of the French empire’.
The idea was that timeless, natural logic should prevail over the old feudal and tribal divisions. Tyrants came and went but the Alps would last forever. In this way, ‘prejudices, habits and barbaric institutions consolidated by fourteen centuries of existence’ would be swept away. Language barriers were explicitly ignored, despite objections from some councils – like that of Saint-Malo on the borders of Brittany – that they would be forced to work with people who spoke ‘languages predating Caesar’s conquest’.
A seemingly small but important complaint about the new départements was that people would lose their collective names. Bretons, Burgundians, Gascons and Normans would officially cease to exist and be left with nothing but a national identity. The new names were too brutally descriptive to be used for individuals. No one would try to call themselves a Bouches-du-Rhônien or a Mont-Blancois.
The success of the Revolution’s egalitarian reinvention of France lay, ironically, in the rise of the urban middle class, which was less attached to ancient boundaries and local identities. The historical divisions of France came to be associated with quaint provincials and primitive peasants. For all its practical virtues, the division of France into départements helped to accelerate a process that can best be described as the opposite of discovery. Ignorance of daily life beyond the well-connected cities and familiarity with the monuments and personalities of Paris would be signs of enlightened modernity. The provinces would be recreated as the great domain of the unconscious mind – la France profonde, a source of fairy tales, natural wonders and threats to civilization.
The commemoration of national anniversaries that is still a notable feature of French public life is also an obliteration of events and cultures that are not to be remembered. This process of forgetting was one of the great social forces in the formation of modern France. Middle-class children would forget the provincial languages they learned from nurses and servants, or remember them only as a picturesque remnant of the past. Peasant children would be thrashedand mocked for speaking the language of their parents at school. Most of the descendants of those benighted millions in the Abbé Grégoire’s ‘eradication’ report would lose the tribal speech of their pays and acquire a highly codified and formal foreign language known as French – a language which, according to many French-speakers, almost no one speaks correctly. In the land of a thousand tongues, monolingualism became the mark of the educated person.
5
Living in France, I: The Face in the Museum
A LMOST EVERY TOWN IN F RANCE every town in France now has a museum of ‘daily life’ or of ‘popular arts and traditions’. Most of them are stocked with artefacts that would otherwise have disappeared or turned into expensive accessories in homes and restaurants. The roughly decorated chests, the butter churns and baskets, the wooden tables with smooth, saucer-shaped depressions into which the soup was poured, bear witness to the resilience of their owners. They have the dignity of objects that shared a human life. Each one contains the ghost of a gesture that was performed a million times. They make it easy to imagine a life of hard work and habit.
Naturally, the artefacts are the best examples available: the hefty cradle, the expensive plough with metal parts and a manufacturer’s name, the embroidered smock that was kept in a chest as part of someone’s trousseau and never saw the pigsty or the field. As survivors, they tell a heartening tale of endurance. Other companions of daily life – the rotting bed, the treasured dung heap, the stench-laden fug of human and animal breath that could extinguish a burning candle – are impossible to display.
Sometimes, the person who was survived by her possessions appears in their midst and the
The idea was that timeless, natural logic should prevail over the old feudal and tribal divisions. Tyrants came and went but the Alps would last forever. In this way, ‘prejudices, habits and barbaric institutions consolidated by fourteen centuries of existence’ would be swept away. Language barriers were explicitly ignored, despite objections from some councils – like that of Saint-Malo on the borders of Brittany – that they would be forced to work with people who spoke ‘languages predating Caesar’s conquest’.
A seemingly small but important complaint about the new départements was that people would lose their collective names. Bretons, Burgundians, Gascons and Normans would officially cease to exist and be left with nothing but a national identity. The new names were too brutally descriptive to be used for individuals. No one would try to call themselves a Bouches-du-Rhônien or a Mont-Blancois.
The success of the Revolution’s egalitarian reinvention of France lay, ironically, in the rise of the urban middle class, which was less attached to ancient boundaries and local identities. The historical divisions of France came to be associated with quaint provincials and primitive peasants. For all its practical virtues, the division of France into départements helped to accelerate a process that can best be described as the opposite of discovery. Ignorance of daily life beyond the well-connected cities and familiarity with the monuments and personalities of Paris would be signs of enlightened modernity. The provinces would be recreated as the great domain of the unconscious mind – la France profonde, a source of fairy tales, natural wonders and threats to civilization.
The commemoration of national anniversaries that is still a notable feature of French public life is also an obliteration of events and cultures that are not to be remembered. This process of forgetting was one of the great social forces in the formation of modern France. Middle-class children would forget the provincial languages they learned from nurses and servants, or remember them only as a picturesque remnant of the past. Peasant children would be thrashedand mocked for speaking the language of their parents at school. Most of the descendants of those benighted millions in the Abbé Grégoire’s ‘eradication’ report would lose the tribal speech of their pays and acquire a highly codified and formal foreign language known as French – a language which, according to many French-speakers, almost no one speaks correctly. In the land of a thousand tongues, monolingualism became the mark of the educated person.
5
Living in France, I: The Face in the Museum
A LMOST EVERY TOWN IN F RANCE every town in France now has a museum of ‘daily life’ or of ‘popular arts and traditions’. Most of them are stocked with artefacts that would otherwise have disappeared or turned into expensive accessories in homes and restaurants. The roughly decorated chests, the butter churns and baskets, the wooden tables with smooth, saucer-shaped depressions into which the soup was poured, bear witness to the resilience of their owners. They have the dignity of objects that shared a human life. Each one contains the ghost of a gesture that was performed a million times. They make it easy to imagine a life of hard work and habit.
Naturally, the artefacts are the best examples available: the hefty cradle, the expensive plough with metal parts and a manufacturer’s name, the embroidered smock that was kept in a chest as part of someone’s trousseau and never saw the pigsty or the field. As survivors, they tell a heartening tale of endurance. Other companions of daily life – the rotting bed, the treasured dung heap, the stench-laden fug of human and animal breath that could extinguish a burning candle – are impossible to display.
Sometimes, the person who was survived by her possessions appears in their midst and the
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