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| The Discovery of France | 
 enlarge | Author: Graham Robb
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: £18.99
Buy New: £9.49
You Save: £9.50 (50%)
New (21) from £9.30
Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 680
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6 x 1.7
ISBN: 0330427601
EAN: 9780330427609
ASIN: 0330427601
Publication Date: September 7, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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Discover the real France February 1, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Graham Robb is a serious scholar. He has written books on Balzac, Rimbaud, Victor Hugo and Baudelaire. This list also suggests another academic and personal passion - France. He earned a PhD in French literature at Vanderbilt University after his degree in modern languages at Oxford, and has since excelled as a writer. This is a rare fusion of scholarly research and revelatory fact, written in an accessible but highly literate and engaging style.
The book is quite difficult to pigeonhole. It is at times a travel book, based on Robb's own personal experience of cycling around France and getting a feel for the immensity of what the pre-industrial nation would have been. It is also an anthropological study of the French, and the development of the nation through history. In fact the central thesis, that the idea of a French nation is a purely modern conceit, occupies much of the book. Robb then sets out to describe what the modern republic replaced. The migrations of peoples, the intricate network of towns, villages and regions, the Babel tongued array of languages and dialects, the cast of untouchables and the tenuous attachment to Paris and royal control.
It is a biography of the French people, an erudite, if potted, ramble through folklore, local history, linguistics and sociology. Perhaps most startling is that the book manages to amaze on every page with facts that even those conversant with French history would be intrigued with. This is a history of the ordinary people, of the rhythms and nature of everyday life. It is an account of a nation held together by the loosest of binds, where the Paris elite could barely travel and expect to be understood outside the Ile de France.
This is at the heart of the book. Robb considers that the bulk of history written on France starts from the central conceit that Paris, king and court were somehow representative or integral to the rest of France. He demonstrates this falsehood with startling stories, from the existence and experience of an outcast group, the Cagot to the original `tour de France', conducted on foot by the apprentice bands of craftsmen and covering the vast internal migrations of workers, the daily grind and difficulty of peasant life, and the experience of those `explorers' who ventured into this misunderstood hinterland, are revealed in a delicious and gripping text.
If I was to be glib I could say this was a Bill Bryson for the literary set, but this would diminish both Robb and Bryson's work. It is a unique and fascinating ramble through French history, with a strong central argument that modern France, and with it the modern French, are a singularly modern creation. This was built over the rich and intricate patchwork of local and regional identities, which, Robb manages to argue with an erudite conviction, were far more interesting and noteworthy entities.
Robb won the 1997 Whitbread Book Award for best biography with Victor Hugo and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Rimbaud in 2001. I expect this book to win even greater praise. This was easily my non-fiction book recommendation of the year for 2007, and is a book I will return to. It was revelatory, lucid and vivid. Anyone with an interest in France, or in history, will be well served by getting this book as soon as possible.
Eugen Weber - Peasants into Frenchmen November 30, 2007
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
Anyone who likes this book really ought to check out a remarkable book written by the recently deceased American historian, Eugen Weber, "Peasants into Frenchman" - first published by Stanford University Press in 1976 but still in print. (Published also in French in as "La Fin des Terroirs: La modernisation de la France rurale 1870-1914".) It transformed my understanding of modern day France.
France Profonde November 18, 2007
18 out of 19 found this review helpful
This book allows you to discover a completely unexpected glimpse of a forgotten and hidden France. Some of the photographs will stop you dead in your tracks. Instead of the uniform, smooth running and modern France we see today Robb takes you into a world of a France that was scarcely known even to its own government. Using the detail from his research he describes the harshness and poverty of the French existence in rural areas and gives a sense of the isolation and boredom of life as well as the great migrations to find work such as the masons of the Limousin. Forgotten trades are explained, forgotten languages resurrected. This book is a must read to help you understand why France is like it is today.
A must October 27, 2007
14 out of 17 found this review helpful
Frankly this is one of the best books I have read in a long time - and I have read a few.
It describes a French reality that is in contrast to official French history that, to anyone living here, is so contrived.
The way of life of the past french population is not only realistic and remarkeable but, for a student of British history, gives a pointer to how many of our ancestors must have lived. This is not about Kings and aristocrats but of ordinary people (and their animals!).
A very good and revealing effort September 26, 2007
57 out of 59 found this review helpful
Less a history, more a biography, informed by Robb's extraordinary on-the-ground research in which he uncovers the folkloric history of a country that is widely misunderstood. Robb peers into the soul of his subject with the background of literary biographer, and is not just entertaining but learned. Robb reveals that contemporary regional identities (Catalan, Breton, Provencal, etc.) that some suggest take France back to its past are actually imagined. Robb reveals the roots to be less regional than minutely local. As late as the 19th century, Frenchmen outside the mushroom of Paris could barely communicate with one another. Robb is a cyclist and has benefited from a velo-eye view. He offers a sharp eye and an original analysis. This is a book that amazes on every page. Even if you have read widely on France, I rate Robb a must. This is a France inedit that strips away the republican myths to show us a nation infinitely more complicated than we imagined.
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