The Discovery of France |
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 | Visiting relatives in France, I often drive down the A26 autoroute over the plain of Champagne: mile after mile of chalk plateau, with never a village or house in sight. I've often wondered how this landscape looked before motor transport, when getting from your house to work the fields involved horse-power or your own feet: was the settlement pattern denser, with hamlets and villages now swept away by the depopulation following agribusiness, or has it always been this empty? Graham Robb answered this for me in this splendid study of the making of modern France: it always was empty, to the extent that in early cartographic surveys of the country the need to record landmarks on this featureless plain led particularly conspicuous trees to find their way onto national maps.
Robb is both a historian and expert on France, and someone who has cycled extensively in the country, and he brings to his historical work a grounding in the sheer physicality of the land that I don't remember ... read more.
Written by Graham Robb.
Published 04 July 2008.
Published by Picador.
rrp £9.99.
454 pages Paperback.
ISBN: 033042761X
ISBN-13: 9780330427616 | |
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