Free The Discovery of France by Graham Robb Page A

Welche community along the ridge of the Vosges, whose Romance dialect once formed a linguistic island in a Germanic sea, still operates a clan system to find employment for the young and to prevent the community from flowing away into the Alsatian plain. The watery suburbs of Saint-Omer are still inhabited by descendants of the Hautponnais and Lyselar. Even the caste of cagots seems to be unconsciously perpetuating itself. Tracing their lineage from legal documents, an anthropologist has recently discovered that families descended from cagots still tend to intermarry and practise the same traditional trades, though they have never heard of cagots.
    It would take something more powerful than political will to forge this swarming continent of microscopic kingdoms into a single nation. Discrimination was the life-blood of tribal France. But it was also one of the means by which the modern nation would consolidate its identity. When François Marlin happened upon a large pariah community in the city of Metz in 1780, he could not have known that he was looking into the distant future:
    They have been piled up here in a little street where they are locked up each night like convicts in a jail. So that they can be told apart from other people, these wretches are forced to wear a black coat and white bands. They can also be recognized by their beards and by the air of reproof that is imprinted on their faces, not by the crime they are supposed to have committed, but by the degraded state in which they live.
    Beyond the Rhineland, the Jewish population of France was tiny and, in some départements , non-existent. Yet the Dreyfus Affair woulddivide the nation as effectively as the Virgin of Roquecezière divided one Aveyron village from another.
    In the absence of a Jewish population, and in regions where cagots were unknown, one of the commonest terms of tribal abuse was ‘Saracen’. It was applied to dozens of different groups, from the Pas-de- Calais to the Loire Valley and the Auvergne, and from the tip of the Gironde peninsula to the Alps of Savoy. The Burhin and Chizerot tribes on either bank of the Saône in Burgundy were thought to be Saracen because they were short and dark and because they treated illnesses with a special form of ‘oriental’ massage. (Reports that they wore turbans and Turkish trousers and swore by Allah are not entirely reliable.) The dark-eyed, dark-haired people of the spacious Val d’Ajol near Plombières-les-Bains were also said to be Saracen. One of the clans was famous for treating broken bones and dislocated limbs. Their children were sometimes seen on doorsteps, playing with dismantled skeletons.
    Arab colonies along the eighth-century invasion routes may have contributed physical features, words and even skills to the local population, but when all the ‘Saracen’ tribes of France are plotted on a map, it becomes apparent that they existed almost everywhere except where one would expect to find a strong Arab influence.
    Local identity consisted ultimately, not in ethnic origins, but in the fact that a community happened to be where it was rather than somewhere else. On this local level, the river of history is a sluggish stream full of counter-currents and hidden chasms. In the summer of 2004, rock faces on the road that climbs steeply out of the Val d’Ajol to the north were covered with political posters urging a population once thought to be Saracen to say ‘ Non à l’Islamisation de la France ’. For some of its inhabitants, tribal France is still a dangerous, divided land.

 
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    O Òc Sí Bai Ya Win Oui Oyi Awè Jo Ja Oua
    O N THE SIXTEENTH DAY of Prairial in Year II of the ‘one and indivisible’ French Republic (4 June 1794), the representative of the Loir-et-Cher département was making his way to the National Convention through a city that was being torn apart by something worse than tribal war. On that day, Citizen Robespierre was to be elected President of the Convention.