We were soon accosted by two young mountaineers, handsome and well made; they were walking barefooted, but with that grace and agility which so particularly distinguish the natives of the Pyrenees. Their bonnets were tastily ornamented with mountain flowers; and an air of adventure about them interested me exceedingly.
—Ramond de Carbonnières, Travels in the Pyrenees, 18131
In the course of history Pyreneans have often been subject to the shifting perceptions of the outside world, which have changed in accordance with the perceptions of the mountains themselves. Strabo wrote disparagingly of the “rough and savage manners” of the barbarian tribes of Asturias, Cantabria, and the Pyrenees who slept on the ground, fed on goats, and wore their hair long “after the fashion of women.” These Iberian mountain men were fond of athletics, boxing, running, and martial games; they drank beer instead of wine and danced to the sound of flutes and trumpets, “springing up and sinking upon the knees.”2 Strabo wrote at a time when mountains were generally associated in the Greek and Roman imagination with primitiveness and barbarism. Long after the Christianization of the Pyrenees, and the integration of the Pyrenees into the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage, however, their inhabitants were still regarded as a breed apart.
The Codex Calixtinus described Basques as “ferocious people; and the land in which they dwell is savage, wooded and barbarous.”3 The Codex reserved even harsher language for the Navarrese, who were comprehensively denounced as “debauched, perverse, perfidious, disloyal and corrupt, libidinous, drunkard, given to all kind of violence, ferocious and savage, impudent and false, impious and uncouth, cruel and quarrelsome, incapable of anything virtuous, well-informed of all vices and iniquities.”4 These vices supposedly included “incestuous fornication” with animals, which allegedly led the Navarrese to attach locks to the behinds of their mules or horses in order to reserve exclusive rights to them—a ludicrously impractical precaution that undoubtedly existed only in the author’s imagination.
From the eighteenth century onward, Pyreneans tended to be depicted more positively. Clarence Willoughby, the English hero of Anna Maria Porter’s romantic novel Roche-Blanche; or, The Hunters of the Pyrenees (1822), grows up in Béarn and develops his agility, strength, and manly virtues through his interactions with the “inhabitants of the Pyrenees, to whom activity of body, and joyousness of spirit, were particularly dear.” “The besetting sin of the Swiss—greed—I have never found in the Pyrenees,” wrote the Scottish traveler and journalist Henry David Inglis in 1840. “The intercourse of the mountaineer with strangers has hitherto been too limited to dull his natural feelings of justice, kindness and generosity. . . . Crime of every description is rare in the Pyrenees; theft is very infrequent, and murder altogether unknown.”5
The French cartographer Aymar d’Arlot de Saint-Saud (1853–1951) made numerous mapping expeditions of the Spanish Pyrenees, and often praised the mountaineers who assisted him for their sharpness and intellectual curiousity. In Contribution a la Carte Des Pyrénées Espagnols (Contribution to the Map of the Spanish Pyrenees, 1892), he listed “Goodness, amiability, generosity, candour, honesty, native pride” (my translation) as the principal characteristics of the Spanish inhabitants of the Aragonese and Catalan Pyrenees—virtues that he contrasted favorably with the mountaineers of his own country, who he found “less lively of body and spirit.”6 Nineteenth-century travel writings, paintings, postcards, and tourist posters often echoed these depictions in a more general celebration of Pyrenean virtue, as the incorporation of the Pyrenees into the modern world was accompanied by the “discovery” of the people who lived in them. As was often the case in other “discovered” places in the same period, this fascination often focused on the more exotic and picturesque Pyrenean types, who were often depicted through the same romantic prism as the landscape itself.
Shepherds
Few occupations are more quintessentially Pyrenean than stock-breeding and animal husbandry, and few have been more romanticized and idealized by the outside world. Archaeological evidence suggests that shepherds were already grazing sheep, goats, and cattle and storing winter fodder in the Pyrenees in the Neolithic era, and some scholars contend that the abundance of prehistoric dolmens in some parts of the mountains mark ancient grazing trails to the high pastures. In his study of medieval transhumance in the Eastern Pyrenees, David Blanks described a pastoral economy whose essential hallmarks remained unchanged for centuries, in which peasant families depended on the sheep, goats, and cattle that provided them with milk, cheese, wool, soap, meat, and fertilizer, and bones to make containers, cards, knives, and flutes.7
Within this local village economy each member of the household played his or her part: the men who did the shearing; the women who spun the wool; the young boys who took the sheep to pasture; and the girls who carried them food or brought churns of milk and butter down from the mountains. Where possible, these herds were taken by adolescent boys to the nearest pastures and then brought back home the same day to share the house with their owners. If the pastures were farther away, these boy-shepherds would spend the night, and sometimes the whole summer, in the high mountains, where they were attended and supplied with messages and freshly baked bread by a team of messengers—usually girls—from the village. From November to mid-May their animals would feed on fodder.
At the other end of the spectrum were the big landowners, monasteries, or more distant entrepreneurs who hired professional shepherds to take large herds to and from the high pasturelands. These wage-earning shepherds were paid in coin and also in food to take sheep into the high pasturelands for the summer and then down to Catalonia and even as far as Valencia during the winter months. Some worked for multiple employers during their working lives and went on to become herders themselves. All these shepherds had to take into account the local traités agreed between the valleys and villages whose lands they passed through, and the tithes and other demands imposed by the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, for cheese, milk, and wool.
Once in the high mountains, the shepherds more or less governed themselves. From the Inquisitorial interrogations carried out by Jacques Fournier, the bishop of Pamiers, into the Cathar heresy in Montaillou in the Comté de Foix from 1318 to 1325, we know that the more well-established professional shepherds, or bergers, lived communally in groups of up to ten shepherds in shared huts, or cabanes, with flocks of one hundred animals or more. They spent the summer months watching over their animals and making cheese and milk, which they kept cool in specially dug pits or in little “reservoirs” in streams. The cabanes were organized into a rigid hierarchy that descended from the chef de cabane (head shepherd) all the way down to the lowly migrant shepherds, who were obliged to live in separate fenced-off sheep holds, or cortals, with their animals. Strict rules governed these medieval shepherd societies. Lower-ranking shepherds were not allowed to eat or drink before the head shepherd, and those who breached this etiquette could expect to be beaten or deprived of their supper.8
Pyrenean Arcadias
These medieval shepherd societies were regarded with suspicion by the Inquisition, as a result of their independence and their mobility, but they were often seen very differently in more recent times. Shepherds were a romantic staple of early modern and ancien regime literature, and in 1778 the popular French writer Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis (1746–1830), better known under her nom de plume Madame de Genlis, described the real-life Pyrenean shepherds she encountered in the Campan Valley in terms that were fully in keeping with the conventions of Marie Antoinette’s court. De Genlis’s depictions of these shepherds were firmly rooted in the Arcadian tradition, whether she was describing the “rustic sounds of the flageolet and bagpipe; and the rural airs which the shepherds sung, seated on the brinks of rocks” or the “daughters of the Pyrenees, every one of them remarkable for their beauty and handsome shapes,” taking baskets of fruit and cheese to their retired shepherd grandfathers.9 On witnessing a shepherd throw a bouquet of roses to his betrothed, de Genlis concluded that “if happiness exists on earth, these are the manners, and these the sentiments, which should insure its possession.”
These reflections were accompanied by a detailed description of the organization of these shepherd societies, in which shepherds as young as eight or nine guarded sheep on the hills immediately above the valley, while older shepherds went up into the high pastures. While the younger shepherds were able to “exercise themselves in clambering up the rocks; and leaping the rapid brooks they accustom themselves to look without horror on the amazing height of our precipices,” retired shepherds worked in the valley below them as laborers, plowmen, or farmers. At the age of fifteen these boy-shepherds were handed the shepherd’s crook by their fathers, who were given a spade to symbolize their new role as laborers, until finally they retired from all work and spent their days “supinely extended in the grass . . . plunged in deep and profound reveries.”
Other visitors echoed de Genlis’s celebration of the shepherds of the Pyrenees. The “true inhabitant of the Pyrenees, the native shepherd of these mountains, however uncultivated or poor is lively, generous, and noble, proud even in a state of degradation, and under every reverse of fortune,” wrote Ramond of the men who often gave him shelter during his Pyrenean journeys.10 For Ramond, these shepherds embodied a “true nobility” that was descended from “race not climate.” Jules Michelet described “the roving life of these shepherds” as “one of the most picturesque elements in the south. These nomads, companions of the stars in their eternal solitude, half astronomers, half sorcerers, carry their goods with them.”11
The life of a Pyrenean shepherd was not always as appealing as it seemed to outsiders. Shepherds on the transhumance routes in the high pastures, or estives, spent months away from home with little or no contact with their families or with any other people except their fellow shepherds. In some cases they had no shelter from inclement weather except for the coffin-like wooden boxes that they carried into the mountains with them or the dome-like dry-stone shelters known as orris, which can be found in the Ariège and other parts of the Pyrenees. The material rewards for so much time and effort were often meager—for the shepherds if not for the owners of their flocks and herds. “For notwithstanding the luxuriance of these valleys, little of their luxury, even to-day, goes to the tillers of their soil,” Asa Dix observed in 1890. “The Pyrenean farmer or mountaineer has to support his family now, as in past ages, in poverty. Little beyond the most meagre of diet can he commonly provide them, and it is the joint anxiety of ensuring even this, that wears and disfeatures him and them, as much doubtless as its meagreness.”12 Shepherds on the transhumance routes were often absent for most of the year, spending the summers in the high mountains and the winters in the lowlands, visiting their wives and children only briefly. Not surprisingly their wives were often as lonely as their husbands, as the high rates of alcoholism and early pregnancies in the Aragonese Pyrenees attested.
The harsher realities of shepherding tended to be obscured in the beaming barefoot shepherds in Rosa Bonheur’s Pyrenean paintings, or the Pyrenean shepherds standing with their crooks, their flocks, and their dogs against a pristine mountain backdrop in nineteenth-century French postcards and railway posters advertising the route thermale. Spanish shepherds often featured in these French postcards, as wilder manifestations of the more “savage” Spanish Pyrenees, in their wide-brimmed hats and ponchos. In the early twentieth century, the Spanish photographer and pharmacist Ricardo Compairé Escartín (1883–1965) included some striking photographs of Spanish shepherds in the high mountains in his pioneering ethnographic studies of upper Aragon. Compairé was an avid pyreneist, and his lovingly posed images of shepherds and peasants in traditional costume were consciously intended to record customs, costumes, and traditions that had already begun to vanish from the mountains. Not for the first or last time, the idealization of Pyrenean heritage and tradition in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century iconography was infused with an element of nostalgia for societies that were already being radically transformed by modernity.
Traditional Pyrenean mountain life in the nineteenth century. Note the splendid modern bridge through the doorway. Thomas Allom, A Cabaret in the Pyrenees: Rainy Day, ca. 1840 (Bibliothèque municipale de Toulouse, via Wikimedia Commons).
The Dark Valley
Something of the magnitude of this transformation can be gleaned from a visit to the Vall Fosca (Dark Valley), just south of the Aigüestortes National Park, in the Catalan Pyrenees. The valley takes its name from the steep, narrow slopes that limit the light it receives during the winter months, and most visitors reach it from the main road that leads up toward the Vall d’Aran and France. Shortly after leaving the town of Pont de Suert you turn off to the right along a road that roughly follows the line of the Flamisell River, and then drive up a curving mountain road between steep slopes still thick with oaks and holm oaks, rising past a succession of stepped meadows dotted with the nondescript ski villages that abound in the Catalan Pyrenees.
Until the early twentieth century the Vall Fosca was almost completely isolated from the outside world. Its fourteen hundred inhabitants lived in nineteen villages and hamlets in a semifeudal agrarian society dominated by three families, without schools, electricity, or roads other than paths and cart tracks. Most of them wore wooden clogs or went barefoot. They shared their houses with their animals, as they had done for centuries, and they eked out a living from cattle and sheep grazing, breeding horses and mules, or plowmaking, saddlemaking, and other agricultural trades. In 1912 this isolation was abruptly shattered, when Energía Eléctric de Catalunya (Catalan Electric Energy, EEC) began an ambitious scheme to generate hydroelectric power from the thirty-seven glacial tarns in the present-day national park of Aigüestortes in order to power the textile factories of Barcelona, some 155 miles (250 kilometers) away.
This project was the brainchild of Emili Riu i Periquet (1841–1900), a journalist, politician, and entrepreneur from the nearby town of Sort, who established the EEC in 1911, with capital from Catalan and foreign investors. In the summer of 1912 some four thousand Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Turkish workers descended on the Vall Fosca. Working at altitudes of more than 6,562 feet (2,000 meters) in all weathers, these workers built a 19-mile (30-kilometer) road from the nearest town of Pobla de Segur right up into the upper valley, in addition to a telephone line, a power station, a barracks-like encampment, and a 9.5-mile (15-kilometer) network of tunnels among a dozen lakes, which channeled water down an enormous water chute from the high mountains to the power station at the hamlet of Capdella 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) below.
All this was achieved in an incredible twenty-three months. Today the power station is still operational, but it is not until you reach the top of the valley, where the plantation forest gives way to the gaunt rocky peaks beyond the Sallent reservoir, that you realize the prodigious feat of engineering that built this system. From the reservoir you take the cable car up to the Estany Gento (Gento Lake), where the cambra de l’aigua (water chute) forces water 2,790 feet (850 meters) down the mountainside. The former narrow-gauge track once used by mule-drawn wagons has become a walking route that leads around the Montseny mountain past mostly abandoned old pump stations and other industrial buildings, through a succession of narrow tunnels.
A photograph shows a group of Riu’s workers in waistcoats and rope-soled sandals on a pulley-drawn metal beam dangling above one of the lakes. They exude the same sense of pride in an epic task that one finds in photographs of workers on New York skyscrapers, and the physical resilience that enabled them to endure eleven-hour working days, seven days a week, in weather conditions that sometimes obliged them to use crampons, snowshoes, and ice axes. Despite the primitive working conditions at the outset, some four thousand workers eventually settled at Capdella with their families, in a colony with its own cinema, library, tennis courts, and canteen and the EEC’s own hotel, the appropriately named Hotel Energía. These developments had immediate and long-term implications for the valley’s indigenous inhabitants. Though some locals claimed that “their” electricity had been taken from the valley, landowners won permanent concessions from the EEC, which guaranted them free electricity in perpetuity. Mass-produced goods overwhelmed the local economy, and peasants abandoned their old trades to take up the higher wages on offer at the EEC and began to send their children to the company school. Within a few years a way of life that had remained much the same for centuries had been changed beyond recognition. A similar process unfolded at different speeds across the Pyrenees.
Workers at Estany Gento, above Capdella, date unknown (with kind permission from Museu Hidroelèctric de Capdella).
Pyrenean society was never exclusively pastoral. As early as the first century BCE, gold, silver, copper, and other metals were being mined in the Roman provinces in the central French Pyrenees, and there were marble quarries around the town of Lugdunum, now the town of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges. In 1778 more than 2,400 women in the border town of Puigcerdà were occupied in spinning and weaving woolen stockings. In 1837 James Erskine Murray observed the inhabitants of the Carol Valley making wool stockings, some thirty thousand of which were exported annually to Bordeaux, Toulouse, and other parts of France. In 1890 Blackwoods magazine could report that “pastoral occupations form only a small part of the business of the Pyrenees. . . . As water power is to be found everywhere, there are flour-mills and saw-mills in many of the villages. In certain valleys . . . almost every peasant has rough little grinding stones and converts his own barley, buckwheat and maize into flour. Handlooms are numerous, and coarse woollen stuffs for the peasants’ clothes are largely made.”13
As was the case in the Vall Fosca, the industrialization of the Pyrenees undermined the local village economy, and it also offered better-paid alternatives to agricultural work, as peasants, farmers, and shepherds abandoned the land to work in the cities, or sought new employment opportunities in recreational tourism or in the mines, factories, and worshops that sprung up across the Pyrenees in the nineteenth century. In the Biros Valley in the Ariège, many locals abandoned sheepherding to work in the silver- and zinc-bearing lead mines at Bentaillou and Bulard. In the French Pyrenean commune of Vicdessos, the number of farms declined exponentially following the opening of a metallurgical factory in the area in 1910.
The rise of industrialized animal farming; restrictions on communal land use and grazing routes; population decline; the reluctance of the young to take up a profession that was regarded as arduous and badly paid—all these factors contributed to a long-term decline in the numbers of shepherds and herders. The old pastoral world of the Pyrenees never disappeared completely. In his engaging account of his emigrant journey from the Bearnese Pyrenees to the United States, the restaurateur Jean Louis Matocq describes a mid-twentieth-century Pyrenean childhood that many of his medieval predecessors would not have found entirely unfamiliar, on a three-hundred-year-old farm with no water, toilet, or electricity in which he was already plowing, milking cows, tending sheep, and pitching hay for the winter at the age of eleven.14 In 1837 James Erskine Murray wrote of the “celerity with which the shepherds of the Pyreneés [sic] draw their flocks around them” with dogs and whistles. “There is no such sight to be witnessed in these mountains such as ‘sheep driving’;” he wrote, “no ‘knowing little collies’ used in collecting the flocks, or keeping them from wandering; the Pyrenean shepherd, his dogs, and his flock, seem to understand each other’s duties; mutual security and affection are the bonds which unite them.”15
Today there are an estimated 1 million sheep in the Pyrenees, and the sight of sheep being effortlessly rounded up by mountain dogs, or patous, in a high mountain pasture at the end of the day remains one of the most beautiful spectacles in the mountains. In the Marcadau Valley and the Vallée d’Ossau, you can still encounter beige and cream Pyrenean cows, with their great bells around their necks, or buy freshly made cheeses from a shepherd’s cabane, or pass men and women leading mules or donkeys laden with cheese or milk down from the high pastures. Shepherds still take their flocks into the high mountains each summer for the annual transhumance, though many now use trucks and vans to transport them, and visit their animals on motorbikes or quad bikes. But it is still possible to find shepherds living alone in the high mountains, or whistling and calling out to their animals, and to see them as the descendants of the fourteenth-century shepherd of the Ariège or Cerdagne whom Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie called “as free as the mountain air he breathed.”16
Night Work
The same cannot be said of another iconic Pyrenean occupation that was frequently celebrated by nineteenth-century travelers. The origins of smuggling, or “night work” (gaulana) as it is known in Basque, can be traced back to the sixteenth century, when Philip II first attempted to transform the Pyrenees into a “frontier of heresy” and added the control of illegal contraband to the duties of the Inquisition. Neither the Holy Office nor the secular justices were ever able to impose their authority over a mountain range that offered endless opportunities for escape and evasion. Much of the Pyrenees in the sixteenth century remained a lawless no-man’s-land, where bandits, deserters, counterfeiters, and fugitives from justice lived alongside charcoal burners, woodcutters, and iron foundries.
Many of these bandits and smugglers came from noble families, such as Felipe de Bardaxí, the lord of San Juan de Plan in the Gistaín Valley of Huesca Province, whose band combined robbery with murder and horse smuggling across the frontier. Bardaxí also spied for the Spanish Crown during the French Wars of Religion and even fought with Catholic armies against the Huguenots. As a result he continued to enjoy royal protection, until some of his many enemies managed to kill him with axes while he was taking Holy Communion in his home village. Such was his reputation that the people of San Juan celebrated his murder with an Our Father and a Hail Mary—a custom that continued until 1888.17
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the French and Spanish governments made occasional joint attempts to stem the smuggling of untaxed goods. In 1722 the Paris and Madrid courts agreed to return “thieves, assassins, and deserters” to their respective kingdoms, and these efforts were also extended to smugglers. In May 1773, 140 smugglers took temporary control of the border town of Puigcerdà and emptied its prisons of convicted brethren. In reponse, the two governments signed a series of accords allowing troops to cross the state boundary in pursuit of smugglers.
In 1830 the Spanish government enacted a harsh anti-smuggling law whose punishments included deportation to the Antilles and the garrotte, and in 1842 the paramilitary corps of carabineers established by the treasury earlier in the century to enforce customs restrictions on the country’s frontiers was placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of War in a renewed attempt to establish control over the Pyrenean border. These efforts had no more impact than their predecessors. Many Pyrenean villages and valleys depended on these paqueteros (packet carriers) for their prosperity and survival. In one episode in the Aragonese village of Aísa in Huesca Province in the nineteenth century, the local priest asked Queen Isabel II to pardon twelve men from the village who had been arrested for robbing a consignment of goods from a government store and various others who had fled to France to avoid arrest, on the grounds that there were no longer any men left in the village to look after the animals and the harvest.
In Aragon and Navarre, smuggling was a professional or semiprofessional activity, to the point where columns of a hundred or more armed men escorted mule trains laden with household utensils, tools, olive oil, tobacco, ham, and guns through the mountains. In the Hecho and Ansó Valleys of Aragon, smugglers routinely fought nocturnal gun battles with the carabineers. In Andorra, Spanish smugglers took advantage of the co-principality’s geographical location inside France to avoid customs duties and taxes, while French businesses looking to take advantage of Andorra’s exemption from Spanish taxes smuggled French products through Andorra into Spain. In the nineteenth century, Andorra became one of the main routes for contraband tobacco from Spain into France, and many Andorran households began cultivating tobacco specifically for French markets.
As is often the case, repression was never able to eliminate an industry that was driven by price differentials and shifting patterns of supply and demand. In the eighteenth century the Cerdagne became a major point of entry for the illegal transfer of Spanish gold and silver to France. In 1818 a French customs director complained that industrial looms and skilled workers were being smuggled into Catalonia through the Cerdagne to fuel the Catalan textile industry. During the first Carlist War the Spanish government frequently complained that Carlist troops were being supplied with gunpowder by French smugglers, and the French authorities issued a ban on the possession of gunpowder near the frontier in an attempt to stop this traffic.
These prohibitions failed to prevent such activities and may even have intensified them, as border restrictions often do. The Carlist Wars also generated a demand in Spain for smuggled uniforms, grain, and weapons—and for soldiers. Crossing the French-Spanish border from Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the middle of the first Carlist War in 1840, Théophile Gautier observed how “the war has given rise to a frontier trade in two commodities: firstly, in bullets found on the battle-field, and secondly in human contraband. They export Carlists like bales of goods; there is even a tariff: so much for a colonel, so much for an officer; the bargain is made, the smuggler arrives, carries off his man, takes him over the frontier and delivers him at his destination like a dozen handkerchiefs or a hundred cigars.”18 The British Carlist volunteer Charles Frederick Henningsen later recalled the smugglers who took him “through mountain paths so steep and dangerous, that in ordinary time the inexperienced traveller would have done nothing but think on the natural horrors of the road.”19
Given the economic importance of smuggling to the Pyrenean valleys, it is not surprising that the more prolific and daring smugglers were often regarded as local heroes. The “monarch of Hecho,” Pedro Brun, fought so many gunfights with the carabineers in the first decades of the nineteenth century that Isabel II put a price on his head. In response, Brun personally traveled to Madrid from his home in Aragon to present himself at court—an act that so endeared him to the queen that she promptly pardoned him. Pyrenean smugglers were also regarded as attractive figures by the outside world. French posters and postcards often depicted Spanish smugglers in colorful costumes with muskets and loads on their backs making their way up solitary mountain paths. Gustave Doré drew a grippingly dramatic portrait of armed smugglers clinging to a mountainside. The popular French illustrator Paul Gavarni (1804–66) also drew some fabulously exotic and romantic images of smugglers he met during a visit to the Pyrenees, from which he took his own nom de plume.
Such images often referenced Ramond’s description of the Aragonese smuggler he encountered descending from the Brèche de Roland: “In the countenance of this man I could perceive a mixture of boldness and confidence; his thick and frizzled beard was continued up into his black and curling hair; his broad breast was open, his strong and nervous legs naked; all his clothing consisted of a simple vest; the covering of his feet, after the manner of the Romans and Goths, of a piece of cow’s skin applied to the sole of the foot, and bound round it like a purse, by means of two straps, which were afterwards crossed and fastened above the ancles.”20
“A mixture of boldness and confidence.” Paul Gavarni, Pyrenean smuggler, 1829 (Bibliothèque Municipale de Toulouse).
In 1873 the French poet Frédéric Soutras (1814–74), a founder-member of the Ramond Society, published a 350-verse poem entitled Les échos de la montagne celebrating the exploits of Brice d’Estensan, a smuggler from the village of Estensan in the Vallée d’Aure who shot and killed two customs men. For Soutras, Brice was an authentic rebel, a “hunter above the peaks / On the flank of glaciers / On seeing Isards / he thought of customs men,” outwitting and fighting oppressive treasury officials on behalf of the people in his valley, while wooing countless Pyrenean women as he roamed the mountains. Smugglers were not always described so fondly. Henry Russell once told the French Alpine Club how he and his companions were set upon by “four hideous Spaniards . . . with glittering daggers round their waists, an axe and a knife,” in a shepherd’s cabane high above Gavarnie. Though two of his friends were detained at axe point, Russell and his other companions managed to escape and spent the night hiding in the forest before the smugglers returned to where they came from without having harmed their two prisoners.21
Most smugglers were not bandits, but ordinary Pyreneans from either side of the border. In the 1830s a French army officer in the Cerdagne complained that the contraband trade had “caused the abandonment of work. There is not a single inhabitant of these frontier districts who would accept for honest and easy work the salary that he so hastily accepts for a contraband enterprise. From the one, he sees only drudgery; from the other, merit and pleasure.”22 In the early twentieth century Spanish seasonal workers often used their earnings to buy watches and other items that they brought back to their villages without paying tax. Ordinary Frenchmen and women living close to the border routinely took part in the pacotille (household smuggling) and crossed the border to bring back a bag of groceries from Spanish stores, and French customs officers often turned a blind eye to these activities. Some Spaniards even set up stores close to the border, selling meat, fresh vegetables and fruits, wines, spirits, and cigarettes.
For much of the twentieth century, the flow of smuggled goods across the Pyrenees followed the same general pattern: manufactured products from France into Spain and agricultural products from Spain into France. During World War II this pattern was briefly reversed as Pyrenean smugglers brought what had become luxury goods into occupied France, such as penicillin, lace, thread, sugar, and olive oil, and returned with payment in the form of money, jewels, and gold. Many Pyrenean smugglers also took to smuggling people across the frontier into Spain, from escaped Jews to Allied airmen and Free French. After the war, smuggling reverted to its prewar patterns, as smugglers transported ball bearings, copper, precision instruments, and other manufactured goods from France into Spain and alcohol, sheep, mules, cattle, and horses in the other direction. By the 1960s smuggling had begun to diminish as the price differentials on either side of the frontier decreased and the cost of smuggling itself went up. By the 1970s it had become only a marginal activity, and by the time Spain formally joined the Schengen Area in 1995, smuggling had become a historical anachronism, like the border itself.
Today this history of smuggling has become a “colorful” tourist attraction. In Andorra the Tobacco Museum of Sant Julià de Lòria celebrates what the Lonely Planet guide calls “the decadent pleasures of smoking and smuggling.” Guidebooks still invite travelers to visit the French-Basque village of Salé which was once known as the “Republic of Salé” because of its long history of smuggling. Other Pyrenean professions have been similarly appropriated by the heritage industry. At the Museum of the Pyrenees in Lourdes, visitors can contemplate lovingly assembled displays of plows, hoes, milk churns, furniture, and models of shepherds in immaculately restored Bearnese huts.
Other Pyrenean museums are dedicated to the cork industry, local folk costumes, farming implements, mining, the salt industry, ethnography, and folklore. In the Aragonese Pyrenees, competitions and races are held each spring to remember the navateros (rafters) who once brought timber down from the mountains by roping tree trunks together. Local associations build these navatas using traditional methods and steer them down spating rivers. In the French and Spanish Pyrenees walkers and visitors can take part in the annual parties and fêtes des bergers (shepherds’ festivals) and accompany shepherds into the high mountains, and some Pyrenean villages still celebrate customs and traditions that reach deep into the premodern history of myth and superstition that was also part of the Pyrenean past.