WE often hear it said that France does not consider herself a part of the rest of the world, that the French people, who live on a continent, are infinitely more“insular”than their English neighbors who dwell in rainy solitude on an island, in short, that the French, by their persistent and systematic refusal to take any interest, however slight, in the affairs of this planet, are the most selfish and selfcentered of all nations and are at the bottom of most of our present troubles.

Well, in order to understand things thoroughly, we must go down to their roots. The roots of any given people are situated deep down in the soil and in the soul.The soil has influenced the soul and the soul has influenced the soil.We cannot understand the one without understanding the other.But when we have grasped the true inner meaning of both, we have a key to the character of almost any nation.

Most of the accusations we hear so often uttered against the French are based upon the truth. But so was that unbounded and unquestioning praise heaped upon them during the days of the Great War, for both their virtues and their defects grew directly out of the geographic position of their country.It had made them self-centered and self-contented, because the land they occupied between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean was absolutely self-sufficient for their needs.Why go abroad for changes of climate of changes in scenery when you can find all of those in your own backyard?Why travel all over the globe to study differences of language and habits and customs when a few hours in a train will carry you from the twentieth to the twelfth century or from a smiling, verdant county of castles to the magnificent mysteries of a land of sand-dunes and solemn pine trees?Why bother about passports or letters of credit and bad food and sour wine and the dull, stodgy faces of frozen northern peasants when your own food and drink and beds and conversation are about as good as any this vale of tears can provide, when you live in a land where(believe it or not!)they can make spinach a dish fit for human consumption?

Of course a poor Swiss, who has never seen anything except a mountain, or a poor Dutchman, who has never seen anything except a flat piece of green meadow with a few black and white cows, must go abroad once in a while or he would die of boredom. A German will sooner or later tire of his exclusive diet of excellent music interspersed with indifferent sausage-sandwiches.An Italian cannot live on spaghetti all his life long.And a Russian must crave an occasional meal without standing six hours in line for half a pound of oleomargarine.

But the Frenchman, lucky devil, lives in an earthly paradise where all things are to be had by all men without a change of cars and therefore he will ask you,“Why should I ever stir from my own country?”

You may answer that this is a hopelessly one-sided point of view and that my Frenchman is all wrong. I wish that I could agree with you but I am forced to admit that France in many respects is a country singularly blessed by Nature and its general geographical background.

In the first place, France has every sort of a climate. It has a temperate climate.It has a hot climate.It has a medium climate.France is the proud possessor of the highest mountain in Europe.At the same time the French have been able to connect all the industrial centers of their land with canals that run through absolutely flat country.If a Frenchman likes to spend his winter sliding down the slopes of a hill, he moves to a village in the Savoy in the western branch of the Alps.Does he prefer swimming to skiing, all he need do is take a ticket for Biarritz on the Atlantic or to Cannes on the Mediterranean.And should he be of a particular curiosity about men and women, should be interest himself in the outward aspect of monarchs in exile and exiles about to turn monarchs, of actors with a future before them and actresses with a future behind them, of fiddle virtuosos or paragons of the piano, of dancers who have lightly upset a couple of thrones and all the other great little people who are in the limelight, he need merely take a chair in the Café de la Paix, and order himself a glass of coffee and cream, and wait.Sooner or later, every man, woman or child who ever made the front page of the world’s news-sheets will pass that corner.And what is more, they will pass that cornet without attracting any particular attention, for this procession has been going on for almost fifteen centuries and a king or an emperor or even the highest dignitary of the Church causes about as much commotion as a freshman on a college campus.

Right here we come upon one of the unanswerable mysteries of political geography. Two thousand years ago most of the territory that flies the Republican tricolor(and flies it day and night, for the French, once they have hoisted a flag, never pull it down until time and the weather have reduced it to unrecognizable shreds)was part of the great western European plain and there was no earthly(that is to say, geographic)reason why some day all the land between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean should become one of the most highly centralized nations of the world.

There is a school of geography which holds that climate and geographical background play the decisive part in shaping human destinies. Undoubtedly they do—sometimes.Quite as often it is the other way around.The Moors and the Spaniards lived on the same soil and the sun shone with equal violence upon the valley of the Guadalquivir in the year 1200 as it did in the year 1600.But in the year 1200 it bestowed its blessings upon a paradise of fruit and flowers and in the year 1600 it forced its accursed rays upon a parched wilderness of neglected irrigation ditches and weeds.

The Swiss speak four languages, yet feel themselves to be members of one single nation. The Belgians speak only two and hate each other to the point where the desecration of each other's soldiers'graves has become a regular Sunday afternoon pastime.The Icelanders on their little island maintained their independence and self-government for over a thousand years against all comers, and the Irish on their island hardly ever know a moment of independence.And so it goes.Human nature, regardless of the advance of the machine and of science and of standardization of every sort, will always remain an extremely unstable and undependable factor in the general scheme of things.It has been responsible for the many strange and unexpected developments of which the map of the world is the living evidence;and France is merely one of the object lessons which bears me out on this point.

Politically speaking, France seems to be one country. But if you will kindly look at the map you will notice that France is really composed of two separate parts which actually turn their backs upon each other—the valley of the Rhône in the southeast which looks out upon the Mediterranean and the great inclined plain of the north and the west which faces towards the Atlantic.

Let us begin with the oldest of these two halves. The Rhône takes its origin in Switzerland but it really does not become a river of any importance until it has left the Lake of Geneva and has reached the city of Lyons, the center of the French silk industry, where it combines with the Saône, a river which comes down from the north and which has its source only a few miles from that of the Meuse, a river which is as intimately connected with the history of northern Europe as the Saône(combined with the Rhône)is with that of the south.The Rhône is not a very navigable river.Before it reaches the Gulf of the Lion(no, the name Gulf of Lyons which appears on many maps is an error)it has come down some 6000 feet, which accounts for its rapid currents which have not yet been entirely overcome by the modern steamer.

Nevertheless it offered the ancient Phoenicians and Greeks a convenient entrance way into the heart of Europe, for manpower—slave-power—was cheap. The ships could be dragged upstream by these prehistoric Volga boatmen(their fate cannot have been much happier than that of their Russian colleagues)and downstream was a matter of a few days.And so it happened that the old civilization of the Mediterranean made its first attack upon the European hinterland by way of the Rhône valley.Strangely enough Marseilles, the earliest commercial settlement in that region(and still the most important French port on the Mediterranean)was not situated directly at the mouth of the river but several miles towards the east.(It is now connected with the Rhône by means of a canal.)Nevertheless it proved a very good choice, for Marseilles became such an important center of trade that as early as the third century before Christ Marseillian coins had found their way as far as the Austrian Tyrol and the region around Paris.And soon the whole region immediately to the north of it recognized Marseilles as its capital.

Then, during an ill-fated moment in its history, the citizens of the town, hard pressed by wild tribes from the Alps, asked the Romans to come and help them. The Romans came and, as was their habit, stayed.All the land along the mouth of the Rhône became a Roman“provincia”and the name“Provence”,which has played such a great role in history, bears silent testimony to the fact that it was the Romans, rather than the phoenicians and Greeks, who recognized the importance of this fertile triangle.

But here we find ourselves face to face with one of the most perplexing problems both of geography and history. The Provence with its mixture of Greek and Roman civilization, its ideal climate, its great fertility, its front door opening upon the Mediterranean and its back door leading conveniently to the plain of central and northern Europe, seemed predestined to become the logical successor to Rome.It was given every possible natural advantage and then, with all the trump cards in its hands, it failed to play them.During the quarrels between Caesar and Pompey, the Provence took the side of Pompey and the rival gang destroyed the city of Marseilles.But that was a minor incident, for soon afterwards its citizens were doing business once more at the same old stand, while literature and courtly manners and the arts and sciences, no longer safe in Rome, fled across the Ligurian Sea and turned the Provence into an island of civilization entirely surrounded by barbarians.

When the Popes with all their wealth and power were no longer able to maintain themselves in the city of the Tiber(the Roman mob of the Middle Ages was little better than a pack of wolves and as relentless as our own gangsters)they too moved their court to Avignon, the town famous for the first attempt at bridge-building on a large scale(most of the bridge now lies on the bottom of the river, but in the twelfth century it was one of the world's wonders)and where they owned a castle that could withstand a hundred sieges. Thereupon, for almost an entire century the Provence was the home of the head of Christendom, its knights took a very prominent part in the Crusades and one noble Provencal family became the hereditary ruler of Constantinople.

But somehow or other the Provence was never able to play the role for which Nature seemed to have predestined her when she created these delightful and fertile and romantic valleys. The Provence gave us the Troubadours, but even they, although recognized as the founders of that form of literature which has maintained itself ever since in our novels and our plays and our poetry, were never able to make their soft Provencal dialect, the langue d'oc, the general tongue of all France.It was the north with its langue d'oil(oil and oc were merely different forms for oui or yes)—it was the north, which enjoyed none of the natural advantages of the south, which was to found the French state, create the French nation and bestow upon the world in general the manifold blessings of French culture.But sixteen centuries ago, no one could have foreseen this development.For then the entire plain which reaches from the Pyrenees in the south to the Baltic in the north seemed predestined to become part of a vast Teutonic empire.That would have been the natural development.But man not being very much interested in natural developments, everything came differently.

To the Romans of Caesar's time, all this part of Europe had been the Far West. They had called it Gallia because it was inhabited by Gauls, by people belonging to the mysterious race of fairhaired men and women to whom the Greeks had given the general name of Keltoi or Celts.And in those days, there were two kinds of Gaul.One was the region of the Po River, between the Alps and the Apennines, where the fair-haired savages had made their appearance at a very early date and which was known as Gallia Cisalpina or Gaul-this-side-of-the-mountains.That was the Gaul which Caesar left when he threw his famous dice and boldly crossed the Rubicon.Then there was the Gallia Transalpina, the Gaul-across-the-mountains, and that accounted vaguely for all the rest of Europe.But after Caesar's famous expedition of the years 58-51 B.C.,it came to be associated more particularly with the France of today.It was a fertile land which could be made to pay taxes without too much objection on the part of the natives, hence an ideal domain for intensive Roman colonization.

The passes between the Vosges Mountains in the north and the Jura in the south offered no great difficulties to the progress of an army consisting mostly of infantry. Soon the great plain of France was dotted with Roman fortresses and Roman villages, markets, temples, jails, theaters and factories.A small island in the river Seine, where the Celts still lived on houses built on poles, and called Lutetia(or Lutetia Parisiorum after the Parisii who had first taken possession of this natural fortress)became an ideal spot on which to build a temple dedicated to Jupiter.That temple stood where Notre Dame arises today.

As the island had direct water communication with Great Britain(a most profitable Roman colony during the first 400 years of our era)and was an excellent strategic center from which to watch the turbulent regions between the Rhine and the Meuse, it quite naturally developed into the chief center of the vast Roman organization that administered the Far West.

As I told you in the chapter on maps, we sometimes wonder how the Romans were able to find their way across the whole island and mainland world of that day but there can be no question about it—they had an unerring instinct for the right spot, whether they were building a harbor a fortress or a trading-post. A casual observer, after passing six dreary weeks amidst the rains and fogs of the Parisian valley, may ask himself,“Why in the name of Mars did the Romans ever select this forlorn spot to be their administration headquarters for all their western and northern possessions?”But a geologist with a map of northern France before him could show us.

Millions of years ago, when all this territory was being tortured by incessant earthquakes, and when mountains and valleys were thrown hither and yon as casually as the chips on a gaming table, four heavy layers of rock of different ages were tossed about in such a way that they came to lie on top of each other, like the saucers of one of those Chinese tea-sets which used to delight the hearts of our grandmothers. The lowest and biggest of these saucers stretches from the Vosges Mountains to Brittany, where its western brim lies buried beneath the waters of the British Channel.The second one reaches from Lorraine to the coast of Normandy.The third one, the famous Champagne region, encircles the fourth one, appropriately called the Ile de France, or the Island of France.This“island”is a vague circle bounded by the Seine, the Marne, the Thève and the Oise;and Paris is situated right in the heart of it.That meant safety—almost complete safety—because it offered the greatest amount of protection from foreign invasion.For the enemy was obliged to storm the steep outer edges of those saucers while the home troops were not only in an excellent position for defence but in case of defeat could leisurely withdraw to the protection of the next saucer-rim and could repeat that performance four times ere they had reached their little island in the Seine, which, by the burning of the few connecting bridges could be turned into an impregnable fortress.

It was of course possible for a very determined and well-equipped hostile force to take Paris. But it was exceedingly difficult, as the Great War has shown us only recently.It was not only the valor of the French and English that kept the Germans out of the French capital.It also was that geographical accident of millions of years ago which had put every possible natural barrier in the way of the invaders form the east.

France has been obliged to fight almost ten centuries for her national independence. But whereas most countries have been under the necessity of guarding four separate frontiers, France was able to devote all her energies to the protection of her western boundaries;and this probably accounted for the fact that France could develop into a highly centralized modern state long before any of the other nations of Europe.

The whole of the western part of France, situated between the Cévennes and the Vosges and the Atlantic falls quite naturally into a number of peninsulas and valleys which are separated from each other by low mountain ridges.The most western of these valleys is that of the Seine and Oise which is connected with the plains of Belgium through a natural gateway defended since time immemorial by the city of St.Quentin.In modern times it has become a very important railroad center and as such it was one of the main German objectives during the march on Paris in 1914.

The valley of the Seine and that of the Loire are in easy communication with each other by way of the gap of Orleans. As a result thereof that region was bound to play a very important role in the history of France.The national heroine of the French is known as the Maid of Orleans, and the biggest railroad station in Paris is called the Gate d'Orléans, and it was the geographical position of that city on that pass between the north and the south which was responsible for both names.In the Middle Ages, knights in armor fought for such key positions.Today railroad companies fight for such key positions.The world changes.But often enough, the more it seems to change, the more it really remains the same.

As for the connection between the Loire valley and the valley of the Garonne, it followed the present railroad line via Poitiers, and it was near Poitiers that Charles Martel in the year 732 prevented the Moors from pushing any further into Europe, and it was near Poitiers that the Black Prince in the year 1356 so completely annihilated the French forces that France remained under English domination for almost another hundred years.

As for that wide valley of the Garonne, the southern part of which is that famous land of Gascony whence came the dashing d'Artagnan and the noble King Henry　Ⅳ,that part of France is in direct communication with the Provence and the Rhône valley by way of a valley that runs from Toulouse on the Garonne River to Narbonne, which used to be on the Mediterranean and which incidentally was the oldest of all Roman settlements in Gaul.

Like all such prehistoric highways(for that route was used thousands of years before the beginning of written history)it has always been a source of revenue to some one. Racketeering and profiteering are as old as the human race.If you doubt this statement, go to any mountain pass in any part of the world and remain in that neighborhood until you have definitely located the spot where the road was at its narrowest a thousand years ago.On that exact spot you will find the ruins of from half a dozen to two dozen castles and if you know anything about ancient civilizations, the different layers of stone will tell you:“Here in the year 50 B.C.and in the year 600 and in 800 and in 1100 and in 1250 and in 1350 and in 1500 some robber baron built himself a fortress which allowed him to demand tribute from all passing caravans.”

Sometimes you will be surprised to find a flourishing city instead of a mere ruin. But the towers and ravelins and counterscarps and bastions of Carcassonne will tell you how terribly strong such a mountain pass fortress had to be to survive the attacks of all its hungry enemies.

So much for the general landscape of France. Now let me add a few very general characteristics about the people who live in this land between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.There is one thing they seem to have in common, a certain sense of balance and proportion.I would almost feel inclined to say that the French tried hard to be“logical”,if that unfortunate word were not so closely connected with the idea of something dry and dull and pedantic.

It is true that France is the home of the highest mountain in Europe. The top of Mont Blanc is now French territory, but that is merely an accident.The average Frenchman is as little concerned about that waste of snow and ice as the average American is about the Painted Desert.What he likes best is the harmonious roll of the hills of the Meuse region and Guyenne and Normandy and Picardy, the pleasant little rivers with their high poplars and their leisurely barges, the haze that hangs over the valleys at night and then turns them into paintings by Watteau.What he knows best are those little villages where nothing ever changes(the greatest strength of any country),those small towns in which the people live or at least try to live as their ancestors did fifty or five hundred years ago, and Paris, where the best living and the best thinking have gone hand in hand for more than ten centuries.

For the Frenchman, contrary to the absurd fables foisted upon us during the Great War, is not a sentimental dreamer, but a most intelligent and eager realist. He stands with both feet flatly on this earth.He realizes that he will live but once and that threescore and ten is all he can expect.And so he endeavors to make himself as comfortable as possible while on this planet and wastes no time imagining the world better than it is.C'est la vie—such is life—and suppose we make the best of it!Since food is agreeable to civilized man, let us provide even the poorest with the knowledge of good cooking.Since wine, ever since the days of our Savior, has been regarded as a fit drink for true Christians, let us cultivate the best of wines.Since the Lord in his wisdom has seen fit to fill this earth with many things agreeable to the eye and the ear and the nose, let us not indulge in a haughty denial of these divine bounties but partake of them as an all-wise Providence has evidently meant us to do.And since Man is stronger when fighting in a group than when acting alone, let us stick closely to the family as the elementary social unit which is responsible for the weal and woe of all its members just as all the individual members are responsible for the weal and woe of the family.

This is the ideal side of French life. There is another side, much less agreeable, which however grows directly out of the very qualities which I have just enumerated.The family quite frequently ceases to be a pleasant dream and becomes a nightmare.The endless grandmothers and grandfathers who rule the clan act as a brake which prevents all progress.The excellent habit of saving for sons and grandsons and great-grandsons degenerates into a hideous habit of scraping and filching and rooking and pinching and economizing on every necessity of life, including that charity towards one's neighbor without which civilized existence becomes a very drab experience indeed.

But by and large the average Frenchman, of however humble rank or station, seems to carry with him a certain practical philosophy of life which provides him with a maximum of content at a minimum of expenditure. For one thing, he is not ambitious in our sense of the word.He knows that all men are born unequal.They tell him that in America every boy may some day hope to become president of the bank for which he works as a clerk.What of it?He does not want to assume all that responsibility!What would become of his three hours for luncheon?It would of course be nice to have all the money that goes with the job, but the sacrifice of comfort and happiness would be too great.And so the Frenchman works and works industriously and his wife works and his daughters and his sons work too, yes, the whole country works and saves and lives the sort of lives it likes to live and does not try to lead the sort of lives other people think they ought to like to live;and that is a bit of wisdom which does not make for great riches, but which is a better guarantee for ultimate happiness than the doctrine of success preached all over the rest of the world.

Whenever we come to the sea in this geography of ours I shall not tell you that the people of the coast indulge in fishing. Of course they do.What else would you expect them to do?Milk cows or dig for coal?

But when we reach the subject connected with agriculture, we shall make a very curious discovery. Whereas in most countries the population during the last hundred years has been attracted to the cities, fully sixty percent of all-Frenchmen continue to live in the country;and France today is the only country in Europe which could withstand a prolonged siege without importing grain from abroad.The ancestral methods of working the fields are gradually making way before the improved methods of modern science and when the French peasant shall have ceased to till his soil as his great-great-grandfather did in the days of Charlemagne and Clovis, France will be entirely self-supporting.

What helps to keep the peasant on the land is the fact that as a rule he is his own proprietor. His farm may not be much of a farm but it is his own.In England and in east Prussia, two parts of the Old World where there is a great deal of agriculture, the farms belong to some vague and distant landlord.But the French Revolution did away with the landlord, whether noble or cleric, and divided his property among the small peasantry.That was often very hard on the former proprietors.But their ancestors had acquired those possessions by right of eminent plunder, so what was the difference?And it has proved of tremendous advantage to the country at large.For it gives more than half of the people a direct interest in the welfare of the whole nation.Like everything else, that state of affairs probably has its disadvantages.It may account for the exaggerated feeling of nationalism among the French.It may explain the provincialism which makes every Frenchman stick to the people of his own village even when he moves to Paris, so that Paris is full of little hotels catering to certain groups of regional travellers, a situation which we could only duplicate if New York had hostelries patronized exclusively by Chicagoans or Kalamazooians or Fresnonians or people from Horsehead, New York.It also explains his utter unwillingness to migrate to other parts of the world, but then again, why should any one move to another country when he is perfectly happy at home?

Next to agriculture, the cultivation of the wine-grape keeps vast numbers of Frenchmen attached to the soil. The entire valley of the Garonne is devoted to vine culture.The city of Bordeaux near the mouth of the Garonne and just north of those vast silty plains called the Landes, where the shepherds walk on stilts and the sheep can remain out of doors all the year long, is the center for the export of this wine, as Cette, on the Mediterranean, is the harbor for the famous wines of the piping hot valley of the Rhône.The wines from Burgundy—the so-called Côte d’Or—are gathered together in Dijon, while those of the Champagne are assembled(and multiplied and divided)in the ancient French coronation city of Rheims.

When grain and wine fail to support the population, industry helps out. The ancient French monarchs were something more than haughty imbeciles who oppressed their subjects and wasted useless millions on the pretty ladies of Versailles.They made their courts the center of fashion and civilized living towards which all the world flocked to learn agreeable manners and to be taught the difference between eating and dining.As a result, even today, a century and a half after the last of the ancient rulers was thrown into the quick-lime of a Paris potter's-field, with his head between his feet, Paris dictates unto the rest of the world what to wear and how to wear it.The industries which provide Europe and America with those indispensable luxuries which most people prefer to the sheer necessities, are centered in and around the Ile de France and they provide employment to millions of women and girls.The endless flower fields of the Riviera are the original source whence flows most of our perfumery at six and ten dollars a bottle(a very small bottle, too, but that is the result of our wise decision to tax all those things which we ourselves can't make).

Then came the discovery of coal and iron in the soil of France, and Picardy and Artois grew drab and ugly with those vast dump-heaps of cinders and slag which played such a great part during the battle of Mons, where the English tried to stop the Germans in their march upon Paris. Lorraine became the center for the iron industry.The central plateau fabricated steel.When the war was over, the French hastened to annex the Alsace which provided them with more steel and which, during the last fifty years of German domination, had gone in heavily for textiles.As a result of this recent development, one-quarter of the French people, are today engaged in industries, and they can proudly boast that their industrial cities are fully as hideous, as unattractive and as inhuman in their outer aspect as those of England or of our own country.