Free Celestine by Gillian Tindall

of history, one might argue that this road was a more truly significant and representative event than the replacement of the Second Empire by the Third Republic. Whether the other changes at village level that the 1870s and ’80s were to bring would have come in any case, even without a Republic to orchestrate them, remains a matter of debate. The democratic spirit of Republicanism did, however, lay an obligation on all its male citizens that, under older regimes, had been largely avoided: in the last quarter of the century the Minutes of Municipal meetings in Chassignolles fill up with requests – to be forwarded to the military authorities – that this or that young man should be excused from military service since he was needed down on the farm. So the most obvious sign of the distant events that were shaping France’s history was the desire on the part of the village to keep their boys away from them.
    *   *   *
    In the local newspapers, revolutions in Paris surface a little more, since they were written for and by townspeople. Their circulations were counted in hundreds only, and till near the end of the century they hardly penetrated the villages. So, for instance, L’Écho de l’Indre (later L’Écho du Berry ), which was published in La Châtre, represented exclusively the preoccupations of the bonne société of that small town or, if we are to believe George Sand, the six or seven sociétés that did not necessarily consort with each other, let alone vote the same way. These social divisions, in practice, operated more along political lines than along lines of class. In essential terms the small towns in the first half of the nineteenth century seem to have been as close-knit as the present villages. In addition, whatever urban airs they might have given themselves, the townspeople lived so close to the countryside that their interests were more or less identified with it. The figures usually given for percentages of urban as opposed to rural populations in France are therefore misleading. For the entire nineteenth century, the ‘urban’ population of the Indre hovered around twenty-eight per cent as opposed to seventy-two per cent ‘rural’, but the urban were hardly so in the way we would use the word today. Most La Châtre families owned fields or orchards or a vineyard outside the city; many of them supplied some of the made goods or skills that country people were now beginning to purchase.
    The cultural gulf between town and country in France, which existed then and still exists to a large extent today, has more to do with social manner and self-image than with any deep-seated material differences. French class fantasies are not the same as those that are current across the Channel. The better-off inhabitants of English country towns have for a long time cultivated that peculiarly British rural inverted snobbery, innocent yet tenacious, which expresses itself in old trousers, darned sweaters, dogs, guns and Country Life. In contrast, the inhabitants of provincial French towns like La Châtre and Châteauroux have traditionally turned their eyes towards Paris. They adopt a tenue de ville, all neat suits and shoes, carefully styled hair and ceremonial greetings. But in reality Paris is far away from La Châtre even today, and was a great deal farther for much of the nineteenth century, when it took from nine to twelve hours in a coach before you got even as far as Châteauroux.
    The name of the main street in La Châtre was obediently changed over the years from Rue Nationale to Rue Royale, then Rue Égalité, then Rue Impériale and then back again to Nationale, as great events demanded. There were occasional eruptions of patriotic fervour over such manufactured ‘events’ as the Emperor’s birthday – and, indeed, the occasional demonstration, from one of the sociétés, of anti-Royalist emotion.