The Discovery of France

A Historical Geography

By: Graham Robb

Narrated by: Derek Perkins

A New York Times Notable Book, Publishers Weekly Best Book, Slate Best Book, and Booklist Editor's Choice

A narrative of exploration - full of strange landscapes and even stranger inhabitants - that explains the enduring fascination of France. While Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris, large parts of France were still terra incognita. Even in the age of railways and newspapers, France was a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks, and pre-Christian beliefs. French itself was a minority language.

Graham Robb describes that unknown world in arresting narrative detail. He recounts the epic journeys of mapmakers, scientists, soldiers, administrators, and intrepid tourists, of itinerant workers, pilgrims, and herdsmen with their millions of migratory domestic animals. We learn how France was explored, charted, and colonized, and how the imperial influence of Paris was gradually extended throughout a kingdom of isolated towns and villages.

The Discovery of France explains how the modern nation came to be and how poorly understood that nation still is today. Above all, it shows how much of France - past and present - remains to be discovered.

©2007 Graham Robb (P)2020 Tantor

Anything Graham Robb writes is gold

Graham Robb brings France into a perspective like none other, couldn't stop listening. His depth of research and skill with storytelling keeps you engaged while bringing the reader history, economics, politics, anthropology in combination and nuance with new ways to see the past that always make you think vs. writing with an obvious bias.

Fascinating History of France Warts and All

Fascinating history of France, the good and the bad. How the country became the wonderful beautiful place it is now. Also how the people became one from many different cultures.

Very interesting but…

While I quite recommend the book, I’ll also advise to take everything with a grain of salt. On more recent topics where I can judge, the author is very ideologically oriented, caricatural and arguably factually wrong. Which leaves me unsure of whether to trust the rest.

Great history of the cultural formation of France

I read this to get an understanding of the historical and cultural context of France before going on vacation there. And it was exactly what I was looking for. It covers what life was like for normal people living in the regions of modern day France. It is not a history of important dates and kings and battles like a textbook would be.

Bien parlé et fascinant!

An established expert on French culture, author Graham Robb decides to do something new. He wants to render a view of French history that combines a richly place-based peasant worldview with outsider historical observations, from Julius Caesar to Charles de Gaulle.

The bicycle goes slowly, sensitive to changes in terrain, staying close to the earth. Lingering in dozens of regional "pays" [from Latin paga, meaning tribe] Robb evokes the ancient cycles of village life. Unlike the scholar's mentalized urban-world, identity here is tribal, xenophobic, and rooted in an earthy bond between humans and animals.

The result of Robb's wide-lens, compare-and-contrast exploration is a lively, insightful taste of the old sub-stratum. I listened several times because it was so engaging. And Robb's mixed-level method succeeds intellectually as well. By weaving in charming anecdotes, private journals, and government statistics, he paints a surprisingly clear picture of how the gens-du-pays - with much mistrust -- eventually became French. Or did they?

Elegantly narrated by Derek Perkins. Highly recommended.

Not what I expected…

Wanted to like this but it was kind of boring. I thought it would cover more history. It was basically about the daily lives of isolated French tribes and then how they eventually became connected by road and rail.

Almost There

I loved the idea of a history of the ‘small folk’ of France, but the execution of the text didn’t quite get there.

Robb did an admirable job of compiling the history of a largely illiterate and overlooked people. There are some fascinating anecdotes and ‘facts’ in the book, but the narrative jumps from region to region then back again in a way that I found disorienting. This happens in chronology too, though that was easier to parse.

Sometimes I felt as if the story was on the brink of summiting to some greater point only to slip back to its starting position.

In the final chapter, Robb felt the need to highlight some tragic event in modern France and suggest how far France has to go in order to satisfy his utopic vision for it. This tiresome, but oh so fashionable, trope always sours my enjoyment of a book. It would be nice to actually put down a book and be able to draw my own conclusions rather than have a ‘lesson’ spoon-fed to me by a virtue signaling author who can’t figure out any other way to close a story.

I learned a lot

I learned a lot of interesting things about France. It was hard to stay focused. The narrator was good.

Different

Was hoping for an intensive history of the founding of France to modern day. Instead, this was more of a historical nature guide that bounced around between the 18th to 19th century, always leaving wondering what was going on.