The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

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The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

3.94 of 5 stars 3.94 · rating details · 598 ratings · 126 reviews

While Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris, large parts of France were still terra incognita. Even in the age of railways and newspapers, France was a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks, and pre-Christian beliefs. French itself was a minority language.

Graham Robb describes that unknown world in arresting narrative detail. He re...more

Hardcover, 454 pages

Published October 17th 2007 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published 2007)

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Nov 12, 2009 Paula rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, best-reads-of-2009, history

Francophile that I am, I will never see France quite the same way after having read Robb's fascinating historical geography (or geographical history)of France up to WWI. Almost every page, in fact, almost every paragraph proves chock-full of interesting "facts" and authorial observations. There are chapters on languages (French having been a minority, i.e., "foreign" language a mere hundred years ago); animals (the "60 million Others" who also inhabited the Hexagon); maps, roads, travel in all i...more Francophile that I am, I will never see France quite the same way after having read Robb's fascinating historical geography (or geographical history)of France up to WWI. Almost every page, in fact, almost every paragraph proves chock-full of interesting "facts" and authorial observations. There are chapters on languages (French having been a minority, i.e., "foreign" language a mere hundred years ago); animals (the "60 million Others" who also inhabited the Hexagon); maps, roads, travel in all its dimensions, "colonization" of the nation, tourism and more. I am already rereading this book with a map of France spread out on the dining room table in front of me as I do so (bearing in mind that to "find" all the locales Robb references really requires a palimpsest of old and new, large and small scale, linguistic, ethnographic & topographic maps, some of which may not even exist.
A few anecdotal gems:
"But if all the nicknames had been adopted, the map of France would now be covered with obscenities and incomprehensible jokes." (36)
"Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies . . . Slowness was not an attempt to savour the moment." (76)
"The Virgin Mary was always more important than God . . . . He was no more important than a bishop." (130)
"The century's greatest expert on gossip and pre-industrial telecommunications, Honore de Balzac, suggested that rumour could travel at about 9 mph." (141)
"Any commemoration of European unity should remember the smugglers and pedlars who helped to keep the borders open." (152)
"Three years later the dogs of Paris had their own ambulance." (179)
"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." (243)
"France was repeatedly reconquered by French forces." (256)
"it is quite possible to travel from one end of the country to the other without . . . realizing that many of the landscapes that seem typically and eternally French are younger than the Eiffel Tower." (268)
(less)

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Feb 08, 2009 Djewesbury rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: social-history

This is a fascinating book, full of the perfectly unexpected. It is possibly the best piece of social history I've ever read. The accepted version of modern French history relies on a linear story of gradual and natural centralisation: the organic creation of a nation conceived of, in its essential form several hundreds of years ago, and striving ever since towards its own self-realisation. Robb overturns this view and demonstrates again and again that it is a miracle that modern France ever cam...more This is a fascinating book, full of the perfectly unexpected. It is possibly the best piece of social history I've ever read. The accepted version of modern French history relies on a linear story of gradual and natural centralisation: the organic creation of a nation conceived of, in its essential form several hundreds of years ago, and striving ever since towards its own self-realisation. Robb overturns this view and demonstrates again and again that it is a miracle that modern France ever came into existence at all. Little more than a hundred and fifty years ago, the vast majority of the 'French' were quite unaware that they were French at all, did not speak the French language and had never travelled outside their region. The latter is hardly unusual, but when one adds to this the fact that large areas of France remained unmapped, and completely unknown to outside eyes, until the mid-nineteenth century; that official knowledge of some regions did not extend fifty metres from the side of the main coach road; and that travel of any kind was tortuously slow and uncomfortable, we can start to see the French state as a rather more modern invention than we would ever have supposed. Indeed, it would be fair to say that it didn't really begin to emerge in a recognisable form until the educational and other reforms of the Third Republic, in the 1870s.

Robb treats his subject in themed chapters which are not straightforwardly arranged in an overarching chronology, although that chronology does frame the book as a whole (and the contemporary conclusion provides a fitting point of departure for further investigation). Unlike other 'themed' histories (I'm thinking particularly of Peter Ackroyd's long, dry 'biography' of London, which often reads like an unedited, self-indulgent list of lists) Robb's succeeds in giving life to the many dimensions of his subject, in order that we might start to view it more convincingly as a whole. He considers the many cultural, social and technological changes that might be thought of as central to a history such as this - innovations in cartography and in transport, regional identities, linguistic and topographical diversity, and so on. But he is also keen to reclaim those dimensions that often pass out of the record, the historiographical gaps and silences: in a chapter describing the passage of the year in pre-mechanised rural France, he asks his modern readers to try and comprehend the inactivity that dominated more than half of the agricultural year. How, he wonders, can history-writing describe the sheer boredom of these months? To eke out provisions between the reaping of one harvest and the sowing of the next, ordinary people would, more or less literally, hibernate, and the countryside would fall quiet throughout the whole of winter, but nowhere in existing literature is this really adequately described. In his desire to make tangible the pace of actual life, Robb evokes both Henri Lefebvre and E.P. Thompson, whose 'Making of the English Working Class' sometimes seems to be a template for this book (and who also famously concentrated on the birth of modern conceptions of time).

Other reviews have quoted at length the startling facts that Robb excavates, and which he stitches through his narrative: the stilted shepherds of the Landes, the whistling language of the Pyrenees, and so on. All these certainly provide colourful illumination but the book is ultimately far more than just a collection of wonderful details. Robb is a sensitive and rigorous investigator, but whilst he makes the synthesis of hundreds of sources appear effortless, he never takes his eye off the larger story - the emergence of a contemporary France which is as much made by this collection of neglected, intimate, disparate and often suppressed histories, as by the epic, forward-thrusting narrative it more often tells of itself.(less)

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Feb 25, 2013 Elizabeth Theiss rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: france

My deep love for France and the French is not based on deGaulle's France as a great nation but rather on its profound diversity of its language, culture, cuisine and mode de vie. Every region, every village, is unique because of its soil, what it grows, the history of its people. While the blender of globalization has been homogenizing culture in larger cities, one can still find villages that build the Feu de St. Jean at midsummer and watch the young men leap over the flames. Ancient dances, re...more

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Jun 07, 2012 Kate Stedman rated it 5 of 5 stars

I am going to put in this review by Brenda Wineapple of the NY Times:

“Before the revolution,” it turns out, “the name ‘France’ was often reserved for the small mushroom-shaped province centered on Paris.” What’s more, beyond that relatively small oasis, “France was a land of deserts” — of huge vacant spaces that had still not been accurately mapped in their entirety and that most natives never even tried to explore. (As late as the mid-19th century, it seems, “few people could walk far from thei...more

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Feb 06, 2012 Ben Dutton rated it 5 of 5 stars

Graham Robb is an expert on nineteenth century French literature, noted for his biographies of Victor Hugo, Balzac and Rimbaud. In this, his history of that country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as France was beginning to discover her nationality, Robb comes to realise he knows less than he should. He says in his introduction: “I began to explore the country on which I was supposed to be an authority… my professional knowledge of the country reflected the metropolitan view of write...more Graham Robb is an expert on nineteenth century French literature, noted for his biographies of Victor Hugo, Balzac and Rimbaud. In this, his history of that country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as France was beginning to discover her nationality, Robb comes to realise he knows less than he should. He says in his introduction: “I began to explore the country on which I was supposed to be an authority… my professional knowledge of the country reflected the metropolitan view of writers like Balzac and Baudelaire, for whom the outer boulevards of Paris marked the edge of the civilised world.” This distinction – of a France of the city and a France of the country – becomes clear as the dominant worldview of many learned French as Robb’s history progresses.

The Discovery of France is a perfect introduction into the social, economic, and political growth of this nation: it misses out some of the more well known episodes – the Revolution, for instance, though the effects of such things reverberate through many of the tales told herein – and instead chooses to focus on the more minor stories, those things that form the fabric of a nation. It is a book to savour, to digest in small doses – I read it over a period of some months, sometimes not picking it up for a few weeks. Every page is crammed with fascinating detail: the Camargue stilt walkers, the murder of surveyors, the destruction of natural wilderness, the changing face of rural life. It is like reading a particularly brilliant episode of Q.I., the BBC’s erudite panel show. You can open this book on any page and find something of interest – the kind of book that makes you say openly: “Well I never knew that!”

My knowledge of France, and its history, was, I must admit, limited before reading this fine book. What Robb has managed to achieve is make me fascinated more than ever by France, and also illuminated my understanding of writers such as Balzac – there are details in the classic French novels that made little sense before, and now they ring clear as day.

I said earlier that The Discovery of France was a history of that nation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but Robb ends his work on a pointed note: he refers to the murder of French Algerians in 1961: “On the night of 17 October 1961, thousands of French Algerians protesting peacefully against the curfew that had been imposed on them, were rounded up by the Paris police. Though records have disappeared and though official figures still disagree with scholarly estimates, it is certain that many Algerians were tortured, maimed and stuffed into dustbins, and that about two hundred were beaten up by policeman and thrown into the Seine, where they drowned, in the tourist heart of Paris.” In 2001 a plaque was erected at knee height in memorial to this tragic day, but most Parisians are still unaware of it. He ends his book on this note: “In the twenty first century, many parts of France remain to be discovered.” It is a bitter note to end on, but perfectly encapsulates how far France (and by the same code the world) has come and how far it still has to go; that this journey of discovery is never over.

Robb’s book was the winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaajte Prize in 2008 and the Duff Cooper Prize.(less)

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Aug 03, 2011 Andrew Ives rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Rather long and wordy, this book blows hot and cold in its ability to keep the readers' interest, with some chapters such as those on the variance of French language, Cassini's map-making efforts, local legends, The Tour de France and several others being much more interesting than certain other chapters such as road-building, WW1, the onset of tourism and especially the 'cutting room floor' material that ends the book on rather a sour note.

Well-written it may be, but it is, for the most part,...more

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Mar 29, 2009 Veronica rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

I'd read a lot of rave reviews of this book, so I was keen to read it even though I rarely read non-fiction. So I snapped it up as part of a 3-for-2 offer. It isn't exactly what I'd expected -- the publisher's blurb makes much of Robb cycling 14,000 miles round rural France, enabling him to get a close-up view of landscape and history, but at least as significant is the four years he spent in libraries! This book is a treasure-trove of quirky anecdotes and unexpected aspects of French history. H...more I'd read a lot of rave reviews of this book, so I was keen to read it even though I rarely read non-fiction. So I snapped it up as part of a 3-for-2 offer. It isn't exactly what I'd expected -- the publisher's blurb makes much of Robb cycling 14,000 miles round rural France, enabling him to get a close-up view of landscape and history, but at least as significant is the four years he spent in libraries! This book is a treasure-trove of quirky anecdotes and unexpected aspects of French history. He's obviously a serious historian, with books on Balzac and Rimbaud to his credit, but he writes in an accessible way, always retaining the reader's interest. It's difficult to classify, combining history, geography, anthropology and linguistics.

Robb brings home just how empty, poor, and far from "civilisation" parts of rural France were, even in the 18th and 19th century, and -- as I already knew -- how few people spoke French as their first language. There are some compelling images: the peasants who basically hibernated in winter to conserve energy because they didn't have enough to eat; the cartloads of abandoned babies (because their families couldn't feed them):
"The carters set out on their two hundred and fifty mile journey with four or five babies to a basket ... To make the load more tractable and easier on the ears, the babies were given wine instead of milk. Those that dies were dumped at the roadside like rotten apples... for every ten babies that reached Paris, only one survived more than three days."

The chapter on religion has some entertaining anecdotes. Speaking of the traditional fondness for local saints who mirrored earlier pagan gods, he writes: "The church was important in the same way that a shopping mall is important to shoppers: the customers were not particularly interested in thr creator and owner of the mall; they came to see the saints who sold their wares in little chapels around the nave." Then there were the women who, offended by their priest's threat of excommunication, "stormed the altar, tore off his wig, destroyed the processional crosses, and beat him with the pieces."

There are more serious insights here too: for example, he writes that the French obsession with commemoration of significant events on specific dates highlights the reverse: the events that are not commemmorated. He cites the failure to acknowledge Vichy's role in deporting Jews during the Second World War, and the embarrassed silence over Algeria, but this reminded me too of the "hidden history" of refugees fleeing Franco in 1939, treated as criminals and herded into camps in France. Only now, 70 years later, is this event being publicly commemmorated and the failures of the French authorities recognised.

Anyway, I won't burble on any longer -- if you are interested in France, more especially if you are a foreigner living in France and want to understand better why the French are the way they are, this book is definitely worth reading.(less)

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Cathy Robb is wrong when he says there is no memorial to those deported in WW2 from France. A memorial in Paris dates from 1962. http://www.paris.org/Monume ...more
Mar 27, 2009 06:36am

Veronica Hi Cathy

I've reached that page now; he actually says there is nothing _in Vichy_ to commemmorate the deported, so that wouldn't include the Paris monu...more
updated Mar 29, 2009 10:35am

Cathy Ah thanks. I feel more able to trust his book now.

I'll long remember (accurately or not - I should check!) Robb's characterisation of 18C French peasa...more
Mar 29, 2009 09:28am

Jan 08, 2010 Hester rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: christianity, europe, farms-gardening, france, history, non-fiction, paris

This is one of my favorite books ever. It changed the way I viewed history and the way I viewed France. Every page was surprising and exhausting. Did you know they had dog-powered machinery in France? Where the dogs trained other dogs how to use it? That one of the first geographers of France was killed as a sorcerer? That there were orgies in Notre Dame? That Paris has always been a polyglot city, since people from different provinces did not speak the same language? That the government did not...more

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Aug 09, 2012 Therese rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Francophiles, linguists, general readers

Shelves: french, history, travel

A fascinating look at how French culture, language, identity, and borders took shape, particularly during the 1700s and 1800s. I read some chapters and skimmed others, but on the whole I was surprised at how readable, charming, engaging, and well-written this was. Granted, I came to it with low expectations, since anything with the word "geography" in the title I automatically assume will be a slog to get through. But the author knows how to tell a story, and he weaves together a fabric of strik...more

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Dec 14, 2009 Sam Schulman rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a really delightful and witty book that explains why France, as strange and complicated as you may think it is, is even stranger and more complicated when you look closely at all the old provinces and new departments. I read it 2 years ago but I thought of one of its pictures - and its captions - today when observing my neighbor's cows. It is the interior of a peasant house in "les Landes" - today's Landes, Gironde, Lot-et-Garonne. A big fireplace - hams and bacons hanging from the rafte...more

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Jan 14, 2009 John rated it 5 of 5 stars

This was great, but it's hard to explain exactly in what way. It's just filled with anecdotes, really, about all the little corners of France, the different provinces and people and languages. It's the kind of thing I would read all over again, just because there's so many interesting little tidbits that I can't remember them all after just one reading. The main thing you get from this is that it's kinda a minor miracle that France exists as a country, since only two hundred years ago two thirds...more

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Mar 11, 2009 Jan rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: every Francophile

An unbelievable biography of a country that hardly knew itself as a country. Written by someone who could not possibly be more in love with his subject, this is an account of the wild human corners of France that were for many years patronized and misunderstood by the denizens of Paris, resisting attempts to map them and incorporate them into the national spirit.

The Kingdom of France was a patchwork of suspicious villages, whose inhabitants rarely spoke the King's language and who moved by medi...more

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Aug 13, 2012 Beboots rated it 5 of 5 stars

I haven't learned so many new things about a country in a single book in years.

I picked this book up in an English-language bookstore in Bordeaux, France, and found it endlessly fascinating. Did you know that in the mid-19th century there were more detailed maps of the interior of the massive North American continent than the interior of France? Or that so few of French rivers are navigable? Or that in the mid-19th century, the majority of Frenchmen couldn't speak "French"?

The book delves into...more

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Jan 10, 2011 William Bennett rated it 4 of 5 stars

I originally picked this book up at school while I was teaching French--the idea being that Graham Robb was coming to BYU and giving a lecture, therefore reading some of the book beforehand would be a good move. I neither read much of the book nor attended the lecture, but I did enjoy finishing it a year plus later.

Robb does have an engaging narrative style, but his prose tends to wander rather more than I would prefer, especially since his epilogue really doesn't do too much in the way of tying...more

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Jan 04, 2013 John rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I had just finished reading the "Inheritance of Rome" about the years 500-1000AD. This book (picked up at a library book sale) was a nice follow-on. It tells about France from about 1500 to recent years in a geographical sense (not lists of important people which it avoids); or, more correctly, how France has not been "france" at all but an evolving conglomeration of very local parts (pays) that vary in language, beliefs, etc. France is a very recent creation. The local folks did not see themsel...more

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Dec 01, 2008 Nicole rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, cycletour-bicycles

A view of the french rural changes covering the periods between the revolution & WWI when the bicycle was the first major change in transportation.
This book offers a brutal view of the rural peasants limited options. It is surprising to realize the state of agriculture and industry in France compared to England. Now I begin to understand how a small island could possibly stand up to Napoleon's vast resources as they did.
The myriad interconnections the peasants had kept them separate from cit...more

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Apr 10, 2013 Lesley rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is greater than the sum of its parts. Each individual chapter taken in isolation is of interest, but the epilogue, which Robb executes with characteristic lightness of touch, encourages the reader to consider the book as a whole and reflect on the rights and responsibilities of the citizen, the extent to which the state ought to intervene in the lives of these citizens, and the importance of nationhood . Robb's two great achievements are putting the ordinary man or woman, the paysan, r...more

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Jun 28, 2011 J.S. Graustein rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, travel, france

I read this book to prepare for my upcoming personal Tour de France with my daughter and sister. THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE was thoroughly researched and provided a unique perspective on the development of a nation. Robb is a talented storyteller, weaving encyclopedic facts into compelling narratives. I would have rated it 4 stars, but there were a few moments here and there that came off a bit "preachy." However don't let that deter you from reading this book. You'll never look at France, or any n...more

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Aug 24, 2012 Gerald Sinstadt rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction-general

Graham Robb knows a lot of France as well as knowing a lot about France. His book is a patchwork portrait, part history, part topography, part sociology.

As one who has grown up within a nation that can trace its roots back for centuries, I was immediately struck by the author's account of how slowly France evolved as a single country. Until the relatively recent past, he points out, it was a huge collection of small pays, each with its own narrow boundaries, its own customs, often its own langua...more

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Dec 26, 2011 Alex de G rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: france

What a fantastic book - immediately and easily approachable, well written. Not your average history book; the stories are personal, beautifully human and appeal to the reader. I loved this book - could hardly put it down. I hoped to gain an appreciation for the rich tapestry that comprises the history of France, to whet my appetite - and this book did precisely that. While it lacked detailed coverage of the political undertones of the French Revolution, and the specifics on Paris were covered le...more

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May 29, 2010 itpdx rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

Wow! I am ready to go back to France and explore the country and its people with a whole new set of eyes! Graham Robb presents the common people of France outside of Paris--how and where they lived, how they learned, why and how they traveled, what they ate and how these things changed between the revolution and the WWI. This book is a revelation.
Robb has some interesting and helpful maps in the book, but I would recommend having a good geo-physical map and a good political map available as you...more

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Jun 24, 2010 Andrew added it

Shelves: history

I think this book was written for me. Someone who fusses over obscure intersections of space and time, and a natural Francophile to boot. This is a remarkably populist history, one that doesn't concern itself with grand movements, but the daily lives, habits, and myths of the ordinary people in the early years of the French Republic. Which is exactly what I groove on. The next time you see some French tourists acting condescending towards their hosts in foreign countries, remember that their rec...more

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May 30, 2009 Josh Frost rated it 3 of 5 stars

In many ways, this book is fascinating...Robb wanders into tiny villages in France and explores their history. These very civilized, quiet, almost boring little towns were pretty wild not very long ago, and were amazingly closed off from the rest of the world. (Just ask the 17th century surveyor from Paris who was murdered by the villagers who didn't understand - or understood too well! - what he was trying to do.) I can't give the book 5 stars, though, because Robb is so enamored of detail that...more

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May 29, 2009 Pam rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I loved this book and wish there were a comparable book for every part of the world. Maybe these books do exist and I just haven't found them yet.

Graham Robb tells the story of the creation of France as a nation-state and the creation of French national identity. I learned some amazing and surprising details of French life before the creation of national railroads, and roads in general (people lived underground; seasonal workers essentially hibernated). I found this to be a light but informative...more

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Sep 09, 2010 Eleanor rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Francophiles, Cyclists, History Buffs

While this book doesn't unfold quite as coherently as Robb's new book Parisians it's still strong history that's readably presented (I even read this on the beach). His prose is a little wandering but the jumble of facts and ideas feels like you are following his train of thought which is backed up by extensive research. Again, cycling plays an important role in this book and Robb has actually cycled around France and to many of the remote places he writes about. I hope next he'll devote a book...more

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Feb 14, 2013 Rick Skwiot rated it 5 of 5 stars

According to author Graham Robb, a scant few hundred years ago France consisted largely of suspicious and superstitious pagan peasants who spoke discrete tongues (none of which was French), ate unpalatable and malnutritious food, and seldom ventured beyond a day’s walk of their homes. (Even today, Robb notes, some 86 percent of French people have never flown on an airplane.)

However, in the intervening years France has somehow come to be known as a rational, monolinguistic land of art, sophistic...more

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Feb 26, 2013 Jan-Maat added it · review of another edition

Shelves: 21st-century, france, travel

This isn't an armchair travel book, it's an armchair time travel book. The use of the singular in the title is potentially misleading. It is the result of the author's discovery of France on bicycle and in the archives (but not both at the same time I hasten to add to reassure any anxious library lovers). It is also a book about how many times and how many ways France has been discovered.

So we have the two men who tried to discover the boundary between the Langue d'Oc and the Langue d'Oil, one d...more This isn't an armchair travel book, it's an armchair time travel book. The use of the singular in the title is potentially misleading. It is the result of the author's discovery of France on bicycle and in the archives (but not both at the same time I hasten to add to reassure any anxious library lovers). It is also a book about how many times and how many ways France has been discovered.

So we have the two men who tried to discover the boundary between the Langue d'Oc and the Langue d'Oil, one died and the other lost an eye in the process (I'm not sure if the discovery of the Benrather line was quite so dangerous). We have the explorers of caves and caverns, Cassini's mapmakers (one of whom is murdered while surveying in the first pages of the book), the first tourists and the sudden attention of the Parisian anthropologists to the supposedly backwards and primitive types to be found in the countryside though to their chagrin they found that Breton skulls were larger than supposedly superior Parisian types.

Then there are other discoveries. The discovery of the world beyond their villages made by generations of migrant workers who spent years working in different cities with people from particular areas dominating certain trades, and the discovery of a notion of being French thanks to universal education, mass literacy and the bicycle.

The most profound discovery is that of the pre-modern ways of life that existed. A town's bread baked once a week, or harder yet all the year's baking done at once with the hard loaves softened in water, milk or wine throughout the year. People living a subsistence lifestyle slowing down into a semi hibernation during the winter months, the lives of those for whom going barefoot was a more sensible way of crossing fields than wearing shoes or the stilt wearing shepherds whose way of life disappeared with the coming of modernity.

Tying the book together is the discovery of long standing prejudices. The book opens with the still mysterious persecution of the Cargots and ends with that of people of North African descent stuck in high rise suburbs.

You are left with a sense of the mass of differing ways of life, habits of speech and economic networks that is hidden by the neatness and precision of a modern map.(less)

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Aug 14, 2011 Guy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: culture, history, have-read-more-than-once, travel, socsci

A wonderful book: well-written, spiced with humor, chock full of anecdotes, wide-ranging, eye-opening... and difficult to do justice to in a review. If you peruse other reviews here on Goodreads or on the back-cover of the paperback edition you may be reminded of the elephant as described by the blind men: totally different depending upon which part of the animal they touched. So it is with "The Discovery of France". Depending upon the reviewer it is: a collection of bizarre anecdotes and intere...more A wonderful book: well-written, spiced with humor, chock full of anecdotes, wide-ranging, eye-opening... and difficult to do justice to in a review. If you peruse other reviews here on Goodreads or on the back-cover of the paperback edition you may be reminded of the elephant as described by the blind men: totally different depending upon which part of the animal they touched. So it is with "The Discovery of France". Depending upon the reviewer it is: a collection of bizarre anecdotes and interesting facts, a narrative of how France became a modern state, a social history, a historical geography, a literary exploration, a biography of France, a travelogue, and so on. So, rather than add another attempt to classify the book I'll just say that is is fascinating, and should be read by anyone who is even vaguely interested in France.

Here are a few of the themes that most interested me:

o I don't think I've come across a more insightful description of what it was like to live in pre-modern Europe, in which hunger was a constant concern, seasons and geography were paramount, and communications with the world outside one's local collection of villages was limited (and interest in that wider world more limited still).
o the contrast between the standard narrative of a centralized France as one of the first European nation states, and the reality of an immense and largely (to Paris) unknown patchwork of micro-regions, with very different life-styles and local cultures largely determined by geography.
o how like a tower of Babel the pre-modern world was, with immense language variation over short distances, and the problems that this entailed. For example -- as recently as 1850 one of the major problems the French army had with recruits was mutual incomprehensibility because standard French was the mother tongue for less than half of the citizens of France.
o how recent modernity actually is for most of France and the French, and what an immense task it was to standardise things within the country. Language is the most obvious example, but there were regional variations in weights and measures, different towns had different times (Brest was 27 minutes behind Paris!), in some areas people drove and cycled on the left hand side of the road, in others on the right, and so on and so on.
o the immensity of France in the absence of modern transport, and how astoundingly good Roman transport technology was (unsurpassed -- and rarely even approached! -- in Europe until the invention of the railroad).

I could go on, but I'd be wasting time that you could more profitably spend by reading the book yourself.(less)

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Jun 27, 2009 Chris added it

Shelves: othernonfiction

I picked this book up as airplane reading because the other books I was reading were too heavy (one in subject matter, the other in sheer size). and I ended up finishing it on the trip.

It's a historical geography of France, which is both entertaining in its own right, and interesting from a Nationalist perspective. The idea of an iconic, unified France is very new; a hundred or so years ago most French citizens did not speak French as their first language, and a substantial minority didn't unde...more I picked this book up as airplane reading because the other books I was reading were too heavy (one in subject matter, the other in sheer size). and I ended up finishing it on the trip.

It's a historical geography of France, which is both entertaining in its own right, and interesting from a Nationalist perspective. The idea of an iconic, unified France is very new; a hundred or so years ago most French citizens did not speak French as their first language, and a substantial minority didn't understand it at all. My own ancestors in Normandy, Lorraine and Anjou would have all regarded each other as foreigners, and would not have been able to mutually communicate. The native languages of the south, Gascon and Provencal, have more in common with Catalan (which which they are mututally comprehensible) than French. Alsatian is closer to German. Breton is a Gaelic language. And no one has any idea where Basque came from.

Two hundred years ago most French folk were completely incomprehensible as little as a hundred miles from their home, with what we think of as French as the language of government and of Paris. France has long been a country of the countryside; Paris is the only city to ever have more than a million residents, and to this day only a quarter of the French live in metro Paris; two hundred years ago, it was a much lower percentage. The bulk of France was divided into hundreds of little pays, loosely translated as "countries" and that division meant there was much about the countryside that lay undiscovered and unknown beyond the residents of the local pays. The largest canyon in Europe, located in Provence, wasn't known to the world at large until the early 1900s. "Frenchman" was a word for tax collector in places. Good maps of the countryside did not exist until the mid 1800s.

The book is an exploration of the social and geographic consequences of that vast array of internal divisions. It's more descriptive than argumentative; the book isn't really built around a thesis per se, it's more just saying "look at that!" So it doesn't carry with a huge sense of narrative or coherence, but the individual tidbits it brings up are sufficiently interesting to carry it along anyway. The ending is a bit weak, but a book written like that is hard to "conclude" so that's fine. (less)

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Jan 08, 2008 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Francophiles, students of history and technology

Recommended to Laura by: New York Times book review

The life of man is nasty, brutish and short, says Thomas Hobbes, and that fact is underscored time and again in Graham Robb's interesting book. Of course, the France of monarchs, the Church, the aristocracy, celebrated painters and poets has been known for a very long time---that France is the France of history as it has been taught for generations. Robb shows us the France outide of, far from Paris. For a very long time, that vast area had little knowledge of and connection with Paris, centrali...more

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About Graham Robb

Graham Macdonald Robb FRSL (born June 2, 1958) is a British author.

Robb was born in Manchester and educated at the Royal Grammar School Worcester and Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied Modern Languages. He earned a PhD in French literature at Vanderbilt University.

He won the 1997 Whitbread Book Award for best biography (Victor Hugo) and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Rimbau...more

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Books by Graham Robb

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