The Pyrenees in the Modern Era: Reinventions of a Landscape, 1775–2012 9781350024786, 9781350024816, 9781350024793

Citation preview

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era Reinventions of a Landscape, 1775–2012 Martyn Lyons

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Martyn Lyons, 2018 Martyn Lyons has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Poster Les Pyrénées, Gavarnie, by Frédéric Alexianu aka F. Hugo d’Alesi (1849–1906) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lyons, Martyn, author. Title: The Pyrenees in the modern era : reinventions of a landscape, 1775-2012 / MartynLyons. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic,2018. | Includes bibliographicalreferences and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017040893 (print) | LCCN 2018027106(ebook) | ISBN 9781350024793(PDF eBook) | ISBN 9781350024809 (EPUB eBook) | ISBN 9781350024786(hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Pyrenees--History. | Tourism--Pyrenees. Classification: LCC DC611.P988 (ebook) | LCC DC611.P988L96 2018 (print) | DDC 946/.5--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040893 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2478-6 PB: 978-1-3501-2651-0 ePDF: 978-1-3500-2479-3 eBook: 978-1-3500-2480-9 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of maps Acknowledgements Note on translations and transcriptions Abbreviations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Introduction: The Pyrenean world Romancing the stones? The Enlightenment invention of the Pyrenees Visions of the picturesque: The romantic Pyrenees Others among Others The railway age and the coming of mass tourism, 1853–1914 The heroic Pyrenees: The challenge of the peaks Making the nation: Cyclists and excursionists Peoples of the frontier Dangerous borderlands, 1936–45 The anthropological gaze The death of Cannelle and the Green Pyrenees The Pyrenees today

Notes Select bibliography Index

vi vii viii ix 1 17 35 53 71 89 107 125 143 161 179 197 204 238 254

List of maps 1.1 Pyrenees: Administrative. 9.1 Pyrenees: Second World War escapes. 11.1 Pyrenees: Territory of the bear.

5 151 180

Acknowledgements First of all, a disclaimer. I am not a hiker, I am not a long-distance cyclist and I have never been skiing. I have never seen a Pyrenean brown bear, whose habits I have now studied in detail, nor am I ever likely to set eyes on one, at least not in its natural habitat. But I do have something in common with many of the characters who inhabit this book: I am an outsider in the Pyrenees and, if I have provided any insights into my subject, I do so from the perspective of a historically informed visitor. Like many of the nineteenth-century tourists discussed in later chapters, I came to the Pyrenees from Toulouse, and my very first approaches dated from the days when I was researching material there for my doctorate. At that time, it was not uncommon to hear Occitan spoken in the streets of the city; as a former laureate of Toulouse’s Académie des Jeux Floraux, I am saddened by the fact that this has now become a rarity. It was then that I made my first acquaintance with the region, and so now I acknowledge debts that in some cases go back many years. I thank all those who have introduced me to one corner or another of the mountains and the surrounding region. They include the Fouquier family of Toulouse for allowing me to stay at their house in the Cerdagne, as well as for introducing me to a Pyrenean shepherd – then, as now, a subject of ethnographic interest and certainly out of his comfort zone in the big city. I thank the Gonzales family for showing me Lourdes for the first time, and the Bokhoves of Sitges for a much more recent excursion to the monastery of Poblet. I thank departmental archivists in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne), Foix (Ariège) and Pau (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) for their assistance and expertise. In researching this project, I have also appreciated the help of librarians in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, and in the salle régionale of Toulouse municipal library. I am grateful to the George Rudé Seminar in French History for comments on a version of Chapter 11; and to the Research Cluster on Transnational Histories at the University of New South Wales for discussion in response to a version of Chapter 9. Above all, I would like to thank Mina, as always, for commenting on drafts, for her enthusiastic interest in the Cathars, and for keeping me company on a very chilly drive to Montaillou one snowy November day. Martyn Lyons, Sydney, 2017

Note on translations and transcriptions All translations are my own unless otherwise stated. The vocabulary used to classify Basque and Catalan separatist movements is a political minefield. Analysts refer to ‘regional nationalisms’, ‘sub-state nationalisms’, and sometimes to ‘peripheral’ or ‘minority’ nationalisms. Nationalists, of course, do not accept that they form a ‘region’, a periphery or a ‘sub’-anything, since this phraseology seems to relegate them to an inferior or marginal position. I have tried to dodge this problem by labelling them either as separatist or just nationalist movements. Throughout the book, I have transcribed place names in Spanish where the place concerned is in Spain, and in French when the place is in France. Hence I refer to Monte Perdido rather than Mont-Perdu, although that is what French climbers called it. I have made exceptions to this general rule where there is a familiar English equivalent. Thus I have preferred Navarre to Navarra, the Basque Country to País Vasco and Catalonia to Cataluña. A further decision had to be made whether to express Basque place names in Castilian (as in Guipuzcoa) or in Euskara (Gipuzkoa). For the sake of consistency throughout this book, I have used Castilian Spanish names for anywhere in Spain, but I know that in making this choice I risk being accused of political partisanship, although I have no desire to take sides. A similarly thorny situation, and a similar risk, arises when I use Castilian names for places in Catalonia.

Abbreviations ADH AEC AESC AM CAF TCF THF

Annales de Démographie historique Associació d’Excursions Catalana Annales – Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations Annales du Midi Club Alpin Français Touring Club de France The History of the Family

1

Introduction: The Pyrenean world

Imagining a landscape Landscape, Simon Schama once said, is ‘a text on which generations write their recurring obsessions’.1 Landscapes are rich in myth and memory, and those myths constantly get entangled with national and regional identities. Perceptions of landscapes are loaded with ideological and cultural assumptions: outsiders, for example, nostalgically value the untouched wilderness as a positive contrast to the stress and ugliness of urban life; in the nineteenth century, they came to celebrate and sentimentalize the survival of a lost, pre-industrial world. Mountains had a special meaning for nineteenth-century travellers: in ranges like the Pyrenees, they projected on to the mountains their need for rapture or horror, the picturesque or the sublime, a meeting with the exotic or the tranquil contemplation of the divine. Changing visions of the landscape are the subject of this book, and it treats them by focusing on the Pyrenees from the late eighteenth century. The great French historian Fernand Braudel associated mountains with immobility, but human perceptions of landscapes are constantly fluctuating. Landscapes, as we will see, are by nature unstable and highly constructed. The Pyrenees provide a significant case study, partly because of their enormous geographical sweep, and also because the region embraces extraordinary cultural and linguistic diversity and has always had an important role in the European geographical imaginary. The modern Pyrenees has attracted poets and scientists, provided a laboratory for historical anthropologists and engendered a thriving tourist industry. The region offers a rich opportunity for the study of constructions of landscape. The historical account which follows offers an interpretation of evolving constructions of the landscape over 250 years. Beginning with Jean Darcet’s inaugural lecture of 1775 to the Collège de France which, significantly, he

2

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

devoted to the Pyrenees, up to present-day environmental problems, a series of subtle changes occurred in the invention of the landscape. In order to examine them, we must see the mountains through the lenses of tourists and travellers. Some of them, like Hilaire Belloc or Victor Hugo, are well known to lovers of literature, but the names of many of the travel writers consulted here are obscure and forgotten. Their work has usually been discarded because it has never been considered of any great literary value. We cannot, however, judge perceptions of the landscape solely on the basis of a few high-profile authors; we must dig deeper and resurrect some anonymous rank-and-file writers as well. At the same time, we must consider the nature of tourism itself. The traveller, according to Eric Leed, is a liminal figure, defined by his or her status as a detached outsider.2 Outsiders, however, are capable of making a great emotional investment in the landscape. Leed also drew attention to the time-travel aspects of travel writing, as tourists ‘step back into long-lost centuries’ in a favourite cliché of the American journalist Amy Oakley, whom we will meet later on her journeys through the Pyrenees.3 For other specialists in the cultural history of travel, European travellers expressed a general crisis of modernity, as they embarked on a doomed spiritual quest for something that modern Western societies have now irrevocably lost.4 As mass tourism started to boom in the nineteenth century, social elites found their favourite playgrounds invaded by newcomers and they deplored the philistinism of the new tourists. James Buzard and Jonathan Culler have both made suggestive comments on the growth of this ‘anti-tourism’, that is the emergence of tourists desperate to get ‘off the beaten track’, away from the masses, in search of destinations and experiences more natural, more authentic and markedly different from those of the common herd.5 Michel de Certeau, similarly, envisaged a subversive kind of tourism, in which the traveller disregards conventional itineraries and devises his or her own cultural map.6 All these are useful guides for dissecting different reincarnations of the landscape. Just as nineteenth-century travellers took with them a good tourist guidebook, published perhaps by Murray, Baedeker or Joanne, these scholars’ ideas will be packed in our own luggage. My intention, however, is slightly different from theirs. The Pyrenean focus of this book is narrower in geographical terms, and it is broader in its historical scope. I am concerned with changing representations of the landscape over time, detected in a variety of sources. Travel writing constitutes one of them.

Introduction: The Pyrenean world

3

Travel and travel writing In European terms, the genesis of modern mass tourism occurred approximately in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Significantly, travel writing boomed at exactly the same time, from individual accounts and diaries to commercially available guidebooks. Travel engendered a mass of writing in a rapidly expanding genre, which enables us to view travel to the Pyrenees in terms of both cultural practices (i.e. what travellers actually did there) and textual representations of the region (how they imagined the mountains).7 Tourism as a cultural practice always relied on writing to sustain and perpetuate itself. Advertising, newspaper articles and personal accounts publicized attractive destinations and set the fashion for travellers. The sale of lithographs in the first half of the nineteenth century presented the picturesque Pyrenees to the discerning public. Posters advertising Pyrenean spa resorts portrayed rural life as a colourful spectacle of costume and dance, in which the local inhabitants all appeared to share the general joyfulness. In fact their role was to decorate the scenery for the sophisticated visitors who otherwise ignored them. Great writers like Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and many others all tried their hand at writing travel journals. John Murray, Adolphe Joanne and Karl Baedeker produced successful guidebooks which dictated the itineraries and organized the emotional reactions of thousands of new travellers. Travel and writing about it were inseparable. Travellers took notes as they travelled, jotting down new sights and sensations which they would later try to recall in the form of a more considered and reflective literary text. Nulla dies sine linea was Linnaeus’s advice to all botanists – not a day without writing.8 Sometimes travellers wrote up their diaries in the evening, when they had the time and leisure to reflect on the day just passed, but a few preferred the immediacy of notes taken on the spot. Scientists and later anthropologists usually wrote notes in the field. But when they tried to recall them later, they might easily forget the exact time and place of the observation they had recorded, as when Alexander von Humboldt wrote a memory of Tenerife which he later realized had actually happened in Madeira.9 Such travellers could not interpret the world except through the medium of written notes. Most often their written recollections were derivate or conventional; their memories were buried in clichés wrapped up in literary references. Their notes were sometimes faulty, but what interests us are their memories, clichés and all, rather than the concrete details of what, where and when. We are not seeking

4

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

an exact reconstitution of their actions and movements, but rather clues to their impressions of the landscape and the silent assumptions which framed their responses. Tourists – those who travel for pleasure – are central to this book, but they do not provide the only materials for this study. There have been many other reasons for visiting the Pyrenees: in the late eighteenth century, scientists did so to collect geological specimens, mining the mountains for data which they believed held the clue to the earth’s early history, and they are discussed in Chapter 2. Others went to the spa resorts on doctors’ orders, and constructed a romantic vision of the Pyrenees, albeit at a comfortable distance from the peaks. Their accounts form the basis of Chapters 3, 4 and 5. Mountaineers went to scale the highest peaks, as we shall see in Chapter 6, transforming the Pyrenees into a physical test of determination and manliness. The first racing cyclists who encountered the Pyrenees in 1910, riding on unsealed dirt tracks, pushed their bodies to the limits of endurance to turn the mountains into an arena of heroic masculinity. Meanwhile, as Chapter 7 makes clear, excursionists on bicycles and on foot enjoyed the exercise on less demanding slopes, promoting new priorities like physical fitness and an identification with the national territory. Chapter 8 turns to the idea of the frontier between France and Spain, which was simultaneously challenged and exploited by shepherds and smugglers, as well as Basque and Catalan nationalists. In the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, as we shall see in Chapter 9, the border between France and Spain became an escape route for refugees in both directions, as the mountains acquired a new personality as a corridor to freedom. In the twentieth century, sociologists and anthropologists paid special attention to a handful of Pyrenean villages. The commercial success of LeRoy Ladurie’s Montaillou is discussed in Chapter 10, along with selected scientific studies of a disappearing social structure, eroded by the forces of modernity. All these groups have reimagined the mountains for their own purposes, as a scientific laboratory, a theatre for heroic achievements or a gateway to survival. Even the driest texts of Enlightenment geologists and modern social scientists embody a certain representation of the landscape. More recently, environmentalists have tried to impose their own vision of the Pyrenees as a green wilderness, particularly in their attempts to ensure the survival of the emblematic Pyrenean bear, a principal theme of Chapter 11. The historical sources which sustain this study are therefore both literary and non-literary, canonical and by unknown or forgotten writers. They include scientific treatises, scholarly articles and polemical websites, insofar as all of these express a certain vision of the Pyrenean landscape.

Introduction: The Pyrenean world

5

Map 1.1 Pyrenees: Administrative.

The frontier My Pyrenees stretch approximately 450 kilometres from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. The region embraces all or part of six French departments, namely and from west to east, the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Hautes-Pyrénées, Haute-Garonne, Ariège, Aude and Pyrénées-Orientales. It includes parts of the Spanish regions of Catalonia, Aragon, Navarre and the Basque Country, as well as the tiny state of Andorra. Behind the Pyrenees, but very much involved in the Pyrenean world, lie two important metropolises: Toulouse and Barcelona, and lesser cities like Pau and Bayonne, Pamplona and St Sebastián, which were familiar to many nineteenth-century residents and visitors to the Pyrenees. The mountains rise to a maximum height of 3,400 metres on the Aneto in the wellnamed Maladetta (accursed) range. The Pyrenees abounds in massive limestone and granite peaks, deep gorges, powerful torrents and waterfalls, as well as lakes and cirques – flat, rounded areas carved out by glaciers and often surrounded by cliffs, like the Welsh cwm. Most rain falls on the French side, which is relatively green, while the Spanish side is much more arid. The ascent is also steeper on the French side, while on the Spanish side it is more gradual but not necessarily easier on foot. Refugees from Nazi-occupied France often thought mistakenly that their troubles were over when they crossed the frontier, but they still faced a very difficult descent into Spain.

6

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Through the centre runs the frontier between France and Spain. On the whole scholars and commentators have been too easily dominated by its invisible power. Historians have tended to look at the Pyrenees from their national perspective, either exclusively French or Spanish, stopping short at the political and linguistic border. French specialist Jean-François Soulet, for example, wrote a magisterial and invaluable history of the Pyrenees in the nineteenth century, in a weighty doctoral thesis of two volumes and over 1,100 pages, but his analysis hardly ever ventured across the border into Spain.10 As one Spanish commentator put it, scholars seem to freeze into ice-statues when they reach the dividing line.11 Any treatment of the Pyrenees, however, demands a transnational approach. One reason for this lies in the multiplicity of exchanges which have traditionally occurred, and which still do occur, between local inhabitants on both sides of the range. Another pressing reason for a transnational approach is the difficulty inherent in making any frontier into a reality at high and uninhabitable altitudes. This book, therefore, attempts a two-sided treatment of how the Pyrenees has been imagined. A consistently even-handed approach, however, is unrealistic and the balance of the discussion tends to favour the French side. There are several reasons for this. The first lies in the nature of the historical sources. French travellers produced more published material than their Spanish counterparts, because there were simply more of them. The scientists who explored the Pyrenees in Chapter 2 were almost all French, and in the early nineteenth century, Spanish travellers and their travel accounts were outnumbered by French tourist writings. Spanish railways took much longer to incorporate the Pyrenean periphery than did the French railway system, and the infrastructure of tourist facilities was generally poorer on the Spanish side. Spanish interest in the Pyrenees did not truly flourish until the 1890s, when a prosperous Barcelona bourgeoisie had emerged, with leisure time and cultural aspirations. The Spanish contribution will thus play a much greater role from Chapter 7 onwards, where we enter the later part of our period. A second reason why France outweighs Spain in the travel literature is that France was by far a preferable destination for tourists. On the Spanish side of the mountains, only Panticosa ranked as an attractive tourist resort, and that was true only at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth. Panticosa is discussed in Chapter 5, but it failed to compete with more fashionable and well-established French resorts. Destinations like Bagnères-deLuchon and Cauterets were internationally renowned, and attracted thousands of tourists every year from all over Europe and later the United States. Even Spanish tourists preferred to take a holiday in France.

Introduction: The Pyrenean world

7

Lastly, realities dictate another imbalance in the discussion: the largest group of Pyrenean travel writers came neither from France nor Spain, but from Great Britain. British tourists, together with a handful of Americans, regularly outnumbered both French and Spanish travel writers in the Pyrenees. The British were ubiquitous travellers; they dominated the tourist market, they provided influential models for mountaineers and cycling clubs before the First World War, and they too visited France in preference to Spain, at least until the 1960s, when cheap flights and package holidays attracted them to the Costa del Sol in their hordes. Because almost all of them arrived in the Pyrenees via Paris, Bordeaux and Toulouse, the early chapters of this book will present a predominantly northern view of the mountains. The discussion, therefore, transcends the limitations of a one-nation or a onelanguage approach, but it will inevitably do so in an uneven way. It takes account of the preponderance of British tourists, the comparative rarity of Spanish tourists, and the continued popularity of France as the preferred destination for all of them. Frontiers divide but also connect people. Before the nation-states of the nineteenth century began to define and exert their territorial sovereignty, the inhabitants on one side of the frontier enjoyed a variety of relationships with the people on the other side, to be discussed in Chapter 8. They made local agreements which helped to maintain order in the valleys for centuries until, in the nineteenth century, the nation-state made them obsolete.12 At least, the nation-state attempted to do so, but it continued to meet obstacles. In 1793, during the French revolutionary wars, the ‘French’ village of St Laurent de Cerdans (Pyrénées-Orientales) defected to the enemy, welcoming Spanish troops with open arms. Borders, as this suggests, are constantly subject to negotiation between the people who live in them and who cross through them.13 Borders are areas of co-operation as well as of conflict; and they indicate ambivalent identities. In the Pyrenees, the exact location of the frontier was not determined until the late nineteenth century. Only after the Treaties of Bayonne in 1856–68 were stones actually laid to mark the Franco-Spanish frontier, and until then no-one knew for sure where it actually was. Frontiers are always easier to delineate in settled, farming societies; in pastoral societies like the Pyrenees, with the annual movement of sheep and shepherds to and from summer pastures, the frontier was less significant.14 Boundary lines cut through social, economic and cultural contexts which do not necessarily disappear just because they straddle a legal border. In the Pyrenees, Catalan space does not coincide with national frontiers,

8

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

even if the French integration of Roussillon (north Catalonia to the nationalists) has been far more effective than the Spanish integration of Catalonia. The Basque country defines an even clearer territory and a linguistic and cultural group lying across the national frontier. I treat the frontier not in terms of a boundary line, but as a broader zone, existing on both sides of the legal frontier, where many social and economic interactions take place which are specific to that trans-frontier zone. We find a continuity of economic and commercial life across the political border: in the Pyrenees, the inhabitants on both sides were involved in similar high-altitude pastoral activities, not to mention smuggling. A range of social interactions continues to take place within the frontier zone. Families have relatives on the other side of the national frontier, they own property there, and so on. In the tiny border village of Urepel (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), for example, families send their children to the (French) village school, draw their family allowances in France and receive their mail through La Poste, but they are dependent on Spanish police and are subject to Spanish taxation.15 In addition, there is considerable cultural and linguistic continuity within the frontier zone, as in the cases already mentioned of the Basques and the Catalans. It would be rash to argue for a common Pyrenean identity, although in the past some romantics have done so. In 1910, Henri Cavaillès claimed that a Pyrenean federation had existed for 300 years during the French Ancien Régime as an état singulier, an individual state. This ‘state’ had no capital, no government and no army of its own, but it did claim its own legal systems.16 During the French Ancien Régime, war between rival communities was endemic, and it could mobilize entire villages. This state of chronic inter-communal violence was what Christian Desplat called the ‘forgotten peasant war’.17 The essential point remains, however, that the people of the valleys had mechanisms and institutions to settle their own disputes, without reference to government authority. Only a few die-hard regionalists would now accept the proposition that the Pyrenees constituted a virtual independent state. The Pyrenean frontier zone is historically made up of independent and relatively isolated valleys, each of which pursued a relatively autonomous life and claimed its own institutional structure. This is furthermore a land of many languages, including Basque, Béarnais (which is a Gascon version of Occitan), Occitan itself in its many local variants, as well as Catalan and Aragonese. The Pyrenees is therefore an area of considerable cultural complexity, which bewildered outsiders who were certainly intrigued by the exceptional Basques but struggled to make themselves understood. On the other hand, the region shares both a common geography and the economic

Introduction: The Pyrenean world

9

activities which derive from it. In this sense, although to speak of a common Pyrenean identity may be a distortion, we can nevertheless envisage a ‘Pyrenean world’, underpinned by a common sylvo-pastoral economy. What, then, did this Pyrenean world look like in the nineteenth century?

The Pyrenean pastoral economy in the nineteenth century The Pyrenean world was based on its agro-pastoral economy. The livestock herd was crucial: its size defined a family’s wealth and its organization shaped the family’s activities. The structure of the Pyrenean family and its inheritance customs, designed to fit a pastoral economy with scarce resources, would later fascinate social scientists, as we will see in Chapter 10. Grazing resources were limited, and so pasturing was carefully regulated to maximize their usage without provoking conflicts. The high pastures were common land, a vast collective resource which could make up 80 per cent of a village’s territory.18 There were close to a million sheep grazing on the French side of the Pyrenean slopes at the beginning of the nineteenth century, approximately double their present number.19 Many shepherds owned small flocks of only twenty animals, while larger entrepreneurs leased out their herds of several hundred in a system known as en gazailhe, in which the lessee returned half of the produce to the owner, including both wool and lambs. In summer, shepherds took their sheep up to the high pastures (estives); in winter, they might travel long distances on foot to pasture them in the Landes in south-west France. Étienne Lamazou was one such transhumant shepherd from Béarn, born in 1900. He remembered his father taking the family herd to pasture in the Bordelais and being absent from home for as long as ten months in the year.20 In the central Pyrenees, sheep were taken to winter pastures in the Ebro valley or in lower Languedoc. Moving several hundred sheep perhaps as far as 200 kilometres was an expensive operation, since villages en route charged fees for crossing their bridges. The wealthy Rocatallada family, who owned 1,500 sheep in western Aragon, spent 78 per cent of their annual cash budget on funding winter pastures, and only 12 per cent on their shepherds’ wages.21 Later in the twentieth century, the sheep could be transported by train or by truck. Forests still covered about one-third of Pyrenean territory, although perhaps 40 per cent of forest land had been lost since the reign of Louis XIV. The demands of the royal navy, timber merchants and the iron-forge masters had substantially reduced the wooded areas of the mountainsides. According

10

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

to Étienne Dralet, Conservateur des Eaux et des Forêts in the Toulouse region during the Napoleonic Empire, one iron forge consumed the equivalent of a 94– hectare forest every year.22 In the nineteenth century, observant travellers like Ramond de Carbonnières were already sensitive to the continuing destruction of the forests and its unsustainability. Cutting down trees had a cumulative effect: it caused soil erosion, which in turn led to further deforestation when rivers swept away their own banks and brought mudslides in their wake. ‘In the high mountains’, wrote a prescient Ramond in 1795, ‘a hundred rashly felled trees will bring about the ruin of ten thousand others’. Ramond compared a new sawmill awaiting the arrival of trees to a shark lying in wait for a shoal of herring.23 Forests provided essential collective resources to the Pyrenean peasantry, offering them substitute pastures and a resource for gathering fuel and building materials. The forest gave them material for clogs, household furniture and essential heating. Making use of the forests in this way was an ancient customary right which peasants vigorously defended against state regulation. The new French Forest Code of 1827 tried to ban the grazing of goats and sheep in the forests, and claimed a monopoly of woodcutting for the royal administration. Substantial fines were imposed for violation of the new rules and the result was the armed uprising of the Guerre des Demoiselles, so-called because rebels disguised themselves in female dress. This would not be the first or the last time that the people of the Pyrenees challenged the authority of the nation-state.24 Violence flared again in the 1840s, when rioters attacked forest guards in the Ariège.25 One forest inspector asked a suspect ‘What is your profession?’, and he brazenly replied ‘délinquant forestier’ (forest criminal).26 Communal rights in the forests were essential for the survival of poor peasant communities, but the French navy needed to build ships. The Pyrenean forests continued to shrink in the nineteenth century. Pyrenean peasants were micro-landowners of extremely modest means. In the Ariège and Pyrénées-Orientales, over 80 per cent of landowners owned fewer than 10 hectares each, and a survey of 1892 showed that half the properties in these two departments covered no more than 1 hectare each.27 A similar pattern of small-scale landownership obtained on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. As a result of the small size of their landholdings, all peasants relied heavily on the communal resources of the village. Very little land was cultivatable except on the valley floors. Nevertheless, peasants grew rye, potatoes, maize and fruit, terracing their plots to fit the terrain like the terraced rice fields of Vietnam or the Philippines today. Plots were small and access to them was difficult. Before the advent of chemical

Introduction: The Pyrenean world

11

fertilizer, peasants had to carry manure up the slopes, and in steep and difficult terrain, mechanization was unimaginable. Instead, mules and human manpower did the hard work. As more farmers left the land in the late nineteenth century, unprofitable fields were abandoned, and the farmland was converted into pasture or else the vegetation took over. The advance of the green wilderness may please contemporary conservationists; to local farmers it seemed more like criminal neglect. Winegrowing expanded in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in the eastern Pyrenees, but the wine economy was devastated by the phylloxera, a destructive aphid which progressively destroyed French and European vine crops from the 1870s onwards. By the mid-1890s, the Pyrenean vineyards had become totally phylloxerated. French vines were replaced by resistant American varieties, but viticulture was now effectively abandoned in Andorra and the Pallars. Joan Serinyana, a Catalan wine-grower from Llança (Girona), endured a litany of disasters which illustrate the precarious fate of the industry in the region in the second half of the nineteenth century.28 First, a blight known as le mal blanc reduced him to penury in 1855 and he was forced to seek temporary work in France. He recovered, but in the 1870s, the phylloxera struck his vines. In the 1880s, his crop was again affected by mildew. The hard labour of repeatedly replanting his vines took its toll on his physical health, and the effort killed his wife Rosa in 1897. In the early twentieth century, a new problem emerged: over-production and competition from Algeria sent prices crashing and threatened winegrowers’ incomes. The winegrowers of Languedoc, including those in the Aude and Pyrénées-Orientales departments, launched a revolt in 1907 which involved a tax strike and the wholesale resignation of municipal councils. The rebellion was crushed by Prime Minister Clemenceau. As a result of this rebellion, southern cities like Narbonne, Béziers and Perpignan were stigmatized as hotbeds of ‘le Midi rouge’ (the red South). The Pyrenean population suffered endemic poverty, and this was aggravated from the mid-eighteenth century onwards by 100 years of population growth. In 1786, the parish priest of Signac in the Comminges reported to his bishop: ‘The poor make up half of the village; the miserable make up the other half.’29 People relied heavily on bread, maize and potatoes, together with milk in the mountains and fish if they were lucky enough to live near the coast. Not surprisingly, the Pyrenees never became a site for gastro-tourism. Dietary deficiencies were responsible for common disabilities like goitre (enlargement of the thyroid) and pellagra. Misery left its legacy in the poor physical condition of Pyrenean conscripts, and their widespread failure to qualify for French military service

12

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

because of illness or disability. Under the Bourbon Restoration, 51 per cent of candidates were exempted from military service in the Hautes-Pyrénées, and 46 per cent in the Haute-Garonne. A variety of medical reasons lay behind this, including a high incidence of goitre, but they all had their roots in poverty and a poor diet. Illiteracy, another index of poverty, was very high among conscripts in the central and eastern Pyrenees, reaching over 73 per cent for young men called up in the Ariège.30 Chronic undernourishment left most inhabitants with little resistance against devastating diseases. The great cholera epidemic of 1830–32 miraculously passed the Pyrenees by, but the next wave of cholera in 1854 spread fast.31 Doctors could rarely be found in remote rural areas away from the fashionable spa resorts. In eighteenth-century Béarn, the Soule and BasseNavarre there was one doctor for every 6,200 people, and this represented a relatively high level of medical infrastructure for the period, boosted as it was by the proximity of the city of Bayonne.32 Nineteenth-century tourists knew little of these realities and, if they did, they preferred to ignore them. They idealized the simple life and what they called the ‘ancient patriarchal customs’ of the Pyrenean peasantry, but failed to comprehend the destitution with which they struggled daily. At the mid-point of the nineteenth century, the French countryside was ‘full’ in demographic terms. Its population had never been so dense and it would never again be so numerous. The population of the Ariège department, for instance, rose by one-third between 1800 and 1851, mainly due to the decline in the rate of infant mortality.33 In the eastern regions of upper Aragon, the number of households increased by 169 per cent between 1717 and 1857.34 In Malthusian terms, the rise of the population had outstripped the capacity of the region’s meagre agricultural resources to sustain it. From this point on, a slow but relentless rural exodus began. The central Pyrenees would lose 45 per cent of its population on the Spanish side between 1860 and 1970, and 63 per cent on the French side between 1846 and 1968.35 In upper Aragon, many villages were deserted or reduced to a population of only twenty or thirty. Resilience and resourcefulness were necessary for survival. Two expedients acted as perennial safety valves: emigration both seasonal and permanent, and smuggling.

Emigration and the ‘magic line’ Seasonal emigration in search of temporary work was a traditional resource of poor, mountain communities. Frenchmen journeyed into Spain in summer

Introduction: The Pyrenean world

13

to work on the grain and wine harvests in the Ebro valley. Others went from both sides of the Pyrenees north into Languedoc and beyond to harvest cereals, grapes, olives and chestnuts. Specialists in particular trades travelled in search of work at any time of year, like the woodcutters of Foix, the bear trainers of the Ariège or the livestock gelders of Béarn.36 The parish priest of Melles (HauteGaronne) reported in 1786 that the chief industry of both sexes is to move away towards Bayonne for a part of the year. A few go begging in unknown places; others cross into Spain, towards Valencia, to go and sell milk; others are woodcutters engaged in logging the forests for timber dealers; others are employed in the sawmill. Others travel to the Bordelais.37

The Basques had always sought employment further afield following the decline of the whaling industry in which they had once been experts. They travelled to Bordeaux and thence to the United States or the West Indies, or to South America via the northern ports of Spain. Many seasonal emigrants travelled French roads as peddlers (colporteurs), their baskets full of devotional books, cheap printed brochures, almanacs and fairy tales, as well as combs, rabbit skins, hardware and other miscellaneous but portable goods. In 1855, over 5,000 such travelling colporteurs left the single arrondissement of St Gaudens (HauteGaronne).38 They brought home cash, which enabled their families to pay their taxes, and in the process their absence relieved them of another mouth to feed for many months of the year. Smuggling was endemic across the entire mountain range. In fact, it was well integrated into daily life and, in the western Pyrenees, peasants virtually considered it as a customary right.39 The frontiers were a ‘magic line’, wrote Michel Brunet, which had the extraordinary power to transform the value of goods which crossed it.40 Salt was smuggled into Ancien Régime France, where royal taxation pushed up prices to make this a lucrative trade. Tobacco, livestock and various foodstuffs secretly travelled in both directions throughout our period and well into the twentieth century, especially sardines, olive oil and oranges from Spain into France, and cloth, mules and horses in the other direction. Caravans of mules escorted by bands of armed contrabandistas were impressive threats for customs officials, who rarely dared to confront them. In 1773, after all, a band of 140 smugglers had seized control of the town of Puycerda and released all the prisoners from jail.41 In 1789, the French Revolution swept away royal monopolies, and with them the officials of the Ferme Générale who had policed the Roussillon frontier.

14

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Attempts to re-establish customs posts in 1791 produced violent anti-customs riots in Perpignan, when local inhabitants opportunistically labelled customs officials as agents of counter-revolution.42 As the historian of the Roussillon Michel Brunet concluded: The frontier was no longer a fortified limes separating two sovereign states in conflict with each other, but a zone of rather vague dimensions in which networks of smugglers shared the same language, the same risks and the same profits. Each night they rebuilt their Catalan solidarities on very shady foundations.43

The complicity of locals and the so-called callada – the law of silence – were essential to their success. Smuggling will be considered further in Chapter 8.

Crisis and insubordination The social cohesion of Pyrenean society had rested on the pastoral industry, but in the nineteenth century, the population declined, and with it so did the traditional economy. Collective rights were increasingly undermined, by French legislation on the use of forests, by uncontrolled private land seizures, the sale of common land and enclosures. At the same time, the isolation of Pyrenean communities was breaking down, as they became increasingly subject to the intervention of the state, which imposed new forms of taxation, conscription and eventually primary education in the national language. It is clear from the French evidence that these changes met with persistent local resistance. Popular refusal to comply with the demands of the state had resulted in the War of the Demoiselles against the Forest Code, and protests against forest legislation resumed during the economic crisis of the 1848 Revolution. In the Capcir (Pyrénées-Orientales), the forest guards were driven out by a popular uprising, and inhabitants invaded the forests, introducing their livestock and cutting wood just as they wished. Entire villages were mobilized by what one historian called the ‘gendarmophobia’ of the Pyrenees. Nine thousand troops were needed to quell disturbances in the region.44 Nothing better illustrates opposition to the state in the region than responses to conscription. Resistance to military recruitment was at a high point in the early Napoleonic years. Between 1800 and 1805, when draft-dodging and desertion eliminated 28 per cent of recruits nationally, the rate of insoumission (disobeying the call-up) in the Ariège reached 98 per cent. Prefects were sacked when they could not deliver their quota of recruits, which perhaps explains why the Ariège

Introduction: The Pyrenean world

15

had sixteen prefects between 1800 and 1848.45 Desertion and draft-dodging were eight times higher here than the national average in the mid-nineteenth century.46 There was a close correlation between the call-up for military service and emigration, but escaping to America was only one solution. Hiding in the mountains and crossing the frontier was another, in the knowledge that villagers would protect deserters. A false birth certificate could persuade the authorities that an individual was too young for the call-up. Self-mutilation like amputating part of the right thumb could ensure military exemption. In the nineteenth century, conscripts could pay for a substitute to take their place but, in the Pyrenees, very few could afford the expense. It was more likely, given the financial incentive, that Pyrenean men would volunteer to act as a substitute for wealthier neighbours. Seething insubordination of one kind or another was endemic throughout the century. The slow pace at which the French language spread was another symptom of the rejection of a foreign culture. It was difficult to promote the use of French in primary schools when even the teachers in the Basque country and Catalanspeaking Roussillon could not speak French fluently themselves. In 1863, according to official government statistics, one-third of school-age children in four Pyrenean departments were still unable to speak or write French.47 Félix Pécault, a French school inspector during the Third Republic, reported on popular reluctance to send children to primary schools in the Basque country: ‘The Basques’, he wrote in 1879, isolated in their mountains, in their language and in their religion closed to outside influences, in their national sensitivities, have up until now only a superficial experience of the emancipating force of the French genius.

In Bayonne and Mauléon, three-quarters of schoolchildren could neither speak nor understand French.48 Yet France did succeed in integrating its peripheral provinces. The rural exodus, which drove many from the mountains to the French-speaking cities, helped to make ‘peasants into Frenchmen’.49 So too the development of a nationwide infrastructure of roads and railways broke down the isolation of the valleys. Similar developments had the same effect on the Spanish side, although there they came later. The road to Seu d’Urgell was completed only in 1906 and to Puycerda even later in 1914. The development of commercial winegrowing, especially in the eastern Pyrenees, assimilated small peasant vignerons into a national and even international market. Historian Michel Brunet described the history of his native Roussillon during and after the French Revolution as a narrative of chronic civil disobedience, but he placed the turning point of

16

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Roussillon’s integration into France in the middle of the nineteenth century.50 After this point, the railways, the educational system, the wine industry and depopulation of the mountains all combined to defuse popular resentment in the Pyrenees.

The tourist gaze The story of Pyrenean society in the nineteenth century is thus one of poverty and rebellion, depopulation and gradual assimilation into the nation-state. Generations of visitors, however, insulated in their tourist cocoon, were oblivious to the harsh realities of peasant life around them. They romanticized the dashing Spanish smuggler, without seeing the poverty that produced him. They exoticized regional costumes and dances, like the Aragonese jota and the Catalan sardana, without identifying the context in which provincial cultural identities struggled against national centralization. They saw the local inhabitants as part of an impressive décor rather than as rural workers eking out a living in unforgiving geographical conditions. The tourist gaze was always highly selective. Directed by guidebooks and inspired by poets, novelists and painters, nineteenth-century visitors had only minimal contact with locals. For American journalist Amy Oakley, the Pyrenees meant peace, freedom from ‘the grime of cities’, pure water and communion with the infinite. Even if these are illusions, she wrote, they are illusions that the modern world needs. ‘Let us guard our dreams inviolate’, she urged, ‘Let us cherish each his Pyrenees!’ The view of the mountains was everything. ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills’, Oakley declared like the psalmist, ‘from whence cometh my help.’51 She hardly ever lowered her gaze to comprehend humble Pyrenean peasants at work. Only in the twentieth century did French and Spanish social scientists take an interest in a traditional society which was rapidly disappearing. No doubt it was precisely its imminent disappearance that spurred them into action. As we shall see in Chapter 10, they began to take a closer and more objective view of the Pyrenees and its people. Until then, the tourists, patients of the spas, mountaineers, pilgrims and cyclists who criss-crossed the mountains imposed upon it their own fantasies, ambitions and neuroses. They invented their own Pyrenees.

2

Romancing the stones? The Enlightenment invention of the Pyrenees

The scientist’s essential baggage In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment discovered the Pyrenees. Scientists and surveyors travelled across the mountains to measure the height of the peaks and to collect scientific information. Geologists brought home fossils and rock specimens, while botanists accumulated examples of local flora. Like all subsequent climbers, the geologists took specialist equipment with them. On his expeditions to the Monte Perdido, Ramond de Carbonnières used bâtons ferrés, which were strong iron-tipped poles up to five feet long, crampons (climbing irons) or hobnailed boots, and rope. An axe was needed to climb a glacier, as climbers would carve out steps in the ice and ascend in a laborious zigzag. Ramond also carried an eyeglass and a compass but, in September 1797, he lost both down a crevasse on the Monte Perdido.1 Ramond’s party would walk for fourteen or fifteen hours in one day, but they lacked the means to stay on the mountainside overnight. Neither his first nor his second foray up the Monte Perdido actually reached the summit.2 For the Enlightenment scientists, however, this was not the main objective. Climbers did not always admit that a brandy flask was another essential part of their equipment. They carried hammers to break and take rock specimens. Pasumot also carried a magnifying glass for scientific study. His technique was to breathe on the rock to moisten it and then see if it smelt earthy. In this way, he identified whether or not it contained schist.3 A change of footwear into espadrilles was advisable for tackling rocky ascents. When he climbed the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, aged fifty-five or fifty-six, Pasumot changed into espadrilles halfway to the summit. He described their advantages as follows:

18

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era footwear of coarse cloth with a sole of small knotted ropes, thick enough to protect one’s feet, supple enough to support one’s full weight and still prevent sliding.4

Vincent Chausenque, who made a series of expeditions between 1810 and 1852, offered further advice to the amateur. Take the indispensable bâton ferré, he urged, which is the climber’s ‘third leg’. The diligent observer needed writing materials to take notes on the spot. Strong sunlight burned the skin and snowglare irritated the eyes; Chausenque therefore recommended that climbers take coloured eyeglasses or a black crepe veil.5 The scientist’s baggage was cumbersome. Darcet had his barometer, which at that time was used for calculating altitude, while the botanist Saint-Amans required sketchbooks and his journal, not to mention his copy of Linnaeus for reference.6 This is how the scientist set out – but en route he accumulated even more impedimenta as he gathered specimens of rock and plant species. It was the job of the guide to carry all this additional baggage. One vital item was conspicuously lacking in their kitbags – a reliable map – and this deficiency made their exploits even more remarkable. Cassini’s maps of France, which were the first to be based on accurate surveying methods, were still in progress and were not completed until 1815. Even then, they left the Spanish side of the frontier completely blank. As a result, Ramond had no map of the Monte Perdido when he climbed it. There was little point in trusting local knowledge: local inhabitants did not know the high terrain well because they had no good reason to visit it. Mutual comprehension was sometimes difficult to achieve; local peasants had their own names for their mountains and valleys, and these did not always coincide with the labels of scientists or cartographers. Ramond’s account of his ascent conveys a genuine sense of pioneering discovery. Only near the summit did he realize he was in Spain. It was essential for him at that point to make a good drawing.7 The scientific travel literature of the late eighteenth century valued exact instruments and accurate measurements, which would later be summarized in the statistical tables which were hallmarks of the serious scientific observer. The genre demanded that personal impressions should not be recorded, and political observations, too, were irrelevant. Pasumot carried out investigations near Barèges in 1789, and he added a postscript to his records in 1797, but he never once mentioned the tumultuous events of the French Revolution which were going on around him.

Romancing the stones? The Enlightenment invention of the Pyrenees

19

The scientific community What had in previous centuries seemed marvellous but unknowable was in this period subjected to an unprecedented effort to record and classify a range of natural phenomena. The high peaks – and not just the foothills already frequented by the habitués of the spa resorts – were elements of a text which had to be deciphered and appropriated. The Pyrenees was imagined as a historical archive containing vital evidence about the pre-history of the earth. Natural historians – mainly geologists – aimed at what they considered an objective and empirical view of the range’s resources. They were conscientious scientists and, unlike later travellers, they were not inclined to indulge in personal recollections or reveal their subjective impressions. What excited them most of all was geological data, which they believed would either confirm or challenge prevailing theories about the early history of our planet. In the voyage savant, therefore, the traveller insisted on a scientific approach to data. In spite of this, the scientists of the Enlightenment did occasionally let their guard down and comment on the picturesque scenery. In one case, perhaps the most celebrated of all, Ramond de Carbonnières went so far as to experience and relate the very un-scientific thrill of conquering the summits. This chapter will review the ways that the scientific eye constructed the Pyrenees, before analysing Ramond’s unique contribution to the Pyrenean imaginary. The geologists and botanists discussed here were all French. The absence of Spanish scientists in the Pyrenees reflects the weakness of Enlightenment forces in the Iberian peninsula. This is not to say that Spain did not experience the Enlightenment: in the reign of Charles III (1759–88), Spanish reformers wrestled with administrative problems very similar to those that exercised progressive thinkers elsewhere in Europe. But in Spain, they did so in an intellectual climate dominated by the spirit of counter-Reformation Catholicism. The Inquisition, moreover, policed any departure from Catholic orthodoxy and these influences had effectively removed Spain from Europe’s scientific community. Those Spaniards who were interested in rationalism or religious scepticism looked to France as their model; they were the afrancesados, and any hopes they had of influencing Spanish life in the immediate future were dashed when Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808. France then became the national enemy, and her armies condemned as servants of a heathen power. Besides Ramond, the main scientists discussed in this chapter are, in chronological order, Darcet, Palassou and Pasumot. Jean Darcet or D’Arcet

20

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

was Professor of Chemistry at the Collège de France from 1774 until 1793, and he devoted his inaugural lecture to the Pyrenees.8 Bernard de Palassou was a botanist from Oloron who studied the mountains in the 1780s. He was tutor of the Duc de Guiche, brother-in-law of Louis XV’s minister Choiseul. Palassou was commonly known as ‘l’abbé’, although he was in fact a lay preacher who had never been ordained as a priest. He published his first major geological treatise on the Pyrenees in 1781.9 François Pasumot, born in 1733, was a cartographer and formerly a physics teacher at Auxerre. He was the oldest researcher in this group, coming to the Pyrenees later than his colleagues, on the eve of the French Revolution. He published his findings in 1797.10 All these intellectuals were rivals, but they belonged to a homogeneous scientific community. They built on each other’s work and reported to the same peer groups from France’s elite scientific institutions. Darcet held a chair at the Collège de France, and under the Republic and the Consulate he was associated with the Institut National, established in 1795 to replace the royal academies which the Revolution had abolished. Palassou reported to the royal Académie des Sciences, which authorized the publication of his work. Under the Republic, Ramond reported his work to the Institut National. He referred to the work of all his predecessors, but he addressed them as citoyen, in the fraternal style of the French Revolution. They formed an exclusively male community: on Pasumot’s second trip to Barèges, he was accompanied by Madame de Marnésia, but she only made a fleeting appearance in his account and presumably did not accompany him to the summit of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre.11 As we have seen, they were a predominantly French community, since French scientists dominated Pyrenean exploration in this period. They came from different disciplines – Darcet was a professional chemist, while Palassou was a mining engineer entrusted with a government commission to inventory the mineral resources of the Pyrenees, at a time when the myth that the mountains concealed rich deposits was still alive. Before the Revolution, they depended on aristocratic patronage and royal sponsorship. Darcet, for instance, had the philosophe Montesquieu as his patron in Bordeaux, after his own father disinherited him for trying to pursue an intellectual career. In 1756, he fought in the Seven Years War under a new patron, the Comte de Lauraguais. Darcet was a scientist in the service of the government; he took many commissions and worked as chemist at the Sèvres porcelain centre, which he directed, and at the Gobelins tapestry factory.12 As we shall see, Ramond de Carbonnières also had a wealthy patron: he owed his advancement to the notorious Cardinal de Rohan.

Romancing the stones? The Enlightenment invention of the Pyrenees

21

Their achievements, therefore, depended on peer review, the financial backing of eminent aristocrats, and royal missions of a mainly utilitarian nature. Usually, they were only able to investigate a small part of the Pyrenean range, like Pasumot who visited the Barèges region several times, accompanied by the botanist Saint-Amans. Unlike later tourists who wrote for commercial purposes and for popular consumption, their audience was composed of fellow intellectuals. They shared a common cultural capital and attacked similar research questions. When Palassou laced his account with references to Ovid, Livy or Caesar, he was drawing on a classical culture that would have been familiar to his educated peers. They frequently cited and criticized each other, operating within a closed network of inter-textuality.

The scientific approach To appropriate the Pyrenees was to measure the height of the peaks, and to classify their flora. In his inaugural lecture, Darcet had called for an interdisciplinary approach to the classification of knowledge. Experts in physics, chemistry and natural history must all co-operate, he urged, because only through their accumulated efforts and experiments could knowledge advance: ‘only by means of work, experiment and repeated observation can we make progress’.13 In 1774, he had visited Barèges to conduct barometric tests. With the help of his portable barometer, he tried to measure mercury levels at different altitudes. He published all his data gathered over six days, as well as thermometer readings and subsequent calculations of the height of the surrounding mountains. Through measurement and statistical tables, the Pyrenees would be understood. Botanists, too, were interested in gathering specimens and information, with a view to classifying the flora to be found at high altitudes. Meanwhile chemists analysed the mineral content of the water at Pyrenean spas. Darcet’s barometric calculations were only approximate. He believed erroneously that the Pic du Midi de Pau was the highest point of the range – an assumption later disproved by his successors.14 In 1786, Jean-Joseph Vidal and Henri Reboul conducted the first accurate geodetic survey, and calculated that the highest point was at 1,763 metres above sea level, in the Maladetta range on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. Ramond confirmed this when he actually climbed the Monte Perdido himself in 1788.15 Measuring the height of the peaks was the first scientific approach to the mountains.

22

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

In their observations and measurements, scientists made comparisons, most often between the Pyrenees and the Alps, referring to the pioneering work of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, and occasionally with the Andes as well after Alexander von Humboldt’s journey to South America in 1799–1804. The Swiss Alps held a special appeal for Protestant travellers like the Englishman William Coxe especially if, like Coxe, they were admirers of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his bestselling novel, La Nouvelle Héloïse, set in that region.16 Ramond made constant comparisons with the Alps, which he had visited himself in 1777 when he was twenty-two years old. He subsequently published a translation of William Coxe’s account of the Alps, inserting his own original and critical comments.17 The Alps were thus a permanent reference point for his observations on the Pyrenees, which were also informed by his own ethnographic commentary. The Pyrenees and the Alps, he wrote, had the same torrents and precipices, similar flowers and the same pastoral economy. The shepherds, however, were poorer in the Pyrenees, since in his opinion the livestock there produced less milk.18 Ramond compared Gavarnie to Grindelwald and the waterfall of Lauterbronnen,19 while the Pyrenean valley of Campan reminded him of the Appenzell.20 The cheese, Ramond concluded in a non-scientific aside, was far better in the Alps.21 The valley of Campan was already well known, and it corresponded to an ideal of pastoral beauty already attributed to the Swiss valleys, admired for their traditional democratic institutions and successful environmental balance. According to Serge Briffaud, Ramond de Carbonnières saw Campan as a vision of the ecologically balanced future.22 Campan particularly impressed him for its fertility and tranquillity, and its apparent immunity from avalanches and rockfalls. It was a second Arcadia, ‘a mirage which presaged a future world’.23 These were not exactly the comparisons of a scientific geologist, who aimed to use the comparative method to make deductions uncontaminated by individual subjective impulses. After a further expedition to the Pyrenees in 1801, Ramond made some more geological comparisons. The Pyrenean chain, he now argued, was simpler in its structure than the Alps, but the formation of secondary geological layers was more confused. The calcareous element was more abundant in the Pyrenees than in the Alps, an issue that struck all observers of the period. Whereas Mont Blanc stood out in the Alps ‘like a giant surrounded by pygmies’, the Monte Perdido emerged from a strong supporting cast of imposing peaks.24 The Monte Perdido was certainly not a Pyrenean Mont Blanc, precisely because it was as much calcareous as it was granitic. Geologists believed the mountains had a ‘primitive’ granite base, covered with ‘schist’ – sedimentary

Romancing the stones? The Enlightenment invention of the Pyrenees

23

rock or shale containing various minerals such as limestone, slate, mica and marble. The problem was that these elements were closely mixed in the Pyrenees, which made it difficult to be sure which came first, the granite or the limestone. For Pasumot, the Pyrenees were distinctive precisely because of this mixture. Limestone was found at all altitudes, sometimes with fossils, sometimes without.25 Pasumot drew attention to what he saw as the inferior qualities of the Pyrenees. The Pyrenean valleys were narrow; in fact they were really gorges, often with no room for anything at the floor except a torrent. The valleys, furthermore, were stifled (étranglées) by the mountains and, except for Campan, they were short on forest and arable land.26 He failed to recognize some of the advantages of the Pyrenees: they were more accessible than the Alps, and there were fewer glaciers and less snow there, which made mountain climbing easier and less dangerous. Scientists like Pasumot, however, were not interested in climbing the peaks; their self-appointed task was to analyse geological formations.

The geological invention of the Pyrenees – methodologies and theories Enlightenment observers saw the Pyrenees as a database which would yield significant information about natural phenomena. Their fundamental assumption was that through detailed observations and deductive reasoning, they could make the Pyrenees intelligible and discover clues about the origins of the earth. To this end, they patiently accumulated a mass of detail. Palassou, for example, travelled systematically from west to east, giving a geological description of every valley, an account of the production output of existing mines, supplemented by his general observations, region by region. This gave him a huge range of illustrative examples and he could claim to discuss the Pyrenees as a whole. At the end of his text, he added a catalogue of the plants he had observed in different parts of the mountains. Palassou recorded rock composition valley by valley; he spotted clay, limestone, slate, quartz, marble, mica, porphyry and whatever the local mines produced – marble, copper, lead, cobalt and even gold in the upper Ariège. He noted the presence of ‘ophite’ (serpentine) in the pays de Soule.27 Only occasionally did he pause to note interesting local customs, as when he briefly described hunting wood pigeon in Basse-Navarre, or the incidence of goitre at Bagnères-de-Luchon. These digressions interrupted a dry catalogue of mineral and agricultural resources.28 His successor Pasumot recognized the work of Palassou as an important point

24

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

of reference.29 His own method, however, was different. Instead of tackling the entire range, he concentrated on one area near Barèges, and his description proceeded not valley by valley in the style of Palassou, but rock by rock, stratum by stratum. Pasumot’s work was intensely focused. He criticized Ramond for his lack of detailed mineralogy, and he was not interested in Ramond’s descriptions of the life and customs of the rustic inhabitants he encountered.30 In 1788 and 1789, Pasumot travelled in the company of the botanist Saint-Amans, who later published his own account of the expedition under the revealing title Fragments d’un voyage sentimental et pittoresque dans les Pyrénées. Several years later, Pasumot made a return trip, this time without Saint-Amans, and published his findings in 1797. He seems to have deliberately tried to distance himself from the deviant ‘sentimental and picturesque’ tone of his former companion. Instead, he pointedly entitled his own work ‘voyages physiques’. Pasumot, like Palassou before him, never once used the word ‘pittoresque’ to describe the Pyrenees. One cognitive strategy was to chart each valley in turn, as Pasumot had done. Another approach, adopted for instance by Reboul, was to climb up the valleys towards the sources of the streams which flowed through them. This was a search for origins – in this case the search would lead towards the peaks which had once sent boulders cascading down into the gorges. Ramond adopted yet another methodology – he aimed straight for the summits, suggesting that a literal overview of the range could provide more insights about its structure than a minute examination at ground level. His global view rejected the close-to-theground methodology of many of his contemporaries, who, he believed have never contemplated the arrangement of the mountains from above and who, resolved to take only disturbances into account, always with the microscope before their eyes and a cry of alarm in their throat, give two metres of disorder a value they deny to a hundred thousand in symmetry.31

For all the late eighteenth-century scientists who researched the Pyrenees, the accumulation of empirical mineralogical data would enable useful generalizations to be made. We must now turn to their ideas and theories. Eighteenth-century geologists were increasingly aware that biblical explanations of the origins of the earth were problematic. For one thing, the time scale was wrong. Basing their calculations on biblical information, theologians traditionally thought the earth was only a few thousand years old, a view impossible to reconcile with the long chronological story envisaged by scientists. Secondly, the discovery of fossils on mountaintops was potentially a

Romancing the stones? The Enlightenment invention of the Pyrenees

25

threat to religious ways of thinking. To be sure, fossils found at great altitudes comforted belief in the Great Flood of Noah. And yet some fossilized creatures were molluscs and quadrupeds belonging to species now extinct. This idea did not conform with the notion of a sort of immaculate creation, in which all species came into being at a single stroke and remained immutable forever after. None of the scientists considered here invoked the authority of the Bible – in fact they ignored it completely. As we shall see, however, they did not rule out the possibility of a non-biblical Great Flood or two. The empirical study of the earth was in its infancy, but the pioneers discussed here were turning the study of rock strata into a historical science. The Enlightenment sought in the Pyrenees a history and a structure – the history would explain its geological origins, and the structure would make order out of chaos, intelligibility out of mystery. Between the 1780s and 1815, according to David Oldroyd, geology became historicized.32 Darcet’s 1775 lecture had taken a historical perspective. He stressed the geological decadence of the high Pyrenees, and the continuing process by which enormous rocks were becoming detached and thrown down into the valleys. ‘These mountains’, wrote Darcet, ‘give a striking impression of decrepitude.’33 The melting snow and descending torrents sent a mass of undifferentiated rock hurtling downhill. The Pyrenees had acquired ‘an air of old age, suffering and death’.34 The mountains were in ruin, and this was a long-term and continuing historical process of collapse. As more debris broke off and crashed into the valleys, the altitude of the peaks was being reduced while the valleys were constantly rising higher above sea level. The Enlightenment interpreted the Pyrenees as a series of puzzles to be solved by empirical observation. One of these stood out, and it related to the age of rock strata and the time sequence in which they had taken shape. The earliest sedimentary deposits, which geologists identified as granite, were labelled ‘primitive’, implying that they were there at the very beginnings of our planet. Other subsequent deposits were called ‘secondary’ and this was where the fossils were to be found. The starting hypothesis in the Pyrenees was therefore that the hard original granite was coated by an envelope of softer rocks. The action of a primordial ocean which once covered the region was considered responsible for depositing the sediments in the first place. If the Pyrenees had once been submerged by a great ocean, what exactly was the role of the sea in forming the range? The Pyrenees had a characteristically mixed mineralogical content, exhibiting a combination of granite and calcareous rock (schist) that was not to be found in the more granitic Alpine peaks. Palassou suggested that the interleaved layers of rock must have been

26

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

deposited by the ocean at different times.35 The ocean, he thought, had covered the Pyrenees for thousands of years, during which time millions of sea creatures were converted into ever-present limestone. The granite peaks had thus been clothed in ‘secondary’ deposits of limestone and shingle left by the sea. Erosion and degradation had dislodged much of that ancient clothing, leaving naked granite behind.36 Pasumot, too, noted the presence of enormous bodies of granite which had broken free from the peaks.37 Like Darcet, he was very impressed by the decay and collapse of the mountains over time. He believed the turbulence of the ocean had caused this, and he supposed that when the ocean covering the area receded towards the north, it had carried granite rocks downstream.38 Pasumot’s patient and relentless accumulation of data did not preclude formulating general and speculative theories. Ramond, like his contemporaries, sought a pattern in the apparently chaotic nature of the mountain range. On the Maladetta in 1788, he thought he perceived the essential unity of the Pyrenees in a series of peaks sharing a common base.39 As in his subsequent book, he saw the Pyrenees as a series of parallel bands of mountains, of which the central band was the highest and the outlying bands of an inferior height.40 The bands were not exactly in parallel: they were intertwined with each other. Ramond detected more granite towards the south on the Maladetta, and more calcareous rock towards the north.41 In addition, Ramond saw the Pyrenees as two distinct mountain chains, one from the Atlantic to the Maladetta, and the other from the Maladetta to the Mediterranean.42 This was Ramond’s way of discovering order amongst confusion. Ramond argued that a central granite line ran from WNW to ESE. This was the original axis of the Pyrenees (l’axe primitive), running from Eaux-Chaudes to Néouvielle. But it had always seemed anomalous that the highest point of the range (the Monte Perdido, as he thought) did not lie on the central watershed. Ramond described two parallel ranges (chainons) following the same direction as the central line, one to the south, via Gavarnie and the Pimené, and another to the north, running through the Pic du Midi.43 Seen from a height, the Pyrenees revealed to Ramon its uncanny symmetry. Both he and Palassou sought a logical pattern in the midst of apparent randomness. How then did Enlightenment scientists explain the origins of the Pyrenees? In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, two theoretical viewpoints competed to provide the answer. On one hand, the ‘neptunians’, following the German geologist Abraham Werner, believed that the movement of a great ocean, under which the region had once been submerged, accounted for the mountains. The ocean, Werner argued, had first deposited granite and later

Romancing the stones? The Enlightenment invention of the Pyrenees

27

schist and limestone. This theory had the advantage of being compatible with the Book of Genesis. The rival school of ‘plutonians’, following the Scottish scientist James Hutton, believed that upheavals beneath the crust of the earth itself were responsible for throwing up mountain ranges like the Pyrenees. Hutton suggested that the earth contained hot molten rock which expanded and forced its way through the surface. This was the origin of volcanoes, hence the plutonians were also known as ‘vulcanists’. It was many decades before the weight of evidence against the neptunian theory became overwhelming, and all the geologists considered in this chapter still accepted it. Pasumot favoured the turbulence of the ocean as the chief creative force; Ramond similarly argued against the igneous origin of Pyrenean rock formations.44 In the eighteenth century, geological theorists were prone to catastrophic rather than evolutionary explanations, but belief in the catastrophes in question was no longer authorized by the Bible. Enlightenment geologists sought origins in non-biblical upheavals: on one hand, an ancient ocean, on another, violent subterranean earthquakes and volcanic convulsions were responsible for the Pyrenees. Today geologists would talk in different terms of the gradual convergence of the earth’s tectonic plates, but this was a much later twentiethcentury conception. The Iberian and European plates, it is now thought, came together in a slow-motion collision at some time between one hundred and twenty-five million years ago. Sophisticated dating techniques, however, were not available to Enlightenment geologists, and their conceptual toolbox was quite different from that of today. France and Switzerland had been at the centre of geological thinking – the extinct volcanoes of the Auvergne and the discovery of the Alps and the Pyrenees put the region in the forefront of geological discourse. Before long, however, attention turned elsewhere, to Scotland for example and the Appalachians. Humboldt had explored the Andes, and Mackenzie crossed the Rockies in 1793. In the nineteenth century, Pyrenean geological mapping would no longer have the same power to confirm or modify prevailing orthodoxies. Enlightenment scientists made no breakthrough discoveries in the Pyrenees. Their conclusions were closely enmeshed in contemporary disputes between plutonians and neptunians on the origins of mountain ranges, and the role of either long-term flooding or a series of subterranean explosions in their formation. Their achievements were firstly, to emphasize the importance of empirical observation, and in so doing to move the discussion one step further away from biblical authority; and secondly, they saw the Pyrenees in a historical perspective. Geological developments took thousands, if not millions of years, but they did not obey scriptural timetables or fit the theory of short, sudden catastrophes.45

28

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Ramond de Carbonnières With the exception of Ramond, the geologists considered here were averse to the idea of climbing the peaks. The heights were nevertheless important to them, since the material they examined in the valleys had originated at a greater height, and had simply been carried down by a torrent or an avalanche. The summits held secrets about the primitive origins of the mountains. As Ramond put it: ‘Every degree of altitude adds a century to the age of the mountains.’46 They entered the barren wasteland of the higher altitudes not for pleasure or the drive for conquest which motivated later mountaineers, but purely in the interests of science. Their reluctant ascent was a necessary hardship, but they would stoically endure the discomfort to advance the state of knowledge. Palassou, about to climb the Pic du Midi, apologized to his reader for leading him into such a wilderness, praising any reader ‘who is brave enough to follow him into these sad places’.47 Climbing the peaks was a personal sacrifice they made for greater ends. Ramond had a different attitude. Ramond came to the Pyrenees almost by accident, in the retinue of his patron and employer, the Cardinal de Rohan. Rohan was fleeing from public disgrace in the Diamond Necklace Affair, in which his desire to gain Marie Antoinette’s confidence had got the better of his judgement. Rohan had been duped into buying the expensive necklace and then delivering it to a woman he mistakenly thought was the Queen. He had fallen victim to a confidence trick which damaged the reputation both of himself and, by association, of the Queen. Admirers of Ramond were at pains to protest that he himself had not been implicated in the ignominious swindle, insisting that Ramond was only following orders as the Cardinal’s secretary, when he obediently burned incriminating documents.48 The gullible Cardinal had in fact committed no crime, but if he had done so, Ramond would surely have qualified as a rather naïve accessory after the fact. Ramond was a fashionable young man imbued with the culture of sensibility, and had written an unsuccessful play imitative of Goethe’s Werther when, in 1777, he made his first walking tour of the Swiss Alps. His father, who was a royal official, arranged an entry for Ramond into the salon of the liberal aristocrat La Rochefoucauld. He published his critical translation of William Coxe, previously mentioned, and in 1781 was appointed secretary to the Cardinal. In 1787, in the aftermath of the Diamond Necklace Affair, Ramond accompanied the Cardinal to Barèges. He made his first expedition to the central Pyrenees in 1788, and published his Observations, with the imprimatur of the Académie des Sciences, in 1789.

Romancing the stones? The Enlightenment invention of the Pyrenees

29

Politics then intervened. In 1791, Ramond was elected deputy of the revolutionary Legislative Assembly. He joined the moderate Feuillant club and supported Lafayette, his second flawed patron after Cardinal Rohan. Lafayette’s defection to the Austrian enemy in August 1792 brought Ramond’s downfall in its wake, and he fled from Paris. In 1794, back in the Pyrenees, he was arrested as a suspect and imprisoned in Tarbes. He was released after the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor Year 2. Under the Directory, he obtained a post as a teacher at the new École Centrale in Tarbes, and made two attempts at climbing the Monte Perdido. In 1800, he became a member of the Académie des Sciences, and began a new career as a Napoleonic bureaucrat. He was president of Napoleon’s Corps Législatif, and served as prefect of the Puy-de-Dôme department from 1806. In 1809 he became a baron de l’Empire. Ramond thus had several careers, as Cardinal Rohan’s secretary under the Ancien Régime, a revolutionary legislator, Napoleonic functionary, author, scientist and Pyrenean climber. One more posthumous role awaited him. In 1863, a group of mountaineers founded the Société Ramond in Bagnères-de-Bigorre. He had been installed as the revered ancestor of Pyrenean mountain climbing. In the Pyrenees, Ramond usually walked alone, staying at shepherds’ huts and boasting that he knew them well.49 He got great satisfaction from undertaking climbs which everyone else considered too dangerous.50 If his guides hesitated, he was quite prepared to advance alone. In practice, his conquest of the Monte Perdido in 1802 at the third attempt owed much to his guide Rondo, who actually arrived first at the summit. In his Pyrenean writing, he fashioned an identity for himself as an unconventional climber. When he met and got information from an intimidating Aragonese smuggler who had a ‘fierce and noble’ look, he claimed for himself a bravado and disdain for convention which others could not match.51 In 1781, Ramond asserted his individual identity in paradoxical manner: he translated William Coxe’s letters on Switzerland – hardly a recipe for originality, but Ramond interpolated his own comments and criticism which took up about one-third of the entire published text.52 In spite of the apparently parasitical nature of this project, Ramond asserted his own superiority over Coxe and his methods. Ramond believed he was the superior traveller because, unlike Coxe, he understood local dialects and went on foot from one humble cabin to another.53 Coxe, on the other hand, knew no German, travelled in carriages and stayed in good hotels – a style of travel which Ramond despised.54 In his search for greater authenticity, Ramond expressed the kind of inverted snobbery later exhibited by tourists claiming to find a more ‘real’ experience off the beaten

30

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

track.55 Coxe’s account included what Ramond considered a Protestant bias, and he therefore deleted certain passages.56 Ramond was a son of the Enlightenment, but he was nevertheless a croyant, a Catholic believer. On his ascent of the Monte Perdido in 1797, Ramond analysed the content of the rock, the purity of its granite, mixed with magnesium, porphyry, slate and iron oxide.57 He made drawings of rock crystals, and gathered a herbier of rare plant species. All his investigations were aimed at deducing the origins of the range. Ramond conveyed the excitement of finding shell fossils at altitudes of 3,000 metres or more, of discovering rare plants and above all of approaching a peak where no-one had previously ventured.58 His book includes several engravings of granite rock and fossils, and estimates of the heights of various peaks. He confirmed that the Monte Perdido was the highest point, and also that at the summits, so-called ‘primitive’ granite was mixed with ‘secondary’ material like slate and limestone. These were traces, Ramond believed, of successive deposits caused by the action of the primeval ocean.59 In addition, he could show that, contrary to some opinion, there were indeed glaciers in the Pyrenees, even if they were not as impressive as those of the Alps.

Romancing the stones? Ramond’s perceptions of the Pyrenees were exceptional for his time, and he had an enduring influence on subsequent generations of Pyrenéistes. As a geologist, he was an amateur compared to Darcet, Palassou and Pasumot, having never held a teaching post in mineralogy or natural history as they had done before attacking the mountains. His two main accounts nevertheless stand out for three main reasons: firstly, he took a broader and more inclusive view of the mountains. He was of course interested in their scientific value, but at the same time he appreciated their picturesque qualities and was interested in the lives of the inhabitants. His accounts reflect the emotional appeal of his encounter with the Pyrenees, as well as an interest in local ethnography. Secondly, Ramond could write crisp, incisive prose which refreshes the reader like a gust of cool mountain air, in contrast both to the dry scientific treatises of the geologists, and the clichéridden verbosity of some of the romantic writing on the Pyrenees which was to appear over the next half-century. Ramond’s third distinctive contribution will also be discussed here: unlike his colleagues, he experienced the thrill of the mountain, and the excitement of its physical challenges. In discovering this sense of adventure he was indeed a precursor of nineteenth-century Pyrénéisme.

Romancing the stones? The Enlightenment invention of the Pyrenees

31

As we have noted, scientists viewed the Pyrenees with detachment and only very rarely did they record a subjective response to what they observed. Ramond used the language of the picturesque much more freely. He found the tiny village of Lourdes a picturesque site because it was a gorge dominated by a chateau on a high rock. He felt similarly attracted to the chateau Sainte Marie in the Bastan valley, or at least to what was left of it, and to the old chateau at Venasque. Ramond was susceptible to the romantic appeal of ruins. The vocabulary he used to describe the countryside would be echoed a hundred times over by romantic tourists of the following generations: the valleys were délicieux or alegre (happy) as Spanish tourists would say, the meadows were riants (smiling) while les neiges éternelles (eternal snows) overlooked many a charmant tableau (charming picture).60 Ramond echoed other observers who saw in the green Pyrenean valleys a kind of Edenic paradise. Looking down on the Bielsa valley from above, Ramond imagined it as it might have been before any human intervention: ‘It’s the earth in the first days of its infancy before man had subjected it to cultivation.’61 This vision of pastoral virginity had a great seductive power: ‘What irresistible penchant’, Ramond asked himself, ‘captures my thoughts and directs my steps, holding me back and amusing my imagination with a vain desire to build my cabin here and hide my family away?’ We must be able, Ramond continued, to escape sometimes from the oppressive urban crowd, and not fear to shed a tear when we inevitably need to rejoin it.62 Insipid reflections on the dramatic skyline of the Pyrenees would not suffice: Great, proud nature that nothing could trivialise, neither insipid descriptions, nor burlesque paintings, nor even the admirers that its fame attracts! For a long time yet she will amaze and delight any man of taste and knowledge; and wherever his path may take him, he will not pass by here without saluting the majesty of the Pyrenees.63

This kind of eulogy would make Ramond the darling of nineteenth-century Pyreneists. His first sight of the Monte Perdido in the summer of 1797 inspired an outburst of unmitigated joy. The spectacle of the nearby summit was both frightening and sublime. It disoriented the viewer who experienced an immediate sensory overload. ‘Several moments’, he wrote, ‘were not enough for us to gather our senses.’ ‘Voilà le Mont-Perdu! Voilà le Mont-Perdu!’ the group exclaimed, even though the shape of the summit was hard to make out amongst the snow and cloud. God, Ramond believed, was present at the scene.64

32

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Ramond was no mere detached observer. He knew the élan of the high peaks, of venturing where no human had before set foot. A sense of joy and wonder emanates from his prose as he recorded the approach to the Monte Perdido: From the top of the rocks, we looked in dumb surprise at the majestic spectacle that awaited us at the passage of la Brèche [Roland’s Breach]; we didn’t expect it; we had never seen it; we had no idea how incomparably dazzling it would appear on a fine day […] the summit of Mont-Perdu resplendent in all its celestial clarity no longer seemed to be part of the earth. I would only try in vain to paint the magic of this scene: its colour and composition are both quite foreign to everything that normally strikes the eye.65

In this Ramond resembles Eric Leed’s heroic traveller, engaged on a ‘spermatic journey’, in which the male personality is extended into infinite space, whether that space is conquered as a scientist, explorer or mountaineer.66 Like all such heroes, Ramond was in some degree an egoist. Towards the culmination of an ascent, he entered an ‘altered state’ of rapture and acquired a new sensual awareness. Once there, he felt a physical transformation, an astonishing lightness of being. He was reluctant to descend.67 Unable to reach the summit in 1797, he returned to conquer the Monte Perdido in 1802. Whereas the geologists, with their eyes firmly fixed on rock strata, took very little notice of the local inhabitants, Ramond showed some interest in their lives. In fact, he tended to idealize their rustic simplicity. He took shelter with the shepherds, and drank the milk they offered him, but he decided that to offer them payment would be an insult. In Ramond’s Rousseauist imagination, he and the Pyrenean shepherds enjoyed a relationship of equality and fraternity.68 His admiration for their simple and dignified life was unbounded. He wrote of: the true owner of the Pyrenees, the indigenous shepherd of these mountains, intelligent but uncultured, noble and generous in his rags, proud even in his abasement, serene in the face of adversity, always friendly, recognizable from one attribute which he has inherited from his race rather than received from heaven, a nobility which he has never disgraced and which sticks to him whatever the circumstances.69

He compared the Spanish shepherds to those of antiquity, imagining that they resembled their predecessors from the time of Moses or the Greeks.70 Ramond treated smugglers with similar respect. In his description, they were clever, resolute and familiar with every danger of their trade. Although they terrified ordinary travellers, the unconventional Ramond did not fear them.71 He claimed he won their respect, since he had nothing they wanted to steal, and

Romancing the stones? The Enlightenment invention of the Pyrenees

33

because he travelled unarmed and posed no threat. Once again, he implied a kind of mutual fraternal acceptance between himself and the Pyrenean population. If travellers, as Leed insists, are defined by their condition as strangers, then Ramond played this role to full advantage.72 He communicated with shepherds and smugglers as a complete stranger, without any of the trappings of civilization and therefore, he thought, without either party harbouring any preconceptions about the other. In his meetings with shepherds and bandits, Ramond believed he connected as an equal, almost without history or identity, simply as man to man. Ramond climbed the Pic du Midi thirty-five times and perhaps he deserves the title of the inventor of the Pyrenees conferred on him by the historian JeanFrançois Soulet.73 He was an Enlightenment traveller, classically educated, an admirer of Rousseau and an active participant in the moderate phase of the French Revolution. He became a geologist, researching the age and composition of the granite peaks and the presence there of schist and limestone. Unlike other geologists who relentlessly catalogued the resources of the valleys, Ramond climbed the heights. He wrote in dramatic but simple prose about picturesque valleys, fearsome precipices and thunderous waterfalls. He was interested in local people and local customs and convinced himself that he had a special rapport with them. Ramond was a savant, but a savant sensible – a scholar with feeling. His perceptions of the Pyrenees were thus more complete and rounded than those of his contemporaries and competitors. Uniquely for his time, he experienced the elation of the climber who had reached uncharted territory and was reluctant, once the summit was achieved, to come down to earth again. Future travel guides would pay him generous homage. The legacy of the geological discourse, to which he had singularly contributed, echoed through the travel writing of the following century. Together with contemporaries like Palassou and Pasumot, Ramond had helped to make the wild peaks intelligible.

3

Visions of the picturesque: The romantic Pyrenees

From science to sensibility In the early decades of the nineteenth century, visitors to the Pyrenees struggled to find a vocabulary that would adequately describe the dramatic landscape of craggy mountains, plunging ravines and rushing streams. The generations of Romanticism experienced ‘l’éxoticisme des hauteurs’ (the exoticism of great heights), and searched for the experience of the romantic sublime and the contemplation of the infinite. Romantic tourists, inspired by the poetry of Byron and Ossian, sought out ruined chateaus and the effects of moonlight upon the snowy slopes. The mountains induced a dream-like state and a sense of reflective melancholy. The tourists’ visits were not complete unless they had experienced the violence of a Pyrenean storm. The conventions and strategies which made possible the symbolic appropriation of the mountains in the Romantic period will be examined in this chapter. ‘Picturesque’ was the term tourists used most frequently to label a sight that pleased them, but they scattered it throughout their travel accounts so indiscriminately that it is not easy to pin down exactly what they meant by it. They also referred to views they called ‘romantic’ and ‘sublime’, designating multifaceted but interconnected ways of conceiving the Pyrenees. The ‘picturesque’ suggested a sentimental response, while ‘romantic’ usually implied stronger emotions. The ‘sublime’ denoted both pleasure and horror, and it occasionally had sinister Gothic aspects. At the same time, some Pyrenean encounters could never be classified as picturesque, and in fact tourist descriptions often outlined the repulsive anti-picturesque elements of the landscape. But these negative responses also serve to define the concept more precisely. English literary scholars have pinpointed the period from the 1770s to the 1790s as the apogee of the cult of the picturesque.1 In tourist accounts of the

36

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Pyrenees, however, it clearly endured well into the nineteenth century. The chief theorist of the British picturesque was William Gilpin, who published several guidebooks on the subject from 1782 onwards, based on his tours to various regions of Britain, such as the Wye Valley and the Lake District.2 There is no indication, however, that any eighteenth- or nineteenth-century tourists to the Pyrenees, whether English, French or Spanish, read or referred to Gilpin. His commentaries, and scholars’ analysis of them, nevertheless help to elucidate this ‘precarious and paradoxical’ concept, and the following discussion draws on his observations.3 Since the 1790s European sensibilities had changed. Travellers now wanted to differentiate themselves from the dry scientific treatises discussed in the previous chapter. Like Ramond, they placed a new value on subjective emotions, and their writing was intended to express their inner feelings. Instead of scientific discourse, they aimed to provide amusing reflections and sentimental asides. Later in the century, visitors produced volumes of anecdotic memoirs whose whimsical nature was advertised in their titles: fragments, impressions, arabesques, bluettes (trifles).4 They privileged the author’s subjectivity. Thus François Albaniac, who travelled with his family from Agen to Bagnères in the summer of 1818, pointed out that ‘I didn’t undertake this journey to study the mountains; so I didn’t travel through them with the nervous and erudite curiosity of the mineralogist or the botanist.’ Geologists were far too serious, whereas Albaniac promised his readers that he would remain in ‘la domaine de la gaîeté’ (in cheerful territory).5 Yet in spite of such explicit attempts to sketch a new discourse of the Pyrenean landscape, tourist accounts continued to incorporate the scientific representations which preceded them. Vincent Chausenque addressed his long descriptions to natural historians as well as to painters and poets, and included an extensive and pedantic introduction on geological debates and comparisons with the Alps, the Andes and the Himalayas.6 Even Albaniac, who as we have seen, promised his readers fun rather than science, owned a mineralogical collection.7 The travel writing of Vincent Chausenque is a constant resource for perceptions of the Pyrenees in the early nineteenth century. His two-volume work is not remarkable either for the acuity of its insights nor for the clarity of his prose. On the contrary, his views were very conventional, and his writing oscillated between the long-winded and the turgid. Chausenque is notable for the way he represented and incorporated a number of very common reactions. His account was geographically comprehensive, and it combined observations

Visions of the picturesque: The romantic Pyrenees

37

recorded on several journeys made at very different times. Chausenque was an artillery engineer in the western Pyrenees in the Napoleonic Wars, he visited St Sauveur in 1827, and made another trip there about ten years later. He visited the Valle de Arán in 1849, and came back to the Pyrenees again in 1852. He compiled a multi-layered report based on visits over almost forty years. Chausenque tried to be all-encompassing, but his vision of the picturesque never escaped the grip of the geological discourses which had originally mapped out the field. Chausenque’s book is part geological, part botanical and part travelogue, together with some place-name etymology and history. The genre of picturesque travel writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century thus risked awkward combinations. As Nigel Leask argued, travel writing in the Romantic period struggled to synthesize literary and scientific discourses.8

In search of the picturesque ‘Picturesque’ literally means ‘like a picture’, or suitable to be painted. Travellers in the Pyrenees were delighted if they could compare the view before them to a wellknown canvas, and they usually referred to Claude, Poussin and Salvator Rosa. English travellers sometimes carried a special hinged convex mirror, known as a ‘Claude glass’, which both reflected the view and reduced its scale, thus allowing them to ‘capture’ it, as would a modern photographer.9 Tourists turned their backs on the landscape and through tinted reflective glass they enjoyed the view as if in moonlight or at sunset – the amateur artist carried such aids to make what he or she saw into something paint-worthy. De Bellèze, who made a five-month trip to Bagnères-de-Bigorre in 1853, did not need to give a close description of the mountains to enjoy the painterly effects of the view. From the distance of Pau he appreciated the Pyrenean horizon in different lights and through the eyes of a gallery of artists: ‘This morning’, he wrote for his sister in Paris, you have the limpid calm of Poussin, at noon, it’s the greyish colour of Ingres, later the serenity of Gleyre; in the evening, it’s the purple sky of Claude; the day after tomorrow, Delacroix might take his palette and roughly spread red, green and blue everywhere.10

De Bellèze didn’t need to find his own words; he let artistic references do the work for him. Travellers in the Pyrenees very often went armed with sketchbook, paints and brushes, relying on their guide to carry all this equipment. Taking home the sketchbook, and perhaps publishing a few drawings from it in their travelogue, would preserve a trophy of their adventure.

38

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

The picturesque was a vague category which lay somewhere between nature and art. Nature had its faults and omissions, and if it did not completely live up to the viewer’s picturesque standards, then it had to be ‘improved’ by tinted glass, by omitting a discordant feature or adding an interesting motif, or by criticizing the view. What a shame, thought E. E., that the waterfall at Cériset (near Cauterets) does not fall straight, but instead is channelled to one side by a rock lying in its path.11 The painter could do better. As Gilpin had advised, ‘Nature is most defective in composition; and must be a little assisted.’12 For the traveller in search of the picturesque, then, nature often needed correction. Madame Joudou wanted the countryside to look like a jardin anglais, a careful balance between the natural and the contrived. The view should be enclosed, she thought, and not unlimited, with trees, lawns, streams and a few well-placed rocks for variety.13 The traveller wanted nature to elevate itself to the level of great art, but searching for picturesque compositions in nature was almost doomed to disappointment. When nature fell short of expectations, tourists superimposed their own imaginary Pyrenees on what they saw. According to Gilpin, the picturesque should resemble great art. As in a painting, the quest for the picturesque required a scene with contrast and variety, a deep but not infinite perspective, an interesting focal point in the foreground, and something to frame the whole composition. Arthur Young thought he had found this when he approached the little cathedral of St Bertrand-de-Comminges in 1787. He saw essentially what still confronts today’s tourist. In front of him, the cathedral sat above the plain on higher ground, framed naturally by the surrounding mountains. It formed ‘an exquisite little picture’, while ‘towering forests, finishing in snow give an awful grandeur, a gloomey [sic] greatness to the scene’.14 In the surrounding countryside, the villages, valleys and many waterfalls added to its picturesque qualities. It was best not to actually climb the mountains. Viewing the landscape from a great height would limit its picturesque potential. The landscape required a point of interest in the foreground and a background formed by the mountain range, and this was best appreciated at eye level. In the 1850s, Hippolyte Taine’s travelling companion Paul explained why it was illogical to climb a mountain in order to view the countryside. From a distance, he reportedly said, the colours seem indistinct, the relief is flattened and everything seems on a Lilliputian scale. Rather, Paul advised, ‘A landscape is a painting. You must put it where you can see it.’15 Sometimes the view was too extensive to be ‘put’ anywhere, as in the valley of Argelès, much appreciated by Ramond de Carbonnières, but which deterred E. E. because there was too much for the eye to take in at once. He preferred a

Visions of the picturesque: The romantic Pyrenees

39

scene with some curious detail on which to concentrate, like a ruin, a bridge or a lake.16 ‘Views from great heights’, complained Henry Blackburn who travelled to the Pyrenees in 1880, ‘are generally failures, when objects lose their beauty of form, and there is little or nothing to guide the eye to any distinct distance or perspective’.17 The romantic gaze pictured the Pyrenees selectively, and through painterly eyes. The traveller appropriated the landscape not as a whole but in fragments or isolated scenes which could be assimilated into the fluid criteria of the picturesque. To some extent, the difference between the picturesque and the sublime was simply one of size. A grandiose and towering peak was sublime to contemplate, but the picturesque privileged scenes on a smaller scale. Thus Juan Avilés appreciated the Valle de Arán because it seemed to him a green utopia, a miniature valley, dotted with toy villages.18 The mountains were imagined as a theatre, stage-managed in some minds by divine hands. The valleys formed vast amphitheatres and, in the Vallée de Carol, Adolphe Thiers reported ‘you might be entering a theatre, in which the seats in the wings are none other than immense rocky peaks which rise up perpendicularly, facing other seats directly opposite them’.19 The most theatrical and picturesque site of all was the cirque of Gavarnie. Gavarnie was a must-see destination for the nineteenth-century tourist, recommended by guidebooks to French, English and Spanish tourists alike for its picturesque qualities. Gavarnie is a cirque, that is to say a bowl at the head of a valley formed by erosion, holding a lake or the remains of one, surrounded by a semi-circular rocky wall, down which several waterfalls cascaded. Behind and above Gavarnie stood the great towers of the Marboré, which visitors described in exactly those words like an impenetrable and sinister fortress of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Expatiating on the wonders of Gavarnie was compulsory for all tourists. Madame Joudou, then aged forty, travelled with her sons and a chambermaid to the Pyrenees in 1818. She predictably found Gavarnie a picturesque amphitheatre. She enjoyed the variety of colours and the richness of the countryside that she passed through on the way there. Looking up to the rocky heights behind the cirque itself, she saw balconies and galleries, and above them crenellated castles, towers and ramparts. The sunset on the peaks recalled an opera set.20 Chausenque found a full repertoire of metaphors to respond to Gavarnie. It was the ‘amphitheatre of Titans’, a sanctuary as inspiring as the interior of a Gothic cathedral, or even a courtroom with its tiered seats constructed by God to pass judgement on humanity.21 Tourists in search of the picturesque thus reinvented the Pyrenees as a painting by Salvator Rosa, a soaring Gothic cathedral or a theatre of the giants.

40

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

The landscape was reimagined according to their romantic obsessions. But one thing was missing from their vision: there were no people in sight. The inhabitants of the Pyrenees went unnoticed unless they were of picturesque interest. A smuggler perhaps, or a gypsy, might excite the romantic imagination and planting one in the foreground of a painting was a sure way to embellish it. A close encounter with a bandit, however, was to be avoided in case romantic illusions were shattered. The bandit, as James Buzard puts it, might not ‘speak in the discourse that constructs him’.22 Miserable shepherds were unlikely to qualify as picturesque, and their sheep were of even less interest. The picturesque would only be compromised by the presence of real working people in the countryside.23 From time to time, local inhabitants did inevitably intrude into the traveller’s field of vision. Tourists sometimes noticed the high incidence of goitre around Bagnères-de-Luchon, caused by malnutrition. They were sometimes aware of the cagots – a minority once treated as outcasts whose ethnic origins were the subject of speculation: were they descended from the Goths, the Moors or medieval lepers? Cretins and cagots, however, could never be part of a picturesque scene. Travellers isolated themselves from such social realities, preserving the stereotypical image of the sturdy, independent, Pyrenean ‘montagnard’, living in age-old simplicity. Victor Dujardin was inspired by a certain image of the shepherd on his visits to Roussillon in 1889 and 1890. Dujardin described himself as ‘a man of the north’ and he was completely seduced by all the clichés of the Mediterranean – the sun, the azure sea, the transparent air, plentiful fruit and wine. He imagined his Pyrenean shepherd in a picturesque pose: The Pyrenean shepherd […] is superb to look at when he stands out against a background of blue sky. Emotionless as the statue of the Commander [from the legend of Don Giovanni], his eye is lost in the contemplation of vast horizons; he fills his lungs with the strong scents of the woods. His mind seems far away, lost in some mysterious meditation; the hours go by, and he is insensible to frostbite or torrid heat, to the breeze’s caresses or the violent winds, to rainstorms or blizzards.24

Like his flock, the shepherd lives in silence, indifferent to his physical surroundings. Shepherds were romanticized, but real peasants were largely ignored, and there was a clear discrepancy between their wretched and impoverished state and the tourist’s idealization of them and their landscape. The tourists quoted in this chapter had rarely encountered lower-class poverty in their everyday lives, except perhaps to give charity to the needy.

Visions of the picturesque: The romantic Pyrenees

41

According to De Bellèze’s travelling companion, no art could accommodate ‘a man in rags, sick, deformed’. It was best to give the beggar a sou and move on.25 As Andrews argues, the search for the picturesque had no social conscience.26 De Bellèze’s companion happened to be a countess, but this was no accident since the search for the picturesque was always the affair of a cultured elite. Early nineteenth-century tourists were connoisseurs of good taste. When they referred to the art of Claude Lorrain or when they freely quoted from Byron’s Childe Harold, they assumed cultivated readers who knew what they were talking about. They formed an educated fraternity sharing a common code, sometimes cross-referencing each other and reproducing similar stale clichés to describe their experiences. According to Gilpin’s theories, the picturesque was made up of variety and contrasts. This, however, was open to interpretation. What exactly should be varied, and what should be contrasted? Woodland with pasture, perhaps, or the plain with the mountain, but these were vague suggestions. Contrasts in the landscape should be harmonious, but this too might be interpreted in different ways. In practice, the picturesque was often identified with lush vegetation and a prosperous and productive agricultural scene. Albaniac thought he had found it on the banks of the Adour near Bagnères, and he wrote: In twenty minutes the road out of Bagnères becomes really romantic. What luxurious vegetation! Fresh and attractive woods; very charming country houses; meadows of the deepest green; crowds of weeping willows; chestnut trees laden with fruit; enormous oaks […] what else can I say? All is cheerfulness, freshness, health and well-being.27

The scene was ‘riant’ or ‘ravissant’ (charming or delightful) and these were favourite adjectives to describe pleasant rural scenes and green pastures. Cénac echoed the standard vocabulary when he found near Tolosa in the Spanish Basque country ‘a delicious valley, charming (riante), fertile but narrow’.28 For Puigdollers, the countryside was ‘alegre’, the water crystalline and the streams were singing.29 Tourists expected to be charmed by fertility and greenery. Their appreciation of the picturesque depended on a landscape that had been tamed and was productive. This vision of neatness, fertility and variety seemed familiar to the English tourist. Order, cultivation and productivity in the Pyrenean lowlands resonated with core English values.30

42

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

The Gothic picturesque Like Gilpin, the picturesque tourist sought a view with a point of interest in the foreground – a bridge, a waterfall, a smuggler or a bandit, for instance, real or imagined. A lake would sometimes suffice. The Lac de Gaube near Cauterets, for example, had potential. Here an English honeymoon couple had drowned in 1824, the husband failing in his attempt to rescue his doomed bride. Many tourist accounts related this tragic story, repeatedly embellished; it validated the lake’s status as a romantic location. A ruin could inspire travellers. A ruined abbey, for example, signified the inevitable passing of time and the transience of the world, triggering a fit of romantic melancholy. Abbeys were symbols of Catholicism and possibly therefore of superstition if the traveller was a Protestant, and this added an extra frisson of horror to the vision.31 A taste for Gothic horror informed the search for the picturesque, particularly in the earliest decades of the nineteenth century. Joudou was particularly sensitive to picturesque ruins, as well as dungeons and crypts: she had visited a crypt full of corpses at St Michel in Bordeaux on the way to the Pyrenees, which filled her with ‘terror and fright’.32 The church at Gavarnie catered successfully for such lovers of the macabre, because here were displayed thirteen skulls purporting to belong to Templars executed by Philippe le Bel in 1307. Sensibilities have changed: today the skulls are discreetly enclosed in a cabinet and there are no longer as many of thirteen of them.33 Anne Radcliffe’s popular Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, published in 1794, was a regular reference point evoking haunted ruins and supernatural effects. Chausenque used Radcliffe to reinforce his image of the towers of the chateau de Foix, which by the time of his visit in the 1830s was a grim prison.34 Louisa Costello saw the ghost of an armoured knight in the chateau of Pau, and she sensed that the ghost of the unfortunate Blanche II of Navarre haunted the tower of Moncade near Orthez, where she had reputedly died poisoned in 1464.35 Carlos Soler lapsed into an orgy of medievalism on contemplating the twelfth-century ruined castle at Loarre. He found it magical when seen just before dusk, reminiscent of the warlike Middle Ages, the sentinel in his alcove in the wall, the horrible chains, the drawbridge, the jangling of arms, the elegance of the guards, the strident clash of steel [….] the splendid salon and the wandering troubadour, in love with the lady and pleading his suit with inspired verses.36

In spite of this onslaught of clichés, the Gothic face of the picturesque had faded by the middle of the century. When Frederick Johnson visited the Pyrenees in

Visions of the picturesque: The romantic Pyrenees

43

the mid-1850s, Radcliffe had clearly become the object of caricature. Johnson recalled: The romance reader of forty years back will remember those terrible old castles in the Pyrenees, whereunto benighted travellers were guided over a drawbridge, then ushered into lofty halls, and after being plundered of all they had, were cast into noisome dungeons; when a misguided, but repentant female ultimately rescued them from the tyrant’s power, or the ghost of some murdered victim revealed to them a way of escape […] an over sensitive female friend of ours, whose knowledge of the Pyrenees was derived chiefly from this source, recently expressed her chief dread of the journey to Pau, as arising from a morbid repugnance to the banditti infesting those parts.37

The shudder of Gothic horror had now become a signifier of feminine frailty. The appreciation of the picturesque in the Pyrenees was not simply a visual experience. It could involve an attack on all the senses. If the visitor was not there in the summer months, he or she could feel severe cold, as Adolphe Thiers did in November and December 1822. The mist, which from a distance wreathed everything in mystery, could at the wrong altitude seep into one’s clothing. In the summer, visitors not only recorded the colours of the fields and flowers, but they also noted the freshness of the mountain air, and the gentle sounds of goat bells or the rippling of streams, signifying pastoral tranquillity. At Eaux-Chaudes, Henry Blackburn was exhausted by the sonic assault he suffered: ‘On summer nights’, he wrote, when the mountains seem to close over us, and every sound is echoed with wonderful distinctness through the valley; when the murmuring of the Gave, the wind in the trees, the tinkle of bells, the cries of shepherds, and the bleating flocks in front of our open windows, continue almost incessantly through the night, we have sometimes wished for a little more peace.38

Most of the time, however, the sonic landscape was filled with deafening torrents of crashing water. The sense of smell, too, was part of the Pyrenean repertoire and visitors to those spas where the waters had a high sulphur content were severely tested. The picturesque was a sensory experience, and to witness a Pyrenean storm was an especially romantic and stereophonic moment. E. E. found that a storm near Bagnères-de-Luchon had a magical effect. Half of the countryside was ‘plunged into all the horrors of the night, under a black, livid sky crisscrossed by menacing forks of lightning; all the voices of the mountain screamed in terrible thunderclaps’.39 Storms arrived suddenly and could be immensely destructive, tearing down trees and causing floods. The violence of a storm in the mountains inspired terror, but this was not to be avoided – it was rather to be savoured.

44

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

When Louisa Costello witnessed a winter storm, ‘All became black; the thunder roared, the wind howled, the hail beat down, and winter and storm prevailed. I watched all this with delight [my emphasis]; for it was impossible not to see anything more sublime.’40 The Pyrenees were horrible, said the young Aurore Dupin (later George Sand), but ‘délicieux’ at the same time.41

The anti-picturesque The picturesque Pyrenees was mainly a lowland phenomenon. Higher up the slopes, visitors encountered its opposite. Instead of harmony they found chaos, in place of colour and variety they encountered drabness and monotony. Instead of fertility, the peaks were barren. The picturesque aesthetic was also defined by its own opposite. For a few, as we have seen, the barren savagery of the high altitudes for a time evoked a shiver of Gothic horror, and deterred tourists in the lowland spa resorts who valued the gentle, green valleys and were moved by a pastoral vision of the picturesque. Visitors to the spa resorts did go on picnics and made excursions, but they rarely directed their gaze upwards at what they saw as the repulsive treeless zone above. Rather, they defined this aridity as an absence of landscape. The mountains could be a blot on the picturesque landscape. According to Fourcade, a lawyer from Tarbes travelling in 1834, the mountains simply spoiled a good view: ‘the high mountains which surround it’, he wrote referring to the Lac de Gaube, ‘damage the effect’.42 Many tourists, especially women, did not want to be dwarfed by the mountains. Female travellers preferred to be charmed rather than intimidated. Georgiana Chatterton decided that mountains were best seen from a distance: I do not think that, on a near approach to mountains, they have at all the same attractive, friendly look as at a distance; on the contrary, instead of being dear friends they are more like enemies. Marks of destruction, the ravages of torrents, the woful [sic] effects of avalanches, are met with at every step. The rocks seem ready to fall and crush us, and the rivers rush along with savage fury and deafening noise. No images of peace, scarcely of happiness, meet the eye.43

The mountains in this description seem to violate all principles of the picturesque. Chatterton experienced a form of claustrophobia: the valleys seemed like narrow culs-de-sac offering no exit. She admitted to suffering from ‘a sort of mountain surfeit’.44 No doubt she would have agreed with Gilpin that ‘the spiry pinnacles of the mountain […] give no pleasure to the picturesque eye’.45 On the Pic du Midi, Joudou had a vision of the world’s end:

Visions of the picturesque: The romantic Pyrenees

45

The place becomes sad, limited, wild […] the mountains here are arid, naked, stripped; the rocks, devoid of all vegetation, are scarcely covered by a lichen whose monotonous colour only changes as the light does.46

For Juan Avilés, the torrents of the Maladetta were ‘tears of eternal pain’, which could never ‘expiate the horrible crime of its satanic pride’.47 Immense rocks, scattered over the landscape, signified disorder and chaos. Travellers found such scenes barren and hideous, and their eerie silence disturbed them. One site at Gèdres near Gavarnie was particularly desolate. Here the hiker saw huge rocks as big as houses: ‘You could believe’, wrote Saint-Amans, ‘that you were suddenly transported to the infernal banks of the river Lethe, where dumb shadows, where cold and slow-moving waves offer nothing but sleep and death.’48 Le ‘chaos’ of Gèdres, as it was known, was the hell which the picturesque heaven of a green and smiling countryside required as its ‘Other’.

The Romantic and the sublime The picturesque must be distinguished from the romantic. When Saint-Amans reflected on their different meanings, he concluded that although both the romantic and the picturesque fed on natural contrasts, the romantic signified something extra: it moved the soul and inspired the imagination.49 The concept of the Romantic was more loaded than the merely picturesque: it denoted not just a painterly composition but something capable of stirring the emotions. The young traveller Alfred Tonnellé expressed a profound sense of romantic longing and melancholy in the record of his expedition from Perpignan to the Cerdagne and beyond in August 1858.50 He was a French art and philosophy student, whose diary was full of literary references, but was also punctuated by bouts of romantic introspection. Tonnellé declared himself divided between wanting a fixed focus to his life, a partner, a place to settle, a family, and on the other hand his ambition to travel and to feel free. ‘I then foresaw’, he went on, the emptiness and exhaustion of this long, wandering walk, of this repetitive variety and this fatigue which strikes the lonely spirit, lost in this space and time too vast and too narrow for it, too diverse and too monotonous.51

On the mountains, Tonnellé’s literary paradoxes expressed a profound weltschmerz; we must accept life as it is, he wrote, knowing that all our desires will never be fulfilled. At the age of twenty-six, he felt profoundly discouraged and he could not foresee his future with any optimism. His life so far, he felt, had been

46

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

an introduction, but to what? Decisions, he feared, had to be taken, and yet all he could do was hike over the Pyrenees and take detailed notes.52 His melancholy doubts about his future proved uncannily prophetic. He travelled into Provence, but caught typhoid and died that same October. In his anguished self-doubt, Tonnellé was a quintessential romantic traveller, embarked on a journey in search of himself. His sad, early death enhanced his image of romantic suffering. The landscape was able to arouse the emotions, inspiring a state of reflection and romantic melancholy. A beautiful landscape induced in the romantic spectator a heightened state he or she called a ‘reverie’. At Super-Bagnères, Chausenque was ‘plunged into reveries where the mind would wander with neither a guide nor a landmark, if the tired senses did not put an end to this almost ecstatic state’.53 The romantic tourist found it possible to experience a mysterious affinity with nature. Near the Noguera river in Catalonia, Chausenque believed the individual felt an intimate rapport with creation, alive or inanimate, surrounding him; and if some breeze starts to agitate the treetops, he seems to hear a mysterious voice coming out of the woods to join with his own and express his emotions.54

The overwrought Pedro Abarca was so moved by his first sight of Lake Gersé that he fired his revolver into the air in joy.55 Such feelings of ecstasy or romantic melancholy could be a response to ruins, or the colour of the sunset or moonlight on the mountains, especially on snow-covered ground. Even the forest could appear romantic, like the pine forest recorded by E. E. near the Pont d’Espagne, where he imagined the trees bent like cripples and hunchbacks in the Cour des miracles recreated by Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris.56 The forests may have appeared romantic, but they were also shrinking and they had been shrinking for over two hundred years, as the royal French navy had been taking its toll of shipbuilding material ever since the time of Cardinal Richelieu. Only a small minority of travellers registered the decline of the Pyrenean forests. In 1798, Ramond had deplored public neglect of the once impressive pine forests.57 Chausenque expressed similar regrets, as he saw the progress of deforestation near Sainte-Engrâce and Barétous. Here some firs were perhaps 800 years old and had grown to a height of 100 feet, which made them ideal as masts. In the Ariège, too, Chausenque lamented the deforestation carried out to fuel local iron forges.58 Only in the late twentieth century would the French state legislate to preserve what remained of the forests for their own sake, but this change would require another, ecologically inspired, reinvention of the Pyrenees.

Visions of the picturesque: The romantic Pyrenees

47

One could imagine the forest populated by spirits and mythological figures. When the Barcelona businessman José Puigdollers travelled with his photographer Pedro Abarca to the Valle de Arán in 1902, he imagined a countryside full of nymphs. Then he actually proceeded to photograph them, and the glossy art book they produced contained many images of nymph-like figures.59 I imagine the ladies concerned were the wives of the two travellers, posing obediently beside rivers and waterfalls or frolicking in the foliage. The author and his illustrator had staged their very own version of the ‘pinturesco’. Romantically inclined travellers romanticized the Pyrenean fauna. They rarely came upon an izard (mountain goat) at close range, but frequently spotted small groups grazing or drinking at a lakeside. The sight of izards usually signified the remoteness of the location and its pristine character, unpolluted by human presence. Chausenque saw a bear near Laruns, or so he claimed, calling them ‘dark monarchs of the woods’. He was realistic enough to realize that the bear posed a serious threat to the sheep population, although this did not seem to worry him unduly.60 The circling eagle, another romantic creature, was a symbol of solitude. The romantic contemplation of the landscape partly reflected a crisis of modernity. The traveller felt a sense of loss and nostalgia for an unspoilt pre-modern state of nature. Romantic travel writing was a ‘literature of disappointment’ registering a separation from a past which could never be recovered.61 In this sense the romantic traveller was a time-traveller, exploring a vanished world.62 Travellers imagined the mountain-dwellers as paragons of rural innocence, to be contrasted with the corruption of modern cities. SaintAmans indulged this Rousseauist fantasy when he remarked on the healthy complexions of the working women he saw in Tarbes. This was a far cry, he thought, from the appearance of the exhausted artisans who breathe the infected air of today’s great cities.63 It was disappointing when locals did not quite live up to these expectations of simple moral virtue. In the spa resorts, they seemed prepared to try anything to make the tourist part with his money. At Barèges, Saint-Amans attributed this grasping avarice in the tourist season to the influx of strangers ‘who have perverted the morals of the inhabitants and transmitted to them the poison of greed’.64 The locals, then, were innocent; the evils of modern urban civilization were to blame for corrupting them. The romantic sublime was the most extreme form of the ecstatic state recorded, as we have seen, by spectators like Chausenque. The ‘sublime’ denoted something grandiose, defined by Edmund Burke as something aweinspiring and capable of causing terror, astonishment and a sense of danger.

48

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Whereas beauty produces pleasure, explained Burke, the sublime produces a simultaneous sense of both pain and delight.65 Gilpin’s picturesque landscapes were framed and finite; but the sublime landscape was gigantic, disordered and beyond such control. The mountains were great producers of the sublime, since violent storms, frightening precipices and the threat of avalanches were in plentiful supply. An anonymous dragoon in Wellington’s Peninsular army wrote in his memoir of fearful precipices and yawning chasms which the most brave cannot gaze upon without shuddering. At intervals were to be heard the roar of the mountain torrents and the howl of the ferocious wolf.66

Seekers of the sublime went in search of that shudder of fear, produced by extreme contrasts in the landscape, monstrous storms and deep precipices. Such extreme landscapes induced a contemplation of the infinite and from here it was a short step to achieve communion with God. The devout Eugénie de Guérin came to Cauterets in 1846 two years before she died, and found the scenery ‘magnificent’ and ‘giant’. She witnessed ‘a grandiose storm’ which made her think of God’s power and human fragility.67 Chausenque had the same religious reflex when contemplating the ocean at Bayonne. It seemed immense, and it recalled the infinity of time, and the isolation of the individual when confronted with the mighty forces of nature. He once more quoted Byron’s Childe Harold (‘thou deep and dark-blue ocean’), and laid his soul before God.68 At the same time, the romantic Pyrenees was saturated with historical references. The chateau of Pau, for example, renovated under the Bourbon Restoration, was for many tourists haunted by the spirit of Henri IV to whose memory it was dedicated. The defeat of Charlemagne’s army and the death of Roland in 778 at the pass of Roncevalles were constantly evoked, and tourists visited Roland’s Breach, a natural break in the rocky ridge at the Spanish border which Roland is said to have magically cut with one swipe of his great sword Durendal. A strong taste for medievalism informed many travellers’ accounts, as they drew on Froissart’s medieval chronicle to recount stories of the court of Gaston Phébus at Foix. Indeed history was an essential ingredient of the picturesque. In Blackburn’s own definition, the picturesque is ‘something, in short, that in nature is everywhere, but which […] cannot exist without harmonious contrasts, repose of colour, and a certain amount of age [my emphasis]’.69 Places either seen or imagined were densely saturated in historical and emotional significance.70

Visions of the picturesque: The romantic Pyrenees

49

Romantic landscape fantasies were supported by heavy literary ammunition. For travellers at the turn of the century, the poems of the bard Ossian were in vogue. ‘Ossian’ was the ancient Gaelic poet whose alleged works were in fact composed and published by the Scottish poet James McPherson in the 1760s. McPherson’s achievement was possibly one of the great literary hoaxes of all time; or, alternatively, we might see it as a masterful marketing coup to capture the eager readership of the early or pre-Romantic period. Chausenque, who knew English and Scottish poetry very well, revered the old ‘Homer of Caledonia’, whose voice, he thought, spoke to him miraculously across thirteen centuries.71 In the Valle de Arán, he dreamed of being in ancient Gaul with the Druids, so moved was he by the ‘aspect ossianique’ of the place.72 In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Byron had superseded Ossian as the romantic literary guide to the Pyrenees. Chausenque made frequent reference to Childe Harold, published 1812–18, and even concluded his work with a farewell citation which again adapted Byron: Place me along the rocks I love Which sound to torrent’s wildest roar.73

The original had ‘Ocean’s wildest roar’. According to James Buzard, Byron created a new Europe for tourists, imbuing places with poetry and sexual undertones. The sexual undertones here referred to Byron’s life in Italy rather than to any Pyrenean Don Juan. His poetry, however, allowed tourists like Chausenque to feel distinguished from the crowd, suggesting ‘an aristocracy of inner feeling’.74 Murray later incorporated Byronic quotes into his guidebooks. Byron was thus reinvented for tourist purposes, poetry like Childe Harold and The Prisoner of Chillon being extracted from the political context of Byron’s verse. The Byronic model appealed most obviously to men who wanted to imagine themselves as lone adventurers, unfettered by female controls or by sexual conventions.75 In the eighteenth century, as we have seen, Latin tags and inscriptions had decorated the travel writer’s account; in the 1820s, British romantic poetry had the same function. It invited the reader to recognize the poem or the author, and to join the cultivated club of travellers to whom the writer was advertising his loyalty. Signalling one’s membership of this cultured circle was one way of distancing oneself from the tourist crowd.

50

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Romantic fantasies The landscape was picturesque, but for romantic travellers the Pyrenees was an empty landscape. A human presence could only spoil the vision, unless exotic bandits could be deposited in the foreground. After all, Gilpin had advised his readers: If rocky, wild and awful be thy views, Low arts of husbandry exclude: The spade, The Plough, the patient angler with his rod, Be banished thence.76

Peasants could only dispel the fantasy, and some travellers were acutely disappointed by their encounters with the real inhabitants of the Pyrenees. Selina Bunbury did not mince her words when she spotted a promising group of peasant women on donkeys with their baskets and red hoods near Grip. Instead of the ‘beautiful complexions and innocent countenances’ which an artist would have given them, they appeared instead as hard-featured, weather-beaten women, with skins, even if young, turned thick and brown from the effects of labour and exposure to the atmosphere, and the hideous goitre giving to most of them a repulsive aspect.77

Romantic reveries could not survive the intrusion of real people. The Pyrenees attracted nondescript poets and writing which was highly derivative of preceding accounts. As a result, visitors’ reactions to what this chapter has called the romantic Pyrenees operated within a limited range. For those in search of the picturesque, the countryside was ravissant, riant or délicieux. The native inhabitants, of whom they were only minimally aware, were morally innocent, sturdy, independent and agile. The repertoire of romantic clichés was narrow, and in repeating them travel writers became trapped in their own picturesque rhetoric. Most of the writers discussed here lived and wrote in the first half of the nineteenth century, but a few belonged to the dying eighteenth century and some to the later nineteenth century. Perspectives certainly changed over this period. In the early part of it, the sentimental face of the picturesque was desirable, whereas in the 1820s and 1830s, sensibilities were more romantically inclined and tourists went in search of the sublime and not just the picturesque. One theme was constant: throughout the period, they projected their fantasies onto the landscape. Their ‘escape to the country’ was laden with literary and artistic allusions and historical memories. For one the Pyrenees

Visions of the picturesque: The romantic Pyrenees

51

seemed redolent of the Druidic mysteries of a Celtic past. For another, the mountains were reduced to a Salvator Rosa painting or the effects of a Byronic poem. Others contemplated the infinite, found God and thus spiritualized their landscape. At least one decided to populate the landscape with his own substitute nymphs. They invented the Pyrenees they needed in their attempt, however brief, to step outside the modern world. Their inventions enabled them to escape from strife, squalor and all the oppressive cares of everyday reality.

4

Others among Others

Brief encounters Foreign travel unsettles the tourist. The experience of alien cultures shocks, fascinates and challenges assumptions, while contact with the Other induces a re-assessment of the Self. As French philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote: When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one […] Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just OTHERS, that we ourselves are an ‘other’ among others.1

His words are a suitable starting point for this chapter, which presents a brief study of encounters with otherness in the Pyrenees. There were multiple confrontations between national ‘Others’ in the Pyrenees: the British and the French held deep-seated prejudices about their Spanish Other, the Spanish had particular preconceptions of their French Other, while Catalans and Basques were Others within Spain itself. The encounter with a foreign culture, however brief and superficial, could be re-affirming, if visitors found comfort and strength in their Britishness or Spanishness; but the Other could also prove a source of anxiety and trauma. The discussion first analyses the disturbing otherness of Spain, before considering some typical Spanish responses to the gaze of their European neighbours. Travellers to the French Pyrenees almost always made a brief excursion into Spain. If they approached by train from Paris to Bordeaux, which was the commonest route in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was relatively easy to extend the journey into the Basque country as far as San Sebastián. A few made a further detour to Pamplona to see the cathedral or attend a bullfight. In the central Pyrenees, one could cross the passes to Jaca in Aragon and, further east, Spain was accessible via the Cerdagne or the Valle de Arán. Through the Pyrenean curtain, travellers glimpsed an exotic but contradictory society, at once colourful and repugnant. Although perceptions of Spain

54

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

evolved, particularly when the Napoleonic Wars were recalled, several features remained constant in writers’ imaginations: religious fanaticism, economic backwardness and the idleness of the people were among them, and they all seemed interconnected. Adolphe Thiers, future French prime minister, was just twenty-five years old when he visited the Pyrenees in 1822 as a liberal journalist writing for Le Constitutionnel on the struggle between monarchists and liberals across the border. His reports to French readers disqualified Spain as a European country altogether. He wrote of ‘these monks, these guerrillas, this ultimately picturesque people who resemble an Asiatic migration in the midst of Europe’.2 Orientalist echoes also resounded through the guidebooks of Richard Ford, as he explained Spain to his British readers. ‘The key to decipher this singular people is scarcely European’, wrote Ford, ‘Test her, therefore, and her natives by an Oriental standard, [to see] how analogous does much appear that is strange and repugnant, if compared with European usages?’3 Testing Spain by an oriental or indeed any other standard inevitably exposed national prejudices, as observers performed their English, American or French identities as they reacted to unfamiliar cultural practices, from lunching late to watching a bullfight. They did not have to travel far into the Pyrenees to be confronted by an alien people. In the clichés they used to describe Spanish passion and bigotry, tourists reasserted the calm rationality which they believed defined themselves. Richard Ford, just mentioned, wrote travel guides on Spain for the Edinburgh publisher John Murray. Ford was a rich, well-connected art historian who knew French, Italian and Spanish. In 1831, he travelled around Spain in flamboyant style and distinctive dress. Ford wore a trademark black sheepskin jacket (zamarra), a narrow-brimmed sombrero and a large square silk shawl (pañolón). He sported blue-tinted sunglasses or a green sunshade and a very conspicuous striped cloak. He played the role of an eccentric English hispanophile who had no intention of blending in with the scenery. He drafted his books and articles about Spain later, at his home near Exeter, where he had remodelled an Elizabethan farmhouse, adding Moorish gardens and a Moorish tower.4 His first guidebook was published by John Murray in 1845, and went into several editions over the next forty years. His writing was always very opinionated – usually considered a flaw in a travel guide – but it remains well-informed and amusing. His greatest love was Andalusia, and his books treated the Pyrenees less systematically. In the second edition of his handbook, Navarre occupied only 12 out of 622 pages.5 He was nevertheless a key interpreter of Spain’s culture and idiosyncrasies for English tourists in the Pyrenees.

Others among Others

55

Just as Ford wrote for the English, Justin Cénac-Moncaut introduced French tourists to the Spanish Pyrenees. Andalusia was not everything, he told his readers, and Spain did not consist only of palm trees and oranges.6 Cénac (he hardly ever used his full name) travelled later than Ford, during the 1850s, when rail connections between France and Spain had improved, although he accomplished most of his itineraries in post-chaise (a light, four-wheeled enclosed carriage). He loved the Basque country, and to a lesser extent Catalonia, but his account included frank assessments of Navarre and Aragon as well. Before the 1860s, travellers most commonly arrived by stagecoach (diligence) from Bordeaux, stopping for a passport and customs check at Irún. Here at the frontier they immediately experienced culture shock. If they were going on to Madrid, their horse-drawn coach was replaced by a carriage drawn by eight or ten mules. Unlike horses, mules are not controlled by a bit, and so the coachmen relied on shouting and cajoling them each by name. Progress was very slow. From 1864, a railway link from Paris to Madrid via Irún became possible, but at first there was only a single line of track on the Spanish side. There were few amenities and travellers were advised to bring their own food on the Ferrocarril del Norte. At Irún, travellers knew they were entering a different world. ‘A striking difference immediately manifested itself in every thing around us’, reported Michael Quin, crossing the Bidassoa in 1822, just before the French military intervention.7 He was immediately aware that A new language; faces of a totally different character; labouring men of a wretched appearance, their naked feet bound in rude sandals, women without even sandals or shoes of any sort […] assured us that the Bidassoa is no ideal boundary.

A few years later, the well-heeled Caroline Cushing, wife of an American diplomat, found that the Spanish frontier guards and their surroundings ‘presented an appearance of the utmost wretchedness, while the room itself into which we were ushered was dirty and desolate beyond description’.8 After France, Spain seemed impoverished, and its inhabitants poorly dressed and lazy to boot. And yet these tourists did not falter in their quest for the exotic and the new.

Landscape and national identity As Marjorie Morgan reminds us, travellers heading south from Britain who crossed national borders like the Pyrenees had to endure a long list of nuisances, which included fleas, bugs, cockroaches, mosquitoes, foreign toilets, seasickness,

56

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

diarrhoea, checkpoints, customs officials, document delays, currency changes, tea without milk and unpleasant people spitting on the ground.9 All of the above, except seasickness, applied in Spain. By disrupting daily rituals and unsettling the tourist, foreign travel made travellers acutely aware of national differences. Their national consciousness was confronted and aroused. They identified with home, and perhaps they thought their own country superior; occasionally they viewed their life back home in a newly critical light. Even the climate was a marker of national identity, as it seemed to influence the soul of the people who lived under it. In English eyes the fierce Spanish heat made its people correspondingly passionate. England, in contrast, had its own national climate, which was considered moderate rather than extreme, mild rather than oppressive, reflecting the allegedly gentle and reasonable nature of its inhabitants. Lady Georgiana Chatterton certainly subscribed to this theory. Chatterton was a novelist and travel writer, whose account of the Pyrenees, published in 1843, combined elements of several different genres.10 Her accounts were interspersed with long historical anecdotes about, for example, Gaston Phébus in Béarn, or Dame Carcas in Carcassonne. She included some of her own sketches, along with poetry which she quoted often, from Ariosto and Tasso, Tennyson or Young’s Night Thoughts.11 She knew Italian, and she travelled with Spanish books. She could also converse in French and relied on Froissart’s chronicles for historical information. At the same time, she referred to French and English travel guides. Literature, history, poetry and travel writing in various languages thus informed her impressions of Spain. But none of these resources fully prepared her for her Spanish encounter. As we shall see, her excursion across the border was an emotionally strained experience. Georgiana Chatterton found the Spanish climate very exacting. In the Valle de Arán, she endured scorching sun and a ‘five hours’ fly-tormented ride’.12 Chatterton thought the benefits of foreign climates were recklessly exaggerated, writing: I do not think the air of France, north or south, or indeed that of Germany, or even Italy, a bit more exhilarating to the spirits than the sweet breezes of our own dear England.13

This was admittedly a reflection recorded in her most homesick phase, when she was laid up exhausted in St Sauveur. She went on to conclude that foreign climates were very prejudicial to British constitutions, mainly because they subjected the English to extremes of hot and cold. British tourists’ comments on

Others among Others

57

the scorching heat of Spain reinforce Katherine Turner’s insights into nineteenth-century British middle-class travel.14 Whereas British identity had previously been associated with eccentric individualism, it was now embedded in national values of moderation and reasonableness. On the continent, in contrast, the natives were too easily carried away by their passions and were prone to hot-tempered violence. Englishness was further identified with a love of liberty, in contrast to the absolute monarchies of continental Europe. The agronomist Arthur Young’s travels in France coincided exactly with France’s pre-revolutionary crisis of 1787– 89, and the evolving political deadlock in Paris made him especially appreciative of English individual and parliamentary freedoms. When he saw the chateau of Lourdes, he saw not a picturesque scene, but a reminder of the tyrannical lettres de cachet, which allowed the monarch to imprison wayward subjects there at will.15 Young initially sympathized with the French Revolution, but his assignment was to survey the state of French agriculture, which he did so through English eyes. Prosperity, he assumed, would flow from peasant ownership of the land and enclosures which facilitated individual investment. Hence he deplored the short-term leases common in France and the sharecropping system (métayage) which operated in the centre and south-west of the country. Nothing here could match the progress made by the independent English farmer. The French monarchical regime did have one redeeming feature in Young’s eyes: it built good bridges and roads, even if they carried little commercial traffic. When he crossed the border into Spain at the Valle de Arán, he noticed the difference. The poor state of Spanish roads, in his opinion, was a symptom of bad government.16 Throughout his investigative travels, Young benchmarked French and Spanish systems against Britain, which he usually assumed to be superior in terms of prosperity and freedom.17 Visitors to Spain recalled the Napoleonic Wars, in fact for many years afterwards they could hardly avoid witnessing the destruction the war in Spain had caused, for instance as a consequence of the British bombardment of San Sebastián in 1813. On this subject, the British and the French took up antagonistic national positions. John Walker was stirred by patriotic memories of the war as late as the 1890s. At San Sebastián, he saw [in] places scarred by shot and shell, where brave Englishmen gave up their last breath in an alien land, fighting side by side with comrades speaking an alien tongue, nature has planted white flowers of peace. Here one realizes the truth of the old aphorism, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.18

58

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

This motto sounded eerily like a prophetic epitaph for a future and even more deadly war, except that white flowers grew instead of poppies on the killing grounds. For Walker, more than eighty years after the event, Wellington had left his mark as ‘our never-to-be-forgotten soldier hero’.19 In contrast, the French Guide Joanne held the British responsible for their detestable attack on San Sebastián. The 1866 guide to Spain related this as a wartime atrocity, in which the city’s ‘so-called liberators’ committed rape, murder, arson and looting.20 Richard Ford’s original manuscript for John Murray had been so forthright in condemning atrocities on both sides during the Peninsular War that the publisher persuaded him to tone down his comments and remove passages which might antagonize his potential readers. Describing a country recently ravaged by destruction and unspeakable cruelty was not perhaps the most convincing way of persuading travellers to visit it, especially if they were compatriots of the defeated French. Spanish tourists had their own patriotic response; they remarked on the portrait of the popular guerrilla leader Ezpoz y Mina hanging in the Diputación (regional government centre) in Pamplona, and they did so with pride.21 The War of Independence, as the Spanish knew this war, became a foundation stone of Spanish nationalism in the nineteenth century. It was identified as a heroic popular uprising both against the effeminate and impious French and the weak and disloyal enlightened classes (ilustrados) of Spain itself. Meanwhile the Spanish story of the war against Napoleon habitually obscured the British contribution.22 In the wake of Wellington’s victorious Spanish campaign, English intellectuals adopted a warmer attitude to Spain. Their new discourse took into account the heroic resistance of Spain against Napoleon. Spanish history could now be written as the story of a proud, undaunted nation opposed to all invaders. In this version of Spain, the bloodthirsty guerrilla was transformed into a nationalist freedom fighter. As Diego Saglia has argued, this construction created a new romantic geography, which had an important place in British culture between 1808 and 1820.23 Saglia, however, was chiefly discussing English poets, who were imagining Spain from a comfortable distance. British soldiers who had actually fought in Spain took a different view as they approached the Pyrenees from San Sebastián. In 1813, British soldiers in Wellington’s Peninsular army welcomed the company of the enemy – those modern and civilized French officers, who made Britain’s Spanish allies seem barbarous by comparison – and they crossed the Bidassoa into France with a great sense of relief and of returning at last to civilization.24

Others among Others

59

In the Spanish Pyrenees the tourist gaze was coloured by a range of national prejudices. Richard Ford knew he had to neutralize a few British prejudices if his guidebooks were to be successful. He thus gave them specific advice on how to deal with Spain’s disconcerting climate and customs. He thought it important, for example, to conform to Spanish dining times and to take a daily siesta. Protestants were warned to be discreet because in Spain, he told them, there was only one faith and no recognition of religious toleration: here Ford touched a sensitive English nerve. Tourists should be careful not to give offence to proud Spaniards because, Ford wrote The Spaniard is of a very high caste and a gentleman by innate aristocracy; proud as Lucifer and as combustible as his matches, he is punctilious and touchy on the point of honour.25

He introduced English visitors to the need to ‘pay with both hands’, by which he meant that it was advisable not just to pay the advertised price for services, but also to give tips or bribes, and to take small silver coins for this purpose. ‘Never cross the Pyrenees’, Ford warned, ‘to wage a guerrilla warfare about shillings and half-crowns […] in Spain, backshish, as in the East, is the universal infallible open sesame and most unanswerable argument.’26 Ford wanted British visitors to be conscious of their national identity abroad, and he hoped that a self-reflexive attitude would induce them to temper their conduct and neutralize possible adverse consequences. The fact that his first voluminous edition sold 2,000 copies for John Murray in the first two years of publication suggests that he was moderately successful in these aims.27 As Ford realized, travellers carry their origins with them. They travel in order to liberate themselves from the constraints of normal domestic life, but are unable to assume a second persona when in a foreign environment. They cannot leave their cultural prejudices behind them. As Buzard puts it, the traveller is ‘the relentless representative of home’.28 Travel writers like Ford adapted their discourse accordingly, seeking to make the otherness of Spain recognizable and familiar. Spain had to be assimilated into friendlier landscapes. Entering Aragon through the porte d’Espagne in the early 1920s, the American traveller Amy Oakley found herself ‘in what might have been a canyon of the Rockies’;29 Hilaire Belloc compared the Cerdagne to a small English county, with fields and market towns.30 In ways both trivial and profound, perceptions of the landscape and its inhabitants were closely connected to a sense of national identity.

60

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

The Basque enigma Travellers heading south from Bayonne made their first real contact with Spain in the small Basque town of Fuenterabbia. The Guide Joanne for 1888 described it as ‘a Spanish town par excellence’, because it was dark, desolate and in a state of ruin. It had narrow streets with over-hanging balconies and beautiful women, the French guide indicated.31 Cénac, on the other hand, was more attracted by the local men. The Basque boatmen, he thought, could have been sculpted by Michelangelo.32 Thomas Roscoe, an English tourist travelling during the Carlist War in 1835, loved Fuenterabbia because it was mentioned in Milton’s Paradise Lost, so that it was ‘embalmed in everlasting fragrance in the memories of Englishmen’.33 In the eyes of this eccentric commentator, even gypsy-infested ruins could stir up proud national recollections. Progress to San Sebastián gave further nourishment to stereotypes of Spain. For hispanophile purists, San Sebastián was a Basque town and could never represent the true Spain. The city, rebuilt after the Peninsular and Carlist Wars, now sported modern hotels and wide streets which lacked the charm of Fuenterrabia. For Pyrenean tourists in search of a taste of Spain, however, this was often as far as they ventured. In San Sebastián, Cénac sketched Spanish life as if it was a colourful opera. By the time Cénac wrote, the Don Juan and Carmen stereotypes of Spain had been consolidated in tourist mentalities, with all that this implied about the perceived theatricality and sexualization of Spanish life.34 Social life was conducted from balconies. The windows looking out on the street were boxes from which one viewed the stage, in other words the street itself.35 When Cénac actually did go to a theatre performance, he saw a woman stabbed there, which somewhat sobered his impressions, although the incident corresponded exactly with prevailing clichés about Spanish violence. The Basque country presented an enigma to travellers. Its inhabitants were fiercely independent and spoke an impenetrable language, which the Romans had found barbaric and the Iberians incomprehensible. Thomas Roscoe could not understand a word of Basque, but he somehow knew that it ‘has in it all the flavour of antiquity, without being cultivated or possessing a literature’.36 The Basques had a reputation for aggressive patriotism and fanatically Catholic loyalties. The Basques were altogether difficult to classify, but their independent traditions nurtured many tourist myths. One way to assimilate the Basque country was to compare it to Scotland, and visitors wrote of its heather and gorse, its ‘glens’ and ‘highland scenery’.37 The Basques had never been subjected

Others among Others

61

to a feudal elite, Cénac noted, and as a result they were wedded to an ancient ideal of liberty and equality. Their culture had a biblical simplicity, and he wrote: their social organisation is based on the most complete equality; and this equality is sustained by the noble birth of all citizens […] a model people for philosophers of the school of [Rousseau’s] Émile or the Vicaire Savoyard, and yet very Catholic, they have achieved real happiness, prosperity without ostentation; they combine an unpretentious courage with inexhaustible patriotism.38

The Basque people, according to French visitor Vincent Chausenque, preserved a way of life that was over 3,000 years old. Yet unfortunately their independent spirit could be taken too far to produce ‘a ferocity revolting to nature’.39 Chausenque had a further reason to qualify the romantic myth of Basque liberty: young men of the French Basque country habitually deserted from the French army in large numbers. On the whole, no other province of the Spanish Pyrenees provoked such interest or generated such enduring myths. Aragon seemed desolate and arid to most travellers, impoverished and infested with smugglers and bandits; Navarre, although more picturesque, did not have the same appeal, although Ford recommended the region to hunting and fishing enthusiasts. The Catalans were the only exception, because their industry and prosperity defied the stereotype of Spanish idleness.40 Only here did British visitors find evidence of the kind of work ethic which they claimed as their own. As we shall see below, the Catalans responded positively to this characterization of their culture.

Rosaries and daggers The prevailing discourse emphasized Spanish backwardness and poverty. Adolphe Thiers saw Spain as degenerate. The Spanish had repelled the Moors, cut down Charlemagne’s army at Roncevalles, and resisted Napoleon, but the precious metals of South America had made them idle and complacent. Their poverty, by implication, was their own fault.41 Nineteenth-century tourists encountered Spanish poverty in the squalid streets of Puigcerdá or Seu d’Urgell. The traveller who called himself E. E. found Spanish shepherds’ huts ‘dirty and smelly’, and rather than enter one he judged it a better policy in bad weather to take shelter under a rock.42 Richard Ford had already warned them what to expect. Spanish spa resorts, he wrote, could not compare with those in France, let alone English or German resorts. ‘Facilities are deficient on the Spanish side’, as he put it, and the tourist must be

62

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

prepared to ‘rough it’. The Spanish Pyrenees would not appeal to ‘lovers of the fleshly comforts of cities’.43 Nevertheless, a romantic imagination could always overcome even the most disagreeable Spanish conditions: ‘These shepherds’, wrote E. E., ‘whose robust body, immobile atop a rock, is outlined against a blue sky, with their large sombrero and richly-draped cloak, don’t they seem to you like mysterious beings, the guardian deities of the valley?’44 Poverty bred crime which, along with the religious issue, was perhaps the most confronting problem that travellers in the Pyrenees had to face. Artists and poets could romanticize the lonely figures of the smuggler and bandit, but for many tourists, they represented a threat. The Napoleonic Wars had shown that the Spanish guerrilla tradition was alive and well. Guerrillas could be admired for their agility, audacity and physical endurance, but tourists might prefer them to remain within the realm of the imagination. Within that realm, fantasy ran freely. Ford idealized the guerrillas thus: The highlanders of Navarre are remarkable for their light, active physical forms, their temperate habits, endurance of hardships and privation, and individual bravery and love of perilous adventure; the pursuits of the chase and smuggling form their usual occupation: thus their sinewy limbs are braced, and their hawkeyed self-reliance sharpened. Naturally, therefore, they have always been firstrate guerrilleros.45

Ford could not afford to go on for long in this vein. Writing for English travellers, his task was to reassure them and let them know that Spain was a safe place to travel. The risk of robbery, he assured his readers, had been greatly exaggerated. English travel writers, he claimed, conventionally included a bandit adventure story in their account as a matter of necessity, while the French were absurdly gripped by ‘bandittophobia’.46 Ford advised tourists in Spain to travel in confidence, but to keep a small amount of money at the ready in order to keep thieves happy. He advised his clients not to carry a gold watch and chain.47 But perhaps some middle-class readers found such advice disturbing rather than comforting. Even Spanish travellers went armed in the Pyrenees, and meeting a bear was not the only risk they feared. In the mid-nineteenth century, travellers were often asked to pay a special levy either to their coachmen or the local militia (miquelets), to guarantee their immunity from highway robbery. This was protection money, enabling brigands to take their cut without putting themselves to the inconvenience of actually robbing anybody. The fear of bandits persisted, however, as Georgiana Chatterton attested. Approaching the Pyrenees from Pau, she had dreamed of Spain as a land of serenades and romantic lovers. She loved the colourful dress

Others among Others

63

of Catalonia and Aragon, describing local costumes in some detail, the long red caps worn by men in the Valle de Arán, their brown jackets and culottes, and their blue stockings with coloured garters. In Aragon, she enthused over the women’s high conical hats with wide brims and tassels, the green richly embroidered velvet coats, brocade satin waistcoats, red silk scarves worn around the waist, brown striped velvet culottes, garters, blue stockings and sandals (espadrilles).48 Spain, for her, was a sartorial feast. But at the same time as she tried to sustain her Spanish fantasies, she had a feeling that bandits were lurking behind every rock. On the way from Pau to Lake d’Oô, she met Spanish peasants who had ‘banditti countenances and long red caps’.49 A little later, at Vielha in the Valle de Arán, she had a frightening experience which coloured the rest of her trip. The town was full of blackened ruins from the recent Carlist Wars and, reinforcing its sinister appearance, locals told her stories of plunder, murder and cruelty in those wars.50 Perhaps Chatterton had been reading too many Gothic novels, but she felt surrounded in Vielha by a ‘banditti-looking crowd’ which would not leave her party alone. She was afraid some violence might be done.51 The food, she reported, was disgusting and the atmosphere one of ‘ominous gloom’. Attitudes to Spain could be ambiguous and unstable. Chatterton’s original excitement turned to a fear of being encircled by bandits. She wrote: the intense pleasure I felt at getting safe back into France again cannot be described; and yet I was equally enchanted at setting my foot on Spanish ground when we entered Aragon.52

In Chatterton’s case, the ‘tourist gaze’ was reciprocated; in Vielha she felt she was being watched, surrounded and intimidated by the locals. The tourist gaze, as Darya Maoz reminds us, does not travel only in one direction; there is a mutual gaze, in which the locals observe the tourists, and both influence each other’s behaviour.53 From this moment on, Chatterton started to feel weary and increasingly homesick. The trip to Vielha had left her shaken, and both physically and emotionally exhausted. She travelled on, but at St Sauveur, she felt tired and unwell, took to her bed and did not go on any more long excursions, even missing out on visiting the popular site of Gavarnie. Her husband William went there instead and climbed the Pic du Midi, and she included his accounts vicariously in her book.54 Clearly traumatized by Vielha, she longed for ‘the easy and beaten track of Italy’, and she now admitted to suffering from ‘a sort of mountain surfeit’.55 The otherness of Spain could be contradictory and problematic. On one hand, it seemed enlivening and enchanting, but at the same time it created fear and insecurity.

64

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

In the end, therefore, travellers to the Pyrenees glimpsed paradoxical stereotypes of Spain. The land was colourful, passionate and exotic, but it was also bloodthirsty, menacing and ignorant. The artist E. E. looked down on Spain from the Venasque, imagining Spain – land of devotion and courage – land of religion and love – land of rosaries and daggers, I greet you! My spirit is exalted, my imagination brings forth visions, of monks and beautiful black-eyed Andalusian girls.56

He ‘heard’ the steps of the Moors at the gates of Granada, fleeing the Cid, he ‘saw’ Cortes leaving for the New World. But a vision of ‘rosaries and daggers’ concealed important ambiguities. The religious history of Spain was an important component of its otherness. Since the sixteenth century, Spain had been associated with religious bigotry typified by the Inquisition, arbitrary despotism and cruelty towards the conquered Inca people. Spaniards were considered superstitious, treacherous, intriguing, boastful, lecherous, cowardly and, as we have seen, bloodthirsty and indolent.57 In spite of their religious devotion (or perhaps because their religion seemed so fanatical), they committed almost every offence against Enlightenment values. In spite of enlightened reform and the alliance with Britain against Napoleon, the Black Legend of Spain was not easily dismissed. Victor Hugo most eloquently expressed the paradoxical otherness of Spain. Indulging his characteristic love of dramatic antithesis, Hugo remarked of Pamplona that Everything here is capricious, perverse and unique; it’s a mixture of primitive customs and degenerate customs; naiveté and corruption; nobility and bastardry; the pastoral life and civil war.58

The Hugolien paradoxes continued: the women of the Spanish Pyrenees were beautiful but had bare and dirty feet; soldiers played the guitar, while priests smoked cigars and eyed up the women. Actually Hugo himself liked and recorded flirtatious conversations with girls he met on the beach. He too was not impervious to the Carmen syndrome.

The corrida More than any other single event, the bullfight had the potential to unsettle the visitor to Spain. It was clearly a vital and dynamic part of Spanish culture, but travellers from Britain, America and France all found its cruelty difficult

Others among Others

65

to reconcile with their fascination with exotic Spain. Ford’s guidebooks said little about it, although he wrote extensively elsewhere in praise of the corrida.59 Perhaps Ford’s omission was a tactful acknowledgement of the high degree of difficulty involved in explaining the bullfight to British spectators. The bullfight phenomenon has attracted scholarly attention from a wide range of historians, anthropologists and psychologists. They have emphasized the important themes of honour and dishonour (vergüenza). They have tried to situate the corrida within an ancient tradition of pagan fertility cults, or to contextualize it within Spain’s village fiesta. They describe a process of democratization and professionalization, in which an aristocratic pastime became a thriving leisure industry, with its own manipulative entrepreneurs and popular celebrities.60 Here our concern is with the perceptions of nineteenthcentury tourists, mainly from France and Britain. In the Pyrenees they were on the geographical periphery of the bullfight whose traditional home was in Andalusia. Seville and Madrid were the main centres of the corrida, and they lie outside the scope of this book. Tourists, however, attended bullfights in the Pyrenean region, for example in Bayonne. Although France had banned bullfighting in 1890, the practice was allowed to continue in the south in deference to the strength of local traditions.61 Pyrenean tourists also attended corridas de toros in San Sebastián, and in Pamplona during the fiesta of San Fermin in July, well known for the encierros, the running of the bulls. Carrie Bess Douglass described the bullfight as a nationalizing factor which brought the different regions of Spain together. The Catalans’ refusal of the bullfight weakens her argument about the bullfight as a national event, but in the late nineteenth century, a nationwide cycle of fiestas developed in Spain’s major cities, and Pamplona was a prominent venue in this fiesta nacional.62 Nineteenth-century tourists always described the moments of ritual and high drama in the corridas they attended. They recorded the first rushing entrance of the bull, temporarily stopped in his tracks by the sudden bright light and the wall of sound from thousands of spectators. They described the picadors and their blindfolded horses, soon to be gored by the onrushing bull. Dying and with their entrails protruding, horses were made to stand upright for as long as possible to take another charge, enabling the picador to lance the bull. Only in 1930 were regulations introduced to allow protective padding for the horses. A corrida normally programmed six bulls, but equine mortality could easily be twice as high as this. Tourists noted the banderilleros who distracted the bull from disembowelling the horses and meanwhile inserted their brightly coloured darts between his shoulder-blades. At this time, by popular demand,

66

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

firecrackers might be attached to the darts to enrage the bull further, in case his torment made him less than lively. Above all, tourists recognized the final blow, ideally delivered with skill, daring and precision by the espada (or matador). He represented calm intelligence, thought the eyewitness William Clark, in the face of animal fury.63 Perceptions of the bullfight were not confined to the action within the ring; the crowd itself was a major topic of interest. Observers like Henry Blackburn in 1864 noted ‘a crushing, struggling and surging mob’, the competition for a seat on the favoured shady side of the plaza (a la sombra), and the chronic unEnglish inability of Spaniards to form an orderly queue for tickets.64 Blackburn likened it to the festive crowd at Epsom racecourse on Derby Day – a false comparison, since the bullfight was not a gambling opportunity. The crowd wore colourful costumes, jackets and mantillas, wide capes and broad sombreros, and ladies waved decorated fans. Spectators noted with mild surprise the enthusiastic presence of women, even if they were in a minority. The impulsive and judgemental nature of the audience was emphasized by social historian Thomas Mitchell, who saw the bullfight increasingly characterized by ‘spectator empowerment’. A matador who did not play to the crowd was likely to have a short career.65 Foreign tourists went to the corrida out of curiosity, and many were disgusted. But beneath their moral indignation, a few recognized the appeal of the violence and excitement they outwardly deplored. William Clark, a Cambridge don, felt conventionally sickened by the goring of the horses, but then admitted experiencing a ‘savage joy’ which indicated ‘the wakening of the wild beast within, which we bridle with texts of religion, and cram with scraps of morality; which we may lull, but cannot kill’.66 Never tell a Spaniard, warned Clark, that you think the bullfight is barbaric. It was more conventional, of course, for British, French and American visitors to be horrified by the bullfight. Joanne’s 1858 guide expressed a predictable revulsion towards it. The Guide noted that the Plaza de Toros in Pamplona could seat 8,000 spectators. Considering that the local theatre only held a maximum of 800, this ‘indicates in a fairly exact fashion how much the Spanish prefer this barbaric entertainment to the calmer and more gentle diversions of the theatre or the lyric arts’.67 More than half a century later, Amy Oakley expressed a similar revulsion when she attended a corrida in Bayonne. Like many Anglo-Saxon commentators, she found injuries to the picadors’ horses almost as offensive as the torment of the bull itself. She felt horror at the torture of a series of bulls and the deaths of

Others among Others

67

several horses. Unable to stomach any more, she left the plaza in disgust halfway through the corrida.68 A few excuses could be made, and the Spanish themselves made them: the horses which suffered were old and worn out in any case, while some of the proceeds of the corridas went to worthy charities. Perhaps, Clark suggested, the Spanish grandee looks upon the bullfight as the English gentleman values foxhunting – as welcome mental refreshment from the tedious social round. But this was another misleading analogy, since no fox ever had to die in the presence of 15,000 shouting fans.69 Overall, however, the bullfight produced a sickening disgust, as an exhibition of ‘unnecessary cruelty’ in which ‘fair play’ had not been shown to the bull.70 Katherine Lee Bates, an American travelling in 1899 and writing for Macmillan’s series of travel books, called the corrida Spain’s ‘hereditary rage’.71 All the same, she ‘became an accomplice in this Spanish crime’, recognizing the ambiguities of spectator reactions. She forced herself to stay until the end of the programme, by which time, ‘I was long past indignation, past any acuteness of pain, simply sickened through body and soul and unutterably wearied with this hideous monotony of slaughter.’72 In bullfight spectator trauma, the experience of Spain reached its extreme point and tested the limits of toleration.

Through a Spanish lens Spanish visitors to the Pyrenees were well aware of British and French stereotyping and they responded to it in their own travel writing. Fernández Villegas, for example, complained about the French labelling of Spain as the land of flamenco, and wondered why they failed to appreciate Spanish literature and Spanish industry as well.73 Spanish travel accounts asserted the Castilian or Catalan identities of their authors as they, in their turn, ‘othered’ their French neighbours. José Álvarez Junco has argued that Spain imagined itself as a Mater Dolorosa, a sorrowful mother resembling the Virgin Mary weeping at the foot of the Cross.74 Spain saw herself as a land of suffering, divided and exhausted by the Carlist Wars, and then traumatized by the loss of its colonial empire. This process culminated in 1898, when Spain lost Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. There was no mistaking Spain’s decline and its failure to make the grade as a modern world power. The flawed nature of the nation-building process in Spain is still a matter of debate amongst historians, but the weakness of Spain’s

68

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

integrating mechanisms was brought into relief by the relative success of nationbuilding in the French Third Republic. Many surviving Spanish travel accounts were written in this period, which to some extent accounts for their defensive tone, as well as their mitigated admiration for contemporary France. For Spanish tourists, France in the Belle Époque represented a culture of luxury, superficiality and anticlericalism. Spaniards commonly conceived of France, and especially Paris, as a pleasure dome: ‘We think’, wrote José Ortega, ‘that France is Paris and Paris is the boulevard des Italiens. We remember the Paris that dances, devours truffles and drinks Champagne and squanders its money on easy girls (cocottes)’.75 The prestige of French cuisine reflected this image of French sophistication. José Banqué, a professor from Barcelona travelling in 1910, found that good food was a powerful reason to forgive France some of its shortcomings. For five consecutive days, at his halts at Le Vernet, Mont-Louis and elsewhere, he faithfully transcribed the entire dinner menu into his travelogue. At Cabanasse, his party dined on noodle soup, civet de lapin, cabbage, veal, local mushrooms, roast leg of lamb and dessert. After meals like this, no wonder his group sometimes decided to forgo a planned walking excursion the next morning in favour of hiring a carriage.76 France was a place of indulgence, but it was hard to take it seriously. Richard Ford observed the darker side of the national character in both countries, when he wrote about the Spaniard’s intense hatred of the Frenchman. ‘Here’, he said, ‘is the antipathy of an antithesis; the incompatibility of the saturnine and slow, with the mercurial and rapid; of the proud, enduring, and ascetic, against the vain, the fickle and the sensual.’77 The Spanish of course were cast as the proud ascetics and the French as vain and fickle. For the Spanish Left, as for Marxist movements everywhere, the revolt of the Paris Commune in 1871 made France a historic model of revolutionary democracy in practice. The high prestige of Paris as a centre of revolution was acknowledged, for example, by the anarcho-syndicalists of Barcelona. But they did not come from a social group that produced an abundant travel literature. Instead, their Catalan employers crossed the Pyrenees as tourists and, in their eyes, nothing was more fickle than the French habit of rising in revolution and overthrowing governments. The French, according to Fabié, changed dynasties and regimes ‘with breath-taking ease’, which seems a little harsh, considering Spain’s own history of the Carlist Wars in the nineteenth century (1833–39, 1846–49 and 1872–76) and the brief Republic of 1873–74.78 The trope of French inconstancy was here more powerful than the memory of Spain’s own recent instability.

Others among Others

69

Cuisine aside, Spanish travellers did not trust the French. They were shallow and unreliable. Juan Avilés, writing in 1893 from the sources of the Garonne river, warned of the ‘false elegance of the French character’, and predicted that French decadence was leading the nation astray. France had lost it virile qualities, he argued, and it had only survived until now because it was lucky enough to enjoy a fertile soil and a gift for commerce. But today, he judged, the nation was hurtling towards its ruin.79 The Spanish discourse of French decadence was compounded by the anticlericalism of the Third French Republic. A constant and distinctive feature of Spanish tourists’ writing was the regularity with which they visited churches, monasteries, sanctuaries, hermitages as well as local weddings and funerals. Religious ceremonies were an integral part of their lives both at home and away from it, and they deplored France’s separation of Church and State in 1905. English tourists, too, registered France’s neglect of religion just as much as they recoiled from the excesses of the Marian cult in nineteenth-century France. Sarah Ellis, a devout Protestant Nonconformist, was surprised to see French people working in the fields on Sunday, and she deplored holding horse races and dances in Pau on the Sabbath.80 Selina Bunbury was as equally shocked by French rudeness towards priests as she was by the ‘idolatrous worship of the Virgin Mary’ she witnessed at Betharram.81 French anticlericalism managed to antagonize two very different Others: Spanish Catholics and English Sabbatarians. The Spanish gaze thus identified luxury, shallowness and disrespect towards religion as features of French otherness. At the same time, however, Spain admired French modernity. José Banqué travelled specifically to see France’s engineering accomplishments in the Pyrenees. He visited dams, hydroelectric installations and cement factories. He was impressed by French viaducts and railway tunnels, and the availability of the telegraph in remote French villages. The new French electric train line (still in the planning stage when he toured in 1910) was another object of admiration.82 Seen through a Spanish lens, France was a beacon of modern technology. This was particularly a Catalan perception. Catalans identified with all that was modern and progressive about contemporary European society. They were, in their own view, pragmatic achievers, energetic and inventive, builders of modern factories and patrons of modernist art and culture. From this elevated platform, they criticized their Castilian Others, who seemed still sunk in backwardness and obscurantism. French and British travellers saw Spain as violent, lazy and bigoted; the Catalans wanted to extricate themselves from this categorization. In their own eyes, they had far more in common with modern France and Britain than they did with parasitical Castile.

70

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Conclusion In the process of writing the landscape, travel writers revealed their own prejudices and yearnings, and were sometimes transformed by the experience of a strange periphery like the Pyrenees. They enacted their own national identities, from the very English Georgiana Chatterton worrying about having enough soap, to the young Adolphe Thiers measuring his own liberal views against fanatical Spanish royalism, and Juan Avilés’s jeremiads about the shallow French. Spain remained the touchstone, capable of both fascinating and horrifying both French and English visitors to the Pyrenees. In the Pyrenees, Spain was everybody’s Other; many travellers of fine sensibility succumbed to its allure and usually discovered the limits of Spain’s appeal when they experienced bullfight spectator trauma. Spain resembled a Foucauldian ‘heterotopia’ – it embodied a conflicted imaginative repertoire, in which the desired ‘elsewhere’ could also be a source of profound anxiety.83 Spanish travellers returned the gaze, viewing the French as elegant and superficial, modern but anticlerical. Their views were not uniform; Basques, Catalans and Castilians had their own specific perspectives and regarded each other as ‘Other’. In the Pyrenees, they, too, were Others among Others.

5

The railway age and the coming of mass tourism, 1853–1914

Railways, stagecoaches and mules The age of iron and steam brought mass tourism to the Pyrenees. The ranks of the travelling elite now expanded to include middle-class tourists from all over Europe and North America. Tourists marvelled at the new bridges, viaducts and tunnels which punctuated the novel adventure of steam trains. Some were excited by experience of train travel: the young and ailing Marie Bashkirtseff, rattling through Austria, wrote enthusiastically in her journal: You go fast with the express, I was never looking at the same thing for more than a minute. Everything rolls by, everything passes, everything rushes past and it’s all so beautiful! That’s what I admire with all my heart.1

Others, like Gustave Flaubert, found it all unutterably boring. But whether the traveller embraced the novelty of the railways like Bashkirtseff, or complained about them like grumpy Gustave Flaubert, they were radically changing perceptions of travel. Rail travel made the Pyrenees more accessible than ever before, and the journey was cheaper. In the Pyrenees, modernity arrived a little later than in England, where Thomas Cook’s package tours were first introduced in 1841. The difficult terrain and the dispersed population of the mountains made routes to many smaller centres unprofitable. The line from Paris to Bordeaux opened in 1853, with a connection to Toulouse in 1856, and another line from Toulouse to Bagnèresde-Luchon opened in 1873. On the Spanish side, the pace of railway building was even slower. Jaca only became accessible from Zaragoza in 1872. In the 1920s, modernization brought Barcelona within five hours of the Pyrenees. Until then, everyone complained about Spanish trains: they moved slowly, and made long stops for lunch at stations with restaurants.2 In the mid-nineteenth

72

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

century, therefore, the final approach to many Pyrenean spa resorts had to be made by diligence or a small carriage. Most tourists travelled to the spa resorts on doctors’ orders, and this chapter considers their perceptions of the Pyrenees. It reviews their preferred destinations, the nature of their stay in the Pyrenees as a temporary departure from home and normality, and their relationship to the mountains which formed the backdrop for their visit. It will consider to what extent these tourists lived in an environmental bubble, seeking to replicate a familiar world and a comforting routine which resembled as far as possible their life back home in Paris, London or Madrid. In contrast, the chapter also considers their contacts with local inhabitants and their encounters with the unfamiliar. The expansion of middle-class tourism during the French Second Empire and Third Republic meant that the tourist gaze was not merely directed at the scenery; it took in other tourists as well, now present in ever-greater numbers. Some would find ways to avoid the crowds and to distance themselves from the masses. These were the ‘anti-tourists’ of the Pyrenees.3 Romantics continued to prefer to travel by stagecoach, but in comparison with the train, coaches were slow and hazardous. The diligence, wrote historian Marjorie Morgan, was a dinosaur which at best moved at about six miles per hour with twenty-five to thirty people on board.4 Victor Hugo took thirty-six hours to travel from Paris to Bordeaux in 1843 which, in terms of endurance and discomfort, made travelling by stagecoach the pre-industrial equivalent of today’s long-haul flights.5 Muddy roads could slow progress, and on a steep hill passengers were asked to step down from the coach for a while to lighten its load. The interminable journey would be punctuated by stops at atrocious coaching inns to change the horses. The carriages were uncomfortable, especially if one had not been quick enough to reserve a corner seat, and the company might be disagreeable. Another hazard was the occasional dead and decomposing horse left by the roadside.6 There were several options open to the traveller who took the diligence. He or she could travel in the body of the coach (à l’intérieur), or in the front compartment, the coupé. Georgiana Chatterton, for example, sat in the coupé and left her maid to fend for herself in the coach. The top storey, l’impériale, carried the baggage and a few intrepid travellers who were prepared to brave the elements. It was on the impériale that the romantic traveller came into his own. Victor Hugo recommended it: from the banquette behind the coachman he could see the countryside, whereas inside the coupé the traveller saw very little except the horse’s harness and besides, it was stuffy in there.7 Hugo found the

The railway age and the coming of mass tourism, 1853–1914

73

company much more interesting on the impériale. You could talk to the peasants who travelled there, or you could have a conversation with the driver, and in this way Hugo, who identified himself as an unconventional tourist, felt he was making genuine contact with local people. They might confess extraordinary things to a stranger: ‘It’s like browsing through a novel (un roman de moeurs) as you travel.’8 The train was not only faster, but more predictable. Because unexpected delays to the diligence were likely, it was difficult to predict exactly when it would arrive anywhere. Railway timetables implicitly claimed that trains operated, at least in theory, with clockwork precision. Whether they operated on time or not, the railways changed the traveller’s relationship with the landscape. In the stagecoach, the countryside passed by slowly, but from a train window, it was merely a blur. The train traveller, according to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, perceived the landscape ‘panoramically’, in other words speed made it impossible to pick up any details in the foreground.9 Conversing with locals who clung to the stagecoach or jumped onto the roof for a free ride was now out of the question. The traveller now became distanced from the landscape through which he or she passed. Space and time shrank when one travelled by rail, but passengers experienced a far less intense relationship with their surroundings. John Ruskin worked out a new Euclidean law of tourism: ‘all travelling’, he said, ‘becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity’.10 The railway was a symbol of progress and modernity, but there were those who despised it, arguing that going by coach or, even better, on foot, guaranteed a more authentic travel experience. The train was for the idle and unadventurous; real tourists took the harder route.11 Romantic walking had been valued for its closeness to nature, and the opportunity which a country walk gave for personal reflection and introspection. Walking in the countryside, as practised by Wordsworth in the Lake District for example, was a valuable escape from the urban grind and enabled the solitary traveller to recover a sense of self (and romantic walking was usually conceived of as solitary).12 Towards the end of the century, walking was recommended for physical strength. Victor Dujardin, travelling in the Pyrénées-Orientales in 1890, adopted an ideal of fitness to promote the benefits of walking. Walking, he argued, keeps you strong. We cannot all go out and chop trees like Gladstone, he admitted, but we can all walk, and in doing so we will prevent obesity, loosen the muscles and improve the circulation.13 The hiker needed to be careful, according to Paul Joanne’s 1888 guidebook.14 He should not carry a backpack weighing more than eight kilos, prescribed Joanne, and he should wear woolly socks and hobnailed boots. On

74

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

a sunny day, it was best to put egg white on your face and hands as protection against sunburn. After the day’s hike was over, the walker was advised to grease his feet with lard. The greater the inconvenience, the greater the reward. In and around the spa resorts of the Pyrenees, train travel had its limits. There were some places which could only be reached on foot, or on horseback or by one or other of the exotic means of transport available locally. Edwin Dix, a Princeton graduate who visited the Pyrenees in the 1880s, discovered the joys of the vinaigrette, a small carriage for one drawn by a donkey, and the cacolet, a contraption consisting of two armchairs slung over a horse or mule, the driver on one side and a single passenger on the other. This used to be the normal means of transport between Bayonne and Biarritz. The cacolet was highly insecure – both driver and passenger had to mount simultaneously in order to keep in balance.15 At all the resorts, the tourist could hire a horse or a mule for the day, and if a lady was not prepared to do this she could hire a chaise à porteurs, a kind of sedan chair carried by a team of four men, reputed for their strength and agility over rocky terrain. Rail travel, therefore, delivered tourists faster and in greater numbers, but once in the mountains, they needed enterprise and endurance to see more of their surroundings.

Travel guides: the Guides Joanne Just as the numbers of Pyrenean tourists rose, so too did the quantity of travel literature published. In France, about thirty-three volumes in the genre were already appearing annually by 1850, if we count titles which included the keywords ‘voyages’, ‘séjours’ or ‘itinéraires’.16 This was the heyday of Murray’s and Baedeker’s guide books, published in a compact format, with densely-packed information aimed at an educated middle-class readership. The new guidebooks had to be updated regularly in order to provide reliable information; this built-in obsolescence made new editions necessary but guaranteed continuing sales. As we have seen, late-eighteenth-century travel writing was dominated by scientific discourse, and was accordingly a masculine genre. In the Romantic period, travel writing became more impressionistic, and female authors came into their own. The guidebooks of the middle and later nineteenth century, in contrast, seem asexual, full of laconic data and trying to appeal to as many different clienteles as possible. One of Labiche’s comedies opens at the Gare de Lyon, where Perrichon, an agitated bourgeois, and his family are about to depart on holiday.17 Perrichon is

The railway age and the coming of mass tourism, 1853–1914

75

a novice train traveller, anxiously asking the marchande de livres for something his wife and daughter can read. He demands a book which does not mention the taboo topics of flirtation, money, politics, marriage or death. The bookseller obligingly sells him a guidebook, ‘The Banks of the Seine’. Labiche was satirizing bourgeois gender expectations, but in the process he also drew attention to the anodyne nature of travel guides. Guidebooks structured the tourist experience, telling readers what they ought to see, which usually meant urban monuments like churches, museums, cathedrals and castles. In the Pyrenees, they needed to identify the best scenic views, and make judgements about the degree of difficulty involved in mountain walks. If tourism is a performance, as some would have it, the guidebooks provided the script for the cast to follow.18 They set out a normative code for the traveller, who could easily find out where to go, how to get there cheaply and conveniently, and what to think when he or she got there. Authors of the guidebooks cited one another and competed with each other. They deciphered the Pyrenees for readers everywhere, not just those from their own nation. By the middle of the nineteenth century they were connected to a network of international tourism. In France, the Guides Joanne carried most authority. A household word in the Second Empire, they were even included in 1986 in Pierre Nora’s compendium of Lieux de Mémoire, sites of memory which once defined the nation but have now lost their charismatic power.19 Adolphe Joanne was a lawyer from Dijon who was passionate about Switzerland, the subject of his inaugural guide in 1841, and he later became president of the Club Alpin Français, discussed in the next chapter. His editions remodelled the provincial geography of France, and they were slow bestsellers. His provincial geography was profoundly indebted to the French private railway companies, which each won concessions to build lines in certain designated regions. His first guide to the Pyrenees, published in 1858, relied on the network controlled by the Compagnie des Chemins de fer du Midi, then presided over by the banker Péreire.20 Joanne boasted that his guide drew on the best available scientific expertise, and he was notably assisted by the geographer Elisée Reclus. His guides to the Pyrenees went into five editions by 1879, and when Adolphe Joanne died in 1881, the series was taken over by his son Paul, who continued to produce the Guides-Diamant, a very small format series in-32o with distinctive dark green covers. The plan of the guides remained the same. The visitor to the Pyrenees was first offered some general advice (Avis et conseils), which gave details of train travel, together with distances and ticket prices. Four sections followed, each one

76

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

dealing with a French department, starting with Pays Basque-Navarre-BassesPyrénées and heading eastwards to conclude with the Pyrénées-Orientales. Andorra was included in the treatment of the Ariège because it was best accessed from Ax-les-Thermes. In subsequent editions, the emphasis shifted slightly from west to east. This no doubt reflected the lack of interest in Spain, which was now treated in a shorter section, compared to the rising popularity of Carcassonne and the newly-fashionable Côte Vermeille. The text was densely packed into two columns of small print. The first edition stretched to 683 pages including the index, not counting dozens of pages of advertisements, mainly for hotels, which filled the endpages. The second edition of 1862 grew to a mammoth 767 pages.21 Joanne’s Itinéraire descriptif offered the traveller over 200 set itineraries, interspersed with descriptions of the main towns and their attractions, and a few notes on the ascent of the peaks. Joanne gave plenty of information about the spa resorts, including details of promenades and excursions, together with a chemical analysis of the water in each spa. His notes on the mountains were often cursory and limited to advice about how much a guide would cost and how long the walk would take. He strongly recommended the Canigou in the Pyrénées-Orientales, however, because it was an easy climb and he had done it himself in 1857.22 In the 1888 edition, Paul Joanne distinguished the easy climbs from the more challenging and frankly dangerous ascents. He clearly indicated where hiring a guide was essential.23 Paul Joanne took his reader up the mountainside by mule track, picking out cabins along the way where it was possible to spend the night. The Pic de la Munia, to take one example on the border in the central Pyrenees, was highly recommended for the magnificent view in these terms: ‘3h15 descent; difficult passage; to attempt it, one should not be liable to vertigo’.24 By the time this edition appeared, the vogue for mountaineering was well-established. Like his father, Paul Joanne paid homage to the great climbers of the past, who will be considered in Chapter 6. But his guide had acquired an additional persona. It was now three layers in one, a mixture of the scientific Pyrenees, the Romantic and picturesque Pyrenees, and finally the Pyrenees of the new alpinisme. The Guide Joanne claimed to be a historical as well as a descriptive itinerary. Joanne’s history was patriotic and strove to be uncontroversial. His references to the Napoleonic Wars took on a nakedly anti-British stance, and he very rarely mentioned anything as divisive as the French Revolution. Earlier eras were safer, and they left more monuments, instead of destroying them. His accounts of any town usually began with some place-name etymology, followed by Roman origins if any, and then plenty of detail from the medieval centuries. Here he

The railway age and the coming of mass tourism, 1853–1914

77

included references to religious conflicts, but remained quite impartial. He was not complimentary to the Bourbon Ancien Régime, praising Voltaire’s intervention in the Calas Affair, and disapproving the royalist fanaticism which led to the assassination of General Ramel in Toulouse by White Terrorists in 1814.25 His historical viewpoint – not too monarchist, not too revolutionary – conformed with what one would expect of a dutiful subject of the Emperor Napoleon III. Joanne anthologized and plagiarized other travel writers, and this was typical of a genre where authors borrowed from each other, or criticized each other in order to strengthen their own foothold in the market. The travel literature of the nineteenth century did not only describe places to visit; it also contained a discourse about tourism itself, and about travel literature. This was a selfreferential, competitive and densely inter-textual genre. The Joanne guides to the Pyrenees were no different. Joanne made two personal trips to the region, but his guidebook also drew on Ramond, Chausenque, Cénac, Taine and others. He provided a bibliography of several pages and frequently excerpted long passages from other works verbatim.26 Citing as many authors as possible enabled Joanne to claim that his guide was more comprehensive than any other. He came under fire, however, from Spanish readers like Francisco Fernández, who objected to the Guide’s negative comments about his own country.27 As Daniel Nordmann has pointed out, the Guides Joanne relied on the railways, and followed their routes as far as possible. The set itineraries began and ended in Paris, and were traced onto existing railway networks. Even the Pyrenees edition started with the journey from Paris to Bordeaux, which absorbed thirty pages of the text in 1858. The Guides encouraged a ‘tourisme cultivé’, by describing all the great sites that the traveller could see from the train: ruins, cathedral spires and chateaus.28 They also pointed out bridges, tunnels and viaducts en route.29 These wonders of modern engineering were still novel enough to warrant a notice. Joanne was part of the Hachette publishing stable, and so his guides were sold at every station bookstall after Hachette successfully bid for the sole right to establish them. Even though the vast majority of the Pyrenean itineraries offered by Joanne could not be completed by train, the railway nevertheless provided the framework and the raison d’être of this whole publishing enterprise. The third edition of 1868, which had been revised by Reclus, was prefaced by a map of the entire French railway network, together with a regional map of the Chemins de fer d’Orléans et du Midi.30 By 1899, the Chemins de fer du Midi were sponsoring their own travel guides, the Guides Conty, featuring their own special offers, and referring the reader to other specialist literature for information on possible ascents.31

78

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

The Pyrenees on the horizon – Biarritz, Tarbes and Pau In the French approaches to the Pyrenees, three towns attracted visitors – Biarritz, Tarbes and Pau. From here, the mountains formed a permanent backdrop, but they remained distant, on the horizon. And many tourists had no intention of getting any closer. There was no particular reason to visit Biarritz before the 1850s. Victor Hugo admired it in 1843 as a little fishing port and feared it would become fashionable and lose its charm. He was right about its becoming fashionable. The European elite led the way, when in 1854 the visit of Napoleon III drew attention to the resort. His wife Eugénie Montijo’s family had already chosen Biarritz as their summer residence, and when she became Empress of France, the popularity of Biarritz escalated.32 In 1868, there were 400 British residents there.33 The railway line from Bayonne opened in 1877. In 1889, Queen Victoria stayed there for a month, and British Prime Minister Gladstone made several visits. Sea bathing was the main attraction of Biarritz. As Alain Corbin has demonstrated, sea bathing was becoming accepted as healthy exercise. It was invigorating and encouraged longevity. It offered a bracing antidote to the foul air of the city. The ocean shore, once considered a dangerous and unpleasant resting-place for stinking debris, increasingly appealed to visitors. The Guide Joanne explained bathing procedures and the presence of a lifesaving team to rescue imprudent swimmers. The Guide also complained that the beach lacked shade, which at least indicated that visitors now wanted to spend some time there.34 The beach had thus been ‘invented’ by the mid-nineteenth century, and the Romantic period saw the ‘golden age of the shore’, when its picturesque qualities were fully appreciated.35 The people of the shoreline, the fishermen and seaweed collectors, now seemed simple, virtuous and idyllic. ‘Nothing is finer’, wrote Hugo, ‘than a village of fishermen, with their simple and age-old customs, sitting at the edge of the ocean.’36 The tourist went to Biarritz not only to enjoy the beach, and perhaps to bathe, but also to watch other bathers. Bathing necessitated a mingling of social classes and to some extent, a mingling of the sexes. The tourist gaze was a gendered gaze, and beaches like Biarritz were sexualized and voyeuristic spaces where women might be subjected to male surveillance (in some situations, they might also seek it, and in others the roles might be reversed).37 As Englishman Charles Weld reported, ‘the fashionable Parisienne knows she has many eyes on her, – sometimes, however, more than is pleasant […] when the sea is not too rough flirtations are carried on amidst the breakers’.38 The

The railway age and the coming of mass tourism, 1853–1914

79

Empress Eugénie herself bathed there in public view, but at a discreet distance from the crowds. Apart from looking at the bathers, one could also look at the sea, and be inspired by the contemplation of the infinite. Hippolyte Taine, whose account of the Pyrenees normally strove to be realistic and critical, nevertheless obeyed a standard romantic impulse in enjoying the immensity of the ocean at Biarritz. ‘Here’, he wrote, ‘something fierce and invincible endures. The Ocean has retained its freedom and its omnipotence.’39 The mountains were away in the distance and, in gazing at the ocean, one turned one’s back on them. Visitors often used Tarbes as a platform for visiting the mountains but rarely lingered there, except to admire the fresh rivulets running alongside the streets, or to visit its busy market. Pau, on the other hand, was a destination in its own right, and the home of a substantial British colony. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, tourists readily agreed that Pau was not an impressive town. It was dilapidated, according to Louisa Costello in 1842–43, and it was not clear if the restoration of the chateau would eventually produce a sight worth seeing. It looked slovenly and ugly to her, even if the views of the distant mountains were beautiful.40 Pau’s climate, however, was reputedly mild and pleasant. Whatever Louisa Costello’s strictures, she was nevertheless prepared to make Pau her base, leaving to her brother Dudley the strenuous masculine role of actually exploring the Hautes-Pyrénées. The English had adopted Pau ever since some of Wellington’s officers discovered its advantages at the end of the Peninsular War. By 1869, there were 2,000 British people living there.41 In Pau the English hunted with hounds and organized horse racing. Sarah Ellis found English doctors there, and mince pies at Christmas.42 Popular entertainments included bandstand music, polo matches and balloon ascents.43 Pau in the season is a ‘British oligarchy’, Edwin Dix recorded.44 Members of the English set lived in a virtual enclave in which they reproduced the cultural practices they knew. Tim Edensor argues that tourists may inhabit ‘heterogeneous spaces’, where they meet locals and are open to a range of new contacts. This was presumably the case, for example, when Ramond de Carbonnières drank milk with Pyrenean shepherds in the ‘heterogeneous spaces’ of their cabins. On the other hand, according to Edensor, tourist practices can be ‘enclavic’, as when tourists are enclosed, like the British visitors to Pau, within a cultural bubble of their own construction.45 To some extent, as we shall see, this was also true of life in the Pyrenean spa resorts as a whole. In Pau, the British colony reinvented the Pyrenees as a corner of the English countryside.

80

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Pau is the historical capital of Béarn and then, as now, Henri Quatre was everpresent. His statue, his chateau and his myth were inescapable. In the chateau, which was (and still is) largely empty and devoid of furniture, visitors dutifully acknowledged the enormous shell in which the infant Henri supposedly lay after his birth. Whether it was the original relic, or a replica introduced after the ancient shell was destroyed in the French Revolution did not matter: the myth of Henri Quatre was intact. Edwin Dix faithfully recited its principal elements – the king who loved his people and promised they would be well fed, with a chicken in every peasant’s cooking-pot, the king who abjured Protestantism to bring national reconciliation after sectarian conflict.46 This was a myth of paternalist monarchy and national unity. Pau was in the process of becoming a Henri Quatre theme park, in which the region’s most eminent historical figure was packaged, marketed and exploited for tourist consumption. Only Sarah Ellis was prepared to depart from this pre-ordained script. She was a Quaker turned Congregationalist, travelling with her husband who was in turn a prominent figure in the London Missionary Society. Her version of Béarnais history was uncompromisingly pro-Protestant. Instead of reproducing the royalist myth of Henri Quatre, she focused instead on his mother, Jeanne d’Albret Queen of Navarre, whose conversion to Calvinism in 1560 she considered noble, just and righteous. Ellis added heretically that the integration of Béarn into France by Louis XIII in 1620 was received sullenly by a vanquished people.47 Ellis’ Nonconformist Protestant sensibilities made her a stranger in Pau. The sight of Frenchwomen doing heavy physical work instead of confining themselves to domestic tranquillity startled her; and she could never abide the local neglect of Sabbath observance.48 In her eyes French desecration of Sundays showed a lack of due solemnity and of true spirituality.

Taking the waters: a hierarchy of spa resorts The tourist gaze has multiple faces – romantic, sacred, ethnological among them – but in the case of the Pyrenean spa resorts, mass tourism was prompted by reasons of health. The poet Lamartine came in 1840 for his rheumatism. The painter Delacroix was at Eaux-Bonnes in 1845 for tubercular laryngitis. By 1840, 3,000 curistes visited Cauterets in the high season, and 8,000 stayed in Bagnères-de-Bigorre.49 Each watering place had its speciality, thus the waters at Bagnères-de-Bigorre were reputed to be laxative, diuretic and good for the digestion.50 The spas provided a wide range of treatments, from a simple

The railway age and the coming of mass tourism, 1853–1914

81

glass of water to total immersion. There were high and low pressure showers, descending and ascending showers and horizontal showers. The Guides Joanne gave the tourist a detailed analysis of the chemical contents of the water at each resort. Resident doctors prescribed waters, purges, bleedings and detailed diets. There was money to be made here in the season, both by the tourist industry and the medical profession. As one madrileño joked, if Moses came back to life again to draw spring water from hard rock, he would pray to Jehovah that the stream would be sulphurous.51 The Pyrenees were being reinvented as a cure for the illnesses of modern life. As a result, they acquired a reputation as a place full of the sick and the frail, and this association was exacerbated after the visions of Bernadette Soubirous turned Lourdes into a world pilgrimage centre and a magnet for invalids worldwide. Visiting the spa was not of course a full-time occupation, and tourists always had time on their hands. In fact, boredom was their main problem. Henry Blackburn, always a self-conscious Englishman abroad, mocked French tourists for not appreciating the scenery and for constantly complaining of ‘ennui’. He deplored the faded dandies at Luchon, desperate to find a way to fill the interminable gap between déjeuner and dîner.52 Despising the French for their laziness and unwillingness to do any climbing was a British obsession, not shared by Spanish tourists. French tourists refused Charles Weld’s invitation to climb to Roland’s Breach because, they said, it was too difficult (pénible) and all you could see there was the mist.53 Tourists of course did not arrive in great numbers at the spa resorts just in order to improve their health. They went because the resorts were fashionable – some more so than others – and because the railways had made it easier to travel to them.54 They went to see and to be seen, and there were many opportunities for self-exhibition, at dances, concerts, reading-rooms, the theatre and the gambling salons. Social groups intermingled, the aristocracy with the provincial middle classes, the Spanish with the French. Social opportunities were greater if tourists opted for the mesa redonda – in other words, they dined at a common table, instead of paying more to have their meals brought to their private lodgings. In the informal ambiance of the resort town, it was hard to exactly pinpoint everyone’s social rank. When social distinctions became blurred, it was easier to play a role. At Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Joudou’s travel guide recommended an evening passeggiata on the Place Coustous, because that was where ‘le beau monde’ gathered. Meeting strangers here was easy, according to this guide, because ‘here we must consider ourselves as though in a republic whose members live together without regard for inequalities of status, and where the

82

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

only objectives are pleasure and dissipation’.55 Matrons scouted for an eligible husband for their daughter, older men were interested in an affair with a younger woman, and young women fell in love, like twenty-one-year-old George Sand in 1825, enamoured of Aurélien de Sèze in Cauterets. The temporary nature of their stay in the resorts, and their distance from the responsibilities and worries of real life, made ‘holiday romances’ more likely. The spa resorts of Europe, according to Blackbourn, offered tourists a fantasy world; they were a kind of ‘Disneyland for the upper classes’.56 Spanish tourists formed an important contingent of the clientele of French Pyrenean spa resorts. In the eighteenth century, Spanish tourists to the Pyrenean spas had generally been aristocrats in poor health, their wives in search of a cure for supposed infertility, or priests escaping the clutches of the Inquisition.57 In the nineteenth century a new, middle-class clientele from Zaragoza and Madrid descended on the resorts on both sides of the range. Their presence was vital to the prosperity of the spa resorts, and business suffered severely from their absences in times of civil war or the immediate aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Whether they went in search of health, amorous intrigue or a range of other amusements on offer, the mountains themselves remained well out of focus. Tourists in the spa resorts tended to stay in the valleys. The mountains were daunting and inaccessible to them. The high peaks made José Ortega feel small, and this was not a pleasant sensation. ‘We are’, he wrote, ‘like a family of ants climbing over the reliefs on a wall in the monastery of the Escorial.’58 The Pyrenees provided an agreeable décor for their excursions, picnics and fêtes champêtres. You do not have to worry about going climbing, advised Ernest Bilbrough, just leave the Maladetta to the experts and enjoy a good ride or a beautiful drive in a carriage.59 For De Bellèze, who stayed at Bagnères-de-Bigorre for five months in 1853, the aficionados of the spa resorts were merely spectators who remained in the wings instead of sitting in the main auditorium.60 The main action of the drama passed them by. There was an unspoken hierarchy of spa resorts. Rank depended on the town’s remoteness or accessibility, its scenic beauty and the price of its accommodation, which was in turn a consequence of fashionable status. On the French side, Barèges was almost universally described as a depressing place, ‘disagreeable’,61 ‘desolate’,62 ‘woful’ [sic]63 or ‘gruesome, morbid, abhorrent, funereal’.64 Barèges was used by the French army as a convalescent home for the war wounded and mutilated, which added to its air of despondency and reinforced the impression that the Pyrenees was no more than a glorified hospital. Charles Weld cruelly summed up the poor patients of Barèges as ‘ugly and limping hags […] shrivelled men and

The railway age and the coming of mass tourism, 1853–1914

83

puny, rickety children’.65 Barèges consisted of one street squeezed into a gorge, and it was therefore vulnerable to flooding and avalanches, which sometimes forced the complete evacuation of the town. When the season was over, it became an uninhabitable ghost town, like a place for exiles in Siberia, wrote Chausenque.66 Higher on the status ladder were the twin resorts of Eaux-Bonnes and Eaux-Chaudes, which flourished in the 1840s. Eaux-Bonnes was the more chic destination of the two, even if its sulphurous spring emitted an unpleasant odour. It boasted a fine promenade horizontale which, as its name indicated, demanded no climbing whatsoever from the idle stroller. It attracted many Spanish patients. Samazeuilh, a lawyer who visited in 1857, called it a site for the ‘aristocracy of invalids’, by which he meant that poorer people could not afford to rent accommodation there.67 On the Spanish side, the resort of Panticosa was for a long time scorned by foreign tourists and the Guide Joanne. It was indeed dilapidated, until Guallart and Co. started to modernize its facilities in the mid-1850s.68 Difficulty of access and slow investment always put Panticosa at a competitive disadvantage in relation to French spa resorts. It never became as cosmopolitan as they did, appealing for the most part to clients from Aragon and Madrid. By 1880, however, Panticosa had 900 beds, and when Aguas de Panticosa was formed as a public company in 1900, a golden age dawned for the neglected Spanish spa. In 1896, the Gran Hotel acquired bidets for the first time. Electric lighting was introduced in 1898. The Hotel Continental, built in 1903, had a hydraulic lift. This was Panticosa’s heyday. It offered customers state-of-the-art hydrotherapy, including special breathing apparatus for respiratory complaints, a dedicated gargling room (gargarizador), hot showers, cold showers and alternating hot and cold showers, as well as sit-down baths for treating blocked intestines and female sexual organs.69 But in 1915 and 1917 avalanches destroyed one-third of its hotel accommodation and Panticosa never fully recovered from the disaster. At the top end of the tourist market, the three most fashionable spa resorts in the mid-nineteenth century were Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Cauterets and Bagnèresde-Luchon (also known simply as Luchon). Bagnères-de-Bigorre was already popular in the eighteenth century, but it became one of the main spas in midcentury, even though Luchon competed strongly with it in the 1850s and 1860s. By 1880, it was receiving up to 7,000 visitors annually, but the Guide Conty estimated it had 25,000 tourists in 1890.70 E. E. found little he could paint there in 1834, but the place was splendid with fine hotels and brilliant salons.71 In modern times its popularity has declined: a little over 5,000 tourists visited the spa at Bagnères-de-Bigorre in 1981.72

84

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Cauterets did not have eighteenth-century origins like Barèges and Bagnèresde-Bigorre, and only became fashionable in the 1820s. The composer and musician Oscar Commettant visited Cauterets in the 1860s, and enjoyed the soirées musicales, dances, hunting, trout-fishing and even the local dog market. He calculated the mortality rate in the summer season and worked out that, although 8,000 tourists came every year, ‘only’ seventy-five had died there over a decade – a bizarre tribute to the healing properties of its water.73 Luchon was ‘la reine des Pyrénées’, renowned for elegance, grace and high prices. Its prestige grew in the Second Empire, and it seemed then like a miniature version of Paris, with its tree-lined avenues and cafés, its Vauxhall and jardin anglais, and eventually its gas-lighting. Everything seemed provided here to amuse the idle rich (and, incidentally, to make them forget they were in the Pyrenees, hundreds of miles away from the capital). Tourist posters advertised balls, theatre, night life and ‘le plus beau casino du monde’, completed in 1880. Luchon was a precious jewel, announced the Guide Conty, laid out in perfect taste.74 It was a cosmopolitan resort, attracting foreigners and popular with madrileños. Luchon was a pleasure palace and a tourist enclave. It welcomed 9,000 tourists in 1865, and it was now only twenty-four hours from Paris.75 Luchon’s sophistication, however, was not to everyone’s taste. Alexandre de Metz-Noblat decided that Luchon was too civilized, and that he had not come to the Pyrenees in search of the Champs-Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne.76 Taine cast a scathing eye over his fellow tourists there and pronounced them all dull and pretentious.77 Arriving in Luchon could certainly be a culture shock for dedicated hikers. Hilaire Belloc, who travelled in the early years of the twentieth century and wrote a companion to a walking tour, advised serious walkers to use Luchon as a place to change sterling into francs. At the same time he warned them that if they had been walking all day, at Luchon they would have to dress up.78

The tourist and the anti-tourist In the Pyrenees local traditions were paraded for tourist consumption. Local costumes greatly interested tourists as did the dances performed at local festivals. The blue beret of the Basques, together with their brown or red jackets, velvet breeches and espadrilles became shorthand for the Basque country as a whole, and regularly appeared in tourist advertising (see the cover illustration).79 Regional festivals were another opportunity to show off a pre-packaged form of

The railway age and the coming of mass tourism, 1853–1914

85

Pyrenean culture, like the fête de St Jean at the beginning of June, marking the departure of the sheep flocks from the lowlands to their high summer pastures. Mountain guides, too, performed a kind of ‘staged authenticity’, when they regaled their clients with tales of heroic bear hunts in the past. The tourist gaze was sometimes reversed. Locals observed the tourists, and tailored what they offered to satisfy tourist tastes and maximize their own profits.80 In the spa resorts, tourists were vulnerable to exploitation since they had little sustained contact with local inhabitants. As Henry Blackburn recognized, ‘On a journey of this kind we come very little into contact with the peasantry.’81 Except for mountain guides, landladies, waiters and occasionally a muleteer, the inhabitants were invisible. In 1897, in a remarkable episode in Harold Spender’s Pyrenean travels, he and his photographer Llewellyn Smith came across a group of Spanish peasants at Bielsa. They were intrigued by the cameras and asked to be photographed. The two British hikers obliged them, but they secretly ‘snapped’ the peasants with the camera shutter closed. Clearly they had no interest in keeping images of local people; the camera was intended only for the scenery.82 It was perhaps better that way, since locals rarely lived up to their literary image as a sturdy upright race of shepherds. Begging, for example, was especially deplorable to Protestant tourists (it was banned in Spanish resorts after 1875). Louisa Costello was disappointed to find the urchins at Izeste (Pyrénées Occidentales) in rags and tatters, neither ‘pretty nor romantic’, while two Spaniards she saw at Gabas qualified as wild enough, but looked ‘too dirty and slovenly to excite much admiration’.83 At Grip (Hautes-Pyrénées), Selina Bunbury found peasants with ‘a repulsive aspect’, in direct contradiction of the grace, innocence and beautiful complexions painted by fanciful artists. Near Eaux-Chaudes, on the other hand, she saw ‘some splendid specimens of the peasantry’.84 The metaphor reduced local residents to a rare species of flora. As for Lourdes, the place attracted almost universal Protestant condemnation. Blackburn called the grotto disgusting, and Bilbrough found it ‘hard to conceive anything more pitiable or repulsive’.85 For Francisco Fernández, Lourdes’ combination of great devotion and commercial greed sparked an anti-Semitic reaction. Some of the dealers were undoubtedly Jewish, he reported, and the scene resembled the Temple of Jerusalem before Jesus purged it of the moneylenders.86 The American Amy Oakley deplored the ‘tawdry banality’ of Lourdes but expressed some empathy with the lame and crippled who gathered there in hope of a cure. If it provides consolation, she conceded, let us not deride it.87 Oakley recognized popular religiosity by wrapping it up in patronizing language which kept it at arm’s length. After all, she said, Lourdes was rather

86

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

like Benares on the Ganges. This comparison effectively created an enormous cultural distance between Oakley and the mass of pilgrims she was observing. Lourdes continued to grow, after the episcopate endorsed Bernadette’s visions in 1862 and the railway line to the town was opened in 1866. By 1908, 1.5 million pilgrims were arriving annually. The rise of Lourdes coincided with the spread of the Marial cult in the nineteenth century, and Pope Pius IX’s insistence on elevating the Immaculate Conception into a Catholic dogma. Lourdes attracted many in the Third Republic who wanted France to do penance for the sins which had led to the defeat of 1870 and the subsequent socialist uprising in Paris, and it played a role in subsequent controversies dividing republicans and clericals.88 Today, six million visitors arrive in Lourdes each year, and in the peak season, it provides 800 confessions daily.89 Every year, French national railways put on 900 extra pilgrims’ trains to Lourdes.90 Lourdes sells mass-produced devotion and demands the highly regulated crowd management visible there today. Amy Oakley would have been appalled. Only a very few tourists departed from the beaten track in search of a more authentic experience. Usually, they were content to take their daily dose of spa water and remain within their own artificial world. Nevertheless, mass tourism had its enemies, a small number of non-conformists who distanced themselves from the crowd, like Ernest Bilbrough who advised visitors to go in spring, out of the high season, in order to avoid the tourist crush. Harold Spender could not avoid the crowds at Gavarnie, which he deplored. Meeting the flood of tourists there after a climb was like ‘emerging from the Khyber Pass into the Richmond Road’.91 Similarly, cavalcades of pilgrims at Lourdes destroyed all the magic of the mountains. Taine adopted an ironic stance, ridiculing his fellow tourists. He attacked those who stayed indoors and never saw anything, those who were slaves to their guidebook and those who boasted endlessly about their previous travels. He despised ‘the sheep mentality, which expresses admiration when told to and gets enthusiastic in imitation of others’.92 Individuals like Taine reacted against the popularization of scenic venues and the robotic behaviour of the new tourist masses. They implicitly claimed for themselves a greater sensitivity and independence of spirit. By distancing themselves from the crowd, they asserted their superior taste and knowledge which enabled them to appreciate their surroundings more authentically and more profoundly than the majority. In Bourdelien terms, they were operating a strategy of distinction, claiming a greater cultural capital to distinguish themselves from the wealthier but sheep-like bourgeoisie. Belloc despised the spa resorts as the playground of the pampered rich. As for Luchon, he wrote,

The railway age and the coming of mass tourism, 1853–1914

87

For a century it has had the character […] of great luxury, and of a colony, as it were, of the main towns of Europe. But […] it is in some way saved from the odiousness which most cosmopolitan holiday places radiate around them like an evil smell. The influence of Paris is in some part responsible for better manners and greater dignity than such tourist places usually show.

In condemning the spa resorts as ‘cosmopolitan’ Belloc intended to make a deeply insulting comment, and he accused Lourdes and Cauterets, too, of being detestably cosmopolitan. It would be madness, he advised, to stop there.93 The age of mass tourism had engendered its own antithesis – the ‘anti-tourist’. In later years, elitists would have even more to complain about. Winter sports establishments appeared for the first time in 1906 in Eaux-Bonnes and in 1910 in Cauterets. Once again, these developments were intimately connected to the railways. The Compagnie des Chemins de fer du Midi was deeply involved in investment in winter sports facilities, for example in new hotel accommodation at Superbagnères, linked by electric train to Luchon in 1912. Electrification drew on local sources of hydroelectric power, and it promoted the tourist industry. In the 1920s, ‘trains de neige’ linked the Tourmalet with the Pic du Midi de Bigorre.94 A new clientele was descending on the Pyrenees, and they would outnumber the spa-drinkers of the late nineteenth century. Meanwhile, as the habitués of Luchon or Cauterets enjoyed their annual season of revivification and amusement, another kind of visitor was imagining the Pyrenees from much closer range and in a different perspective. These were the mountaineers, and their story forms the subject of the next chapter.

6

The heroic Pyrenees: The challenge of the peaks

The heroic age Mountaineers have always been notoriously bad at explaining why they repeatedly risk their own lives and those of others to climb to the summits of remote mountains. After the Matterhorn disaster of 1865, in which four climbers fell to their deaths, the sheer folly of the sport seemed to outweigh any arguments they might invoke in its favour. In their writings, however, nineteenth-century Pyrenean mountaineers provided some clues about the motives that drove them forever upwards. Among them were patriotism, the thrill of exploration, the nurturing of male egos in competition with each other, a desire to get closer to God and a longing to escape from the soft and effeminate cities of the plain. Asking why we climb mountains was a stupid question, according to the Bulletin Pyrénéen, since one might as well ask why do we play the piano or why do we go dancing? But then the journal answered its own question: the mountains, it declared, were a school of energy and willpower, and a good antidote against national decadence.1 Climbers continued to take risks, to expose themselves to the dangers of crevasses and avalanches and to battle against extreme weather conditions. In the Pyrenees as well as in the Alps, they relished the challenge and tested their physical endurance to the limit. This was the heroic age of the Pyrenees. Henri Béraldi, the French historian of Pyrénéisme, called the decades between the 1860s and the 1880s the ‘Grande Époque’ of Pyrenean mountaineering.2 Tourists had regarded the higher altitudes where no vegetation grew as barren and repugnant, but now for the first time a number of adventurous men saw the mountain peaks as a challenge, an arena for heroic achievements. This chapter considers what drove them. It will examine their relationship with the Pyrenean peaks, which they saw as ripe for ‘conquest’. The importance of the Club Alpin Français, which channelled and celebrated their enthusiasm and their projects, will also be considered.

90

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Just as we have seen in earlier chapters, it was important to write about one’s exploit. For Pyrenean mountaineers, a daring ascent lost most of its value unless it was recorded in writing. Without a written account to establish who made the first ascent, any subsequent climber might claim that he (or she) had done it first. Whereas tourists wrote ‘voyages’, Pyreneists wrote ‘ascensions’. The ‘ascent narrative’ became a literary genre of its own. Béraldi wrote succinctly at the end of the nineteenth century: The ideal Pyreneist must know at the same time how to climb, write and feel. If he writes without climbing, he can do nothing. If he climbs without writing, he leaves no trace. If, as a climber, his account is dry, he leaves a mere document.3

Very few Pyreneists lived up to Béraldi’s exacting ideal. Ramond de Carbonnières, discussed in Chapter 2, was certainly one of them. The romantic but unfortunate Alfred Tonnellé, discussed in Chapter 3, was another climber who wrote with emotion. The greatest of them all, and perhaps the model for Béraldi’s ideal, was Henry Russell, a climber and author held in awe by his contemporaries. In a later section, this chapter will turn to his achievements, his writing and his complicated relationship with the mountains. Certainly, earlier climbers had made their mark before the 1850s. Ramond had climbed the Monte Perdido, with his guides Laurens and Rondo, in 1802. In 1838, Ann Lister followed by the Prince of Moskova, son of Napoleon’s Marshal Ney, reached the summit of the Vignemale. In 1842, Count Franqueville made the first ascent of the Aneto, accompanied by the Russian army officer Platon Tchihatchev. These last two gentlemen amateurs were inspired by the scientific impulse. In fact, Tchihatchev arrived at the top of the Aneto without a barometer, but three days later he brought all his equipment to the summit to take meteorological measurements, until he was defeated by the extreme cold.4 After the 1850s, Pyrenean mountaineering entered a new and more glorious phase. In this period, according to Peter Hansen, mountain climbers embodied a new form of modernity. The conqueror of every new peak personified the romantic notion of a single autonomous individual dominating his natural environment.5 Mountaineering was character-building, nurturing bravery and athleticism. Mountain climbing, insisted Henry Russell, was not an entertainment: it was a moral education.6 It tested the fortitude of the male body, it defined the man. Climbers took pride in the physical punishment that distinguished them from ordinary mortals. They rarely stopped to take a drink and they ate very little. They endured blistered lips, burnt skin and frostbitten toes. They were tough and their exploits consciously extended the physical limits of human potential.7

The heroic Pyrenees: The challenge of the peaks

91

Patriotism and the healthy male body Climbing the peaks was a matter not just of personal but also of national pride. British climbers, who were pioneers and dominated the sport, felt their daring and initiative stemmed from racial superiority. The vogue for gymnastics and bodily hygiene inspired the founders of the English Alpine Club in 1857, and it became a model for the French equivalent established in 1874, as well as for similar clubs in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Austria. For the British, foreigners lacked the necessary grit to succeed. In Luz Charles Weld looked down on the feeble French: ‘If you ask a Frenchman’, he wrote, whether he has ascended any of the mountains, he will probably tell you that he climbed the Pic de Bergons and no other. Our continental neighbours, though possessing considerable energy, do not expend it on mountain climbing.8

Henry Russell echoed racialized views of the world current in late nineteenthcentury Europe. He attributed an intrepid love of freedom and adventure to the Nordic races and especially the English: ‘There is something of the Alpine in the English genius’, he thought, ‘in their dominating spirit, stormy and free, enamoured of tempests and sublime disorder.’9 The strong northerner was contrasted with the soft southerner. Climate, Russell assumed, determined personality: ‘Tel ciel, tel caractère.’10 French climbers had their own nation at heart, especially after the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Following this national trauma, French intellectuals indulged in a phase of introspection as the nation sought explanations for its spectacular failure. The French admired German discipline which they contrasted with the pleasure-seeking frivolity associated with their own society under Napoleon III. This self-examination was exacerbated by a widespread sense that the French ‘race’ was degenerating, and by a general neurosis over France’s low birth rate which compared unfavourably with the rapidly expanding population of their great rival, Germany. Physical exercise, including mountain climbing, was one remedy for strengthening French virility, and restoring the reproductive capacity of Frenchmen. Hence the Club Alpin Français was born in order to regenerate the patrie in the wake of the defeat at Sedan and counteract the danger of national emasculation. It aimed to bring together ‘all those who feel the virile love of nature’, and who were ready ‘to attack the virgin peaks’.11 Such sexual metaphors were endemic in the masculine rhetoric of mountain climbing.

92

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Spain, too, had its own crisis of morale after 1898, when Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines were lost in the Spanish-American War. The intellectual movement known as regeneracionismo urged the renewal of Spanish culture. For regenerationists, the recovery of the Hispanic race would be grounded in the physical development of its young men. This idea promoted sporting activities such as mountain climbing. Basques and Catalans were active climbers at the turn of the century, even though neither Basque nor Catalan nationalists accepted any responsibility for the failures of the Madrid government in 1898. Mountaineering, insisted the Catalan climber Guilera i Albinyana, was not just the monopoly of the English and a few other foreigners, because we, the Catalans, can do it too.12 British muscular Christianity promoted the ideal of mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body), and British institutions provided a model which European mountaineering clubs adopted. Hence the Club Alpin Français wanted ‘healthy, robust bodies and pure, strong, generous souls’.13 Mountain walking, according to the climber Henry Spont, involved endurance and speed, boldness and sang-froid, courage and strength. ‘Considered from this angle’, he wrote, ‘walking becomes a virile, active, conscious pleasure.’14 Climbers affirmed the values of fair play and disinterest. Mountain climbing was an expression of middle-class identity and values, and it was to be conducted in the spirit of gentlemanly amateurism. They deplored working-class sports in which professional athletes performed for money; and at the same time, they distinguished themselves from effete aristocratic dandyism. Climbers tacitly and theoretically subscribed to a masculine code of honour.15 Nevertheless, it was important to get there first. Hostility, jealousy and intense masculine competition characterized the so-called fraternity of mountaineers, in the Pyrenees just as elsewhere. When, at the age of sixty-six, the celebrated Pyrenean climber Charles Packe looked back on his career, he deplored the excesses of this competitive urge. The competitive drive, he wrote, turned good companions into ‘enemies to be defeated instead of friends worthy of affection’, and ‘teaches that the greatest pleasure in any climb is to eclipse everyone else in the race, or, in the hallowed English expression, breaking the record’.16

The ascent narrative Making a ‘first ascent’ was a respected achievement, and it demanded a written record. Several shepherds had in fact climbed the Vignemale in 1798, but this could be discounted. The winner of the contest would always be the first climber

The heroic Pyrenees: The challenge of the peaks

93

who actually published his story. The ‘ascent narrative’ became an essential component of a successful climb, and a plethora of them appeared from the 1860s onwards. Adolphe Joanne, publisher of the well-known French travel guides, even invented a new word – ‘ascendre’ – to describe the sport.17 The ascent narrative followed standard conventions, faithfully reproduced by Guilera in his account of his ascent of the Pedraforca in 1919. The story was one of triumph over many obstacles. These included ice, vertical rock faces, sudden torrents and avalanches and the threat of a violent storm. Sometimes, Guilera wrote, the party could only advance 30 metres per hour. The climbers were always aware of the abyss below, and readers were constantly reminded of it. Climbers were usually armed, in case they came across Spanish bandits, fugitive deserters or bears, often feared but rarely encountered. True to the genre, Guilera made it clear that magnificent panoramas rewarded the climber, in spite of cold and frostbite. Arriving at the summit was always a great triumph: ‘you feel that you are the same person as you are every day, except that inside yourself is something extraordinary that predisposes you to feel like a hero or a superman’.18 The glacial wind, which some called ‘le vent d’Espagne’, and the whiteness of the snow were common features of the ascent narrative, as was the obligatory expression of admiration for the scenery. The narrative was not complete without at least one close shave, as when Russell’s guide Célestin Passet ‘nearly’ fell down a crevasse on the Clarabide in 1882.19 The adventurous spirit of the climber was another trope, as he frequently ignored the advice of his guide and defiantly set out on a risky route.20 Guides were occasionally portrayed as dull and cautious, to bring the daring of the climber into greater relief. The dangers they incurred should not be belittled. Avalanches, for example, were frequent occurrences, and caused fatal casualties at lower levels. In 1855, twelve were killed by an avalanche at Barèges, and a series of avalanches in the Ariège in 1895 resulted in over thirty fatalities. The thrill of the narrative, however, quickly palls, especially in the hands of inexperienced writers. Béraldi complained about the mass of mediocre narratives, and he blamed the Club Alpin Français for not being discriminating enough in publishing climbers’ activities. Many ascent narratives were admittedly extremely tedious. As Béraldi lamented, one mountain crest was more or less like any other, and once you had read one description of a snowdrift, you had read them all. Writers drowned their story in a mass of detail. They recorded exactly when they got up in the morning, at what time they ate their tinned sardines or took a shot of cognac.21 Only a few climbers, like Henry Russell, wrote sparely and also poetically about the Pyrenees.

94

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Reaching the summit was the climax of the ascent narrative, and significant rituals took place there, weather permitting. Usually, climbers marked their achievement either by leaving a visiting card, or by writing a short record (procès-verbal), putting it in a bottle and burying it under a stone cairn, obligingly assembled by their guides. This was a risky method of archiving the moment: Spanish shepherds were suspected of taking bottles and metal containers left at the summits.22 More frequently, the bottle was broken in a storm and its paper contents dispersed. The Club Alpin Français systematized the practice by providing registers which climbers could sign and place in tin boxes. When cameras became easily portable, climbers took a group photograph to commemorate the occasion. Climbers may not have stayed very long at the summit, especially if it was very cold, and they immediately had to prepare for a difficult descent. But summit behaviour varied enormously, and it could summarize the entire spirit of the climbers’ relationship with the mountain. Some intoned God Save the Queen, while others danced to the Marseillaise. When Tenzing climbed Everest in 1953, he gave thanks to Buddha; in 1960, a Chinese team left a bust of Chairman Mao at the top of Everest.23 In the Pyrenees, toasts of champagne were drunk, thoughtfully packed by the guide in advance, or sometimes a religious ceremony took place. On Monte Perdido in 1890, at 2.00 am in difficult weather, Henry Russell casually drank punch and smoked a cigar.24 Normally, he wrote, he was happy to lie down at the summit, having seen ‘the virginal magnificence of those sunrises’. The sights of nature satisfied his soul.25 But on another occasion in 1874, he celebrated a successful ascent by firing his gun into the air.26 Franz Schrader, always a conscientious scientist, took everybody’s pulse to show how it increased at altitude.27 Whether they climbed the peaks for spiritual ecstasy or in the cause of science, it was a serious and solemn endeavour. The proper contemplation of nature required silent meditation. One group which started a snowball fight on the modest Pic de Sésérite (1,591 metres) in 1897 was clearly not entering into the true spirit of mountaineering.28 Once a new peak was conquered, it had to be named, usually in honour of the man who had made the first ascent. A new nomenclature was thus superimposed on local knowledge and custom. The names that French climbers gave the mountains often bore no relation to the names by which locals knew the surrounding geography. Basques and Béarnais, for example, had their own vocabulary and did not know the French names of neighbouring mountains, while Spanish guides used a different nomenclature again. It was almost impossible, according to one member of the Club Alpin Français, to distinguish

The heroic Pyrenees: The challenge of the peaks

95

the lakes and summits on the basis of what local residents called them, so that it was no wonder that the military map contained errors and confusion, considering the labyrinth of contradictory information available.29 In Aragon, Russell wrote, the mountains all have two or three different names, ‘like petty thieves’.30 But climbers enjoyed the ritual of naming ‘new’ peaks, like the Pic Russell, as though the mountain had never had a name before they arrived. In 1878, the Grand Batchimale was re-baptized the Pic Schrader, and Saint-Saud also had a peak named after him. It did not matter if the indigenous population gave the mountains quite different names; climbers were conquerors who renamed the landscape in order to know it and appropriate it for themselves. They knew their names would endure in modern cartography. The natives of the Pyrenees were treated with at best patronizing condescension, and at worst insults. Schrader described one Spanish shepherd he met on the Anisclo pass as ‘a fine, robust man, with a slightly more developed intelligence than his sheep’.31 In Bielsa, local residents showed great interest in his map, and studied it intensely, ‘with an ardour and vivacity of comprehension which show what treasures lie dormant and uncultivated in their brains’.32 Russell found them to be naïve, good-humoured children with the virtues of savages.33 They clearly could never share or understand the rarefied world of heroic Pyrenean climbers.

Conquering the unknown Pyrenees In the heroic Pyrenees, climbers were conscious of venturing into the unknown, reaching summits previously untrodden. For Harold Spender on the Balaitous in 1897, part of the experience was the absence of any human trace: ‘Except in Arctic regions’, he wrote, ‘I do not suppose that there are many views on this planet so independent of human colouring and adornment as the views obtained from high mountains.’34 Climbers often reflected on how many or how few people had gone before them, and took the bottles from the cairns to find out how many predecessors there had been, and how recently they had been there. When Franz Shrader reached the Anisclo pass in upper Aragon, he was thrilled to realize that beyond it lay ‘les régions inconnues’.35 Not even the great Ramond had ever crossed it. The race to conquer every unknown peak, however, was ultimately not sustainable. Sooner or later, as climbers attained summit after summit, there were no virgin mountains left to seduce. The unknown Pyrenees was a finite

96

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

and a shrinking quantity. How could the challenge and the excitement be renewed? The answer lay in Spain. The French Pyrenees succumbed first, but on the Spanish side there remained many virgin peaks whose chastity was vulnerable. French and British climbers therefore began to explore Aragon for the first time, and they were joined before long by Spanish climbers. They ventured into Spain even during the Third Carlist War (1872–76), when the Carlist army was retreating in disarray from Navarre into France. The French climbers, furthermore, attempted the Spanish peaks with French guides who were themselves entering a terra incognita.36 The push into the Spanish Pyrenees was clearly rewarding. Franz Schrader, at the cirque de Barrosa, urged others to follow him: ‘The wonders of the French cirques’, he told his fellow-mountaineers, ‘do not at all surpass those of Spain; there is a whole area there of prodigious originality and grandeur, and almost completely uncharted’.37 Eventually, however, the Spanish explorations of Schrader and fellowFrenchman the Baron de Saint-Saud had mapped the Spanish peaks, so that they too offered no further mysteries. In 1881, Schrader looked back with great nostalgia at the excitement he had once experienced in the unknown Spanish Pyrenees: Once you had crossed the frontier, you entered that great land of poetry, the unknown. Who were you, distant summits with your pearly silhouettes, whose name and entourage no man could tell us?

But now, modern science had answered his questions, and he asked Should we mourn the joy of discovery, the pure and noble intoxication of unveiling the unknown, the inexpressible magic of an uncharted summit […] now you are measured, catalogued, fixed and your peaks and valleys each appear with their own name, their orographic report, their altitude precisely calculated?38

Eventually, Spain, too, held no novelty for Pyrenean climbers and at that point the heroic age of the Pyrenees seemed closed. There was, however, one further attempt to manufacture a challenge worthy of heroes. A cult of difficulty developed, in which climbers deliberately chose a harder route, or climbed in winter when conditions were harsher or assumed handicaps which would test their fortitude. Winter climbing, according to one Pyrenean member of the Club Alpin Français, could enhance ‘the physical joy of muscular work’.39 Mountaineering equipment was changing to make ascents safer, but not everybody was happy to use it. Henry Russell was reluctant to

The heroic Pyrenees: The challenge of the peaks

97

use ropes to connect climbers. He found them unnecessary over snow, as the Matterhorn incident seemed to prove, when four climbers, attached to each other by rope, dragged each other to their deaths.40 But Russell was by no means a reckless climber, and he advised minimizing risk as far as possible. A more typical exponent of the cult of difficulty was Henri Brulle. In 1889, Brulle climbed the couloir du Gaube in winter, with the celebrated guide Célestin Passet. The ‘couloir’ (corridor) is a deep cleft in the north face of the Vignemale, and this challenge involved ascending a steep slope of hard ice. Passet laboriously carved out a zig-zagging staircase of 1,300 steps in the ice so that Brulle could reach the top. At the end of the climb, Henry Russell, who hated this sort of exhibitionism, met them both with a glass of punch and drily commented ‘Next time, you will have to do it walking backwards.’41 Béraldi shared his distaste for such pointless stunts, and called Brulle’s exploit the last convulsive spasm of heroic Pyreneism. Climbers saw themselves as members of an elite (and in terms of their social background, this was certainly the case). They knew that not everybody shared their passion and few really understood it. They were only happy experiencing the extreme conditions of great heights, and the society of the lowlands made them uncomfortable. When they went on an excursion in the Pyrenean valleys, they felt they were committing infidelity to the mountains. Henry Russell immersed himself so profoundly in the ecstatic contemplation of the infinite that he hated the prospect of coming down from the mountain afterwards. For true alpinists, he considered, ‘the soul darkens and despairs when they come down from the clouds and the eternal snows to return once again to the crowd and to captivity’.42

The Pyrenees and the male ego Mountaineering metaphors likened reaching the summit to sexual conquest. The peaks were virgin, the climbers virile. Henry Russell climbed his favourite Vignemale thirty-three times, counting every victory like a Don Giovanni. In 1867, when he climbed the Anayet in Spain, he sent a message to the Société Ramond, celebrating the achievement in imagery both military and sexual: ‘I take great pleasure’, it ran, ‘in announcing the capture (prise de possession) by myself and the guide Sarrettes of a peak hitherto inviolate’.43 In the Pyrenees, terrain higher than about 1,500 metres was masculine territory, and a hyper-masculine discourse informed the ‘ascent narrative’. Most women preferred the foothills

98

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

and the social life of Cauterets or Luchon. The story of the Pyrenees confirms Michael Reidy’s insights into mountaineering in the Alps, demonstrating that gender was codified by altitude.44 This does not mean that women never intruded into this masculine world. Feminist historians have been at pains to establish that women did climb mountains, defying conventional gender expectations, ignoring medical advice, and going far beyond the customary routine of taking the waters, enjoying gentle walks and sketching. Clare Roche, while echoing the literature’s undue obsession with Alpine scenarios, has nevertheless successfully brought such independent women into focus.45 Female climbers were still considered oddities. Even in the 1890s, the Bulletin Pyrénéen of the Club Alpin Français (Pau section) always noted how many women accompanied each recorded excursion. Although women excursionists were by then commonplace, they were still counted and listed as though they formed an extraneous category. On the occasion of the Club Alpin’s national congress in Pau in 1897, delegates were asked to divide into three streams: firstly, the experienced mountaineers, secondly modest mountaineers and thirdly cyclists and those who wished to travel by coach. Women (twenty-nine attended the congress) were expected to fall into the last category, described by the organizers as ‘the dilettanti of the mountains, more interested in the search for artistic impressions than the satisfactions of sporting vanity’.46 Although female climbers could sometimes be encountered at higher altitudes, women rarely wrote about their exploits in the same public way that men considered essential. Much of the correspondence and journals of women climbers was published posthumously, if they were published at all, and this goes a long way towards explaining women’s invisibility. The first woman to climb Mont Blanc was a twenty-eight-year-old local woman, Marie Paradis in 1809, but because she was a peasant in a world of upper- and middle-class gentlemen amateurs, and because she did not or could not write about her own climb, the event was disregarded by later mountaineers.47 The difficult experiences of women on the high peaks, and the significance of leaving or not leaving written testimony to their presence there, are fully demonstrated in the Pyrenees by the case of Ann Lister. Ann Lister was a Halifax heiress who inherited her uncle’s wealth in 1826, and went to live in Paris.48 She made her first visit to the Pyrenees in 1829, when she was forty years old, accompanied by the British ambassador’s wife Lady Stuart. In 1838, she returned with her companion Anne Walker, determined to climb the Vignemale. In Luz she hired two guides for fifty francs per day, and in

The heroic Pyrenees: The challenge of the peaks

99

addition she paid Henry Cazaux, an experienced mountain guide, twenty francs to take her to the summit. The party of four reached the summit and, according to custom, celebrated the achievement with a glass of wine, wrote their names and the date in a bottle and placed it under a stone cairn. Cazaux, however, was the servant of two masters, and had already been hired to climb the Vignemale by the Prince of Moskova, the son of Napoleon I’s illfated Marshal Ney.49 The Prince’s party arrived a few days after Lister’s ascent, unaware that she had already made the climb, and intending to be the first to reach the summit. Cazaux did not want to lose his fee for a historic climb, and therefore let the Prince believe that Lister had not personally reached the top of the mountain, and that only her guides, including himself, had actually made it to the summit. When the Prince eventually reached the top, Cazaux did not show him the bottle under the cairn which would have told him that he was not, as he imagined, the first to arrive. The Prince’s erroneous claim to be the first to climb the Vignemale spurred Lister into action. She refused to pay the duplicitous Cazaux, and demanded a written statement to attest that she had in fact been the first climber to reach the summit. She persuaded Latapie, a lawyer from Lourdes, to draw up a document (certificat de conquête) for the Prince to sign, recognizing that Lister had reached the top under her own steam. Cazaux’s deception was exposed and he had little option but to sign while another of Lister’s guides, Jean-Pierre Charles, witnessed it. Lister was vindicated, the Prince felt humiliated, and Cazaux was finally paid for his services. The clear difference between men and women climbers lay in the fact that women very rarely wrote about their ascents, whereas men always did; writing a public record of the climb to the summit was an essential part of making the claim to have been the first climber there. Without a publication, their story would always remain open to question, unsubstantiated by an authoritative source. Eventually in 1842 the Prince published his account in Paris in the prestigious Revue des Deux Mondes. His story gave few details and he did not mention any of his guides, giving the public to believe that he had been the first ‘conqueror’ of the Vignemale. By the time the Prince’s article appeared, Ann Lister had sadly died while travelling in the Caucasus. She clearly had little intention of issuing any public documentary record, beyond the certificate that she had been provoked into organizing in 1838. Her papers were discovered almost by chance in Halifax Municipal Library by Vivienne Ingham, a retired local historian. Ingham visited the Pyrenees and collected oral evidence from locals which supported Lister’s version of the exploit.

100

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

The Club Alpin Français and the democratization of the Pyrenees The Club Alpin Français was founded in 1874 and within a year it had 1,700 members. Annual reports show that numbers continued to rise to a peak (to use an appropriate metaphor) of about 6,000 members in the 1890s. The club’s heartland was always in Savoy and it prioritized the Alps, but it included a substantial Pyrenean membership which regularly complained that its members were treated as second-class citizens. The Club Alpin Français promoted mountaineering, published many ascent narratives, and institutionalized the relationship with the mountains which this chapter has outlined. The work it did in assisting mountaineers eventually transformed perceptions of the landscape. As this section will show, in making the mountain more accessible to a greater number, the Club Alpin Français undermined the elitism of its pioneers and heroes. Adolphe Joanne, publisher of travel guides, was the club’s leading light, and he became the first president. The other founding members belonged to a social and intellectual elite, including the Duke of Aumale, Alexandre Dumas fils, the publisher Plon, and architect Viollet-le-Duc. It was a truly national organization, but it spawned several Pyrenean subsidiaries. The largest was the south-western section, based in Bordeaux, which had 191 members in 1876.50 Other groups of activists were soon formed in the central Pyrenees (Toulouse), the western Pyrenees (Pau) and at the Canigou (Perpignan). At the turn of the century, even more sections were formed, at Bayonne (1898), Bagnères-de-Bigorre (1899), Bagnères-de-Luchon (1902) and Tarbes (1904). But by this time the club’s concerns extended beyond mountaineering alone; they included milder forms of excursionism, to be considered in the next chapter. The Club Alpin Français was always open to interested parties who never intended to set foot on a mountain; they contributed their subscriptions and enjoyed the regular banquets. The admission fee of ten francs, together with another twenty francs annual subscription in the case of the south-western section, guaranteed a certain exclusivity. Members formed a male fraternity drawn chiefly from the upper middle classes. Of the eighty-eight members of the south-western section in 1877, the professions of sixty are known. They were overwhelmingly drawn from the ranks of Bordeaux businessmen and the liberal professions, especially lawyers. Only three of them were women.51 Béraldi considered their leaders to be seven heroic stars whom he called the Pleiades: Henry Russell, Alphonse Lequeutre

The heroic Pyrenees: The challenge of the peaks

101

who completed Adolphe Joanne’s guidebooks to the Pyrenees, the topographers Édouard Wallon and Franz Schrader, Maurice Gourdon who was one of the first travellers to write about Andorra, Aymar de Saint-Saud who embarked on a personal mission to open up the Spanish sierras, and Captain Prudent whose task was to co-ordinate up-to-date cartographical data. The club professed a scientific purpose. Geological analysis was always a priority for Franz Schrader, and improving on existing cartography was a concrete achievement of the Club Alpin Français. Before the 1880s the only available map of the Pyrenees was a deficient army map dating from 1864, and climbers regularly reported additions or emendations in order to disseminate more accurate topographical information. The Club Alpin Français improved mountain paths, created refuges where climbers could rest for a night, established lookout points and observatories. It maintained a system of accreditation for local guides, and set up a secours mutuel to provide them with a retirement pension. It provided parchment ledgers which were deposited in various cairns at the summit of the Vignemale, the Monte Perdido and other popular peaks. It organized excursions and later school camps (caravanes scolaires), but these did not flourish as desired.52 These activities made the Pyrenees more accessible to the general public, which was not to the taste of every veteran mountaineer. They valued their special status and did not always approve of the influx of hikers. There was a tension, therefore, between the role of the Club Alpin Français as the organ of the mountaineering fraternity on one hand, and its role as propagator of the benefits of healthy outdoor exercise for all on the other. Not everyone could appreciate the splendours and miseries of mountaineering. There was an elite, according to Llewellyn Smith, to whom the bivouac and the sleeping-bag, the rough fare, long marches, and inevitable hardships incidental to travel in regions unorganised by Cook, are only an additional attraction.53

Russell himself, who pioneered shelters and refuges, deplored the advent of crowds of climbers. For him, it was no more necessary for everyone to climb mountains than it was for them to play the piano like Liszt or paint like Raphael. ‘A crowd’, he decided, ‘makes everything look ugly, even nature, and especially mountains’.54 Climbing mountains was designed to develop muscles, encourage virility and self-reliance in the face of danger. They were not a café-concert open to all and sundry. They demanded serious monk-like contemplation. The democratization of the mountainsides was seen as a form of sacrilege.55

102

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Observers denounced the advent of ‘cookism’ into the Pyrenees, referring in derogatory fashion to Thomas Cook’s package tours, but the south-western section of the Club Alpin Français still tried to reassure members by promising that improving public access to the mountains did not mean turning them into a jardin anglais or scattering sand on the glaciers to make climbing easier.56 Only in 1894 did the club fully embrace its contradictions. President Laferrière then declared that the conquest of the mountains had now been achieved; the task ahead, in his view, was to organize the mountains and ‘colonize’ them. The heroic period of the Pyrenees was effectively buried.57

Henry Russell Henry Russell, as we have already seen, shared many characteristics of mountaineers in the heroic age of the Pyrenees, including their masculinist and racist assumptions. Russell, however, was a complicated personality. He was revered by his contemporaries, in spite of his eccentricities and misanthropic tendencies. He was also an accomplished author who fully met Béraldi’s triple requirement for a good mountaineer – he could climb, write and feel. Count Henry Russell-Killough, to give him his full title, was born in Toulouse of a French mother and an Irish father.58 He grew up a traditional Catholic, fluent in English and French, and with enough of an investment income to travel and climb mountains. Russell attended a Jesuit college, and then in 1856 he went travelling. We are now familiar with students travelling abroad on a small budget, as a rite of passage before concentrating on university study, but Russell’s youthful travels make today’s ‘gap year’ look like a stroll to the corner shop. He visited North and South America, Russia and Siberia, Peking, Australia and New Zealand, India and the Himalayas. When he returned home in 1860 he was twenty-seven years old, and ready to devote himself to mountain climbing. His writings are enriched by reminiscences of the sights and sounds of these early years. On the Maladetta, he recalled the cupolas of Irkutsk shining in the January sun,59 while elsewhere a scene reminded him of a Siberian dawn, or the copper-coloured evenings of India.60 Russell dominated Pyrenean mountaineering between the 1860s and the 1880s. He was the first to climb the cylinder of the Marboré, and the first to climb the Vignemale in winter. He could claim thirty first ascents. In 1863, he founded the Société Ramond with his friend Charles Packe, and campaigned to

The heroic Pyrenees: The challenge of the peaks

103

set up an observatory on the Pic du Midi de Bigorre. A preliminary station was set up, but shepherds destroyed the instruments there, reportedly fearing that their flocks would be bewitched. The observatory was finally built in 1882.61 Russell’s accounts of his climbs were each only a few pages long, first published in the bulletin of the Société Ramond or the reports of the Club Alpin Français. Like all ascent narratives, they stressed the dangers and hardships of mountain climbing and the demoralization caused by abandoning a climb in bad weather. In 1878, he gathered his ascent narratives together and published them in Pau in book form, under the title Souvenirs d’un montagnard, destined for a small group of cognoscenti. He became dissatisfied, however, with the chronological arrangement of the narratives, and he felt that his own contribution to the discovery of the Spanish peaks had not been made sufficiently clear. According to Béraldi, he threw all the copies he could find from the Pont de Jurançon into the Gave de Pau.62 In 1888, he produced a new version, with a geographical arrangement of his climbs, moving from west to east, giving greater emphasis to the peaks of Aragon. In literary terms, the result was probably a work of higher quality than anything previously produced for either the Pyrenees or the Alps.63 But the reprint of the original 1878 edition, on which this chapter draws, would not have been authorized by Russell himself. Russell distanced himself from positivists like Schrader. He wanted to shake off ‘the pitiless constraints of modern science’.64 I am a simple tourist, he falsely claimed, saying ‘for me, it’s a search for emotions’.65 Instead, he celebrated the beauties of nature and the colours of the landscape. The mountains were full of light, and he was dazzled by its intensity, the Siberian whiteness, the blueness of the ice and the scarlet sunsets on the winter peaks.66 Unlike the Alps, he argued, the Pyrenees have a southern charm. They inspire love, like listening to a Chopin nocturne.67 Moreover, the mountains had a soul, which continued to inspire poets, intellectuals and of course athletes. The mountains had to be savoured alone. In fact the search for solitude was perhaps Russell’s strongest motivation. Mountaineers, he believed, were naturally people who shunned human company. The crowd, he said ‘profanes everything and destroys its poetry. Besides, it kills freedom.’68 He compared himself more than once to Robinson Crusoe alone on his island, except for Friday, the equivalent perhaps of Russell’s mountain guides.69 It was heresy to assume that climbing with a large group of friends was more enjoyable; they would distract from serious contemplation of the infinite, it would be like chatting during a concert instead of listening to the music.70 Russell always preferred taking shelter alone rather than sharing a shepherd’s hut. He designed

104

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

his own sleeping bag made of sheepskin pieces to give himself more freedom on the mountainside at night. ‘One is braver in the mountains when one is alone’, he declared, arguing that solitary climbing improved one’s character.71 At lower levels, even rushing rivers disturbed his quest for silence. The torrents, he wrote, produce a cacophony worthy of Wagner. From a Chopin-lover like Russell, this was not a compliment.72 Silence and solitude enabled him to get closer to God and a sense of the infinite. Russell’s ascent narratives are sprinkled with religious references which illustrate his profound Christian faith. The gold-tinged clouds make the soul dream of the Seraphim bowing down before the Almighty, he wrote in one account; in another, the mountains were tattooed with snow like stigmata.73 At the opening of the refuge he built on the Vignemale in 1883, affectionately known as the Villa Russell, he organized a Mass there for thirty guests and had a priest bless the refuge.74 Russell experienced the high peaks as sacred places whose essence only the chosen few could penetrate. ‘In my snowy paradise’, he wrote, ‘as with the paradise of the saints, many are called but very few are chosen’.75 Each mountain had its own unique character. They resembled people, and especially women. Like people, mountains had their point of weakness, and the climber had only to discover it in order to succeed.76 The Vignemale was his favourite companion, and he wrote of it that ‘one adopts a mountain, one marries it, one adores it, one presents it proudly to one’s friends’.77 By 1900, Russell had climbed the Vignemale thirty-one times and he would do so twice again; on his twenty-fifth ascent in 1894, he celebrated his ‘silver wedding’ with the mountain.78 On the Vignemale, the Villa Russell had a coal-fired stove and a carpet of hay on the floor. It was large enough to sleep several people at once and, at 3,200 metres, it assisted hundreds of climbers to climb the Vignemale in the decade after its inauguration in 1882. Russell had several caves dug out of the rock to provide refuges for climbers. He persuaded the prefect of the Hautes-Pyrénées to give him a ninety-nine-year lease of the mountain for one franc. The Vignemale, with its cave refuges and the Villa Russell, was his own mountain, his personal territory and his life-long Pyrenean love-affair. Russell was a contradictory character: on one hand, he frequented Pau society in winter, went to soirées and concerts and played the cello there. During the winter season, he fitted easily into Pau’s Anglophone social world. Yet, as we have seen, he aspired to complete solitude on the mountainside. He was a winter socialite with misanthropic tendencies and the ability to turn himself

The heroic Pyrenees: The challenge of the peaks

105

into a troglodyte on the Vignemale. In his ascent narratives, he hated the lowlands. The sight of a cultivated field made him ill because it seemed like a stain on the landscape.79 He mixed with company in Pau, and yet wrote that he shunned ‘effeminate pomaded city-goers’, wanting only the fellowship of true mountaineers who had legs, muscles, passion and enthusiasm.80 Russell knew he was something of an eccentric, and that if he became too much of a solitary mountain dreamer he would never be able to face the life of the salons. In a self-conscious moment, he confessed ‘I feel it only too strongly, I am a little wild (sauvage), and my life has been a kind of challenge thrown in the face of civilisation.’81 Perhaps this solitary and defiant pose was the most genuine of Russell’s many faces. It represented the heroic stance of the mountaineer, accepting physical danger and embracing the desolation of the high peaks. Russell gives us a very individual vision of the Pyrenees, religious in inspiration and romantic in temperament. In his vision, the mountains built character and athletic vigour, but they were also sacred sites which led him towards his God. Only a select group of exceptional men like himself could endure their hostility and fully comprehend their beauty. What made Russell even more exceptional was that he could write about his experiences with poetry, clarity and conviction.

End of an era By the 1890s, all the Pyrenean peaks higher than 3,000 metres had been climbed. The heroic age was drawing to a close. Climbers had conquered the Spanish peaks, and then climbed then again, in winter, by a new and more hazardous route, or without a guide. Now they would have to find new challenges, in the Andes or the Himalayas. The ranks of the Pyrenean Pleiades were growing thin. Lequeutre died in 1892, Wallon in 1895 and Charles Packe in 1896, prompting Russell to write In Memoriam in Packe’s honour, although it was perhaps a requiem for heroic Pyreneism itself.82 In 1901, the Pyrenean edition of the Guide Joanne deleted much of its mountaineering content and concentrated on detailing tourist facilities in Pau, Lourdes and Biarritz. The mountains had become more accessible to the public than ever before, welcoming school camps, photographers, hikers and cyclists, a development which Henry Russell deplored, because for him solitary exploration was always preferable to collective efforts. The Pyrenees, Béraldi raged, had become ‘la montagne-banlieue’, a suburb suitable for Sunday excursions from Pau and

106

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Tarbes. The mountainsides were henceforth littered with paper, eggshells, chicken bones and empty sardine tins.83 For the old guard, the Pyrenees now resembled a picnic site from hell. The Club Alpin Français reached new extremes in opening the mountains to the general public: in 1896 the eastern Pyrenees section dynamited the rock face to blast open a new passage to the top of the Canigou.84 The configuration of the landscape was literally being reshaped.

7

Making the nation: Cyclists and excursionists

Delights of the velocipede At the end of the nineteenth century, the bicycle began to change some fundamental aspects of work and recreation. The new machine opened up a world of Sunday picnics in the countryside, shorter commuting times and new dating rituals. The bicycle assisted soldiers, postmen and delivery boys, and it enriched the romantic life of couples: in 1893, Émile Zola cycled daily from Medan to Verneuil-sur-Seine to visit his mistress Jeanne Rozerot, and they went on rides together.1 The bicycle’s unprecedented speed radically altered conceptions of time and space and produced a modern sense of personal independence. At the same time, it enabled young people to set out on the discovery of their own country. Fourens, who rode across Roussillon in 1907, referred to: Our friend the bicycle, which, in its patient way, anticipating progress, led us, who are young, free and heedless of the hard work, the long journey or our primitive night’s lodging, towards the discovery of the wonders of our homeland.2

Fourens encapsulated here some major themes behind the popularity in France of ‘La Petite Reine’ (The Little Queen) as the bicycle was affectionately known: it was a symbol of progress, and it was associated with youth and freedom, the joys of ‘roughing it’ and not least with patriotism. The bicycle left an important legacy for the history of tourism, in the form of Michelin guides, better road maps and road signs, which automobile tourism later demanded in its turn.3 It opened up new forms of access to the Pyrenees. Cycling did not in itself, however, present a new vision of the mountain environment. The first generations of cyclo-tourists responded to the mountains with the clichéd language of the picturesque already discussed in Chapter 3. Nevertheless, there was something new about exploring the countryside in the period of the French Belle Époque. As this chapter will argue, it was closely associated with the idea of national revival. The ideal of physical regeneration was shared on both sides

108

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

of the Pyrenees, in French attempts to rebuild after the defeat of 1870, and in the Catalan cultural renaissance (renaixement) of the same period. This chapter discusses two distinct forms of cycling. On one hand, competitive cycle racing represented by the Tour de France came to the Pyrenees in 1910, thus including the region for the first time within the new territorial unity described by the Tour. On the other hand, more gentle forms of cycle-led excursions were promoted by enthusiasts like Fourens cited above, and encouraged by the Touring Club de France. Excursions to discover the nation and its treasures took different forms, both pedestrian and on two wheels. Accordingly, this chapter also refers to the patriotic project of the Associació d’Excursions Catalana. In each case, hiking and biking helped to build the nation. Mobility was transformed by the commercialization of the so-called ‘safety bicycle’. In the 1880s and 1890s, cycles acquired the essential design features with which we are familiar today. Unlike their penny-farthing ancestors, they now had two wheels of equal size. They had chain-driven rear wheels and their tyres, aggressively promoted by Dunlop and Michelin, were pneumatic instead of being made of solid rubber. They were lighter than before, which made it easier for women to ride them. Thanks to the French bicycle tax, first levied in 1893, the number of cycles in circulation in France was recorded (although no doubt it was under-reported by many seeking to evade the tax). There were close to a million cycles on French roads by 1900, and seven million by 1926. After an explosion of recreational cycling in the 1930s, French bicycle ownership rose to 8.8 million. Cycling had become essential to working-class life and leisure.4 Cycling clubs thrived in the Belle Époque; France had 1,700 of them by 1899.5 The main umbrella body for French cyclo-tourism, the Touring Club de France, claimed over 136,000 members on the eve of the First World War.6 In this period, the bicycle was still a luxury, as Baudry de Saunier had implied in 1893 when he declared I know of only two acceptable reasons why a man of common sense should refuse to enjoy the delights of the velocipede: poverty or haemorrhoids.7

Poverty, if not piles, was becoming less of a barrier. The advent of the motor-car did not diminish the appeal of the bicycle. While the middle classes turned to motor transport after the First World War, workers and peasants increasingly adopted the bicycle.8 A process of democratization turned the bicycle into an everyday machine for millions, and a thriving second-hand market made it available to those on limited budgets.

Making the nation: Cyclists and excursionists

109

The early expansion of cyclo-tourism was a reflex against the evils of urbanization. Middle-class cyclists wanted to escape from the stifling atmosphere of congested cities and the close proximity of their social inferiors, in order to benefit from the fresh air of open spaces like the Pyrenees. In 1888, Miquel Cuní outlined the noxious aspects of industrial Barcelona for his fellow Catalan excursionists, in an article complaining of tobacco smoke in theatres, frequent road accidents, bad smells on the Ramblas and foul-mouthed blaspheming workers, among other offences to middle-class comfort and propriety.9 Whether or not their tone was as grumpy as Cuní’s, cyclists and hikers successfully popularized the benefits of fresh country air for all. The growth of the boy scout movement, youth hostelling and children’s holiday camps (colonies de vacances) all suggested a generalized escape to the country away from the modern city. The bicycle’s association with women’s emancipation has been often debated, but frequently exaggerated. Women were a small minority among cyclists as a whole. Out of 1,138 members of the Touring Club de France in 1891, only fourteen were women.10 Female membership later rose to 10 per cent, but new women members had to be proposed for election by their husband, father or brother, and some cycling clubs even required married women to show written permission from their husband.11 The Touring Club de France saw itself as a fraternity of the freemasons of the road, and this inherently gendered conception marginalized women.12 In any case, women cyclists would never set out on an excursion alone; they were always accompanied by their husband or another male relative, like ‘R. M. C.’, a woman from Toulouse who set out on a round trip to Perpignan with her husband and young nephew. The husband’s role was to lead the way, push both bikes up steep gradients or when it was foggy, and repair the punctures. The party encountered strong winds and dusty conditions near Narbonne and R. M. C. became so tired that she left the group and took a train to Carcassonne.13 Clearly there were physical and social limits to female independence on two wheels. Women on wheels nevertheless threatened conventional gender roles, and aroused considerable medical debate. Some doctors saw the positive gain for women’s health in vigorous exercise and fresh air, a conception which made the bicycle a weapon against the degeneration of the race. Others, on the other hand, warned of female over-excitement, genital agitation, the masturbatory quality of pedalling and risks to female fertility.14 In the context of late nineteenth-century France and its anxieties about population growth, any perceived threat to women’s fertility was a matter of national concern. Doctors were especially concerned about the imagined adverse consequences of cycling during menstruation or

110

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

pregnancy. Short, leisurely trips were advised.15 Cycle manufacturers of course encouraged women to ride and claimed that cycling in tandem was good for a marriage. A couple that biked together stayed together and this, too, was good for the national birth rate.16

Cycling for the nation In the Spanish-American War of 1898, Spain lost her remaining colonial territories of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, and the defeat demonstrated her incompetence as an imperial power before the world. There followed an intense period of introspection, a questioning of the nation’s future and a search for the means to ‘regenerate’ it. The ideas of regeneracionismo, as this movement is known, were not entirely new, but they were now advanced with greater urgency and in an intellectual climate of deepening pessimism. There was, inevitably, a search for scapegoats: the Church was blamed for the loss of the Philippines, and the army’s weakness blamed on the recruiting system which allowed the sons of the rich to buy themselves out of military service, so that most of the fighting and dying was done by the poorest classes. There was an attack on caciquismo – the political system which relied on clientelism and on local bosses – the caciques – to deliver votes in return for jobs and contracts. Spain’s problems were not hers alone. All other European countries were wrestling with the same issues of modernization, and the same problem of adapting essentially oligarchical and hierarchical systems to a world of mass political parties and a more articulate and well-organized labour movement. Regeneracionismo, however, did not offer a coherent political programme; rather, it expressed a general attitude of discontent about the workings of Spain’s institutions and her political elites. No great political reforms were achieved, and Sagasta, who in 1898 had led his country into a war he surely knew it would lose, remained in power. Although regeneracionismo did not bring about significant political change, it had an influence in other areas of Spanish life, such as education. A new pedagogy developed which placed greater importance on physical exercise. Thousands of young men had been lost in Spain’s civil wars and colonial struggles, or else they had succumbed to tropical diseases in Spain’s far-flung Empire. Between 1895 and 1897, 50,000 men had died in the Spanish Caribbean, but only about 2,000 of them fell in combat: the rest died of yellow fever.17 Meanwhile, urban expansion was creating overcrowded and disease-ridden cities. The national

Making the nation: Cyclists and excursionists

111

mood after the ‘Desastre’ of 1898 was machismo-inspired. The revival of Spain had to begin by improving physical hygiene and strengthening the muscles and virility of its young men. This would be achieved through gymnastics, athletics and competitive sport.18 The Madrid Football Club, for example, later to become Real Madrid, was founded in 1902, but the Basques and Catalans were already a step ahead. The Athletic Club of Bilbao was conceived in 1898, and the Fútbol Club de Barcelona was established in 1899. This context favoured the growth of hiking and excursionism. Like regeneracionismo itself, these were essentially middle-class activities, and English, French and German models were influential. Spanish men needed to grow stronger. If they were perhaps less muscular than northern Europeans, they could surpass them in agility, and such qualities needed to be developed in the interests of national revival. In the Pyrenees, accordingly, the middle-class cyclists of the fin de siècle, both Spanish and French, discovered the body. Pyrenean cycling improved the oxygen intake, counteracted obesity as well as aiding digestion and muscular development. Cycling and daily gymnastics, combined with the pure air of the mountains, fulfilled a new ideology of physical fitness, and appealed to freedom-lovers yearning for a life beyond their drab city environments.19 In this way, cycling could promote a better society. In the oft-quoted words of French journalist Pierre Giffard, cycling was not just a sport but a means of social improvement (un bienfait social).20 In France’s new vogue for sport after 1870, and Spain’s search for revival after 1898, the mountains were re-evaluated as a sort of national gymnasium. They would enable both populations to recuperate and physically strengthen themselves. In France as well as Spain, therefore, cycling was part of the desired national revival. Between 1885 and 1895, the French population increased by only a quarter of a million; but the population of Germany increased by eight million over the same decade.21 France was one of the first countries in the world to achieve zero population growth but, in the years after 1870, anxiety over low fertility produced a national neurosis. Physical strength and renewed virility were patriotic imperatives. Cycling was praised as an antidote against the emasculation of France. The appalling casualties suffered by the French in the First World War merely exacerbated their natalist obsession. Cycling in the Pyrenees was a patriotic endeavour for another reason: it enabled cyclists to get to know their own country better. The accounts of cycling excursions in the Pyrenees and elsewhere published by the Touring Club de France were designed to make France’s inhabitants more aware of the country’s

112

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

natural assets and far-flung geography. There were risks involved, especially at first. Young tourists on two wheels explored the villages of La France profonde, but local peasants were not always thrilled by the intrusion and sometimes pelted them with stones.22 Nevertheless, cycling through the Pyrenees was a way of revaluing la patrie. The work of the Touring Club de France was rooted in a patriotic project. The organization’s motto was ‘Pro Patria’, and it saw a need to ‘revivify our forces and develop our physical abilities’. The Touring Club formed part of ‘an immense patriotic surge’ in the wake of the defeat of 1870, ‘in which the desire for revenge distantly rumbled’.23 ‘If there is one time when chauvinism can be praiseworthy’ the Touring Club later re-affirmed, ‘this is it. Love for our country must form the basis of all our plans.’24 The discovery of the national landscape was a priority. The French, argued René Bellet, did not love their country enough. Tourist snobbery meant that they knew Switzerland and Scotland better than France itself. The motherland beckoned, and the French were urged to take their holidays in France.25 Baudry de Saunier had laid down French cyclism’s guiding principle: ‘Let’s bring the wheat we have grown in the Beauce back to our own French granaries.’26 One significant project of the Touring Club de France was to enlist its members in the construction of a catalogue of France’s historical monuments and sites of natural beauty. Members were invited to nominate their candidates for inclusion, and provide photographs of them. In principle, all faces of the patrie were represented, but the collection gave the impression of a static and timeless rural France. Rivers and rural scenes dominated. Tourists themselves were not to appear in the photographs, and in fact people were rarely to be seen in the frame. As a result, France seemed uninhabited and silent.27 During the First World War, the Touring Club sent parcels to the front, and provided flowers for graves.28 A new post-war patriotic agenda for cyclists demanded the integration of the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine into the national tourist network. After 1918, an influx of foreign tourists was expected, but they needed to be liberated from Baedeker, the guidebook of the enemy, and provided with Hachette’s and Joanne’s guides instead. Many former hospitality workers were about to be demobilized and they needed civilian jobs. French hotels, cyclists were told, needed French owners and French staff. Hence ‘Boche, Austro-Boche or Bochophile’ hotel employees had to be purged.29 The Touring Club would, as always, fulfil its duty to the nation.

Making the nation: Cyclists and excursionists

113

The Tour de France in the Pyrenees Cyclo-tourism and excursions to the hills were ways of celebrating nationhood. Indirectly, competitive cycle racing was another. Spain had its Tour of Catalonia from 1911 to 1913, but attempts to extend it into a national race were scuppered by Madrid–Barcelona rivalry, and the Vuelta a España did not materialize until 1935. In the first decade of the twentieth century, in contrast, the Tour de France was already developing into a truly national sporting institution.30 This section turns to the Tour de France, the greatest race of all, and its first arrival in the Pyrenees in 1910. The press and manufacturing industry, as most scholars emphasize, were responsible for bringing the Tour de France into being. Several interpret the Tour as a highly commercialized symbol of Frenchness, and an important element of contemporary French globalization.31 Others stress the carnivalesque character of the Tour and, drawing on the anthropologist Bakhtin, show that for every village concerned it represents a festive moment where peace and stability are completely overturned.32 These interpretations, however, seem to describe what the Tour has become, rather than how it developed from its origins. Historically the Tour de France has actively shaped and consolidated national consciousness, by connecting hundreds of relatively remote villages in a common, national event.33 The passage of the Tour and its gaudy cavalcade through small communities like Argelès-Galost or Eaux-Bonnes made them part of France, and gave them fifteen minutes of fame and national attention. The Tour has now indeed become an annual summer fête, but there was little that was festive about its early years. When the Tour first arrived in the Pyrenees in 1910, it seemed as though the riders had been asked to perform a superhuman task. To appreciate what the first Pyrenean mountain stages meant to the Tour de France, we must focus on that first encounter in the summer of 1910, on the riders who endured the ordeal, and on the media bosses who made money out of sending them up the steepest slopes that cyclists had ever climbed.34 The Tour was inaugurated in 1903 at a critical moment. Masculinity, according to many historians, was in crisis.35 The virility of Frenchmen needed to be encouraged and their physical vitality improved, if France was to achieve the regeneration it desired, after the catastrophic defeat at Sedan at the hands of Prussia. This was the context in which the Tour was born, but the trigger was the desperate rivalry between two sporting newspapers and their managing editors – Pierre Giffard’s Le Vélo and Henri Desgrange’s L’Auto-Vélo. L’Auto-Vélo was a daily costing only five centimes, but when it appeared on the scene in 1900,

114

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Giffard’s paper Le Vélo was the established organizer of some of France’s major cycle races, including Paris–Roubaix, Paris–Bordeaux and Paris–Brest–Paris. Desgrange needed to go one better than this. In 1903, along with his associates Victor Goddet and Géo Lefevre, he organized the first truly national race – the Tour de France. This new venture would break with the tradition of previous races in which riders raced from Paris to another provincial city; now the riders would describe a nationwide circuit, delineated by the geography of France itself, starting and finishing in Paris. In 1903, there were only six stages, punctuated by many rest days. The whole race took nineteen days to complete, and the riders covered an unprecedented 2,400 kilometres. Desgrange did not have it all his own way. In 1903, Giffard sued him and L’Auto-Vélo for plagiarizing the title of his own paper, Le Vélo. Desgrange was forced to rename his paper L’Auto, a reminder that behind the Tour’s organizers were powerful sponsors in the emerging automobile industry. Giffard was financed by leading car manufacturer Darracq, while L’Auto was supported by his rivals Dion, Panhard-Levassor and Renault.36 But Giffard had done his cause no good by openly supporting Alfred Dreyfus in the pages of Le Vélo, whereas Desgrange sensibly kept sport and politics well apart from each other. Le Vélo lost advertisers and readers and this explicit commitment to the Dreyfusard cause, as much as the success of the Tour de France, brought about the demise of Le Vélo in 1903. The circulation of L’Auto started to rise from its nadir of 20,000 in 1903.37 The success of the Tour eventually doubled the paper’s circulation every July when the race was in progress. After the first few iterations of the race, however, the novelty started to wear off, and Desgrange searched for a new attraction to sell his race and defeat his competitors. His assistant Alphonse Steinès suggested that the route should pass through the Pyrenees. Steinès had already won his spurs in 1905 by negotiating a revolutionary new addition to the Tour: he had persuaded the German authorities to allow the inclusion of a stage through the ‘lost provinces’ of Alsace and Lorraine to Metz. Today the Tour conventionally makes a similar excursion into foreign territory, but these stages outside France have never had the same national and political significance as they did in the years before 1914, when riders entered territory annexed by Prussia after 1870 which France longed to regain. Steinès had made this possible; he was now entrusted with a mission to the Pyrenees to verify that climbing the peaks on a cycle was not a completely farcical proposition. Steinès’ journey of reconnaissance to the Pyrenees has entered Tour de France folklore.38 He ventured into the mountains in January – not the best time

Making the nation: Cyclists and excursionists

115

to judge the state of the passes in July, but Steinès would not be deterred. He set off with a chauffeur from Sainte-Marie-de-Campan to investigate the ascent of the Tourmalet, but his car was blocked by snow. The chauffeur turned back, but Steinès trudged on over the summit in snowdrifts four feet deep. A young shepherd led him over the pass but then left him on his own. He fell down a ravine into a stream, but struggled on, although he thought he had lost his way. According to Steinès, he sat down on a kilometre stone and wept. He was found near Barèges at three o’clock the next morning. In fact there were no sealed roads over the Pyrenean passes, only trails worn by loggers dragging timber down the slopes, and stony paths used by shepherds and cowherds. Steinès, however, was determined to make his idea a reality. In spite of his hair-raising adventure, he sent this telegram to Desgrange: Crossed the Tourmalet. Stop. Very fine road. Stop. Perfectly passable. Stop. Signed, Steinès.

There was logic in Steinès’ obstinacy. The success of the Tour in the Pyrenees depended, as he no doubt realized, on overcoming the most adverse physical conditions. If the Pyrenees did not present a high degree of difficulty, there was little to be gained by including it in the Tour. As riders would discover in 1910, the Pyrenees represented danger, exhaustion and a challenge to test the hardiest of men. The material conditions of cycle racing in the early years of the century made the Pyrenees a fearsome prospect. The bicycle had been hailed as a symbol of modernity, but by today’s standards, technology remained primitive. Wheel frames were made of wood, and the machines weighed about 20 kilograms. Punctures were frequent and riders had to stop and repair them themselves. Gear options were crude. Not until 1937 did Degrange allow the inclusion of multiple gear shifts (dérailleurs); until then he was determined to make the Tour as hard as possible for the competitors. Desgrange saw the Tour as a contest between individuals, and he fought against the influence of manufacturers’ teams like Alcyon and Peugeot. Instead of sponsors and team tactics, he envisaged single combat between gladiators. In 1910, there was none of the supporting infrastructure which characterizes the modern race. Medical assistance was strictly limited. Riders were not permitted to change their cycle; the frame of each machine was punched with lead clips (poinçonnage) which identified it and made any substitution quickly detectable. Each stage was a marathon, beginning in the early hours of the morning and lasting perhaps thirteen or fourteen hours. Competitors were

116

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

expected to achieve a minimum average speed of 15 kilometres per hour and, if they failed to do so, they would be eliminated, and ‘swept up’ by the balai or ‘broom-wagon’ which Desgrange ordered to follow the peloton. Riders frequently abandoned the race. Between 1903 and 1914, an average of only 31 per cent of starters actually completed the Tour.39 They were known as the rescapés – the survivors. There were many hazards en route, as well as the ever-present threat of sabotage by rival supporters. In 1904, armed men ambushed a group of riders near St Etienne and beat them, leaving them bleeding by the roadside.40 Semeurs de clous were a recurrent risk – enemies of the Tour or of individual riders who scattered nails on the road to induce punctures and crashes – and they reappeared near Dax on the 1910 Tour itself. The use of drugs to influence the result is nothing new – it is as old as the Tour itself. In the years before 1914, however, drugs were not employed to enhance one’s own performance but to immobilize a rival, usually by adding poison to his drink-bottle. Difficulties were thus stupendous, but selling newspapers and bicycles depended on overcoming them. During the Tour of 1914, L’Auto sold 320,000 copies daily.41 The Tour had a special appeal for young working-class men.42 Octave Lapize, for example, winner of the 1910 Tour, was a Parisian whose father drove a brewer’s dray while his mother was a marchande de vins (wine-seller). François Faber, the 1909 Tour winner, worked as a dock labourer and a furniture remover. Miners and labourers decided to chance their hand alongside these part-professionals. For a young man of humble origins, the prize money was an important incentive. Apart from the prizes offered by L’Auto itself, there were many minor prizes, promised by local communities, cycle manufacturers and even local cafés along the route. Maurice Garin, who won the first tour in 1903, pocketed a total of 6,125 francs, at a time when a worker’s daily wage averaged only five francs.43 He was a former chimney-sweep from Lens, who bought a petrol station with his prize and worked there after he retired from racing. Between the wars, the Left accused the Tour of exploiting working-class athletes for media profits. Albert Londres’ article of 1924 in Le Petit Parisien exposed the excessive demands made on riders, whom he represented as convicts (les forçats de la route).44 For communists, the Tour was an example of capitalist injustice and racing was a form of slave labour. And yet for a small number of workingclass riders, the prize money still beckoned. Some aspects of working-class male behaviour could offend bourgeois susceptibilities, and Desgrange, who needed to groom his rough-mannered charges for his newspaper public, assumed responsibility for making them

Making the nation: Cyclists and excursionists

117

respectable. In L’Auto, he prescribed correct dress and behaviour (tenue correcte) for riders. Competitors, he advised, should dress neatly and cleanly, curb their bad language and refrain from urinating in public (which was inevitable over a thirteen-hour stage). In 1910 he remedied this problem by providing toilet facilities at major checkpoints and making their use compulsory. Riders were forbidden to throw away their empty drink bottles in urban areas (apparently littering the countryside was not offensive). Fines were imposed on riders for infringing this code. Desgrange fought a long battle against cheating. In early tours, a few riders would speed up their arrival at the stage finish by taking a train. In the Pyrenees, Desgrange argued, there was no risk of this happening since the route went nowhere near any railway line. The Tour of 1910 was presented as a sporting epic of suffering and extenuation, although the organizers were taking a huge gamble on whether the competitors could endure the physical challenge. Desgrange could not confidently predict in advance whether the mountains or the riders would prevail. L’Auto promised a saga of pygmies and giants, in which the competitors were the pygmies struggling through gigantic Pyrenean landscapes.45 The key to the Tour was the stage over 326 kilometres from Luchon to Bayonne, which included the four big climbs of the Peyresourde, the col d’Aspin, the Tourmalet (over 2,000 metres in altitude, requiring an 18-kilometre climb around repeated hairpin bends) and the Aubisque. L’Auto used an epic vocabulary to present the contest. The riders faced ‘an almost superhuman task’ in what was to be ‘the most colossal challenge’.46 These were not race reports, but a part of the hyperbolic build-up designed to present the Pyrenees as hostile, dangerous and (almost) insurmountable. The riders, suggested L’Auto, would enjoy magnificent views but, it added in a rare lapse into understatement, ‘pity that the road is not brilliant’.47 Previewing the Pyrenean stages was a major feature of the newspaper’s preparation for the Tour; there were warnings of sharp bends, dangerous descents, avalanches, and one-in-ten gradients. L’Auto conjured up a landscape of menace and severe hardship. Conditions threatened to be appalling, but this is what would sell newspapers and bicycles. Steinès reported from Campan, where he had once again gone ahead to check the state of the ‘roads’: ‘It’s tough, very tough, but isn’t that what we were looking for?’48 Only exceptional courage and male fortitude could combat the dangers of the Luchon–Bayonne stage. It was to be a ‘Homeric battle’, in which riders would be ‘always climbing, their faces convulsed, muscles standing out, transfigured by the effort’.49 On the day before the Luchon–Bayonne stage, Desgrange, who had been following the race in person, decided to return to Paris pleading illness,

118

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

leaving on-the-spot refereeing to his deputy Victor Breyer. Perhaps the timing of his withdrawal was not coincidental; possibly he did not want to be present if the stage ended in disaster. The gamble taken by Steinès and accepted more reluctantly by Desgrange paid off. The Pyrenean section of the 1910 Tour had been designed to elicit unprecedented feats of athleticism and endurance and it did so, not only from the victor Lapize, but also from all the forty-six riders who completed the Luchon– Bayonne stage. The Pyrenees had been turned into an arena for an extraordinary display of masculine endurance and resolution. The hyper-masculinist discourse which, as we have seen in Chapter 6, surrounded mountaineering, was echoed in the first Pyrenean stage of the Tour. The pygmy-like riders, dwarfed by the peaks, had been transformed into what L’Auto called ‘the giants of the road’. Nicknames seemed to confirm the superhuman status of leading Tour riders. François Faber was ‘The Giant of Colombes’, Gustave Garrigou was ‘The cheerful lad (joyeux gars) from Pantin’, while the Flemish ace Vanhouwaert was dubbed ‘The Lion of Flanders’. Lapize was a diminutive 1.62 metres tall, and hardly qualified as a giant, and he was known by the sporting public more affectionately as ‘Tatave’ or ‘Le Frisé’ (Curly). Desgrange, reviewing the event later, wrote that out of the 110 riders who started the 1910 Tour, forty-one had finished the race. For Desgrange there were too many rescapés, and he promised to make the race even harder in future. Success was going to his head. He now envisaged more stages, at Dunkirk, Marseille, Besançon or Rouen. La Grande Boucle (the Great Loop), as the Tour was to be called, was becoming more inclusive of the nation as a whole.50 Octave Lapize had proved himself ‘fast, resilient, determined’, living up to expectations of his courage (vaillance).51 Lapize, however, proved something of a rebel. When Steinès had the original idea of conducting post-race interviews, Lapize told him that Desgrange was an ‘assassin’.52 He was reportedly so angry at what he had been compelled to endure that he threatened to abandon the race once he reached Eaux-Bonnes. Whatever Lapize may have threatened, he thought better of it and went on to win the Tour outright. When Octave Lapize denounced the 1910 Tour organizers as assassins, he may have made an unconscious prophecy, looking forward to the way the French High Command was to send young working men to their deaths in the war of 1914–18. François Faber, who finished the 1910 Tour in second place, was Luxembourgeois by birth. In the First World War, he joined the French Foreign Legion and was killed in action in 1915. Lapize became a sergeant in the air force and was fatally shot down in 1917 near Verdun. They were not the only

Making the nation: Cyclists and excursionists

119

casualties among the giants of the road. Desgrange survived the war, but when he re-launched the Tour de France in 1919, he had to do so with a completely new generation of cyclists. Thanks to him, the ascent of the Tourmalet became one of the race’s permanent fixtures.

Leisurely excursions The Touring Club de France did not concern itself with cycle racing. It took responsibility for leisure cycling and tourism in general. Established in 1890, it campaigned for better roads and improved road signage. It produced regional maps of France, and created an accreditation system for hotels. After 1900, it launched a campaign to install modern toilets in all hotels. It inspired the creation of Syndicats d’Initiative, responsible for developing tourism at the municipal level. The Touring Club advocated the use of cycles by the army. It promoted many forms of tourism, including winter sports and camps for young people. It promoted the Route des Pyrénées, running laterally across the central French Pyrenees. It produced a monthly journal; the following sections draw on it to discuss excursions both on foot and in the saddle. The journal insisted on the importance of writing about one’s excursion. During the 1890s, its cover presented an image of a male cyclist sitting on the grass beside his machine, taking notes. Individual excursions were reported in the revue, and the accounts embodied a code of conduct for the cyclo-tourist. He or she should never leave the group, should always retain good humour, and remember that the outing was not a race, but an opportunity to enjoy fresh air and patriotism. Cycle writing, like tourist guidebooks, told fellow clubists where to go, how long it might take, what to feel when they got there and how to ‘read’ the countryside. Prizes were offered for the best account, and the 1910 winner was a Pyrenean cyclist who crossed the Ariège, the Aude and the PyrénéesOrientales. His account was entirely undistinguished from a literary point of view, but he had mapped out a new itinerary and shown that it was practicable.53 The early days of leisure cycling were fraught with difficulty. The roads were poor and sometimes full of potholes. The journal of the Touring Club advised cyclists to be polite to peasants and not to frighten the children or shoot at dogs. It was not wise, they were reminded, to scatter flocks of sheep encountered on the road. All this advice assumed a high risk of confrontation between riders and locals, who tended to see groups of cyclists as a nuisance.54 Nevertheless, cycling clubs blossomed, and the Touring Club’s attempt to improve the country’s tourist infrastructure paid off.

120

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Bordeaux was a dynamic centre for cycling clubs, and a Béarnais club was also established in Pau, where Anglophile influence was probably decisive.55 The bulk of cycling club membership was made up of small urban businessmen (petits commerçants) and white-collar employees, the ‘new social classes’ (couches nouvelles) whom republican politician Léon Gambetta had identified as an emerging force. Very few workers became members, but a few members of the upper classes lent their patronage and occupied the leading club offices.56 The greatest expansion of cycle clubs occurred in the foothills, where slopes were gentler and cycle technology could cope with them. In the Pyrenees, this meant in towns like Pamiers and Tarbes, rather than in mountainous areas. In the early years of the century, tourism was beginning to open up the Pyrenees. The electric train to the Cerdagne was constructed, the first ski stations were built, and soon there was even a road into Andorra. We are battling to develop the potential of the ‘unknown Pyrenees’, declared Emmanuel Brousse, deputy for the Pyrénées-Orientales, in 1911, on the occasion of the Great Winter Week in the Pyrenees.57 The gentler slopes of this easternmost Pyrenean department were always more hospitable to leisure cyclists than the central mountains. Furthermore, the Touring Club defended the cause of environmental conservation in the Pyrenees, and tried to raise awareness of the dangers of deforestation. This was not a popular cause locally, however, since the Touring Club freely accused peasants and shepherds of recklessly damaging the region’s forests, as well as hunting the isard and the ibex (bouquetin) to extinction.58 Tourist bodies believed the Pyrenean countryside had to be rescued from its own inhabitants, in a conflict that prefigured today’s arguments about the future of the Pyrenean bear (see Chapter 11). In spite of nationalist propaganda about the need for vigorous exercise, the Sunday outings encouraged by the Touring Club were never too demanding. Undulating slopes were preferred to hairpin ascents. Nevertheless, Fourens’ prizewinning story of 1910 recounted a daily ride of over 70 kilometres, and another rider affirmed that covering 100 kilometres per day was perfectly achievable on a good bike with a well-adjusted saddle and the correct riding posture.59 Riders described the countryside in the hackneyed language of the picturesque. R. M. C., for example, liked the ‘smiling country’ of the Aude, while Maurice Gravier appreciated ‘charming countryside and splendid views’ south of Pau.60 Fraternal conviviality was important, and many excursions would conclude in a local inn, where toasts were offered to the ‘freemasonry of fresh air’.61 The Touring Club was a lay organization and normally took no heed of

Making the nation: Cyclists and excursionists

121

the Sabbath, although in the Basque country, Sunday excursions could only be arranged after Mass.62 The Basque nationalist movement of the early twentieth century attached great importance to the countryside. Basque excursionists (mendigoizales) were a national vanguard, made up of young middle-class men ready to spread the spirit of Basque-ness amongst peasants along their hiking routes.63 Excursionists were dubbed ‘guerrillas of the patria’, and they were expected to speak Euskara, know Basque history, dance Basque dances and be Catholics. They expressed their nationalism through an emotional affinity with the landscape, to which they attributed symbolic value as the resting-place of Basque ancestors and evidence of the permanence of the nation. The immovable Pyrenees represented a return to authentic Basque rural values, and a national landscape was constructed around them. Decades later, in Franco’s Spain, hiking in the Basque country or going for a picnic in the mountains might therefore be viewed as an act of political protest in favour of Basque separatism, and it risked being banned by the Guardia Civil.64 The camaraderie of Basque youth associations could be read as subversive, insofar as they represented a subculture potentially hostile to the dictatorship. Excursionism thus retained a nationalist core which was slow to disappear.

Catalan excursionists The Associació d’Excursions Catalana also saw hiking as a nation-building exercise which would strengthen a sense of Catalan identity. The Association’s patriotic purpose was clearly set out in its first monthly bulletin. The association devoted itself to ‘making the value of our motherland better known’, including Catalonia’s glorious architectural and artistic heritage. The first article of the Association’s constitution made it clear that its aim was to celebrate not only Catalonia’s artistic achievement, but also its natural beauty, folklore and language.65 Excursionism was an integral part of ‘Catalanism’, as conceived by the Association. President Arabía y Solanas told a conference in Barcelona in 1880: We respect our native land; that is why we study it and why we want to make it better known; our Catalanism depends on improving ourselves physically, morally and intellectually [my emphasis].

He added in a speech reportedly received with a salvo of applause:

122

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Exercises, rising early in the morning, breathing the pure and embalming air of the fields and the mountains draws young people away from the many centres of dissipation and useless pastimes to be found in our great cities.66

When Arabía attended a Catalan fiesta in Perpignan, he was pleased to find an atmosphere ‘saturated with excursionism’.67 In reinforcing a sense of Catalan identity, Arabía argued, the nation could achieve greater independence from Spain.68 The Association promoted the scholarly study of Catalan folklore, and it raised funds for the restoration of historical monuments like the monasteries of Ripoll and also Poblet, which had been closed and empty since the secularization laws of 1835.69 It organized excursions, usually to a specific destination like a historic building, both in the Pyrenees and elsewhere within Catalonia. It urged reforestation, and envisaged a national park in the mountains, long before the idea ever surfaced in France.70 The Association made a conscious effort to escape from Catalan provincialism. It put the region on the map and contributed to the Europeanization of the excursionist movement.71 The excursionist supporters of the Catalan cultural renaissance were mainly drawn from the wealthy bourgeoisie of Barcelona. About two-thirds of members came either from the commercial and industrial middle classes or from the liberal professions. They were joined by a sprinkling from the fine arts and associated industries – typographers, engravers, painters, watchmakers and writers.72 In Ramón Arabía y Solanas, they had, from 1879 to 1883, the kind of president of which many organizations dream. Arabía was a Barcelona intellectual and a member of the Alpine Clubs of France, Austria and the Appalachians, and he knew French, English, Italian and German, although he insisted that all the activities of the Association be conducted in Catalan. He was young (in his thirties), energetic and committed, and a tireless excursionist. He accepted a missionary role, and eloquently articulated his vision of Catalanism on repeated occasions, not only at meetings of the Excursionist Association in Barcelona, but also in public lectures in Catalan provincial towns. For him, the Association was an important actor in the Catalan renaissance, as well as in the European rediscovery of nature. For Catalan excursionists, two sites were of particular significance. One was the great monastery of Montserrat, and the other, more relevant here because it is more genuinely Pyrenean, was the Canigou (lo Canigó). It mattered little that the Canigou lay in France, and that in the late nineteenth century, the best way to approach it was from the French side. Bosch de la Trinxería, who in 1887 published Recorts d’un excursionista (Memoirs of an Excursionist), frequently

Making the nation: Cyclists and excursionists

123

claimed ownership of ‘our high Pyrenees’, and had a strong affection for the Canigou. The Canigou, according to a popular verse which Bosch gushingly quoted, was ‘a precious gift (montanyas regaladas), that flowers all summer, spring and autumn. Give me your love, my sweet, give me your love, consolation of my heart.’73 The Canigou was a mountain of poetry and homage. Descriptions of the Canigou drew heavily on Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer, whose highly successful romantic poem, Canigó, published in 1886, was a hymn of praise to Catalonia’s national mountain. Verdaguer was a defrocked priest, whose religious attachment made him an idiosyncratic excursionist: he obsessively visited churches, sanctuaries, hermitages and monasteries. As a foreign traveller, he visited Protestant and Russian Orthodox churches, German synagogues and North African mosques, but they all made him pine for his ‘Christian and fervent Catalonia’. His travel writing described the Catalan Pyrenees as a world in need of preservation, to give true and lasting value to its distinctive language, folklore and of course religion.74 Since, in the eyes of Catalan nationalists, only a historical accident divided their native land into two parts, the Canigou represented an aspirational fantasy of Catalan unity.

Pioneers of tourism Romantic Catalan nationalism thus placed new value on the national heritage, both natural and artistic. In France, recreational cycling was similarly an expression of national revival. Even the racing cyclists of the Tour de France were defining the French national territory, and incorporating the Pyrenean periphery within it after 1910. This period of muted French revanchisme (the desire for revenge against Germany), and Spanish regeneracionismo contributed to the development of the tourist industry on both sides of the mountains. Cycling and excursion clubs lobbied for better roads and hotel facilities. The movement produced the Syndicats d’Initiative in France, while in Spain a government tourist agency was established in 1911 under the Marquis de la Vega-Inclán (Comisaria Regio del Turismo).75 It issued a propaganda booklet for the English-speaking market in 1928. In shaky English, the author, a sub-director of the Prado Museum, described an idealized Spain in the throes of modernization and industrialization.76 In France, tourist propaganda praised the attractions of every region, and the Pyrenees took their place among them, from the ocean at Biarritz to the mountains, spa resorts and the Mediterranean coast, henceforth known as the Côte Vermeille (Vermilion

124

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

coast), presumably to rival the Côte d’Azur.77 Facilities before 1914 were still sub-standard, but train travel had improved. Organizations like the Catalan Excursionists’ Association and the Touring Club de France were pioneering initiatives, later superseded by the enveloping power of the state. In 1984, the Touring Club de France went bankrupt. The French state had assumed many of its self-appointed functions, like the protection of public monuments and the inspection and grading of hotels. But between the 1880s and 1920s, both hiking and biking had played their part in raising national consciousness of the mountains.

8

Peoples of the frontier

The tribute of the three cows Every year on 13 July, a group of villagers from Barétous in Béarn meets a group of villagers from Roncal in Navarre to conduct an archaic ceremony whose origins are lost in time, but date from at least the fourteenth century. They meet halfway between Barétous and Roncal at St Martin’s Stone, which was once a pagan megalith bearing magical healing powers until it was replaced in 1858 by a mundane border stone, number 262. According to ritual, the villagers lay down their weapons to form a cross on the ground, kneel and together swear an oath to keep the peace. Three times they repeat the ritual phrase ‘Paz abant’, ‘May peace continue’.1 Then the people of Barétous offer the people of Roncal three heifers, a gesture which probably originated in some long-forgotten compensation for offences and injuries. Known as the Tributo de las Tres Vacas, it became a hallowed custom. The oath of peace is confirmed by an exchange of presents and a modest meal. In 1891, the ritual heifer tribute was challenged by the Protestant pastor Alfred Cardier who denounced it as a ridiculous and humiliating medieval relic. In the age of nationalism, some French inhabitants disliked the idea of giving a meaningless tribute of cows to Navarre. In the 1890s, the custom fell into disuse. In the twenty-first century, however, when such pedantic expressions of nationalism themselves seem dated, the custom has been revived, and it is still performed for tourists. The tribute of the three cows (or heifers) confirmed an ancient peace charter (carta de patz) between the two villages. This form of independent village diplomacy dated from a time when communities on both sides of the national frontier negotiated their own ways of settling conflicts without reference to any higher authority. They interacted with each other on a daily basis regardless of the legal frontier which theoretically separated them. The nation-state, exercising its claim to exclusive territorial sovereignty, eventually made such customs obsolete,

126

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

but it did so belatedly and imperfectly. This chapter will consider some ways in which local inhabitants on both sides of the Pyrenees respected the frontier, manipulated it, lamented it or simply ignored it in the modern era. Historians now view national borders not as natural barriers but as arbitrary constructions. The process of globalization and the growth of transnational institutions such as the European Union have undermined their importance. The border is a fluid zone in which a range of interactions – social, commercial, cultural and religious – occur between peoples living on each side of the legal demarcation line. Borders or frontiers (I use the terms interchangeably) bring people together as much as they divide them. Certain frontiers, however, are only too real, as the African immigrants to Europe who risk a Mediterranean crossing have learned in our own time. Borders matter, even if people take advantage of them in ways which authorities did not envisage, as smugglers, traders or political fugitives.2 In the Pyrenees, establishing the border between France and Spain was a long drawn-out task. When the Treaty of the Pyrenees was signed in 1659, it initiated a process of demarcation which took centuries to complete. It did not get under way in earnest until the mid-nineteenth century, when the Treaties of Bayonne (1856, 1862 and 1868) determined the location of boundary markers. The boundary commissioners consulted local villagers and their decisions were often based on traditional pastoral agreements still in place.3 In this way, the territorialization of the nation-state legitimized the assumptions of old agreements like the tribute of the three cows. Even then, the borderline remained uncertain. The stones got buried in snow, pushed over by livestock, or were deliberately uprooted by zealous Basque nationalists.4 The Treaty of the Pyrenees had outlined the aspirations but not the real power of nation-states. The Pyrenees was neither a cultural nor a linguistic frontier, and if national identities were to develop, they would have to be imposed on its inhabitants. In his study of the Cerdagne, Peter Sahlins upset the applecart by arguing that this was not at all how national identities developed in the Pyrenees.5 Instead of a top-down process in which national centres of authority gradually enforced their view of the world in their distant peripheries, Sahlins detected the reverse: the impulse to draw a boundary line and to identify with either France or Spain originated not from the centre but, he argued, from the periphery itself. The French, for example, started to see the Spanish as ‘foreign’ when they realized that the French state could assist them in their local disputes over livestock and pasturing rights. The process of identifying with France or Spain began, according to Sahlins, at the border itself.

Peoples of the frontier

127

Identity, however, national or otherwise, is difficult to fathom. It denotes an emotional attachment, a familiarity, a sense of affection and perhaps a sense of pride. Such inner emotions of people in the past are not directly accessible to historians. Instead, analysts must deduce a sense of identity from external signs or proxies. Those proxies, like food preferences, dress choices and language usage, are often deceptive. It is perhaps harder than Sahlins realized to judge how genuinely the precepts of official nationalism were internalized at the grass roots. As Sahlins himself recognized, Pyrenean villagers quite conceivably used the power of the nation-state simply as a convenient instrument, because it was one resource among others available to them, and not out of a deepseated emotional loyalty. In referring to the French or Spanish authorities for support in their local grievances, their sense of national identity may have been purely opportunistic, in which case we may classify it as an example of ‘national indifference’ as defined by Tara Zahra in her studies of central Europe.6 ‘In vain can we say today’, complained the Spanish boundary commissioners in 1852, this or that is your nationality, this is your fatherland, and that is your history, only because here and there stands a mountain which defines a watershed; in vain can we tell them, ‘we will change your name because there is a barrier which divides you’ […] these people will not believe us.7

If this was so, the attitude of the peoples of the frontier towards the nation-state was one of ambivalence and sometimes hostility. Other loyalties, to the region or to an ethnicity in the Basque case, were strong. Many inhabitants, furthermore, crossed the line on a daily basis, because they had ‘intermarried’ and refused complete adherence to a monolingual community. In Sahlins’ model the geographical periphery became the most dynamic agent of national identity formation. At best, this hypothesis only applies to the Cerdagne. In the Valle de Arán, locals insisted on maintaining economic contacts across the mountains even during the Peninsular War, and they tended to support whichever political group promoted good relations across the border.8 We cannot apply the model to the western Pyrenees, either, since here the Basques on either side of the frontier have never regarded each other as foreigners.9 To some extent, we can say the same about nineteenth-century Catalonia: for a Basque or a Catalan sense of identity, the national frontier was not meaningful. This chapter extends these ideas, outlining the sense of independence expressed by the border peoples of the Pyrenees. It will consider the history of both Basque and Catalan nationalism from the mid-nineteenth century onwards,

128

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

with special reference to their conception of the frontier. Andorra, too, was part of the Pyrenean frontier world. Smuggling, an ancient Pyrenean profession which defied the frontier and yet profited from it, will also be discussed. First, however, we must return to the world-view of the villagers of Barétous and Roncal to consider the fate of cross-Pyrenean peace charters.

Peace charters Geography isolated the valleys of the high Pyrenees, and reinforced their independence both from the centralizing monarchies and from each other. Valley communities like Aspe and Ossau retained autonomous control over their own affairs. In these valleys, an oligarchy of family heads organized pastoral life, fixed the dates for the start and finish of winter pasturing, and mobilized a local defence force in case of conflict with neighbouring valleys. They did not have to contend with a strong local nobility and they had no need to refer to any distant ruler to confirm their decisions.10 In 1693, the Vallée d’Aspe expressed the revolutionary idea that its relationship with the French Crown was based on a mutual contract. The community claimed ownership of the mountain it inhabited, and the inhabitants outlined the basis on which they expected respect from the monarch: they defended his frontier against Spain, and they needed to be armed in order to perform this duty for the king. It would be fitting, then, for him to recognize their ancient liberties. Needless to say, this blackmail could not protect them for long against the inroads of royal taxation levied by Louis XIV, the Sun-King himself.11 The valleys clung tenaciously to their ancient charters, which protected their fueros or fors et coutûmes, that is to say their traditional rights and customs. Villages administered their own pasturelands, mines and even thermal resorts (for example at Barèges). The extent of common land far outweighed private property in the mountains, and this made common village decisions all the more significant. The villages elected their own consuls every year, and entrusted them with the job of dividing the community’s tax burden among the taxpayers.12 They held court, imposed fines and sometimes prison sentences. This Pyrenean independence can be romanticized. It is tempting to see the autonomy of the valleys as democracy in action, across an archipelago of miniature republics. In practice, however, democracy was limited. In a patriarchal peasant society, only male heads of households exercised real authority.

Peoples of the frontier

129

The village ‘republics’ often competed against each other for limited resources, which consisted mainly of pastureland and forest. They did not warm to the presence of strangers and they did not tolerate the livestock from a neighbouring valley straying on to their own precious pastures. Stray livestock could be seized; the right of carnau technically allowed the carnalador, who had captured the guilty animals, to kill them. This, however, would be an extreme outcome; usually a settlement was reached between rival communities. Similarly, the right of pignoration authorized the holding of stray cattle until compensation had been paid. In other words, livestock that strayed was held for ransom. The struggle for control of natural resources like pastures could lead to serious conflict, in the form of what historian Christian Desplat has called ‘the Forgotten War’, referring to inter-village clashes.13 Conflicts over forest use and grazing rights were endemic and they were not confined to the medieval period. Between 1827 and 1856, two communities on opposite sides of the Pyrenees confronted each other over grazing rights in the Pays Quint (Kintoa in Basque), which straddles the border south of the valley of Aldudes. In 1827, 500 armed peasants faced off against each other for several days. In 1830, the Spanish seized 100 cows from Baïgorry, and returned only a fraction of that number after the obligatory ransom had been paid. In the same year the people of Salazar Valley (Navarre) took 400 cows, but an agreement was reached and after payment of thirty sous per head, the cattle were returned. This series of livestock captures and the payment of ransoms for their release continued up to the middle of the century. The peasants involved on both sides were Basques – but their common ethnicity in no way guaranteed friendship and understanding when serious matters like pasturing rights were at stake. One enduring problem was that the actual location of the frontier was always in doubt – it had to be negotiated between the villagers themselves. In the 1840s, peace was secured by a rough agreement between local mayors but the government, in the person of the sub-prefect of Mauléon, claimed jurisdiction over such disputes in the future. The autonomy of the valleys would eventually have to yield to the power of the state. This would be the last of the Pyrenean peasant wars.14 Autonomous villages did not only exert their sovereignty by regulating pastoral use and policing infringements of the regulations; they also made treaties with neighbouring villages across the frontier. Agreements between French and Spanish village communities administered the sharing of resources, peaceful trade and the passage of flocks on the way to their summer pastures (estives). International village diplomacy was designed to keep the peace, and the

130

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

agreements were known by the French as the lies et passeries (perhaps meaning alliances and rights of way), and on the Spanish side as cartas de patz, or peace charters. They reduced the level of inter-village conflict, but they nevertheless envisaged the punishment of owners of livestock which strayed beyond its allotted territory. The peace charters contained clauses guaranteeing their validity even if France and Spain happened to be at war with each other. Such ‘non-aggression’ pacts, as Jean-François Soulet called them, defied the ruler’s authority and completely ignored the frontier.15 In making such cross-border treaties, and setting up a judicial apparatus to judge and fine offenders, the villages of the high mountains were exerting a form of sovereignty at a micro-level which defied the authority of the state. The attempt, however, to locate and mark the frontier in the late nineteenth century demonstrated the intention of both France and Spain to assert their territorial sovereignty. The long process of political and economic integration into modern nation-states would make the cartas de patz obsolete and superfluous. The villages gradually lost the autonomy they had enjoyed for centuries under the Ancien Régime. At first, Béarn, Navarre and Roussillon were incompletely absorbed by the seventeenth-century monarchies. But the growth of national economies, and the building of roads and eventually railways on each side of the frontier, reinforced the integration process. The communities on each side of the mountain range were increasingly drawn into their own national economies. Roussillon dealt more with Perpignan, Toulouse and Paris, instead of privileging the Barcelona market. French villages looked more towards France in their commercial exchanges, and Spanish villages became gradually more oriented towards the Spanish interior. But for several hundred years, the Pyrenean valleys had had no need of a distant, foreign monarch to settle disputes and keep a fragile peace between them.

Smuggling The porous Pyrenean frontier zone sheltered one of the region’s most enduring industries – smuggling. The tax systems of Ancien Régime France and Spain had always invited illegal trade in goods subject to royal monopolies; of these, salt and tobacco offered smugglers the greatest profits. The mountains hid the mule trains carrying contraband, and the enclaves of Andorra and the Spanish territory of Llivia, enclosed within the French Cerdagne, gave smugglers an

Peoples of the frontier

131

escape route, at least in the central Pyrenees. The frontiers were a ‘magic line’, wrote Michel Brunet, which had the extraordinary power to transform the value of goods which crossed it.16 Smuggling provided an income for mule-drivers and boatmen, as well as providing cheap supplies for innkeepers and flour-millers. In this region, smuggling was an accepted part of normal existence. In the Ancien Régime, the French royal salt tax, the gabelle, made the illegal traffic in salt the most lucrative of all contraband. Although the French Revolution abolished all the monarchy’s indirect taxes, a tax on salt was reintroduced by the Bourbon Restoration in 1816. In the later years of the eighteenth century, another commodity proved even more tempting to the smuggling trade – tobacco. In 1701, the Spanish Cortes granted Philip V a royal monopoly on the sale of tobacco (the estanco). According to Lieutenant-Général de Mailly, governor of Roussillon in the 1760s, 400,000 pounds (livres) of tobacco were landed every year at Banyuls-sur-mer, and nine-tenths of this found its way to Spain.17 Most of it was grown in Piedmont and Lombardy, and arrived from Marseille or Genoa to be secretly disembarked at Banyuls. From there, it was driven into Spain by mule-train, in order to evade Spanish maritime surveillance and the risk of being captured by Maghrébien pirates. In summer, the favoured route went over the mountains not far from Le Perthus. In winter, the tobacco took a longer but easier route via Céret and Arles-sur-Tech to Puycerda in the Cerdagne.18 The French pursuit of tobacco smugglers was lukewarm at best. Smuggling tobacco into Spain hurt only the Spanish monarchy, which was not an undesirable outcome as far as the French government was concerned. In nineteenth-century Cerdagne and Roussillon, contraband developed into a large-scale industry, and it made the fortunes of a few ruthless entrepreneurs. The hardened professionals of La Grande Contrebande mainly shipped goods in the direction of Spain, exporting French iron, raw silk, leather, old rags for paper manufacture as well as tobacco. Even when France was at war with Spain, they sent cereals and livestock over the border to supply Barcelona.19 Coastal contraband on a smaller scale sustained the small ports of Banyuls and Port-Vendres on the Mediterranean coast. The Cerdagne supported black markets in a wide range of goods, including grain and livestock, while smuggling provided profits for the transit zones of Andorra and the upper Ariège.20 A wide range of goods was introduced in the other direction, from Catalonia to France, especially food supplies such as olive oil, figs, oranges and sardines, as well as cloth, wool and espadrilles.21 Contrary to the popular image, Pyrenean contraband in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not made up of glamorous luxury items. Historian Annie Brives claimed in the 1980s to have interviewed one of the last surviving smugglers of Gavarnie, Étienne

132

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Pujo-Passet. Before the Second World War he smuggled car and bicycle tyres and raincoats across the border.22 Smuggling was a modest and mundane activity. Smugglers in the Pyrenees could not have enjoyed as much success as they did for so long without the complicity of local populations, and the reluctance of local juries to convict them.23 A Catalan song, printed in 1832, expressed this close relationship between criminals and their local habitat: Si la lley nos apreta/Lo poble nos absol If the law condemns us/The people absolves us.24

Supported by the local population, and often ignored by the government, Pyrenean smugglers continued to prosper in the nineteenth century. They worked the frontier zone they knew well in defiance of the centralizing nationstate. One smuggler in the Oô valley (Haute-Garonne) told Achille Jubinal, future deputy for the department of the Hautes-Pyrénées, in the 1840s: Well might they say that the douaniers (excise men) come in the name of the law, but the mountains don’t belong to the King of France nor to the King of Spain, they belong to the people who live here. That’s why we recognize no other sovereignty but our own.25

There could be no clearer statement of Pyrenean independence. The smugglers subverted the law, and opposed armed force with armed force. When France and Spain were at war with each other, they saw the situation as a window of opportunity rather than an obstacle to trade. There were new sources of profit available in the revolutionary war of 1792–95, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Carlist War of 1833–40. Even when the French government imposed a cordon sanitaire at the Pyrenean frontier in 1821 to prevent the spread of a cholera epidemic from Spain, the contraband business found loopholes in it. Whatever the hazard, man-made or natural, it was business as usual. In some interpretations, this defiance of the power of an oppressive state made the smugglers into heroes of local liberties and independence, whose bravery and cunning were admired and applauded. The social bandit or ‘primitive rebel’ model, however, does not fit the Pyrenean smuggling trade very well. In most cases, the smuggler was not a marginal figure, nor was he sustaining a parallel economy. Rather, contraband was deeply embedded in Pyrenean society as a whole, especially at the two extremities of the mountain range. It involved entire villages and towns, and the romanticized stereotype of the brigand as a chivalrous outsider rarely applied. Instead we might describe them as a local micro-mafia, well integrated into their region, surviving through intimidation,

Peoples of the frontier

133

violence and local silence in the face of the apparatus of justice. At the same time, they provided whole communities in Roussillon and the Cerdagne with a steady income and a semblance of prosperity.

Basque nationalism and the frontier The rise of Basque and Catalan nationalisms in the second half of the nineteenth century has been attributed to the relatively weak process of national integration in Spain as a whole.26 Impoverished first by the Napoleonic conflict and then the Carlist Wars, Spain lacked the economic resources to fund public institutions or an educational system that could effectively integrate the country. Without national conscription, Spain lacked another of the essential mechanisms which nationalized the peasantry in France. Even the symbolic armoury of the nation was deficient compared to that of other European states. There was no commonly agreed national flag until 1977; even today, the Spanish national anthem has no words because there is no consensus on what they might express, or in what language. A flawed process of nation-formation was compounded by patchy economic development, exemplified by the industrialization of Catalonia and the Bilbao region at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus the most economically advanced parts of Spain were not areas where real political power lay. For the economic elites of Catalonia and the Basque country, Madrid seemed a parasitical and backward capital. Most of the Basque country and Catalonia does not lie at the border’s heartland. The two regions belong to the ‘intermediate’ or ‘outer’ borderland. But in their aspirations for unity, they perceived the frontier as a wound which could never heal.27 Separatist ideas meant that Basque nationalists refused to recognize the Pyrenean frontier separating the Spanish Basque provinces (Guipuzcoa, Vizcaya, Navarra and Alava) from the French Basque country (the Soule, Basse-Navarre and Labourd in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department). In 1981, 90 per cent of the Basque population, or about 2.6 million people, lived on the Spanish side, and today they form the Autonomous Community of Euskadi.28 In 1868, more than half of the Basques still spoke Euskara, a language without any relation to the Indo-European language family, which nineteenth-century tourists, as we have seen, found impenetrable. In some aspects, the Basques are biologically distinct: they have a high incidence of blood groups O and Rhesus Negative, which reinforces a sense of ancient unity and of being a race apart.29

134

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

In the Carlist wars of the nineteenth century, Basques defended the provincial privileges enshrined in the fueros against the Spanish state. The Basque provinces were exempt from conscription and taxation, which effectively gave every Basque the status of nobility. In 1876, at the end of the Second Carlist War, the fueros were definitively abolished, but in exchange the Basques negotiated a degree of fiscal autonomy. The traditional roots of Basque nationalism thus lay in the defence of Carlism. Basque separatism did not suddenly discover violence with ETA in the mid-twentieth century; it had frequently taken up arms to defend itself in the nineteenth century. Daniele Conversi argues that Basque separatism became increasingly violent and xenophobic because it was weak and fragmented.30 The Basque language was poorly diffused and very difficult to learn; by 1930, only a third of the Basque population spoke it, and by 1970, the proportion of Basque speakers had fallen to only 23 per cent.31 What was essentially an insecure movement thus founded its unity on race rather than language, unlike the Catalans. For Basque nationalists, spreading the language was a lower priority than preserving the purity of the race, for instance by condemning intermarriage with non-Basques.32 Modern Basque nationalism grew in the transition to industrial society. Rapid industrial expansion in the Bilbao region drew immigrant workers from Spain and elsewhere. By 1900, a swelling population lived in shanty towns, while the overcrowded city suffered from pollution and the risk of epidemics. The new immigrant population (maketos) was a Trojan horse which could spread Spanish socialism and undermine Basque unity. Working-class militancy pitted Spanish immigrant workers against Basque bosses.33 The industrial elite espoused Basquism, but this gave the movement one fundamental contradiction. It prospered in urban centres, while its traditional values were rooted in the countryside. The mainstay of Basquism was the rural farmstead where, nationalists argued, the inhabitants were descendants of a prehistoric race and maintained Basque cultural values in their original purity. Bilbao was seen as corrupt, polluted by Castilianism and riven by social conflict, whereas the countryside remained a mythical site of primitive egalitarianism.34 In its origins, the Basque nationalist movement owed everything to one man – Sabino Arana. Singlehandedly, he articulated the movement’s racist ideology, invented the flag and wrote the national anthem. Even the name the Basques give their country – Euskadi – was his invention. Arana founded the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) in 1895. Arana reacted against the influx of immigrant workers to Bilbao, and condemned the spread of Spanish influence in the city, where the Basque language was becoming marginalized. Arana himself was not

Peoples of the frontier

135

a native speaker of Euskara, but he taught himself the language and wanted to purge it of non-Basque imported words.35 After his early death in 1903, Basque ideology retained its traditionalist roots. The Basque movement was based on nostalgia for an imagined golden age before industrial capitalism. It was supported by a socially heterogeneous mixture of farmers and a manufacturing bourgeoisie which, although sympathetic towards Basque autonomy, saw benefits in maintaining economic links with Spain. The Basque language was not universally spoken, and it enjoyed little prestige since speaking Castilian was a more appealing asset to employers. The Basque movement, already in a precarious position, was tipped into extremism by Franco’s dictatorship. The Francoist repression helped to legitimize the Basque movement. The bombing of Guernica, a traditional centre of the Basque fueros, by Franco’s German allies became an international symbol for the brutality of the Spanish Civil War. For their role in the war, Franco branded Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa as ‘traitor provinces’. After the Civil War, repression intensified. The Basque language was officially prohibited, although many continued to speak Euskara at home. The ban, however, had longer-term consequences. In 1934, over one-third of the Basque population of 1.2 million spoke Euskara; by the 1970s, the total population had doubled, but the number of Basque speakers had not increased.36 Fines were imposed for wearing national dress, or for giving children Basque names.37 The dictatorship spawned the terrorist organization ETA which would demand not just Basque autonomy, but complete secession from Spain. ETA, or to give it its full name, Euskadi ta Askatasuna, was responsible for terrorist violence in the aftermath of Franco’s death in 1975. Between 1977 and 1980, 240 deaths were attributed to ETA attacks.38 Basque nationalists, however, could never represent all Basques. In the first post-Franco election of 1977, the PNV won only 30 per cent of the vote in the Basque provinces.39 Yet 50 per cent of Basques abstained in Spain’s constitutional referendum, because they felt the Spanish state did not go far enough to recognize Basque autonomy.40 ETA was influenced by Marxism and anti-colonialist theoreticians like Franz Fanon. It appealed to members of a younger generation who had seen their parents capitulate to Franco and had become profoundly radicalized.41 There have been periods in which the struggle between Basque autonomists and the Spanish state became polarized. In the 1980s, for example, antiterrorist groups fought a ‘dirty war’ against ETA with the connivance of both Spanish and French governments. Nevertheless, several factors combined to erode support for Basque extremism after the 1980s. The political parties

136

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

regained power, so that ETA was not the only voice of Basque ideals, as it had been under Franco. The Basque provinces became an Autonomous Community of Spain, which softened tensions even if it failed to satisfy extremists. New generations of Basque youth were less politicized than their forebears. Sensing at the same time that, as in Northern Ireland or Sicily, violence and assassinations were no longer socially acceptable, ETA accepted a temporary ceasefire in 1998, followed by a more permanent laying down of arms in 2006. Throughout the period under discussion, Basque nationalists retained a vision of a unified Basque territory. Their dream homeland consisted not just of the Autonomous Community of Euskadi, but also of Navarre (another Autonomous Region) and the French Basque country. In the nationalist mathematics of Sabino Arana, Basque territorial ambitions were defined in terms of ‘4 + 3 = 1’, an equation in which ‘4’ represented the Spanish Basque provinces or South Euskadi, and ‘3’ referred to the French Basque regions, or North Euskadi.42 As one interviewee told Peréz Agote: ‘A Basque can never relinquish Navarre or North Euskadi.’43 But the Basques’ desire to conduct their own ‘trans-border diplomacy’ with their counterparts in France is wishful thinking. On the French side of the frontier, there are no specifically Basque local authorities to whom they can speak. Their achievements are consequently modest, such as making Basque TV programmes available to more viewers in France.44 Paradoxically, the frontier has sometimes been of great benefit to Basque nationalists in Spain. In the years of ETA-inspired terrorism, it offered a refuge for militants who needed to escape. ETA was reluctant to endorse terrorist activity in the French Basque country in case it threatened this valuable sanctuary. On the French side, therefore, militants in the Basque movement were marginalized, and ETA terrorism did not see the French state as a target.45 One militant and popular author, André Ospital, expressed this ambivalent attitude towards the frontier thus The stories I wanted to write are mostly situated around this false frontier which I have always detested. A wall of shame which even divides families. A border between two great powers occupying our own Basque country. [...] But no doubt I became a little wiser with age and I realise that, in the end, this artificial frontier has been and perhaps still is of great benefit to us. All through history, we see that the Basques, persecuted in wars or for their political beliefs, learned how to use the frontier to perfection to take refuge when they needed to on one side of it or the other, without ever leaving the soil of their motherland.46

Peoples of the frontier

137

Catalan nationalism and the frontier There are parallels between the Basque and Catalan nationalist movements: both look back to a golden age, both experienced the force of repression under Franco, both are resigned to the frontier that cuts through their imagined communities. Unlike the Basque movement, however, Catalanism never resorted to terrorist violence, and here the national language rested on stronger foundations. As in the Basque movement, the ideological foundations of modern Catalan nationalism were laid in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when Valentí Almirall explicitly formulated the objective of a federal Spanish state, and won sympathizers among intellectuals and industrialists. Almirall saw Catalonia as an advanced region which needed to be liberated from a backward and parasitical capital. Catalan nationalists opposed the standardization of Spanish legal codes, and preferred protection for their industries rather than the free trade policies espoused in Madrid. They resented the lack of Catalan personnel within the Spanish state apparatus: between 1833 and 1901, Spain had had 902 cabinet ministers, but only twenty-four of them were Catalans.47 Resentment was aggravated by the loss of the colonies in 1898. The defeat was potentially a disaster for Catalonia since the majority of its exports had gone to Cuba (but in fact the loss of colonial markets would soon be cancelled out by the repatriation of capital to Spain).48 Catalan support for regeneration was combined with condemnation of the corruption and ineptitude of the Madrid government. Catalan nationalists looked back to a mythical golden age when the Counts of Barcelona had ruled an independent Catalan territory. In this idyllic medieval past, paternalism, religion and community solidarity had protected society from modern materialism.49 The Catalan Renaixença had a romantic, religious wing as well as a more positivist current among the industrialists. In fact the Catalan national movement spawned many different political groupings; Catalan regionalism was pluralist, and its sympathizers never coalesced around a single political programme. In the Basque country, on the other hand, a minority movement rallied around a single national political party. Unlike the Basque movement, Catalanism did not see immigrant workers as the enemy. Instead, it welcomed them and integrated them. It proved easier to teach Castilians Catalan than it was to make them Basque speakers. A survey of school parents in Catalonia in 1970 showed that 97 per cent wanted their children to learn Catalan, even though 62 per cent were natives of other parts of Spain, suggesting a high level of demand for Catalan language competence among immigrants.50 Catalonia was better than the Basque country at nationalizing its

138

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

new labour force; today Barcelona’s immensely successful football club (‘Barça’) represents just one of its effective integrating mechanisms. Catalan nationalists had a European perspective. Almirall, who like many contemporaries saw the world in terms of racial blocs, had identified Catalanism with the ‘Pyrenean bloc’ of peoples. Pyreneans were allegedly distinguished by practical good sense and concrete achievements. Like the British, they were empirically minded. Catalans were not, like the Castilians, a good-for-nothing Latin race; instead they identified with the European mainstream, and the modernist culture of Barcelona underlined this.51 The Pyrenees was no frontier to them: they looked to France and Britain for economic models and artistic inspiration. According to a phrase attributed sometimes to Alexandre Dumas and sometimes to Jules Michelet, ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees’.52 Almirall moved the line further south. For Catalans, Africa began south of Valencia. One reason why Basque nationalism became violent, it has been suggested above, was because of its inherent weakness. Catalan nationalism, in contrast, was more self-confident. Linguistic unity has always been much more of a reality in Catalonia than in the Basque provinces. In 1987, over 90 per cent of the Principat of Catalonia (that is to say, excluding Valencia) understood Catalan and over 60 per cent could speak it and/or read it – a much higher proportion than the Euskara-speakers in the Basque provinces. Furthermore, the use of Catalan was expanding.53 The Catalan language was a cherished instrument of national consciousness, but it was not used to exclude foreigners from the Catalan polity. All attempts by Franco and his predecessors to Castilianize the Catalans proved counter-productive: they succeeded only in creating greater solidarity between the different strands of the Catalan opposition, from Catholics at one extreme to anarchists at the other. Almirall had once written that the hallmark of a slave was to be forced to speak the language of his master, but Catalans resisted all forms of linguistic harassment.54 Nevertheless, class antagonisms always mitigated the force and coherence of Catalan regional aspirations. Although the Barcelona bourgeoisie was sympathetic to Catalan separatism, it had to deal with a strong anarcho-syndicalist labour movement represented by the CNT, which remained sceptical about Catalanism. As discussed in Chapter 7 the Catalan Excursionist movement promoted a nationalization of the landscape and a romanticization of the Pyrenees as a spiritual source of Catalanism. Excursionists defended the Catalan language and their visits to Roussillon and the Canigou projected an imaginary Catalan community in which Spanish and French Catalans forged a fraternal

Peoples of the frontier

139

unity. Jacint Verdaguer paid homage to the Canigou in his Catalan poem: ‘Catalans who climb there’, he wrote, ‘esteem their land more highly, / see all mountains as vassals of their mountain, / see all heads at their Titan’s feet.’ He celebrated the bonds between French and Spanish Catalans: ‘Those who now are neighbours will tomorrow be brothers; / and, as the mountain draws its curtain open, / glorious France, pious and heroic Spain / will stretch out their hands to each other.’55 All Catalans were, after all, sheltered by the same mountains and they spoke the same language. The frontier which separated them was an artificial barrier, wrote Maspons, an excursionist to Roussillon: ‘Even though one is stepping onto foreign soil, one feels as though one is at home there.’56 Spanish Catalans had to admit, however, that their French brothers were becoming less and less familiar with the Catalan tongue. The spread of the French language was increasingly powerful, so that in Roussillon, Catalans were on the defensive whereas in Barcelona the contrary was true. Francoist repression failed to destroy Catalan separatism, although it tried hard to do so. The use of the Catalan language was banned, Catalan books were burned and all teaching of Catalan culture was abolished at Barcelona University. Even the national dance, the sardana, was outlawed. The dictatorship imposed 4,000 death sentences in Catalonia between 1938 and 1953.57 Nevertheless, clandestine Catalan publishing continued, and the annual literary festival of the Jocs Florals (Floral Games) took place regularly in exile between 1941 and 1976. The Catholic Church provided a refuge and a focus of protest. The Abbey of Montserrat, a sacred site for Catalans, held a symbolic Mass in Catalan in 1947, and a large Catalan flag (the senyera) was flown from the hilltop. The outspoken Abbot gave an interview with Le Monde in which he condemned the Franco regime.58 Falangism could not erode the bastions of Catalan culture. After Franco, they re-emerged endowed with renewed prestige. Today, Catalan separatism wears more secular colours. Both the Basque country and Catalonia are Autonomous Regions with their own parliament, school system, TV channels, police force and social welfare system. Everyone in the Catalan parliament uses Catalan and it dominates life in local administration. Asserting Catalan’s European identity, and distancing the region’s relative prosperity from the failures of Madrid, are very much live political issues. The notion of making the French frontier redundant, however, was already a distant dream by the end of the nineteenth century. The integrating force of the French republican state had consigned it to the realm of romantic fantasy.

140

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Andorra as a frontier state Andorra is one of Europe’s micro-states, seldom discussed except as a bizarre anomaly or a haven for duty-free shopping. Unlike Monaco or San Marino, Andorra is a border state. Andorra’s very existence, not to mention a portion of its income, derives from its position on the peripheries of two great European states. The views of nineteenth-century travellers were polarized. For some, Andorra was a utopia; for others, a hell-hole. In one rosy vision, it seemed free, independent and simple, ‘a land that has all the glamour of the ancient world, all the charm of romance’, as Harold Spender romanticized it in 1897.59 A decade later Hilaire Belloc found its people courteous and well-to-do, an inexplicable description which went against the impression of dire poverty registered by almost everyone else who visited the remote republic.60 At the same time, Catalan nationalists idealized Andorra as an island of Catalan culture free of Castilian oppression.61 What was impressive was Andorra’s survival without any of the normal apparatus of state control. It had no army, no police force, no customs posts and no post offices, which made Spender think of it as a ‘cradle of freedom, a simple, industrious and primitive world’.62 He did not add that Andorra’s freedom and simplicity meant that it had no schools, no doctors and no roads either. Andorra’s unique status had been first guaranteed by Charlemagne. Its centuries-old political system had the appearance of a primitive democracy. The six parishes elected their General Council by verbal vote, and it appointed a president (syndic) and administered day-to-day affairs. In fact, nineteenthcentury Andorra was a patriarchy: only male heads of households had the right to vote. Andorra was not independent: it existed under a regime of dual sovereignty, shared between the French state, which inherited its powers from the medieval County of Foix, and the Bishop of Urgell in Spain. Both French and Spanish sovereigns appointed their viguiers (or vegueres) who were responsible for law and order. Even today these sovereigns receive their annual tribute from the Andorrans, in the form of cheeses, hams and capons. The system of dual sovereignty preserved Andorra, since neither France nor Spain could take control of the state without incurring the hostility of the other. Victorin Vidal, who wrote the first guide to Andorra in 1866, described it as part of the debris washed up in the shipwreck of the feudal age.63 Andorrans speak Catalan, which led a few patriotic travellers to suggest that it should become part of Spain. But there was no other good reason why either France or Spain should wish to annex Andorra, given the dire poverty of its

Peoples of the frontier

141

inhabitants and the barrenness of its soil. Mary Eyre, travelling in 1864, found nothing to eat there and repeatedly turned down lodgings offered to her because they were dirty and infested with insect life. Its people, she wrote, were ‘poor, bigoted, ignorant, dirty, lazy and vicious’.64 Hostility towards foreigners was another feature of the anti-utopian discourse about Andorra. Eyre herself was stoned by young boys and was followed everywhere by a crowd of ragamuffins.65 Andorrans were notorious for their taciturnity. In Catalonia, people who kept their mouths shut were accused of ‘making like an Andorran’ (hacer el andorrano).66 Andorrans appeared to live in a time warp. They still did public penance, on their knees in church with candle in hand, long after the Catholic Church elsewhere had abandoned the practice.67 Capital punishment, on the rare occasions when it was necessary, took the form of execution by garrotting. Andorra actively refused modernity. For decades, it opposed road building and attempts by French companies to develop its spas as tourist centres. It rejected proposals to build a casino. It rejected telegraph communications, to the point where locals chopped down the telegraph poles erected to carry them.68 It rejected French primary education, preferring that children learn the catechism and little else. Like the southeast Asian hill peoples of Zomia studied by James Scott, Andorrans deliberately refused literacy in the nineteenth century, and this protected them from being absorbed into either French or Spanish culture.69 They were practised in the art of not being governed. Andorra survived through its frontier status, through income from seasonal migration to Languedoc, and from contraband, buying young mules in France, fattening them on its own hillsides and selling them in Spain. Poverty was Andorra’s secret weapon – it made sure that no foreign power would covet the territory, leaving Andorra to continue its immutable ways. In the 1920s, the French installed hydroelectric stations and Andorra today has ski resorts and tourist installations, just like other Pyrenean centres. In the Second World War, Andorrans learned to deal in a new kind of contraband, as they smuggled refugees out of Nazi-occupied Europe over the mountains. This new method of exploiting the border is the subject of the next chapter. At the end of the Second World War, Andorra’s population was no more than 6,000; today it has risen to over 80,000, with the influx of Spanish, French and Portuguese residents. It lives on two kinds of tourism: retail tourism, attracting shoppers in search of low-duty goods, and le tourisme blanc, white tourism, in other words skiing. Andorra is a tax haven. Imports are taxed, but there is no personal income tax, and the rate of Value Added Tax imposed is very low by

142

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

European standards. Andorra has no railway and no airport. It uses the euro, but does not belong to the European Union. It accommodates three educational systems: French, Spanish and Andorran, all of which use some Catalan as a teaching medium. Its border status continues to define the republic’s character and enables it to survive. By the end of the nineteenth century, the nation-states had consolidated their control of the national territory. They built on the peace charters between Pyrenean villages, but superseded them to confirm the state monopoly of international diplomacy. The process of national integration was more complete in France, where conscription, universal primary education, the rural exodus and the formation of national markets all tightened the connection between France and its Pyrenean periphery. Michel Brunet described Roussillon in a state of chronic insubordination at the end of the eighteenth century, but a century later the French state offered valuable jobs while the decline of Spain had reduced the attraction of Barcelona.70 Integration attempts came at a price, and the price was the rise of Basque and Catalan nationalisms. The new movements saw the Pyrenees as the cradle of peasant values and as a great spiritual resource for the motherland. The frontier that divided their imagined community could be exploited as a refuge; but any thoughts of erasing it were hopeless dreams.

9

Dangerous borderlands, 1936–45

Introduction Between 1936 and 1945, the Pyrenees was the scenario of two large-scale human exoduses. The first was the flight of Spanish republicans to France, as Franco’s nationalist forces overcame Catalonia in the Spanish Civil War. The second, a few years later, was the escape of refugees in the opposite direction, fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe into neutral Spain. Both movements involved men and women who hoped to reach safety in order to renew their struggle against European fascism. For others, crossing the Pyrenees was the prelude to a new life elsewhere. The mountains now took on a new persona: they represented the road to freedom. The journey, in each case, was dangerous and difficult. There were deaths among women, children and the elderly and occasional suicides. These were the years of the traumatic Pyrenees. There was a connection between the exodus of Spanish republicans in one direction and the escape from France of Allied airmen and Jews in the other. Many Catalans who fled from the advance of Franco later joined the resistance in France; whether they belonged to an organization or not, they acted as mountain couriers or passeurs, guiding Europe’s desperate fugitives to safety. This chapter focuses particularly on the passeurs, their knowledge of the frontier zone and their very mixed motives. First I consider the republican exodus from Spain, La Retirada.

La Retirada In January 1939, Franco’s motley nationalist coalition of Falangists, right-wing Catholics, Islamic Moroccan troops and Italian fascist soldiers delivered the final blow to the Spanish Republic when its armies swept across Catalonia. The

144

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Catalans, including anarchists, socialists, communists and liberals had fought for a Spanish republic which would bring equality and social justice; at the same time they had fought for a Spain which would recognize the independent culture and language of their rich province. These dreams of provincial autonomy were now in ruins, and they would not be resurrected until after the death of Franco in 1975. In 1939, the last bastions of republicanism were crumbling. The Catalan capital Barcelona itself, once the headquarters of European anarchism, fell at the end of January. Fearing reprisals, thousands of Catalan republicans, socialists and anarchists fled over the border to France. Franco’s imminent victory sparked off a mass exodus of the desperate and defeated. In 1936, the nationalists had closed off the western Pyrenean frontier at Irún, so that when their armies entered the Basque country in 1937, refugees were forced to escape by sea, from the ports of Bilbao, San Sebastián and Santander. Some had gone to Mexico – the only country, then under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, to welcome Spanish refugees who were elsewhere identified as dangerous ‘reds’, los rojos. Others were helped by charitable and left-wing organizations to find a refuge in France, Britain, Belgium, Denmark, the Soviet Union or Switzerland. In 1939, however, Franco had ordered a blockade of the ports and escape by sea was not an available option. When Catalonia fell, somewhere between 350,000 and a half a million people sought to flee into France by walking north and crossing at Port-Bou, the pass of Le Perthus, via Prats-de-Mollo or Andorra.1 The refugees included a handful of priests, escaping the domination of enemies they considered as the ‘Satanic Reds’. They included Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei, who took a glass and patena with him so that he could celebrate Mass daily with his companions en route across the mountains to Andorra.2 But the vast majority were republican refugees, many of them rankand-file supporters of Barcelona’s anarcho-syndicalist movement. This was La Retirada – the retreat from Spain – an immense and chaotic movement of people over the Pyrenean frontier. Several hundred art works by Goya, Velasquez and other Spanish masters were escorted from Barcelona over the frontier.3 But the principal traffic concerned people, most of them Catalans, both civilians and soldiers from the defeated republican army, socialists, anarchists and separatists, making their way on foot, hoping for a generous and fraternal welcome in France. The roads leading north filled with streams of refugees, their wives and children, carts and mules. As the terrain grew more difficult, they gradually abandoned the luggage and treasured belongings which encumbered them. At

Dangerous borderlands, 1936–45

145

Mollo, the last village before France, Dolores Torres remembered leaving the family mule to a peasant, and abandoning her trousseau, linen and a box of photographs.4 Torres, born near Lerida in 1900, was a defiant young woman in her thirties. At the age of twenty-one, she had got married against her parents’ wishes. The couple had travelled across the border to Bourg-Madame where an obliging priest would marry eloping couples from Spain.5 Torres had three children but her husband Antonio was a disappointment. He was uncommunicative, Torres wrote in her memoirs, and in addition he was illiterate and a gambler. Torres, for her part, had learned to read and write at evening classes, and she became a republican sympathizer. She leaned towards communism, but was too much of an individual to join any political party and subject herself to its discipline. Now, still a rebel in her own eyes, Torres gradually shed something of her old identity as she trudged across the eastern Pyrenees. The local peasants had a windfall, considering all the furniture and carts which were abandoned in La Retirada. Jaime Espinar saw piles of abandoned objects along the route, from expensive cars, to personal items ‘dragged’, he wrote, ‘from forgotten drawers of houses’.6 These were sometimes precious items of great sentimental value. Abandoning them in the snow signified a rupture with one’s previous life, and a traumatic loss of identity. The refugees were strafed by German aircraft, and they suffered from cold and exhaustion as they struggled for days over the mountains in winter conditions. Some lost their toes, like the two brothers of José Maria Fontana, whose foot blisters and scratches became infected.7 There were deaths, separations and suicides. Dolores Torres remembered her group making slow progress over the passes in single file through the snow. One completely exhausted woman dropped her baby, which fell to a horrible death into the ravine – assuming that the child had not already frozen to death in its mother’s arms.8 Frederica Montseny was another eloquent memoir-writer, and an anarchist, who had been Minister for Health in the republican government led by the socialist Largo Caballero. Montseny saw the frontier crossing in biblical terms. The first section of her memoirs, Pasión y muerte (Passion and Death), published in 1949, was entitled ‘The Exodus’, but she invoked the New Testament and the passion of Christ more frequently for models of her ordeal. She likened the long retreat from Spain to the Way of the Cross: ‘At the stops they made in the villages along this Via Crucis’, she wrote, ‘they stretched out tired and extenuated in the gutters of the highways.’ The refugees experienced their own Calvary: ‘How many old people, sick,

146

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

wounded and children were to lie in graves along this long, sad Calvary!’9 Montseny saw her fellow refugees as victims of a biblical curse like the one that condemned Ahasverus, the legendary Wandering Jew, to walk the earth until the Second Coming as punishment for refusing to assist Christ on the path to his crucifixion. She wrote: For two years we were collectively the living incarnation of the Wandering Jew. The Biblical curse accompanied us. Walk! Walk! Walk! [...] your crime, refugee, was greater than that of Ahasverus. Your passion, greater than Christ’s. Your death, more wretched, more laughable, more sad.10

Montseny’s account was full of dramatic and emotive language which contrasted the present misery of Spain with the epic history of its people. Her rhetoric was designed to elicit French sympathy, as well as to express the collective solidarity of all those who accomplished their Retirada. The refugees had hoped for a warmer welcome on the French side of the frontier. France was, after all, the land of liberty and human rights, a sister republic and a professed enemy of fascism. ‘To their disappointment and surprise’, wrote Isabel de Palencia, ‘the France that was waiting for them was not the one they had believed in.’11 Jaime Espinar recalled the hopes he entertained as he reached the boundary stone marking the frontier: We had climbed the mountain summit. The wind let us know this. Then, a boundary marker, engraved in stone. France and Spain, never more separated by a line – a line, full of innocence, carrying no warlike message, free of mistrust and fortifications. 12

In Espinar’s imagination, the frontier had no significance. But the fraternal embrace he expected to receive when he crossed it did not materialize. The French reception was cool and full of suspicion. Nothing, to be sure, had prepared the French for the arrival of the massive numbers of refugees of all ages, many in urgent need of medical treatment, who arrived in desperation at the frontier in January 1939. On 28 January, the French government opened the frontier to civilians, still hoping to exclude former soldiers in the Spanish republican army. A few days later, on 5 February, France yielded to pressure and opened the frontier to soldiers as well, on the condition that they were disarmed before proceeding further. In these days of uncertainty, the scene at the frontier at Le Perthus was one of complete confusion. It was described in the following terms to the French Chamber of Deputies by Albert Sarrault, Minister of the Interior:

Dangerous borderlands, 1936–45

147

There are mothers and children, there are old people and invalids, there are civilians and soldiers. There is everything. There are heroes and deserters, good people and the rabble, the respectable (honnêtes gens) and the virago, the innocent and the bandit; there are dying ‘madres’; there are amputees with stumps oozing blood and the pus of gangrene through hastily applied bandages […] But all this disparate and heterogeneous crowd, in spite of differences of age and social condition, has nevertheless one and the same look, expressing moral and physical prostration. Haggard eyes, ghastly complexion, the uniform mask of faces ravaged by famine, fever and suffering, the terrible and poignant face of great human misery.13

Sarrault, it should be noted, was a member of the centrist Radical party and held no particular brief for socialism or communism. When refugees arrived in France, they were confronted by heavily-armed Senegalese troops, which many republicans, expecting a friendlier reception, remembered as a terrible shock. According to Isabel de Palencia, they were ‘semi-barbarous’.14 For the exiles of La Retirada, their experience of the Pyrenees was a physical ordeal and a painful passage into a new existence. It represented a traumatic rupture with their previous life, and a loss of identity. Arriving in France was not just a difficult phase which they knew would lead to a better life.15 Instead, the refugees of La Retirada were caught between one society which exiled them and another which rejected them as dangerous and unwanted ‘Spanish Reds’ or sales metèques (dirty wogs). They would now enter a liminal existence of camps, temporary work permits, and provisional residences with no clear outcome. Crossing the Pyrenees did not even guarantee survival. Thousands died of exhaustion in the weeks after reaching the French frontier – well over 14,000 according to Antonio Vilanova in his book Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones).16 They included the poet Antonio Machado, who died in Collioure aged seventy-four. His grave there remains a memorial to all those who died in La Retirada, and it has a post-box where his readers and sympathizers still leave dozens of messages every year. This was perhaps Europe’s first significant refugee crisis and little, it seems, has been learned from it. The French authorities were taken by surprise; they had insufficient resources to deal with the unexpectedly large number of refugees. Women and children were separated from the men and eventually dispersed across the villages of France. They subsequently had great difficulty finding where their male partners were, and many parents lost contact with their children, especially the ones who had been left behind in Spain. The men were

148

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

disarmed and herded into concentration camps (which is what the French called them) hurriedly organized on the beaches at Argelès, St Cyprien and elsewhere at Le Vernet and in the chateau of Collioure. Although the French authorities facilitated medical treatment for the refugees, eye-witnesses reported appalling conditions in the camps.17 At Argelès there were no facilities at all at first, simply an area of sand framed by barbed wire. Before huts were constructed, the ‘inmates’ had to dig holes in the sand for a little shelter from the winter tramontane. Quaker organizations offered clothes and medication for the sick and the wounded. There were no latrines, except for the sea, and even when some were built, at high tide according to Espinar ‘The sea at Argelès lost its ancient Latin beauty to become an enormous, monstrous lavatory’.18 Typhus and dysentery were rife. Later, in their memoirs, the refugees would remember above all the wind and the sand. They suffered a form of disorientation called arenitis – beach syndrome. Juan de la Pena entitled his collection of poems Arena y Viento (Sand and Wind), writing ‘All is sand. I am sand, you are sand, he is sand, the mobile guards are sand [...] My soul no longer exists.’19 Gradually, the inmates of the camps manufactured a life for themselves. They organized cultural activities and produced handwritten newspapers. There was a thriving black market. At Argelès, it was said you could buy anything you wanted along the improvised avenue nicknamed the Ramblas, in memory of Barcelona’s famous boulevard.20 For Manuel Andajar, St Cyprien was a ‘non-place’ which was gradually urbanized, with an Avenue de la Liberté, and a Barrio Chino, named after the red light district of Barcelona.21 There are some bright spots in this story of hardship. Elizabeth Eidenbenz, a Swiss Protestant aid worker who had originally volunteered to work with children in Catalonia, set up a maternity ward in a derelict chateau near Elne (Pyrénées-Orientales). Four hundred and forty-three children of the Retirada were born there between 1939 and the liberation of France in 1944 (which suggests, incidentally, that French attempts to segregate the refugees on gender lines were ineffective).22 Eidenbenz spoke both Castilian and Catalan and she drove a van named Rocinante, after Quixote’s valiant steed. After 1940, her personal hospital became a refuge for Jews, and Jewish births were registered there under false names. More than half a century later, this female Schindler was suddenly showered with medals. Israel listed her as a Righteous Gentile (2002), Spain decorated her (2006) and she received the Légion d’honneur (2007). Eventually, the refugees of the Retirada left the misery of the camps. About 6,000 joined the French army’s Foreign Legion and some were sent to Indochina.

Dangerous borderlands, 1936–45

149

Those taken prisoner by the Germans were deported to Mauthausen, where they were given a special badge – a blue triangle labelled ‘Rotspanier’, Spanish Red. About 5,000 Spaniards died there.23 Many refugees returned to Spain, and 28,000 emigrated to Mexico. By the end of 1939, after repatriations and re-emigrations, about 300,000 refugees of the Retirada had left France.24 Others were assigned work, and eventually found a residence and perhaps a spouse in France. Dolores Torres was sent to live at Moullans-sur-Ouvèze in the Drôme department, where she stayed. Her daughter Montserrat later married a Frenchman. As Frederica Montseny had foreseen, getting to France was only the beginning of the refugees’ problems. It was not until March 1945 that Spanish republicans were officially given the status of refugees. Those who had remained, refusing both repatriation to Spain and re-emigration, continued their fight against fascism by any means available. The communist writer and intellectual Jorge Semprun was aged twenty in 1943. He joined the French resistance, was captured and sent to Buchenwald. He was not alone in suffering repeated displacements from one concentration camp to another. Militants from the Retirada continued the war against Franco from French bases near the frontier. Up until 1950, anti-Franco guerrillas like Josep Dot (codenamed Athos) used the Pyrenees as a launching-pad for robberies, assassinations of Guardia Civil and ex-falangistas, the sabotage of railway lines and electricity pylons.25 The long-term aim was to overthrow Franco and reconquer Spain. In 1944, 4,000 militants led by the communist Unión Nacional Española attempted an invasion of Spain through the Vallé de Arán. Franco saw them coming and forced them to withdraw. The invaders had hoped for local support for republicanism, but the expected popular rising did not materialize. Like many exiles, the men of the Retirada were living in the past. In their minds, they were still fighting the Spanish Civil War. They remembered the Spain of 1936, divided and in armed conflict, but eight years later the war was over and it became clear that no-one wished to restart it. Anarchists and communists had originally come to the Pyrenees in the Retirada hoping to assist the anti-Franco opposition in northern Spain. Originally, they had envisaged smuggling anti-Francoist militants out of Spain, but before long they responded to the increasing demand to smuggle people over the mountain in the opposite direction. They became freedom smugglers, guiding escapees from Nazi-occupied Europe over the Pyrenees. In 1939, the refugees had become prisoners of the French but, after June 1940, they assisted French victims of Nazi oppression. The irony of Spanish and Catalan refugees reinventing themselves as guides for French rebels was

150

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

not lost on the people smugglers themselves. As Jaume Pallarès exclaimed, ‘We had to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the French when the Germans arrived […] and we were the ones who came from Argelès!’26 After France fell in 1940, and thousands fled south as the Germans advanced on Paris, the Spanish exiles had a ‘déjà vu’ experience. The French, who had given them such a hostile reception in the ‘camps of scorn’, were now on the receiving end of defeat. In their memoirs, the Spanish republican refugees saw in 1940 a re-run of their own suffering, this time with the French as victims. Isabel de Palencia wrote in retrospect: ‘It has been necessary for France to be betrayed herself, as she finally was, to question why the Spanish republicans were treated in such a way.’27 The retreat from Spain and its aftermath had been traumatic. The Pyrenees was experienced as a nightmare by those who were desperate to cross it, whether they were Catalan families or soldiers fleeing into France. For years, their struggles were forgotten. Only after the death of Franco in 1975 did it become possible to recall and commemorate La Retirada, in the publication of individual memoirs and in the French and Spanish media. The Spanish republicans had crossed the frontier in 1939 in a mass movement born of despair; in the Second World War, many Catalans helped equally desperate refugees to escape to freedom in the opposite direction. Their story is told in the following section.

The freedom smugglers of the Second World War In the late 1990s, Assumpta Montellà started collecting the oral testimonies of surviving Catalan passadors – the mountain guides who had taken refugees of different kinds and nationalities out of Vichy France (subsequently Nazioccupied France), across the Pyrenees to safety in Spain. In another place and time, these men and women might be denounced as ‘people-smugglers’, but Montellà called them ‘freedom smugglers’ – Contrabandistes de la Llibertat – and I follow her lead. In the course of her research, she learned a new definition of the word frontera. The people of the frontier follow their paths over the mountains, among the animals and the huts which dot the landscape, and in their eyes and minds they perceive a land without differences. They have become accustomed over the years to not seeing the frontier and they have blurred it, like someone trying to erase a line. Only the government insists on registering its length and power.28

Dangerous borderlands, 1936–45

151

Map 9.1 Pyrenees: Second World War escapes.

For the passadors, as Montellà realized, the frontier did not exist except as an artificial invention of politicians; for the refugees, however, it was anything but invented – their lives depended on stepping over it. The Pyrenees stretch approximately 450 kilometres from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, and there were literally dozens of escape routes all along the mountains. Indeed, the passadors kept choosing new ones to avoid falling into a predictable pattern: they had to keep the German frontier guards guessing. Escapes through the Vallé de Arán or Andorra were high-altitude routes and not for the faint-hearted. The easiest pedestrian routes were at the extremities of the range, but this was where surveillance was most intense. In the central Pyrenees, the routes through the Cerdagne to Puycerda were less demanding, and smugglers preferred to take women and children this way if possible. Madame de Lattre de Tassigny, whose husband later commanded the French forces in the Indochina War, was escorted over the frontier by this route. Émilienne Eychenne identified 2,500 different freedom smugglers. Out of 7,158 identified escape attempts, just over 2,000 were failures for one reason or another – representing a failure rate of over 28 per cent.29 The number of individuals rescued is impossible to estimate with accuracy. The French Ministry of War Veterans made a conservative estimate of 33,000, but this did not include Allied pilots or German dissidents.30 The leading scholar in the

152

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

field, Josep Calvet, proposes a much higher minimum of 80,000, including the Nazi frontier guards who wanted to escape in their turn at the liberation of France.31 The escapees had various nationalities, but their affiliations are not always easy to identify. Of the 40,000 foreigners interned by Spain, there were many Frenchmen who passed themselves off as Canadians which made it easier for them to get British assistance. Official Spanish statistics classified Jews variously as Germans, Austrians, Poles, ‘Palestinians’ or stateless persons (apatrides).32 Jews themselves claimed Dutch or Polish nationality to conceal their true ethnicity.33 The largest group of escapees was made up of young Frenchmen avoiding labour conscription – STO or Service de Travail Obligatoire – introduced by the Vichy government in 1942 to recruit French labour for German factories. More than any other single factor, this forced young men into the resistance movement; but many STO draft-dodgers preferred to escape to Spain and join the Allied forces fighting in North Africa. There were French soldiers hoping to join the Gaullists in London, there were Polish and Dutch escapees, as well as German dissidents. Perhaps as many as 1,500 Belgians also escaped over the Pyrenees. British airmen, shot down over occupied Europe, were smuggled back to Britain. Israeli historian Haim Avni claimed that 37,500 Jews escaped through Spain.34 Many were assisted by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. They were usually heading for Lisbon and a boat to the United States.35 Who were the passadors (or pasadors in Castilian)? The people smugglers included rojos (reds) as well as shepherds and professional smugglers, who exchanged their usual mule-loads for human cargo. The Soldevila brothers, for instance, were Catalan smugglers from Pallars who took wool into Andorra, and were recruited by the Belgian intelligence network in 1943.36 Perhaps the passadors combined two roles, asking escapees to carry contraband for them. There was no incompatibility between full-time smuggling and left-wing commitment. Communist smugglers abounded, like André Parent, born in 1908, alias Claude. Parent lived in the Cerdagne, and he was both a French customs official and a smuggler (a very practical combination) as well as a communist. He took escapees across the mountains sometimes on his own account and sometimes in collaboration with the maquis. For Parent, the smugglers formed an exclusive fraternity. ‘In the mountains’, he related, ‘we didn’t need law courts, we sorted out our affairs amongst ourselves, without needing justice or magistrates. You found corpses, but it was rare if you didn’t know the murderer.’37

Dangerous borderlands, 1936–45

153

French agent Robert Terres described the local passeurs who worked for him as the most implacable (irreductibles) but most idealistic of the antifascist refugees, who were dedicated to continuing the struggle against Franco and equally ready to accept some help in the form of protection and money.38

Perhaps the best passadors were indeed those with political convictions. They had to be prepared to take some risks and to be discreet and sober. They had to look after their escapees, carry their bags, their children and sometimes the clients themselves. They had to know what to do if escapees suffered from frostbite. They had to know the mountains, and be strong enough to walk several days through them at a stretch.39 The Pyrenees, wrote Eychenne, were ‘une muraille percée’ – like a Great Wall of China with many small holes in it.40 The passadors had to know where the holes were and which ones were most suitable for their clients. A few were extortionists; some were double agents. Not all freedom smugglers were locals. The largest resistance network in the western Pyrenees was led by Andrée de Jongh, a twenty-five-year-old Belgian woman known as Dédée. She first came to public attention in spectacular fashion, turning up at the British Consulate in Bilbao with three British airmen in tow, whom she had hidden and escorted all the way from Belgium.41 At first the British could not believe it, but once they had got over their suspicions, MI5 asked her to set up what became the Comet network in the French Basque country. Dédée was a popular figure amongst RAF pilots, several of whom proposed marriage after their successful escape. In 1943, she was captured by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbruck, but she survived. Comet probably saved about 800 escapees, most of them Allied pilots. The sponsorship and co-ordinating role of the British secret service was crucial to the freedom-smuggling operations. Networks like Pat O’Leary and Comet were run by the British, who provided the commanders and the money. One leader of Pat O’Leary was Francisco Ponzán, an anarchist whose group took about 3,000 escapees into Spain. Ponzán himself did not escape the Gestapo; he was killed by the Germans only a few days before the liberation of Toulouse. The Maurice network specialized in getting French soldiers to the Gaullist forces in North Africa. The Ajax network, again sponsored by the British, recruited many Spanish communists. Thérèse Mitrani, codenamed Denise, was recruited in Lyon by a man she knew only as René, and spent months criss-crossing the south-west of France taking escapees to and from Perpignan. She had made contact with the ‘Vic’ network, and René was in fact Haim Victor Gerson, a British carpet dealer and a major in the SOE (Special Operations Executive) who organized this network of British, Jewish and Catalan personnel.42

154

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

The British took advantage of the French enclave at Canfranc, five miles inside the Spanish frontier in Navarre. Canfranc was a railway station on the Pau-Zaragoza line, built in 1928. Its status as French territory was underwritten by an international convention. It became an espionage base and an arrival point for refugees crossing the frontier. It was valuable to the Germans and Spanish, too, which was why they tolerated its existence. The Germans used Canfranc as a transit point for smuggling stolen Jewish gold out of occupied Europe, and for smuggling wolfram into occupied Europe from Spain.43 Canfranc was always a white elephant; it was an enormous establishment which never attracted the volume of traffic desired. The rail link was closed in 1970. Many people had to be hired and supervised to make escapes possible. Escapees had to be escorted to the frontier, hidden, lodged and fed. They needed false papers and a few pesetas. The smugglers themselves had to be hired, and more than one was needed. In the central Pyrenees, one escort would take the group as far as possible by train or by car, another would lead the group into Andorra, where he handed over to yet another guide who would take the escapees into Spain. Andorra was a key link in this chain: many passadors lived there and, it was an important refuge on the crossing, although it was teeming with franquista spies.44 The passadors were the most expensive part of the chain. The average price they demanded was 10,000 francs per head, the cost of two and a half pairs of shoes at the inflated prices of 1942.45 Smugglers might accept a discounted rate for a group or a family, and they might bargain for jewellery instead of cash. In many cases, they asked for more than this – after all, it was wartime and they were risking their lives. In a few cases, they would stop on the mountains and refuse to go any further unless they were paid more money. In the mountains, local complicities were vital to success. Simone Arnaud, who left from Lannemazan (Hautes-Pyrénées) en route for the Col d’Aspin, was helped at various stages by a shepherd and a peasant, before descending to Bielsa on the Spanish side. Lisa Fittko, who escorted German dissidents and Social Democrats across the eastern Pyrenees, rented a house from the socialist mayor of Banyuls, who provided maps of well-worn smugglers’ routes and stamped the escapees’ false identity papers. Fittko’s first client was the GermanJewish intellectual Walter Benjamin, who insisted on stopping every ten minutes to conserve his energy throughout the ten-hour climb. Throughout the crossing, Benjamin clutched a black leather case containing, Fittko presumed, a manuscript. Fittko showed Benjamin the way down to Port-Bou, on the Spanish coast, but both of them were unaware that the Spanish government had closed the frontier for a few days to all those without an exit visa. This happened

Dangerous borderlands, 1936–45

155

occasionally, but temporarily, in the early years of the war. Later, when it became clear that the Germans were likely to lose the war, the Spanish government placed no diplomatic obstacles in the path of escapees. Benjamin was distraught at the prospect of being sent back to Nazi-occupied France. He had taken the precaution of bringing some morphine with him, and that night he committed suicide in his hotel in Port-Bou. The black leather briefcase was never found.46 Although freedom smugglers grew accustomed, as Montellà remarked, to ‘not seeing’ the frontier, it was a matter of life and death for the escapees. Yet under snow, in the harsh winter of 1942–43, the border was often invisible. The paths were snowed under that season from December to May, with 4 metres of snow recorded in February 1943 at the Pic du Midi.47 The snow claimed many victims, of frostbite, bleeding haematomas, panic, vertigo, fatal heart attacks, miscarriages or sheer exhaustion. Occasionally an avalanche swept somebody away. In a blizzard, visibility was poor and even mountain guides could become disorientated. Several escapees got lost and froze to death, while others came down on the wrong side of the mountain, thinking they were in Spain.48 In March 1944, a group of seventeen escapees got lost in the snow near Port d’Arinsal in Andorra. Three Englishmen collapsed and died there and were buried in the local cemetery.49 Nanette Fleischmann, a forty-year-old Polish Jew, crossed into Andorra in the winter of 1942 with her German Jewish companion, but they were severely frozen in temperatures of minus twenty-five degrees, and they had to have their legs amputated. Samuel Sequerra, based in Barcelona for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, got them to a clinic and they were given prosthetics. Fleischmann fortunately reached New York.50 Many others died in this frontier zone. José Alcoverro, then aged twelve, was carrying his little brother but his mother was too weak to continue with them and he could not support both at once. Alcoverro, facing a tragic dilemma, left his mother to die in an attempt to save his brother. His half-brother also died on the journey and his father was captured and later died in Mauthausen.51 For many, as Montellà poetically put it, ‘the dagger of cold had begun to prepare its gentle death by freezing’ (la mort dolça de la congelació) – gentle only because the victim slipped into unconsciousness before death.52 For just a few privileged individuals, it was possible to cross the zone in greater comfort. Baron Maurice de Rothschild was a French Senator who, at the death of the Third Republic, had voted against handing over power to Pétain. He was stripped of his French citizenship and escaped via the eastern Pyrenees. As soon as he reached Le Perthus, the last commune on the French side of the pass, he took a taxi to Barcelona, 165 kilometres away, and moved into a suite at the

156

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Ritz. There he waited for his wife Noémie, who arrived by the easier Cerdagne route with a stash of diamonds which more than covered the baron’s incidental expenses.53 If escapees survived the mountain and the winter conditions, they always faced the danger of being spotted and captured. In the early Vichy period, French surveillance was not systematic. One could travel to the foothills by bus or by train as far as La Tour de Carol, and usually French gendarmes and customs officials could be avoided. The French gendarmerie was sympathetic to escapees except on the rare occasions when they felt the need to demonstrate to the Nazis that they were an effective and reliable police force. French customs officials might accompany the passadors, or warn them in advance if they anticipated trouble.54 After 1942, however, when the Germans took control, there were more identity checks at the railway stations, as well as German army detachments posted along the frontier. Patrols of Grenzschutz (frontier police) with dogs, and Gebirjägers (light mountain infantry) searching for smugglers could turn up anywhere. From February 1943 onwards, the Germans ordered French customs officials to remain 15 kilometres inside the frontier. The Pyrenees thus became a forbidden zone which the Germans alone would police. The Guardia Civil lurked on the other side of the border. The Spanish police were keen to prevent the illegal return of communists to Spain, and the carabineros would turn back anybody they caught, receiving a monetary reward from the Germans. In 1943, however, when it appeared that Germany could not win the war, the Spanish authorities were less keen to hand escapees back to the Germans. Many escapees were surprised to find that once they reached Spain, they were imprisoned in Jaca or Pamplona, or even sent to Franco’s notorious internment camp at Miranda del Ebro.55 There they would wait until they were taken in charge by the British Consulate, or another friendly consular service, or the Red Cross. The British and Americans paid for this privilege by providing Spain with much-needed coal and fertilizer.56 Francoist policies towards the escapees thus fluctuated in response to foreign pressure. At first, refugees with a legal transit visa endorsed by a foreign consulate were not harassed. But as the Germans put more pressure on Franco to prevent Frenchmen from joining the Allied forces in North Africa, more escapees were repatriated. This could be traumatic, and it led to Jewish suicides, including that of Walter Benjamin. The British and Americans threatened Spain with economic sanctions if it did not adhere strictly to the code of neutrality. The replacement of Serran Suñer by Count Jordana as Foreign Minister in September 1942 was

Dangerous borderlands, 1936–45

157

a turning point for the Allied cause in Spain. Spain swung increasingly towards tolerating the refugees as the likelihood of Nazi defeat grew. There was always a risk of betrayal, as the dramatic story related by the passador André Parent illustrates: I was taking a group of six Jews and we were starting to climb the ridge […] In front of us we saw the footprints of another group of Jews who had left the day before. They were led by Matheu, an untrustworthy customs man. When we got to the top of the ridge we found the Jews who had gone before us, all dead stretched out on the snow. They were still warm [...] But we couldn’t stop, we had to get to the fir trees before it grew light and stay hidden in darkness. After a few hours we arrived at a safe place, the trees protected us while we waited to attack the last section before the frontier. There, as well as watching out for Nazi guards, we found Matheu, who replied nervously to our questions about the group of dead Jews. We decided to tie him to a tree and hold a people’s trial. The verdict was unanimous: guilty. Matheu was executed, killed by seven bullets, one from each of us. All the Jews in my group fired a shot at the traitor, even little Denise, who was sixteen, pulled the trigger. When we got across the frontier, I looked back and his corpse had already been buried in the snow which the blizzard had whipped up. An excessively generous concession on the part of the mountain to someone who deserved to be torn apart by the vultures.57

The passador could be turned into a Nazi informer or a double agent, and the Germans paid well for their services. The danger of informers made it imperative to watch your tongue, as the taciturn smuggler Jacques Obradors insisted: ‘In this life’, he said, ‘if you want to do something safely, it’s best not to mention it to anyone. If two people know about something, that’s one person too many.’58 He subscribed to the Catalan motto ‘a closed mouth keeps out flies’ (en boca tancada no entren mosques). Some passadors were naked extortionists. In a bar in Tarascon-sur-Ariège, Lieutenant Maurice Heym was asked for 60,000 francs per person to take his family, including his pregnant wife, across the frontier. Part way there, the passadors abandoned them, they got lost and were picked up by a German patrol.59 This ugly scenario was repeated with minor variations many times over. If the passadors were armed, which was usually the case, it was difficult to refuse their demands. The passadors looked askance at refugees who, fresh from life in the city, were unprepared for the rigours of several days’ walking at night over rugged terrain. Some escapees were simply difficult, refusing to part with precious possessions which encumbered them and slowed the whole party down. Others were too

158

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

conspicuously dressed. It was no good arriving in heels, as some women did – they had to be changed into boots and socks. Nor was it very wise to arrive in brand new hiking boots, which signalled one’s intentions much too obviously. It was best to merge with the local peasantry, and set off at dawn with them, dressed as they were in espadrilles – Pyrenean rope sandals tied up around the lower leg. The Polish-born refugee Conrad Liberman was grateful to peasants for walking his children over the frontier in this way disguised as themselves.60 A fur coat was more practical, but it was also tempting; Liberman’s mother’s fur coat was stolen in Andorra. Some escapees were not physically equal to the challenge, and this could have tragic consequences, as in the case of Jacques Grumbach, a socialist journalist wanted by the Gestapo who tried to cross in the harsh winter of 1942 with a group led by Cabrero, known as El Mano, a smuggler and former Spanish republican living in Andorra. Grumbach had taken the train from Toulouse to La Tour de Carol, carrying a large suitcase which was probably full of books, and which attracted the attention of the Germans. At a check-point at Ussat-les-Bains, Grumbach persuaded the Germans that he was researching the Cathars and was going to visit Montségur. At Ussat, he and his small group met Cabrero and set off in the rain. Grumbach was not easily mobile, and the guides referred to him as El Gordo – the fat man. He was already vomiting on the first morning of the journey. By the time they reached the Pas des Aigles, at 2,400 metres, in snow and fog and probably about fifteen degrees below zero, the passadors feared Grumbach would not make it. Cabrero forced him to abandon the suitcase, and threw it into a ravine. Then Grumbach caught his foot between two rocks and probably broke his ankle. Cabrero left him there, got the rest of the group to safety in a shepherd’s cabin, where he lit a fire, and he went back for Grumbach. He found him unconscious and freezing in the snow, and he shot him dead on the spot like a suffering animal.61 Cabrero took Grumbach’s watch, his wallet and a ring, and pushed the corpse down the slope, hoping no-one would identify it. The rest of the group got to safety via Andorra, but not before shots were exchanged with a German patrol. Meanwhile the unscrupulous El Mano had forced them to pay him more money. The story came to light when some geologists came across Grumbach’s remains in 1950, and in 1953 Cabrero was tried for murder in Foix. The prosecution made much of the fact that Cabrero had pocketed Grumbach’s valuables before disposing of the body. Cabrero had surrendered the wallet to his resistance network, but made the mistake of keeping the watch, which allowed the prosecution to portray him as a looter intent only on personal gain.

Dangerous borderlands, 1936–45

159

Cabrero’s defence argued that he was acting on orders, and in the best interests of the group as a whole. His story brought to light the ugly side of the resistance movements, but in the early 1950s, the myth of the resistance was at its height. France desperately wanted to believe in a resistance movement that was heroic and which occupied the ethical high ground. In this climate, some of the more dubious activities of the resistance were often obscured. Cabrero, after all, had served France and had certainly risked his life doing so. He may not have been the ideal resistance hero, but he was acquitted. National frontiers can create a ‘smugglers’ niche’.62 In this case the human contraband concerned was extremely vulnerable to exploitation as well as being at the mercy of the elements. The escapees, desperate to cross the frontier zone, experienced their transit as a physical and psychological ordeal, whether they were Jews, Allied airmen or Frenchmen refusing labour conscription. It was particularly harrowing for those who expected warmth and comfort at the end of their hard journey; but many escapees spent time in unsavoury Spanish jails before they were permitted to travel further. We should not lose sight of the positive elements of the crossing into safety. Reaching the end could justifiably be celebrated as a fiesta. In the summer of 1943, Simone Arnaud’s group made it to Bielsa, were offered food and drink and invited to join a small banquet which was being held to see off some local conscripts. The porons were handed around, she recalled, there were oranges and panadas to eat. Soon, the locals started singing. Inspired by the wine and the attention lavished on herself as a young attractive Frenchwoman, Simone and her companions responded with a rousing Marseillaise. She was to face three weeks in a women’s prison before the French Red Cross took her to Madrid, then to Setúbal (near Lisbon) and put her on a ship to Casablanca. ‘Now’, she wrote in her diary after that modest fiesta in Bielsa, ‘with all our heart we sang the Pyrenees, these Pyrenees that we had just conquered’.63

10

The anthropological gaze

A tale of two villages For the general public, the historical anthropology of the Pyrenees is a tale of two villages: Montaillou, a tiny backwater at an altitude of 1,400 metres east of Ax-les-Thermes over the col de Chioula, and the focus of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s bestselling study of medieval village life;1 and Artigat, set in the fertile Lèze valley west of Pamiers, the village of the sixteenth-century Martin Guerre and of his skilful impersonator Arnaud du Thil, the subject of a contextual study by Natalie Davis and a successful film directed by Daniel Vigne.2 This chapter will focus on the Montaillou phenomenon, but the enormous popularity of both suggested a profound need for a certain kind of representation of the Pyrenees on the part of the reading and film-going public. There is much more than these two well-known villages, however, in the scholarly studies of Pyrenean communities by social and cultural anthropologists, historical demographers, sociologists and ethnographers which proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s. Like the general public’s fascination with the region, the social and historical anthropology of the Pyrenees makes silent assumptions about Pyrenean society which have never been made fully explicit. From the earliest work of Pierre Bourdieu onwards,3 social and cultural anthropologists have investigated the specifics of family structures and inheritance customs in Pyrenean micro-societies. They conceptualize the Pyrenees in a certain way – as a series of small but cohesive rural communities, valuable for laboratorylike study because their sheer isolation has for so long protected them from outside influences (like agrarian capitalism, the spread of the national language and tourism) which were eventually to bring their disintegration, or at least transform them radically. The anthropologist’s gaze frames a micro-society trapped between disappearing tradition and disruptive modernity; it also assumes a narrative of depopulation, the erosion of centuries-old practices and

162

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

the decline of local cultures. This is as true for Spanish anthropologists studying the deserted villages of Aragon as it is for those engaged in fieldwork in the Pays Basque Français. Ladurie enjoyed the celebrity that the publication of Montaillou brought him. Pierre Nora, publisher at Gallimard, had to order hasty reprints to meet public demand for the book.4 Translation into many languages followed, and I return to them later. Ladurie appeared on French television in Bernard Pivot’s legendary book programme Apostrophes. Academic conferences were held to discuss the book, but Ladurie’s fame now reached beyond scholarly circles; he had become a publicly known historian. What lay behind the popularity of a remote village with barely 250 inhabitants in the early fourteenth century, when the Inquisition started to take a fatal interest in them? Before answering this puzzle in more detail, I would like to situate Montaillou (and to a lesser extent the story of Martin Guerre as well) within two discourses which inform the anthropological gaze more generally. The first of these is a discourse of Occitan exceptionalism – that is, the idea that unique customs, family structures and beliefs distinguished the land and culture of Occitania. But where, geographically speaking, is Occitania? In Ladurie’s view, Occitania embraces every part of southern France where the Occitan language was once spoken. The heartland of Occitania, however, was the royal province of Languedoc, which stretched from Toulouse in the west to the River Rhône in the east, and from the Pyrenees to the Auvergne. Languedoc only partially overlapped with the Pyrenees. It included the Pyrenean territories which lie within the modern departments of the Aude, the Ariège and the Haute-Garonne, but Occitania is not the Pyrenees. Whatever affinities it may have with neighbouring areas, it does not strictly speaking include the distinct regions of Roussillon and Catalonia, of Béarn, Aragon and the Basque country. Secondly, a discourse of decline and the disintegration of traditional societies runs through the anthropological vision of the Pyrenees. Historians and other investigators knew that the distinctive peasant societies of the Pyrenees had once been widespread but now, in the second half of the twentieth century, they were disappearing. Peasant studies in general developed in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s as social scientists examined how peasants adapted, or failed to adapt, to the challenges of industrialization and modernity. Some transformed themselves, but many inhabitants departed or emigrated, reflecting and at the same time deepening a long-term crisis of depopulation and economic stagnation. As Basque studies specialist William Douglass put it, anthropologists

The anthropological gaze

163

started moving into the peasant villages of the Pyrenees just when the peasants themselves were moving out, or when those who chose to remain were turning themselves into something other than peasants.5 The audiences of Montaillou or The Return of Martin Guerre situated those villages in an exotic world which had now vanished, but whose struggles they could nostalgically appreciate at a very human level. I understand the ‘gaze’ of the anthropologist to include the assumptions of several academic disciplines, including historians, sociologists and demographers. In this chapter, ‘anthropologist’ is a shorthand label for all those social scientists whose researches adopted, to a greater or lesser extent, an ethnographic vision. In previous chapters, I have used the notion of the ‘gaze’, which places the onlooker as a superior outsider dominating a viewed object which remains passive and inert. But the ‘gaze’ of the scholarly ethnographer is different from that of the tourist. We have encountered tourists who paid very little attention to the actual inhabitants of the Pyrenees; they romanticized them, stereotyped them or simply ignored them. In this chapter, for a change, the investigators under discussion were very interested in the inhabitants. Their fieldwork depended on interviewing the locals and living with them for an extended period. Juan José Pujadas and his partner Dolores Comas, for example, carried out fieldwork in several Aragonese villages in the 1970s. Juan José talked to people in bars and public places and visited shepherds in the hills. Meanwhile Dolores shared the female work and sociability of her local community. In 1975, the two researchers had a son there, born in Echo. As a family, they enjoyed greater social acceptance and their relationship with the locals acquired a new, more intimate, dimension. All this is openly related in their account – the anthropologists never tried to efface their presence, or obscure the relative subjectivity of their analyses.6 As both insiders and outsiders, they made a personal investment in the people of the Pyrenees. That investment and the assumptions which governed it need to be elucidated. I turn first to the public acclaim for Ladurie’s Montaillou, before considering the perspectives of Bourdieu and social anthropology. Lastly, the more nuanced viewpoints of Spanish anthropologists will be addressed.

Montaillou, Occitan village Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a northerner, born in Normandy, writing about the south. He is also a practising Catholic, writing in Montaillou about some very unorthodox Christians. His view is therefore that of an outsider. He was

164

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

originally inspired by Jean Duvernoy’s book on the Inquisition in Pamiers, which led him to get hold of a copy of the Inquisition register of Bishop Jacques Fournier, held in the Vatican Library, on which Montaillou is based.7 He read the trial records as it were against the grain, as a historical ethnographer, elucidating not merely the Cathar beliefs which led to the arrest of the entire village in 1308, but also the details of the everyday lives of the Montalionais, and the economic and social structures on which their beliefs rested. He contrasted the free and independent life of itinerant shepherds with the stable life of the village, centring on the domus.8 The domus, known as the ostal in Foix, the hostau in Béarn and the casa in Aragon, was much more than a home or a household. It carried great symbolic significance, as a religious unit, a legal entity and a landowner. In an impoverished subsistence economy, it was the hub around which both agricultural production and cultural life revolved. A domus, for example, might have its own ancestorrelics and spirits. Under its roof, there was a complex family structure, to be discussed later, and a system of dowries and inheritance customs designed to keep the family estate intact from one generation to the next. The domus stood firm against adversities like religious persecution and plague. To the anthropological historian, Montaillou was structured as an ‘archipelago of domus’.9 Basing his study on the Pamiers Inquisition records of 1318–25, Ladurie analysed the village economy, its ecology, its social organization and beliefs as a single coherent system. Montaillou, however, was not a dry exposition of social science micro-data. It became a bestseller because it offered imaginative insights into the mental universe of medieval Occitania, from the perspective of a tiny, isolated village. It used not statistical data with which Ladurie was in fact very familiar, but a very traditional source, namely the record of the cross-examinations of heretics carried out by the zealous Bishop of Pamiers. Based on a conventional documentary source, narrowly focused in time and place, Montaillou was furthermore about real people. It did not discuss impersonal trends, profound and anonymous historical movements, but Pierre Clergue the sexy priest, Pierre Maury the ingenious shepherd, and other individual characters of real flesh and bone, not to mention lice. Feminists, too, were interested, especially in the independent life of Beatrice de Planissoles, her free choice of lovers and the rape she suffered at the hands of Pathau Clergue.10 Similarly, much of the discussion about Martin Guerre focused on the decision of Bertrande de Rols to accept the false Martin into her bed, and whether she did so as a knowing accomplice or an innocent victim of the impostor.11

The anthropological gaze

165

In analysing the trial records, Ladurie faced a multiple translation problem. The Montalionais testified in Occitan, but the Inquisition clerk recorded their testimony in Latin, which would have to be read to the accused in Occitan so that his or her statements could be confirmed. Then Ladurie translated the Latin record into modern French. English readers thus encounter Montaillou in its fourth linguistic incarnation. In spite of this, the voice of the Montalionais is still heard as though an oral history project was being conducted. They showed impressive narrative skills and above all a prodigious memory when questioned by the Inquisition.12 Not only could they recall detailed conversations which happened fifteen years previously, but they remembered who was present, who was sitting on which side of the fireplace and what they were wearing at the time. They had a memory and a gift for story-telling which we often associate with oral cultures. Life in Montaillou was sexy, brutish and short. The village was blessed with a priest who, in his exploits with a dozen mistresses including his own sisterin-law, personified a prevalent view of sexual pleasure, astonishingly free from feelings of guilt or hypocrisy. This priest could even recommend incest as a way of saving on marriage dowries.13 In addition, Montaillou was focused on a power struggle between families: the sort of clan politics, perhaps, around which rural life in Mediterranean Europe has revolved for centuries. The game was to manipulate the Inquisition, in order to protect one’s friends and clients and send one’s enemies to prison. This was a deadly game, which eventually backfired on the dominant Clergue family, who had captured the key positions of local power, those of the village priest and steward to the absent seigneur. No doubt the heady cocktail of sex and religion helped to boost the book’s sales. The Cathar heresy, crushed by the Albigensian Crusade in the early thirteenth century, rejected Church authority in favour of a life of purity and abstinence. Catharism challenged the Catholic rites of confirmation and extreme unction, and allowed only one sacrament, the consolamentum, which rolled a ritual baptism (without water), confirmation and extreme unction into one. Dying Cathars were ‘hereticated’, and sometimes entered an endura, a holy fast until death. They needed a Cathar ‘priest’, a Perfect (parfait) to ensure the salvation of their souls. As a military force, Catharism had made its last stand at the fortress of Montségur, near Foix, in 1244, where more than 200 heretics who refused to abandon their faith were burned to death. Cathar activity in Montaillou thus represented a late revival of the faith, repressed in its turn by the Inquisition.14 The popularity of Montaillou cannot be explained without recognizing widespread fascination with the puritanism of the Cathars and their refusal to

166

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

accept the institutional authority of what they regarded as a corrupt Church. But the strange attraction exerted by the Cathars was entwined with another major theme – that of Occitan identity itself, of which Catharism came to be seen as an important marker. Unfortunately translations of Montaillou usually failed to do justice to the Occitan dimension which was explicit in its original title, Montaillou, village occitan. The American edition was strangely entitled Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error,15 while the British version appeared as Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village.16 The Dutch and Norwegian editions at least referred to the Pyrenees, but not to Occitania.17 Perhaps not surprisingly, the Spanish edition was one of the very few translations which did not regard the Occitan reference as a stumbling-block.18 The book’s original French subtitle ‘village occitan’ was important to the author. He derided foreign publishers who obliterated the explicit Occitan reference as ‘imbeciles’ who underestimated the intelligence of their audiences.19 In 1966, Ladurie had published his doctoral thesis, which was a substantial study of the peasants of Languedoc during the Ancien Régime, and he insisted that ‘If I worked on Montaillou, it was above all because I am a historian of Languedoc.’20 In the case of Montaillou, then, we cannot analyse the attraction of the Pyrenees without at the same time addressing the question of Occitan identity, and the role of Catharism within it. And this is in spite of the fact that Occitania and the Pyrenees are far from the same thing. The popularity of Montaillou surged on the back of two separate but loosely connected trends of the 1970s and 1980s. One was a growing academic interest in peasant studies and culture generally; and the other was a more popular interest in French regionalism and regional identity. Militant Occitan intellectuals elaborated a narrative about the political and cultural conquest of the South by the French. They argued that Occitania had been colonized by the North, and they accused the southern bourgeoisie of betraying its regional roots in adopting the French national language as well as accepting the opportunities offered by integration with the French monarchy. Medieval Occitania was frequently imagined as a land of tolerance and freedom, in contrast to the repressive and authoritarian monarchy of France. Occitania was seen as humane and even democratic, the victim of papal repression and centralized monarchical power. Ladurie was careful to distance himself from this radical discourse. He rejected the thesis of colonization, pointing out that there was no massive expropriation of land and that, until the sixteenth century, the advance of the French language in the Midi was very patchy. Occitania, he argued, was unique because of its Latin heritage, its own language, the continuity

The anthropological gaze

167

of heresy and anticlericalism in this land of both Catharism and Calvinism, and in its history of economic under-development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.21 The problem for regionalists was that Occitania has always had uncertain boundaries and a history of internal divisions, especially religious ones. Even more importantly, it has never been a political reality until very recently. Occitania, Ladurie concluded, was a ‘giant geographical entity, but a political non-entity, like a great ship sailing on a black night without any lights’.22 Nevertheless, the popular imagination seized on Occitania’s mythical past and used the memory of Catharism to bolster a sense of collective identity. Since the 1920s, historical novels set against the Cathar story have become a recognized sub-genre. With a few exceptions, they have treated the French conflict between North and South, between centralizing Jacobins and regionalists, between resistors and collaborators. They have shown a repeated fascination with secret societies, the search for the Holy Grail and esoteric religions.23 In the twentieth century, Cathar history was appropriated and commercialized by the tourist industry. Tourist guides to the ruined castles of the Route cathare attest to the transformation of Catharism into an object of mass consumption. There were Cathar castle sugar cubes, Cathar wines and patisseries (although the Perfects would never have touched either of them), Cathar fun runs and opportunities offered in the press for readers to convert to Catharism.24 Catharism was appropriated to define the region, with scant respect for historical accuracy. The pompes funèbres cathares (Cathar funeral services), spotted by this author near Pamiers, seemed in particularly bad taste, given the mass slaughter of the heretics at Montségur. Academics responded soberly to these developments. The Centre National d’Études Cathares was established in Carcassonne in 1981 to provide some scholarly correction to the enveloping myths of Catharism.25 For example, there was a rumour of Cathar hidden treasure, and a hair-brained notion that the hilltop fortress of Montségur was in fact a temple to the sun. The persistent legend associating Catharism with the Holy Grail enjoyed a recent revival in Kate Mosse’s novel Labyrinth. The author imaginatively reconstructed life in the medieval Cité of Carcassonne, but she also allotted Catharism its clichéd role of heroic resistance against totalitarian authority.26 Mosse peppered her narrative with Occitan phrases without fear of reader resistance, and her series became known as ‘the Languedoc trilogy’. In her time-slip narrative, switching between the thirteenth and twenty-first centuries, the past keeps surging back into the present, just as Catharism has certainly done, with many concomitant distortions.

168

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Kate Mosse is just one example of a general tendency to elide the Pyrenees with the entire history of Languedoc, and to reinvent the region as a kind of Cathar utopia. In Mosse’s fiction, the Pyrenees have their own spiritual presence embodied in the mysterious and ghostly character of Audric Baillard, who at the same time personifies the eternal legacy of Catharism. However much the geography of Occitania and the Pyrenees are being confused here, it must be conceded that the success of Kate Mosse, as of Ladurie’s Montaillou, responded to a need to reinvent a southern sense of identity.

Frédéric Le Play and the ideal Pyrenean family The sociology of the Pyrenees begins with Frédéric Le Play and his investigations into family structures in the 1850s and 1860s. Much of the later scholarly discourse, including the early work of Bourdieu, was to some extent framed as a conversation with, and a refutation of Le Play. Le Play was a teacher in metallurgy at the École des Mines, and he travelled through Europe collecting material for a book on metallurgy which was never published. Le Play became far more interested in the family as a social unit and a transmitter of values. He developed a conservative model of the traditional patriarchal family as the key to the social order. In 1855, He published Les Ouvriers européens (European Workers), which analysed examples from Russia, Scandinavia and central Europe as well as England and France.27 In 1871 a second book went further, introducing more model families from all over France.28 Le Play was looking for the ideal stem family or famille-souche (familia troncal in Spanish), which he believed held the best chance of passing on standards of frugality and good morality to future generations. He thought he had found his ideal in the Pyrenees, in the shape of the Melouga family of Lavedan (HautesPyrénées). The stem family, which Le Play thought was the dominant family structure of southern France, was one in which several generations of married couples lived under the same roof. The father bequeathed the family holdings to a single heir, usually but not invariably the eldest son, while younger siblings either worked unmarried for the family estate, or left home to marry elsewhere and create their own new ‘stem’. Le Play was not simply a social science observer; he had a political reform programme in mind. He deplored the legislation of the French Revolution, essentially confirmed by Napoleon’s Civil Code, which decreed the equal division of inheritances in the interests of individual equality. Le Play

The anthropological gaze

169

sought to undo what he perceived as the evils of the Revolution, by restoring the testamentary freedom of the father. Only if patriarchs could decide exactly how to dispose of the family assets could the traditional family survive. In the Pyrenees, Le Play found societies which had successfully resisted the tyranny of the centralized French state. In Navarre, the Basque Country and Lavedan, families had managed to evade the law of equal inheritances and show the way forward for the future.29 Le Play first visited the Pyrenees in 1829, but it was not until 1856 that he met the Melouga family, who embodied the values he was looking for: intergenerational co-operation, work in common and an inheritance system which favoured the eldest son but also provided for the younger offspring.30 When Le Play first encountered the Melouga household it numbered fifteen persons: fourteen family members and one servant. Joseph Py, the seventy-four-year-old widower, was the head of the family. His eldest daughter Savina was his heiress and she lived with Py together with her husband and their seven children. Of these children, the eldest daughter would be heiress in her turn and, according to accepted practice, her siblings would be offered dowries if and when they married, as compensation for giving up any legal claim on the inheritance. The household also included Savina’s unmarried uncle Dominique Py, her unmarried aunt and two unmarried brothers. The family members submitted to paternal authority and to a system of primogeniture (male or female) in the common interest of the family. The eldest child would receive one-quarter of the inheritance as the Civil Code demanded, but she would pay off her brothers in return for their surrender of any legal right to a share of the property. The Melouga were not a rich family, but the household was nevertheless a large one by local standards. Their slate house was valued at about 1,200 francs in 1856 – about the price of seven cows.31 Le Play thus saw in Occitania a model of resistance to the statutory legislation which he deplored. He and his assistants painstakingly compiled portraits of model families like the Melouga of Lavedan, detailing their possessions and family budgets. He applauded the overriding peasant aim of keeping the family estate intact. But was Le Play right about the prevalence of the stem family in the Pyrenees? How long could his traditional family, caught in a snapshot at a certain moment in time, continue to resist socio-economic modernization? And above all, for how long would younger siblings accept their subordinate status and continue to sacrifice personal ambition for the family good? Le Play’s model was frozen in time. The isolation of Pyrenean villages was not permanent, as younger men and women would emigrate in search of greater

170

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

personal freedom and fulfilment, while the growth of the tourist industry would undermine the importance of traditional agriculture. In 1864, the Melouga patriarch Joseph Py died, and thenceforth the Melouga inheritance was threatened by legal challenges which drained its financial reserves. Savina’s uncle Dominique began a lawsuit to obtain a share of the estate. Then Savina quarrelled with her eldest daughter Marthe and, in 1874, in order to settle family disputes the Cour de Cassation (Appeal Court) ordered the division of the property. The much-vaunted Melouga had become an unstable family, now reduced from the status of landowners to wage-earners. In 1882, the heiress Marthe sold the hostau and went to live in Cauterets.32 The model Pyrenean family had shattered under the pressure of its own internal disputes.

Pierre Bourdieu and the bachelors’ ball The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was a native of Béarn. His family spoke Béarnais at home, and he attended the lycée at Pau before going to Paris as a star pupil to complete his secondary and tertiary education. So in one sense he wrote about the Pyrenees as a native, using oral testimony from Béarnais villagers as part of his empirical data. He habitually reflected on his own position and methods and, in his first article, he even named one of his informants as co-author. In practice, his insider status was complicated by his recruitment into the class of intellectuels – in French terms, university-educated people. He referred to himself as a class defector, and he was conscious of moving between two worlds – those of the Pyrenean village and Parisian intellectual circles.33 He did his military service in Algeria, and published his first sociology text on Algeria in the Que sais-je? series in 1958.34 His first published work on the Pyrenees was a lengthy study of single men in Béarn, published in 1962 in Études Rurales, a relatively new journal founded by Isac Chiva to promote the expanding field of peasant studies.35 A second article on marriage strategies followed in the Annales in 1972.36 Bourdieu did his North African fieldwork in Kabylia, and in Béarn he carried out interviews in 1959–60 in the fictitious village of ‘Lesquire’, which was somewhere very close to his native village of Denguin, in the winegrowing area of the Jurançon. Bourdieu was bold to compare Béarn and Kabylia, and in doing so he was making a statement about the direction of anthropological research in France. Ethnographic fieldwork, as he wanted to demonstrate, should not apply exclusively to remote societies in Africa

The anthropological gaze

171

or the Asia-Pacific region. The French Empire was disappearing, and it was time for anthropologists to turn the microscope on France itself, to analyse social structures within their own domestic sphere. Bourdieu advocated a kind of ‘repatriation’ of French anthropology: France itself was to be his laboratory.37 Bourdieu was establishing his professional credentials: he showed that he could do empirical work and undertake multi-site studies. He was uneasy with the structuralist paradigm, and the fact that he published his second article on Béarn in a history journal (the Annales) signified his desire to distance himself from it. Whereas Le Play had held up a frozen snapshot of the famille-souche in the 1850s, Bourdieu saw a historical process at work, in which peasant communities were not closed and static, but were gradually confronting the problems of industrialization and the emigration of young people. In Béarnais marriage customs, he saw not a fixed structure whose rules were unconsciously obeyed, but strategies devised according to family circumstances and in response to biological contingency (for example, whether a family gave birth to a male heir or not was evidently a matter of chance). Struggling against the dominant influence of Lévi-Straussian structuralism, he emphasized the evolution of the Pyrenean village over time. When he turned in his Études Rurales article from structure to process, he outlined the social and economic factors which had undermined the traditional marriage and inheritance system since the end of the First World War. Whereas Le Play had envisaged all family members working for the good of the whole, Bourdieu focused on the fate of the disinherited younger sons and daughters, whom he portrayed as the unhappy victims of the system. For them, remaining single and staying at home to work on the farm was an increasingly unpopular option. Individuals no longer tolerated the traditional system of arranged marriages, organized by their elders to pursue a family strategy without regard for their feelings. Young people were leaving for the city, to Pau, Toulouse or Bordeaux, or perhaps to Paris or overseas. Young women, especially, had discovered that a little education could lead to employment in shops or offices and perhaps to marriage with a white-collar worker, which they preferred to the prospect of hard labour in a marriage to a local farmer. They could escape from parental authority, and avoid conflicts with a mother-in-law which were always exacerbated when two generations co-habited in a stem family. Young women thus played a crucial role in the breakdown of the cultural isolation of the village, and Bourdieu even claimed later that he had been doing ‘gender studies’ avant la lettre.38 Market forces and cultural change had brought about a ‘Copernican

172

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

revolution’ in which the family farm was no longer the centre of the universe. Bourdieu subscribed to a broad narrative of decline and disintegration. The old system was breaking down. Le Play had interpreted that system as stable and harmonious; but Bourdieu saw the Pyrenean family as an increasingly dysfunctional entity which perpetuated inequalities between old and young, men and women. Bourdieu stressed that urban tastes were invading village society (his remarks on consumption prefigured his later elaboration of the concept of habitus). Women preferred Paris fashion and modern hairstyles and they were the chief avenue through which the rural world adopted modern consumption patterns. Women were the Trojan horses of urban taste in a rural world.39 But as women departed the village for a better life, they left behind a cohort of ageing men who were no longer able to find a bride close to home, especially if they lived in remote hamlets. Hence the bachelor’s ball became Bourdieu’s expressive image of the crisis of Pyrenean village society, and it epitomized the logic of the new marriage market. This was the title of the posthumously published book in which he revisited the research problems of his early academic life.40 The cover of the Seuil edition of the 2002 volume presents an image of the village dance (bal du comice agricole), seen over the shoulder of an older man in a beret, standing alone and apart from the younger couples. These older men, unmarried and unmarriageable, described with some sympathy by Bourdieu, had the physical habitus of a peasant. Their gestures were heavy and clumsy and they were uncomfortable in female company. The new-fangled charleston and the cha-cha pushed them to the margins, as spectators but not participants in the dance:41 They will stay there until midnight, hardly talking, in the light and noise of the dance, watching girls who are inaccessible to them. Then they will go off to a room in the inn and drink together. They will sing old Béarnais songs at the top of their voices [...] while the orchestra plays twists and cha-chas nearby. And, in twos and threes, they will slowly wander home, at the end of the night, to their distant farms.

Bourdieu had provided a clear answer to Le Play: peasant society was in a long-term crisis. The Pyrenees were now re-invented as a local dance with a sad surplus of men, deserted by family members who no longer accepted the constraints of the traditional social system. He described the ‘demoralization’ of an older generation who felt doomed, and who nurtured a ‘catastrophic vision of their own future’.42

The anthropological gaze

173

After Bourdieu In the wake of Bourdieu’s early fieldwork in Béarn, a number of French anthropologists and historical demographers took up the baton. In the 1980s and beyond, they elaborated the hypotheses of Bourdieu in their studies of the stem family, inheritance and dowry customs and emigration patterns. Jean-François Soulet, who wrote a rich historical study of society and politics in the French Pyrenees during the nineteenth century, confirmed the emphasis placed by both Le Play and Bourdieu on the traditional authority of the paterfamilias. In the traditional family, the head of the household had sole responsibility for managing the property, conducting market transactions, naming his heir or heiress, as well as exercising the right to punish his wife, children and servants. In 1863, for instance, one father in St Lizier (Ariège) apparently hanged his twenty-two-year-old daughter who was not completely sane and whom he punished for her misbehaviour, telling an anxious neighbour that he had no right to intervene.43 Historical demographers based at the University of Toulouse worked on rather less dramatic material, asking the fundamental question: how prevalent was the stem family after all? Agnès Fine-Souriac studied census records in the Pays de Sault (Aude), just a few kilometres from Montaillou, using the methods of family reconstruction deployed at that time to great effect by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, founded in 1964. Scholars like Fine-Souriac intervened in a continuing debate about how widespread the simple nuclear family had been in pre-modern times. Whereas the British historian Peter Laslett had suggested that the nuclear family was not a modern invention, but had long pre-dated industrial society, historians like Fine-Souriac believed family structures in south-western France were historically more ‘complex’, rather than nuclear.44 By this they meant that families were likely to be extended, either horizontally to include married siblings and their families under the same roof, or vertically, to include the nuclei of two or three generations, as in the stem family model. Fine-Souriac injected some welcome common sense into the debate, but pointing out that at some point elderly parents would die, leaving a married couple alone with young children. It would take time before those children grew to adulthood and got married in their turn. The fully formed stem family, therefore, comprising three generations, was a phase which passed and then returned. Examined ‘longitudinally’, i.e. over a long time span, the stem family expanded and contracted like an accordion, according to the normal cycle of births and deaths.45 The stem family could be envisaged as a model needed to

174

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

preserve property intact in an agro-pastoral society where properties were very small. This helped to put the stem family in perspective, without in any way reducing the impact of Bourdieu’s analysis. Fine-Souriac portrayed a society in which severe economic constraints limited the size of families, where people were leaving and land going out of cultivation, and villages were shrinking and dying.46 Fine-Souriac’s findings were adopted by Antoinette Fauve-Chaumont, whose research concerned the Baronnie of Esparros, a group of four villages in the Hautes-Pyrénées. Accepting that the stem family was a model subject to the normal flux of births and deaths, and that it periodically therefore looked just like a nuclear family, she tried to give a quantitative appraisal. She found the proportion of ‘complex’ families was in decline in the late nineteenth century. The population was diminishing and so too was the size of households. Men and women were marrying at a later age; the average age at marriage in nineteenthcentury Esparros was twenty-seven for men and over twenty-five for women.47 Echoing Bourdieu, she found that growing old was a ‘sad fate’ for men when younger family members had departed, and when the division of estates was becoming more frequent.48 Legal historian Jacques Poumarède made it clear that inheritance customs varied from region to region and even from valley to valley. In the Middle Ages, the Pyrenees was a kind of legal conservatory of many different and exotic species.49 He made it clear at the same time that the younger sibling was, as Bourdieu had argued, the ‘structural victim’ of the system. Younger sons were virtually condemned to celibacy, working as unpaid helpers, sometimes forced into long absences like the travelling shepherds of Montaillou. Their fate was misery and subordination. One could say the same about many young girls who were pawns in the marriage game, used to enhance the wealth and status of the household.50 The fate of emigrants was studied by Rolande Bonnain, a Parisian researcher working on children born in Marsac (Hautes-Pyrénées), and Marie-Pierre Arrizabalaga, who studied in California before becoming a lecturer in Pau. Her eventual focus was on the fate of Basque women who emigrated from Sare, near St Jean-pied-de-port, enjoying the freedom to make autonomous choices about their work and destination.51 Both confirmed but nuanced Bourdieu’s insights into the relative importance of female emigration. After the middle of the nineteenth century, girls left Marsac more frequently than did boys, but after 1870 the proportion was temporarily reversed, probably because of the devastating effects of the phylloxera on French wine growing.52 After the First

The anthropological gaze

175

World War, girls again formed the majority of those who left the village. Like Bourdieu, Bonnain outlined a traditional system in a state of dissolution. French social scientists converged on this pessimistic vision of the Pyrenees as a site of decadence and disequilibrium. On the Spanish side, however, the picture was a little more sanguine.

Spanish anthropology French anthropologists came relatively late, as we have seen, to the study of their own societies. This was not the case for their Spanish counterparts. The collapse of the Spanish Empire in the Spanish-American War of 1898, when Spain lost its territories in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, brought about a period of introversion and national soul-searching. The intellectual movement known as regeneracionismo began an objective diagnosis of Spain’s problems and failures. One intellectual and politician who pursued this task of national selfcriticism was Joaquín Costa, who initiated ethnographic study in upper Aragon at the end of the nineteenth century.53 A few decades later, Spanish Pyrenean ethnography was further advanced by Ramón Violant i Simorra, an entirely self-taught ethnographer who in 1940 became curator of Catalan ethnography at the new Museu d’Indústries i Arts Populars. Like the German scholars who inspired him, Violant’s work took a broad view of cultural life and placed great emphasis on material culture. He studied and inventoried, among other subjects, local clothing, headwear, chimney styles and hunting implements. This was the first time that a local had done Pyrenean fieldwork and, as the title of his main work suggests, he already had a sense of a disappearing world.54 Following these pioneers, Spanish anthropologists discovered many features of Pyrenean society which echoed the findings of Le Play, Bourdieu and others in France. The stem family, grouping two or three generations in the same household, appeared a distinctive feature in Spanish Catalonia and the Basque Country. Basques in particular valued the stem family as an embodiment of regional traditions and their own cultural superiority.55 Although stem families may have constituted a statistical minority, the practice of designating a single heir (male if possible) was enshrined in the civil code of Navarre. Although the traditional Basque farming household, working a baserria (farmstead) in common, declined after the Second World War, the stem family still carried symbolic value. In spite of population decline and the shrinking size of

176

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

households, American anthropologist William Douglass found the stem family was a still a treasured ideal in his chosen village of Echalar, near the French border.56 In Huesca, Lisón Arcal found an inheritance and marriage system with many parallels on the French side of the mountains.57 Here male primogeniture was not a rigid rule, but it was always preferable to designating a female heiress. The overriding aim for peasant families was to protect the integrity and lineage of the casa. He described a patriarchal system symbolized by the household head’s exclusive seat in the kitchen near the fire, and the place reserved for him at the head of the table (cabecero de mesa). The head would always be served his food first, and the best meat was reserved for him. Like Bourdieu, Lisón stressed the life of subordination which awaited younger siblings, and he further drew attention to the potential for family conflict, between father and heir, between heir and younger brothers, between young wives and mothers-in-law.58 Lisón parted company with Bourdieu, however, by insisting that this was only one side of the coin, and that Huesca families generally showed great solidarity, and found ways of reconciling individual autonomy with the need to keep the family property intact.59 In general, Spanish interpretations argued that in poor natural environments, the stem family and the practice of nominating a single heir were rational responses. Natural resources were insufficient to provide viable equal inheritances to all family members. The traditional inheritance system, then, was ‘an ideal way of adapting society to a physical environment poor in resources’.60 In Aragon from the 1970s, family size was shrinking, land was going out of cultivation and villages were becoming abandoned – a process the Spanish called the ‘dezertización’ of the countryside. In the early 1980s, José Lisón Huguet defended his doctoral thesis before the University of Zaragoza based on a microstudy of Liri in the Benasque valley, a village which then had a population of only thirty-nine. He needed to interview the remaining inhabitants before they too disappeared, and his work was thus a contribution to the archive of vanished communities.61 The authority of the paterfamilias was weakening and young people were seeking marriage partners outside the local region. According to Severino Pallaruelo in 1988, population density in Aragon already resembled that of the Sahara.62 Spanish researchers, however, did not regard this situation as catastrophic. Instead, anthropologists highlighted the adaptability of the Aragonese peasants. They found solutions to the decline of traditional agriculture, to the end of their physical and cultural isolation, and to the advance of modernity and

The anthropological gaze

177

industrialization. Some found the answer by switching from sheep-rearing and donkey sales to cattle production. In other words they adapted to the capitalist market now dominated by large agro-pastoral concerns. Meanwhile, women looked for jobs in domestic service or in holiday resorts. As ever, emigration also helped to maintain an equilibrium between the size of the resident population and exiguous natural resources.63 When, in the 1990s, two demographers from the University of Zaragoza began a micro-study of the villages of the Yerri valley in Navarre, they significantly framed their work around the positively minded question: How had society adjusted to processes of economic change?64 Instead of Bourdieu’s Pyrenean vision of a long-term crisis, the Spanish view emphasized the preservation of social equilibrium in a new eco-demographic configuration. The population of Murelaga in Vizcaya, studied by Douglass, was compelled to disengage from traditional agriculture and seek alternative sources of employment. This transformation, however, was not the problem – it was the solution.65

Return to Montaillou Anthropologists are not tourists. They did not imagine the Pyrenees as a picturesque or romantic décor, nor did they see agriculture without cultivators or imagine peasants outside their normal social context of work and family. Instead they came to the villages of the Pyrenees to analyse social structures and economic and cultural change at first hand. Nevertheless, social scientists constructed a discourse of the Pyrenees and a narrative to frame their analyses. In Ladurie’s Montaillou, a section of the Pyrenees shared some of the distinctive characteristics of traditional Occitan culture, including its language and its inclination towards heresy. As we have seen, however, scholars felt uncomfortable with the wave of popular regionalism which supported their work but also reinvented the Pyrenees as a lost Cathar paradise. Le Play had found in Lavedan the ideal family structure, guaranteeing stability and harmony in spite of what he saw as misguided attempts by the state to legislate for the equality of heirs. A century later, Bourdieu envisaged Béarn as a bachelors’ ball, where a surplus of adult men were doomed to solitude. In Spain, a different narrative developed: one which valued ecological balance and the peasant capacity for adaptation. In Montaillou today, the vestiges of the medieval village are just visible, its stone foundations buried under a grassy hillside. Across the valley, narrow terraces where maize and vegetables were once intensively cultivated now lie

178

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

abandoned and overgrown. Next to the site of the old village stands the ‘new’ Montaillou. In 2008, the village officially had just twenty-five inhabitants. The chateau is in ruins, and the nineteenth-century church is derelict and dangerous to enter. There is a radio station – Radio Montaillou-Pyrénées – which is presumably a boon to shepherds on their high summer pastures. Montaillou also has a small office which functions as the mairie. Some things do not change. Between 2001 and 2014, the mayor was Jean Clergue, no doubt a descendant of the lustful and resourceful clan that dominated the village in the early thirteenth century.

11

The death of Cannelle and the Green Pyrenees

Introduction On All Saints’ Day 2004, a hunter in the Vallée d’Aspe (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) shot and killed Cannelle, the last female brown bear indigenous to the Pyrenees, during a boar hunt (battue des sangliers). Cannelle was suspected of making recent attacks on sheep. Now cornered by six hunters and their dogs, and trying to protect her cub, she became unusually aggressive towards one hunter, René Marquèze, who confronted and killed her. The incident provoked a nationwide uproar. Cannelle’s corpse was quickly helicoptered away for an autopsy. The socialist party declared itself ‘scandalized’. In the conseil des ministres, President Chirac mourned ‘a great loss for biodiversity’, in what Le Monde jokingly called a funeral oration.1 Between 3,000 and 5,000 demonstrators protested outside the Panthéon in favour of protecting ‘la grande faune’, and a further demonstration occurred at Oloron-Sainte-Marie (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) at the end of November. Within six months a petition in favour of protecting les grands prédateurs had gathered 120,000 signatures.2 René Marquèze was charged with destroying a protected species; he claimed he acted in legitimate self-defence. In Pau, the judge declared he had no case to answer. Although this decision was reversed on appeal, Marquèze was to serve only a few weeks in prison. The French state sponsored a civil case brought against him by various green organizations, and in 2009 Marquèze was condemned to pay 14,500 euros in damages and legal costs. Hunting organizations rallied round to raise the money for him, and this was to become a familiar pattern. Why had the death of one animal sparked off such severe reverberations that even the President of the Republic felt obliged to comment? The hunter, once the embodiment of Pyrenean endurance, ingenuity and masculinity, was now cast as the villain, while his victim was transformed from a public nuisance into a popular heroine. How had this dramatic role reversal occurred?

180

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

This chapter demonstrates that the importance of the bear lies in its ability to crystallize, more sharply than any other issue, the continuing conflict between an ailing pastoral economy on one hand, and the rising force of the ecological lobby on the other.3 In examining this conflict, and some of the historical influences which inform it, we can identify the death of Cannelle as a turning point in popular mobilization in support of animal protection. The media war surrounding Cannelle, which was clearly won by the ecologists, also revealed something else: the Pyrenees themselves were once more being reinvented, and the brown bear, ursus arctus, was central to France’s newly constructed image of the region.

Conflicts and ‘reintroductions’ The conflict had long pre-dated the death of Cannelle. Since the late 1960s, the Pyrenees were the theatre of abortive ministerial initiatives, the creation of a French National Park in 1967, and plans to create bear reserves which were successfully resisted by the pastoralists. A full narrative of these developments lies beyond the scope of this book. I take up the story with the decision to introduce Slovenian bears into the Pyrenees in 1996, in order to save the species from extinction in the region.

ATLANTIC OCEAN

FRANCE Pau

Oloron Arette

Bagnères-de-Bigorre Lourdes St Béat Laruns Foix Luz St Saveur Melles Cominac BagnèresCouserans de-Luchon Aran Vignemale

Ansó

au

Aspe

Pamplona

Carcassonne

Tarbes

Aydius Oss

Basque Country

Toulouse

Navarre

Monte Perdito

Perpignan

ANDORRA Huesca

Aragon Catalonia Zaragoza

SPAIN

Barcelona

MEDITERRANEAN SEA 0

Map 11.1 Pyrenees: Territory of the bear.

km

100

The death of Cannelle and the Green Pyrenees

181

Béarn, which had a long familiarity with bear predation, opposed the reintroduction of Slovenian bears. The only place which offered to host this event was the commune of Melles in the Comminges (Haute-Garonne). Here the mayor had his eye on potential tourist income. According to the daily Libération, he asserted in 2006: ‘Lourdes took off thanks to the Virgin; but here we will have the bear.’4 Nothing envenomed the conflict more than the reintroductions, first of two females Ziva and Mellba, both already pregnant, followed by the dominant male Pyros. Since bears are no respecters of frontiers, Mellba drifted into the Ariège and provoked local protests there before she was eventually shot dead near St Béat (Haute-Garonne). The hunter responsible was not prosecuted.5 The same fate befell Ziva in Spanish Catalonia. By 1999, 445 sheep deaths had been attributed to Ziva, Pyros and their offspring.6 In the central Pyrenees, farmers had long since given up guarding their sheep, and there were no patous (Pyrenean guard dogs) on the high pastures. In other words, the sheep were completely unprotected. In 2000, Augustin Bonrepaux, deputy for the Ariège, proposed an amendment to hunting legislation, which would have brought about the capture and expulsion of the newly introduced Slovenian bears. The Slovenian bears were to be treated just like illegal immigrants. According to Senator Louis Althape, ‘When you have illegal immigrants, you charter a plane (i.e. to deport them). We must buy a return ticket for the Slovenian bears.’7 But the amendment was lost in the National Assembly. Local representatives like Bonrepaux and Jean Lassalle (leader of the Institut patrimonial du haut Béarn) were experts in the art of populisme montagnard, seeking to manipulate rural problems in order to secure funding from Paris. They trod a very fine line, careful to appear concerned for species conservation, but at the same time aware that the hunters and the agrolobby were expecting their interests to be defended. In fact the mobilization generated by the death of Cannelle in 2004 had made further reintroductions impossible to prevent. In 2006, a second group of five Slovenian bears was introduced, most of them again in the Haute-Garonne. A demonstration against these reintroductions attacked the town hall at Arbas (Haute-Garonne) and vandalized the premises. The culprits were fined, but the damage bill was picked up by the syndicat de la chasse (hunters’ association). Another rally against reintroductions met at Bagnères-de-Bigorre, and supporters responded with a counter-rally in Toulouse. This ‘pro-bear’ counter-rally had originally been scheduled for Luchon, but fear of serious disorder forced it to move to the more benign environment of the regional capital. In 2006, one of the Slovenians, Palouma, was found dead, having probably fallen down a ravine.

182

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Another bear, Franska, was killed in a road accident on the Route Nationale 21 between Lourdes and Argelès-Galost. Her body was full of gunshot. Several pots of bear ‘poison’ were found in the mountains: they contained honey laced with shards of glass.8 This was reminiscent of another poisoning incident in Navarre in 1983, when a bear was killed by apples laced with strychnine.9 The death of Cannelle, therefore, was just one episode, albeit a crucial one, in a thirtyyear-old conflict between local authorities and Paris, and between the pastoral industry and the ecologists. The polemic continues today over the internet.10 The struggle is underpinned by deep-seated historical forces. One of these is the ancient and pervasive culture of hunting in the Pyrenees, together with the enduring interests of the pastoral economy in the face of long-term decline and threats to livestock. At the same time, the controversy echoes the historic claims of the Béarnais peasantry to carry arms as a basic democratic right. The struggle also generates regional and even xenophobic impulses which are historically endemic in provincial France. The conflict is exacerbated by the unique symbolic power of the bear, who has never simply been an animal like any other. In addition, the struggle over the survival of the bear must be situated in the context of the continual reinvention of the Pyrenees since the eighteenth century. The conflict over Cannelle illustrates the reincarnation of the Pyrenees as a ‘green zone’, in which our understanding of what constitutes a ‘wilderness’ is being reinterpreted.

The culture of hunting Bears had once been extraordinarily plentiful, and by no means confined to forest and mountain. Jean-Claude Bouchet, one of the few observers whose comments were based on scholarly analysis, estimated that at least 3,000 bears were killed in the Pyrenees over three centuries up to 1950, but his calculations did not include Spanish data.11 Sancho of Navarre killed fourteen bears in a single winter in 1165, along with sixteen wild boar, twenty-two stags, twelve izards (mountain goats), fifteen mouflons (wild sheep) and forty-four hare.12 Hunting was then part of a chivalric and aristocratic ethos. When Gaston Phébus, count of Foix and viscount of Béarn, wrote his famous Livre de la Chasse in 1387, he devoted a whole chapter to the bear hunt. Capturing a bear involved swordsmen, lancers, archers and dogs. This was the honourable way, and Phébus despised the use of poisons and traps as ‘la vilaine chasse’ (dirty hunting).13 Before firearms became readily available, bear kills were sporadic. Shepherds were poorly armed, and

The death of Cannelle and the Green Pyrenees

183

the use of traps and poisons was ineffective, at least until the twentieth century. Medieval hunters grappled mano a mano with the bear, plunging a sharp knife into its body to kill the animal as it tried to crush the hunter in a powerful embrace. Hunters who survived this personal combat were revered for their courage and daring. By the late eighteenth century, what popular historians Marliave and Casanova described (with some exaggeration) as a ‘war of extermination’ was under way.14 In the mid-nineteenth century, the human population of the Pyrenees was at its peak, and inhabitants sought to protect both their flocks and cultivated areas from predators. Peasants burned forests to flush out the bears and destroy their habitat. Communal battues were organized by the lieutenant de la louveterie (Wolfcatcher Royal), a position established in the fourteenth century. The office was abolished by the Revolution in 1793, but re-established in 1814. It had overall responsibility for the fight against all bêtes nuisibles (harmful animals). The law of 19 Pluviôse Year 5 (7 February 1797) regularized the system of organized battues to destroy animaux nuisibles, which essentially meant wolves and bears. The communal battue had a social function, and it was a festive occasion, in which the village enjoyed a celebration, and the men paraded their kills as trophies. They were noisy affairs, as the beaters tried to scare their prey by bashing pans, spades, drums and other ‘instruments charivaresques’, as one eighteenth-century commentator described this rough orchestra.15 However colourful they may have been, the battues were frequently ineffective. They appeased anxious pastoralists, but rarely captured a bear. The system of rewards for successful bear killers, which dated from the Middle Ages, was still in force. In the sixteenth century, the Parlement of Pau gave a reward of ten francs eight sous for a bear, and half as much for a wolf. In the single commune of Laruns (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), to take one example, thirty-seven bear captures were thus rewarded in thirty-four years from 1577 on.16 In the Ancien Regime, rewards were paid from communal funds, so that every locality had responsibility for its own protection, but in 1814, the system was centralized and put in the hands of the prefects. In the nineteenth century, the scale of rewards had become more sophisticated. In the Ariège, a dead bear was worth twenty-four francs, but a female fetched thirty francs.17 When the last bear hunter of Vizcaya in the Spanish Basque country killed his bear in 1871, he received an ounce of gold and a merit certificate from the commune of Mañaria.18 Dynasties of professional hunters emerged, revered for their bravado and skill. Toussaint St-Martin from the Vallée d’Ossau personally killed about thirty bears,

184

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

and subsequently made a career as an official tourist guide for the Club Alpin. He died in 1960.19 The Authier family, including the remarkable but illiterate Tambel, operated in the Ariège between the eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Martí Bringué, the last man to kill a bear in Pallars (Catalonia) circa 1948, described his emotion when he realized his bear was dead: When I realised that it was dead, I was really happy, I was so proud! I was so excited to have killed such a spectacular animal that I couldn’t even roll a cigarillo because I was so nervous.20

The successful hunter returned in triumph, and it was customary to conduct a tournée of nearby villages to exhibit the dead bear as a trophy. One instance of such a trophy exhibition was reported in Palencia as recently as 1988.21 During this triumphant exhibition of the bear, the hunter collected gifts from grateful villagers, some eggs, ham and perhaps wine and potatoes for a celebratory and well-lubricated feast.22 The bear’s skin and fur were valuable commodities, and the grease, of which there was plenty, could be sold for various commercial uses. Bear fat was supposedly good for treating rheumatism and hair loss. The proceeds of three bear kills could keep a hunter for a year, but this was a very unreliable income.23 The macho swagger of hunting culture was embedded in village tradition, which did not easily adapt to a new environment in which the hunter was criminalized. For centuries bears and shepherds had co-existed, willingly or not, but by the 1950s only about fifty bears survived in the Pyrenees.24 They had long since disappeared from Catalonia and, as previously mentioned, the last bear hunted in Vizcaya was killed in 1871. He is still exhibited at the Centro de Interpretación in Urkiola National Park.25 In the central Pyrenees, 124 bears were killed in the Couserans and the Val d’Aran in the course of a century from 1890 to 1990.26 The last Andorran bear was killed 1942; the last organized battue in the Ariège was held in 1940. Bears were increasingly confined to Béarn and Bigorre, and here they would make their last stand.27 By the 1990s, then, the few survivors appeared to be dead bears walking. Bears survived only in the upper valleys of Béarn and Aragon. Hunting, of course, was not the only reason for their decline. Their relatively slow rate of reproduction was a contributing factor. Bears live for twenty to thirty years, but a female will only give birth to about fifteen cubs in her lifetime, of which probably only one in three will live to adulthood. At this rate the survival of the Pyrenean brown bear was and still is precarious.28 The gradual encroachment of human activity on the bears’ traditional habitat reduced the population. New roads and tunnels,

The death of Cannelle and the Green Pyrenees

185

hiking paths, deforestation, new ski resorts and the development of Pyrenean tourism in general all reduced the bear’s habitat or ‘biotope’. But as the bears flee human contact, they have to compete with a rising population of wild boars, which share the same wooded habitats, and consume the same diet of nuts and acorns. About 30,000 wild boar were killed in Navarre and Aragon in the 2007–8 season alone.29

The shepherd and Maître Martin In late summer bears refuel their bodies in preparation for winter hibernation. This season is when they are most likely to descend on livestock, killing possibly dozens of sheep in a single raid. Traditionally the resulting destruction was roughly estimated to deprive the peasant of ten per cent of his income, and it was known as Martin’s tithe (Martin being one of the bear’s generic nicknames).30 The Mémorial des Pyrénées commented on this demanding seigneur in 1883: The ancestors of the shepherds in the vallée d’Aspe never knew the feudal tithe […] it would be ironic (piquant) if their descendants had to pay a tenth of their livestock to Maître Martin.31

Sheep are the most common victims of bear attacks, but goats, cows and horses have also been killed by bears. At Bielle in 1824, even the ‘taureau communal’ was killed after a combat with a bear.32 The centralized system of compensation paid to pastoralists leaves records which allow us to measure the extent of recent damage to the Pyrenean sheep population. According to the Parc National, every Pyrenean bear kills 3.4 sheep annually on average.33 In 2013, 171 animals were killed by bears in the French Pyrenees.34 On the Spanish side, between 350 and 400 head of livestock were lost in Catalonia over thirteen years between 1996 and 2008.35 The damage is not restricted to livestock. Bears love maize, apples, grapes and of course beehives. They are principally vegetarian, but their omnivorous appetite makes them twice as destructive as either wolves or wild boars. Bears do not merely tear livestock apart, they also terrify it to death. There is a constant risk of panic and flocks stampeding over cliffs can fall to their death. In 1979, a bear scared a flock in Ansó (Aragon), causing the loss of 149 sheep.36 Similarly, in 2005 the bear Boutxi was responsible for driving 160 sheep over a precipice.37 It is no wonder that shepherds on both sides of the frontier would like to see the bear eliminated.

186

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Ecologists dismiss this damage as trivial compared to the enormous sheep population – over half a million strong – which grazes across the whole Pyrenean range. They exculpate the bear by blaming wild dogs for many sheep deaths. They argue that 99 per cent of sheep that die in the Pyrenees do so from causes other than bear attacks, such as disease, accidents and attacks by wild dogs. Bear predation, in their view, is a faux problème. Alain Reynes even went so far as to describe the bear as an ‘epiphenomenon’.38 This seems to underestimate the passion which reintroductions have aroused. Moreover, the response that dogs kill more sheep than bears appears particularly insensitive to the fate of the sheep themselves. It is a surprisingly callous attitude for a self-styled animal conservationist. Most small peasants cannot afford a patou (the Pyrenean guard dog), although in 1990, the Artus Association created a pool of dogs which could be rented for the summer.39 Sheep are generally unguarded on their mountain pastures except in Béarn, where local cheeses have been successfully commercialized, particularly in the Vallées d’Aspe and d’Ossau. Here, unlike in the Ariège, the shepherd is likely to spend more time on the mountainside, milking and making cheese on the spot. Elsewhere shepherds are reluctant to spend long periods on the mountains, in spite of the risk of bear attacks. Etienne Lamazou came from a family of shepherds who, every year, drove their flock from summer pastures in the Pyrenees to winter pastures in the Landes. For ten months of the year they were away from their home in Aydius, a small village of stone houses with a population of 500, which was first reached by road in 1907. Lamazou’s memoirs tell many stories of encounters with bears. Lamazou claimed that he never killed a bear, but lost perhaps twenty-five sheep to bear attacks over a working life which stretched from 1912 to 1969.40 From the age of fifteen, Lamazou was sent to guard his family’s 280 sheep above Aydius. Lamazou slept in his pinewood cabin with his ancient Napoleonic pistol under his pillow, ready to make a noise to scare off the animal he knew as ‘l’ennemi’ or ‘Martin’.41 Once, he relates, a bear entered a sheep-pen and killed or wounded several sheep, which meant potential ruin for the shepherd who had lost half his flock. According to Lamazou, other shepherds each gave the victim one of their own animals so that he could reconstitute his capital.42 Lamazou’s autobiography illustrates the fragility of the pastoral economy, and the complete lack of sophistication of protection measures against bears. His memoirs were published in 1988, when the author was eighty-eight, and they reflect the prevailing controversy over the bear. They are full of nostalgia for a lost way of life, and they represent the shepherd not as a killer, but rather as a nomad

The death of Cannelle and the Green Pyrenees

187

who lived a hard but independent life, and whose livelihood could be seriously threatened by predators. When the Parc National des Pyrénées Occidentales was created in 1967, local opponents argued that the park would violate centuries-old pasturing rights, and by protecting the bear it would endanger the pastoral economy. In practice the park satisfied no-one; ecologists complained in their turn that the protected area of the park was too small, and that it did not correspond to the altitudes most frequented by bears.43 The system of compensation put in place by the FIEP (Eco-pastoral Intervention Fund), together with the Parc National, went some way to protect pastoral interests, especially after the shepherd was awarded an additional prime de dérangement (115 euros per attack), which compensated him not just for the loss of the sheep, but for the time and effort needed to retrieve the carcass and report the fatal incident. In addition to the basic compensation fee of 120–140 euros per animal, the farmer could also claim 46 euros per sheep in compensation for lost income from the lambs, wool and milk which a dead sheep might have generated.44 In 2012, the total amount of compensation available was potentially 240 euros per lost sheep. Similar schemes operate in Spain, where a Law on Bear Conservation was enacted in 2008. In Navarre, shepherds receive an additional sum just for working on the mountainsides, regardless of the presence of bears in the neighbourhood. This payment is designed to reward the extra effort required to establish protection measures.45 As a result the preservation of every bear costs the authorities a fourfigure sum in euros every year. Behind the nostalgia of Lamazou and the protests against current policy changes lies a pastoral economy in distress. In the last thirty years, the population of the Pyrenees has aged and the number of agro-businesses has declined. In the Ariège alone, 60 per cent of small farms disappeared between 1979 and 2000.46 The number of traditional shepherds like Etienne Lamazou has shrunk. In 1905, Lamazou’s village of Aydius had supported seventy-three shepherds, but in the mid-1980s there were only two left, and the village’s population had fallen to a mere sixty-seven.47 The Aragonese Pyrenees, too, have been deserted, leading to loss of pasture and creeping reforestation. Violaine Bérot, formerly a Toulouse businesswoman who returned to her native Ariège to run a small farm raising horses and goats, sympathized with the remaining shepherds: ‘Who in our modern society’, she asked, ‘is mad enough to accept to work for five months non-stop without a single rest day and in extreme solitude?’48 At the same time, sheep flocks have had to grow bigger in order to be profitable. International competition from New Zealand and elsewhere makes pastoral agriculture hard

188

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

to sustain. Between 1980 and 2000, the minimum wage doubled in France, but the sale price of a lamb remained unchanged at 70 euros (in 2014 it was about 120 euros).49 Is the bear simply a scapegoat for the troubles of the agro-pastoral economy? Are the pastoralists defending an obsolete agricultural system? The most militant and articulate spokesmen of the ecological lobby argue exactly that. In their view, what is really at stake in the conflict is the economic future of traditional pastoralism in crisis.50

The right to carry arms in Béarn The anger of hunters and residents has deep historical roots. They lie in the Béarnais claim to the right to carry arms. Although legally speaking, hunting in the Ancien Regime was an aristocratic privilege, the nobility was never able to enforce its exclusive right to carry arms. Attempts by seigneurs to disarm their peasants ran up against the popular belief that carrying arms was an essential human right. Many landowners accepted reality by simply demanding that hunters deliver the choicest parts of the animals they killed. Thus the abbey of Saint Savin in Bigorre demanded, in its charter of 1398, the head, the feet and a quarter of the prey, according to the right of symier (or cimier).51 In legislation against seigneurs, the inhabitants of the Quatre Vallées of Bigorre claimed that hunting was not a privilege, but a fundamental collective right, and in the seventeenth century, the fors (charter of customs) of Navarre allowed shepherds to use arms in self-defence against wild beasts.52 Repeated ordinances from Louis XIV to protect the aristocratic monopoly of hunting, and successive decrees in the same vein from his Intendants suggest that the privilege was ignored by the Estates of Béarn and Basse-Navarre.53 Nor would the Parlement of Toulouse enforce royal edicts against Languedoc’s right to hunt. The peasants kept their crossbows and later, their guns. Their right to do so was reasserted in 1789: the cahiers de doléances (lists of grievances) of Bagnères-deBigorre claimed the right of mountain people to carry arms to defend themselves against bêtes féroces, and almost two-thirds of the communes of Béarn made the same demand, justifying it as necessary self-defence and indispensable for the protection of private property.54 In fact peasants rarely possessed effective modern weapons. In the nineteenth century, they relied on single-barrelled guns which had to be reloaded after every round.55 As we have seen, in the twentieth century, Etienne Lamazou was armed with a pistol more than 100 years old, which was intended to make a frightening noise rather than actually kill anything.

The death of Cannelle and the Green Pyrenees

189

In spite of this, attempts to limit hunting rights have to overcome the weight of centuries of local defence of democratic and customary rights. Hunting was part of the peasant’s egalitarian agenda in the French Revolution, and it was part of everyday village life, in which legal prohibitions were freely ignored.

Regionalism The campaign against the reintroduction of bears into the Pyrenees thus drew on a millennial discourse of equality and peasants’ rights, bolstered by arguments for public utility and the defence of property. In addition, the campaign opportunistically appealed to a sense of regional pride and identity. Béarnais and Ariègeois alike felt with some dismay that policies concocted in Paris were gradually depriving them of control over their own environment. Local peasants’ defence of their mountain pastures against the bear has even been compared to the Guerre des Demoiselles (War of the Maidens) of 1829–32, which was the occasion of armed retaliation against royal attempts to restrict collective rights in the forests.56 This spirit prevailed in 1906, when the law on the Separation of Church and State sent inspectors into French parishes to make an inventory of church property. At the parish church of Cominac (Ariège), the detested officials were confronted by two montreurs d’ours (bear trainers) together with their bears. They stood guard at the front door while the priest read out a protest.57 Here the bears were imagined as guards for the priest, in collusion with the local community. On this rare occasion, villagers had appropriated a folkloric image of the bear for their own purposes. For over a century, then, the bear has been a part of popular challenges to the authority of the nation-state. The rhetoric of campaigners against reintroduction indicates the tone of regional and xenophobic sentiment generated by the conflict. Ecologists were condemned as eco-fascists or khmers verts (green Khmers).58 The Slovenian bears, it was claimed, were inferior in quality to the indigenous French bear, which was more adaptable and of superior intelligence. The Slovenian bears, in contrast, were vehicles of genetic pollution, dubbed ‘ours poubelles’ (garbage bears) in a pamphlet of 2001 entitled La Colère des Pyrénées.59 ‘Slovene: Go Home’ was a slogan touted by a demonstration in the Ariège which the Toulouse daily La Dépêche du Midi freely appropriated.60 A three-way conflict developed, between local politicians, the Minister for the Environment and the ecologists’ lobby. In this struggle, local politicians claimed that both the ministry and the ecologists were intruders who threatened Pyrenean identity.

190

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

The plans and decrees of the European Union have added another dimension, making this a four-way conflict. The EU’s Natura 2000 programme, for example, encountered solid opposition, not only from hunting and fishing organizations, but also from local populations who feared that bureaucratic interference would threaten traditional agriculture and mountain pasturing. The Union’s Common Agricultural Policy nevertheless provides subsidies for mountain livestock, regardless of the sustainability of large herds at high altitudes.61 A homogeneous Pyrenean identity is a fiction, or at least a notion full of contradictions. The independence and isolation of valley communities always fragmented the mountains into distinct communities often antagonistic towards one another. Perhaps joint demonstrations against the bear changed this – Violaine Bérot interestingly claimed that resistance did create new solidarities, and forged a Pyrenean identity. This identity, however, is far from monolithic. There are many who identify with the Pyrenees but at the same time support the reintroduction of bears. An opinion poll of 2004 in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques suggested that 77 per cent of residents favoured new reintroductions, and a similar poll in the central Pyrenees in 2005 found 62 per cent in favour.62 Local opinion itself is clearly polarized for and against the bears. The traces of these divisions remain visible in the graffiti regularly encountered by any motorist in the upper Ariège, which proclaim ‘Oui aux ours’ or alternatively ‘Non aux ours’. On the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, echoes of this conflict were muted in comparison. The French reintroductions did however provoke a ‘cataleptic fit’ in the local Spanish press, according to one commentator.63 Attacks on conservationism in Aragon in the 1990s took the form of car-burning, attacks on forestry machinery and hostile graffiti.64 The bear problem, however, was less acute here. Spain has a longer tradition of environmental protection than France, as well as previous experience of managing its other declining bear population in the Cantabrian mountains. Spanish National Parks owe their origin to excursionists like Lucien (or Luciano) Briet, whose published work extolled the natural beauty of Aragon. Briet was especially attracted to the Ordesa Valley, encompassed by one of the first National Parks, and he strongly recommended speleology (the study of caves).65 The conservationist cause was crucially supported in parliament by Pedro Pidal, an Asturian aristocrat who was an enthusiastic hunter, climber and a deputy with a strong interest in the environment. Thanks to their efforts, two National Parks were established in 1918, the first in the Cantabrian mountains (now the park of the Picos de Europa), and the other in the central Pyrenees (now the park of Ordesa and Monte Perdido), which forms part of a trans-border UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The death of Cannelle and the Green Pyrenees

191

Pidal was appointed Spain’s first General Commissioner of National Parks. Regional autonomy, however, has created some inconsistency in park administration in the past, since a species declared close to extinction in one region may be considered merely ‘vulnerable’ in another. Nevertheless, bears have been a protected species in Spain since 1973. The issue seems more explosive on the French side simply because the French Pyrenees are more densely inhabited than the Spanish, by people, sheep and hitherto by bears as well. When the government of Navarre tried to implement a species conservation plan in 1996, it was indeed opposed locally, but on the grounds that it was unnecessary since the bear was already extinct.66

The name of the bear Considerable emotional capital has been invested in the bear, which is another reason why the fate of the species in the Pyrenees has aroused such heated argument. Michel Pastoureau brilliantly outlined the animal’s mythical and symbolic status since earliest times in his book The Bear: History of a Fallen King.67 Anthropomorphic qualities have always been attributed to the bear. The bear stands upright like a human, although this is not its preferred means of mobility. The animal is a similar height to a human and surprisingly dexterous, able to throw objects, pick berries, climb trees and catch fish. For centuries, medieval scholars thought that bears copulated not like other quadrupeds, but ad modum hominem, that is to say face to face.68 Marcel Couturier, doctor, hunter and pseudo-zoologist, could write of the bear in 1954: its intellectual ability is characterised by judgement, memory, sang-froid, rapid comprehension, discernment, idea association and interpretation of evidence.69

In short, a model pupil, if not an impeccable genius. Legends and folk tales contain many stories of human infants nurtured in the wild by bears, and there are some real cases as well. The Mad Woman of Montcalm (Ariège), found by hunters running wild and naked on the mountain in 1807, claimed the bears had kept her warm in winter for many years.70 She was imprisoned as a lunatic in the chateau de Foix but clearly could not tolerate confinement, and died after three months there in 1809. Stories abound of children born of a bear and a woman, like the fictional strongman of Languedoc, Jean l’Ours. Male bears were considered to be strongly attracted to women, and prone to abduct and rape them. Today, bears appear symbolically in festivals in the Basque Country and Navarre, sometimes chasing young girls and sometimes

192

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

being chased away by young men. Bear festivals in Catalonia re-enact such events in early February. This is the moment when the bear emerges from hibernation to test whether winter is over. Festivals of Candlemas (2 February) traditionally welcomed the bear as the harbinger of springtime and the revival of nature. In the annual fête de l’ours, for example at St Laurent de Cerdans, a man dressed as a bear abducts a young girl and takes her to the forest. A group of young men come to her rescue and symbolically kill the bear. But since this is a festival of rebirth, the bear is resurrected, and then celebrations can begin.71 In the nineteenth century, bears were exploited by Ariègeois montreurs, who trained them to dance and perform, usually after a particularly cruel apprenticeship as a cub. In 1880, the Ariège supported about 200 bear trainers, and entire villages depended on the profession.72 In Béarn, the montreurs d’ours were active until the First World War. The last montreur of the Vallée d’Aspe, Pierre de Listou, died in 1950 after being attacked by his own bear.73 A cruel form of justice, perhaps. The bear, then, is an animal like no other, with human characteristics and a great symbolic presence. A vague notion of human brotherhood with animals underpins ecological assumptions and the adoption of the bear by local museums as a part of our natural heritage. On the other hand, protesters implicitly reject the idea of ursine anthropomorphism, and in so doing they reassert the traditional Western dichotomy between man and beast.74 Nothing better illustrates the endurance of the bear’s charisma in modern times than the practice of naming the bear. In the upper Pallars, the bear is sometimes known as ‘la Senyora’, and for French shepherds he was always a gentleman to be respected, ‘Monsieur Martin’, lou moussou (Le Monsieur), or lou pedescaous (the barefoot one). Now each individual bear has a name. At the time of the first reintroductions, names were proposed by schoolchildren in the Vallée d’Aspe itself. More recently, suggestions were invited over the internet by the organization Pays de l’OursADET (Association pour le développement économique et touristique). In the process of humanization, this is called ‘baptizing’ the newly introduced bears, and each bear is assigned a godparent.75 A child who proposes the winning name is given a teddy bear (peluche) named after the real bear concerned. The names are significant: Caramelles and Mellba commemorate Melles, the only commune willing to launch the reintroductions in 1996; Pyros and Pyrène were references to the Pyrenees; while Franska, killed after a car chase only 3 kilometres from Lourdes, was intended to suggest eastern European origins while keeping a French identity. Callisto was named after the mythological nymph who was transformed into a bear, and later placed among the stars as Ursa Major. The

The death of Cannelle and the Green Pyrenees

193

Slovenian male bear introduced in 2006 was named Balou, after Mowgli’s teacher in Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which angered many as it camouflaged a wild predator in the role of the children’s friend. The mythical bear has entered our subconscious, which makes it difficult to think of it entirely objectively in its wild animal reality.76

The reinvention of the Pyrenees Since the second half of the eighteenth century, the Pyrenees have been continually reinvented by outsiders. Today visitors still go to the Pyrenees in search of an authentic rustic past. In remodelling the architecture of their secondary homes, they strip away the plaster and cement to expose bare stone walls, considered typically rustic. This return to an idyllic past is very selective. There is no desire of course to revisit the dire poverty that once afflicted the lives of Pyrenean peasants. Visitors value a view of the forests, and interpret plentiful green vegetation as the restoration of a traditional Eden, before human destruction did its work. Local peasants, on the other hand, might see advancing greenery as the abandonment of the fields and a return to anarchy. At present, inhabitants have no wish to return to the proliferation of wild animals, and local authorities are sometimes suspected of introducing harmful species clandestinely.77 Every era, including our own, has given the Pyrenean landscape a different value. With the death of Cannelle, a new conception of the Green Pyrenees came into focus. Increasingly, public opinion is aware of the destructive contribution of human actions to the disappearance of the bear and of other species indigenous to the mountains. Out of this guilty conscience has arisen a new emphasis on species conservation and the protection of biodiversity. The brown bear, to be sure, is not an endangered species globally speaking.78 It survives in Russia and Finland, as well as in parts of eastern Europe – otherwise reintroductions would not be possible. The complete extinction of the bear in the Pyrenees would not drastically affect the mountains’ ecosystem. But the bear has now become indelibly identified with the Pyrenees and environmental protection. Public perceptions of animal species can change radically, and often for reasons which are far from scientific. A notorious predator has been reborn as a regional icon. The Pyrenees region has become what two Spanish scholars call a ‘state-sponsored zoo’. Introduced species include the rainbow trout for recreational purposes, the Louisiana shrimp for gastronomic reasons, and the

194

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

Asian hornet which apparently arrived by accident in Chinese pottery imports. The fate of fauna, native or introduced, depends on ecological engineering, in which ‘nature is reinvented to fulfil our postmodern standards for wilderness’.79 ‘Nature’ is now conceived in terms of political ecology, that is to say as a series of resources which have to be managed. Different social and political groups, however, compete for control of those resources and access to the mountains. In the contemporary Pyrenees, the ‘natural’ is now fabricated, preserved and carefully manipulated.80 The Pyrenees are reborn as a new Noah’s Ark, into which species can be introduced and observed as in a laboratory. The bears are fitted with electronic trace collars, and hidden cameras strategically located in their favourite habitats relay film clips of their daily activities to internet sites. The banal life of the Pyrenean bears has almost become a televised reality show. The death of Cannelle confirmed and accelerated this new form of environmental manipulation, and a new way of imagining the Pyrenees.

Conclusion Since the 1970s, various ecologist organizations have defended the cause of the bear and succeeded in enacting measures for its protection. These included the system of compensation to shepherds for the loss of livestock killed in bear attacks, and the relatively ineffectual institution of National Parks, as well as restrictions on hunting. All such measures conflict with the deep-seated historical forces mentioned in this chapter – namely the glorification of the hunter, the demand to bear arms for the protection of property as a natural right, the sense of regional independence affronted by directives denounced as illegitimate interference in local matters. Protective measures, like the provision of more guard dogs and electrified pens to fence in the sheep at night, appear to be bearing fruit. Although the number of bears has increased, the amount of recorded damage they do declined in 2014 and 2015. Only seventy-nine sheep were lost in the Ariège in the summer of 2015, the lowest figure in a decade.81 Nevertheless, reintroductions have stalled in France and the political deadlock is unresolved. The Catalan government’s unilateral reintroduction of a bear in 2016 threatens to reignite the situation. The European Union has proved largely ineffective in reprimanding the French government for neglecting its commitments to environmental conservation. In spite of the European Union, Franco-Spanish co-operation in the issue remains elusive, as demonstrated by Catalonia’s limited support for

The death of Cannelle and the Green Pyrenees

195

reintroductions, in contrast to their complete suspension ordered by France’s Environment Minister, Ségolène Royal. Historians, too, have allowed national frontiers to limit their perspectives. As Eugeni Casanova, author of the first treatment of the problem from a Spanish angle, lamented: ‘Every author freezes like a statue made of ice before a line on the map, just the opposite of what the bear has been doing for centuries.’82 The bear is a transnational animal: managing its future requires co-ordination between France and Spain as well as between Spanish regional governments. In spite of road accidents, illegal hunting, the virtual impunity of shooters like René Marquèze, and the unfortunate death of Balou by lightning strike in 2014, the bear population of the Pyrenees has risen. It now stands at over thirty, after a baby-boom in the summer of 2015.83 Thinly spread across Béarn, Aragon, the Ariège and the Valle de Arán, this group still remains too small for sustainability. In the absence of further reintroductions, its reproductive capacity is heavily dependent on the dominant male, Pyros, which makes it vulnerable to all the disadvantages of inbreeding. Civilized dialogue between conflicting parties has been absent, and in any case, no solution can work without taking into account the anxieties of the pastoral industry. Ecologists still appear to represent a distant urban elite, inclined to talk patronizingly about ‘educating’ the local population rather than involving it directly in policy-making. Local inhabitants, for their part, do not always see the purpose of species preservation. Meanwhile, Cannelle’s son, the ten-month-old cub who was with his mother when she was shot, escaped and survived. His name, in deference perhaps to the Spanish dimension of the problem, is Cannellito, and he lives today with his elders in upper Béarn.

12

The Pyrenees today

People in the past viewed landscapes differently from the way we see them today. The terrain may be unchanging but spectators are volatile, as they respond to cultural trends or nationalist fantasies. This book has reviewed a range of interpretations of landscape over two and a half centuries, taking the Pyrenees as the object of the observer’s gaze. In the late eighteenth century, scientists saw the mountains as a botanical and geological laboratory, which they read as evidence about the origins of our planet. Romantic tourists in the nineteenth century Pyrenees invested their own meanings into contemporary concepts like the picturesque and the sublime. In the mid-nineteenth century, the spa resorts attracted consumptives and invalids who turned the Pyrenees into a sanatorium. For some, high altitudes were to be avoided because they were barren and lugubrious; for others, the peaks were there to be scaled by men of strength, energy and physical daring. Excursionists pursued fresh air and fitness, while racing cyclists endured the Pyrenees as an arena of pain. Patriots nationalized the landscape, and saw the mountains as one source of their own cultural identities. The presence of the border, for centuries uncertain, gradually took on a more substantial reality, constraining Basque and Catalan nationalism, but providing hidden benefits for smugglers and political refugees. Some of these incarnations were specific to certain conditions and historical conjunctures. The German occupation of France, for example, together with official Spanish neutrality, lent the Pyrenean frontier a special significance for the duration of the Second World War. In this case, the perception of the Pyrenees as a frontier to freedom was created by quite specific historical circumstances. The various representations of the mountains discussed in this book, however, cannot all be identified with a precise historical moment. They overlapped with each other and I have not tried to confine them to a finite period. Perhaps they are best seen as a series of layers which supersede but do not obliterate one another. The scientific ambitions of Enlightenment scientists did not completely fade

198

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

from view, but they recurred in popular travel guides throughout much of the nineteenth century. Similarly, early romantic concepts of the picturesque were alive and well at the end of the nineteenth century, too. The various inventions of the landscape discussed in previous chapters could therefore be encountered simultaneously, and so visions of the landscape competed with each other. The fantasies projected onto the Pyrenees by one group of tourists clashed with the obsessions of another. Some, indeed, despised tourism altogether and saw themselves as superior travellers, disciples in search of more serious knowledge and a deeper understanding of the mountains. These considerations have some implications for contemporary inventions of the Pyrenean landscape. The notion of the Pyrenees as a wilderness to be conserved and as a protection zone for endangered species has been, and is still, contested, even though the image of the Green Pyrenees currently prevails in media discourse. The implications of this study suggest, however, that enthusiasts of the Green Pyrenees may not always dominate the way we see the mountains. The Pyrenean imaginary is constantly fluctuating, and every coherent vision of the mountains has in time been superseded by another. Like all the visions which have preceded it, the notion of the Pyrenees as an organized wilderness is culturally conditioned and historically contingent, and it carries a use-by date. The history of the invention of the landscape suggests that no interpretation (not even the Green Pyrenees) can aspire to a permanent monopoly of the truth. The main emphasis in this book has been on outside observers, whether intellectuals, tourists, mountaineers or the sick in search of a water cure. They all brought to the mountains their own fantasies and prejudices, their own desires to escape the evils of modern cities, to get closer to God, or to prove themselves in a demanding physical ordeal. They travelled with cultural baggage, in which were packed the national identities they took for granted, and the preconceptions of the Other which inevitably framed their reactions to a strange environment. The main focus has been on France, partly because roads, railways and tourist infrastructure were better developed on the French side of the mountains, compared to the Spanish side. The majority of Pyrenean tourists preferred France, as they still do, and so most of the travel literature available for analysis concerns French destinations. Travel, as we have seen, exposed English, American and Spanish conceptions of France and the French; it also led French and Anglo-Saxons to define themselves in the mirror of the Spanish Other. Spanish tourists, meanwhile, had their own views of the French and Anglo-Saxons in the world north of the Pyrenees; we are all someone’s Other. Travel thus narrows the mind, in spite of Mark Twain’s advice to the contrary; it

The Pyrenees today

199

makes travellers more precisely conscious of who they are and why they should be proud to be different. It was vital for outsiders to write about their visit. The boom in tourist travel in the second half of the nineteenth century was accompanied by a corresponding boom in travel literature, including the commercially successful guides produced by Murray, Baedeker and Joanne. Mountaineers needed to record their feats in writing; excursionists encouraged each other to take notes on their itineraries and experiences. Individuals wrote in various genres, from quasi-objective scientific treatises to the most subjective or poetic descriptions. The literary genre in which they chose to write is itself an important expression of the way they configured the landscape. When we ask any question of the travel literature of the past, we can expect an answer on two levels. Firstly, there is the level of what travellers actually did, where they went, what they thought about the places they visited and what they decided to reveal about what they felt about the scenery or about each other. Secondly, there is the level of their writing, with all its imaginative constructions of the landscape, mistakes, obfuscations and lack of transparency, inventions and omissions, deliberate or accidental. With few exceptions, all the groups of observers I have analysed from the late eighteenth century to the present took very little notice of local inhabitants in the Pyrenees. They ignored them, idealized them or saw them as picturesque additions to a rural scene. Smugglers, bandits and mountain shepherds were romanticized and exoticized, but poor peasants at their daily work were overlooked. This was nothing new. It was embedded in the instinct for natural conservation which appeared very early in the story, in laments by a few far-sighted French administrators about the damaging consequences of deforestation in the Pyrenees. Their answer to the problem was usually to blame the practices of local peasants who, in their collective use of forest resources, were simply adopting centuries-old techniques of survival in a rugged physical environment. Blaming the peasant for the state of the landscape was a longterm trend. Both nineteenth-century experts and contemporary defenders of hunted species like the bear shared the assumption that locals badly needed an ‘education’ in how to live responsibly in the environment where they had survived (with great difficulty) for generations. Not surprisingly, the pastoral industry of the early twenty-first century has stiffened in protest against modern forms of patronizing condescension. The only partial exception to this pattern is provided by the anthropologists, investigating Pyrenean communities as social oddities on the verge of extinction. They at least took the peasants seriously, studied their beliefs, their languages

200

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

and their social organization at first hand, analysed their relationships with the city and with each other. In their study of how family structures and inheritance patterns in the Pyrenees adapted to an exiguous agriculture, they even found a kind of ecological wisdom. All the same, they contributed almost unanimously to a narrative of decline. Today, the Pyrenees has lost thousands of its traditional inhabitants, but the region can no longer be said to be in decline. It attracts religious tourists and pilgrims, skiers and hikers. It abounds in tuberculosis clinics, solar energy stations and hydroelectric installations. Traditional industries certainly have died and the communities which supported them have dissolved. Now, there are different industries in the region, bringing new jobs and fresh investment. The Pyrenees is once again reborn, this time as a thriving leisure park. Herein lies the current dilemma of the Pyrenees: new industries and their supporting infrastructure potentially threaten the prevailing conception of a mountain wilderness where human influence, although undeniably present, is supposed to remain invisible. The imperatives of natural conservation are not always compatible with the interests of tourist development. In this dilemma lies the seed of conflict. In 1989, for example, environmentalist Michel Geoffre, addressing a conference in Jaca, sounded a note of warning about uncontrolled tourist development.1 National Parks and their boundaries, he reported, were constantly brought into question because they were seen as obstacles to development. The systematic damming of the streams, he claimed, was disfiguring the landscape. The unrestricted use of heavy trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles by builders and tourists was intrusive, and liable to create new water channels. Geoffre was promoting what he called the Charter for the Protection of the Pyrenees, which underpinned a new organization called the Conseil International Associatif pour la Protection des Pyrénées, with Geoffre as its Secretary-General. To read Geoffre’s conference presentation today is to listen to a very lonely voice. The whole trend of the Jaca conference was towards greater investment, the further implantation of small-scale industries, and the possibilities of more intense economic development within the regulative framework of the European Union. When a few speakers recommended restoring the Romanesque churches of the Pyrenees, or promoting the Cathar heritage, the audience, one imagines, was attentive, because these were ideas for enhancing the region’s appeal to tourists. But when Geoffre warned that progress was going too far, he spoke in an arena where he had few supporters.

The Pyrenees today

201

In the 1980s, further symptoms of disquiet emerged in the opposition to growing French exports of electricity across the Pyrenees to Spain. The transport of electricity across the mountains necessitated the construction of cables and pylons, which defaced the landscape and aroused local opposition. Economic interests dictated the success of the electricity sales, and they also served the interests of European co-operation. Opposition groups, however, prioritized other environmental considerations, and succeeded in forcing EDF (Électricité de France, the main French energy company, largely government-owned) to lay more expensive underground cables, instead of relying on the offending overhead installations.2 Ski stations, in their turn, brought disruption. They required the purchase of communal land, which caused property values to rise in the immediate surroundings. Occasionally, this was a boon. A municipality could benefit from the arrival of tourist facilities on its doorstep.3 More often, investors in Toulouse, Paris or Barcelona provided the capital and also exported the profits. Ski tourism and other economic developments can have other undesirable repercussions, including water pollution and threats to native fauna, to which I will return. ‘Sustainable tourism’ is apparently a universally accepted objective, but what exactly is to be ‘sustained’? Sometimes the problem appears to mean ‘how can we sustain the current level of tourism?’ rather than: ‘how can we develop tourism without irreparably damaging the natural environment?’ In 1997, GavarnieMonte Perdido was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site. This step, however, could be interpreted as a marketing ploy by the tourist industry, since it apparently had little impact on the continuing construction of ski-lifts and snow cannon.4 Today, the long-term future of ski tourism, in the Pyrenees and elsewhere, is in question for other reasons, since global warming threatens to shorten the skiing season. Hydroelectric power installations require new reservoirs, created by the deliberate flooding of valley floors. In many parts of the Pyrenees, it is here, in the bottom of the valley, that the only fertile land is to be found. Struggles over water have provoked conflict with local communities in Aragon.5 Commercial imperatives have also dominated forest development. Reforestation for the production of wood pulp for paper manufacture prioritizes not traditional trees, but fast maturing species which will achieve rapid profitability.6 The Spanish Pyrenees also has its ski stations but, on the whole, the Spanish tourist industry has preferred to exploit other locations. Beach tourism was promoted under the Franco regime in the 1960s, with its emphasis on the ‘Costas’ (Costa del Sol, Costa Brava, etc.). Since the dictatorship, cultural and

202

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era

eco-tourism have to some extent turned public attention towards the mountains again. The camino francés (the French road to Santiago de Compostella) has been revived, tempting pedestrian tourists to follow in the steps of medieval pilgrims over the Pyrenees through Cantabria and Asturias to Santiago. In fact, tourist publicity notwithstanding, there is more than one ‘French road’ to Santiago: one, starting in Vézelay, crossed the mountains near St Jean-pied-de-port; another from Arles crossed at Somport, and they joined up south of Pamplona. Agrotourism is another comparatively recent development in Spanish Pyrenean tourism. The development of agro-tourism in the Basque country in particular, offering holidays in renovated farmhouses, seems entirely compatible with the Basques’ traditional view of their own rural-based cultural heritage.7 Difficulties remain in resolving the conflict between natural conservation and economic revival. Chapter 11 suggested that conflicts surrounding the introduction of Slovenian bears were indicative of this wider problem. At the time of writing (mid-2017), this problem has been put on hold in France since Ségolène Royal, Minister for Ecology, recognized the interests of the pastoral industry and announced, on 19 July 2014, that there would be no further reintroductions of bears into the French Pyrenees. This was perhaps the most pro-pastoral declaration yet made by any French ecology minister. At the same time, she officially released three young ibex (bouquetins) into the wild in the Hautes-Pyrénées.8 The climate seems more bear-friendly on the other side of the mountains. In 2016, the Catalan government at last fulfilled its long-standing promise to introduce a male bear into the Pyrenees, with potential political repercussions that have yet to become manifest. After a baby-boom among the bear community in 2015–16, there are now estimated to be at least thirty individuals in the central Pyrenees.9 France’s refusal to take further action clearly contradicts Catalan policy, demonstrating the complete lack of cross-frontier co-operation on this issue. The brown bear and the bouquetin are not the only introduced species in the Pyrenees, and not all introduced species are a threat to livestock. The rainbow trout was a successful addition to local wildlife, and has reproduced successfully. Others, however, are nuisances. The Asian hornet (frelon) attacks bees. The indigenous white-footed shrimp is menaced by the signal shrimp and the Louisiana shrimp, as well as by the American mink (vison), introduced for its fur in the nineteenth century. Not all native Pyrenean species, like the brown bear, are in danger of local extinction. Some indeed are problematic for precisely the opposite reason; the explosion of the wild boar (sanglier) population may be a joy to hunters but is damaging to crops. The bearded vulture (quebrantahuesos),

The Pyrenees today

203

however, is both a danger and itself endangered. Recent vulture attacks on newborn calves have once again posed the question of how to reconcile biodiversity with the interests of the pastoral industry. Debating detailed solutions to this issue remains outside the scope of this history. It is clear, however, than any solution will have to recognize two recurrent themes in this book: firstly, it will inevitably reflect prevailing constructions of the Pyrenean landscape and fulfil some of the fantasies which we project into the mountains; secondly, those prevailing constructions are historically determined and products of their time.

Notes Chapter 1 1 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Fontana, 1996), 12. 2 Eric J. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler from Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York: Basic Books, 1991). 3 Amy Oakley, Hill-Towns of the Pyrenees (New York: Century, 1924), 151. 4 Jás Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, eds, Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London: Reaktion, 1999). 5 James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Jonathan Culler, ‘Semiotics of Tourism’, American Journal of Semiotics 1, nos. 1–2 (1981): 127–40. 6 Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 1. Arts de faire (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1980). 7 Catherine Bertho Lavenir, La roue et le stylo: comment nous sommes devenus touristes (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999), 13–61. 8 Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, ‘A Portable World: The Notebooks of European Travellers (18th to 19th Centuries)’, Intellectual History Review 20, no. 3 (2010): 380. 9 Ibid., 399. 10 Jean-François Soulet, Les Pyrénées au XIXe siècle, 2 vols (Toulouse: Eché, 1987). 11 Eugeni Casanova, Crónica de un exterminio: el oso de los Pirineos (Lleida: Milenio, 2002), 19. 12 Patrice Poujade, Identité et solidarités dans les Pyrénées: essai sur les relations humaines (XVIe–XIXe siècle) (Aspet: PyréGraph, 2000), 141–79. 13 Henrice Altink and Sharif Gemie, ‘Introduction: Borders: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern: Definitions and Debates’, in At the Border: Margins and Peripheries in Modern France, ed. Altink and Gemie (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), 5–6. 14 Günter Lottes, ‘Frontiers between Geography and History’, in Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500–1850, ed. Steven G. Ellis and Raingard Esser (Hanover: Wehrhan Verlag, 2006), 45–7. 15 José-RamÓn Cubero, L’invention des Pyrénées (Pau: Cairn, 2009), 24. 16 Henri Cavaillès, ‘Une fédération pyrénéenne sous l’Ancien Régime: les traités de lies et de passeries’, Revue Historique 35, no. 105 (1910): 1–34. 17 Christian Desplat, La guerre oubliée: guerres paysannes dans les Pyrénées (XIIe–XIXe siècles) (Pau: J & D Éditions, 1993).

Notes

205

18 Soulet, Les Pyrénées, vol. 1, 129. 19 Jean-François Soulet, La vie quotidienne dans les Pyrénées sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Hachette, 1974), 120. 20 Étienne Lamazou, L’ours et les brebis: mémoires d’un berger transhumant des Pyrénées à la Gironde (Paris: Seghers, 1988), 29. 21 Severino Pallaruelo, Pastores del Pirineo (Madrid: Ministerio de la Cultura, 1988), 131. 22 Jean-François Soulet, ‘La civilisation matérielle d’autrefois’, in Les Pyrénées, de la montagne à l’homme, ed. François Taillefer (Toulouse: Privat, 1974), 279. 23 Ramond de Carbonnières, Carnets Pyrénéens, tome 4, cit. by Soulet, Les Pyrénées, vol. 2, 156. 24 Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 25 Louis Clarenc, ‘Le code de 1827 et les troubles forestiers dans les Pyrénées centrales au milieu du XIXe siècle’, Annales du Midi (henceforth AM) 77, no. 73 (1965): 293–317. 26 Soulet, Les Pyrénées, vol. 2, 504. 27 Ibid., vol. 1, 104–5. 28 Jordi Curbet Hereu, ed., Les llibretes de memòries de Joan Serinyana (1818–1903), vinyater llançanenc (Girona: Universidad de Girona, 2007). 29 Armand Sarramon, ed., Les paroisses du diocèse de Comminges en 1786 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1968), 371. 30 Jean-Paul Aron, Paul Dumont and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Anthropologie du conscrit français d’après les comptes numériques et sommaires du recrutement de l’armée (1819–1826) (Paris & The Hague: Mouton, 1972), 80–1, 144–5, 172–9. 31 Soulet, Les Pyrénées, vol. 2, 45; Jean-Yves Bousigue, ‘L’épidémie, objet de l’histoire: le choléra dans le canton des Cabannes (1854)’, AM 97, no. 172 (1985): 411–26. 32 Christian Desplat, ‘L’encadrement médical dans le ressort de l’intendance d’Auch et de Pau au XVIIIe siècle’, AM 100, no. 184 (1988): 459–75. 33 Clarenc, ‘Le code de 1827’, 312. 34 Soulet, ‘La civilisation matérielle d’autrefois’, 290. 35 Max Daumas, ‘Les activités productrices d’aujourd’hui’, in Taillefer, Les Pyrénées, 390. 36 Soulet, La vie quotidienne, 161–3. 37 Sarramon, Les paroisses du diocèse de Comminges, 410. 38 Frédéric Barbier, ‘Un exemple d’émigration temporaire: les colporteurs de librairie Pyrénéens (1840–1880)’, AM 95, no. 163 (1983): 289–307. 39 Christian Desplat, ‘La contrebande dans les Pyrénées Occidentales à l’époque moderne’, Revue de Pau et du Béarn 27 (2000): 158. 40 Michel Brunet, Le Roussillon: une société contre l’état, 1780–1820 (Toulouse: Eché, 1986), 169–71.

206

Notes

41 Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley : California University Press, 1989), 90. 42 Brunet, Le Roussillon, 124–30. 43 Michel Brunet, Contrebandiers, mutins et fiers-à-bras: les stratégies de la violence en pays Catalan au XVIIIe siècle (Canet: Trabucaire, 2001), 87. 44 Soulet, Les Pyrénées, vol. 2, 517, 626. 45 Ibid., vol. 2, 268, 472. 46 Ibid., vol. 2, 474. 47 Ibid., vol. 2, 320. 48 Rapports d’inspection générale sur la situation de l’enseignement primaire, 1879–1880 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1880), 60–79, Académie de Bordeaux, Département des Basses-Pyrénées. 49 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of Rural France, 1870–1914 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977). 50 Brunet, Le Roussillon, 546. 51 Oakley, Hill-Towns of the Pyrenees, 328–9, quoting Psalm 121.

Chapter 2 1 Louis-François Ramond de Carbonnières, Voyages au Mont-Perdu et dans la partie adjacente des Hautes-Pyrénées (Paris: Belin, 1801), 109. 2 Ibid., 58–61. 3 François Pasumot, Voyages physiques dans les Pyrénées en 1788 et 1789 (Paris: Le Clère, 1797/An 5), 90. 4 Ibid., 268–9. 5 Vincent Chausenque, Les Pyrénées, ou voyages pédestres dans toutes les régions de ces montagnes, depuis l’océan jusqu’à la Méditerranée, 2 vols (Agen: Prosper Noubel, 2nd ed., 1854), vol. 1, 110. 6 Jean Florimond Boudon de Saint-Amans, Fragments d’un voyage sentimental et pittoresque dans les Pyrénées ou lettre écrite de ces montagnes (Metz: Devilly, 1789), 131, 147. 7 Serge Briffaud, ‘Naissance d’un paysage: l’invention géologique du paysage Pyrénéen à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’, Revue de Synthèse 110, nos. 3–4 (1989): 445. 8 Jean Darcet (or D’Arcet), Discours en forme de dissertation sur l’état actuel des montagnes des Pyrénées, et sur les causes de leur dégradation (Paris: Collège de France, 1776). 9 (L’Abbé) Palassou, Essai sur la minéralogie des Monts-Pyrénées, suivi d’un catalogue des plantes observées dans cette chaîne des Montagnes (Paris: Didot Jeune, 1781). 10 Pasumot, Voyages physiques.

Notes

207

11 Ibid., 90. 12 Georges Cuvier, Notice historique sur Jean Darcet, lue à la séance publique de l’Institut National le 15 nivôse an 10 (Paris: Institut National, 1802/An 10). 13 Darcet, Discours, 53. 14 Ibid., 15. 15 Louis-François Ramond de Carbonnières, Observations faites dans les Pyrénées, pour servir de suite à des observations sur les Alpes (Paris: Belin, 1789), 126; and his Voyages au Mont-Perdu, 7. 16 Katherine Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe, 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 33–4. 17 Louis-François Ramond de Carbonnières, Lettres de M. William Coxe à M. William Melmoth sur l’état politique, civil et naturel de la Suisse, traduites de l’anglais, et augmentées des observations faites dans le même pays par le traducteur (Paris: Belin, 1781). 18 Ramond de Carbonnières, Observations, 27–9. 19 Ibid., 54, 73. 20 Ibid., 133. 21 Ibid., 198. 22 Briffaud, ‘Naissance d’un paysage’, 422–3. 23 Ramond de Carbonnières, Observations, 33–5. 24 Ramond de Carbonnières, Voyages au Mont-Perdu, 115–16, 337–8. 25 Pasumot, Voyages physiques, 43–8. 26 Ibid., 189–91. 27 Palassou, Essai sur la minéralogie des Monts-Pyrénées, 32. Also known as grunstein because of its green tinge. 28 Ibid., 26, 230. 29 Pasumot, Voyages physiques, iii–iv. 30 Ibid., v. 31 Ramond de Carbonnières, Voyages au Mont Perdu, 285–6. 32 David R. Oldroyd, Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 115; Henry Faul and Carol Faul, It Began with a Stone: A History of Geology from the Stone Age to the Age of Plate Tectonics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1983). 33 Darcet, Discours, 8. 34 Ibid., 35. 35 Palassou, Essai sur la minéralogie des Monts-Pyrénées, 134. 36 Ibid., 154. 37 Pasumot, Voyages physiques, 29–30. 38 Ibid., 36–7. 39 Ramond de Carbonnières, Observations, 246–7.

208 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Notes Ibid., 273–9. Ibid., 275. Ibid., 279. Ramond de Carbonnières, Voyages au Mont-Perdu, 319–23 and Plate V. Ibid., 11; Ramond de Carbonnières, Observations, 392; Pasumot, Voyages physiques, 36–7. Numa Broc, ‘L’histoire de la géographie au XVIIIe siècle’, Information Historique 30, no. 2 (1968): 65–70. Briffaud, ‘Naissance d’un paysage’, 440. Palassou, Essai sur la minéralogie des Monts-Pyrénées, 178. Henri Béraldi, Le passé du Pyrénéisme: notes d’un bibliophile, 5 vols (Paris: Danel & Lahure, 1911–20), vol. 5 (1920) passim. Ramond de Carbonnières, Observations, 53–4. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 82. Ramond de Carbonnières, Lettres de M. William Coxe. Béraldi, Le passé du Pyrénéisme, vol. 3, 145–55. Ibid., vol. 3, 51. Buzard, The Beaten Track, 4–6. Béraldi, Le passé du Pyrénéisme, vol. 3, 54. Ramond de Carbonnières, Voyages au Mont-Perdu, 25. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 369–91. Ramond de Carbonnières, Observations, 15–16, 20, 190. Ramond de Carbonnières, Voyages au Mont-Perdu, 77. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 203. Ibid., 63–4. Ibid., 112–13. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler, 286. Béraldi, Le passé du Pyrénéisme, vol. 3, 211–12. Béraldi here quotes Ramond’s writings on the Alps. Ramond de Carbonnières, Observations, 114. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 91. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler, 58. Jean-François Soulet, La vie quotidienne dans les Pyrénées sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Hachette, 1974), 23–5.

Notes

209

Chapter 3 1 Stephen Copley and Peter Garside, ‘Introduction’, in The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. Copley and Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3; Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), Chapter 2. 2 William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770 (London: Blamire, 1782); William Gilpin, Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty Made in 1772, on Several Parts of England; Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland (London: no publisher given, 1786). 3 John Whale, ‘Romantics, Explorers and Picturesque Travellers’, in Copley and Garside, Politics of the Picturesque, 191. 4 Mme Amable Tastu et al., Alpes et Pyrénées: arabesques littéraires, composées de nouvelles historiques, anecdotes, descriptions, chroniques et récits divers (Paris: Lehuby, 1842); Anon. (Alexandre de Metz-Noblat), Bluettes: Constantinople, Egypte, Rome, Venise, Espagne, Pyrénées, par un touriste (Nancy : Vagner & Paris: Douniol, 1858). 5 Fs. Albaniac, Voyage pittoresque et sentimental à Bagnères-Adour, département des Hautes-Pyrénées (Nantes: Mellinet-Malassis, 1818), 13–14. 6 Chausenque, Les Pyrénées, ou voyages pédestres, Introduction. 7 Albaniac, Voyage pittoresque, 34. 8 Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 6–9. 9 Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989), 67–70. 10 S. de Bellèze, Voyage de Paris aux Pyrénées: simples causeries (Pau: Vignancour, 1854), 21. Charles Gleyre (1806–74) was a Swiss-born orientalist academic painter and former student of Ingres. 11 E. E., Un voyage d’artiste, guide dans les Pyrénées, par deux amis (Paris: Gosselin & Renduel, 1835), 31. 12 William Gilpin, Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel and on Sketching Landscape (London: Blamire, 2nd ed., 1794), 67. 13 Jean-Baptiste Marie Joudou, Voyage dans les Pyrénées en 1818 (Paris: self-published, 1820), 127. 14 Arthur Young, Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789, ed. Matilda Betham-Edwards (London: George Bell, 1905), 34–41. 15 Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, Voyage aux Pyrénées (Paris: Hachette, 2nd ed., 1858), 108–9.

210

Notes

16 E. E., Un voyage d’artiste, 15. 17 Henry Blackburn, The Pyrenees: A Description of Summer Life at French Watering Places (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881), 125. 18 Juan Avilés Arnau, El Pallás, Arán y Andorra: recuerdos y impresiones de viaje (Barcelona: El Universo, 1893), 76. 19 Adolphe Thiers, Les Pyrénées et le Midi de la France pendant les mois de novembre et décembre 1822 (Paris: Ponthieu, 1823), 171. 20 Joudou, Voyage dans les Pyrénées, 190–209. 21 Chausenque, Les Pyrénées, ou voyages pédestres, vol. 1, 360–2. 22 Buzard, The Beaten Track, 210. 23 Stephen Copley, ‘William Gilpin and the Black-Lead Mine’, in Copley and Garside, Politics of the Picturesque, 55–7. 24 Victor Dujardin, Voyages aux Pyrénées: souvenirs du Midi par un homme du nord: le Roussillon (Céret: Lamiot, 1891), 434. 25 De Bellèze, Voyage de Paris aux Pyrénées, 43–4. 26 Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, 59, 236. 27 Albaniac, Voyage pittoresque, 18. 28 Justin Cénac-Moncaut, L’Espagne inconnue, voyage dans les Pyrénées, de Barcelone à Tolosa, avec une carte routière (Paris: Amyot, 1861), 60–1. 29 José Puigdollers y Maciá, Por los Pirineos: impresiones de un viaje (Barcelona: Mercurio, 1903), 106. 30 Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 71–81. 31 Michael Charlesworth, ‘The Ruined Abbey: Picturesque and Gothic Values’, in Copley and Garside, Politics of the Picturesque, 62–80. 32 Joudou, Voyage dans les Pyrénées, 52–7. 33 The victims were almost certainly not Templars but Knights Hospitaller of St John. As for the genuineness of the exhibit, one local sexton reportedly explained: ‘When the skulls get too old, we change them’ (www.templum-aeternum.net consulted June 6, 2016). 34 Chausenque, Les Pyrénées, ou voyages pédestres, vol. 2, 8. 35 Louisa Stuart Costello, Béarn and the Pyrenees: a legendary tour to the country of Henri Quatre, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1844), vol. 2, 56–7, 191. 36 Carlos Soler y Arques, De Madrid a Panticosa: viaje pintoresco a los pueblos históricos, monumentos y sitios legendarios de la Alto Aragón (Madrid: Minuesa de los Rios, 1878), 162. 37 Fred H. Johnson, Winter Sketches in the South of France and the Pyrenees (London: Chapman & Hall, 1857), 142. 38 Blackburn, The Pyrenees: A Description of Summer Life, 59. 39 E. E., Un voyage d’artiste, 111.

Notes

211

40 Costello, Béarn and the Pyrenees, vol. 2, 42. 41 George Sand, Histoire de ma vie, tome 4, cit. by Jean Fourcassié, Le romantisme et les Pyrénées (Paris: Gallimard, 1940), 163. 42 A. Fourcade, Album pittoresque et historique des Pyrénées (1835), cited by Anne Lasserre-Vergne, Les Pyrénées centrales dans la littérature française entre 1820 et 1870 (Toulouse: Eché, 1985), 30. 43 Lady Georgiana Chatterton, The Pyrenees with Excursions into Spain, 2 vols (London: Saunders & Otley, 1843), vol. 2, 70. 44 Ibid., vol. 2, 99. 45 Gilpin, Three Essays, 43. 46 Joudou, Voyage dans les Pyrénées, 142. 47 Avilés, El Pallás, 109–10. 48 Jean Florimond Boudon de Saint-Amans, Fragments d’un voyage sentimental et pittoresque dans les Pyrénées (Metz: Devilly, 1789), 138. 49 Ibid., 23. 50 Alfred Tonnellé, Tres mesos als Pirineus: diari de viatge, 1858 (Tremp: Garsineu, 2000). Previous editions of the text, transcribed by Tonnellé’s mother, were produced in very small print runs for his close family and a few bibliophiles, and they are unfindable today. This Catalan translation made the diary available for the first time. 51 Ibid., 49–50. 52 Ibid., 129. 53 Chausenque, Les Pyrénées, ou voyages pédestres, vol. 2, 232. 54 Ibid., vol. 2, 258. 55 Puigdollers, Por los Pirineos, 98. 56 E. E., Un voyage d’artiste, 38. 57 Ramond de Carbonnières, Voyages au Mont-Perdu, 212, 215. 58 Chausenque, Les Pyrénées, ou voyages pédestres, vol. 1, 149–53 and vol. 2, 100–1. 59 Puigdollers, Por los Pirineos, 63. 60 Chausenque, Les Pyrénées, ou voyages pédestres, vol. 1, 124, 138. 61 Jás Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Introduction’, in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. Elsner and Rubiés (London: Reaktion, 1999), 4–7. 62 Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 46. 63 Saint-Amans, Fragments d’un voyage sentimental, 14. 64 Ibid., 171. 65 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: Dodsley, 2nd ed., 1757), 42–3, 58, 127. 66 Gavin Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War: Encounters with Spain and Portugal, 1808–1814 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 74. 67 Fourcassié, Le romantisme et les Pyrénées, 273.

212 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Notes Chausenque, Les Pyrénées, ou voyages pédestres, vol. 1, 179–80, 189. Blackburn, The Pyrenees: A Description of Summer Life, 181. Buzard, The Beaten Track, 185. Chausenque, Les Pyrénées, ou voyages pédestres, vol. 1, 286, 302. Ibid., vol. 2, 289. Ibid., vol. 2, 325. Buzard, The Beaten Track, 117, 121. Ibid., 130. Gilpin, Three Essays, 119. Selina Bunbury, Rides in the Pyrenees, 2 vols (London: Newby, 1844), vol. 2, 30–1.

Chapter 4 1 Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 278. 2 Thiers, Les Pyrénées et le Midi de la France, 2. 3 Richard Ford, Hand-Book for Travellers in Spain (London: John Murray, 2nd ed., 1847), xi. 4 Brinsley Ford, ed., Richard Ford in Spain, exhibition catalogue (London: Wildenstein, 1974), 9–29. 5 Ford, Hand-Book for Travellers in Spain (1847). 6 Justin Cénac-Moncaut, L’Espagne inconnue, voyage dans les Pyrénées, de Barcelone à Tolosa, avec une carte routière (Paris: Amyot, 1861), I–IV. 7 Michael Joseph Quin, A Visit to Spain; Detailing the Transactions Which Occurred During A Residence in That Country, in the Latter Part of 1822, and the First Four Months of 1823, with General Notices of the Manners, Customs, Costume, and Music of the Country (London: Hurst, Robinson, 2nd ed., 1824), 37. 8 Caroline Elizabeth Wilde Cushing, Letters Descriptive of Public Monuments, Scenery, and Public Manners in France and Spain, 2 vols (Newburyport, MA: E. W. Allen, 1832), vol. 1, 2–3. 9 Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain, 12. 10 Chatterton, The Pyrenees. 11 Ibid., vol. 1, 275 and vol. 2, 159, 163, 292, 299–300, 320. 12 Ibid., vol. 2, 6. 13 Ibid., vol. 2, 43–4. 14 Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe, 1750–1800, 202. 15 Young, Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788, 1789, 60. 16 Ibid., 43. 17 Peter M. Jones, ‘Arthur Young (1741–1820): For and Against’, English Historical Review 127, no. 528 (2012): 1100–20.

Notes

213

18 Rowland Thirlmere (pseudonym of John Walker), Idylls of Spain, Varnished Pictures of Travel in the Peninsula (London: Elkin Mathews, 1897), 16. 19 Ibid., 89. 20 Alfred Germond de Lavigne, Itinéraire descriptif, historique et artistique de l’Espagne et du Portugal ( Paris : Hachette – Guides Joanne, 2nd ed., 1866 ), 8–9 . 21 Francisco Fernández Villegas, Por los Pirineos: notas de viaje (Madrid: Romero, 1989), 29–30. 22 José Álvarez Junco, Spanish Identity in the Age of Nations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 91–103. 23 Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 9–18. 24 Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War, 211–13. 25 Ford, Hand-Book for Travellers in Spain (1847), lviii–lix. 26 Ibid., lix. 27 Ibid., vii. 28 Buzard, The Beaten Track, 8. 29 Oakley, Hill-Towns of the Pyrenees, 282. 30 Hilaire Belloc, The Pyrenees (London: Methuen, 1909), 276–7. 31 Paul Joanne, De Paris aux Pyrénées et les Départements du Sud-Ouest de la France: Pyrénées (Paris: Hachette-Guides-Diamant, 1888), 18. 32 Cénac-Moncaut, L’Espagne inconnue, 14. 33 Thomas Roscoe, The Tourist in Spain (London: Robert Jennings, 1837), 11. 34 Joseba Gabilondo, ‘On the Inception of Western Sex as Orientalist Theme Park: Tourism and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Spain (on Carmen and Don Juan as Femme Fatale and Latin Lover)’, in Spain is (Still) Different: Tourism and Discourse in Spain, ed. Eugenia Afinoguénova and Jaume Martí-Olivella (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008), 19–61. 35 Cénac-Moncaut, L’Espagne inconnue, 19. 36 Roscoe, The Tourist in Spain, 10. 37 Thirlmere, Idylls of Spain, 34; Katherine Lee Bates, Spanish Highways and Byways (New York: Macmillan, 1912 [1900]), 363. 38 Cénac-Moncaut, L’Espagne inconnue, 10, 94–6. 39 Chausenque, Les Pyrénées, ou voyages pédestres, vol. 1, 198 and vol. 2, 104–7. 40 Mario Ford Bacigalupo, ‘A Modified Image: English Travel Accounts of Spain, 1788–1808’, Dieciocho 2, no. 1 (1979): 37. 41 Thiers, Les Pyrénées et le Midi de la France, 139–40. 42 E. E., Un voyage d’artiste, 57. 43 Richard Ford, Gatherings from Spain (London: Murray, 1846), 18–22. 44 E. E., Un voyage d’artiste, 57.

214

Notes

45 Richard Ford, A Handbook for Travellers in Spain (London: John Murray, 5th ed., 1878), 500. 46 Ford, Gatherings from Spain, 186–92. 47 Ford, Hand-Book for Travellers in Spain (1847), xxx. 48 Chatterton, The Pyrenees, vol. 1, 375; vol. 2, 108. 49 Ibid., vol. 1, 329. 50 Ibid., vol. 2, 9–10. 51 Ibid., vol. 1, 378–9. 52 Ibid., vol. 2, 14. 53 Darya Maoz, ‘The Mutual Gaze’, Annals of Tourism Research 33, no. 1 (2006): 221–39. 54 Chatterton, The Pyrenees, vol. 2, Chapter V. 55 Ibid., vol. 2, 74, 99. 56 E. E., Un voyage d’artiste, 123. 57 Mario Ford Bacigalupo, ‘An Ambiguous Image: English Travel Accounts of Spain, 1750–1787’, Dieciocho 1, no. 2 (1978): 116. 58 Victor Hugo, En voyage: Alpes et Pyrénées (Paris: E. Hugues, no date), 91. 59 Richard Ford, ‘Elogio de las corridas de toros’, Quarterly Review 62, no. 124 (October 1838): 385–424. 60 Timothy Mitchell, Blood Sport: A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1991); Adrian Shubert, Death and Money in the Afternoon: A History of the Spanish Bullfight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 61 Shubert, Death and Money in the Afternoon, 12–13. 62 Carrie Bess Douglass, ‘The Fiesta Cycle of Spain’, Anthropological Quarterly 64, no. 3 (1991): 126–41. 63 William George Clark, Gazpacho: or, Summer Months in Spain (London: J. W. Parker, 1850), 55. 64 Henry Blackburn, Travelling in Spain in the Present Day (London: Sampson, Low, Son & Marston, 1866), 67–73. 65 Mitchell, Blood Sport, 148–9. 66 Clark, Gazpacho, 56–8. 67 Adolphe Joanne, Itinéraire descriptif et historique des Pyrénées de l’Océan à la Mediterranée (Paris: Hachette, 1858), 127. 68 Oakley, Hill-Towns of the Pyrenees, 435–7. 69 Clark, Gazpacho, 57–8. 70 Blackburn, Travelling in Spain, 82–3. 71 Bates, Spanish Highways and Byways, 114–19. 72 Ibid., 129–30. 73 Fernández Villegas, Por los Pirineos, 168–9.

Notes

215

74 Álvarez Junco, Spanish Identity, 349. 75 José Ortega Munilla, Mares y montañas: Vigo, San Sebastián, Panticosa, Linares, Los Pirineos, Bilbao (Madrid: Fortanet, 1887), 112. 76 José Banqué y Faliu, Una excursión por los Pirineos Orientales (julio de 1910): reseña y impresiones (Barcelona: Casa Provincial de Caridad, 1910), 21–9. 77 Ford, Gatherings from Spain, 29–30. 78 Antonio Maria Fabié, Notas y apuntes de un viaje por el Pirineo y por la Turena hecho en el verano de 1878 (Madrid: Montoya, 1879), 22. 79 Avilés Arnau, El Pallás, 217–18. 80 Sarah Ellis, Summer and Winter in the Pyrenees (London: Fisher & Son, 1841), 9–10, 94. 81 Bunbury, Rides in the Pyrenees, 2 vols, vol. 1, chapter 2, 209. 82 Banqué, Una excursión por los Pirineos Orientales, 24–7. 83 Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain, 62.

Chapter 5 1 Marie Bashkirtseff, Mon journal, entry of Friday August 1, 1873, cited by Sonia Wilson, ‘Turning Train Travel to Account: Locomotion, Femininity and DiaryWriting in the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff ’, French Studies 71, no. 2 (2017): 187–8. This is also the source of the Flaubert reference. 2 Ana Moreno Garrido, Historia del turismo en España en el siglo XX (Madrid: Síntesis, 2007), 46. 3 Buzard, The Beaten Track, 80–97. 4 Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain, 33. 5 Hugo, En voyage, 35. 6 Albaniac, Voyage pittoresque, 9. 7 Hugo, En voyage, 314. 8 Ibid., 315. 9 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 63. 10 Ibid., 60. 11 Buzard, The Beaten Track, 33–4. 12 Tim Edensor, ‘Walking in the British Countryside: Reflexivity, Embodied Practices and Ways to Escape’, Body and Society 6, nos. 3–4 (2000): 81–106. 13 Dujardin, Voyages aux Pyrénées, 129–30. 14 Paul Joanne, De Paris aux Pyrénées, xxiv–xxv. 15 Edwin Asa Dix, A Midsummer Drive through the Pyrenees (New York & London: Putnam, 1890), 32–4.

216

Notes

16 Stéphane Gerson, ‘Parisian Littérateurs, Provincial Journeys and the Construction of National Unity in Post-Revolutionary France’, Past and Present no. 151 (1996): 150. 17 Eugène Labiche and Édouard Martin, Le voyage de Monsieur Perrichon (1860), Act 1, Scene 9. 18 Tim Edensor, ‘Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism: (re)Producing Tourist Space and Practice’, Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 59–81. 19 Daniel Nordmann, ‘Les Guides-Joanne, ancêtres des Guides Bleus’, in Les lieux de mémoire, la nation, part 1, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard-NRF, 1986), 529–67. 20 Joanne, Itinéraire descriptif et historique des Pyrénées. 21 Adolphe Joanne, Itinéraire général de la France: les Pyrénées et le réseau des chemins de fer du Midi et des Pyrénées (Paris: Hachette, 1862). 22 Joanne, Itinéraire descriptif et historique des Pyrénées, 614. 23 Joanne, De Paris aux Pyrénées, xxvi. 24 Ibid., 136. 25 Joanne, Itinéraire descriptif et historique des Pyrénées, 394–7. 26 Ibid., e.g. his account of the Monte Perdido, 316–22. 27 Fernández Villegas, Por los Pirineos, 102, 107. 28 André Rauch, ‘Les vacances et la nature revisitée, 1830–1939’, in L’avènement des loisirs, 1850–1960, ed. Alain Corbin (Paris: Aubier, 1995), 98–103. 29 Nordmann, ‘Les Guides-Joanne’, 542–3. 30 Adolphe Joanne, Itinéraire général de la France: les Pyrénées (Paris: Hachette, 1868). 31 Henri Auxcouteaux de Conty, Les Pyrénées occidentales et centrales et le sud-ouest de la France (Paris: Guides Conty, 1899). 32 Nanou Saint-Lèbe, Les femmes à la découverte des Pyrénées (Toulouse: Privat, 2002), 35. 33 Marguerite Gaston, ‘La vogue des Pyrénées’, in François Taillefer et al., Les Pyrénées de la montagne à l’homme (Toulouse: Privat, 1974), 307. 34 Joanne, Itinéraire descriptif et historique des Pyrénées, 78–80. 35 Alain Corbin, Le territoire du vide: l’occident et le désir du rivage, 1750–1840 (Paris: Flammarion, 1990). 36 Hugo, En voyage, 55. 37 Fiona Jordan and Cara Aitchison, ‘Tourism and the Sexualisation of the Gaze: Solo Female Tourists’ Experiences of Gendered Power, Surveillance and Embodiment’, Leisure Studies 27, no. 3 (2008): 329–49. 38 Charles Richard Weld, The Pyrenees West and East (London: Longmans, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1859), 51–5. 39 Taine, Voyage aux Pyrénées, 31. 40 Costello, Béarn and the Pyrenees, vol. 2, 10–25. 41 Gaston, ‘La vogue des Pyrénées’, 306.

Notes

217

42 Ellis, Summer and Winter in the Pyrenees, 378–9. 43 E. Ernest Bilbrough, Twixt France and Spain or A Spring in the Pyrenees (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1883), 17–19. 44 Dix, A Midsummer Drive, 126. 45 Edensor, ‘Performing Tourism’, 59–81. 46 Dix, A Midsummer Drive, 131. 47 Ellis, Summer and Winter in the Pyrenees, 150–68. 48 Ibid., 63, 94, 220. 49 Lasserre-Vergne, Les Pyrénées centrales dans la littérature française entre 1820 et 1870, 27. 50 Saint-Lèbe, Les femmes à la découverte des Pyrénées, 57. 51 Ortega Munilla, Mares y montañas, 110. 52 Blackburn, The Pyrenees, 178. 53 Weld, The Pyrenees West and East, 150, 158. 54 David Blackbourn, ‘Fashionable Spa Towns in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, in Water, Leisure, Culture: European Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan C. Anderson and Bruce H. Tabb (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 9–21. 55 Jean-Baptiste Joudou, Guide des voyageurs à Bagnères-de-Bigorre et dans les environs (Tarbes: Joudou, 1818), 36–7, 57–8. 56 Blackbourn, ‘Fashionable Spa Towns’, 15. 57 Rafael Olaechea, Viajeros españoles en los balnearios del Alto Pirineo francés (Logroño: Colegio Universitario de la Rioja, 1985). 58 Ortega Munilla, Mares y montañas, 133. 59 Bilbrough, ’Twixt France and Spain, 145. 60 De Bellèze, Voyage de Paris aux Pyrénées, 20. 61 Blackburn, The Pyrenees, 150. 62 Bilbrough, ’Twixt France and Spain, 104. 63 Chatterton, The Pyrenees with Excursions into Spain, vol. 2, 72. 64 Dix, A Midsummer Drive, 268–70. 65 Weld, The Pyrenees West and East, 188–9. 66 Chausenque, Les Pyrénées, ou voyages pédestres, vol. 1, 253. 67 J.-F. Samazeuilh, Voyage de Bayonne aux Eaux-Bonnes et aux Eaux-Chaudes en passant par la Basse-Navarre et la Soule (Bayonne: Veuve Lamaignère, 1858), 208. 68 Octavio Montserrat Zapater, El balneario de Panticosa, 1826–1936: historia de un espacio de salud y ocio en el Pirineo Aragonés (Zaragoza: Departamento de Educación y Cultura, 1998). 69 Anon., Guía del bañista en Panticosa (Zaragoza: Calixto Ariño, 2nd ed., 1877), 20–45. 70 Blackburn, The Pyrenees, 158; Conty, Les Pyrénées occidentales et centrales, 273.

218

Notes

71 E. E., Un voyage d’artiste, 10. 72 Le thermalisme dans les Hautes-Pyrénées (Pau: Musée Pyrénéen, exhibition catalogue, 1984), INSEE survey. 73 Oscar Commettant, De haut en bas: impressions Pyrénéennes (Paris: DegorceCadot, 1868), 37, 110–11. 74 Conty, Les Pyrénées occidentales et centrales, 367. 75 Frédéric Barbier, ‘Mont-Oriol aux Pyrénées: Charles-Laurent Tron et Bagnères-deLuchon (1817–1881)’, AM 106, no. 206 (1994): 178. 76 Anon. (Alexandre de Metz-Noblat), Bluettes, 213. 77 Taine, Voyage aux Pyrénées, 274–9. 78 Belloc, The Pyrenees, 317. 79 Chausenque, Les Pyrénées, ou voyages pédestres, vol. 1, 206. 80 John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London: Sage, 2011), 83; Maoz, ‘The Mutual Gaze’, 221–39. 81 Blackburn, The Pyrenees: A Description of Summer Life, 238. 82 Harold Spender and H. Llewellyn Smith, Through the High Pyrenees (London: A. D. Innes, 1898), 216–17. 83 Costello, Béarn and the Pyrenees, 144, 118. 84 Bunbury, Rides in the Pyrenees, 2 vols, vol. 2, 30–1, 260. 85 Blackburn, The Pyrenees, 91–2; Bilbrough, ’Twixt France and Spain, 56–7. 86 Fernández Villegas, Por los Pirineos, 150–2. 87 Oakley, Hill-Towns of the Pyrenees, 301–15. 88 Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age, 10. 89 Le Figaro, 11 février 2008, 10. 90 Le Monde, 12 août 2006, 8. 91 Spender, Through the High Pyrenees, 115–16. 92 Taine, Voyage aux Pyrénées, 109. 93 Belloc, Pyrenees, 253, 312–13. 94 Christophe Bouneau, ‘Chemins de fer et développement régional en France de 1852 à 1937: la contribution de la Compagnie du Midi’, Histoire, Économie et Société 9, no. 1 (1990): 95–112.

Chapter 6 1 2 3 4

Bulletin Pyrénéen no. 22 (juin 1901): 272. Henri Béraldi, Cent ans des Pyrénées (Pau: Librairie des Pyrénées et de Gascogne/ Princi Néguer, 7 vols, 2011–13 [1898–1904]), vol. 3 (1900), v. Ibid., vol. 1, 6. Cubero, L’invention des Pyrénées, 146.

Notes

219

5 Peter H. Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1–2. 6 Henry Russell, Pyrenaica (Pau: Vignancour, 1902), 224. 7 Michael S. Reidy, ‘Mountaineering, Masculinity and the Male Body in MidVictorian Britain’, OSIRIS 30 (2015): 169–71. 8 Weld, The Pyrenees West and East, 150. 9 Henry Russell, Souvenirs d’un montagnard, 1858–1878 (Pau: Les Amis du Livre Pyrénéen, 1978 [1878]), 9–10. 10 Henry Russell, ‘Ascensions’, Annuaire du CAF 18 (1891): 202–3. 11 Annuaire du CAF 7 (1880): 14. 12 Josep Maria Guilera i Albinyana, Excursions pels Pirineus i els Alps (Barcelona: Llibreria Catalonia, 1927), 56. 13 Valbert Chevillard, ‘Le Club Alpin Français de 1874 à 1899, résumé historique’, Annuaire du CAF 26 (1899): 325. 14 Bulletin Pyrénéen, no. 44 (mars–avril 1904): 68–73. 15 Delphine Moraldo, ‘“Mountaineering is something more than a sport”: Les origines de l’éthique de l’alpinisme dans l’Angleterre victorienne’, Genèses 103 (2016): 7–28; Peter H. Hansen, ‘Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Journal of British Studies 34, no. 3 (1995): 302. 16 Charles Packe, ‘Nouvelle visite au Malibierne’, Annuaire du CAF 19 (1892): 200. 17 Club Alpin Français (CAF), Section Sud-Ouest, Bulletin, no. 4 (janvier 1879): 3. 18 Guilera, Excursions pels Pirineus, 50. 19 Comte Henry Russell, ‘Ascensions’, Annuaire du CAF 9 (1882): 250. 20 Tonnellé, Tres mesos als Pirineus, 54, for one of many examples. 21 Béraldi, Cent ans des Pyrénées, vol. 4, 97. 22 Bulletin Pyrénéen, no. 34 (octobre 1902): 155. 23 Hansen, Summits of Modern Man, 271–3. 24 Russell, ‘Ascensions’ (1891), 192–3. 25 Russell, Souvenirs d’un Montagnard, 11. 26 Ibid., 234. 27 Eugène Trutat, ‘Les glaciers de la Maladetta et le pic des Posets’, Annuaire du CAF 2 (1875): 458–60. 28 Bulletin Pyrénéen, no. 8 (décembre 1897): 155. 29 A. Baysellance, ‘Courses dans la vallée d’Azun’, CAF, Section Sud-Ouest, Bulletin, no. 4 (janvier 1879): 18. 30 Russell, Souvenirs d’un montagnard, 305. 31 Franz Schrader, ‘Nouvelles explorations dans le massif calcaire des Pyrénées’, Annuaire du CAF 2 (1875): 428. 32 Franz Schrader, ‘Montagnes de Bielsa et pic de Cotiella’, Annuaire du CAF 4 (1877): 45.

220

Notes

33 Comte Henri Russell, ‘Ascensions Pyrénéennes’, Annuaire du CAF 6 (1879): 201. 34 Harold Spender and H. Llewellyn Smith, Through the High Pyrenees (London: A. D. Innes, 1898), 244. 35 Schrader, ‘Nouvelles explorations’, 421. 36 Édouard Wallon, ‘Les montagnes Espagnoles de Panticosa, de Sallet et de Canfranc’, Annuaire du CAF 2 (1875): 359. 37 Schrader, ‘Montagnes de Bielsa’, 35. 38 Franz Schrader, ‘Panticosa et le Pic d’Algas’, Annuaire du CAF 9 (1882), 323. 39 Bulletin Pyrénéen, no. 37 (février 1903): 14. 40 Russell, Souvenirs d’un montagnard, 13. 41 Béraldi, Cent ans des Pyrénées, vol. 5, 163–7. 42 Russell, ‘Ascensions Pyrénéennes’ (1879), 191. 43 Béraldi, Cent ans des Pyrénées, vol. 3, 87. 44 Reidy, ‘Mountaineering, Masculinity and the Male Body’, 158–81. 45 Clare Roche, ‘Women Climbers, 1850–1900: A Challenge to Male Hegemony?’, Sport in History 33, no. 3 (2013): 236–59. 46 Bulletin Pyrénéen, no. 8 bis (février 1898), souvenir issue of the Congress, 17. 47 Hansen, Summits of Modern Man, 140–1; Reidy, ‘Mountaineering, Masculinity and the Male Body’, 166; Ronald Clark, The Victorian Mountaineers (London: Batsford, 1953), chapter 8. 48 I draw on two main sources for the Ann Lister story: Marcos Feliu, La conquista del Pirineo: una historia del pireneismo (no place: Navarra, 1977); Saint-Lèbe, Les femmes à la découverte des Pyrénées. 49 Ney was executed by Louis XVIII for returning to the Bonapartist cause in 1815. 50 Annuaire du CAF 14 (1888): 567–8. 51 CAF, Section Sud-Ouest, Bulletin, no. 1 (juillet 1877): 68–72. 52 Annuaire du CAF 14 (1888): 539. 53 Spender and Llewellyn Smith, Through the High Pyrenees, 259–60. 54 Russell, ‘Ascensions’ (1891), 200. 55 Russell, Pyrenaica, 224–7. 56 CAF, Section Sud-Ouest, Bulletin, no. 1 (juillet 1877): 16. 57 Chevillard, ‘Le Club Alpin Français de 1874 à 1899’, 320–1. 58 Russell’s aristocratic ancestry is questioned in Paul G. Bahn, ‘Informations supplémentaires sur les fouilles béarnaises de Baring-Gould et la vie des Anglais à Pau au XIXe siècle’, Revue de Pau et de Béarn 13 (1986): 230. 59 Russell, ‘Ascensions’ (1891), 185. 60 Russell, Souvenirs d’un montagnard, 69, 222. 61 Cubero, L’invention des Pyrénées, 155. 62 Russell, Souvenirs d’un montagnard, xii. 63 Béraldi, Cent ans des Pyrénées, vol. 5, 121–9.

Notes 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

221

Cubero, L’invention des Pyrénées, 147. Russell, ‘Ascensions Pyrénéennes’, 192. Russell, Pyrenaica, 27–40. Russell, Souvenirs d’un montagnard, 409. Henry Russell, ‘Exploration du sud-est et sud du Néthou’, Annuaire du CAF 4 (1877): 7. Ibid., 9. Russell, ‘Ascensions’, Annuaire du CAF 11 (1884): 168–9. Russell, Souvenirs d’un montagnard, 14. Russell, ‘Ascensions Pyrénéennes’ (1879), 206. Russell, ‘Ascensions’ (1882), 259; Russell, ‘Ascensions Pyrénéennes’ (1879), 193. Russell, ‘Ascensions’ (1884), 182, 187–8. Russell, Pyrenaica, 153. Russell, ‘Ascensions’ (1882), 255. Russell, ‘Ascensions’ (1884), 169. Russell, Pyrenaica, 151. Russell, Souvenirs d’un montagnard, 118. Russell, Pyrenaica, 9. Russell, Souvenirs d’un montagnard, 6. Béraldi, Cent ans des Pyrénées, vol. 6, 158. Ibid., vol. 6, 163–7. Charles Lefrançois, ‘Au Canigou’, Annuaire du CAF 23 (1896): 275.

Chapter 7 1 2

3 4

5 6 7

Catherine Bertho Lavenir, Voyages à vélo: du vélocipède au Vélib’ (Paris: Paris Bibliothèques, 2011), 46. F. Faurens, ‘Cinq cents kilomètres à bicyclette, à travers l’Ariège, l’Aude et les Pyrénées-Orientales, juin 1907’, Revue Mensuelle du Touring Club de France (henceforth Revue du TCF) 21 (mars 1911): 123. Lavenir, La roue et le stylo, 10–11. Hugh Dauncey, French Cycling: A Social and Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 102–4; Alex Poyer, Les premiers temps des véloce-clubs: apparition et diffusion de cyclisme associatif français entre 1867 et 1914 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 106–8. Dauncey, French Cycling, 45. Poyer, Les premiers temps des véloce-clubs, 281. Philippe Gaboriau, Le Tour de France et le vélo: histoire sociale d’une épopée contemporaine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 135.

222

Notes

8 Harry Oosterhuis, ‘Cycling, Modernity and National Culture’, Social History 41, no. 3 (2016): 235. 9 Associació d’Excursions Catalana, Butlettí Mensual (henceforth AEC Butlettí) 11, nos. 112–7 (1888): 36–7. Because the bulletin started publication halfway through the calendar year, the year numbers are not synchronized with the numbers of the bound volumes. 10 Richard Holt, ‘The Bicycle, the Bourgeoisie and the Discovery of Rural France, 1880–1914’, International Journal of the History of Sport 2, no. 2 (1985): 130. 11 Poyer, Les premiers temps des véloce-clubs, 141–4. 12 Revue du TCF 2 (décembre 1891): 240. This was the second year of the TCF’s existence, but the first volume of its Revue. To avoid confusion I refer to both the year and month of publication. 13 R. M. C., ‘Bicyclettes contre petites et grandes Pyrénées’, Revue du TCF 22 (janvier 1912): 31–4, 22 (février 1912): 64–6. 14 Eugen Weber, ‘La petite reine’, in France: fin de siècle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986): 203; Claude Pasteur, ed., Les femmes à bicyclette à la Belle Époque (Paris: France-Empire, 1986), 69–125. 15 Christopher Thompson and Fiona Ratkoff, ‘Un troisième sexe? Les bourgeoises et la bicyclette dans la France fin de siècle’, Mouvement Social 192 (2000): 9–39. 16 Ibid., 10, 17. 17 José Andrés-Gallego, Un 98 distinto: restauración, desastre, regeneracionismo, Madrid (Encuentro), 1998, 221. 18 Andrew McFarland, ‘Regeneracionismo del Cuerpo: The Arguments for Implanting Athletics in Spain’, Sport and Society 11, no. 6 (2008): 615–29. 19 J. M., ‘Nos camps thermaux et climatiques de vacances de Cauterets: l’avis d’une cheftaine sur leurs bienfaits’, Revue du TCF 46 (mars 1936): 92–3. 20 Gaboriau, Le Tour de France et le vélo, 135. 21 Thompson and Ratkoff, ‘Un troisième sexe?’, 13. 22 Holt, ‘The Bicycle, the Bourgeoisie and the Discovery of Rural France’, 134. 23 Revue du TCF 2 (janvier 1891): 13. 24 Poyer, Les premiers temps des véloce-clubs, 204. 25 René Bellet, ‘Pour que les français daignent de connaître la France’, Revue du TCF 28 (novembre–décembre 1918): 107–8. 26 Revue du TCF 6 (décembre 1896): 444, address to Assemblée Générale. 27 Lavenir, La roue et le stylo, 265–86. 28 Revue du TCF 28 (novembre–décembre 1918): 100. 29 Henry Defert, ‘L’hôtellerie française aux Français’, Revue du TCF 29 (mai 1919): 97–8. 30 Bernat López, ‘The Failed Vuelta Ciclista a España of 1913 and the Launching of the Volta a Catalunya (1911–1913): Centre Versus Periphery in the Struggle for the

Notes

31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

223

Governance of Cycling in Early Twentieth-Century Spain’, Sport in History 30, no. 4 (2010): 547–69. Eric Reed, Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015). Gaboriau, Le Tour de France et le vélo, 18–20. Georges Vigarello, ‘Le Tour de France’ in Les lieux de mémoire tome 3: les France, vol. 2, Traditions, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 885–925. The history of the Tour de France has been told many times over in lavishly illustrated popular histories and bandes dessinées. The most thorough of these is probably Pierre Chany (a former professional cyclist), La fabuleuse histoire du Tour de France (Paris: La Martinière, 1995). Christopher E. Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Christopher S. Thompson, The Tour de France: A Cultural History (Berkeley : California University Press, 2006), 18. Chany, La fabuleuse histoire, 20. Ibid., 112; Bernard Pratviel, Nids d’aigles: histoire du Tour de France dans les Pyrénées (Portet-sur-Garonne: Loubatières, 1993), 13–18. Thompson, The Tour de France, 112. Chany, La fabuleuse histoire, 60–1. Thompson, The Tour de France, 21. Ibid., 5; Philippe Gaboriau, ‘The Tour de France and Cycling’s Belle Époque’, in The Tour de France, 1903–2003: A Century of Sporting Structures, Meanings and Values, eds. Hugh Dauncey and Geoff Hare (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 72. Chany, La fabuleuse histoire, 45. Dauncey, French Cycling, 111–2; Christopher Thompson, ‘The Tour in the InterWar Years: Political Ideology, Athletic Excess and Industrial Modernity’, in The Tour de France, Dauncey and Hare, 79–102. L’Auto, 20 juillet 1910, 3 e–f. Ibid., 17 mai 1910, 1 e–f and 19 mai 1910, 3 e–f. Ibid., 24 mai 1910, 5 c–d. Ibid., 28 juin 1910, 3 d–e. Ibid., 20 juillet 1910, 3 e–f; 19 juillet 1910, 1 e. Ibid., 1er août 1910, 1 c–d. Ibid., 29 juillet 1910, 1 e–f. Ibid., 22 juillet 1910, 2 c. This story has been reported in many different versions, and Steinès was personally responsible for more than one variation. In some versions, Lapize’s words were differently reported, and in others, they were attributed to another rider, Trousselier. I have here preferred the original report in L’Auto, written on the day of the Luchon-Bayonne stage. See Chany, La fabuleuse

224

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77

Notes histoire, 117; Pratviel, Nids d’aigles, 19; Christian Laborde, Pyrène et les vélos: le Tour de France dans les Pyrénées (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993), 31. Fourens, ‘Cinq cents kilomètres’; Lavenir, La roue et le stylo, 148–50. Revue du TCF 2 (janvier 1891): 16. Poyer, Les premiers temps des véloce-clubs, 26. Ibid., 30–5, 120–40, 233–6. Emmanuel Brousse, ‘À propos de la Grande Semaine d’Hiver des Pyrénées’, Revue du TCF 21 (avril 1911): 149. H. D’Agrain, ‘La Vallée d’Argelès’, Revue du TCF 29 (mai 1919): 105–10. Fourens, ‘Cinq cents kilomètres’, 24–5; J. Crépieux-Jamin, ‘L’art de faire plus de cent kilomètres sans fatigue’, Revue du TCF 10 (janvier 1900): 8–10. R.M.C., ‘Bicyclettes contre petites et grandes Pyrénées’, 33; Maurice Gravier, ‘De Bordeaux à Gavarnie à bicyclette’, Revue du TCF 9 (septembre 1899): 399–402. Poyer, Les premiers temps des véloce-clubs, 145–7. Bulletin Pyrénéen, no. 12 (décembre 1898): 104. Maitane Ostoloza, ‘Emoción, paisaje e identidad nacional en el País Vasco: discursos y prácticas en torno a los Mendigoizales (1904–1931)’ in Emoción y identidad nacional: Cataluña y el País Vasco en perspectiva comparada, ed. Géraldine Galeote, Maria Llombart Huesca and Mataine Ostoloza (Paris: Éditions Hispaniques, 2015), 103. Alfonso Peréz Agote, The Social Roots of Basque Nationalism (Reno: Nevada University Press, 2006), 93. AEC Butlettí 1 (1878–79): 2. Ibid., 3, no. 24 (1880): 219. Ibid., 6, nos. 58–9 (1883): 136. Ibid., 2, no. 6 (1879): 81. Poblet was reoccupied by monks after the Civil War in 1940. Today it is a rare example of a lived-in monastery open to visitors. AEC Butlettí 5, no. 48 (1882): 157. Josep Maria Guilera i Albinyana, Excursions pel Pirineus i els Alps (Barcelona: Llibreria Catalonia, 1927), introduction by Maspons i Anglasell. AEC Butlettí 1–2 (1878–79), Llista general de socis, no pagination. AEC Butlettí 10, no. 111 (1887): 203–13; J. Massó y Torrents, ‘Lo Canigó’, AEC Butlettí 6, nos. 58–9 (1883): 139–47; Francisco de S. Maspons y Labrós, ‘Una ascensió al Canigó’, AEC Butlettí 13, nos. 136–8 (1890): 14, 28. Jacint Verdaguer, De Tànger a Sant Petersburg: excursions i viatges, ed. Narcís Garolera (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2003), 18, 104. Moreno Garrido, Historia del turismo en España en el siglo XX, 75–6. Francisco Javier Sánchez Cantón, Spain (Madrid: Comisaria Regia del Turismo, 1928), 92. Comité de Propagande Touristique, Welcome to France (Paris: TCF, 1915), 3–4.

Notes

225

Chapter 8 1 Christian Desplat, La guerre oubliée: guerres paysannes dans les Pyrénées (XIIe–XIXe siècle) (Pau: J & D, 1993), 115. 2 Michel Baud and Willem van Schendel, ‘Towards a Comparative History of Borderlands’, Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): 211–42; Fredrik Barth, ‘Boundaries and Connections’, in Signifying Identities: Anthropological Perspectives on Boundaries and Contested Values, ed. Anthony P. Cohen (London: Routledge, 2000), 17–36. 3 Daniel Alexander Gómez-Ibañez, The Western Pyrenees: Differential Evolution of the French and Spanish Borderland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 51–3. 4 Oscar Jané, ‘La fabrication du frontalier lors du traité des Pyrénées (1659): la création des états modernes et la réutilisation de limites historiques’, in Frontières oubliées, frontières nouvelles: marches et limites anciennes en France et en Europe, ed. Michel Catala, Dominique Le Page and Jean-Claude Meuret (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011), 239. 5 Sahlins, Boundaries. 6 Tara Zahra, ‘Imagined Non-communities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis’, Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 93–119. 7 Sahlins, Boundaries, cit. 247. 8 Sharif Gemie, ‘France and the Val d’Aran: Politics and Nationhood on the Pyrenean Border, c. 1800–1825’, European History Quarterly 28, no. 3 (1998): 338. 9 William A. Douglass, ‘A Western Perspective on an Eastern Interpretation of Where North Meets South: Pyrenean Border Cultures’, in Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, ed. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 88–92. 10 Bartolomé Bennassar, ‘Mentalités, comportements, croyances’, in Les Pyrénées, de la montagne à l’homme, ed. François Taillefer (Toulouse: Privat, 1974), 213–4. 11 Desplat, La guerre oubliée, 25–6. 12 Soulet, La vie quotidienne dans les Pyrénées sous l’Ancien Régime, 47–8. 13 Desplat, La guerre oubliée, 68–77. 14 Christian Desplat, ‘La guerre des limites, 1827–1856: l’appropriation de l’espace pastoral dans les Pyrénées’, in Pyrénées-Terres-Frontières: actes du 118e Congrès National des Sociétés Historiques et Scientifiques, Pau, 25–29 octobre 1993, ed. Christian Desplat (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1996), 27–42. 15 Soulet, La vie quotidienne, 61. 16 Michel Brunet, Le Roussillon: une société contre l’état, 1780–1820 (Toulouse: Eché, 1986), 169–71. 17 Brunet, Contrebandiers, mutins et fiers-à-bras, 38–41.

226

Notes

18 Marcelin Defourneaux, ‘La contrebande du tabac en Roussillon dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, AM 82, no. 97 (1970): 173. 19 Brunet, Le Roussillon, 79–85. 20 Soulet, Les Pyrénées au XIXe siècle, vol. 2, 444–7. 21 Brunet, Le Roussillon, 75. 22 Annie Brives, Pyrénées sans frontière: la vallée de Barèges et l’Espagne du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (Argelès-Galost: Société des Études des Sept Vallées, 1984), 185. 23 Brunet, Le Roussillon, 160. 24 Ibid., 157. 25 Soulet, Les Pyrénées, vol. 2, 461. 26 Álvarez Junco, Spanish Identity in the Age of Nations. 27 Baud and van Schendel, ‘Towards a Comparative History of Borderlands’, 221–2. 28 Marianne Heiberg, The Making of the Basque Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 11; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire de France des régions: la périphérie française des origines à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 108. 29 Henri V. Vallois, ‘Les groupes sanguins de part et d’autre des Pyrénées’, Actas del Primer Congreso Internacional de Estudios Pirenaicos, San Sebastián, 1950, tomo IV (Zaragoza: Instituto de Estudios Pirenaicos, 1952), 136–8. 30 Daniele Conversi, The Basques, the Catalans and Spain: Alternative Routes to Nationalist Mobilisation (London: Hurst, 1997). 31 Heiberg, Making of the Basque Nation, 101; Stanley G. Payne, Basque Nationalism (Reno: Nevada University Press, 1975), 104. 32 Javier Corcuera Atienza, Orígenes, ideología y organización del nacionalismo vasco, 1876–1904 (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1979), 385–8. 33 Heiberg, Making of the Basque Nation, 42–4. 34 Corcuera Atienza, Orígenes, ideología y organización, 363–5. 35 Ibid., 395–7. 36 Peréz Agote, Social Roots, 82. 37 Heiberg, Making of the Basque Nation, 90–1. 38 André Lecours, Basque Nationalism and the Spanish State (Reno: Nevada University Press, 2007), 85. 39 Ibid., 85. 40 Heiberg, Making of the Basque Nation, 125. 41 Peréz Agote, Social Roots, 192–4. 42 Daniele Conversi, ‘The Influence of Culture on Political Choices: Language Maintenance and its Implications for the Catalan and Basque National Movements’, History of European Ideas 16, nos. 1–3 (1993): 193. 43 Peréz Agote, Social Roots, 135. 44 Lecours, Basque Nationalism, 129. 45 Ladurie, Histoire de France des régions, 130.

Notes

227

46 Gisèle Lougarot, Dans l’ombre des passeurs (Donostia: Elkar, 2004), cit. 17. 47 Angel Smith, The Origins of Catalan Nationalism, 1770–1898 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 102; Mary Vincent, Spain, 1933–2002: People and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), cit. 52. 48 Conversi, The Basques, the Catalans, 25. 49 Stephen Jacobson, ‘The Head and Heart of Spain: New Perspectives on Nationalism and Nationhood’, Social History 29, no. 3 (2004): 393–407. 50 Angel Loureiro, ‘Denied Impositions: Harassment and Resistance of the Catalan Language’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2003): 91. 51 Smith, Origins of Catalan Nationalism, 155–6. 52 Jules Michelet, Tableau de la France: géographie physique, politique et morale (Paris: Lacroix, 1875 [1833]), 31, may have started the trend. 53 Conversi, The Basques, the Catalans, 163. 54 Loureiro, ‘Denied impositions’, 85. 55 Jacint Verdaguer, Canigó: llegenda pirenaica del temps de la Reconquista (Barcelona: Proa, 1886), Canto IV, Tall 28. 56 AEC Butlettí, 13, nos. 136–8 (1890): 14 and 28. 57 Jordi Bonells, Les nationalismes Espagnols (1876–1978) (Paris: Éditions du Temps, 2001), 152. 58 Conversi, The Basques, the Catalans, 126–8. 59 Spender and Smith, Through the High Pyrenees, 31. 60 Belloc, The Pyrenees, 268. 61 Arthur Osona, La República d’Andorra: guía itineraria y ressenya geográfichhistórica de las valls (Barcelona: Centre Excursionista de Catalunya, 1896), 6. 62 Spender, Through the High Pyrenees, 34–5. 63 Victorin Vidal, L’Andorre (Paris: Librairie Centrale, 1866), 85. 64 Mary Eyre, Over the Pyrenees into Spain (London: Richard Bentley, 1865), 108 and 116. 65 Ibid., 92. 66 Juan Avilés Arnau, El Pallás. Arán y Andorra: recuerdos y impresiones de viaje (Barcelona: El Universo, 1893), 185. 67 AEC Bulettí 11, nos. 118–20 (1888): 196. 68 Maurice Gratiot, Deux parisiens dans le Val d’Andorre: souvenirs d’un voyage aux Pyrénées (Paris: self-published?, 1890), 79–80. 69 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 220–37. 70 Brunet, Le Roussillon, 546.

228

Notes

Chapter 9 1 Marc Ripol, Las rutas del exilio, paseos y escapadas irrepetibles (Barcelona: Alhena Media, 2005). 2 Jordi Piferrer i Deu, Entre la noche y la esperanza: el paso de San Josemaría Escrivá a través de los Pirineos en el otoño de 1937 (Lleida: Milenio, 2014); Manuel Graña, Cómo escapé de los rojos: odisea de un sacerdote evadido de Cataluña, disfrazado de pastor y perdido en los Pirineos (Burgos: Rayfe, 1938). 3 Sharif Gemie, ‘The Ballad of Bourg-Madame: Memory, Exile and the Spanish Republican Refugees of La Retirada of 1939’, International Review of Social History 51, no. 1 (2006): 27. 4 Dolores Torres, Chronique d’une femme rebelle (Paris: Wern, 1997), 164. 5 Ibid., 58. 6 Jaime Espinar, ‘Argelès-sur-mer’: campo de concentración para españoles (Caracas: Elite, 1940), 9. 7 José Maria Fontana Tarrats, Los Catalanes en la guerra de España (Barcelona: Acervo, 1977 [1951]), 124–5. 8 Torres, Chronique d’une femme rebelle, 165. 9 Frederica Montseny, Cent dies de la vida d’una dona (1939–1940) (Barcelona: Galba, 1977), 31–2. The first edition was published in Castilian, in instalments, in Toulouse in 1949–50. 10 Ibid., 40. 11 Isabel de Palencia, Smouldering Freedom: The Story of the Spanish Republicans in Exile (New York: Longmans, Green, 1945), 41. 12 Espinar, ‘Argelès-sur-mer’, 9. 13 Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, L’éxil des républicains espagnols en France, de la guerre civile à la mort de Franco (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), 45. 14 Palencia, Smouldering Freedom, 48. 15 Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand and Emile Temime, Les camps sur la plage, un exil espagnol (Paris: Autrement, 1995), 4–7. 16 Antonio Vilanova, Los olvidados: los exilados españoles en la segunda guerra mundial (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1969), 10. 17 Jean-Louis Hague Roma, ‘Quelques aspects de la sociabilité des miliciens espagnols refugiés dans le Roussillon (1937–1940)’, Provence Historique 47, no. 187 (1997): 151–61. 18 Espinar, ‘Argelès-sur-mer’, 97. 19 Dreyfus-Armand and Temime, Les camps sur la plage, 80 and 86–7. 20 Ibid., 90. 21 Manuel Andújar, Saint-Cyprien, plage (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2003), e.g. 83 and 117 (first published in Mexico in 1942).

Notes

229

22 William Kidd, ‘Eidenbenz’s Ark: Retirada and Holocaust Memories in the Pyrénées-Orientales’, Modern & Contemporary France 20, no. 4 (2012): 474. 23 Dreyfus-Armand, L’éxil des républicans espagnols, 124. 24 Ibid., 79–80, 120–4. 25 Ferran Sánchez Agustí, El maquis anarquista: de Toulouse a Barcelona por los Pirineos (Leida: Milenio, 2006). 26 Assumpta Montellà, Contrabandistes de la llibertat (Badalona: Ara Llibres, 2009), 63. 27 Palencia, Smouldering Freedom, 47. 28 Montellà, Contrabandistes, 17. 29 Émilienne Eychenne, Pyrénées de la liberté: les évasions par l’Espagne, 1939–1945 (Toulouse: Privat, 1998), 191, 287, 291–2. 30 Gisèle Lougarot, Dans l’ombre des passeurs (Donostia: Elkar, 2004), 7–8. 31 Josep Calvet, Las montañas de la libertad: el paso de refugiados por los Pirineos durante la segunda guerra mundial, 1939–1944 (Madrid: Alianza, 2010), 19. The original Catalan edition was published in 2008. 32 Ibid., 131–7. 33 Josep Calvet Bellera, Huyendo del holocaust: judíos evadidos del nazismo a través del Pirineo de Lleida (Lleida: Milenio, 2014), 98. 34 Haim Avni, España, Franco y los judíos (Madrid: Altalena, 1982). 35 Eychenne, Pyrénées de la liberté, 205–15. 36 Josep Calvet Bellera et al., La bataille des Pyrénées: réseaux d’information et d’évasion alliés transpyrénéens: Ariège, Catalogne, Andorre (Toulouse: Pas d’Oiseau, 2013), 86. Originally published in Catalan as La batalla del Pirineu (Tremp: Garsineu, 2011). 37 Montellà, Contrabandistes, 112 and 141–50. 38 Calvet, Montañas de la libertad, 51. 39 Eychenne, Pyrénées de la liberté, 162–78. 40 Ibid., 40, 85. 41 Montellà, Contrabandistes, 61–2. 42 Thérèse Mitrani (Denise), Service d’évasion (Paris: Continents, 1946). 43 Ramón Javier Campo, La estación espía. Las claves de la derrota de los nazis en los Pirineos (Barcelona: Peninsula, 2006). 44 Calvet, Montañas de la libertad, 61. 45 Eychenne, Pyrénées de la liberté, 149; Émilienne Eychenne, ‘Le franchissement clandestin de la frontière dans les Pyrénées centrales’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale et des Conflits Contemporains 33, no. 131 (1983): 101. 46 Lisa Fittko, Le chemin des Pyrénées: souvenirs, 1940–41 (Paris: Maren Sell, 1987), 146–64. First edition published in Munich (Carl Hanser) in 1985. Subsequent English edition entitled Escape through the Pyrenees (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991).

230 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60

61

62 63

Notes Eychenne, Pyrénées de la liberté, 20. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 24–5. Calvet, Huyendo del holocaust, 127. Montellà, Contrabandistes, 127. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 24. Eychenne, ‘Le franchissement clandestin de la frontière’, 99. Ginette Ravous-du Château, ‘My Escape from France’, History Workshop Journal 48 (1999): 222–36. For conditions in Miranda del Ebro, see Calvet, Montañas de la libertad, 211 ff. Eychenne, Pyrénées de la liberté, 44–54. Montellà, Contrabandistes, unnumbered dedication page. Ibid., 157. Eychenne, Pyrénées de la liberté, 93. Conrad Liberman, ‘Il n’y a plus de Pyrénées: une traversée clandestine des Pyrénées en décembre 1942’, Matériaux pour l’Histoire de Notre Temps 16 (1989): 49–56, 17 (1989): 81–8. Francis Aguila, Les cols d’espoir: le passage des évadés de France par la haute Ariège, la Cerdagne et l’Andorre (Toulouse: Pas d’Oiseau, 2008), 46ff. It is impossible to know whether, as Cabrero alleged, Grumbach was actually unconscious. Aguila, who tells a racy story based on the trial reports, assumed so. See also Calvet Bellera et al., La bataille des Pyrénées, 171–4. Barth, ‘Boundaries and Connections’, 28–9. Eychenne, Pyrénées de la liberté, 245–6.

Chapter 10 1 2

3 4 5

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan, 1294–1324 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Le retour de Martin Guerre, 1982, starring Gérard Depardieu, Nathalie Baye, Roger Planchon. Pierre Bourdieu and J.-P. A, ‘Célibat et condition paysanne’, Études Rurales 5, no. 6 (1962): 32–135. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Une vie avec l’histoire (Paris: Tallandier, 2014), 162–3. William A. Douglass, Echalar and Murelaga: Opportunity and Rural Exodus in Two Spanish Basque Villages (London: C. Hurst, 1975).

Notes

231

6 Juan José Pujadas and Dolores Comas d’Argemir, Estudios de antropología social en el Pirineo aragonés (Zaragoza: Gobierno de Aragón, Departamento de Educación y Cultura, 1994), 20–2. 7 Ladurie, Une vie avec l’histoire, 157–64; Jean Duvernoy, L’inquisition à Pamiers (Toulouse: Privat, 1966); Jean Duvernoy, ed., Le registre d’Inquisition de Jacques Fournier, évêque de Pamiers (Vatican Library MS 4030), 3 vols (Toulouse: Privat, 1965). 8 Ladurie, Montaillou, 114. 9 Ibid., 28–35. 10 Susan Stuard, ‘An Unfortunate Construct: A Comment on E. Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou’, Journal of Social History 15, no. 1 (1981): 152–5; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ed., with Anne Brenon and Christine Dieulafait, Autour de Montaillou, un village occitan: histoire et religiosité d’une communauté villageoise au moyen âge (actes du colloque de Montaillou, 25–27 août 2000) (Castelnaud la Chapelle: l’Hydre, 2001), contributions by Gwendoline Hancke, Daniela Müller and Anne Brenon. 11 Robert Finlay, ‘The Refashioning of Martin Guerre’, American Historical Review 93, no. 3 (1988): 553–71; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘On the Lame’, American Historical Review 93, no. 3 (1988): 572–603. 12 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Les conteurs de Montaillou’, AESC 34, no. 1 (1979): 61–73. 13 Ladurie, Montaillou, 33, 155. 14 Ladurie, Autour de Montaillou, 13–22. 15 Montaillou: Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Vintage/ Random House, 1979). 16 Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324 (London: Penguin, 1980, 1984, 1990). 17 Montaillou, een ketters dorp in de Pyreneen, 1294–1324 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1984); Montaillou: Katarer og Katolikker under inkvisisjonen i en Landsby i Pyrenéene, 1294–1324 (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1986). 18 Montaillou, aldea occitana de 1294 a 1324 (Madrid: Taurus, 1988). 19 Ladurie, Une vie avec l’histoire, 162. 20 Interview with Anne Dero-Proutheau, La Dépêche du Midi, 19 janvier 2000. 21 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ‘Occitania in historical perspective’, Review 1, no. 1 (1977): 21–30. 22 Ibid., 23. In 2016 the administrative regions of Midi-Pyrénées and LanguedocRoussillon were merged. By popular demand, the new mega-region was named Occitanie, to the chagrin of French Catalans. With the disappearance of ‘Roussillon’ from the title, the new nomenclature has obliterated their identity. 23 Jean-Marc Lafon, ‘Cendres et émeraudes: la catharisme romanesque au XXe siècle’, AM 115, no. 242 (2003): 261–82.

232

Notes

24 Emily McCaffrey, ‘Imagining the Cathars in Late-Twentieth-Century Languedoc’, Contemporary European History 11, no. 3 (2002): 409–27. 25 The Centre was closed in 2011 due to a lack of public funding. 26 Kate Mosse, Labyrinth (London: Orion, 2005), and the rest of her Languedoc trilogy, Sepulchre (2007) and Citadel (2012). The TV miniseries of Labyrinth was first released in 2014. 27 Frédéric Le Play, Les ouvriers européens, étude sur les travaux, la vie domestique et la condition morale des populations ouvrières de l’Europe (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1855). 28 Frédéric Le Play, L’organisation de la famille selon le vrai modèle, signalé par l’histoire de toutes les races et de tous les temps (Tours: A. Mame et Fils, 5th ed. 1907 [1871]). 29 Ibid., 86, 99–107. 30 Louis Assier-Andrieu, ‘Le Play et la famille-souche des Pyrénées: politique, juridisme et science sociale’, AESC 39, no. 3 (1984): 498. 31 Jean-François Soulet, Les Pyrénées au XIXe siècle, 2 vols (Toulouse: Eché, 1987), vol. 1, 289, 295. 32 Assier-Andrieu, ‘Le Play et la famille-souche’, 500–1; Le Play, L’organisation de la famille, 225–98, epilogue by M. E. Cheysson, written in 1884. 33 Deborah Reed-Danahay, ‘Tristes Paysans: Bourdieu’s Early Ethnography in Béarn and Kabylia’, Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 1 (2004): 91–2. 34 Pierre Bourdieu, Sociologie d’Algérie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958). 35 Bourdieu, ‘Célibat’. 36 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Les stratégies matrimoniales dans le système de reproduction’, AESC 27, nos. 4–5 (1972): 1105–27. 37 Loïc Wacquant, ‘Following Bourdieu into the Field’, Ethnography 5, no. 4 (2004): 387–414. 38 Pierre Bourdieu, Le bal des célibataires: crise de la société paysanne en Béarn (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 9. 39 Ibid., 227–8. 40 Ibid. 41 Bourdieu, ‘Célibat’, 99–101. 42 Bourdieu, Le bal des célibataires, 241. 43 Soulet, Les Pyrénées au XIXe siècle, vol. 1, 386. 44 Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965); Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, eds, Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 45 Agnès Fine-Souriac, ‘A propos de la famille-souche pyrénéenne au XIXe siècle: quelques réflexions de méthode’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 25, no. 1 (1978): 99–110. 46 Ibid., 108–10. 47 Antoinette Fauve-Chaumont, ‘Le fonctionnement de la famille-souche dans les baronnies des Pyrénées avant 1914’, ADH (1987): 249–50; and the same author’s

Notes

48 49 50

51

52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65

233

‘Les structures familiales au royaume des familles-souches: Esparros’, AESC 39, no. 3 (1984): 513–28. Antoinette Fauve-Chaumont, ‘Vieillesse et famille-souche’, ADH (1985): 119–20. Jacques Poumarède, ‘Famille et tenure dans les Pyrénées du moyen-âge au XIXe siècle’, ADH (1979): 349. Agnès Fine and Claudine Leduc, ‘La dot, anthropologie et histoire: cité des Athéniennes, VIe–IXe siècles/pays de Sault (Pyrénées Audoises), fin de XVIIIe siècle–1940’, Clio: Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 7 (1998): 44. Marie-Pierre Arrizabalaga, ‘Basque Women and Migration in the Nineteenth Century’, THF 10, no. 2 (2005): 99–177; and her ‘The Stem Family in the French Basque Country: Sare in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Family History 22, no. 1 (1977): 50–69. Rolande Bonnain, ‘Houses, Heirs and Non-Heirs in the Adour Valley: Social and Geographic Mobility in the Nineteenth Century’, THF 1, no. 3 (1996): 283–4. Joaquín Costa, ed., Derecho consuetudinario y economía popular en España, 2 vols (Barcelona: Henrich, 1902). Ramón Violant i Simorra, El Pirineo español: vida, usos, costumbres, creencias y tradiciones de una cultura milenaria que desparece (Madrid: Plus Ultra, 1949). William A. Douglass, ‘The Famille-souche and Its Interpreters’, Continuity and Change 8, no. 1 (1993): 87–102. William A. Douglass, ‘The Basque Stem Family Household: Myth or Reality?’, Journal of Family History 13, no. 1 (1988): 75–89. José C. Lisón Arcal, ‘La casa oscense’, in Los pirineos: estudios de antropología social e historia, ed. Alfonso Esteban and Yves-René Fonquerne (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez & Universidad Complutense, 1986), 11–93. Ibid., 78–81. Ibid., 91–3. Jesús J. Sánchez-Barricarte, ‘Developments in Household Patterns in Three Towns in Navarre, Spain, 1786–1986’, THF 7, no. 3 (2002): 479–99. José Lisón Huguet, Algunos aspectos del estudio etnográfico de una comunidad rural del Pirineo Aragonese Oriental (Zaragoza: Instituto Fernando el Católico, 1984). Pallaruelo, Pastores del Pirineo, 215. Pujadas and Comas d’Argemir, Estudios de antropología social, 28. Pilar Erdozáin-Azpilicueta and Fernando Mikelarena-Peña, ‘Labor Power, Social and Economic Differentials and Adaptive Strategies of Peasant Households in Stem-Family Regions of Spain’, THF 3, no. 2 (1998): 155–72. Douglass, Echalar and Murelaga, 178–9, 190–1.

234

Notes

Chapter 11 1 Laurent Greilsamer, ‘Aux bêtes sauvages, la patrie reconnaissante’, Le Monde (7 novembre 2004). 2 Farid Benhammou, Vivre avec l’ours (Blois: Hesse, 2005), 117. 3 The conflict between ecologists and pastoralists over the Pyrenean bear does not prevent them from becoming allies in other causes, for example in the campaign against genetically modified crops. 4 Violaine Bérot, L’ours: les raisons de la colère (Pau: Cairn, 2006), cit. 39. 5 Benhammou, Vivre avec l’ours, 64–5. 6 Olivier de Marliave, Histoire de l’ours dans les Pyrénées de la préhistoire à la réintroduction (Bordeaux: Éditions Sud-Ouest, 2008), 199. 7 La république des Pyrénées, 30 avril 2001, cited by Farid Benhammou, ‘Vendre la peau de l’ours avant de l’avoir sauvé? Une géopolitique locale de la conservation d’une espèce emblématique’, in L’ours des Pyrénées: les quatre vérités, ed. F. Benhammou et al. (Toulouse: Privat, 2005), 103. 8 Pascal Etienne and Jean Lauzet, L’ours brun: biologie et histoire des Pyrénées à l’oural (Paris: Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, 2009), 333. 9 Casanova, Crónica de un exterminio, 130, first published in Catalan in 1997. 10 See for example the ‘pro-bear’ and pro-tourism site http://www.paysdelours.com and the ‘anti-bear’ and equally pro-tourism site http://www.pyrenees-pireneus.com/ Faune/ours/, consulted 24 May 2016. 11 Jean-Claude Bouchet, Histoire de la chasse dans les Pyrénées françaises (XVIe–XXe siècles) (Pau: Marrimpouey, 1990), 185. 12 Marliave, Histoire de l’ours dans les Pyrénées, 45. 13 René Cuzacq, Maître Martin: l’ours des Pyrénées (Pau: Marrimpouey Jeune, 1961), 22–3 (offprint from Les Pyrénées, 1960–1). 14 Marliave, Histoire de l’ours dans les Pyrénées, Chapter 2; Casanova, Crónica de un exterminio. 15 Bouchet, Histoire de la chasse, 19. 16 Archives Départementales des Pyrénées-Atlantiques (Pau), B5963, decisions of the Parlement of Pau, 1577–1601. 17 Marliave, Histoire de l’ours dans les Pyrénées, 85. 18 Ibid., 32. 19 Ibid., 98. 20 Casanova, Crónica de un exterminio, 269. 21 Ibid., 58–9. 22 Bouchet, Histoire de la chasse, 85–9. 23 Ibid., 78.

Notes

235

24 Gérard Caussimont, Avec le naturaliste sur les pas de l’ours brun des Pyrénées (Toulouse: FIEP-Loubatières, 1997), 25–6. 25 Migel Mari Elosegi, El oso pardo en los Pirineos (Barcelona: Lynx, 2009), 117. 26 Marliave, Histoire de l’ours dans les Pyrénées, 24. 27 Ibid., 20–31. 28 Etienne and Lauzet, L’ours brun, 194. 29 Elosegi, El oso pardo, 204. 30 Marliave, Histoire de l’ours dans les Pyrénées, 61 and 66. 31 Mémorial des Pyrénées, 30 mars 1883, cited in Bouchet, Histoire de la chasse, 58. 32 Bouchet, Histoire de la chasse, 57. 33 Etienne and Lauzet, L’ours brun, 155. 34 La Dépêche du Midi (Ariège edition), 12 avril 2014, 9. 35 Elosegi, El oso pardo, 188. 36 Claude Dendaletche and FIEP (Fonds d’Intervention Éco-Pastoral), Pyrénées: l’ours (Pau: Groupe Ours Pyrénées & World Wildlife Fund, 1981), 48. 37 Bérot, L’ours: les raisons de la colère, 62. 38 Alain Reynes, ‘De la chasse à la réintroduction: entre histoire et espoir’, in Benhammou et al., L’ours des Pyrénées, 60, 64. 39 Marliave, Histoire de l’ours dans les Pyrénées, 58–9. 40 Lamazou, L’ours et les brebis, 193. 41 Ibid., 9–10. 42 Ibid., 189. 43 François Merlet, Seigneur des Pyrénées: l’ours (Pau: Marrimpouey Jeune, 1971), 82. 44 Dendaletche and FIEP, Pyrénées: l’ours, 46. 45 Elosegi, El oso pardo, 198. 46 Benhammou, Vivre avec l’ours, 74. 47 Lamazou, L’ours et le brebis, 198–203. 48 Bérot, L’ours: les raisons de la colère, 41–2. 49 Benhammou, Vivre avec l’ours, 74. 50 Reynes, ‘De la chasse à la réintroduction: entre histoire et espoir’, 64. 51 Bouchet, Histoire de la chasse, 42. 52 Ibid., 43. 53 Christian Desplat, ‘La chasse en Béarn à l’époque moderne’, AM 98, no. 176 (1986): 486–90. 54 Bouchet, Histoire de la chasse, 45. 55 Pêche et chasse dans les Pyrénées françaises (Pau: Musée Pyrénéen, Catalogue of Exhibition at the Château-fort de Lourdes, 1972), 76–7. 56 Bérot, L’ours: Les raisons de la colère, 50. 57 Michel Papy, ‘Sur l’image de l’ours des Pyrénées dans l’opinion d’après quelques cartes postales du début du XXe siècle’, in L’ours brun: Pyrénées, Abruzzes, Monts

236

58 59 60 61

62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75

76

Notes Cantabriques, Alpes du Trentin, ed. Claude Dendaletche et al. (Pau: Centre Pyrénéen de Biologie et Anthropologie des Montagnes, 1986), 191–2. Benhammou, ‘Vendre la peau de l’ours’, 102. Published in Tarbes by the ADDIP (Association pour le Développement Durable de l’Identité Pyrénéenne), cited by Benhammou, ‘Vendre la peau de l’ours’, 103. Benhammou, ‘Vendre la peau de l’ours’, 104. Meredith Welch Devine, ‘Localidad e influencias globales. El pastoreo en sola y las regulaciones de la Unión Europea’, in Ecología política de los Pirineos: estado, historia y paisaje, ed. Ismael Vaccaro and Oriol Beltran (Tremp: Garsineu, 2007), 45–59. Etienne and Lauzet, L’ours brun, 332. Casanova, Crónica de un exterminio, 16. Xavier Carbonell, ‘Conflictos socioambientales en la planificación y la gestión de los recursos naturales en el Pirineo Aragonés: el caso de los valles occidentales’, in Vaccaro and Beltran, Ecología política, 61–76. Luciano (Lucien) Briet, Bellezas del alto Aragón, (Huesca: Justo Martínez, 1913). Elosegi, El oso pardo, 129. Michel Pastoureau, L’ours: histoire d’un roi déchu (Paris: Seuil, 2007, English ed. published by Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011). Ibid., 71. According to Pastoureau, this urban myth was not dispelled until the eighteenth century. Marcel Couturier, L’ours brun (Grenoble: self-published, 1954), cited in Marliave, Histoire de l’ours dans les Pyrénées, 72. Christian Bernadac, ‘Madame de … qui vivait nue parmi les ours’, Historama no. 2 (April 1984): 89–93. Daniel Fabre, ‘Le carnaval de l’ours à Saint-Laurent de Cerdans’, in Dendaletche et al., L’ours brun, 146–9. Marliave, Histoire de l’ours dans les Pyrénées, 200. Cuzacq, Maître Martin, 41. José Angel Bergua Amores , Concha Martínez Latre and Bruno Castro Benito, Reinventar los Pirineos: a propósito del conflicto del oso ( Zaragoza : Delegación del Gobierno en Aragón & Caja de Ahorros Immaculada , 2011 ), 103–24 . www.paysdelours.com, consulted 24 May 2016. Godparents include Carla Bruni, wife of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and film actors Gérard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant. More recent names include Bambou, Noisette, Caramellita, Hvala (‘thank you’ in Slovenian), Pélut (a Catalan grape variety), Boavi, Bonabé, Alos, Isil (all four are place names on the Spanish side of the frontier), Sarousse (the Gascon name for wild sorrel) and Moonboots.

Notes

237

77 Joan Frigolé, ‘Los modelos de lo rústico, lo salvaje y lo silvestre y la identidad de un valle del entorno del Cadí (Alt Urgell)’, in Vaccaro and Beltran, Ecología política, 163. 78 www.worldwildlife.org/species/brown-bear, consulted 24 May 2016, suggests a world population of over 200,000. 79 Ismael Vaccaro and Oriol Beltran, ‘Livestock versus “Wild Beasts”: Contradictions in the Natural Patrimonialization of the Pyrenees’, Geographical Review 99, no. 4 (2009): 499–516. 80 Sophie Bobbé, ‘L’ours des Pyrénées, un sauvage parmi tant d’autres’, in Benhammou et al., L’ours des Pyrénées, 123–46. 81 La Dépêche du Midi (Ariège edition), 30 septembre 2015. See also the 12 décembre 2016 edition which calls this trend into question. Controversy revived in July 2017, when 209 sheep ran over a precipice to their deaths during a bear attack at Mont-Rouch, near the port de Marterat. 82 Casanova, Crónica de un exterminio, 19. 83 La Dépêche du Midi (Ariège edition), 29 août 2015, 9.

Chapter 12 1

2 3 4

5 6

7

8 9

Michel Geoffre, ‘Extraits de la Charte pour la Protection des Pyrénées’, in Los Pirineos, montaña de Europa: actas del coloquio, Jaca, 22–23 junio 1989 (Madrid: Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Urbanismo, 1990), 180–7. Renan Viguié, La traversée électrique des Pyrénées: histoire de l’interconnexion entre la France et l’Espagne (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014). Louis Assier-Andrieu, ‘Scenarios of Transition in the French Catalan Pyrenees’, International Social Science Journal 114 (1987): 459–80. Sylvie Clarimont and Vincent Vlès, ‘El turismo en los Pirineos: ¿Un instrumento de desarrollo sostenible?’ in Ecología política de los Pirineos: estado, historia y paisaje, ed. Ismael Vaccaro and Oriol Beltran (Tremp: Garsineu, 2007), 77–99. Gaspar Mairal, ‘La montaña frente al llano: ecología política de un conflicto territorial’, in Vaccaro and Beltran, Ecología política de los Pirineos, 101–15. Enrique Segovia and Miguel Rafa, ‘Spain – the Pyrenees’, in Rebuilding Communities: Experiences and Experiments in Europe, ed. Vithal Rajan (Totnes: Green Books, 1993), 147. Justin Crumbaugh, ‘Reading Rural Tourism: On the Recreational Nature of Basque Heritage’, in Spain is (Still) Different: Tourism and Discourse in Spain, ed. Eugenia Afinoguénova and Jaume Martí-Olivella (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008), 85–104. La Dépêche de Dimanche (Hautes-Pyrénées edition), 20 juillet 2014, 2–3. Pascal Marie, ‘Carnet rose: baby-boom chez les ours des Pyrénées’, La Dépêche du Midi (Ariège edition), 29 août 2015, 9 and 18 juin 2016, 26.

Select bibliography Primary sources – newspapers and periodicals Associació d’Excursions Catalana, Butlettí mensual, 1878–90. L’Auto, mai–juillet 1910. Bulletin Pyrénéen, 1896–1904. Club Alpin Français (CAF), Annuaire, 1875–1904. Club Alpin Français (CAF), Section Sud-Ouest, Bulletin, 1877–82. La Dépêche du Midi (Toulouse), 2014–2016. Le Monde, 2004–2016. Touring Club de France, Revue mensuelle, 1891–1940.

Primary sources – published books and articles Albaniac, François, Voyage pittoresque et sentimental à Bagnères-Adour, département des Hautes-Pyrénées (Nantes: Mellinet-Malassis, 1818). Andújar, Manuel, Saint-Cyprien, plage (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2003). First published in Mexico in 1942. Anon., (Alexandre de Metz-Noblat), Bluettes: Constantinople, Egypte, Rome, Venise, Espagne, Pyrénées, par un touriste (Nancy: Vagner and Paris: Douniol, 1858). Anon., Estrategía para la conservación del oso pardo en los Pirineos (Madrid: Ministerio de Media Ambiente y Medio Rural y Marino, 2009). Anon., Guía del bañista en Panticosa (Zaragoza: Calixto Ariño, 2nd ed., 1877). Anon., Plainte contre la France devant la Commission des communautés européennes pour défaut de protection de l’ours des Pyrénées (Paris: IMHO, 2010). Arrizabalaga, Marie-Pierre, ‘The Stem Family in the French Basque Country: Sare in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Family History 22, no. 1 (1997): 50–69. Arrizabalaga, Marie-Pierre, ‘Basque Women and Migration in the Nineteenth Century’, THF 10, no. 2 (2005): 99–117. Avilés Arnau, Juan, El Pallás, Arán y Andorra: recuerdos y impresiones de viaje (Barcelona: El Universo, 1893). Banqué y Faliu, José, Una excursión por los Pirineos Orientales (Julio de 1910): reseña y impresiones (Barcelona: Casa Provincial de Caridad, 1910). Bates, Katherine Lee, Spanish Highways and Byways (New York: Macmillan, 1912 [1900]). Bellèze, S. de, Voyage de Paris aux Pyrénées: simples causeries (Pau: Vignancour, 1854). Belloc, Hilaire, The Pyrenees (London: Methuen, 1909).

Select bibliography

239

Bilbrough, E. Ernest, ’Twixt France and Spain or A Spring in the Pyrenees (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1883). Blackburn, Henry, Travelling in Spain in the Present Day (London: Sampson Low, Son & Marston, 1866). Blackburn, Henry, The Pyrenees: A Description of Summer Life at French Watering Places (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, revised ed., 1881). Bonnain, Rolande, ‘Houses, Heirs and Non-Heirs in the Adour Valley: Social and Geographic Mobility in the Nineteenth Century’, THF 1, no. 3 (1996): 273–95. Bonnain-Dulon, Rolande, ‘Contrats de mariage et migration des filles au XIXe siècle dans les Pyrénées’, ADH (2011): 49–68. Bourdieu, Pierre and J.-P. A, ‘Célibat et condition paysanne’, Études Rurales 5, no. 6 (1962): 32–135. Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘Les stratégies matrimoniales dans le système de reproduction’, AESC 27, nos. 4–5 (1972): 1105–27. Bourdieu, Pierre, Le bal des célibataires: crise de la société paysanne en Béarn (Paris: Seuil, 2002). Briet, Luciano (or Lucien), Bellezas del alto Aragón (Huesca: Justo Martínez, 1913). Bunbury, Selina, Rides in the Pyrenees, 2 vols (London: Newby, 1844). Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: Dodsley, 2nd ed., 1757). Byron, Alfred Lord, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (London: John Murray, 1812). Cavaillès, Henri, ‘Une fédération pyrénéenne sous l’Ancien Régime: les traités de lies et de passeries’, Revue Historique 35, no. 105 (1910): 1–34. Cénac-Moncaut, Justin, L’Espagne inconnue, voyage dans les Pyrénées, de Barcelone à Tolosa, avec une carte routière (Paris: Amyot, 1861). Charlotte, Une messe à Gavarnie: fragment d’un voyage dans les Pyrénées (Paris: Soye & Bouchet, 1864). Chatterton, Lady Georgiana, The Pyrenees with Excursions into Spain, 2 vols (London: Saunders & Otley, 1843). Chausenque, Vincent, Les Pyrénées, ou voyages pédestres dans toutes les régions de ces montagnes, depuis l’océan jusqu’à la Méditerranée, 2 vols (Agen: Prosper Noubel, 2nd ed., revised and augmented, 1854). Clark, William George, Gazpacho: or, Summer Months in Spain (London: J. W. Parker, 1850). Comité de Propagande Touristique, Welcome to France (Paris: TCF, 1915). Commettant, Oscar, De haut en bas: impressions pyrénéennes (Paris: Degorce-Cadot, 1868). Conty, Henri Auxcouteaux de, Les Pyrénées occidentales et centrales et le sud-ouest de la France (Paris: Guides Conty, 1899). Costello, Louisa Stuart, Béarn and the Pyrenees: a legendary tour to the country of Henri Quatre, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1844). Couturier, Marcel, L’ours brun (Grenoble: Self-published, 1954).

240

Select bibliography

Curbet Hereu, Jordi ed., Les llibretes de memòries de Joan Serinyana (1818–1903), vinyater Lançanenc (Girona: Universidad de Girona, 2007). Cushing, Caroline Elizabeth Wilde, Letters Descriptive of Public Monuments, Scenery, and Public Manners in France and Spain, 2 vols (Newburyport, MA: E. W. Allen, 1832). Cuvier, Georges, Notice historique sur Jean Darcet, lue à la séance publique de l’Institut National le 15 nivôse an 10 (Paris: Institut National, 1802/An 10). Darcet (or D’Arcet), Jean, Discours en forme de dissertation sur l’état actuel des montagnes des Pyrénées, et sur les causes de leur dégradation (Paris: Collège de France, 1776). Dix, Edwin Asa, A Midsummer Drive through the Pyrenees (New York and London: Putnam, 1890). Douglass, William A., Echalar and Murelaga: Opportunity and Rural Exodus in Two Spanish Basque Villages (London: C. Hurst, 1975). Douglass, William A., ‘The Basque Stem Family Household: Myth or Reality?’, Journal of Family History 13, no. 1 (1988): 75–89. Dujardin, Victor, Voyages aux Pyrénées: souvenirs du Midi par un homme du nord: le Roussillon (Céret: Lamiot, 1891). E. E., Un voyage d’artiste, guide dans les Pyrénées, par deux amis (Paris: Gosselin & Renduel, 1835). Ellis, Sarah, Summer and Winter in the Pyrenees (London: Fisher & Son, 1841). Erdozáin-Azpilicueta, Pilar and Fernando Mikelarena-Peña, ‘Labor Power, Social and Economic Differentials and Adaptive Strategies of Peasant Households in StemFamily Regions of Spain’, THF 3, no. 2 (1998): 155–72. Espinar, Jaime, ‘Argelès-sur-mer’: campo de concentración para españoles (Caracas: Elite, 1940). Esteban, Alfonso and Yves-René Fonquerne eds., Los pirineos: estudios de antropología social e historia, actas del coloquio celebrado en la Casa de Velázquez, 22–23 octubre 1981 (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1986). Eyre, Mary, Over the Pyrenees into Spain (London: Richard Bentley, 1865). Fabié, Antonio Maria, Notas y apuntes de un viaje por el Pirineo y por La Turena hecho en el verano de 1878 (Madrid: Montoya, 1879). Fauve-Chamoux, Antoinette, ‘Vieillesse et famille-souche’, ADH (1985): 111–25. Fauve-Chamoux, Antoinette, ‘Le fonctionnement de la famille-souche dans les baronnies des Pyrénées avant 1914’, ADH (1987): 241–62. Fernández Villegas, Francisco, Por los Pirineos: notas de viaje (Madrid: Romero, 1898). Fine, Agnès and Claudine Leduc, ‘La dot, anthropologie et histoire: cité des Athéniennes, VIe–IXe siècles/Pays-de-Sault (Pyrénées Audoises), fin de XVIIIe siècle–1940’, Clio: Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 7 (1998): 19–50. Fine-Souriac, Agnès, ‘A propos de la famille-souche pyrénéenne au XIXe siècle: quelques réflexions de méthode’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 25, no. 1 (1978): 99–110.

Select bibliography

241

Fontana Tarrats, José Maria, Los Catalanes en la guerra de España (Barcelona: Acervo, 1977 [1951]). Ford, Richard, ‘Elogio de las corridas de toros’, Quarterly Review 62, no. 124 (Oct. 1838): 385–424. Ford, Richard, Hand-Book for Travellers in Spain (London: John Murray, 2nd revised ed., 1847), reviewed by George Borrow in Quarterly Review 69, no. 126 (1845): 137–64. Ford, Richard, Gatherings from Spain (London: John Murray, 1846). Ford, Richard, A Handbook for Travellers in Spain (London: John Murray, 5th ed., 1878). García Gerpé, Manuel, Alambradas: mis nueve meses por los campos de concentración de Francia (Buenos Aires: Celta, 1941). Gilpin, William, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770 (London: Blamire, 1782). Gilpin, William, Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty Made in 1772, on Several Parts of England; Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland (London: no publisher given, 1786). Gilpin, William, Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel and on Sketching Landscape (London: Blamire, 2nd ed., 1794). Graña, Manuel, Cómo escapé de los rojos: odisea de un sacerdote evadido de Cataluña, disfrazado de pastor y perdido en los Pirineos (Burgos: Rayfe, 1938). Guilera i Albinyana, Josep Maria, Excursions pels Pireneus i els Alps (Barcelona: Llibreria Catalonia, 1927). Hugo, Victor, En voyage: Alpes et Pyrénées (Paris: E. Hugues, no date). Joanne, Adolphe, Itinéraire général de la France: les Pyrénées et le réseau des chemins de fer du Midi et des Pyrénées (Paris: Hachette, 1862). Joanne, Adolphe and Elisée Reclus, Itinéraire descriptif et historique des Pyrénées, de l’Océan à la Méditerranée (Paris: Hachette, 1858). Joanne, Paul, De Paris aux Pyrénées et les départements du sud-ouest de la France: Pyrénées (Paris: Hachette – Guides Diamant, 1888). Johnson, Fred H., Winter Sketches in the South of France and the Pyrenees (London: Chapman & Hall, 1857). Joudou, Jean-Baptiste Marie, Guide des voyageurs à Bagnères-de-Bigorre (Tarbes: Selfpublished, 1818). Joudou, Jean-Baptiste Marie, Voyage dans les Pyrénées en 1818 (Paris: Self-published, 1820). Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, Montaillou, village occitan, 1294–1324 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Lamazou, Étienne, L’ours et le brebis: mémoires d’un berger transhumant des Pyrénées à la Gironde (Paris: Seghers, 1988). Lavigne, Alfred Germond de, Itinéraire descriptif, historique et artistique de l’Espagne et du Portugal (Paris: Hachette – Guides Joanne, 2nd ed., 1866).

242

Select bibliography

Le Play, Frédéric, Les ouvriers européens, étude sur les travaux, la vie domestique et la condition morale des populations ouvrières de l’Europe (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1855). Le Play, Frédéric, L’organisation de la famille selon le vrai modèle, signalé par l’histoire de toutes les races et de tous les temps (Tours: A. Mame et Fils, 5th ed., 1907). Liberman, Conrad, ‘Il n’y a plus de Pyrénées: une traversée clandestine des Pyrénées en décembre 1942’, Matériaux pour l’Histoire de Notre Temps 16 (1989): 49–56, 17 (1989): 81–8. Lisón Huguet, José, Algunos aspectos del estudio etnográfico de una comunidad rural del Pirineo Aragonese Oriental (Zaragoza: Instituto Fernando el Católico, 1984). Lüdemann, Wilhelm von, Viajes a través de las montañas de los Pirineos en 1822 (Pamplona: Institución Principe de Viana, 1972). Mitrani, Thérèse (Denise), Service d’évasion (Paris: Continents, 1946). Montseny, Frederica, Cent dies de la vida d’una dona (1939–1940) (Barcelona: Galba, 1977). First edition in Castilian (Toulouse, 1949–50). Murray, James Erskine, A Summer in the Pyrenees (London: John Macrone, 2nd ed., 1837). Oakley, Amy, Hill-Towns of the Pyrenees (London: John Long, 1924). Ortega Munilla, José, Mares y montañas: Vigo, San Sebastián, Panticosa, Linares, Los Pirineos, Bilbao (Madrid: Fortanet, 1887). Osona, Arthur, La república d’Andorra: guía itineraria y ressenya geográfich-histórica de las valls (Barcelona: Centre Excursionista de Catalunya, 1896). (L’Abbé) Palassou, Essai sur la minéralogie des Monts-Pyrénées, suivi d’un catalogue des plantes observées dans cette chaîne des montagnes (Paris: Didot Jeune, 1781). Palassou, Pierre Bernard, Suite des mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des Pyrénées, et des pays adjacens (Pau: Vignancour, 1819). Palencia, Isabel de, Smouldering Freedom: The Story of the Spanish Republicans in Exile (New York: Longmans, Green, 1945). Pasumot, François, Voyages physiques dans les Pyrénées en 1788 et 1789 (Paris: Le Clère, 1797/An 5). Pêche et chasse dans les Pyrénées françaises (Pau: Musée Pyrénéen, Catalogue of exhibition at the Château-fort de Lourdes, 1972). Poumarède, Jacques, ‘Famille et tenure dans les Pyrénées du Moyen-Age au XIXe siècle’, ADH (1979): 347–60. Puigdollers y Maciá, José, Por los Pirineos: impresiones de un viaje, illustrated by Pedro C. Abarca (Barcelona: Mercurio, 1903). Pujadas, Juan José and Dolores Comas d’Argemir, Estudios de antropología social en el Pirineo aragonés (Zaragoza: Gobierno de Aragón, Departamento de Educación y Cultura, 1994). Quin, Michael Joseph, A Visit to Spain; Detailing the Transactions which Occurred during a Residence in that Country, in the Latter Part of 1822, and the First Four

Select bibliography

243

Months of 1823, with General Notices of the Manners, Customs, Costume, and Music of the Country (London: Hurst, Robinson, 2nd ed., 1824). Ramond de Carbonnières, Louis-François, Lettres de M. William Coxe à M. William Melmoth sur l’état politique, civil et naturel de la Suisse, traduites de l’anglais, et augmentées des observations faites dans le même pays par le traducteur (Paris: Belin, 1781). Ramond de Carbonnières, Louis-François, Observations faites dans les Pyrénées, pour servir de suite à des observations sur les Alpes (Paris: Belin, 1789). Ramond de Carbonnières, Louis-François, Voyages au Mont-Perdu et dans la partie adjacente des Hautes-Pyrénées (Paris: Belin, 1801). Rapports d’Inspection Générale sur la situation de l’enseignement primaire, année scolaire 1879–1880 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1880). Raveau, Claudio, Guía del bañista en Cauterets (Paris: Denné, 1879). Ravous-du Château, Ginette, ‘My Escape from France’, History Workshop Journal 48 (1999): 222–36. Richard, Guide aux Pyrénées: itinéraire pédestre des montagnes (Paris: Audin/Maison, 2nd ed., 1839 [1834]). Roscoe, Thomas, The Tourist in Spain (London: Robert Jennings, 1837). Russell, Henry, Souvenirs d’un montagnard, 1858–1878 (Pau: Les Amis du Livre Pyrénéen, 1978, facsimile of 1878 edition). Russell, Henry, Pyrenaica (Pau: Vignancour, 1902). Saint-Amans, Jean Florimond Boudon de, Fragments d’un voyage sentimental et pittoresque dans les Pyrénées ou lettre écrite de ces montagnes (Metz: Devilly, 1789). Samazeuilh, J.-F., Voyage de Bayonne aux Eaux-Bonnes et aux Eaux-Chaudes en passant par la Basse-Navarre et la Soule (Bayonne: Veuve Lamaignère, 1858). Sánchez Cantón, Francisco Javier, España (Madrid: Comisaria Regia del Turismo y Cultura Artística, 1928). English ed. Spain (Madrid, 1926). Sánchez-Barricarte, Jesús J., ‘Developments in Household Patterns in Three Towns in Navarre, Spain, 1786–1986’, THF 7, no. 3 (2002): 479–99. Sarramon, Armand, ed., Les paroisses de Comminges en 1786 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1968). Serviez, Emmanuel Gervais Roergas de, Statistique du Département des Basses-Pyrénées, 1801–02 (Paris: Ministre de l’Intérieur, 1802). Soler y Arques, Carlos, De Madrid a Panticosa: viaje pintoresco a los pueblos históricos, monumentos y sitios legendarios del alto Aragón (Madrid: Minuesa de los Rios, 1878). Spender, Harold and H. Llewellyn Smith, Through the High Pyrenees (London: A. D. Innes, 1898). Taine, Hippolyte, Voyage aux Pyrénées (Paris: Hachette, 2nd ed., 1858). Tastu, Madame Amable et al., Alpes et Pyrénées: arabesques littéraires, composées de nouvelles historiques, anecdotes, descriptions, chroniques et récits divers (Paris: Lehuby, 1842).

244

Select bibliography

Thiers, Adolphe, Les Pyrénées et le Midi de la France pendant les mois de novembre et décembre 1822 (Paris: Ponthieu, 1823). Thirlmere, Rowland (pseudonym of John Walker), Idylls of Spain: Varnished Pictures of Travel in the Peninsula (London: Elkin Mathews, 1897). Tonnellé, Alfred, Tres mesos als Pirineus: diari de viatge, 1858, trans. Josep María Cuenca Flores (Tremp: Garsineu, 2000). Torres, Dolores, Chronique d’une femme rebelle (Paris: Wern, 1997). Tragsa Group, Ganaderos y osos: conviviendo en los Pirineos (Madrid: Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Medio Rural y Marino & Gobierno de Navarra, 2009). Verdaguer, Jacint, Canigó: llegenda pirenaica del temps de la reconquista (Barcelona: Proa, 1886). Verdaguer, Jacint, De Tànger a Sant Petersburg: excursions i viatges, ed. Narcís Garolera (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2003 [1887]). Vidal, Victorin, L’Andorre (Paris: Librairie Centrale, 1866). Violant i Simorra, Ramon, El Pirineo español: vida, usos, costumbres, creencias y tradiciones de una cultura milenaria que desaparece (Madrid: Plus Ultra, 1949). Weld, Charles Richard, The Pyrenees West and East (London: Longmans, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1859). Young, Arthur, Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789, ed. Matilda Betham-Edwards (London: George Bell, 1905).

Secondary sources Afinoguénova, Eugenia, ‘An Organic Nation: State-Run Tourism, Regionalism and Food in Spain, 1905–1931’, Journal of Modern History 86, no. 4 (2014): 743–79. Afinoguénova, Eugenia and Martí-Olivella Jaume, eds., Spain is (Still) Different: Tourism and Discourse in Spain (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008). Aguila, Francis, Les cols d’espoir: le passage des évadés de France par la haute Ariège, la Cerdagne et l’Andorre (Toulouse: Pas d’Oiseau, 2008). Altink, Henrice and Sharif Gemie, eds., At the Border: Margins and Peripheries in Modern France (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). Álvarez Junco, José, Spanish Identity in the Age of Nations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). First ed. Mater Dolorosa: la idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus, 2001). Andrés-Gallego, José, Un 98 distinto: restauración, desastre, regeneracionismo (Madrid: Encuentro, 1998). Andrews, Malcolm, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989). Aron, Jean-Paul, Paul Dumont and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Anthropologie du conscript français d’après les comptes numériques et sommaires de recrutement de l’armée (1819–1826) (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1972).

Select bibliography

245

Ashfield, Andrew and Peter de Bolla, eds., The Sublime: A Reader in British EighteenthCentury Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Assier-Andrieu, Louis, ‘Le Play et la famille-souche des Pyrénées: politique, juridisme et science sociale’, AESC 39, no. 3 (1984): 495–512. Assier-Andrieu, Louis, ‘Scenarios of Transition in the French Catalan Pyrenees’, International Social Science Journal 114 (1987): 459–80. Avni, Haim, España, Franco y los judíos (Madrid: Altalena, 1982). Bacigalupo, Mario Ford, ‘An Ambiguous Image: English Travel Accounts of Spain, 1750–1787’, Dieciocho 1, no. 2 (1978): 116–38. Bacigalupo, Mario Ford, ‘A Modified Image: English Travel Accounts of Spain, 1788– 1808’, Dieciocho 2, no. 1 (1979): 21–42. Barbier, Frédéric, ‘Un exemple d’émigration temporaire: les colporteurs de librairie Pyrénéens (1840–1880)’, AM 95, no. 163 (1983): 289–307. Barbier, Frédéric, ‘Mont-Oriol aux Pyrénées: Charles-Laurent Tron et Bagnères-deLuchon (1817–1881)’, AM 106, no. 206 (1994), 161–84. Baud, Michel and Willem van Schendel, ‘Towards a Comparative History of Borderlands’, Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): 211–42. Benhammou, Farid, Vivre avec l’ours (Blois: Hesse, 2005). Benhammou, Farid et al., L’ours des Pyrénées: les quatre vérités (Toulouse: Privat, 2005). Béraldi, Henri, Cent ans des Pyrénées, 7 vols (Pau: Librairie des Pyrénées et de Gascoigne/Princi Néguer, 2011–13 [1898–1904]). Béraldi, Henri, Le passé du Pyrénéisme: notes d’un bibliophile, 5 vols (Paris: Danel & Lahure, 1911–20). Bergua Amores, José Angel, Concha Martínez Latre and Bruno Castro Benito, Reinventar los Pirineos: a propósito del conflicto del oso (Zaragoza: Delegación del Gobierno en Aragón & Caja de Ahorros Inmaculada, 2011). Bermingham, Ann, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987). Bernadac, Christian, ‘Madame de … qui vivait nue parmi les ours’, Historama no. 2 (April 1984): 89–93. Bérot, Violaine, L’ours: les raisons de la colère (Pau: Cairn, 2006). Besson, Françoise, Le paysage pyrénéen dans la littérature de voyage et l’iconographie britanniques du dix-neuvième siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000). Blackbourn, David, ‘Fashionable Spa Towns in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, in Water, Leisure, Culture: European Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan C. Anderson and Bruce H. Tabb (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 9–21. Bonells, Jordi, Les Nationalismes Espagnols (1876–1978) (Paris: Éditions du Temps, 2001). Bouchet, Jean-Claude, Histoire de la chasse dans les Pyrénées françaises (XVIe–XXe siècles) (Pau: Marrimpouey, 1990). Bouneau, Christophe, ‘Chemins de fer et développement régional en France de 1852 à 1937: la contribution de la Compagnie du Midi’, Histoire, Économie et Société 9, no. 1 (1990): 95–112.

246

Select bibliography

Bourguet, Marie-Noëlle, ‘A Portable World: The Notebooks of European Travellers (18th to 19th Centuries)’, Intellectual History Review 20, no. 3 (2010): 377–400. Bousigue, Jean-Yves, ‘L’épidémie, objet de l’histoire: le choléra dans le canton de Cabannes (1854)’, AM 97, no. 172 (1985): 411–26. Briffaud, Serge, ‘Naissance d’un paysage: l’invention géologique du paysage pyrénéen à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’, Revue de Synthèse 110, nos. 3–4 (1989): 419–52. Brives, Annie, Pyrénées sans frontière: la Vallée de Barèges et l’Espagne du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (Argelès-Galost: Société des Études des Sept Vallées, 1984). Broc, Numa, ‘L’histoire de la géographie au XVIIIe siècle’, L’Information Historique 30, no. 2 (1968): 65–70. Brunet, Michel, Le Roussillon: une société contre l’état, 1780–1820 (Toulouse: Eché, 1986). Brunet, Michel, Contrebandiers, mutins et fiers-à-bras: les stratégies de la violence en pays catalan au XVIIIe siècle (Canet: Trabucaire, 2001). Buzard, James, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). Calvet, Josep, Las montañas de la libertad: el paso de refugiados por los Pirineos durante la segunda guerra mundial, 1939–1944 (Madrid: Alianza, 2010). First edition in Catalan, 2008. Calvet Bellera, Josep, with Annie Rieu-Mias and Noemi Riudor i Garcia, La bataille des Pyrénées: réseaux d’information et d’évasion alliés transpyrénéens: Ariège, Catalogne, Andorre (Toulouse: Pas d’Oiseau, 2013). Calvet Bellera, Josep, Huyendo del holocausto: judíos evadidos del nazismo a través del Pirineo de Lleida (Lleida: Milenio, 2014). Campo, Ramón Javier, La estación espía: las claves de la derrota de los nazis en los Pirineos (Barcelona: Peninsula, 2006). Casanova, Eugeni, Crónica de un exterminio: el oso de los Pirineos (Lleida: Milenio, 2002). Catala, Michel, Dominique Le Page and Jean-Claude Meuret, eds., Frontières oubliées, frontières nouvelles: marches et limites anciennes en France et en Europe (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011). Caussimont, Gérard, Avec le naturaliste sur les pas de l’ours brun des Pyrénées (Toulouse: FIEP-Loubatières, 1997). Certeau, Michel de, L’invention du quotidien, 1. Arts de faire (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1980). Chany, Pierre, La fabuleuse histoire du Tour de France (Paris: La Martinière, 1995). Clarenc, Louis, ‘Le code de 1827 et les troubles forestiers dans les Pyrénées centrales au milieu du XIXe siècle’, AM 77, no. 73 (1965): 293–317. Clark, Ronald, The Victorian Mountaineers (London: Batsford, 1953). Cohen, Anthony P., ed., Signifying Identities: Anthropological Perspectives on Boundaries and Contested Values (London: Routledge, 2000).

Select bibliography

247

Cohen, Erik and Nir Avieli, ‘Food in Tourism: Attraction and Impediment’, Annals of Tourism Research 31, no. 4 (2004): 755–78. Conversi, Daniele, ‘The Influence of Culture on Political Choices: Language Maintenance and its Implications for the Catalan and Basque National Movements’, History of European Ideas 16, nos. 1–3 (1993): 189–200. Conversi, Daniele, The Basques, the Catalans and Spain: Alternative Routes to Nationalist Mobilisation (London: Hurst, 1997). Copley, Stephen and Peter Garside, eds., The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Corbin, Alain, Le territoire du vide: l’occident et le désir du rivage, 1750–1840 (Paris: Flammarion, 1990). Corbin, Alain, ed., L’avènement des loisirs, 1850–1960 (Paris: Aubier, 1995). Corcuera Atienza, Javier, Orígenes, ideología y organización del nacionalismo vasco, 1876–1904 (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1979). Cubero, José-Ramón, L’invention des Pyrénées (Pau: Cairn, 2009). Culler, Jonathan, ‘Semiotics of Tourism’, American Journal of Semiotics 1, nos. 1–2 (1981): 127–40. Cuzacq, René, Maître Martin: l’ours des Pyrénées (Pau: Marrimpouey Jeune, 1961). Daly, Gavin, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War: Encounters with Spain and Portugal, 1808–1814 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Dauncey, Hugh, French Cycling: A Social and Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). Dauncey, Hugh and Geoff Hare, eds., The Tour de France, 1903–2003: A Century of Sporting Structures, Meanings and Values (London: Frank Cass, 2003). Davis, Natalie Zemon, ‘Les conteurs de Montaillou’, AESC 34, no. 1 (1979): 61–73. Davis, Natalie Zemon, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Debon, Nicolas, Le tour des géants (Paris: Dargaud, 2009). Defourneaux, Marcelin, ‘La contrebande du tabac en Roussillon dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, AM 82, no. 97 (1970): 171–9. Dendaletche, Claude, Pyrénées: l’ours (Pau: Groupe Ours Pyrénées & World Wildlife Fund, 1981). Dendaletche, Claude et al., L’ours brun: Pyrénées, Abruzzes, Monts cantabriques, Alpes du Trentin (Pau: Centre Pyrénéen de Biologie et Anthropologie des Montagnes, 1986). Desplat, Christian, ‘La chasse en Béarn à l’époque moderne’, AM 98, no. 176 (1986): 486–90. Desplat, Christian, ‘L’encadrement médical dans le ressort de l’Intendance d’Auch et de Pau au XVIIIe siècle’, AM 100, no. 184 (1988): 459–75. Desplat, Christian, La guerre oubliée: guerres paysannes dans les Pyrénées (XIIe–XIXe siècles) (Pau: J & D, 1993).

248

Select bibliography

Desplat, Christian, ed., Pyrénées-terres-frontières: actes du 118e Congrès National des Sociétés Historiques et Scientifiques, Pau, 25–29 octobre 1993 (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1996). Desplat, Christian, ‘La contrebande dans les Pyrénées occidentales à l’époque moderne’, Revue de Pau et du Béarn 27 (2000): 151–84. Douglass, Carrie Bess, ‘The Fiesta Cycle of Spain’, Anthropological Quarterly 64, no. 3 (1991): 126–41. Douglass, William A., ‘The Famille-souche and its Interpreters’, Continuity and Change 8, no. 1 (1993): 87–102. Dreyfus-Armand, Geneviève, L’éxil des républicains espagnols en France, de la guerre civile à la mort de Franco (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999). Dreyfus-Armand, Geneviève and Émile Temime, Les camps sur la plage, un exil espagnol (Paris: Autrement, 1995). Edensor, Tim, ‘Walking in the British Countryside: Reflexivity, Embodied Practices and Ways to Escape’, Body and Society 6, nos. 3–4 (2000): 81–106. Edensor, Tim, ‘Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism: (re)Producing Tourist Space and Practice’, Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 59–81. Ellis, Steven G. and Raingard Esser, eds., Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500–1850 (Hanover: Wehrhan, 2006). Elosegi, Migel Mari, El oso pardo en los Pirineos (Barcelona: Lynx, 2009). Elsner, Jás and Joan-Pau Rubiés, eds., Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London: Reaktion, 1999). Erdozáin-Azpilicueta, Pilar and Fernando Mikelarena-Peña, ‘Labor Power, Social and Economic Differentials, and Adaptive Strategies of Peasant Households in StemFamily Regions of Spain’, THF 3, no. 2 (1998): 155–72. Étienne, Pascal and Jean Lauzet, L’ours brun: biologie et histoire des Pyrénées à l’oural (Paris: Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, 2009). Eychenne, Émilienne, ‘Le franchissement clandestin de la frontière dans les Pyrénées centrales’, Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale et des Conflits Contemporains 33, no. 131 (1983): 97–104. Eychenne, Émilienne, Pyrénées de la liberté: les évasions par l’Espagne, 1939–1945 (Toulouse: Privat, 1998). Faul, Henry and Carol Faul, It Began with a Stone: A History of Geology from the Stone Age to the Age of Plate Tectonics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1983). Feliu, Marcos, La conquista del Pirineo: una historia del pireneismo (no place Navarra, 1977). Fillat, Federico, ed., Pastos del Pirineo (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2008). Fittko, Lisa, Escape through the Pyrenees (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991). Ford, Brinsley, ed., Richard Ford in Spain, exhibition catalogue (London: Wildenstein, 1974). Fourcassié, Jean, Le romantisme et les Pyrénées (Paris: Gallimard, 1940).

Select bibliography

249

Gaboriau, Philippe, Le Tour de France et le vélo: histoire sociale d’une épopée contemporaine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995). Galeote, Géraldine, Maria Llombart Huesca and Mataine Ostoloza, eds., Emoción y identidad nacional: Cataluña y el País Vasco en perspectiva comparada (Paris: Éditions Hispaniques, 2015). Gemie, Sharif, ‘France and the Val d’Aran: Politics and Nationhood on the Pyrenean Border, c. 1800–1825’, European History Quarterly 28, no. 3 (1998): 311–45. Gemie, Sharif, ‘The Ballad of Bourg-Madame: Memory, Exile and the Spanish Republican Refugees of La Retirada of 1939’, International Review of Social History 51, no. 1 (2006): 1–40. Geoffre, Michel, ‘Extraits de la Charte pour la Protection des Pyrénées’, in Los Pirineos, montaña de Europa: actas del coloquio, Jaca, 22–23 junio 1989 (Madrid: Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Urbanismo, 1990), 180–7. Gerson, Stéphane, ‘Parisian Littérateurs, Provincial Journeys and the Construction of National Unity in Post-revolutionary France’, Past and Present 151 (1996): 141–73. Gies, David T., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Gómez-Ibañez, Daniel Alexander, The Western Pyrenees: Differential Evolution of the French and Spanish Borderland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). Hague Roma, Jean-Louis, ‘Quelques aspects de la sociabilité des miliciens espagnols refugiés dans le Roussillon (1937–1940)’, Provence Historique 47, no. 187 (1997): 151–61. Hansen, Peter H., ‘Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Journal of British Studies 34, no. 3 (1995): 300–24. Hansen, Peter H., The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2013). Harris, Ruth, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000). Heiberg, Marianne, The Making of the Basque Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Holt, Richard, ‘The Bicycle, the Bourgeoisie and the Discovery of Rural France, 1880– 1914’, International Journal of the History of Sport 2, no. 2 (1985): 127–39. Jacobson, Stephen, ‘The Head and Heart of Spain: New Perspectives on Nationalism and Nationhood’, Social History 29, no. 3 (2004): 393–407. Jones, Peter M., ‘Arthur Young (1741–1820): For and Against’, English Historical Review 127, no. 528 (2012): 1100–20. Jordan, Fiona and Cara Aitchison, ‘Tourism and the Sexualisation of the Gaze: Solo Female Tourists’ Experiences of Gendered Power, Surveillance and Embodiment’, Leisure Studies 27, no. 3 (2008): 329–49. Kidd, William, ‘Eidenbenz’s Ark: Retirada and Holocaust Memories in the PyrénéesOrientales’, Modern & Contemporary France 20, no. 4 (2012): 473–89.

250

Select bibliography

Laborde, Christian, Pyrène et les vélos: Le Tour de France dans les Pyrénées (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993). Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, ‘Occitania in Historical Perspective’, Review 1, no. 1 (1977): 21–30. Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, Histoire de France des régions: la Périphérie française des origines à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2001). Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, Une vie avec l’histoire (Paris: Tallandier, 2014). Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, ed., with Anne Brenon and Christine Dieulafait, Autour de Montaillou, un village Occitan: histoire et religiosité d’une communauté villageoise au moyen âge (actes du colloque de Montaillou, 25–27 août 2000) (Castelnaud La Chapelle: L’Hydre, 2001). Lasserre-Vergne, Anne, Les Pyrénées centrales dans la littérature française entre 1820 et 1870 (Toulouse: Eché, 1985). Lavenir, Catherine Bertho, La roue et le stylo: comment nous sommes devenus touristes (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999). Lavenir, Catherine Bertho, Voyages à vélo: du vélocipède au Vélib’ (Paris: Paris Bibliothèques, 2011). Leask, Nigel, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Lecours, André, Basque Nationalism and the Spanish State (Reno: Nevada University Press, 2007). Leed, Eric J., The Mind of the Traveler from Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York: Basic Books, 1991). Lougarot, Gisèle, Dans l’ombre des passeurs (Donostia: Elkar, 2004). Loureiro, Angelo, ‘Denied Impositions: Harassment and Resistance of the Catalan Langage’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2003): 77–94. McCaffrey, Emily, ‘Imagining the Cathars in Late-Twentieth-Century Languedoc’, Contemporary European History 11, no. 3 (2002): 409–27. McFarland, Andrew, ‘Regeneracionismo del Cuerpo: The Arguments for Implanting Athletics in Spain’, Sport and Society 11, no. 6 (2008): 615–29. Maoz, Darya, ‘The Mutual Gaze’, Annals of Tourism Research 33, no. 1 (2006): 221–39. Marliave, Olivier de, Histoire de l’ours dans les Pyrénées de la préhistoire à la réintroduction (Bordeaux: Éditions Sud-Ouest, 2008). Merlet, François, Seigneur des Pyrénées: l’ours (Pau: Marrimpouey Jeune, 1971). Mitchell, Timothy, Blood Sport: A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1991). Monserrat Zapater, Octavio, El balneario de Panticosa, 1826–1936: historia de un espacio de salud y ocio en el Pirineo Aragonés (Zaragoza: Departamento de Educación y Cultura, 1998). Montellà, Assumpta, Contrabandistes de la llibertat (Badalona: Ara Llibres, 2009). Moraldo, Delphine, ‘“Mountaineering is something more than a sport”: les origines de l’éthique de l’alpinisme dans l’Angleterre victorienne’, Genèses 103 (2016): 7–28.

Select bibliography

251

Moreno Garrido, Ana, Historia del turismo en España en el siglo XX (Madrid: Síntesis, 2007). Morgan, Marjorie, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Nordmann, Daniel, ‘Les Guides-Joanne, ancêtres des Guides Bleus’, in Les lieux de mémoire, la nation, part 1, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 529–67. Olaechea, Rafael, Viajeros españoles del XVIII en los balnearios del alto Pirineo francés (Logroño: Colegio Universitario de la Rioja, 1985). Oldroyd, David R., Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Oosterhuis, Harry, ‘Cycling, Modernity and National Culture’, Social History 41, no. 3 (2016): 233–48. Pallaruelo, Severino, Pastores del Pirineo (Madrid: Ministerio de la Cultura, 1988). Pallaruelo, Severino, José, un hombre de los Pirineos (Zaragoza: Prames, 2000). Pasteur, Claude, ed., Les femmes à bicyclette à la Belle Époque (Paris: France-Empire, 1986). Pastoureau, Michel, L’ours: histoire d’un roi déchu (Paris: Seuil, 2007). Peréz Agote, Alfonso, The Social Roots of Basque Nationalism (Reno: Nevada University Press, 2006). Piferrer i Deu, Jordi, Entre la noche y la esperanza: el paso de San Josemaría Escrivá a través de los Pirineos en el otoño de 1937 (Lleida: Milenio, 2014). Los Pirineos, montaña de Europa: actas del coloquio, Jaca, 22–23 junio 1989 (Madrid: Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Urbanismo, Centro de Publicaciones, 1990). Poujade, Patrice, Identité et solidarités dans les Pyrénées: essai sur les relations humaines (XVIe–XIXe siècle) (Aspet: PyréGraph, 2000). Poyer, Alex, Les premiers temps des véloce-clubs: apparition et diffusion de cyclisme associatif français entre 1867 et 1914 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003). Pratviel, Bernard, Nids d‘aigles: histoire du Tour de France dans les Pyrénées (Portet-surGaronne: Loubatières, 1993). Rajan, Vithal, ed., Rebuilding Communities: Experiences and Experiments in Europe (Totnes UK: Green Books, 1993). Reed, Eric, Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015). Reed-Danahay, Deborah, ‘Tristes Paysans: Bourdieu’s Early Ethnography in Béarn and Kabylia’, Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 1 (2004): 87–106. Reidy, Michael S., ‘Mountaineering, Masculinity and the Male Body in Mid-Victorian Britain’, OSIRIS 30 (2015): 158–81. Rey, Jean-Paul, L’étape assassin: Luchon-Bayonne 1910 (Pau: Cairn, 2010). Ripol, Marc, Las rutas del exilio, paseos y escapadas irrepetibles, preface by Jorge M. Reverte (Barcelona: Alhena Media, 2005). Roche, Claire, ‘Women Climbers, 1850–1900: A Challenge to Male Hegemony?’, Sport in History 33, no. 3 (2013): 236–59.

252

Select bibliography

Saglia, Diego, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). Sahlins, Peter, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley : California University Press, 1989). Sahlins, Peter, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Saint-Lèbe, Nanou, Les femmes à la découverte des Pyrénées (Toulouse: Privat, 2002). Sánchez Agustí, Ferran, El maquis anarquista: de Toulouse a Barcelona por los Pirineos (Leida: Milenio, 2006). Santallana, Jesús Pardo de, ‘Richard Ford, viajero por la España del siglo XIX’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 297 (marzo 1975): 491–521. Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (London: Fontana, 1996). Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Schultz-Forberg, Hagen, ed., Unravelling Civilisation: European Travel and Travel Writing (Brussels: Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes/Peter Lang, 2005). Scott, James C., The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2009). Shubert, Adrian, Death and Money in the Afternoon: A History of the Spanish Bullfight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Smith, Angel, The Origins of Catalan Nationalism, 1770–1898 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Soulet, Jean-François, La vie quotidienne dans les Pyrénées sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Hachette, 1974). Soulet, Jean-François, Les Pyrénées au XIXe siècle, 2 vols (Toulouse: Eché, 1987). Stuard, Susan, ‘An Unfortunate Construct: A Comment on E. Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou’, Journal of Social History 15, no. 1 (1981): 152–5. Taillefer, François et al., Les Pyrénées de la montagne à l’homme (Toulouse: Privat, 1974). Thermalisme dans les Hautes-Pyrénées (Pau: Musée Pyrénéen, Catalogue of an Exhibition at the Château-fort de Lourdes, 1984). Thompson, Christopher S., The Tour de France: A Cultural History (Berkeley : California University Press, 2006). Thompson, Christopher and Fiona Ratkoff, ‘Un troisième sexe? Les bourgeoises et la bicyclette dans la France fin de siècle’, Mouvement Social 192 (2000): 9–39. Turner, Katherine, British Travel Writers in Europe, 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). Urry, John and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London: Sage, 2011). Vaccaro, Ismael and Oriol Beltran, eds., Ecología política de los Pirineos: estado, historia y paisaje (Tremp: Garsineu, 2007). Vaccaro, Ismael and Oriol Beltran, ‘Livestock versus “Wild Beasts”: Contradictions in the Natural Patrimonialization of the Pyrenees’, Geographical Review 99, no. 4 (2009): 499–516.

Select bibliography

253

Vallois, Henri V., ‘Les groupes sanguins de part et d’autre des Pyrénées’, Actas del Primer Congreso Internacional de Estudios Pirenaicos, San Sebastián, 1950, tomo IV (Zaragoza: Instituto de Estudios Pirenaicos, 1952), 113–40. Vigarello, Georges, ‘Le Tour de France’, in Les lieux de mémoire tome 3: les France, vol. 2, traditions, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1992): 885–925. Viguié, Renan, La traversée électrique des Pyrenées: histoire de l’interconnexion entre la France et l’Espagne (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014). Vilanova, Antonio, Los olvidados: los exilados españoles en la segunda guerra mundial (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1969). Wacquant, Loïc, ‘Following Bourdieu into the Field’, Ethnography 5, no. 4 (2004): 387–414. Weber, Eugen, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of Rural France, 1870–1914 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977). Weber, Eugen, ‘La Petite Reine’, in France: Fin de Siècle, ed. E. Weber (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 195–212. Wilson, Sonia, ‘Turning Train Travel to Account: Locomotion, Femininity and DiaryWriting in the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff ’, French Studies 71, no. 2 (2017): 179–95. Wilson, Thomas and Hastings Donnan, eds., Border Identities: Nations and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Zahra, Tara, ‘Imagined Non-communities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis’, Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 93–119.

Index Abarca, Pedro 46, 47 Académie des Sciences 20, 28 Agote, Peréz 136 Ajax network 153 Albaniac, François 36, 41 Albigensian Crusade 165 Alcoverro, José 155 Almirall, Valentí 137, 138 Alps, the 27, 36, 89 compared with the Pyrenees 22, 23, 103 Swiss Alps 22, 28 Althape, Louis 181 altitudes 6, 18, 23, 30, 43, 94, 96, 117, 161, 187 high 8, 21, 25, 28, 44, 89, 98, 151, 190, 197 Álvarez Junco, José 67 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 155 Ancien Régime, French 8, 13, 29, 77, 130, 131, 166, 183, 188 Andajar, Manuel 148 Andalusia, Spain 55, 65 Andes, the 22, 27, 36, 105 Andorra (micro-state) 11, 76, 101, 128, 140–2, 151, 154 Andrews, Malcolm 41 Aneto (mountain) 90 animals, harmful 183 Anisclo pass, upper Aragon 95 anthropology 1, 199 French 171 ‘gaze,’ of the anthropologist 161–78 Spanish 162, 175–7 anti-picturesque 44–5 anti-Semitism 85 Appalachians 27 Arabía y Solanas, Ramón 121, 122 Aragon 12, 59, 96, 162, 176 Anisclo pass, upper Aragon 95 dress of 62–3 Arana, Sabino 134–5 Arcal, Lisón 176

arenitis (beach syndrome) 148 Argelès 148, 150 Argelès-Galost, France 113 aridity 44 Ariège 10, 12, 76, 186, 189 Arnaud, Simone 154, 159 Arrizabalaga, Marie-Pierre 174 art/artists 38, 40, 62 Artigat, village of 161 ascent narratives 92–5, 97, 100, 103 making a ‘first ascent’ 92, 94 Aspe and ossau, 128, 179, 186, 192 Aspe (valley community) 128 Associació d’Excursions Catalana 108, 121, 122 Athletic Club of Bilbao 111 athletics 111 Authier family 184 Autonomous Community of Euskadi 133, 134, 136 avalanches 22, 28, 93, 155 Avilés, Juan 39, 45, 69, 70 Avni, Haim 152 Baedeker, Karl/Verlag Karl Baedeker 2, 3, 112 Bagnères-de-Bigorre 80, 81, 83, 84, 188 Bagnères-de-Luchon. See Luchon Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 113 bandits 33, 40, 42, 62–3, 93, 132, 199. See also smuggling Banqué, José 68, 69 Barcelona 5, 71, 130, 131, 137, 139, 142 anarcho-syndicalism 68, 144 bourgeoisie 6, 122, 138 Excursionist Association 122 Fútbol Club de Barcelona 111, 148 industrial 109 and Madrid 113 modernist culture 138 red light district 148 Barèges region 21, 24, 47, 83, 84, 93, 115 barometer measurements 21

Index Bashkirtseff, Marie 71 Basque country 13, 15, 53, 84, 94, 121, 136, 138, 162, 169, 175, 191, 202 compared to Catalonia 137–8 enigma of 60–1 French 61, 136, 153 language 8, 133, 134, 135, 138 nationalism 121, 133–6, 138, 197 provinces as Autonomous Community of Spain 136 separatism 121, 134 Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) 134, 135 Bates, Katherine Lee 67 bâtons ferrés (poles) 17, 18 battues 183 Bayonne, city of 12, 15, 74, 100 Bayonne, Treaties of (1866–68) 7, 126 beach syndrome 148 Béarn, French province 94, 130, 162. See also Pau, town of bachelors’ ball, seen as 172, 177 bear predation 181 Béarnais language 8 integration into France by Louis XIII (1620) 80 Pau as historical capital of 80 right to carry arms in 188–9 bears 4, 47. See also Cannelle (brown bear), killing of (2004); hunting bear population of the Pyrenees 195 brown 180, 193, 202 conflicts and ‘reintroductions’ 180–2, 189, 194, 195 festivals 191–2 killing of 85, 179–95 killing of sheep by 179, 185, 186 Law on Bear Conservation, Spain 187 legends and folk tales 191–2 life span 184 names 191–3 predation 181, 186 rewards for successful killing of 183 skin and fur, value of 184 Slovenian 180, 181, 189, 202 symbolic power 182, 192 begging 85 Bel, Philippe le 42 Belle Époque, France 68, 107, 108 Bellet, René 112 Bellèze, S. de 37, 41, 82

255

Belloc, Hilaire 2, 59, 84, 86–7, 140 Benjamin, Walter 154, 155 Béraldi, Henri 89, 90, 97, 100, 102, 103 Bérot, Violaine 187 Biarritz, town of 74, 78, 79, 105, 123 Bible 24–5, 27, 146–7 bicycles 4, 107–10, 115. See also cycling and female emancipation 109–10 ‘safety bicycle’ 108 Bilbao, Athletic Club of 111 Bilbao region 133, 134, 144, 153 Bilbrough, Ernest 82, 85, 86 Blackburn, Henry 39, 43, 48, 66, 81, 82, 85 Blanche II of Navarre, ghost of 42 blight 11 blizzards 155 Bonnain, Rolande 174, 175 Bonrepaux, Augustin 181 Bordeaux 7, 13, 53, 120 borders and frontiers 5–9 Andorra as a frontier state 140–2 as arbitrary constructions 126 and Basque nationalism 4, 133–6 boundary lines/markers 7, 8, 126 and Catalan nationalism 4, 137–9 dangerous borderlands (1936–45) 143–59 French/Spanish frontier 4, 6, 7 intermediate borderland 133 location of frontier 129 ‘magic line’ 13, 131 peace charters 128–30 three cows, tribute of 125–8 trans-frontier zone 8 botany/botanists 17, 18, 19, 21 Bouchet, Jean-Claude 182 boundary commissioners 126, 127 boundary lines/markers 7, 8, 126 Bourbon Restoration 12, 48, 131 Bourdieu, Pierre 161, 168, 170–6 Breyer, Victor 118 Briet, Lucien 190 Briffaud, Serge 22 Bringué, Martí 184 Britain 49, 57, 58, 62, 71, 79, 91, 153 tourists/travellers 7, 39, 41, 54, 56–7, 61, 69 Brives, Annie 131 Brousse, Emmanuel 120 Brulle, Henri 97

256

Index

Brunet, Michel 13, 14, 15, 131, 142 Bulletin Pyrénéen 89, 98 bullfight 64–7 Bunbury, Selina 50, 69, 85 Burke, Edmund 47, 48 Buzard, James 2, 40, 49, 59 Byron, George Gordon (Lord) 35, 41, 48, 49 Cabrero (El Mano) 158, 159, 230n61 caciques (local bosses) 110 caciquismo (political system) 110 cagots 40 callada (law of silence) 14 Calvet, Josep 152 Calvinism 167 Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure 173 Campan, Pyrenean valley of 22 Canfranc, French enclave at 154 Canigou, France 100, 122–3, 139 Cannelle (brown bear), killing of (2004) 179–82, 193–5. See also bears Carbonnières, Ramond de 10, 19, 24, 28–30, 36, 38, 79 climbing of Monte Perdido 17, 18, 21, 29, 30, 32, 90 Carcassonne, France 76, 167 Cárdenas, Lázaro 144 Cardier, Alfred 125 Carlist Wars (nineteenth century) 60, 63, 67, 68, 96, 132, 133–4, 134 cartography 18, 95, 101 Casanova, Eugeni 195 Catalan Excursionists’ Association 124 Catalonia 8, 69, 122, 133, 139, 162, 175, 192 Catalan Excursionist movement 122, 123, 138 Catalan language 137–8, 139 compared to the Basque country 137–8 dress of 62–3 excursionists 121–3 Floral Games, annual literary festival 139 nationalism 123, 133, 137–9, 197 separatism 138, 139 catastrophes 27 Catharism 165–6, 167 Catholicism 19, 69 Cauterets (spa resort) 6, 80, 83, 84, 87, 98

Cavaillés, Henri 8 Cazaux, Henry 99 Cénac-Moncaut, Justin 41, 55, 60, 61 Centre National d’Études Cathares, Carcassonne 167 Cerdagne, France 126, 130, 131 Cériset 38 Certeau, Michel de 2 Charles, Jean-Pierre 99 Charles III, Spanish king (1759–88) 19 Charter for the Protection of the Pyrenees 200 Chateau of Pau 48 Chatterton, Georgiana 44, 54, 62, 63, 70, 72 Chausenque, Vincent 18, 36–7, 39, 46, 47, 48, 49, 61, 83 Chemins de fer d’Orléans et du Midi 77 Chiva, Isac 170 cholera epidemic (1830–32) 12 cirques 5 Clark, William 66, 67 ‘Claude glass’ 37 Clergue, Jean 178 clientelism 110 climate 56, 79, 93, 202. See also cold; snow extreme weather conditions 89, 90, 94, 145, 155, 156 Spanish heat 56, 57 climbing/mountain-climbing 4, 17, 23, 38, 87, 89, 90, 117, 199. See also mountains/mountaineering; Pyrenees ascent narratives 92–5, 97, 100, 103 elite, self-perception of climbers as 97, 100 Everest 94 fatalities 89, 93, 97 female climbers 97–9 fraternity of mountaineers 92, 100, 101 ‘Grande Époque’ of (1860s to 1880s) 89 and masculinity 91–2 motives 89 and patriotism 91–2 peaks, challenge of 28, 89–106, 114 solitary 73, 103–4, 105 unknown Pyrenees, conquering 95–7 in winter 96, 97, 102, 103, 104, 105

Index Club Alpin Français 75, 89, 92, 93, 94, 96, 100–2, 106 admission fee 100 Bulletin Pyrénéen 89, 98 and democratization of the Pyrenees 100–2 founding of 91, 100 Pau congress (1897) 98 cold 93, 94, 145, 155. See also climate; frostbite extreme/severe 43, 56, 90 Collège de France 1–2, 20 colonization thesis 166 colporteurs (peddlers) 13 Comas, Dolores 163 Comet network 153 Cominac, Ariège 189 Commettant, Oscar 84 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), EU 190 Compagnie des Chemins de fer du Midi 87 competition 92, 108, 115–16 concentration camps 148, 149 conscripts, Pyrenean 11–12, 14–15 Conseil International Associatif pour la Protection des Pyrénées 200 Conservateur des Eaux et des Forêts, Toulouse region 9–10 conservation/conservationism 11, 120, 186, 187, 190. See also bears environmental 194 natural 199, 200, 202 species 181, 191, 193 consumption patterns 172 contraband. See smuggling 131, 132 Conversi, Daniele 134 Corbin, Alain 78 corridas (bullfights) 64–7 Costa, Joaquín 175 Costello, Louisa 42, 44, 79, 85 Côte Vermeille 76 Couturier, Marcel 191 cows (three). See tribute of the three cows Coxe, William 22, 28, 29, 30 crampons (climbing irons) 17 cross-border treaties 130 Culler, Jonathan 2 Cuní, Miquel 109 Cushing, Caroline 55

257

cycling 4, 107–24 bicycles 107–10, 115 cycling clubs 7, 108, 119, 120–1 cyclo-tourism 108, 109 female cyclists 109–10 forms 108 for the nation 110–12 Pyrenean 111 recreational 108, 123 leisurely excursions 119–21 and social class 109 Tour de France 108, 113–19, 123 Touring Club de France 108, 109, 111, 112, 124 d’Albret, Jeanne (Queen of Navarre) 80 dance 16, 84, 139 Darcet, Jean 1–2, 18, 19–20, 25, 30 Davis, Natalie 161 Dédée (resistance leader) 153 deforestation 10, 46 desertion, military service 14, 15 Desgrange, Henri 113–19 Desplat, Christian 129 Diamond Necklace Affair 28 Diligence. See stagecoaches disease 11–12 Dix, Edwin 74, 79, 80 domus, the 164 Douglass, Carrie Bess 65 Douglass, William 162–3, 176 draft-dodging 14, 15 Dralet, Étienne 9–10 Dreyfus, Alfred 114 Dujardin, Victor 40, 73 Dumas, Alexandre 3, 100, 138 Dupin, Aurore (later George Sand) 44, 82 Duvernoy, Jean 164 earth 25, 27, 32, 33 Biblical explanations of origins of 24–5 early history/pre-history 19, 31 earthquakes 27 Eaux-Bonnes (spa resort) 80, 83, 87, 113 Eaux-Chaudes (spa resort) 43, 83 ecology/egologists 180, 186, 189, 194 Edensor, Tim 79 EDF (Électricité de France) 201 Eidenbenz, Elizabeth 148 El Mano. See Cabrero (El Mano)

258 electricity/electrification 87, 201 elitism 41, 61, 97, 100, 101, 110, 134 Ellis, Sarah 69, 79, 80 emigration/seasonal emigration 12–14, 15 emotions 45, 46 en gazailhe system, pasturing 9 England. See Britain English Alpine Club 91 Enlightenment, Age of 17–33, 197 geological invention of methodologies and theories 23–7 scientific approach 21–3 scientific community 19–21 equipment, mountaineering 96 erosion 26 Escrivá, Josemaría 144 espadrilles (footwear) 17–18, 84, 158 Esparros, Baronnie of 174 Espinar, Jaime 145, 146, 148 ETA (terrorist group) 134, 135, 136 ethnography 22, 30, 163, 170–1, 175 Études Rurales (French journal) 170, 171 European Union (EU) 126, 190, 194, 200 Euskara (Basque language) 133, 135 Everest, climbing 94 excursionism 121–3 Catalan Excursionist movement 122, 123, 138 excursions 53 Catalan excursionists 121–3 cycling 4, 108, 111–12, 119–21 exercise 92, 110 Eychenne, Émilienne 151, 153 Eyre, Mary 141 Faber, François 116, 118–19 Fabié, Antonio Maria 68 Falangism 139, 143 Family. See also marriage extended family 173 ideal Pyrenean 168–70 nuclear family 173, 174 stem family 168, 171, 173–4, 175 traditional family 173 fauna, Pyrenean 47 Fauve-Chaumont, Antoinette 174 federation, Pyrenean 8 Fernández, Francisco 77, 85 Fernández Villegas, Francisco 67 festivals, regional 84–5

Index fieldwork 162, 163, 170–1, 173, 175 FIEP (Eco-pastoral Intervention Fund) 187 Fine-Souriac, Agnès 173, 174 First World War 111, 112, 118 fitness 4, 92, 110, 111 Fittko, Lisa 154 Flaubert, Gustave 71 Fleischmann, Nanette 155 Fontana, José Maria 145 Ford, Richard 54, 55, 58, 59, 62, 65, 68 foreign cultures 53, 59 forests 9–10, 47 conflicts 129 deforestation 10, 46 War of the Demoiselles, against Forest Code 10, 14, 189 fossils 17, 23, 24–5, 30 Fourcade, A. 44 Fourens, F. 107, 108, 120 Fournier, Bishop Jacques 164 France 15, 57, 68, 69, 171, 197. See also under borders and frontiers; French Revolution (1789); Paris; Pyrenees Ancien Régime 8, 13, 29, 77, 130, 131, 166, 183, 188 Basque country 61, 136, 153 Belle Époque 68, 107, 108 Bourbon Restoration 12, 48, 131 Civil Code 169 Cour de Cassation (Appeal Court) 170 cycling in 108, 111 flight of Spanish republicans to 143, 147 Forest Code (1827) 10 French integration of Roussillon 8, 16 gendarmerie 14, 156 maps of 18, 119 Ministry of War Veterans 151 Paris Commune 68 perception of as a place of indulgence 68, 69 Second Empire 72, 75, 84 Third Republic 15, 68, 69, 72, 86, 155 Tour de France 108, 113–19, 123 Touring Club de France 108, 109, 111, 112, 124 tourists/travellers from 6, 39, 55, 81 villages 69, 112, 130, 147 Franco, General Francisco 135–9, 143, 149, 153, 156, 201 death of (1975) 144, 150

Index Franco-Prussian War (1870) 91 Franqueville, Count 90 freedom smugglers (Second World War) 150–9 French Revolution (1789) 13–14, 15, 18, 20, 33, 57, 131 Le Play on 168–9 frontiers. See borders and frontiers frostbite 93, 153, 155 Fuenterabbia (Basque town) 60 Fútbol Club de Barcelona 111, 148 Gambetta, Léon 120 Garin, Maurice 116 Garrigou, Gustave 118 Gavarnie 22, 39, 42, 63, 86, 131, 201 gaze 44, 48, 53 anthropological 161–78 gendered 78 of observer 197 romantic 39 Spanish 69, 70 tourist 16, 59, 63, 72, 78, 80, 85 Geoffre, Michel 200 geology/geologists 19, 22, 23, 24–5, 28, 32, 36, 101. See also rocks/rock formations geological invention of the Pyrenees 23–7 geological specimens 4, 17, 18, 21 Gerson, Victor 153 Giffard, Pierre 111, 113, 114 Gilpin, William 36, 38, 41, 42, 48, 50 glaciers 30 globalization 126 Goddet, Victor 114 goitre 11, 12, 23, 40 gorges 5, 23, 24, 31 Gothic picturesque 35, 42–4 Gourdon, Maurice 101 granite 22, 25, 26, 30 Gravier, Maurice 120 Great Flood of Noah, Biblical 25 Great Winter Week 120 Green Pyrenees 193, 198 Grenzschutz (frontier police) 156 Grip (Hautes-Pyrénées) 85 Grumbach, Jacques 158 Guardia Civil 121, 149, 156 Guérin, Eugénie de 48

259

Guernica, Basque region 135 Guerre, Martin 161, 162, 164 Guerre des Demoiselles 10, 14, 189 guerrillas 54, 58, 59, 62, 149 Guides Joanne 58, 60, 75–7, 78, 81, 83, 105, 112. See also travel guidebooks; travel writing Guilera i Albinyana, Josep Maria (mountaineer) 92, 93 Hachette (publishers) 77, 112 Hansen, Peter 90 Haute-Garonne 12 Hautes-Pyrénées 12, 79, 85, 104, 132, 154, 168, 174, 202 heifers (three), tribute of 125 heroism heroic age 89–90 heroic Pyrenees 89–106 heroic travellers 32 Heym, Maurice 157 hiking 85, 101, 108, 109, 111, 121. See also walking, benefits of Himalayas, the 36, 102, 105 historical sources 4, 6, 19 Holy Grail 167 Huesca 176 Hugo, Victor 2, 3, 64, 72–3, 78 Humboldt, Alexander von 3, 22, 27 hunting 179, 181, 188 culture of 182–5 professional hunters 183–4 Hutton, James 27 hydro-electric power 87, 201 identity, national 55–9, 92, 127 and Tribute of the three cows 125–8 illiteracy, historical 12 Ingham, Vivienne 99 Inquisition, Spanish 19, 64, 164, 165 Institut National 20 insubordination 15, 142 Itinéraire descriptif 76 izard (mountain goat) 47, 182 Izeste (Pyrénées-Occidentales) 85 Joanne, Adolphe 2, 3, 75, 93, 100, 101 Joanne, Paul 73–4, 76 John Murray (publishers) 2, 3, 54, 58, 59, 199

260 Johnson, Frederick 42–3 Jongh, Andrée de 153 Jordana, Count Francisco (Foreign Minister) 156–7 Joudou, Madame Virginie 38, 39, 44–5, 81 Jubinal, Achille 132 Kabylia, North Africa 170 knowledge, interdisciplinary approach to classification 21 La Retirada (retreat from Spain) 143–50 Labiche, Eugène Marin 74–5 labour conscription 152 Lac de Gaube 42, 44 Ladurie, Emmanuel LeRoy 4, 161–6, 177 Lafayette, Marquis de (Gilbert du Motier) 29 Laferrière, President 102 Lake District, Britain 36 Lamazou, Étienne 9, 186, 187, 188–9 landscape 41, 44, 48, 55–9, 112. See also Pyrenees perceptions/visions of 1–2, 100, 197, 198 of the Pyrenees 1–2, 40, 43, 55–9, 193 reshaping of configuration 1, 2, 106 language Basque country 8, 133, 134, 135, 138 Béarnais 8 Catalan 137–8, 139 Occitan 8 of the picturesque 31, 107 Languedoc (royal province) 9, 11, 13, 141, 162, 166, 188 Lapize, Octave 116, 118 Laslett, Peter 173 Lassalle, Jean 181 L’Auto-Vélo (sporting paper) 113–14, 116, 117, 118 Lavedan 168, 169, 177 Le Play, Frédéric 168–72, 175, 177 Le Vélo (sporting paper) 113, 114, 116 Leask, Nigel 37 Leed, Eric 2, 32, 33 Lefevre, Géo 114 Legislative Assembly 29 leisure cycling 119–21 Lequeutre, Alphonse 100–1 Liberman, Conrad 158

Index limestone 23, 26, 30, 33 Lisón Huguet, José 176 Lister, Ann 90, 97–9 Listou, Pierre de 192 lithographs 3 livestock 1, 4, 9, 22, 94, 126, 129–31, 202. See also bears; sheep bear attacks 182, 185, 194 stray 129, 130 Llewellyn Smith, H. 85, 101 Llivia, Spain 130 Londres, Albert 116 Lorrain, Claude 41 Lourdes 31, 57, 85–7, 105, 181 visions of Bernadette Soubirous 81, 86 as a world pilgrimage centre 81, 86 lowlands 41, 85, 97, 105. See also valleys Luchon (Bagnères-de-Luchon) 6, 40, 43, 98, 100 Luchon-Bayonne stage (Tour de France) 117, 118 and railway age 71, 81, 83, 84, 86–7 macabre, the 42 Machado, Antonio 147 Madrid 65, 72, 82, 83. See also Spain and Barcelona 113 Madrid Football Club (later Real Madrid) 111 perceptions of as Spanish capital 133 political issues 92, 137, 139 travel routes 55 Mailly, Lieutenant-Général de 131 Maître Martin 185 Maladetta range 5, 21, 26, 45, 82, 102 maps 101, 154 of France 18, 119 road 107 Marie Antoinette 28 Marquèze, René 179, 195 marriage 172, 174, 176. See also family arranged marriages 171 Marsac (Hautes-Pyrénées) 174 Martin’s tithe 185 masculinity 113, 118 and climbing 91–2 mass tourism 2, 3, 71, 80, 86, 87 Matterhorn disaster (1865) 89, 97 Mauléon 15 Maurice network 153

Index McPherson, James 49 Melouga family, Lavedan 168, 169, 170 methodologies and theories, geological invention of the Pyrenees 23–7 Metz-Noblat, Alexandre de 84 Mexico 144, 149 Michelet, Jules 138 micro-societies, Pyrenean 161 middle-classes 57, 81, 82, 92, 98, 122 cyclists 109, 111 readership 62, 74 tourists/travellers 71, 72 upper middle-classes 100 military service 11–12, 14–15 Ministry of War Veterans, France 151 mist 43 Mitchell, Thomas 66 Mitrani, Thérèse (Denise) 153 modernity 4, 73, 141, 161, 162, 176 crisis of 2, 47 in England 71 in France 69 in the Pyrenees 71 molluscs 25 Mont-Blanc 22, 98 Montaillou (Ladurie) 4, 162, 163–8, 177–8 popularity of 165–6 Montaillou (village of) 161, 162, 164, 165, 173, 174, 177–8 Monte Perdido 22–3, 26, 31, 94, 101, 190, 201 climbing by de Carbonniéres 17, 18, 21, 29, 30, 32, 90 Montellà, Assumpta 150, 151, 155 Montijo, Eugénie (Empress) 78, 79 Montseny, Frederica 145–6, 149 Montserrat, monastery of 122, 139 Morgan, Marjorie 55, 72 Moskova, Prince of 90, 99 Mosse, Kate 167–8 motor transport 108 mountain guides 85, 101, 103, 150, 151, 155 mountains/mountaineering 1, 26, 76. See also Andes, the; Himalayas, the; mountain guides; Pic du Midi de Bigorre; Pyrenees high peaks 4, 19, 24, 32, 39, 82, 105 climbing 28, 89–106, 114 landscape (see landscape)

261

metaphors 97 mountaineering clubs 92 mountaineers (see climbing/mountainclimbing) mountains perceived as a spiritual experience 31, 32, 94, 104, 105 nomenclature 94, 95 summits 17, 19, 24, 28, 30, 31, 32, 89, 93, 94–6, 99, 101 mules 11, 13, 55, 130 Napoleon III 78, 91 Napoleonic Wars 37, 57, 58, 62, 76, 132, 133 national identity. See identity, national National Parks 190, 200 nationalism 58, 127. See also identity, national Basque country 4, 121, 133–6, 138 Catalonia 123, 133, 137–9, 197 cycling and the nation 110–12 nation-formation 133 nation-states 7, 10, 126 Natura 2000 programme, EU 190 Navarre (Autonomous Region) 54, 125, 130, 136, 169, 175, 177, 187, 191 Nazis 143, 149, 152, 155, 156, 197 ‘neptunians’ (theoretical school) 26–7 ‘non-aggression’ pacts 130 Nonconformism 86 Nora, Pierre 75, 162 Nordmann, Daniel 77 nuclear family 173, 174 Oakley, Amy 2, 16, 59, 66–7, 85–6 Obradors, Jacques 157 Occitania 8, 162, 167 exceptionalism, Occitan 162 medieval 164, 166 ocean 25, 26, 30, 48 sea-bathing 78–9 Oldroyd, David 25 ophite 23 Ortega, José 68, 82 Ospital, André 136 Ossau (valley community) 128 Ossian (Gaelic poet) 49 other, the 53–70, 198 outside observers 2, 18, 198, 199 gaze of 197

262

Index

package tours 71, 102 Packe, Charles 92, 102, 105 Palassou, Pierre Bernard de 19, 20, 23–6, 28, 30, 33 Palencia, Isabel de 146, 147, 150 Pallarès, Jaume 150 Pallars, the 11 Pallaruelo, Severino 176 Pamplona, Spain 5, 53, 64, 65 Panticosa (spa resort) 6, 83 Paradis, Marie 98 Parc National des Pyrénées Occidentales 180, 185, 187 Parent, André 152, 157 Paris 68, 72, 77, 84, 87, 99, 114, 130, 150, 172, 181, 182, 201. See also France political issues 57, 86, 189 travel routes 53, 55, 71 Paris Commune 68 passadors (mountain guides) 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158 Passet, Célestin 93, 97 passeurs (mountain couriers) 143, 153. See also mountain guides; passadors (mountain guides) pastoral economy. Pyrenean 7, 9–12, 14, 22, 129, 187–8 Pastoureau, Michel 191 Pasumot, François 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23–4, 26, 30, 33 Pat O’Leary network 153 paterfamilias 173, 176 patriotism 91–2, 108, 197 cycling for the nation 110–12 Pau, town of 5, 21, 37, 48, 62, 63, 69, 78, 103, 105, 120, 170 Club Alpin François congress in (1897) 98 English view of 79, 104 as historic capital of Béarn 80 Parliament 183 Pau-Zaragoza line 154 Pays Basque Français 162 Pays de l’Ours-ADET 192 Pays Quint, grazing rights in 129 peace charters 125, 128–30, 142 peaks of mountains. See mountains/ mountaineering; summits, mountain

peasants 10, 12, 16, 73, 85, 108, 112, 121, 128, 145, 166, 176, 182, 199 ‘forgotten peasant’ war 8, 129 and killing of bears 182, 183, 186 peasant studies 162, 166, 170 Pécault, Félix 15 Pedraforca (mountain) 93 Peninsular War 58, 79, 127 Perpignan, France 14, 100, 122 Phébus, Gaston 54, 182 phylloxera (aphid) 11, 174 physical fitness 4, 92, 110, 111 Pic de la Munia 76 Pic de Sésérite 94 Pic du Midi de Bigorre 17, 20, 26, 28, 33, 63, 87, 103, 155 and the picturesque 44–5 Pic du Midi de Pau 21 picturesque 19, 35, 36, 38, 48, 198 anti-picturesque 44–5 definitions/terminology 35, 48 distinguished from the Romantic 45 Gothic 35, 42–4 language of 31, 107 and nature 38 in the Pyrenees 43 in search of 37–41 and the senses 43 visions of 35–51 Pidal, Pedro 190, 191 pine forests 46 Pius IX, Pope 86 Pivot, Bernard 162 ‘plutonians’ (theoretical school) 27 Ponzán, Francisco 153 population, Pyrenean 11, 12, 176 posters 3 Poumarède, Jacques 174 poverty 11, 11–12, 12, 40, 108 Andorra 140–1 Protestantism 85 Puigdollers, José 41, 47 Pujadas, Juan José 163 Pujo-Passet, Étienne 131–2 Puycerda, town of 13, 15 Py, Joseph 169, 170 Py, Savina 169, 170 Pyrenees. See also borders and frontiers; conscripts, Pyrenean; fauna, Pyrenean; federation,

Index Pyrenean; landscape; mountains/ mountaineering; pastoral economy. Pyrenean; peasantry, Pyrenean; population, Pyrenean; spa resorts; tourists; valleys; vineyards, Pyrenean anthropology 161–78, 199 border between France and Spain 126 central 9, 12, 28, 53, 76, 100, 131, 151, 154, 181, 184, 190, 202 compared with the Alps 22, 23, 103 democratization of 100–2 eastern 11, 12, 15, 106, 145, 154, 155 Enlightenment invention of 17–33 French side 5, 12, 53, 82, 96, 191 Green Pyrenees 182, 193, 198 Hautes-Pyrénées 12, 79, 85, 104, 132, 154, 168, 174, 202 heroic 89–106 ideal Pyrenean family 168–70 landscape of 1–2, 40, 43, 55–9 and male ego 97–9 micro-societies 161 mineralogical content 25 modern 1, 194, 197–203 myth of homogeneous Pyrenean identity 190 natives, treatment of 95 original axis 26 origins, scientific explanations 26–7 pastoral economy (nineteenth century) 9–12 perceptions of 1–2, 19 ‘Pyrenean bloc’ of peoples 138 reinvention of 193–4 as series of parallel mountain bands 26 sociology of 168 Spanish side 5, 10, 12, 15, 18, 59, 61, 62, 96, 190 therapeutic nature of 80–1 Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) 126 unknown 95–7, 120 villages (see villages) western 13, 37, 100, 127, 153 as a wilderness 4, 11, 182, 194, 198, 200 Pyrénées-Orientales 7, 10, 11, 14, 76 quadrupeds 25 Quatre, Henri 80 Quin, Michael 55

263

Radcliffe, Anne 42, 43 Radio Montaillou-Pyrénées 178 railways/railway links 15, 53, 55, 69, 154 electric train line 69 railway age and mass tourism 71, 73, 74, 81, 86, 87 rainfall 4 rationalism 19 Real Madrid 111 Reboul, Henri 21 Reclus, Elisée 75 refugees 4, 143–4, 147–9 regeneracionismo (intellectual movement) 92, 110, 111, 123, 175 regeneration, physical 107–8 regionalism 189–91 Reidy, Michael 98 religion 19, 59, 64, 69, 85. See also Catharism; Catholicism; Lourdes; Nonconformism mountains perceived as a spiritual experience 31, 32, 94, 104, 105 perceived neglect of, by French 69 renaissance, Catalan, 122 republicanism 81, 86, 128, 140, 142, 145–7. See also Third Republic (France) Spanish 143, 144, 149, 150, 158 village ‘republics’ 129 Revue des Deux Mondes 99 Reynes, Alain 186 Ricoeur, Paul 53 riots 14 roads 15, 57, 72, 117 Rocatallada family 9 Roche, Clare 98 rocks/rock formations 17, 22–3, 25–6, 27, 30, 45. See also geology/geologists rock falls 22, 25 Rohan, Louis René Édouard de (Cardinal) 21, 28, 29 Roland’s Breach 48, 81 Rols, Bertrande de 164 Romanticism 35, 37, 197 concept 45 romantic and the sublime 45–49 romantic fantasies 50–1 Romantic period 78 Roncal, Navarre 125 Roncevalles, pass of 48

264 Rosa, Salvator 39, 51 Roscoe, Thomas 60 Rothschild, Baron Maurice de 155 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 22, 33 Roussillon 15, 40, 107, 130, 142, 162 French integration of 8, 16 nineteenth-century 131 Route des Pyrénées 119 Royal, Ségolène 195, 202 ruins 31, 42 Ruskin, John 73 Russell-Killough, Henry 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 100, 101, 102–5 ‘safety bicycle’ 108 Saglia, Diego 58 Sahlins, Peter 126, 127 Saint Savin abbey, Bigorre 188 Saint-Amans, Jean Florimond Boudon de 18, 21, 24, 45, 47 Saint-Saud, Aymar de 95, 96, 101 salt tax 131 San Sebastián (Basque town) 57, 58, 60, 144 Sand, George 44, 82 Santander, port of 144 Sarrault, Albert 146–7 Saunier, Baudry de 108, 112 Saussure, Horace-Bénédict de 22 Schama, Simon 1 schist (sedimentary rock or shale) 17, 22–3, 25, 27, 33 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 73 Schrader, Franz 94, 95, 96, 101, 103 scientific approach 21–3 scientific community 19–21 scientific equipment 18 sea-bathing 78–9 Second Empire, France 72, 75, 84 Second World War 4, 150–9 sedimentary deposits 17, 22–3, 25, 27, 33 Semprun, Jorge 149 separatism Basque country 121, 134 Catalan 138, 139 Sequerra, Samuel 155 Serinyana, Joan 11 Seville, Spain 65 shale 23 sharecropping 57

Index sheep 7, 119, 177, 181, 185 killing by bears 179, 185, 186 shepherds 4, 7, 9, 22, 33, 40, 43, 61, 79, 85, 115, 120, 152, 163, 164, 174, 182–3, 192, 199. See also sheep and killing of bears 178, 182–3, 184–8 and mountaineers 92, 94, 95, 103 Spanish 32, 61, 94 traditional 187 silence 73, 104, 105 ski stations 201 Slovenian bears 180, 181, 189, 202 smuggling 4, 12, 13, 16, 32–3, 40 freedom smugglers of Second World War 150–9 and frontiers 130–3 snow 18, 23, 25, 94, 104, 115, 126, 145, 157, 158, 201. See also cold avalanches 22, 28, 93, 155 blizzards 155 eternal 31, 97 snowdrifts 93, 115 snow-glare 18 social class antagonisms 138 aristocracy/upper-classes 59, 81, 98 intellectuals 170 lower-classes/working classes 40, 92, 108, 116, 121, 134 middle-classes 57, 62, 72, 74, 82, 92, 98, 109, 111 Société Ramond 29, 97, 102, 103 soil erosion 10 Soler, Carlos 42 solitude 73, 103–4, 105 Soubirous, Bernadette (visions of) 81, 86 Soulet, Jean-François 6, 33, 130 spa resorts 4, 12, 19, 44, 47, 61, 72, 74, 79, 85, 197. See also waters, healing powers of as ‘cosmopolitan’ 87 hierarchy of 82–4 and social rank 81–2 treatments offered 80–1, 83 Spain 19, 53, 58, 62, 68, 71, 110, 111, 136, 190. See also Basque Country; Madrid; Pyrenees bullfight 64–7 climate 56, 57 Inquisition 19, 64, 164, 165

Index Law on Bear Conservation 187 nation-building 67 perceptions of 53–4, 60, 64, 67, 68–9 religious history 64 retreat from (La Retirada) 143–50 ‘rosaries and daggers,’ vision of 64 Spanish-American War (1898) 82, 92, 110, 111, 175 Spanish anthropology 162, 175–7 Spanish Civil War (1936–39) 4, 135, 143, 149 stereotypes of 60, 64, 67 tourists/travellers from 6, 7, 31, 39, 58, 68, 69, 70, 81, 82, 198 viewpoint 67–9 Special Operations Executive (SOE) 153 Spender, Harold 85, 86, 95, 140 Spont, Henry 92 St Bertrand-de-Comminges, cathedral of 38 St Cyprien 148 St Gaudens (Haute-Garonne) 13 St Laurent de Cerdans (PyrénéesOrientales) 7, 10 St Martin’s Stone (pagan megalith) 125 stagecoaches 55, 72–3 statistics 15, 152 statistical tables 18, 21 Steinès, Alphonse 114–15, 117, 118 stem family 168, 171, 173–4, 175 Stendhal 3 St-Martin, Toussaint 183–4 STO (Service de Travail Obligatoire) 152 storms 43–4, 48, 93 structuralism 171 sublime, the 35, 39 and the Romantic 45–9 suicides 143, 145, 155, 156 summits, mountain 89, 93, 94–6, 99, 101 and Enlightenment science 17, 19, 24, 28, 30, 31, 32 Suñer, Serran 156–7 sunlight 18 Swiss Alps 22, 28 Syndicates d’Initiative (France) 119, 123 Taine, Hippolyte 38, 79, 84, 86 Tarbes, town of 29, 47, 78, 79, 100, 106 taxation 8, 11, 14, 130, 134, 141, 155 Andorra 141–2 bicycle tax 108

265

French 131 indirect 131 royal 128 salt tax 131 Tchihatchev, Platon 90 Terres, Robert 153 territorial sovereignty 7, 125 Thiers, Adolphe 39, 43, 54, 61 Thil, Arnaud du 161 Third Republic (France) 15, 68, 69, 72, 86, 155 Thomas Cook 71, 102 tobacco 131 Tolosa, Basque country 41 Tonnellé, Alfred 45–6, 90 Torres, Dolores 145, 149 Toulouse, France 5, 7, 10, 100, 130, 153, 201 assassination of General Ramel in (1814) 77 liberation of 153 railway links 71, 158 University of 173 Tour de France 108, 113–19, 123 Touring Club de France 108, 109, 111, 112, 124 tourism 2, 3, 199. See also Pyrenees agro-tourism 202 beach tourism 201 cyclo-tourism 107, 108, 109 mass tourism 2, 3, 71, 80, 86, 87 middle-class 72 pioneers of 123–4 ski tourism 201 sustainable 201 tourists. See also tourism; travellers anti-tourists 72, 84–7 British 7, 39, 41, 54, 56–7, 61, 69 female 44 French 6, 39, 55, 81 nineteenth-century 12, 61, 65 at spa resorts 81, 83 Spanish 6, 7, 31, 39, 58, 68, 69, 70, 81, 82, 198 tourist gaze 16, 72 trains. See railways/railway links transnational research approach 6 transport bicycles (see bicycles; cycling) motor 108

266 stagecoaches 55, 72–3 trains (see railways/railway links) travel guidebooks 2, 3, 16, 39, 54, 74–7. See also Baedeker; Guides Joanne; John Murray; travel writing travel writing 2, 3–4, 7, 18, 37, 54, 59, 70 cycle writing 119 English travel writers 62 mountaineering 90 romantic 47 Spanish 68, 69 and women 74, 99 travellers 1, 2, 6, 7, 32, 55, 59. See also tourists and the picturesque 44, 45, 47, 50 Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) 126 trees, felling of 10. See also deforestation; forests tribute of the three cows 125–8 Trinxería, Bosch de la 122–3 Turner, Katherine 57 Unión Nacional Española 149 urbanization 109, 110 Urepel (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) 8 Vallé d’Aspe 128, 179, 186, 192. See also Aspe (valley community) Vallé de Arán 37, 49, 53, 57, 149, 151 Vallé d’Ossau 128, 186. See also Ossau (valley community) valleys 7, 8, 15, 18, 23–5, 28, 31, 33, 41, 43, 44, 62, 82. See also lowlands amphitheatres, forming 39 borders and frontiers 128, 129, 130 communities 128, 190 flooding 201 floors of 10, 23 specific valleys Aldudes 129 Aragon 184 Argelès 38 Aspe and ossau, 128, 179, 186, 192 Bastan 31 Béarn 184 Benasque 176 Bielsa 31 Campan 22 Ebro 9, 13

Index Lèze 161 Ordesa 190 Salazar 129 Yerri 177 Verdaguer, Jacint 123, 139 Vidal, Jean-Joseph 21 Vidal, Victorin 140 Vigne, Daniel 161 Vignemale (mountain) 90, 92, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105 Vilanova, Antonio 147 Villa Russell, Vignemale Mountain 104 villages 129, 130, 132, 177. See also Montaillou (village of) autonomous 129–30 conflicts 129, 130 French 69, 112, 130, 147 international diplomacy 129–30 and peace charters 128–30 Pyrenean 4, 9, 12, 14, 38, 129–30, 142, 169 village society 172 vineyards, Pyrenean 11 Violant i Simorra, Ramón 175 volcanoes 27 ‘vulcanists’ 27 Walker, John 57, 58 walking, benefits of 73–4, 92. See also climbing/mountain-climbing; hiking Wallon, Édouard 101 wars and conflicts. See also Spain Carlist Wars (nineteenth century) (see Carlist Wars (1833–40)) civil wars 110 First World War (see First World War) ‘forgotten peasant’ war 8, 129 Franco-Prussian War (1870) 91 Napoleonic Wars (see Napoleonic Wars) Peninsular War (see Peninsular War) between rival communities 8, 129 Second World War (see Second World War) War of the Demoiselles, against Forest Code 14, 189 waterfalls 5, 22, 33, 38, 39 waters, healing powers of 80–1, 84. See also spa resorts

Index Weld, Charles 78, 81, 82–3, 91 Werner, Abraham 26–7 wilderness 4, 11, 28, 182, 194, 198, 200 wind, glacial 93 wine economy 11 winter sports 87 working-classes 40, 92, 108, 116, 121, 134 Wye Valley, Britain 36

Young, Arthur 38, 57 Zahra, Tara 127 Zola, Émile 107 zones, trans-frontier 8

267