Acknowledgement
I first encountered la Méridienne verte in Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France, his brilliant geographical and historical exploration of the unknown France profonde. A book that is, he writes, ‘the result of fourteen thousand miles in the saddle [of a bicycle] and four years in the library.’ It is a book I have returned to time and again. My ride would not have happened without it. I hope where I have used it directly, I have acknowledged it. Apologies where I have not.

Preface
I’ve always been a cyclist, in a family of cyclists. From my first cycle trip alone, to France in 1964 – a specific moment, by Mont St-Victoire in Provence – I mark the beginning of my coming into myself. I have never raced, never been a social cyclist. A cycle ride is a conversation, with the places I’m cycling through, the people I meet, and with myself. When I feel the need for a break, a retune, I take off on the bike.

  In 2015, approaching my 70th birthday, I decided to mark it by cycling the length of France, from the Channel to the Pyrenees, along the Paris Meridian. Which in 2000 had been designated la Méridienne verte.

The Paris Meridian
In 1667 a national observatory was built in Paris, south of the Luxembourg palace. In 1669 the first survey of the meridian that passes through the observatory, the Paris Meridian, was begun: observing the heavens, and measuring the earth were indicators of a Renaissance prince’s interest in increasing knowledge; and an absolutist monarch’s wish to measure and map his realm. Over the next 200 years the Paris Meridian was surveyed several times, as improved technology enabled greater accuracy. This was done, variously, to establish the size and shape of the earth; as the central meridian from which to map France; and to establish a universal measure, the metre – one ten millionth of the distance from pole to equator. Through the nineteenth century France disputed with Britain whose should be the world’s Prime Meridian. An international conference in 1884 chose Greenwich. As a measure of their attachment to it, the French continued to use the Paris Meridian for timekeeping and navigation until 1914. It is still indicated on some maps, a line 2º 20’ 11” east of the Greenwich Meridian.

La Méridienne verte
For the Millennium, the Meridian was given a renewed significance, being designated la Méridienne verte, the Green Meridian.
Markers were to be set up in each of the 337 communes it passes through. Banners on the route proclaimed:
– ‘25 November 1999, the Green Meridian takes root, thousands of trees are planted.’ 10,000 are planned. That is one every hundred metres: oaks in the north, pines in the centre, olives in the south.
– ‘18 June 2000, Opening of “chemin de randonnée [trailway] Dunkerque à Barcelone”.’
– ‘July 2000, Various events along the length of the line. Twenty floral places.’
– ‘14 July, l’Incroyable Pique-Nique.’

  And on Bastille Day 2000, the incredible picnic, now called la fête du Millenaire, ‘the biggest party in history’, was held along the Meridian, with a ‘Grand Inauguration’ at Treignat in the middle of France. Dignitaries were gathered there, runners, cyclists, horse riders and balloonists took part in relay races along its length, 2000 racing pigeons from Perpignan were released in Dunkirk and sped along it home. A line of flapping red-and-white-check tablecloths in every village on the Meridian, uniting the French in eating, drinking, and Frenchness.

How intriguing, this ‘green spine’! This new knitting together of France, marked by trees now fifteen years grown, a spine surely consolidated by the local efforts of communes and individuals, in the floral places, reinforced by randonneurs, hikers and cyclists developing it as a long-distance trail. How had it developed, this exciting millennium – even Millennial – idea? I wanted to see.

So I cycled the length of the Green Meridian, from chilling rain in Dunkirk on the North Sea, to baking heat in the Têt valley and up to Py, high in the Pyrenees.

  As I cycled south, keeping close to the Meridian, themes and points of focus emerged in this ever various and diverse country.
Some big, even grand: the great cathedrals and the birth of the Gothic; the contrasting cities on the Meridian of Amiens, St-Denis, Bourges and Albi; the impact of war, from Dunkirk beaches through Great War battlefields, German occupation, the Wars of Religion back to the Albigensian crusade, France a country so much fought across; the mystery of the many ‘Centres of France’; the age-old division of North and South.
Some more personal: remembering, from Paris to the South, a love from long ago; discovering the childhood world of Alain-Fournier and the sources of his marvellous novel, Le Grand Meaulnes; going back to where I tried to live a rural dream forty years ago.

Sudden moments: seeing the Byzantine mosaic in an oratory on the Loire; visiting the grave, high above the Tarn, of one of the original surveyors of the Meridian; crossing a bridge one early morning, the sun like a bouncing bomb exploding in my face …

  And exploring the question of whether the Paris Meridian, that product of scientific rationalism, has an older, deeper meaning. Familiar from The Da Vinci Code, it is an idea refreshed, this time with real evidence and from a different perspective, by Graham Robb in his recent The Ancient Paths: Discovering the Lost Map of Celtic Europe, a map centred close to the route I followed.

But really it is the daily record of my journey through a country I find fascinating, in which the details build into a mosaic picture of endlessly beguiling France.

But one can’t cycle along a Meridian. Nicholas Crane in his walk down England’s Central Meridian allowed himself a 2000 metre band within which to walk. I would have to allow myself much more latitude, as I would be cycling on roads.
Anyway, rather than a rigid following of the Meridian, I wanted to follow what Crane calls ‘desire paths’, to make ‘a journey of my own desire’, and visit places that had memories for me, and new places I was drawn to.

  Imagine the Meridian as the caduceus, the herald’s wand of Hermes, the god of travellers; the roads I would follow are the serpents that writhe and spiral along its length. For, as WB Yeats reminds us, ‘roads are the serpents of eternity … the only things that are infinite. They are all endless.’ Mine was a 1300-mile road trip spiralling around a 600-mile Meridian.

Footnote
I made my trip before the terrorist atrocities of Paris and Nice, when Grexit seemed likely, and the future Brexit vote was seen as just a sideshow to consolidate Cameron’s power. I have always thought myself a committed European, and was an enthusiastic ‘remain’ voter. So, it is strange to read here my many ambivalences towards ‘Europe’ on my journey, my frequent returning to British exceptionalism. I print here my original account, published at the time as a blog, unchanged.
Now, the vote feels like a turning-point of history, with everything ‘before’, including all I’ve written here, viewed through the prism of the ‘out’ vote. If the past is a foreign country where they do things differently, the future is a foreign country where we will experience things differently.

FRANCE
French geographer Vidal de la Blache called France ‘a medal struck in the effigy of a people’. Ormsby’s standard geography of France goes on: ‘France, it has been said, is more one country and one nation than any other country and nation in the world; and few will deny that, to the outside world at least, France speaks with one voice. More perhaps than most lands, she has developed the sense of nationality, of unity.’ France’s famous ‘exceptionalism’.
Yet locality is stubbornly preserved, proudly celebrated. It was with pride as well as exasperation that de Gaulle exclaimed ‘How can one govern a country which has two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?’

Begin with language. On my ride I pass through four language areas: Flemish; langue d’oïl (of which there are five major dialects); langue d’oc (with five major dialects); and Catalan. Within each major dialect of oïl and oc, there are dozens of local dialects.
In 1539 the dialect of oïl spoken in the Paris area was decreed to be the official language of France. All other dialects, whether of oïl or oc (it was not realised until the nineteenth century that they were in fact different languages) were ‘patois’. This has always been a term of denigration. It is a thirteenth-century word meaning ‘grossness or coarseness of expression’. The 2007 Petit Robert dictionary still dismissively defines it as ‘a dialect used by a population, generally few in number, often rural, and of which the culture and level of civilisation are judged to be inferior to the surrounding milieu.’

  The Académie Français was established in 1635 as the official authority on the French language. Its current dictionary has 32,000 words. (The OED has 600,000.)
In 1794 a report was presented to the National Convention on ‘The Necessity and Means of Exterminating Patois and Universalising the Use of the French Language’. And yet at that time hardly 10% of the population spoke French. French-speaking increased after Napoleon introduced conscription, but in 1863 a third of départements were still majority non-French speaking, and a quarter of army recruits spoke no French. Even following compulsory education in 1882, with punishment for any child heard speaking patois in school, there were still cases in the First World War of soldiers shot by mistake by their comrades through mutual incomprehension. In the late 1970s, my neighbours in Aveyron, in their fifties, spoke patois at home, with their children.

And on those tablecloths across France, the different food and drink. Carbonnade flamande and ch’ti beer on the Channel coast; duck pâté and leek pie in Picardy; the thousand cuisines of Paris and the Île-de-France; coq au vin in Berrichonne; river fish and white wines in the Loire valley; game and sheep cheese with light upland reds in Auvergne; cassoulet and the heavy red wines of the Midi …

Perhaps a clue to the persistence of locality lies in the word ‘paysan’. For the British, a term of contempt – ‘you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see’, in John Lennon’s memorable use of the word. Paysan first appears in 1140, to describe the inhabitant of one pays. Pays is from the Latin, pagus, the smallest administrative unit in the Roman Empire. This in turn brings to mind Auden’s poem, ‘Some thirty inches from my nose the frontier of my person goes, and all the untilled air between is private pagus or demesne. Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes I beckon you to fraternize, beware of rudely crossing it: I have no gun, but I can spit.’ Auden’s thirty inches would be, for the paysan, the area within the sound of the church bell, ‘in which everything was familiar: the sound of the human voice, the orchestra of birds and insects, the choreography of winds and the mysterious configurations of trees, rocks and magic wells’, as Robb puts it.

And while the paysans had no guns, they had billhooks and spades, and killed one of the Meridian surveyors, ‘retired’ others, and simply closed their doors to many of the rest. But Paysannat, the class of peasants, is as recent as 1935. For paysan is not a class word, but a locality word. Interestingly, the closest English word is probably ‘yeoman’, which is a class word, a class that died out in the nineteenth century. As the paysan have come under pressure in the twentieth, they have had to adopt class terms, become a paysannat.

There has always been a friction, often a conflict of loyalty, between locality and country, between pays and patrie. Indeed, as seen in the Jacquerie revolt (see Day 6), the paysans’ loyalty was to the king rather than to France. Secret reports in 1860s show little patriotism among paysans. It is only after the trauma of 1871 that the Republic is finally established, with the tricolore, the Marseillaise, Bastille Day, and laïcité central to the definition and celebration of the French state. But of course, that was the product of metropolitan politics.

Perhaps this disconnect between patrie and pays explains some of the contradictions in the French nature to which de Tocqueville drew attention (see Day 1). It is a country in which extreme centralisation is accompanied by an ongoing if intermittent disregard for the state. Salt smuggling to avoid the gabelle was ever a national pastime. And a French friend living in Charente showed me his illegal home distillery for eau de vie, to resist the government’s restriction on how much each wine-grower may distil, even for personal use; and the ‘white roads’, unpaved but drivable ways across the country that the police choose not to patrol, enabling those who’ve had one too many to get home undetected.

The term pays has been used since 1960s to promote local development and tourism, a vague and misty-eyed ‘Pays de la Loire’, or ‘Pays Cathare’.
And yet on each visit to France, there are fewer ‘real’ local shops, fewer family restaurants with one dish of the day.
Has global capitalism done in a few decades what centralising government failed to do in five hundred years, in unifying patterns of consumption and behaviour?
And is the celebration of locality, of pays, a paysan survival, or a bourgeois revival? A revival in the interests of their self-definition. And in the interests of marketing.
What dies at the bottom is revived from the top, often by the parties who killed it; or at least allowed it to die.
What dies as actual is revived as spectacle …

Enough. ‘As the bow doors creak open …’