The discovery of France

What Hacker News says

1. slyallMar 2024
   This sounds similar to "The Discovery of France" by Graham Robb. Recommend
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2. surlyadopterDec 2020
   This is an interesting hypothesis, even though on first blush it seems obviously wrong. I'm glad the article was more nuanced than the headline.

   This reminded me of an interesting tidbit from Graham Robb's book 'The Discovery of France'. He mentions the pre-industrial peasantry (in some extremely rural areas) living in a similar manner. During the winter when there were stretches of time where it was too harsh to do any productive work, the peasants just stayed inside. Food/calories were scarce enough even in the best of times so activity was limited to wake up, eat a bit, sleep, repeat.

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3. surlyadopterDec 2020
   I read the same "fact"* in Graham Robb's 'The Discovery of France".

   *scare quotes because I've only seen one reference

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4. nyolfenNov 2018
   my original phrasing was 'shattering', maybe i should have left it that way. but i agree. one of the best essays i've read on the subject:

   https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society

   > The otaku & hikikomori recognizes this dilemma and he chooses - to reject normal life! He rejects life in the larger culture for his subculture5. It’s a simple matter of comparative advantage; it’s easier to be a big fish in a small pond than in a large one.6

   [...]

   > As ever more opt out, the larger culture is damaged.7 The culture begins to fragment back into pieces. The disconnect can be profound; an American anime geek has more in common with a Japanese anime geek (who is of a different ethnicity, a different culture, a different religion, a different language…) than he does with an American involved in the evangelical Christian subculture. There is essentially no common ground - our 2 countrymen probably can’t even agree on objective matters like governance or evolution!

   > With enough of these gaps, where is "American" or "French" culture? Such cultural identities take centuries to coalesce - France did not speak French until the 1900s (as The Discovery of France recounts), and Han China is still digesting & assimilating its many minorities & outlying regions. America, of course, had it easy in starting with a small founder population which could just exterminate the natives.

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5. KuiperMar 2018
   The fact that peasants did not work more hours is tied to the fact that they were agrarian laborers. Once you've brought in the harvest, what is there to do but lie around and wait until the end of winter? Indeed, "lie around" is most of what they did, and remaining inactive to lower their metabolism was actually a survival strategy to deal with the limited amount of food they had: burn fewer calories, eat fewer calories.

   As the article notes, peasant life consisted of working only part of the year, with longer workdays during harvest season, and short work days (or no work at all) during the rest of the year. In some climates, like the Pyrenees and the Alps, people essentially "hibernated" during the winter: they stayed indoors, lived off their food stores, and expended as little energy as possible.

   Citing Graham Robb's The Discovery of France: 'An official report on the Nièvre in 1844 described Burgundian day-laborers thusly: '“After making the necessary repairs to their tools, these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.” Entering this inactive state was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies.'

   The time that they spent not working was not some leisurely edifying "vacation" that they enjoyed as a luxury; for French peasants in the 1700's and 1800's, being inactive was a survival strategy.

   The parent article paints the time spent remaining inactive in a romantic light, remarking that "the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze." The reality is probably closer to the fact that he probably risked starvation if he regularly engaged in any sort of vigorous activity (no surplus calories to burn on frivolities like dancing or sports or other active forms of recreation), and it's quite possible that the afternoon naps may have felt more like an obligation than an opportunity to "relax." Lying around all day doing "nothing" sounds less like a vacation and more like a prison sentence (quite literally, in the sense that it probably resembles the life that some people live inside of modern prisons, doing essentially nothing as they wait for the days to pass).

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