Travel:France is entrancing, non? Many of us think so, fondly regarding France and the French as a cut above the rest. Its varied landscapes are more sublime, its towns more beautiful, its country folk happier. They eat better, their perfect diets based on wonderful cheeses and wines and local specialities prepared to age-old recipes.
They know how to live and, we like to think, they always lived like this. Much of our fondness is based on the assumption that this enviable husbandry of theirs evolved harmoniously through the centuries when our forebears were steeped in misery and oppression . . .
We are wrong. When Graham Robb set out to discover France, how it was and how it is, he found the place we know and love to be of very recent vintage.
Ignoring Paris, which is no more representative of France than New York is of the US, he has cycled thousands of miles across the length and breadth of la France profonde. This gives life and immediacy to his investigations. He also spent what must have been thousands of hours in libraries, reading the kind of left-of-field accounts that can give received history a novel and disconcerting face.
Eugen Weber broke this ground some decades ago in his seminal Peasants Into Frenchmen. But the more academic Weber is perhaps less known among general readers. Robb provides a fresh, fast-paced, racy read that is quite as fascinating.
His France is a country that up to a little more than a century ago was one only in name, a fabrication of the imperial perspective from distant Paris. Shrouded in bocage and forest it was a kind of jungle, secretive, unknown and perilous. Many of the landscapes that we see as archetypal France are younger than the Eiffel Tower. Like other European countries it was a patchwork of badly mapped regions, isolated one from another by different languages, individual forms of poverty and the absence of efficient transport. Even by the mid-19th century the old Roman roads were still the best. Progress in that century in the form of the railways and the roads and universal education gradually brought about uniformity and prosperity, and Robb tells us how. But the real interest of his book is the picture he paints of the bad old world of the provinces, still relatively recent.
Forget that bucolic existence we like to imagine. In fact, compared to the wretched French peasant his Irish pre-Famine contemporary could be said to have enjoyed a life of plenty - and even, in some ways, to have been more enterprising.
We at least had turf - in many areas the French response to winter cold was to huddle together in bed for months on end. The French equivalent of the potato (on which the Irish thrived) was a rock-hard and gritty bread, a week old or a year old, depending on the region. Meat was likely to be a once-a-year treat. Forget wine - if he was a vine-grower he had to sell his wine for the rent or tithe money. The travel writer, Arthur Young (who also came to Ireland), put the endemic wretchedness down to "a minute and vicious division of the soil": it sounds oddly familiar.
Wild animals particular to the pays - chamois, marmots, birds - were often the only source of protein. Foxes were prized in Burgundy. The French interest in food can be glimpsed here only in the instructions for preparing a fox for the table - it should be "hung out in the garden, on a plum tree, for two weeks during the frosts". Inside every French person there was obviously always a gourmet waiting to get out. However, regional specialities usually had more to do with diseases than with dishes. Here goitres, there pellagra. Everywhere people were stunted and disfigured due to malnourishment. To save energy they walked and worked with a noticeable slowness and much of what they did was unskilled. If we get our image of healthy and hard-working peasants from contemporary paintings, Robb reminds us wryly that "painted peasants were nearly always up to the task".
No, there was little joie de vivre. Life was a misfortune, an endless toil against the savagery of the soil, the elements, and tithes and taxes. Death was regarded as a gift. Sickly children were considered lucky as they might soon be relieved of life.
About children in general, they could be quite unsentimental. Infanticide was common. Unwanted children - "little angels" - were despatched discreetly at the hands of the Night Midwife. Or, with less overt callousness, sent off to the Foundling Hospital in Paris via the donkey- drivers who plied the trade of baby-transporters; stuffed into panniers and fed wine to pacify them, one in 10 survived the journey.
Of course, it wasn't all fatalism and gloom. French ingenuity is evident too. In 1860 there was a beehive for every 13 inhabitants (though Robb doesn't tell us how this statistic was arrived at). In the Landes, the shepherds loped around on stilts and rested in the fields on a tripod version, knitting and conversing.
There is a mystery, however. If la France was not so belle and her inhabitants were so miserable, why did Longfellow, for instance, arrive in 1832 with the same romantic expectations as a Francophile of today? He was not the only one. Where has this mythical France come from? And the baffling thing is that Robb's deconstruction dents it not at all.
Anne Haverty's most recent novel The Free And Easy is now out in paperback
The Discovery of France By Graham Robb Picador, 455pp. £18.99