France: an Adventure History review – a rousing homage to the mysteries of French life

France: an Adventure History by Graham Robb (Pan Macmillan), £18.19.

Graham Robb has done it again. His groundbreaking book, The Discovery of France, was widely praised when it came out in 2007. Its thesis, that the nation we know today as France was only fully acknowledged as such by its inhabitants as recently as the nineteenth century, was both original and challenging. 

Now, in France: An Adventure History, unfolding across 394 pages of dense text, with another 132 pages of references, maps and two separate indexes, he cycles the length and breadth of the country in search of whatever it is that holds it together, in spite of the forces that threaten constantly to tear it apart.  

According to Robb’s original analysis, France, until the coming of the railways, was less a nation-state than a demographic maze, in which people lived their lives largely in ignorance of each other, often not even knowing the name of the next but one village a mere five miles up the road. It wasn’t just getting about that was the problem. French, as a language, was a work in progress, competing with Flemish, Alsatian, Occitan, Breton, Burgundian, Gallo, Gascon, Provençal, Niçard, Catalan and a host of others.

It seemed to me at the time that most of the French of past centuries, however remote from the mainstream, would have been aware of Paris and what it represented (war and taxes) and that even prior to the Steam Age mention of such luminaries as Louis IX, Joan of Arc, Louis XIV and Richelieu would have struck a collective chord. But I accept that in the day-to-day conduct of their lives, citizens — as they would only be so designated after the Revolution —paid little heed to either the concept of a unified France or the conceit that a Breton fisherman was somehow indistinguishable from a winegrower in the Deep South speaking the langue d’Oc. It is a big country after all. 

The research that went into the compilation of this companion volume is both exhaustive and exhausting. It has taken the author a lifetime to separate the facts from the myths and, including the references, it would take almost as long for the reader to fully comprehend. This is not a book to be read from beginning to end, but rather at random, with the pieces fitting together only with gradually increasing awareness and the passage of time. And that is perhaps its greatest strength.

Whether travelling by train or bike, or on foot, Robb reveals France as a repository of secrets most of which remains a mystery to the French, if not always to him. We come away feeling that if we don’t always know the question, at least we know some of the answers. 

In a riveting chapter recounting the “unspeakable torment” of the Albigensian Crusade, in which the author sets out, ostensibly, to recover the lost gold of the Cathars, he reveals his methodology:

“A treasure hunt for a non-existent treasure was as good a pretext as any for a journey of serendipitous discovery. It would be a liberation from the chivvying lists of guidebooks and the quest would have a pleasantly ascetic purity. All archaeologists know the hypnotic pleasure of sifting evidence until nothing is left in the riddle. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbably, must be the truth,” says Sherlock Holmes. Replace ‘improbably’ with ‘banal’ or ‘disappointing,’ and this would be a good description of much historical investigation.”

Robb, you may be assured, has no time for such a linear approach. Instead, “receptive to all sorts of uninvited information,” allowing the faintest light from the most distant star to “fall on the sensitive periphery of [his] retina,” he invites us to join him on the road less travelled. The journey starts with the arrival in the north of Gaul of Julius Caesar, described as “a tidy and punctilious man” with an eye for “ethnological detail,” en route to his victory over the Nervii. Thereafter, an unforgettable (but of course in most cases quickly forgotten) cast of characters fills a narrative that, chronologically, ends with the emergence of the “Jupiter” President, Emmanuel Macron, but in fact, winds constantly back to the middle. 

Robb, as punctilious as Caesar, is careful to come to no particular conclusions. “I am aware,” he writes, “that as a white, male, married, heterosexual, middle-class cyclist with an ability to converse in polite French, I have been spared the hostility I have occasionally seen meted out to other people by civilians as well as by agents of the state, but I was never able or inclined to extract from these experiences a working definition of ‘the French’.”

Others, less well versed in the epic story of France, may, of course, take a different view.