The Discovery of France is a historical perspective on the unification of pays into the France we know today told via a patchwork of interesting facts and anecdotes. It is charming account from Graham Robb, often injected with humour, that led me to enjoy learning history I previously thought was uninteresting. Some of my favourite parts were the stories of the brave map-makers, clever dogs that taught themselves tricks, and the travelling methods of the swamp-dwelling French.

The chapters are centred on themes (e.g., maps, migrants and communities, the Wonders of France, etc.). The temporal progression is conserved within chapters, and the ordering of themes generally is too, though at times there is a bit of skipping back-and-forth between chapter breaks. I found the earlier chapters much more enjoyable, and the final few a bit of a slog. Though this is likely because I was most interested in learning the identities of the different regions of France and less interested in the history of transport. At times it was a bit repetitive with the message too, but not debilitatingly so. From what I see in other comments, I understand that the author brought his own perspective on the country when assembling this book. While this could be a negative for some, I'd say the author's engaging style more than makes up for it.

I read this book to learn more about the French outside of Paris, and I look forward to having these stories in mind as I visit the different regions once being a tourist becomes normal again. ( )

My takeaway from this book is that there is more to France than Paris. As true as that is today, it was even more the case in earlier times, when in vast regions people spoke in Basque, Breton, Catalan, Alsatian, Flemish, and other non-French languages and had no concept of living in a country called France. The land was a quilt of a thousand or more pays.
Graham Robb chronicles this neither with a sense of nostalgia nor of being a collector of the quaint. Before writing this book, he was already acclaimed for his biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Rimbaud. He counted as an expert.
His bicycle tours of the countryside revealed to him much he didn’t know. He supplemented the first-hand knowledge his trips gave him with years of research in many libraries and archives. This combination of first-hand observation and digesting hundreds of old guidebooks, maps, and postcards yields the insight that “the more accurate the map, the more misleading the impression” (p. 6). This sentence is an example of his love of tersely antithetical sentences. Here is another: “Even before it was finished, it was clear that the map of France, with its standardized spellings and consistent symbols, would be considerably more coherent than the country itself” (p. 196).
At times the narrative threatens to become a collection of oddities, but even then, the reader is sustained by the author’s taut, lively prose.
The book is organized more carefully, however, than readily apparent. The first half uncovers a France that has disappeared, the second deals with “forms of life that are more recognizably modern” (p. 138). I especially enjoyed the interlude between parts 1 and 2, on the animal population of France in the 18th and 19th centuries. Merely to conceive of writing such a chapter shows the imagination of the author.
The material Robb integrates into his narrative could have easily bloated to a book twice the size in the hands of a less-disciplined writer. This is a book that repays attentive reading. A very good read. ( )

More than eclectic, I found the selection of topics to be incredibly obscure. Toward the end, Robb gets into the weeds of a conflict between different villages that claim to be nearest the geographic center of France.

> This was the puzzle of micro-provinces that General de Gaulle had in mind when he asked, ‘How can one be expected to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?’

> Dialect terms such as ‘affender’ (to share a meal with an unexpected visitor), ‘aranteler’ (to sweep away spiders’ webs), ‘carioler’ (to cry out while giving birth), ‘carquet’ (a secret place between breast and corset), ‘river’ (to strip off leaves by running one’s hand along a branch) and a thousand other useful gems were like trophies brought back from foreign parts and cleansed of their original context. None of them were admitted to the dictionary of the French Academy

> … common throughout much of Europe until the end of the nineteenth century. In some parts, especially Gascony and the Auvergne, babies were strapped into shallow cradles with their heads in a wooden hollow. The skull grew into the shape of its container and by the time the baby could walk, it had a wide head and a high, flat forehead. Since babies instinctively turn to the light on waking, the result was often startlingly asymmetrical. Later, to prevent the growing brain from cracking open the skull (according to midwives interviewed in the 1900s), the head of the child was compressed with a scarf or, in wealthier households in Languedoc, with a band of strong cloth called a sarro-cap. Many men and women wore these head-constrictors all their lives and felt naked without them. … More than half the men and women in Rouen hospices in 1833, and nearly everyone in some parts of Languedoc had a modified head and some other deformity: an aquiline nose produced by crushing the cartilage and pulling out the nose, or ears squashed and notched by tight bands until they looked like pieces of crumpled linen that had been severely ironed. ( )

I read a lot, but not often do I come on a book that opens as many vistas as this one did.

Example: Robb has a long string of anecdotes about how the peasantry relied on local saints to cure specific diseases, and punished them by flogging (the images were the saints, not representations of them) when they didn't help. He then turns on the reader who is amused or appalled by this level of ignorance, saying: The peasants were on the right track! Specific diseases have specific causes and can often be cured by someone who knows how. The peasants were thus mentally ready to accept the discoveries of modern medical science; all they lacked was information. Whereas the educated classes, including the doctors, maundered on about "humors" and such which didn't explain a thing.

This effortlessly-flowing narrative explores the historical geography of France with fascinating anecdotes and enlightening facts. I learned so much from this book--it's the kind of thing I can really geek out over. Topics range from regional dialects to historical side hustles (get paid to be an alarm clock!) to how to fake injuries for begging to fairy lore and saints galore to the evolution of transportation in the past few hundred years to the 'lost territories' in the 19th century and how they became part of an escalation in national identity. This is a book I'll keep on my shelf for reference from here onward. ( )