“Africa Begins at the Pyrenees”
When Spain was overrun by the Mohammedan, and when in the first generation of the eighth century the Asiatic with his alien creed and morals had even swept for a moment into Gaul, the Pyrenees became a march: at first the rampart, later, when they were fully held, the bastion of our civilisation against its chief peril.
—Hilaire Belloc, The Pyrenees, 1909
Few borders are entirely “natural,” and even the most natural physical frontiers can sometimes have unintended metaphorical associations imposed upon them, so that mountains, rivers, concrete walls, or wire fences become symbolic frontiers that define or confirm imagined distinctions between the territories on either side of them. Such distinctions might consist of Christian “bulwarks” against Islam, like the Militärgrenze, or cordon sanitaire, established by the Hapsburgs along their eastern borders with the Ottoman Turks in the sixteenth century, or the “iron curtain” invoked by Winston Churchill. More recently, certain frontiers, such as the U.S.-Mexican border or the Spanish exclaves in Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco, have become cutoff points between the first and third worlds.
Historically, the “perfect border” of the Pyrenees has acquired its own imagined distinctions, most famously embodied in the observation attributed to Alexandre Dumas père in the early nineteenth century that “Africa begins at the Pyrenees.” Whether Dumas actually said this is not certain, but many of his contemporaries echoed the same essential distinctions, in identifying the Pyrenees as the dividing line between Europe and an Africanized Iberia. For Stendhal, “Blood, manners, language, way of living and fighting, everything in Spain is African. If the Spaniard were a Muslim he would be a complete African.”1 “It is an error of geography to have assigned Spain to Europe,” declared the French diplomat Dominique-Georges-Frédéric de Fourt de Pradt in Mémoires historiques sur la revolution d’Espagne (1816). “It belongs to Africa: blood, manners, language, the way of life and making war, in Spain everything is African.”2
Such imagery has proved to be surprisingly enduring. “Beyond the Pyrenees begins Africa,” observed the American anthropologist and racial theorist William Ripley in The Races of Europe (1899). “Once that natural barrier is crossed, the Mediterranean racial type in all its purity confronts us. The human phenomenon is entirely parallel with the sudden transition to the flora and fauna of the south. The Iberian population, thus isolated from the rest of Europe, are allied in all important anthropological respects with the peoples inhabiting Africa north of the Sahara from the Red Sea to the Atlantic.”3
Whether these distinctions were imagined in terms of landscape, race, culture, or religion, the Pyrenees have been cited again and again as the physical dividing line where they were confirmed. It is difficult to think of any mountain range that has so often been depicted in these terms. The Alps, for example, have often been described as a barrier and a physical obstacle for travelers and invading armies, but they have never acquired the same reputation as a cultural and civilizational frontier that has so often been attached to the Pyrenees. This reputation has had a key role in the imaginative construction of the Pyrenees as a “savage frontier,” and for this reason we need to look a little more closely at the various ways in which the Iberian “Africa” has been imagined, and see how they became part of the imaginative construction of the Pyrenees themselves.
The Song of Roland
This image has its roots in the eighth-century Islamic conquest of Visigothic Iberia, which severed Spain from the mainstream of Latin Christendom. As a consequence the Pyrenees became another of Europe’s antemurale christianitatis—bulwarks of Christianity—a role that was confirmed by the defeat of Abd al-Rahman’s raiders at the hands of the Franks at Tours and Poitiers in 732, and the subsequent Muslim withdrawal into Iberia. Generations of historians have described the Pyrenees as the crucial defensive barrier that held the Muslims in check in the aftermath of that battle—an assumption that tends to take for granted that the Pyrenees were a sufficient obstacle in themselves to put off any putative invaders.
The Pyrenees first began to acquire these symbolic connotations in the outside world as a result of the medieval poem known as The Song of Roland, which was discovered in an Oxford library in 1837. This anonymous poem depicted the famous battle that took place in the Roncesvalles Pass in the summer of 778, when Charlemagne’s army was attacked by Moorish troops during its retreat from Zaragoza. Most scholars believe that this classic chanson de geste (song of heroic deeds) was written in the eleventh or twelfth century, against the background of the First Crusade, possibly as a compilation or distillation of oral legends and heroic songs told by monks and traveling poets known as jongleurs.
The poem is an almost entirely mythologized account of the battle that allegedly took place at the Roncesvalles Pass on August 15, 778. Very few facts about this battle are known for certain. Even the location is disputed, and some legends claim that it took place farther east, in the Boca de Infierno gorge in Aragon. There is general consensus that Charlemagne’s retreating column was attacked by Basques, in revenge for the sacking of Pamplona. Charlemagne’s contemporary biographer Einhard declares that it was Basque irregulars, not Saracens, who attacked the Frankish rear guard in the “narrow defiles” in and around Roncesvalles, destroying a Frankish column and a number of knights, including “Roland, prefect of the Breton marshes.” In The Song of Roland, however, the Basques are replaced by a Saracen horde some four hundred thousand strong—an improbable and almost certainly impossible figure for any army of that time—forewarned by the treacherous Frankish knight Ganelon, which ambushes and annihilates Roland and his cohorts, including the warrior-cleric Archbishop Turpin. In a further departure from the historical record, the poem relates how Charlemagne’s vengeful army subsequently returns to Zaragoza after Roland’s defeat and crushes the Saracens, before executing Ganelon.
Throughout the poem, Roland and his cohorts are ideal Christian warriors, brave, devout, and self-sacrificing, slaying thousands of Saracens to give Charlemagne’s army a chance to retreat. Their Saracen opponents, by contrast, are intrinsically unworthy and despicable. Whereas Roland, Archbishop Turpin, and their fellow soldiers willingly accept martyrdom in exchange for absolution of their sins, the Saracens have no motives except plunder, lands, “gifts of pretty, high-born women,” or the “effigies of gold,” which they promise to offer to their pagan gods in return for victory. Only the Saracen emir Baligant shows any sign of physical attractiveness or nobility, causing the poet to exclaim, “God what a lord, if he were but a Christian!” as he rallies his troops against the returning Franks, only to meet his death at the hands of Charlemagne himself.4
The other Saracens receive no such praise. Not only are they religiously alien, but many of them are also black, a detail that the poem often cites as some kind of explanation for their savagery and depravity. For Roland the sight of this “outlaw race, whose members all are blacker than is ink / and have no white about them, save their teeth,” is a terrifying confirmation that he and his comrades will die in the coming battle. They nevertheless sell their lives dearly, killing thousands of Saracens before they are killed themselves. For Roland, Turpin, and their fellow heroes, it is not enough to simply kill Saracens: their swords cleave right through their bodies and even through the bodies of their horses. Heads are split open and blood runs in torrents. The dying Roland is the last to fall.
“This outlaw race/whose members all are blacker than is ink.” Battle of Roncevaux Pass, fourteenth century, anonymous. (Gallica Digital Library, Wikimedia Commons).
Mortally wounded, he tries to break his sword, Durendal, so that the Saracens cannot use it, but the sword has so many sacred relics in its hilt that it cannot be broken, and Roland dies with his weapon in hand, blowing his ivory horn to summon Charlemagne back, before the angels arrive to bear his soul to Paradise.
Roland’s sacrifice is redeemed as the Franks and their allies return to massacre the “pagan” population of Zaragoza and Charlemagne kills the Saracen emir Baligant, smashing his bejeweled helmet “with France’s sword . . . then cleaves the skull—the brains come spilling out.” After Roland’s betrayer, Ganelon, is hanged and his corpse fed to the dogs, the angel Gabriel descends and summons Charlemagne forth to new conquests.
The Roland legend captivated medieval Christendom and was disseminated in oral and written versions: through the many illustrations of the battle that appeared in the Grandes chroniques de France; through the tenuous connections between the imagined Roland and real Pyrenean places, such as the great portal known as the Brèche de Roland (Roland’s Breach) at Gavarnie, which Roland supposedly cut into the rock with his sword, Durendal; through the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage, on which many pilgrims passed through Roncesvalles to contemplate the scene of Roland’s mythical battle before they continued their journey southward.
This, then, is how the Pyrenees first appear in the European literary imagination: as a sacred battlefield between Christian virtue and a Saracen enemy that is religiously and culturally inferior, and already recognizably “African” in its cruelty and savagery; as a hostile wilderness that colludes in Roland’s destruction by providing the Saracens with their hiding place, and which constitutes another physical obstacle that Charlemagne’s army must overcome as it returns through what the author of The Song of Roland calls “those hills, and soaring rocky bluffs / those sunken glades, those harrowing ravines / then leave behind the passes and the wastelands / they’ve made their way into the Spanish march / and set up camp upon a broad plateau.”
Regardless of the assumptions inherent in the poem, the historical period in which the “harrowing ravines” of the Pyrenees acted as a “bulwark” and a “rampart” was relatively short. As early as the ninth century, Spain was already sufficiently Christianized for pilgrims to make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. For much of the Middle Ages the Pyrenees constituted a physical barrier between rival Christian kingdoms, rather than between Muslims and Christians. Yet even after Islam had been definitively removed from Iberia, Spain continued to be perceived as a land apart that was distinct from the rest of Europe and tainted by its Moorish past, and the Pyrenees were cited again and again as the dividing line between one civilization and another.
“Spain Is Different”
Such imagery was not due simply to the military threat—whether real or imagined—of Islam, but to assumptions and conclusions about the cultural and even racial impact of the Muslim presence in Spain. Medieval Christian travelers often commented with astonishment about and disapproval of the popularity of Moorish food, music, and fashion in Iberian Christian courts. Even after the unification of Spain under Christian rule, sixteenth-century Protestant propaganda tracts depicted Spain as a suspect country that was fatally corrupted by its Moorish and Semitic past.
Spain’s “African” and “Oriental” qualities were frequently cited by French veterans of the Peninsular War. Napoléon allegedly observed that “Spain is different” after the French defeat at the Battle of Bailén in 1808, and many French soldiers echoed this conclusion. The Swiss-born Albert de Rocca, a sous-lieutenant in the second regiment of French hussars, arrived in Spain from more congenial occupation duties in Germany and found that “with regard to knowledge and the progress of social habits, Spain was at least a century behind the other nations of the continent. The distant and almost insular situation of the country, and the severity of its religious institutions, had prevented the Spaniards from taking part in the disputes and controversies which had agitated and enlightened Europe during the sixteenth century.”5
One French financier described his passage into Spain as a journey from “a country where all traces of the past had disappeared” to a country in which “I was finding myself thrown back several centuries. . . . The monastic costumes mixed in with the people . . . it was a representation of the seventeenth century; it was history in action.” Many veterans saw confirmation of these distinctions in the guerrilla tactics adopted by the Spanish. “At that time one had to travel to Spain in the same way as one did in Arabia: woe be to he who strayed from the caravan,” wrote one former soldier of the guerrilla tactics used by the Spanish. “The Spaniards, in whose veins were still to be found some drops of African blood, became veritable Bedouins: motivated more by love of pillage than patriotic duty.”6
Napoléon’s soldiers were not the only occupying army to attribute their defeat to the barbarousness of their enemies. Nevertheless, the image of Spain as an anachronistic outpost of religious fanaticism and ancien régime reaction was echoed by other commentators. In her account of her nineteenth-century Spanish grandmother Pepita’s native land, Vita Sackville-West wrote of “that proud, aloof, and ruthless nation [which] still dwelt self-contained behind the barrier of the Pyrenees; the expression cosa de España (a thing peculiar to Spain) really meant something quite indigenously different from any other part of Europe; the reserve, the austerity, the streak of Oriental secrecy in the Spanish character set them apart even more effectively than the frontier of their mountains.”7
For some nineteenth-century travelers, the differences between Spain and the rest of Europe were confirmed by the landscape itself. Returning from a journey to Spain via Le Perthus Pass in the 1780s, the English traveler Arthur Young compared “the natural and miserable roads of Catalonia” with the “noble causeway, made with all the solidity and magnificence that distinguish the highways of France,” on which he and his companions found themselves: “Instead of beds of torrents you have well-built bridges; and from a country wild, desert, and poor, we found ourselves in the midst of cultivation and improvement.”8
In his memoirs, Louis-Gabriel Suchet, the governor of Aragon during the Peninsular War and one of the most intelligent of Napoléon’s commanders, evoked a Spanish landscape that was familiar to many French soldiers, with its “constantly burning sun, high lands devoid of culture, of which no animated object ever breaks the uniformity.”9 For many soldiers—and the nineteenth-century touristic travelers who later followed in their wake—these differences were immediately evident on crossing the Pyrenees. Writing in the 1840s, the English traveler Richard Ford observed that “while the French slope is full of summer watering-places, social and civilised, the Spanish side is still the lair of the smuggler, and of wild birds and beasts.”10
Such differences were not entirely inaccurate, but nor were they universal. In the Western and Central Pyrenees there is often little difference in the vegetation or climate between the French and Spanish sides. Drive south of Toulouse, Montpellier, and Narbonne and you will find sun-bleached corrugated fields and palm trees that are no less Mediterranean and “African” than the landscape on the other side of the border. But actual distinctions in landscape, terrain, and levels of development were often secondary to the imagined differences and assumptions imposed on the Spanish “Africa” that were sometimes steeped in disgust and at other times inspired a romantic fascination.
“Lovely Spain”
For most nineteenth-century travelers, the differences in landscape and terrain on either side of the Pyrenees merely confirmed certain notions that they had already brought with them. For the American diplomat and congressman Caleb Cushing, the Pyrenees were “still the great national barrier between the neighbouring kingdoms” in 1832 as they had always been, and the Spanish people were “as unlike the French, as unlike the other nations of Europe, as they were when Cortes and Pizarro ravaged America, or when Philip II reared the sombre masses of the Escorial among the snows and tempests of the Guadarrama.”11 Inspired by Spanish resistance to the Napoleonic occupation, a number of British writers developed an infatuation with what Lord Byron called “Lovely Spain! Renowned, romantic land!” in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In her narrative poem Blanche of Castile (1813), Mary Russell Mitford hailed “Romantic Spain! . . . Fancy’s faery land.” In 1825, the poet and novelist Letitia Elizabeth Landon described Spain as the “Land of the olive and the vine / The saint and soldier, sword and shrine!”
François-René de Chateaubriand, Théophile Gautier, Prosper Mérimée, and Washington Irving all depicted Spain as an exotic aberration at the foot of Europe, inhabited by proud women in mantillas, fiery gypsy dancers, bandits, smugglers, and Quixotic dreamers driven by quaint but antiquated notions of honour, passion, and chivalry. In the preface to his collection of poems Les Orientales (1829), Victor Hugo praised the fact that “Spain is still the Orient; Spain is half Asiatic.” In 1822, the future French prime minister Adolphe Thiers traveled around the Cerdagne as a journalist to report on the violent spillover from Spain’s short-lived conflict known as the Liberal Triennium (1820–23), between supporters of the 1812 constitution and the autocratic Ferdinand VII.
At a camp of Royalist supporters near Mont-Louis in the Cerdagne, Thiers expressed his astonishment at the sight of “these monks, these guerrillas, in short, that picturesque people who resemble a migration of Asiatics in the midst of Europeans” and compared these “Asiatic” warriors to a mediocre Europe, which “is almost all softened down into general uniformity by the progress of civilization, and shows only a tolerably happy and tranquil state of society. In the mountains of Spain, is especially to be found that dramatic and original barbarism . . . which arouses the imagination, and offers it grand features to study.”12
Other writers echoed similar sentiments. “[The traveller] crosses the Pyrenees, too weary of the bore, commonplace, and uniformity of ultra civilization,” wrote Richard Ford, “in order to see something new and un-European; he hopes to find again in Spain . . . all that has been lost and forgotten elsewhere.”13 For Jules Michelet, the Pyrenees constituted an “austere, formidable, unbroken rampart . . . the barrier between Europe and Africa,—that Africa which men call Spain,” where the traveler experienced “an absolute and direct divorce, for which no graduation prepares us . . . if you have started from Toulouse over the Pyrenees, and descended their rapid southern slope to Saragossa, you have crossed a world.”14 Like Ford and Thiers, Michelet described the Pyrenees as a gateway to the “unknown which lay beyond” the mountains and “the land of romance and improbable adventures.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Spaniards have not always been flattered by such descriptions. “The apothegm that Africa begins at the Pyrenees remains commonplace in Europe,” lamented the Spanish novelist and diplomat Juan Valera in 1868.”15 “The ignorance of what we were and what we are seems incredible. . . . I have been asked by foreigners if we hunt lions in Spain; they have explained to me what tea is, supposing that I have never taken it or seen it.” Spanish liberals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often frustrated by these representations of Spanish difference, whether it was imagined in positive or negative terms.
In the early 1960s the Franco regime’s minister for information and tourism, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, astutely transformed Napoléon’s observation at Bailén into a catchy slogan for Spain’s booming tourist industry. Posters in English proudly proclaimed, “Spain is different: Visit Spain,” accompanied by images of sandy beaches, flamenco dancers, bullfights, and Holy Week processions.
Today the notion of Spanish “difference” has lost most of the negative connotations that it once had, and the age of air travel has long since eroded the image of the Pyrenees as an imagined “rampart” or “gateway” between cultures and civilizations. Few of the thousands of visitors who travel overland through abandoned Pyrenean customs posts each year, or take the high-speed train from Paris to Barcelona, are likely to see the Pyrenees as a civilizational dividing line or the point of entry to a backward and culturally retarded “Africa.” The “imagined” Pyrenean frontier has vanished along with the political border itself. But historical clichés often acquire an afterlife of their own. As late as 1999, the Encyclopedia Britannica described the Pyrenees as a historic “barrier to human movement” that “rise abruptly from the flanking plains of France and Spain with only steep gorges and steep-walled natural amphitheaters that lead to almost impassable lofty summits. . . . The French peasant’s adage, ‘Africa begins with the Pyrenees,’ is not without a large measure of truth in emphasizing the historic significance of the Pyrenees as a barrier in the development of Spain.”
The Pyrenean Borderland
Such observations give the Pyrenees more metaphorical weight than any mountain range can bear, and they also tend to obscure and overlook a great deal. Every year, on July 13, French villagers from the Barétous Valley in the Bearnese Pyrenees hand over three cows to a Spanish delegation from the neighboring Roncal Valley, chanting the ritual refrain “pax avant, pax avant, pax avant” (peace first). The “Tribute of the Three Cows” dates back to the fourteenth century, when the inhabitants of the two valleys met to put an end to a long and sometimes violent conflict between them. As a result of these negotiations, it was agreed that pastoralists from Barétous could take their cattle to pasture in the Roncal Valley for twenty-eight days a year, on condition that they did not remain overnight. To ensure that these pledges were kept, the inhabitants of the Barétous agreed to hand over three cows with identical horns, teeth, and coats to their Spanish counterparts each year.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this quaint relic of the Middle Ages has become a minor tourist attraction, but the Tribute of the Three Cows is also a testament to cross-border interactions that have rarely been acknowledged in the imaginative construction of the Pyrenean “wall.” Such anomalies are not unique to the Pyrenees. The distinctions imposed on national or historical borders often seem clearer with hindsight or when viewed from a geographical distance, and these distinctions are inevitably hazier on closer inspection. The Pyrenean border, like all borders, is an artificial line that dissects a broader and more multidimensional geographical and cultural space, whose inhabitants often have more in common with one another than they do with their respective countries. To many of the peoples who have actually lived in or near the mountains, the Pyrenees have not been a border between Europe and Africa, or even between France and Spain, but a shared borderland, with affinities and allegiances that reach across the mountains and transcend the reality of the border.
The agreement between the villagers of the Roncal and Barétous Valleys is only one of many traités that long preceded the advent of the Spanish-French border and continued after it was formalized. At the height of the War of the Spanish Succession, in 1712, when French armies were locked in battle with Spanish and Allied armies in Spain, the intendant of Béarn wrote to his superiors to request permission to allow Bearnese cattle breeders to sell their animals in Aragon, reminding them that “the inhabitants of the French and Spanish mountains will do anything to conserve their union, which has never been interrupted even by the bitterest of wars.”16
In this war, and in many others, Spanish and French military commanders were often frustrated by the reluctance of Pyrenean mountain communities to fight or even support their own national armies. In some cases, villages or federations of French and Spanish villages collectively refused to participate in the wars fought by their respective states and even warned one another of the arrival of invading armies. In 1910, nearly half a century after the signing of the Treaty of Bayonne, the French historian and geographer Henri Cavaillès found that many Pyrenean villages on either side of the border were still observing reciprocal agreements and traités that dated back to the Middle Ages. In 1952, the Spanish legal scholar Victor Fairén Guillén noted the existence of a “great international Pyrenean community of men and social groups, united by an extensive system of common interests [which] has been unjustly forgotten”—a system that was still, even then, in existence, centuries after it had first been established.17
This coexistence should not be exaggerated. There have been periods in which Frenchmen and Spaniards in the Pyrenees have hated each other and sometimes fought each other with the same ferocity as their fellow countrymen. But even then, their conflicts were not necessarily explained by their real or imagined cultural differences. In his classic study of the fourteenth-century Pyrenean Cathar village of Montaillou, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie describes the Catholic, Cathar, and Saracen migrant shepherds of Mount Vézian, near Flix in Catalonia, whose members “cooked and shared garlic-flavoured pies, mingling together as brothers regardless of their different opinions.”18 For Le Roy Ladurie these freewheeling shepherds were part of a common “community of culture, at once Moorish, Andalusian, Catalan and Occitan,” that reached across both sides of the Pyrenees.
Today, the abundance of Catalan flags and the prevalence of the Catalan language in the French Pyrenean towns and villages of the Cerdagne and Roussillon are a historical reminder of the Països Catalans—Catalan heartlands that once reached across both sides of the Pyrenees. Similarly, the Western Pyrenees divide the Spanish Basque provinces from the three French territories that form the Basque provinces of Soule, Labourd, and Lower Navarre, which many Basques regard as the Iparralde—the northern part. Each year thousands of Basques take part in the 1,293-mile (2,080-kilometer) relay race known as the Korrika through the seven historic Basque provinces to promote and celebrate the Basque language on both sides of the border.
Such affinities are not unique in themselves. State boundaries often dissect territories whose inhabitants have more in common with their counterparts closer to the border than they do with those of their respective capitals. Many borderlanders speak each other’s languages and share certain cultural and historical markers, and the closer one examines them, the more one finds contradictions and anomalies that do not fit with the expectations placed upon the border itself. But these cultural connections are too often ignored in the depictions of the Pyrenees as a harsh and forbidding dividing line between countries and civilizations—a dividing line that has tended to be imagined in binary, either/or terms. Too often the “savagery” of the Pyrenean landscape is invoked as a confirmation of the cultural assumptions that have served to distinguish the backward and exotic Spanish “Africa” from the modernity embodied by France and the rest of Europe. Not only are these assumptions questionable in themselves, but they have also tended to reduce the history of the Pyrenees to their role as a border, and too easily present the mountains as an uninhabited wilderness. Yet the mountains are, and always have been, only one component of a wider borderland and a mosaic of cultures, languages, and political arrangements that have never been fully encompassed or acknowledged by the French-Spanish frontier—or by the historical representations of Spain’s “African” qualities.
In looking to the “savage” Pyrenees to confirm such distinctions, too many historians and commentators have forgotten that people were living in the mountains long before the border came into existence, and they have also obscured the historical role of the Pyrenean borderland as a cultural bridge, rather than a barrier between Iberia and the rest of the continent, and a transmission belt through which many different exchanges have taken place.