What a deceptive and misleading face it puts on.
Today, roaming the gentle mountains and bucolic valleys of this remote paradise, I am reminded of nothing so much as the Rupert Bear annuals of my childhood. Alfred Bestall illustrated England as Blake hoped it had once been, and he could just as well have been drawing the Morvan.
For the Englishman, nothing provides greater relief from the horrors of southern England, with its endless motorways, grim housing estates and omnipresent, tattooed, aggressively unenlightened masses. Waiting to vote in the violence and pointless prejudice of the far right and it’s MAGA lookalike thugs.
The historical reality of the Morvan however, presents another face altogether from that presented to the simple tourist.
France itself is reeling from the onset of modern Blackshirts, baying for the rights of the true French, using immigration as a tool to stir the less than agile minds of its ignorant supporters. Once it was Jews, now it is simply foreigners. The far right has positioned itself to capitalise on the rural economic discontent in this and other depopulated and poor rural areas.
Was it ever the heaven that Bestall imagined in his drawings? Was it once a green and pleasant land where man lived in peace with his neighbours, cutting trees and rearing cattle?
Was anywhere on earth? The answer of course is that it never was. And sadly never will be. I am lucky enough to be enjoying its natural beauty at a time of peace, but such periods never last.
Violence has been a terrifying, structured reality here since it was first desecrated by the human stain.
Perhaps in the remote, icy wastes of the North and South poles, peace was the norm, where few humans roamed. Or at the bottom of the deep – but no doubt we will get there too. Perhaps Trump will frac it.
Architectural evidence shows this area of great natural beauty was a scene of brutal and endless violence in the neolithic age. It has revealed brutal massacres and ritualised violence.
And so on through the ages (and no doubt further back through the aeons as well).
The grizzliest (but non exclusive ) episodes seem to have been the Gallic Wars in Roman times, the territorial disputes with England in the middle ages, various religious conflicts, and of course the pointless slaughter of the two world wars.
Insultingly, the historians wrap these conflicts in the guise of rationality. The Hundred Year’s war, they say, was a 116 year conflict between the Kingdoms of France and England. It was shaped by feudal land disputes and “royal” ambition. What is a “king” then? How does a king from the 14th Century differ from the tyrants of today, the brutes at the top of the tree in the US, Israel, Russia or China?
The differences are few.
Peel back the treaties, royal lineages, and political maneuvering, and you will find that the Hundred Years’ War (like all wars) was driven by raw, deeply destructive human emotions: pride, intense humiliation, existential fear, and greed.
At the top level it was a toxic struggle for dominance between two groups of rulers. But the greed and bloodlust was not confined to the “nobility” — they infected every level of medieval society, though it manifested differently depending on a person’s social class.
While the lords and knights drove the high-stakes political gambling, the war created a predatory economic ecosystem where commoners, mercenaries, and peasants alike were driven by desperate greed, survival instincts, and a dark appetite for plunder.
By the time the war ended in 1453, vast regions of France—including the Morvan—had lost up to half of their pre-war population to the grim cycle of raid, ruin, famine by design and sickness.
I am not the first to rue the sad state of human affairs, nor, while the species survives, will I be the last.
I wonder if more saw our history in such bleak, accurate terms, we would change our ways?
I doubt it.
On with my tour of the Morvan. Perhaps best not to dwell on it’s dark history.