What is The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War about?

Graham Robb's premise is audacious: France was not discovered until relatively recently, and even then, most of what was discovered was quickly erased. In the century between the Revolution and the First World War, an ancient provincial world of Celtic dialects, local religions, seasonal nomadism, and landscape-specific customs was first mapped and catalogued by the French state, and then systematically dismantled in the name of national unity. Robb's book is both a history of that world and a lament for its disappearance.

The research behind the book is extraordinary. Robb cycled 14,000 miles across France over several years, following the routes of the surveyors, botanists, and army engineers who mapped the country in the nineteenth century. What he found in the archives contradicts almost everything the dominant narrative of French national identity assumes. Most French people in 1800 did not speak French as their first language. Many did not know what France was. The "hexagon" of French national territory was not a stable reality but a construction that required enormous state effort, including military conscription, mandatory schooling, and the deliberate suppression of regional languages, to make real.

The book's method is accumulation: hundreds of specific details, customs, place names, occupations, and beliefs drawn from local histories, folklore collections, and prefectural reports. The world Robb reconstructs is not the France of Paris and the great chateaux. It is the France of the transhumant shepherds of the Pyrenees, the seasonal workers who walked hundreds of miles to work, the villages that worshipped local saints whose names had never been heard in Rome, and the children raised in seasonal isolation so extreme that the state's agents found them barely socialized. This is not a romantic portrait — Robb is clear that the old world was often brutal and its poverty desperate — but it is a corrective to a mythology of seamless national culture.

What makes The Discovery of France a pleasure to read alongside its argument is Robb's prose, which is dry, witty, and occasionally startling. He is a literary biographer by training — he has written on Victor Hugo, Rimbaud, and Balzac — and he brings a novelist's eye for the telling detail to historical geography. The book won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Royal Geographical Society's Geographical Award and has been widely recognized as one of the most original works of French history in recent decades.