Volume 54, Number 19 · December 6, 2007
Who Are 'The French'?
By P.N. Furbank
The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War
by Graham Robb
Norton, 455 pp., $27.95
One should perhaps begin by examining the title of this most appealing book. Graham Robb, the author of much-praised biographies of Victor Hugo, Balzac, and Rimbaud, tells us how he decided it was time for him 'to explore the country on which [he] was supposed to be an authority.' For the angle of vision of the writers he had studied—of almost all major French writers, indeed—was Parisian; and whatever else Paris is, it is not France in miniature. Thus he got onto (he 'rediscovered') that 'miraculous machine' his bicycle and, with a friend, went once or twice a year for several years on a voyage of discovery. This in turn set his mind running on how, over the years from the death of Louis XIV to the outbreak of the First World War, the French themselves discovered France. His journeys became 'a complex puzzle in four dimensions.' He wanted to know what he was missing and what he would have seen a century or two before. Hence to 14,000 halcyon miles in the saddle there had to be added—what was more physically grueling—four years in the library.
Review, 3521 words
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