The Discovery of France
A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War
By Graham Robb
About the book
The idea of the French as a single nation is fairly recent and, in historical terms, misleading, Graham Robb argues. To recover the country's real past, he cycled 14,000 miles around France and spent four years on research. The result is a historical geography of the years between the Revolution and the First World War that examines French national identity through the many cultures and languages within the country, touching on maps, migration, magic, tribal disputes and differences of speech. Picador published it in the United Kingdom in September 2007, and W. W. Norton followed in the United States a month later.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb praised it as a close study of how a state imposes nationality on a people, through internal colonization and the erasure of local traits.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Flaneur)
This book has wonderful qualities that I am certain will be picked up by other reviewers. But I would like to add the following. This is the most profound examination of how nationality is enforced on a group of people, with the internal colonization process and the stamping out of idiosyncratic traits. As someone suspicious of government and state control, I was wondering how France did so well in spite of having a big government. This book gave me the answer: it took a long time for the government and the "nation" to penetrate the depth of deep France, "la France profonde". It was not until recently that French was spoken by the majority of the citizens. Schools taught French but it was just like Greek or Latin: people forgot it right after they finished their (short) school life. For a long time France's villages were unreachable.
A great book, a great investigation.
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