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Notes -
I have recently begun reading Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, after reading a glowing review by Gwern. The book unveils a fascinating record of France around the time of the Revolution -- beyond Paris it was mostly empty tracts of countryside wilderness, punctuated with occasional microscopic hamlets. The isolated villagers rarely encountered the French government, and for the most part were happy to govern themselves, forming a hundred distinct cultures. Astonishingly, there was such a proliferation of dialects across the nation, that villagers living on opposite shores of a river could be unable to understand each other.
In fact, France would be a great setting for one of those "isolated village with secret dark local rituals" stories -- especially if you're thinking of the Alpine villages, so isolated in winter that they stored their dead on ice, on the rooftops, until the snows melted and a priest could reach the village for the funeral rites. I won't be surprised if you tell me such novels have been published in France.
Another part that particularly struck me: the description of cagots, a discriminated minority (not allowed to sit with others in the church, barred from most jobs, etcetera), who were hated for their-- well, that's the thing. They didn't fit any of the usual justifications for discrimination, didn't trigger any primal fears: they didn't belong to a specific ethnic minority, religious sect, or suffer from any particular illness. As far as anyone can tell, they were just... a completely arbitrary subset of families, a hereditary caste, hated and discriminated against for no other reason than "everyone else's doing it".
That's just a small part of the myriad of fascinating stories and trivia from the book, and I'm not even a quarter of the way through.
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