For much of the modern era, though, God was rather easily pleased. This according to Graham Robb's historical, geographical, and ethnographic survey of the French hinterland from the time of the Revolution up to the First World War.
Deep France, "la France profonde," is the romantic term applied by Parisian intellectuals to suggest that the glories of the metropolis, along with its country retreats and other assorted beauty spots, are fed by direct taproot from off-the-beaten-path glories the length and breadth of the hexagon. (France's shape became definitive only after it recovered the great chunk gouged out when the Prussians seized Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, but shape is part of her identity. Some French, with a touch of self-irony, refer to their own occasionally geometric way of thinking as hexagonal.)
Unknown France or even Wild France comes closer to Robb's theme. His study of the country over some 150 years, centering on the 19th century, shows something very different from the orderly unity with agreeable regional variations that we may think of.
A century ago, he writes, French was a foreign language to a majority of the French, who spoke a dozen varieties of the Occitan tongue along with Catalonian south of the Loire, and Basque, Breton, the Germanic-flavored speech of Alsace, and innumerable patois dialects elsewhere. Racine, for example, complained of being unable to order a chamberpot at his inn in Lyon.
Until the railroads came in, travel, even by stagecoach, along mainly miserable main roads was a bone-shaking crawl. At one point Robb renders distances as time: France was three weeks north to south, and three east to west.
Most of the population was rural and thus relatively isolated. Robb pictures a nation whose superstructure was provided by the central government, but whose structure consisted of communes, isolated and distrustful of one another. He tells, for example, of the pitched battle between two communes over which way a statue of the Virgin Mary standing on the hill between them would face; neither wanted the back view.
