Perhaps, after all, things were not as bad as they seemed? As French historians have been pointing out ever since the English farmer Arthur Young made his agricultural tours of France in 1787, 1788 and 1789, not everyone was drowning in poverty. Not all French towns were full of ‘crooked, dirty, stinking streets’ (Brive) and ‘excrementitious lanes’ (Clermont-Ferrand). Some of them, as Young observed, had ‘foot-pavements’ or trottoirs (Dijon and Tours). Not every tavern toilet was a ‘temple of abomination’ and not every serving-girl a ‘walking dung-hill’. Sometimes the traveller was spared the agony of eating his meal on a straight-backed, straw-bottomed chair, and sometimes a glimpse of the greasy, dog-fouled kitchen did not instantly remove his appetite. Many rural houses had windows, quite a few peasants wore shoes and stockings, and if the women of Languedoc went barefoot, at least they had the ‘superb consolation’ of walking on magnificent new roads. The lasting value of Arthur Young’s accounts, which were translated into French and widely read, lay in the fact that he confronted his agronomic theories with the evidence of his senses.
What do You think about The Discovery Of France (2015)?
