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Geographically speaking, Paris is not a big city. Its suburbs stretch on forever and are home to 11 million people , but the city proper, (just 2.2 million inhabitants), is clearly enclosed with the boulevard périphérique. The city can be crossed, according to Graham Robb “in a few hours” by foot.

On a day-to-day basis, you never realise the true size of Paris while you zoom from place to place by métro, bus or taxi. So a friend and I decided to test the “smallness” of the city by walking across it in an afternoon. We followed roughly the route of Métro Line 4, from Porte d’Orléans in the south to Porte de Clignancourt in the north, with a little meander eastwards to take in parts of the Marais.

If we had taken a direct route, the distance would have been just 9km, however with the detours we walked about 13km. South of the river, we traced the route of Général LeClerc’s 2nd Armoured Division as it liberated Paris from German forces on 25th August, 1944. There is even a monument in the Jardin du Luxembourg to one Jean Arnould, killed while liberating the park from Nazi oppression.

Crossing the river by way of the Ile St-Louis, we dog-legged right to walk through the Hôtel de Sully and the Place des Vosges before following our nose north-west past Place de la République towards the 18th arrondissement.

Climbing over the Butte de Montmartre and down the other side, we arrived at the Porte de Clignancourt four and a half hours after we started out. Paris est à nous!

We made a video: four and a half hours walking summarised in four and a half minutes:

The places seen in the video are, in order, from south to north:

Monument LeClerc, Porte d’Orléans, 14e
Place Denfert-Rochereau, 14e
Hôpital St Vincent de Paul, 6e
Fontaine des Explorateurs, 6e
Jardin du Luxembourg
Beer stop, rue Soufflot, 5e
La Sorbonne, 5e
Cathédrale Nôtre-Dame de Paris
The Seine @ Quai de la Tournelle
Hôtel de Sully, 4e
Place des Vosges, 4e
Place de la République, 11e
Arc de Triomphe de la Porte St-Martin, 10e
Tati, boulevard Rochechouart, 18e
Sacré Coeur / Montmartre
Café La Maison Rose, rue de l’Abreuvoir, 18e
Stairs, rue des Saules, 18e
Traffic, Porte de Clignancourt
Celebrating a successful walk with another beer -  Bistrot la Renaissance, rue Championnet, 18e

We imagine there are very few native Parisians who have ever walked the width of their own city, and it’s certainly not something recommended (yet) in the tourist guides.

There are plans afoot to repeat the exercise later this summer by crossing Paris along an east/west axis – a journey of at least 16 kilometres.  Does anyone want to join us?

The Discovery of France, by Graham Robb,
Picador, 2007 [Buy]

The Gorges du Tarn (Photo: Patrick Giraud)

The Gorges du Tarn in southern France are the largest canyon system in Europe, up to 500 metres deep and up to 1500 metres wide, cutting through the heart of the Cévennes. Yet the most amazing fact about this rather large piece of geology is that it was entirely unknown to the French government until 1905.

Until the 19th Century, vast expanses of France remained unexplored, inhabited by a peasant population strongly attached to their local pays, speaking myriad dialects and leading lives mostly independent of the elite minority ruling from Paris.

Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France describes how modern France began to coalesce into a coherent geographical, political and economic unit following the French Revolution. The story told by Robb is necessarily circuitous and complex, with many diversions into curious sub-plots that will suprise most Anglo-Saxon readers, (and probably many French readers too).

Robb is concerned to evoke the experience of the ‘everyday’ French citizen outside Paris, and illustrate how the new France (whether Napoleonic Empire or paternal République) not only brought enormous progress but also erased many lines of custom, territory and language that could be traced back 2 millenia to the time of the Roman Empire.

Shepherds on stilts in the Landes, southwest France

The Industrial Revolution arrived late in France, and witchcraft and Catholicism cohabited in the rural hinterland well into the late 19th century. In many places the village priest (always an outsider) was tolerated only because he was the sole person in the district who could read  – or speak – French.

During this slow emergence into the modern world, a majority of French citizens spoke languages other than French – including hundreds of dialects of Breton, Basque, Franco-Provençal, Alsatian and Occitan.  The introduction of a universal national education system in the mid-1800s was as much concerned with imposing the ‘civilised’ language of Paris on the population and elminating local patois as it was about implementing the republican ideals of equal opportunity.

The advance towards a unified nation occured in fits and starts, with many of the supposed agents of “progress” actually proving counter-productive. For example the building of new national roads and railways promoted growth of towns along their route, but actually served to impoverish and further isolate some regions, such as the Auvergne, which happened to be bypassed by the grand transport schemes launched from Paris.

Illustration from Francois Guizot’s Histoire de la civilisation en France (1830)

It is perhaps appropriate that it should be an English author who writes this story, for the English have for a long time had a complicated love affair with France. In fact many of the best source texts for descriptions of French landscape and society in the 18th and 19th centuries come from English explorers and writers.

Graham Robb accomplished his own exploration of France by bicycle, and he followed up his travels with 4 years of research. Despite 30+ pages of footnotes, the book remains incredibly readable.  As a specialist in 19th century French literature, Robb has written biographies of Victor Hugo, Rimbaud and Balzac (and wrote his Oxford doctorate in the field), but his writing is never laden by excessively academic concerns.

In some ways the entire book resembles a leisurely but thoughtful bicycle journey. Plenty of scope is allowed for detours to admire incidental details or episodes. Anecdotes and sideways leaps into ethnography, linguistics and cartography add spice to Robb’s storytelling. History is rarely linear, and when presented like this, it’s invariably fascinating.

After reading The Discovery of France, I was left feeling just slightly jealous, because Graham Robb has pretty much written exactly the sort of book that I’d love to write if I had the talent, time and brains.

Bilingual French/Breton road signs in Vannes