Toast to the real French: Peasants sorting Champagne grapes near Rheims
This sounds like a wonderful book: The Discovery of France by Graham Robb. From a review in the Daily Mail:
Graham Robb set out to explore the regions of France by bicycle, and this original historical guide ‘is the result of 14,000 miles in the saddle and four years in the library’. Opening in the early 18th century and ending with the outbreak of World War I, his account describes a mysterious and unfamiliar land that bore more resemblance to a collection of hostile tribes in pre-colonial Africa than a European nation, where most people passed entire lifetimes of brutal ignorance within earshot of their village steeple.
Travellers were regarded with deep suspicion, and not even the government had access to a reliable national map. Map-making was a hazardous occupation — geographers were thought to be sorcerers by the locals and dispatched with clubs.
It was only in 1906 that the existence of one of the natural wonders of Europe, the Grand Canyon of Verdon in the south-east, was revealed to a startled nation after an intrepid explorer named Martel had set out from Marseilles and survived a voyage over the canyon’s furious, 13-mile long rapids.
The first great cause of division was language. At the time of the French Revolution, when French was the language of civilised Europe, 40 per cent of the country’s population could not speak it at all, and even 130 years ago 80 per cent of the population preferred to speak a regional language such as Breton or one of more than 50 local dialects.
Robb’s account of the French people and their land as it slowly and reluctantly turned into ‘France’ is studded with unexpected details. [...]
