The Discovery of France - Book by Graham Robb

Name: The Discovery of France
Author: Graham Robb

Until well into the nineteenth century, France remained a largely undiscovered country, waiting to be colonized. The king in Paris, like the later governments, had no direct influence in the individual provinces. This only changed gradually as a modern infrastructure slowly made it easier to reach distant places. Cartographers had been surveying the land since the mid-eighteenth century and creating maps to get a more accurate picture of this France. Railways and new roads caused a rural exodus, primarily to the Paris metropolis. The government struggled to introduce a nationwide standardized time and the decimal system in the provinces. The Parisian empire wanted to civilize the 'savages' in the provinces. Schools only managed to provide well-trained teachers interested in the national cause at the end of the nineteenth century, who instilled in the local children the awareness that people in the province also belonged to a large nation. This new type of teacher worried about the future of children who did not speak the national language well enough. So, students had to endure humiliating punishments if they used words of the local language instead of French in class. At the beginning of the French Revolution, approximately eleven percent of the population of France could speak French. The slow adoption of French as the national language lasted from then until the First World War. In addition to compulsory education, military service, the railway, newspapers, domestic French tourism, and French folk songs contributed to this. France possessed a wealth of different languages in its regions that were displaced by French in this process. But even the opponents of the French nation-state were no longer able to think in non-nationalistic categories. When they demanded an independent nation-state on a small scale (for example, an independent Brittany), they expressed a thought that would have been completely foreign to the local inhabitants before the modernization of their region.

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