I was intrigued by "The Discovery of France: a Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War" within minutes of stumbling on it at Borders a few weeks ago. It's a hopscotching exploration of France from the point of view of the French - how the center (Paris) was mostly ignorant about large parts of the country for a very long time. This is how the book opens:

One summer in the early 1740's, on the last day of his life, a young man from Paris became the first modern cartographer to see the mountain called Le Gerbier de Jonc.

He was killed by suspicious villagers - who saw him as some kind of outside trouble with weird implements. The story bounces around a lot from there, but it held my interest all the way through: Graham Robb did a fine job connecting geography, language, and French history. An interesting point that I did not know: at the time of the French Revolution, French was almost certainly a minority language (at least, as it was spoken in Paris) within France. Makes me wonder how true that was of other parts of Europe, especially places (like Germany) that were politically disjoint at the time.

If you enjoy an exploration of history, language, and geography, this is a book you should add to your collection.

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