Every Francophile worth their sel de Guérande will enjoy The Discovery of France (Norton), Graham Robb’s fascinating examination of the processes by which the France of two centuries ago became the France of modern times. At the Revolution, much of provincial France was unknown and effectively inaccessible to the citizens and administrators of Paris. Those who ventured out of the major urban centres—Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux—and into the country’s interior had great difficulty understanding the local dialects; strangers were greeted with suspicion and sometimes with violence. Robb, a biographer and historian, makes excellent use of both primary and secondary sources, and knows how to balance the scholarly with the anecdotal (you can detect a novelist’s pleasure in his account of how, on “a summer’s day in the early 1740s . . . a young geometer on the Cassini expedition [to produce the first accurate map of France] was hacked to death by natives”). Robb is also an enthusiastic cyclist and claims that this book “is the result of fourteen thousand miles in the saddle and four years in the library.” In a lyrical passage near the beginning of the book, he extols the many virtues of the bicycle, including its ability to re-create, “as if by chance, much older journeys: transhumance trails, Gallo-Roman trade routes, pilgrim paths, river confluences that have disappeared in industrial wasteland, valleys and ridge roads that used to be busy with pedlars.”