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| The Discovery of France | 
 enlarge | Author: Graham Robb
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: £9.99
Buy Used: £4.66
You Save: £5.33 (53%)
New (28) from £4.84
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 619
Media: Paperback
Pages: 454
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 4.9 x 1.3
ISBN: 033042761X
EAN: 9780330427616
ASIN: 033042761X
Publication Date: July 4, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: UK SELLER, EXCELLENT CONDITION, FAST DISPATCH.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Fascinating insight into the lost tribes of France October 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A Francophile with a penchant for learning about France while taking cycling holidays there, Robb has written a brilliant evocation of a lost world, when most inhabitants of France from outside the Paris region did not speak French and did not think of themselves as being French, and then an equally fascinating story of how the railway and the bicycle allowed the French state to impose "Frenchness" on the country. The book draws on evidence mostly from pre-revolutionary France, but with enough from the nineteenth century to support the thesis that it was late nineteenth century technology that made the difference. The storied are fascinating - I was particularly amused to read of a (mildish) torture called "putting on pressure" that Breton women visited on men that they caught alone, and of the fact that in creating the shrine at Lourdes that village put another local place of pilgrimage out of business. You also discover that the original Tour de France was a series of circuits by artisan journeymen and that France had its own caste of "untouchables", the cagots.
If I think that there is any deficiency it is that there is no sense of connection between these simple, sometime primitive, often poor people and any kind of larger society. Most of these people would have had landlords, and not all would have been absentee ones. Even if they did not think of themselves as French, they would have known, and have had mutual bonds of obligation to, people who did. France, after all, produced enormous armies of conscripts throughout the revolutionary wars, and France was generally regarded as the richest country in continental Europe.
As an Brit reading this book one is bound to wonder whether the same could have been said of the British population at the same time, or whether Britain changed earlier, perhaps, because it is smaller and because enclosure changed the nature of agricultural society more even than industrialisation. Perhaps Mr Robb ought to start taking cycle touring holidays in Britain?
 Fascinating. Eclectic. Readable. August 7, 2008
12 out of 15 found this review helpful
This is one of the most enjoyable books i have read in recent years, written in a wonderful accessible style, it contains marvellous detail, and unusual facts about all aspects of France. This is really a first class book, and a great summer read.
Discover the real France July 30, 2008
60 out of 61 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.
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