The Discovery of France Read Online Free PDF Page A

Europe consisted of twelve granite houses and about seventy people, who were ruled by a council of old men. There were no beggars, no servants, and, to the envious delight of the travellers who discovered this spartan Shangri-la, no tax-payers.
    The hamlet-nation of Goust had been known to the outside world since at least the fifteenth century, but the people were left to their own happy devices, ‘an entirely isolated tribe, which has conserved its simple, primitive customs’. The frighteningly steep, rubble-strewn road that leads up to the hamlet was built less than forty years ago. In 2005, Nathalie Barou, the great-granddaughter of one of the women in the photograph of 1889 (figure 1), showed me the medieval door-lintel that bears the original name of her family: Baron. A Baron of Goust is known to have existed in the sixteenth century. One of his ancestors, impoverished by the crusades, may have sold the land to his serfs, who never saw the need to join the confederations that would one day form the province of Béarn and eventually become part of France.
    The people of Goust had no church and no cemetery. When someone died, the coffin was attached to ropes and lowered to the valley below. In fine weather, the living clambered down the mountainto sell milk and vegetables, to have their children baptized or to look at the ladies who came to take the waters at Eaux-Chaudes. When a road was dynamited through the gorge below the hamlet in 1850 and the skimpy wooden ‘Bridge of Hell’ was rebuilt in stone, Goust became a picturesque excursion for a few bored invalids and travel writers. Without them, it might have passed into oblivion like the hundreds of other ‘autonomous republics’ that once existed within the borders of France.
    Goust was an exception mainly because it was relatively well known and because geographical force majeure held it in its patriarchal pose well into the steam age. Compared to other small, remote places, it was really quite well connected to the outside world. Its seventy inhabitants, some of whom were said to have celebrated their hundredth birthday, could hardly have thrived in total seclusion. Their communal treasury contained wool from Barèges and ribbons from Spain, and their genes too must have contained mementos of trips to the world beyond. Even the dead of Goust were comparatively well travelled. Their counterparts in high Alpine villages, if they gave up the ghost during the six or seven months of isolation, were stored on the family roof under a et of snow until spring thawed the ground, releasing the body to the grave and allowing a priest to reach the village.
    Spectacular sites like Goust came to play a vital role in the creation of a French national identity. For the postcard-buying public with return tickets to modern civilization, tribes belonged to remote places – the further from the city, the further back in time. Teetering on the rocky perimeter of France, villages like Goust in the Pyrenees or Saint-Véran in the Alps were the national parks and reservations of the educated imagination. The truth was soon forgotten when cheap travel and national newspapers had telescoped the country and erased the old tribal divisions. Goust was in many respects a normal community in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France. As the economist Michel Chevalier told the readers of a Parisian journal in 1837 after a visit to the eastern Pyrenees and Andorra:
    Each valley is still a little world which differs from the neighbouring world as Mercury does from Uranus. Each village is a clan, a kind ofstate with its own form of patriotism. There are different types and characters at every step, different opinions, prejudices and customs.
    If Chevalier had travelled from Paris on foot, instead of taking a high-speed coach on a modern road, he might have found that his description fitted most of the country.
    Visiting these clans and tiny states involves a long journey into undiscovered