth century. One day that summer, in the centre of Strasbourg, a young artist-engraver from Germany was waiting to board the express coach for Paris, where he hoped to make his fortune. Johann Georg Wille and a friend had walked a hundred and sixty miles from Usingen on the other side of Frankfurt. They had arrived in Strasbourg with just enough time to register Wille’s suitcase at the coach office and to climb the spire of Strasbourg Minster, which was the tallest building in the world. From the top of the spire, they saw the whole Alsace plain and the Vosges mountains where the coach would soon be speeding towards Paris. The sightseeing and the farewell breakfast went on too long. When they arrived on the square, the coach had gone and was already well on its way to the first staging post at Saverne, twenty-five miles to the north-west. What was I to do? The only solution was to run after it. It had been raining and there were still occasional showers. The cobbles were slippery and the only support I had was my feeble sword. Strasbourg is seven leagues from Saverne. I covered the distance, as far as possible, without stopping to eat or drink, and did not catch up with the coach until it was entering the courtyard of the inn at Saverne where it was to spend the night.
travelling around
Until foreign tourists arrived with their money and expectations, most hotels were simple inns at staging posts. They offered meals at the common table and a spartan room, sometimes just a bunk bed in the kitchen or the dining room. The table was usually occupied by travelling salesmen who helped themselves to the stew before the ladies and appeared to need very little sleep. Single bedrooms were usually available only in grand hotels. Many travellers found themselves climbing into bed with a member of the innkeeper’s family or one of the passengers from the stagecoach.
travelling around
Historical dramas usually show the most efficient technology of the period – healthy horses pulling shiny carriages on slightly bumpy roads – but not the most ordinary scenes of daily life: a cow munching peacefully on a main road near a city; two carriages stuck facing each other for hours on a road so narrow that the doors could hardly be opened; a horse, with wooden planks placed under its belly, being hoisted out of a mud-hole; a farmer ploughing up the road to plant his buckwheat and potatoes.
Food
the regional specialties france is so well known for are largely manufactured by a skilled marketer or producer who wanted their own produce to be given a leg up over the countless other ones.
food
For tourists who ventured beyond Paris, the true taste of France was stale bread. The degree of staleness reflected the availability of fuel. A manual of rural architecture published in Toulouse in 1820 stated that the public oven should be large enough to allow the week’s bread to be baked in a single twenty-four-hour period. In the Alps, enough bread was produced in a single batch for a year and sometimes two or three years. It was baked, at least once, then hung above a smoky fire or dried in the sun. Sometimes, the ‘loaf’ was just a thin barley and bean-flour biscuit. To make it edible and to improve the colour, it was softened in buttermilk or whey. Rich people used white wine.
food - specialities
Far from representing the essence of a region, some of these specialties simply reflected the advertising skill of a single grocer. They rarely found their way onto travellers’ plates and were not always available in the region itself. The Dijon area was not particularly rich in blackcurrants until an enterprising cafe owner made an exploratory trip to Paris in 1841, noted the popularity of cassis and began to market his own liqueur as a regional speciality.
food
By 1889, there were said to be a hundred restaurants for every bookshop in the capital. ‘A nutritional tour of Paris, which would once have been a non-event, would now take almost as long as a voyage around the world.’ It was from Paris that many ‘provincial’ dishes reached the provinces.
food
It was only after a century of foreign tourists that large numbers of French men and women began to discover France for themselves. But even then, most food-conscious people preferred to explore the provinces à la carte, in a Parisian restaurant.
Language
the French language as we know it today was a product of Paris and only reached the rest of the country by a concentrated governmental effort to spread it to everyone. it was a slow process but eventually succeeded
language
But the two Romanic languages that covered most of the country – French in the north, Occitan in the south – also turned out to be a muddle of incomprehensible dialects. In many parts, the dialect changed at the village boundary. Several respondents claimed that differences were perceptible at a distance of one league (less than three miles) and sometimes just a few feet, as the writer from Périgueux explained: ‘The patois’s reign ends at the river Nizonne. It is amazing to cross this little stream and to hear an entirely different patois, which sounds more like French.’ In the Jura, there were ‘almost as many different patois as there are villages’. Even plants and stars had their own local names, as if each little region lived under a different sky.
unique story
The shepherds of the Landes spent whole days on stilts, using a stick to form a tripod when they wanted to rest. Perched ten feet in the air, they knitted woollen garments and scanned the horizon for stray sheep. People who saw them in the distance compared them to tiny steeples and giant spiders. They could cover up to seventy-five miles a day at 8 mph. When Napoleon’s empress Marie-Louise travelled through the Landes to Bayonne, her carriage was escorted for several miles by shepherds on stilts who could easily have overtaken the horses. It was such an efficient mode of transport that letters in the Landes were still being delivered by postmen on stilts in the 1930s.