Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture Read Online Free

penultimate peasant, who used to drink. Or at least he did until the day he went down the mountain to vote, and someone in a café told him he didn't look too well. They took him to the hospital for observation, he couldn't drink for eight days, and promptly died.
    The surviving Ultimate Peasant followed a rigidly structured life: he rose at five, and went up the mountain to collect dead wood for a fire ritually lit at five in the evening, every day, regardless of season or weather. He lived with and off his goats; he had a certain amount of money, but didn't spend anything. He had never married. “I suppose he could get a Russian,” said Madame. There is still a bachelors' fête not too far away, where women traditionally came for husbands. Years ago they would be Portuguese or Spanish; nowadays they are Polish or Russian. But this solution is improbable. In the meantime, everyone in the village does errands for the Ultimate One (“It took him fifteen years to say Thank You”). He doesn't drive and—according to the incomers— couldn't live through the winter without their help. At some point he, the last indigène, will die, and then this village, which seemed on first acquaintance so authentic, will become completely false— or, if you prefer, will finish reinventing itself for the modern world. It will be sustained by tourism rather than agriculture; be reliant on cars and out-of-town shopping; and be virtually uninhabited in winter. A seasonal village, repeating from time to time a few of the communal acts which its originators and their successors performed out of necessity and belief and habit.
    La France profonde has disappeared within our century; or at least is now graspable only in tainted form. Edith Wharton saw this about to happen as she roared through France with Henry James at her side. “The trivial motorist,” as she described herself, was to prove the forerunner of other destructive agents: war, peace, communications technology, mass tourism, the industrialization of agriculture, the unfettered free market, Americanization, Eurification, greed, short-termism, complacent ahistoricism.
    The old nation-states of Europe are gradually being homogenized into herdable groups of international consumers separated only by language. Is this a fair—or, at least, the only—price to pay for the avoidance of those recidivist spasms of continent-wide warfare which marked our previous history? Perhaps. Would the Ultimate Peasant prefer to start his life now, with an easier workload, social benefits, subventions from Brussels, satellite porn, and an off-road vehicle? Perhaps. But both the lowering of ambition among the European leadership and the lowering of distinctiveness among the European populations have to be noted. We give character to our own particular region of dullness by certain totemic cults and, where necessary, by the invention of tradition. The French are as good at this as anybody; and the Francophile's dismay at such permitted dilution of the Gallic essence is the greater because the French have always made the largest claims, both for themselves and for Europe.
    The historian Richard Cobb first went to France in 1935, to a Paris which still (just) contained Edith Wharton, though what fascinated him was popular life rather than literary pilgrimage: the street vendors and flame-swallowers, the strolling musicians and prostitutes, the manacled strong men enjoying “droit de pavé on the immensely wide pavement”; the world of obscure bars and tiny, four-table restaurants; the exuberance, volubility, and cheerful anarchy of the daily scene; and behind it all, that enviable ease with pleasure which so attracts the repressed English. He delighted in the pungent Métro and the convivial plate-forme d'autobus (a Cobb leitmotif, along with leprous Utrillo walls and the faux manoir nor-mand), while asserting, and proving, that a city could only be truly known if explored on foot.
    He acquired what he