Customer Reviews
Fascinating insight into the lost tribes of France - By: Mr. Nicholas J Robertson, 05 Oct 2008 
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 & did not think of themselves as being French, & then an equally fascinating story of how the railway & 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, & of the fact thatin 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 & 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 & any kind of larger society. Most of these people would have had landlords, & not all would have been absentee ones. Even if they did not think of themselves as French, they would have known, & have had mutual bonds of obligation to, people who did. France, after all, produced enormous armies of conscripts throughout the revolutionary wars, & France was generally regarded as the richest countryin 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 & because enclosure changed the nature of agricultural society more even than industrialisation. Perhaps Mr Robb ought to start taking cycle touring holidaysin Britain?
Fascinating. Eclectic. Readable. - By: A. Livett, 07 Aug 2008 
This is one of the most enjoyable books i have readin recent years, writtenin a wonderful accessible style, it contains marvellous detail, & unusual facts about all aspects of France. This is really a first class book, & a great summer read.
Discover the real France - By: Ian David Curry, 30 Jul 2008 Graham Robb is a serious scholar. He has written books on Balzac, Rimbaud, Victor Hugo & Baudelaire. This list also suggests another academic & personal passion - France. He earned a PhDin French literature at Vanderbilt University after his degreein modern languages at Oxford, & has since excelled as a writer. This is a rare fusion of scholarly research & revelatory fact, writtenin an accessible but highly literate & 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 & getting a feel for the immensity of what the pre-industrial nation would have been. It is also an anthropological study of the French, & 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 & regions, the Babel tongued array of languages & dialects, the cast of untouchables & the tenuous attachment to Paris & royal control.
It is a biography of the French people, an erudite, if potted, ramble through folklore, local history, linguistics & 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 & 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 & 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 & court were somehow representative or integral to the rest of France. He demonstrates this falsehood with startling stories, from the existence & experience of an outcast group, the Cagot to the original `tour de France', conducted on foot by the apprentice bands of craftsmen & covering the vast internal migrations of workers, the daily grind & difficulty of peasant life, & the experience of those `explorers' who ventured into this misunderstood hinterland, are revealedin a delicious & 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 & Bryson's work. It is a unique & fascinating ramble through French history, with a strong central argument that modern France, & with it the modern French, are a singularly modern creation. This was built over the rich & intricate patchwork of local & regional identities, which, Robb manages to argue with an erudite conviction, were far more interesting & noteworthy entities.
Robb won the 1997 Whitbread Book Award for best biography with Victor Hugo & was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Rimbaudin 2001. I expect this book to win even greater praise. This was easily my non-fiction book recommendation of the year for 2007, & is a book I will return to. It was revelatory, lucid & vivid. Anyone with an interestin France, orin history, will be well served by getting this book as soon as possible.
