The Old, Weird France

November 25, 2007

I spotted The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War last week while browsing in a bookstore in California. Then on arriving home I found a review of the book by Graham Robb in the New York Review of Books (must pay to read article online). This book explores something that I believe is not widely known: France until only very recently was not a cultural unity. That is to say: a large percentage of its inhabitants did not know French and did not identify with the nation within whose borders they resided. The reviewer notes:

[By the middle of the 19th century] France was still a mosaic of tiny pays, each speaking its own patois or dialect. Just how tiny, Robb is at pains to bring home to us. It might be the area within which its own church bell could be heard more distinctly than those of other villages; and on the other bank of the local river people might very likely speak an altogether different dialect and have quite different traditions and manners.

Those who lived in such a small pays found in it their primary identity. Their pays would have stirred up intense feelings of attachment and their favored narratives would have related to events relating to it. They were politically within the borders of powerful France, but they were distant from its aims and narratives.

So how did France become a nation? How did all these peoples come to think of themselves as French? It appears to have been a matter of the slow extension of "Frenchness". That identity radiated out of Paris. Robb points out how many "provincial dishes" originated in Paris. It also owes something to the French literature that was centered in Paris but came to represent an entire nation by means of education. The loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the aftermath of the Prussian War in 1870 led to a systematic attempt on the part of the government to forge a more unified nation:

Newspapers and magazines urged their readers to visit the unknown parts of France and the "lost provinces." Parts of the country were given new names to make them sound more attractive (the coast of Provence became the Côte d'Azur, Brittany's the Côte Émeraude, etc.). Tourist offices persuaded rival villages to work together, laid out signposted walks, and organized colonies de vacances (holiday colonies) for schoolchildren.

So a common identity does not just happen, it is something that a nation encourages and constructs. We should not gloss over the loss of local identity that occurs in this process. The building of a national identity is a terrible thing.

Robb is onto a great story here.. and I am eager to get this book. But it is also worthwhile to step back and remember that the same book could be written about every nation in the world. There is always an "old, weird [insert nation here]" history waiting to be written. That basic story is simply more surprising when it involves a classic nation state like France.

Two of my students this term are writing about Islam in Thailand, and it turns out that there are Thai-Muslims and Malay-Muslims in that country. The most worrisome for the Thai government are naturally the Malays.. located in the south and bordering on Malaysia. How does a nation state deal with cultural outliers? It inevitably embarks on a course of education and encourages the use of the national language. It also works to get greater circulation of people within the country. That line separating Malaysia from Thailand now looks historically random, based as it is on the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909. But whatever the origin of those lines on the map, successful nation states find means to unite their citizens into a flag-waving whole. The "old and weird" are the first things to get eliminated.