Memoirs of a Breton Peasant Jean-Marie Déguignet Seven Stories ISBN 1-58322-616-8 hardcover, 432 pages $28 (US)

Village in the Vaucluse Laurence Wylie Harvard University ISBN 0-674-93936-0 paperback, 390 pages $21 (US)

Walks Through Lost Paris Leonard Pitt Shoemaker & Hoard ISBN 1-59376-103-1 paperback, 194 pages $22 (US)

The French Worker Mark Traugott University of California ISBN 0-520-07932-9 paperback, 382 pages $27.50 (US)

Spring has started to make her presence felt — just in time to stymie another attempt at record rain. As far as bribes go, though: is one sunny weekend going to be sufficient? Are we really so willing to forgive Mother Nature and forget? We’re talking weeks of Pineapple Express weather here, with grey clouds settled in for the duration, and the streets glazed and corrugated with water sluicing to the drains. At such times almost anywhere else seems preferable to this sodden setting; someplace far — at least in spirit — from the constant gurgle of rain running through the eaves.

I suppose that taking flight is the only real escape from a raincoast winter: British Airways, Qantas, Lufthansa, Finnair: surely one of those could help us see and feel the sun. And for those without the means of getting bodily away, a good travel book can do the trick; because the sole requirement of a successful travel narrative is that it take the reader on the literary equivalent of a magic carpet ride: away.

But modern travel narratives are becoming far too formulaic; A Pig in Provence (the title suggests a put-on; but no) is a case in point. Described as:

another extraordinary memoir of a woman embarking on a new life — this time in the South of France. […] Filled with delicious recipes and local color, […] evocative and passionate memoir […] entrancing tale […] perfect for foodies, Francophiles, or anyone who’s dreamed of packing their bags and buying a ticket to the good life.

Yet another bastard offspring of those two proven bestsellers, Under the Tuscan Sun and A Year in Provence. Peter Mayle, whose books have essentially strip-mined Provence of all its unselfconciousness; crossed with Frances Mayes, who did much the same for Tuscany not long ago. Such inbreeding seems to be the accepted way.

Tourism has been a standard pastime of the middle class (armed with their trusty Baedekers) for close to 200 years. But consider the impact on national identity, as airplanes of astonishing size disgorge tourists at all the usual destinations with the regularity of a septic pump. National borders evaporate within the EEC to permit unprecedented internal migrations; the result is a blended cultural landscape which includes a rural south of France filled with homes owned by pensioners seeking refuge from elsewhere. Three years ago J & I rented a home in the French Pyrenees with three other family members; our landlords were a retired Swedish couple who had spent their summer travelling in Australia. C’est la vie.

Perhaps books like A Pig in Provence simply reflect the homogeneity of the global landscape, a world where rural properties in the warmer climates are snapped up by those able to finance parallel lives: a “real” life somewhere boring but financially secure (and culturally familiar), paired with a fantasy life where they — Americans, Canadians, Brits, or Swedes — can go native for a few months every year. Even as they take notes for the next offering in the increasingly unappealing Travel Writing genre.

Faced with this devaluation in the modern travel narrative, what is the desperate armchair traveller to do?

One approach is to follow the example of Jack London’s Star Rover — and take a trip through time rather than through space. The places that you can travel to will rarely live up to their advance billing. Why not accept that fact, and make your next visit to the only place that can never change: the past. With that in mind, here are a few books to help you plan your next armchair holiday: to the France of long ago.

• • •

Time travel is more rewarding in the company of a local, someone raised in that specific time and place. Most period memoirs, though, are written by those with the leisure time to lounge around their writing desks: the upper classes in other words — politicians and the nobility, and why would we want to spend our leisure time with that self-serving lot? There are very few accounts of life among the pre-modern working classes, and a case could be made that the realistic novel (with Émile Zola the earliest practitioner) was invented to fill that void, providing a literary window into that mute world. I suspect that this is one reason that Jean-Marie Déguignet’s Memoirs of a Breton Peasant was a bestseller when it was published in France in 1998: it satisfied a craving to know more about an undocumented past.

Déguignet was born in 1834 to a family of tenant farmers, in a region of France that was, in many respects, a primitive colony of the central government in Paris. The rural poor (of Brittany as elsewhere) were at the mercy of the “landed gentry”, liable to be turned out of their homes at the slightest provocation; they had little hope of ever owning land themselves. As a boy Déguignet was sent out to beg for food for the family table:

In the spring of 1834, an old goodwife from the neighborhood came to tell my mother that she would do better to send me out to make the rounds of the whole commune with a beggar’s pouch than to simply let me beg for my daily meal around Le Guélennec — that I could bring in much more provender for the household. My mother agreed to it. The goodwife was a professional beggar; she undertook to teach me the trade.

He describes these years with no trace of shame: begging was simply a necessary means of survival, in many respects a profession like any other. Déguignet had little opportunity for formal education but made the most of the opportunities that came his way, learning the rudiments of farming, and even teaching himself to speak (and eventually read) in French, an uncommon skill in a region which had its own distinct language: Breton, and where most people had no reason to learn any other tongue.

Brittany offered few opportunities for self-improvement, so Déguignet chose a military career, enlisting in the French army at the age of 20, relieved to have all his needs — food, shelter, clothing — taken care of for seven years. The central section of Memoirs of a Breton Peasant describe’s Déguignet’s experiences as a foot-soldier in the army of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (later Emperor Napoléon III), at a time when France was engaged in a succession of foreign wars. He served for two seven-year terms, seeing action in the Crimean War as well as in Italy, North Africa, and in Mexico (in support of the ill-fated Austrian puppet-Emperor Maximillian).

Déguignet is a colourful character who speaks his mind plainly, and his vehement anticlerical sentiments run through the Memoirs like a vivid thread. Editor Bernez Rouz points out the consequences of these views in a foreword, noting “the difficulty of being a freethinker in a society regulated and controlled by the all-powerful Church.” Déguignet wrote his Memoirs late in life, and the original manuscript was mislaid by a local folklorist who had promised its publication. Only brief excerpts ever made it into print, in the December 1904 issue of La revue de Paris. Outraged at this shabby treatment, Déguignet had no recourse but to sit down and write the whole thing out again. His notebooks (forty-three of them, nearly 4,000 pages) lay in a cupboard undiscovered until recently, a backstory which nicely accentuates the pleasures of the memoirs themselves.

• • •

Our time machine’s next jump is from Brittany during the Second Empire to village life in 1950s Provence, as seen through the eyes of a Francophile American on sabbatical.

The fact that a sociological study of French village life circa the 1950s has remained in print for more than fifty years suggests that it has something more going for it than simply academic merit. Of course it doesn’t hurt that Laurence Wylie’s Village in the Vaucluse has the resources — and the prestige — of Harvard University Press behind it, but the book deserves its status as a classic, offering a fascinating glimpse into the workings of a rural community.

An alias of “Peyrane” was used by Wylie for the village described in Village in the Vaucluse, but this attempt to protect villagers from curiosity-seekers could not prevent a flood of tourists — a preview of “the Mayle effect” — who were able to read between the lines, and in a preface to the second edition Wylie admits that his “Peyrane” was actually the town of Roussillon, about 50 km east of Avignon, in the heart of the department of Vaucluse.

Wylie’s goal was to study a “typical” French village during a sabbatical year (1950-51), and Peyrane/Roussillon was selected because it best matched his criteria:

The best village […] would not be too near Paris or any big city, nor would it be tucked away in too remote an area. It would not be dominated by the presence of a big army camp, factory, mine, school, hospital, or resort. It would not have suffered great damage in the war. The land should not be in the ownership of a small group of individuals, and its use should not be too specialized. The work techniques should be modern but not those of an industrialized agricultural area. There should be a normal flow of population moving to and away from the village. The dialect should not be too difficult for me to learn in a short time — that is, not Basque or Breton.

Village in the Vaucluse has sections on “Growing up in Peyrane,” “Making a Living,” “Health” and “Old Age” — everything you would expect in a serious anthropological monograph. But there are also chapters on “The Hunting Club” and “The Steam Roller Incident,” illustrating Wylie’s firm belief that the villagers of Peyrane/Roussillon were people foremost, and not just subjects to be studied.

In series of epilogues Wylie updates his original conclusions to show a community in transition; in “Peyrane Ten Years Later” he notes the effect of television on social contacts, and remarks on the steep rise in real estate prices as Peyrane evolves into a resort town capable of supporting a previously unheard of three cafés.

Village in the Vaucluse is Marcel Pagnol leavened with Fernand Braudel. This, the third edition, has gone more than thirty years without revision, and it would be fascinating to have recent census data to compare with statistics that showed the village population declining from 1,484 in 1851 to 779 in 1946. But Wylie died in 1996 at the age of 86, and I suspect that his Village in the Vaucluse will remain what it has been for half a century: an affectionate — and clear-eyed — record of a way of life that has essentially disappeared.

• • •

From Provence we journey north (geographically), and back again (chronologically) to the time of Napoléon III, with Leonard Pitt as our erudite guide on a series of fascinating walks through “lost” Paris. While Jean-Marie Déguignet was fighting for his country and emperor in the Crimea, Paris itself was being re-made under the hand of Baron Haussmann, who had been appointed Prefect of the Seine by Louis-Napoléon in 1853. Haussmann’s mandate was to modernize a city that was

bursting at the seams, trying to fit onto a map that was medieval in size and layout. Despite its history and charm, Paris was dark, dirty, foul-smelling and overcrowded. Aside from a few wide thoroughfares, the city was a tangle of narrow, twisting streets that made travel difficult at best, nightmarish at worst.

By the time he was fired seventeen years later, Haussmann had completely transformed Paris into the city we all know today. Entire neighborhoods of the old city were destroyed in bringing Paris into the modern era, a sacrifice which angered many people.

Between 1853 and 1870, Haussmann demolished nearly 20,000 buildings in Paris and constructed 45,000 new buildings. With an army of 60,000 workers laboring day and night, he erased hundreds of streets from the map.

In his introduction to Walks Through Lost Paris, Pitt is too much of a realist to mourn the Paris which was “lost” through the massive civic re-engineering projects of the late 19th Century. In notes accompanying one of the book’s guided walks he points out the banality of a facade which resulted from a 1950s-era renovation, remarking that “Haussmann’s work can be seen as a preemptive strike, pulling the rug out from under the feet of the real barbarians.”

Walks Through Lost Paris contains detailed descriptions of four walking routes through the heart of Paris: one on Ile de la Cité, another in the Marais, and two which begin at Saint-Germain des Prés, heading east and north respectively. Each walk is illustrated with an assortment of contemporary and historic photographs and engravings which allow visitors to compare present-day Paris with the ghost city which still haunts its rues and boulevards.

In one black and white photograph we look down rue Saint-Julien le Pauvre, with the twin towers of Notre Dame just visible above an annex to the Hotel Dieu; in a later photograph (circa 1908) the annex has vanished, while a third reveals the cathedral as we would see it today: looking across the Square Viviani, a pocket park created from the grounds of the demolished annex in 1928.

It is fascinating to observe the evolution of a particular streetscape by comparing photographs taken (in some cases) over a century apart, and amazing what the imagination can do with little more than a collection of old photographs and maps. Assisted by clearly written captions and commentary, seasoned with a rich assortment of lively anecdotes, Pitt can turn a stroll that might otherwise have been just another shopping expedition into a vivid visit to a city which has managed — despite the efforts of Haussmann and the lesser civic planners who followed — to preserve its past in harmony with the present, while epitomizing “the modern” for more than 150 years.

• • •

We will conclude our time travels with an extended stay in the nineteenth century, in the company of seven ordinary working people from various parts of France. Mark Traugott’s The French Worker: Autobiographies from the Early Industrial Age brings the period to life in a way which no historical novel could hope to match, by offering an authenticity that can only come with stories told from the life.

We have Jacques Bédé, a wood turner trained in Tours, forced to move by that city’s commercial collapse:

I still had enough money to make the journey to Paris. I informed my wife, who wavered a bit before deciding to undertake so long a voyage to go to live in a city she held in awe because of its size and the high cost of all the necessities of life. I told my wife that she should not make the capital into a monster, that people lived in Paris the same way they lived everywhere else: by working.

Norbert Truquin, a silk weaver in Lyon, describes the harsh consequences of a downturn in the economy:

We went six months without finding work. When the first note came due, I did not have a cent to pay it off. Three months later, I had two notes to pay, plus one hundred francs of quarterly rent. We were still without work. Fortunately, the baker supplied us with bread on the cuff, and the grocer also gave us credit. For our first six months of honeymoon, we practically lived on boiled potatoes. My wife would buy a quarter liter of wine for dinner. I tried to put an end to this wine ration, but my wife held firm, alleging that without this drop of wine, we would completely lose our strength for when work started back up.

There is Agricol Perdiguier, a joiner born in the Vaucluse, who learns his craft during an extended clockwise tour through the French provinces. Perdiguier’s account of his four-year tour as an apprentice joiner provides a fascinating glimpse into the ancient guild system, with roots that go back well before the Middle Ages. As Traugott says in a footnote, the original guilds (or “worker’s brotherhoods”) were “clandestine associations which protected trade secrets and the society’s rituals from being divulged to nonmembers and tried to control entry to the trade.”

The French Worker peoples nineteenth century France (including Leonard Pitt’s “lost Paris”) with its contemporary inhabitants, and does the job so effectively that the period comes back to life. Books like these can turn almost anyone into an amateur historian, and until a working time machine is finally perfected I can think of no better way for a reader to escape her present time and place.