The past isn’t what it seems: The more you know about France the more this quirky history will amaze you
When we divide the world into developed and undeveloped economies, we should remember how very recent all of what we call development is.
When we marvel at—or doubt–the speed at which China or India or Brazil is becoming developed, we should remember that what is now called the developed world did it just as quickly.
That’s the message of Graham Robb’s amazingly quirky history The Discovery of France (Picador, 2007). Robb attempts, and large succeeds, at that most difficult of imaginative acts: he makes us see a history that we think we know as the story of a strange land full of marvels. (By the way the book is just an amazing amount of fun as well.)
The past, Robb points out, isn’t filled with people just like us. Indeed while the gap in years is small—just 250 years of so—the world of 1750 and 1850 and even 1900 is often unrecognizable to those who live in the developed economies of 2009.
Robb’s subject happens to be France. As a prize winning biographer of Balzac, Hugo, and Rimbaud, it’s a country he knows well and one he clearly loves. But the history he writes could be written of much of the now developed world.
And it’s a strange history indeed.
Consider that
- The effort to draw first complete and reliable map of France dates back to just 1740. The first sheet of Cassini’s great map was published in 1750; the last was printed in 1815.
- In 1777 it took 37,000 (unpaid workers) and 22,000 horses (presumably fed if not paid) seven days to build 22 miles of road in the Rouen region. Read more
