I’ve been visiting the museums of Beaune, Burgundy, checking out the best medieval medical care available, and getting to grips with the production of white wine.
Practicing my French, to mixed effect.
And, reading some fine literary treatments of war.
A Frenchman I happen to know has lived all of his 73 years in one small hamlet of around 100 houses, except for a couple of unhappy years of national service in North Africa. He’s now half surrounded by the holiday homes of assorted Dutch, English and other nationalities, which he tries very hard to adjust to by trying to educate those who are amenable into the ethos and behaviour that he considers appropriate, and traditional. He’s friendly and keen to chat, but loses interest as soon as the topic moves beyond the hamlet.
Having read Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France, I now understand him a great deal more – for its thesis is that France, at least until the First World War, was not a nation, or at least was many, many nations, payes, which might be best defined as an area in which you could hear one church bell. Anyone with an interest in history knows that Germany was very late in European terms in forming as a “nation”, yet in Robb’s account France was scarcely more of one .
To set the scene he looks at the experiences of a series of intrepid mapmakers, some of whom paid with their lives for their efforts, not because of natural accidents but because their “foreign” status and “strange” tools made them targets. So the first mapster to see Le Gerbier de Jonc, 350 miles south of Paris on the watershed dividing the Med from the Atlantic, after trekking for three days through rugged, bare rock, in the early 1740s met his end: the locals took him for a sorcerer, and hacked him to death. Even in Murray’s Handbook for Travellers (1854), while it was suggested that this was a fine region for viewing by balloon, the writer added that this was “only if the aeronaut can remain out of range of a rifle”.
Beyond the main roads, there was wilderness and total isolation. So a girl of eight could get lost in the Issaux Forest, in the Basque Country, and only be found eight years later by shepherds in 1730, having lost her speech. In the mid-18th century a 300-strong band of smugglers roamed one-fifth of France, evading three regiments for a year and half, only captured when the leader, Louis Mandrin, was betrayed by his mistress. It was a land of tiny communities. In the late 18th and early 19th century, almost a third of the population, about 10 million people, lived in isolated farms, or hamlets with fewer than 35 inhabitants. “The known universe, for many people, had a radius of less than 15 miles and a population that could easily fit into a small barn.” Newcomers did arrive over the centuries, such as the Scottish mercenaries given forest land between Moulins and Bourges in the 15th-century by Charles VII, but were absorbed, and almost lost in the folk history that seldom stretched beyond three generations. (They became the Foratin people.)
It was a world that stopped for many months of the year, out of necessity, Robb quotes the diaries of Jules Renard about the Nievre: “the peasant at homes moves little more than the sloth”; “in winter, they pass their lives asleep, curled up like snails”. Official reports (this of 1844 on the Burgundy day labourers of the Nievre) were shocked: “these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.” Yet as Robb says, clearly hibernation was a necessity: a lowered metabolic rate prevented food stocks being exhausted..
And what industry there was often had different motives from the purely economic. In parts of the Auvergne, Robb has found, women got together in the evening, sometimes until after midnight, to sew and knit clothes that were sold to travelling merchants. The profits were tiny, but the proceeds were enough to pay for the lamp oil that enabled them to get together in the first place. And antidote to boredom and a place (almost) of their own.
The established church had little real hold, Robb contends. The “pagan” gods – from pagus or pays – were still around, and saints were regarded much as they had been: “the Church was important in the same way that a shopping mall is important to shoppers: the customers were not especially interested in the creator and owner of the mall; they came to see the saints, who sold their wares in little chapels around the nave”. And the idea of hierarchy among the “congregation” may well not have matched that of the priest. Robb quotes a lovely case from 1872 in Chartes of a woman asked to move out of the way of “le bon Dieu” in a procession. “She retorted, ’Huh! I didn’t come here for him, I came for her, pointing at the Virgin.’”
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It is possible to do this: when I looked at the bus/train timetable and saw the bus only took five minutes I figured it had to be. It took me about 25 minutes dragging a (lightish) suitcase. Walk straight out of Montchanin, turn first left tehre’s a sign), then left again at the roundabout, which puts you on to the new road down to the TGV station. It is mostly all lit, but given that there’s no pavement (footpath) it could be a touch hairy if you were doing this in the dark.
(It might prove necessary because the buses are very irregular.)
Just thought this info might come in handy for someone who’d otherwise have to do what I did – cross your fingers and take a punt…
I’ve been writing on Comment is Free about the Australian bushfires (and the site is certainly living up to its name).
And perhaps less controversially, over on My London Your London I’ve been enjoyed a reversed-gender Tempest – definitely worth seeing if you are in London.
Well done to the Thai women’s rugby sevens team, which has in a run of astonishing victories won its way to the World Cup Rugby Sevens.
Given the extremely strong stereotypes in Thailand about “appropriate” female behaviour, that’s a huge, brave achievement.
(Although I’m not quite so surprised as I might have been had I not played in the Bangkok Rugby Sevens of about 1998 for the British Club. The women’s rugby then was, at least theoretically, “touch” rugby, but as a member of the British Club team I came up against a Thai army team that hadn’t really got that message. Having played full contact rugby myself it didn’t worry me too much, but some members of our team found it a bit of a shock.)
Ah – memories – I’d still love to have played more rugby, but I’m afraid my time for that has passed….
Good news today from the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that the Portugese government had breached the right to freedom of expression when it refused to allow a vessel of the campaigning group Women on Waves into its waters – (and sent a warship to make sure this dangerous ship of women couldn’t get anywhere near).
The Court considered that in seeking to prevent disorder and protect health, the Portuguese authorities could have resorted to other means that were less restrictive of the applicant associations’ rights, such as seizing the medicines on board. It highlighted the deterrent effect for freedom of expression in general of such a radical act as dispatching a warship.
Women on Waves is in some quarters controversial, because it provides pills for early abortion over the internet for women in countries where abortion is otherwise illegal. All the medical evidence I’ve seen of this says it is nearly as safe as abortion under medical supervision, and a lot better than “traditional” backstreet methods, or obtaining dubious pills from other sources.
There’s recently been complaints about this in Northern Ireland – but of course the answer to that is simple: provide women in Northern Ireland with the same access to abortion as is available to women in the rest of the UK.
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