The Discovery Of France: A Historical Geography From The Revolution To The First World War, by Graham Robb

While I must admit that I did not like the pro-socialist and pro-pagan bias that the author showed when it came to discussing matters of politics and religion, there is a lot to appreciate about this book when it come to the idea of how it is that a country is discovered. While we take it for granted that a country like France would be easy to discover, our knowledge of other countries and even our own is especially limited, and this is true most of all for urban elites whose familiarity is only with an extremely small albeit politically important major cities within a given country. If all you know is Washington DC, Los Angeles, and New York City, do you really know the United States? Not at all. If all you know is highways, railways, and big cities, your knowledge of areas is particularly shallow and not very broad at all, and this book does a good job in looking at how it is that France was recognized and understood and even discovered, in a fashion, over the course of the 19th century. Whether or not that interests you is something you need to figure out for yourself.

In terms of its contents, this book is about 360 pages or so of solid material that is divided into seventeen chapters. The book begins with a list of illustrations, maps, and an itinerary. After that the author talks about Europe as being an undiscovered continent in that most people lived far out of awareness of what was going on in main areas (1). A couple of chapters discuss the various tribes of France when looked at in terms of cultural and linguistic methods (2, 3). Another chapter looks at the many ways that yes could be said as a way of showing the immense diversity of France during the 18th century (4). The author gives a couple of examples of life in France during the period when people started wanting to have a better understanding of the country (5, 6). A chapter follows on the religious life of French, much of which had a large degree of pagan admixture (7), as well as the influence of migrants and commuters on the trade and spread of information that took place outside of traditional channels (8). An interlude covered the lives of animals, like dogs involved in smuggling. The second part of the book then looks at life after the revolution, with chapters about the maps (9) that tried to show France in increasing detail as well as the mobilization of France for empire (10). The author contrasts travel in France between the life around Paris (11) as well as the frequently slower nature of travel outside of the major arterial routes (12). There is a chapter about colonization (13) that reminds the reader that this process was involved inside of France as well as outside. There is a humorous chapter on the wonders of France (14), a look at life for the provincial French (15), the influence of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine on French identity (16), and then a discussion of the center of France (17), after which there is an epilogue, chronology, notes, works cited, general and geographical index, and acknowledgements.

In some ways, this author wants to have his cake and eat it too. Most of his books are about the lives of French elites, and he is clearly very comfortable in talking about literary and cultural elites, many of whom came from peripheral regions but made their fame after having acculturated to Parisian ways and language. The author wants to celebrate life in remote and isolated regions, but at the same time wants to show himself off to be cultured at the same time. There is a real problem that the people of the neglected and isolated regions that needed to be discovered often did not write their own stories, only having their own thoughts and behaviors and ways recorded by outsiders, with few exceptions. The author wants to write a history from the ground up, but does not really have the material to do so, and so this book is less a systematic history of the peripheries of France than a series of sometimes entertaining and sometimes frustrating impressionistic sketches told from the point of view of someone with a clear anti-clerical leftist view of history and an agenda that works in accordance with this. Such people as this author is, and those of his political side in general, have long celebrated the common man only as they were in the process of destroying his culture and his ways and leaving him to be dependent on their largess and education about themselves and the world around them. This book is therefore simultaneously revelatory but also frustrating in that the worldview of the author hinders one from getting a better sense of those people who were left behind by efforts to develop and modernize France.