824 Pre-Columbian Mexico City; Unearthing Pompeii; Shortest History of France

24:32You know, liberty, freedom, democracy, philosophy, science. And then they start to excavate this city, and there were things that were quite kind of borderline. And it was everywhere, so not only in the brothel, but also in the private homes. And so people seem to have a very different approach to that. And so it was always very debated and sometimes also hidden from visitors. Now we try to rather to explain it and also to make it understandable as part of the ancient culture, which had its own rules. You know, it seems all very, okay, they basically had no problems at all, but they had also their own ideas and obsessions and imagination.

25:28So I think it's a very interesting topic where we can see the difference between us and them.

25:35Rick Steves:You know, one thing I've been kind of struggling with lately, Gabriel, is as American travelers want to be sensitive and evolved in their sense of justice and respect and honest about the ugly things about history, we have to be careful not to be chronocentric and judge things by our sensibilities today, but try to understand what was the context 2 ,000 years ago when we're looking at things. and it was, I would imagine, it was a slavery-based, male-dominated society permeated by religion and, you know, that would color people's approach to things. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're speaking with Gabriel Zuchtregal, and Gabriel is the director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, and his book is The Buried City, Unearthing the Real Pompeii.

26:23Rick Steves:Pompeii is your best look if you want to get an intimate sense of what daily life was like for ancient Romans. I would say it's your best look at that anywhere in Europe. It's about an hour train ride south of Naples. Naples is a couple hours south by train from Rome, and Pompeii is a very popular site. There are alternative Pompeii's. There's Ostia Antica, which is just a half an hour south of Rome, kind of the port of ancient Rome. There's Herculaneum, which was sort of a sister city of Pompeii that was destroyed in the same eruption, 79 AD. But if you want to see the granddaddy of these sites, you would go to Pompeii.

27:04Rick Steves:By the way, Gabriel, I know you work at Pompeii, and that's your thing, but you've also worked at other sites. How would you compare Pompeii with Herculaneum and with Ostia Antica? Because a lot of travelers don't have a lot of time, and they're overwhelmed by options. How would one choose between these three versions of looking at an ancient Roman town, the once abandoned thriving port of Ostia, south of Rome, or the two victims of Mount Vesuvius erupting, Herculaneum and Pompeii? Well, I think many people come to Pompeii actually because it's kind of the name, right? It's like everybody knows Pompeii.

27:46And you actually, in Pompeii, you get the picture of a whole city. Herculaneum is very interesting. It's much smaller, the excavated part, because it was buried by meters and meters of ash and volcanic material. But there you have the upper floors better preserved. So that's very interesting. So I would absolutely recommend to see also Hyculaneum. Ostia is also a fascinating site. It has a very different story. It lived on into late antiquity and then was slowly abandoned. So what you don't get there is all these glimpses into daily life. But what you see is also the transformation of the city.

28:32So you get the first Christians and there's actually now being excavated a very old Christian church. And so you can see how an old Roman town over time changes toward the early Middle Ages.

28:48Rick Steves:That's right, because Ostia just sort of gradually fell like Rome and eventually was silted up and killed by malaria and mosquitoes, I guess, as Rome fell. You know, Gabriel, I could talk to you forever about Pompeii. It is so exciting, and what an exciting opportunity and responsibility you have to keep that big site running well with the passion that you have, which is really clear when you look through your book, The Buried City, Unearthing the Real Pompeii, your passion for helping people remember the more understanding you bring to your sightseeing, the more you'll get out of it. As the director of Pompeii, let's just close with a thought.

29:25Rick Steves:What is your biggest challenge? And if you had all the money in the world, what would you do to make Pompeii a better experience for your visitors? I think the biggest challenge is certainly the preservation of the site. That's what really causes me sleepless nights. You have to imagine it's such a vast area and since 1748 more than 13 ,000 rooms have been excavated and many of these rooms have plastered walls, have paintings, not all, only a small minority have a roof. So that's really a huge challenge. So what we try to do is to find new methodologies. Of course it's also a cost factor. Most of our resources go into preservation and restoration, but money isn't everything.

30:22It's important, but you also need ideas. And the thing is that there's only one real Pompeii, okay? There's no comparable site. And so you don't have really so much benchmarks to look at. Often if you don't find the solution here, then it's very difficult that it could come from somewhere else. So we always are thinking about how we could use new technology. How can artificial intelligence help us to recognize quickly where we need to act? You know, did all the digital technologies, geoprospection to see into the ground, into the walls, what's happening inside these structures. All that is fascinating, but also somehow urgent.

31:11So you feel this urge to do more, to protect this and to transmit it to future generations.

31:19Rick Steves:It's a huge responsibility. And you, it's for the patrimony of Western civilization, more than for Italy or for Naples or whatever. Gabriel Zuchtregal, thank you so much for joining us. Best wishes with your book, The Buried City, Unearthing the Real Pompeii. I'll be inspired by your work next time I visit. Thanks a lot.

31:45Rick Steves:The Archaeological Park of Pompeii's website is pompeysites.org. Cullen Jones helps us understand the history of France as a global story for our times, too. That's next on Travel with Rick Steves. Baguettes, berets, beheadings, croissants, champagne, coco chanel, these are all things considered quintessentially French, but many of the things that we regard as strictly French actually started out somewhere else. Historian Colin Jones condenses more than 2 ,000 years of French culture and history into 250 pages in his newest book, The Shortest History of France. He makes the point that France has been shaped by its surrounding cultures ever since the beginning.

32:30Rick Steves:Known for its hexagonal or six-sided shape, the borders of France have allowed other cultures and ideas to seep in and permeate its inhabitants only to later be churned out and reinterpreted in their own French style. Cullen Jones joins us now on Travel with Rick Steves to sort through the story of France. Cullen, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me in, Rick, and also I should say thank you for putting in a nutshell the main argument of my book. Yeah, well, the more understanding you bring to your travels, the more you'll enjoy your sightseeing. Absolutely, but also the idea that we think of a nation and we always think of what is essentially French or what is essentially English or American, you know.

33:12So we have a rather enclosed sense sometimes of what is quintessentially this, that or the other. And in writing this history of France, I was trying to open that up a bit and suggest something to the extent to which France and Frenchness and French identity, what is quintessentially French, it has been so often right through its history influenced by things coming across its borders.

33:35Rick Steves:Well, let's talk about that six-sided country. When we look at France on the map of Europe, it's smack dab in the middle, it seems, when you have a Western orientation anyways, and it is six-sided. And that means it's bordered by a lot of other cultural powers. Can we just kind of go around the circle and talk about influence? Let's start with Italy. Yes, Italy has been a great influence on France and obviously vice versa. But probably the time Italy most influenced France and Frenchness was in the period of the Renaissance. The great 19th century French historian Jules Michelet said in the late 15th century, Europe discovered America, but France discovered Italy.

34:20And he thought that was more important culturally in that France didn't have such a strong input. into the discoveries in the Atlantic in the following century. But it was absolutely saturated by the Renaissance culture of Italy, everything from the buildings to the styles of dress to the way people behaved and things like that, and obviously the art and architecture as well.

34:45Rick Steves:Well, and the embodiment of the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci actually decided to finish his life in the court of Francois I, didn't he, in the Loire Valley? And that's why we see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre rather than in the Uffizi or something like that, yeah. So France discovered Italy back when everybody else was discovering America. What about Germany? Because that's a big part of the border, and over the ages that's been a source of a lot of tumult. Absolutely. Before there was Germany, I guess, the area of Central Europe, including what became Germany, It was immensely important in the peopling of France because most of the original, you could say indigenous, but there's waves going way back into prehistory, has come from the east.

35:31Peopling from the east has been always something in French history. The first king of France was a German. Clovis, the monarch who was crowned king of Francia, as the Latinists had it, was a Frank from Germany. He was crowned in the late 5th century, and the German dynasty lasted really for nearly 500 years in France.

35:52Rick Steves:And then what I think, when you were talking about the early kings, and we think of Charlemagne, Charles the Great, his capital was actually in Aachen in Germany today, but I think of him as a great French emperor. What's the story there? It's kind of confusing. Yeah, that's right. So Charlemagne was another Germanic dynasty, following on from Clovis, as I say, who was the first wave coming in in the 6th century. And the Carolingians, which Charlemagne was the most important, as you say, the capital was at Aachen or Aix-la-La-Chapelle. It's very interesting. You think of him as a French emperor.

36:30I think most French people think that too, but Germans tend to think of him as a German emperor, actually. And he's one of those figures who people want to own, you know.

36:40Rick Steves:They would call him Carlo Magnus or Charles Magnus? Yeah, Carlos Magnus is the Latin, yeah. Yeah, but the French Charlemagne. It's interesting to me, a big city in the part of France that's close to Germany is called Strasbourg. And Strasbourg means the city of like a crossroads city. And that is a crossroads over there with lots of cultural action going back and forth. And to this day, you've got that province Alsace in France, which tended for centuries to switch hands after every war between French states and German states. Yes, and I'd also say Alsace and the neighboring area of Lorraine, these are areas in which a version of the German language is the local language or was the local language and in many ways still is the local language.

37:24So the cultural influence, it's a good example of the main argument in my book really that within the hexagon, you find these cultural influences, these accretions from former influences coming from the east. And as you say, Alsace and Lorraine were fought over, particularly in the last couple of hundred years. They had been made part of France during the 18th century. But in the late 19th century, France and Prussia, Germany, went to war. And as a result, the two provinces became part of Germany. After the First World War, which, of course, Germany lost, they passed back into French control and have stayed there.

38:03Obviously, for the period of German occupation in the Second World War, they were reinstated as part of Germany.

38:10Rick Steves:And that's where we find people named Jacques Schmidt, I guess, in Alsace. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with historian Cullen Jones, who has distilled 2 ,000 years of history of France into his latest book. It's called The Shortest History of France, From Roman Gaul to Revolution to Cultural Superpower, A Global Story of Our Times. Cullen is a professor emeritus of history at Queen Mary University in London, and he's currently a John and Constance Berkelung fellow at the Komen Center at the New York Public Library. You'll find more about Kullen and his work in this week's show notes at ricksteves.com slash radio.

38:49Rick Steves:So we're going around the circle of the six-sided hexagonal country of France. We've talked about Italy. We've talked about Germany. There's another fascinating border of France which has a lot of impact on France is Spain, separated by the Pyrenees Mountains, but that didn't keep the cultures from seeping into each other. That's right. I mean, I could give one example here, and then we'll go back a bit earlier, but Spain provided a lot of the peopling of France in the 18th, 19th, 20th centuries. The immigrants into France in that period were often from the south, Italy and Spain. You know, in all the harvests of southern, the wine harvests of southern France, and they were still quite recently, It was usually Spanish and Italian immigrant workers who did the hard work.

39:37And then many of them stayed. So, you know, there's still quite a lot of influence.

39:41Rick Steves:And I went to a bullfight, Colin, in Covance. Yeah, I don't think you would now. No, but they had a great bullfighting culture in southern France for a while. And I would imagine that originated with Spanish. Yeah, and I think the thing, going way back, at either end of the Pyrenees, but also including parts of the Pyrenees, we have two cultural groups which are very distinct and which the frontier really, in a way, hasn't mattered until quite recently. And on the eastern side in Spain, you have Catalonia, but the language there, Catalonian, is very close to Occitan, which is the language spoken by much, much of southern France until the 19th century really started dying out then.

40:24But the area, again, towards Spain, has always been very much more unified, much more culturally homogeneous, really, compared with many other areas. So, yeah, that cultural influence. And then the other side, of course, you've got the Basque country. And the Basque country is in the Western Pyrenees, which goes down to Belbao and Saint-Sebastien, but then reaches up on the French side towards Biarritz. And so the Basques, who have their own language, moreover, and it's still existing, it's still spoken down there, and their own sort of cultural influences as well.

40:54Rick Steves:So, Colin, we've got two more stretches of the French border I'd like to talk about as we review how other cultures have seeped into France. We've got England and we've got the Mediterranean coast, which is really the next piece of land is North Africa. Let's talk first about England, just across the English Channel from France. You know, France and England, they are frenemies forever. They are, you know, very close, but they often identify themselves vis -à-vis the other. It's important to remember that in the Middle Ages, Much of Western France was directly under the control of England, particularly the Normans, but then also the Carolingian Empire.

41:35So England has always been very present. The only king who was ever crowned at Notre Dame Cathedral, actually, was the King of England, Henry VI. All the French kings were crowned in Reims in eastern France. Since then, the cultural influence, the cultural interplay has been just immense in just about every aspect, and it's difficult to sum it up. But one thing which the English people often go to France and they sort of notice as rather a French curiosity, they say, everyone's shaking hands all the while. Well, actually, the French copied the English in the 18th century in their habit of shaking hands.

42:08So even there, it's one of those things which shows the unconscious steps to which these linkages have taken place.

42:15Rick Steves:That whole idea about frenemies, I remember when the English Channel was, the tunnel was finally unplugged and it came into use. And you've got trains going back and forth under the English Channel. connecting London and Paris, there was some sense that, have we broken a dike? Is there some cultural deluge that's going to be a problem? You know, it really was a big kind of emotional deal that you no longer had that moat separating the French and the English people. Well, I regret to say this, but I think Brexit has really changed that. It's picked up on an element, which is always there in English life, that England is different from whatever happens across the channel, even though when you look historically, there's an enormous amount of mutual influence and things like that.

42:58So I think it's very much up in the air. It depends who you are, where you are, what your views are on English identity and world politics. But it would be nice to think that we were getting closer together. I'm not sure it's altogether the case.

43:12Rick Steves:It's kind of undeniably France is the heart of Europe. And is England part of Europe or is England an island near Europe? and I guess you can debate that until the cows come home. Cullen Jones is helping us understand the ingredients that make up today's nation of France right now on Travel with Rick Steves. He's written The Shortest History of France plus The Cambridge Illustrated History of France, Paris, Biography of a City, and The Fall of Robespierre, 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris. Cullen is a fellow of the British Academy and former president of the Royal Historical Society. We have a link to his University of Chicago website in the notes for today's show at ricksteves.com slash radio.

43:54Rick Steves:Hey, I'd like to just finish our conversation, Colin, with North Africa, because right now, throughout the world, there's a movement of people because of former colonial ties, because of economic and political strife and so on. A lot of immigrants, a lot of refugees, and the United States has our concerns with our border, and France on the south has a border, which is the Mediterranean Sea, and a lot of cultural back and forth between the countries of northern Africa and France because of their colonial heritage. How has that impacted France on that side of the hexagon? Yes, if we take the more modern period, I guess we would start it with France's colonization of North Africa, starting with the invasion of Algeria in 1830, and then they built up the empire through the rest of the century.

44:45And for much of the 19th century, certainly through the two world wars, the North African colonists were seen really as an integral part of France and France's future. General de Gaulle, for example, right at the end of the Second World War, he had no sense of decolonization. So the decolonization when it happened in 1961, 1962, was extremely painful for France. But the sense that, you know, the links would be somehow severed was soon put at rest. And in fact, you know, immigration for economic reasons from North Africa to France had been going on for some time. And in fact, the great economic boom which France experienced from 1945 to the mid-70s really was based on the sort of immigrant populations from North Africa and from other parts of the old French Empire and the Caribbean and West Africa and to some extent Southeast Asia as well.

45:35Rick Steves:So you're saying a big economic boom was powered by immigration from former colonies, specifically Arab people from northern Africa coming into France to fuel the economy. Is that right? That is absolutely correct. That basically they provided the labor force really. France's population had been semi-stagnant for a couple of hundred years. Suddenly for reasons we don't know after 1945, people started having babies in France. But it wasn't fast enough for the economic growth, which was very rapid in the early 50s. So as in England, the same thing's happening. You're looking to former colonies or colonies, as they were then, to provide the labor force for economic expansion.

46:13Rick Steves:Yeah. As societies get more and more wealthy, historically they have fewer children per family. And the economies demand the workers. And consequently, you need immigrants. England is learning that. France is learning that. And the United States is struggling with that very reality. And in France today, just as people from south of our border are a major part of our economy and a major part of our story and our society, we've got people from northern Africa as a major part of the French demographic makeup. What is the current situation today in France with Algerians, Tunisians, people from North Africa?

46:52Well, by now, obviously, you've got immigrants coming in, but also two generations, at least two, sometimes three generations of people from former colonies who have been living in France for a very long time. Their families are well rooted there and pretty well integrated. On the other hand, it has become, as obviously elsewhere in the world, a huge political football which has kicked around from left to right. I mean, the economic value of immigration is still quite clear if you're an economist. On the other hand, if you're more towards the right of the spectrum, you're seeing immigration as something which is perhaps taking local people's jobs or somehow diluting the culture of the country.

47:35That's one of the reasons I was trying to emphasize in my book that immigration and indeed the immigration, not just the people but of ideas and values and things, you know, is something which has a huge, huge history in France and is an integral part of what we think of as French identity.

47:53Rick Steves:So the whole takeaway from this conversation for me is France is not some sort of a little flower that blossomed all alone in some European meadow, but it is a mix. and the French DNA is a hybrid. It's at crossroads and it's vital and it's got its challenges, but it is really a leader in Europe. And it's not just because it's purely French. It's because it's absorbed a lot from neighboring cultures. Yeah, I agree. I could say a similar thing about England, but I think France is a particularly good example because in ways which perhaps don't always work elsewhere, color has been less of a problem.

48:32Colour and what's seen as race has been less of a problem in accepting people into citizenship. So, yes, it is one of the great values for me in French history. On the other hand, it must be said, it is being contested at the moment.

48:46Rick Steves:A great part of my travels in France is going to Marseille and seeing a vibrant Arab culture right there. Absolutely, yeah. In the home of the Marseille. Cullen Jones, thanks for writing The Shortest History of France. and I think you've done a great job in condensing an overwhelming story. And it is really important for people who are privileged enough to go to France to understand a little bit of the context. And you've worked very hard to put that together in your book, The Shortest History of France, and it's just a real service. Can we wrap things up just from your point of view? You've done a lot of thinking about France.

49:23Rick Steves:What are the biggest challenges today that France faces, and what's the reason where you would feel good about the state of France? When I wrote the last chapter of the book, the very good editor at Experimental Books, she said, it is a bit depressing in the last few years that there's so many crises coming, reigning in. And I thought, well, yes, that is true, but I've always heard France was a fantastic country with enormous wealth of experience and cultural openness. And I think that's still there. but it definitely, definitely has to come to terms with the issue of immigration and how it deals with the issues of citizenship arising from that.

50:04That will be the big challenge and it is the big challenge, I think, which France is currently facing.

50:09Rick Steves:Well, I think the United States and France should get together and compare notes. Colin Jones, thanks so much and best wishes in your teaching and your work and your travels. Thank you very much.

50:35Travel with Rick Steves is produced by Tim Tatton, Kaz Muralhall and Donna Bardsley at Rick Steves Europe in Edmonds, Washington. Affiliate relations are by Sheila Gerzoff. Website uploads are by Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Court. Our theme music is by Jerry Frank. You'll find more about our guests at ricksteves.com slash radio, and we'll see you next week with more Travel with Rick Steves.

50:59Rick Steves:Hey, I'm Rick Steves. Thanks for listening. You know, the busiest corner at ricksteves.com is our travel forum. That's where a vast community of Rick Nicks exchanges advice, experiences, and tips. This entirely free resource, which empowers real travelers to share real experience, is a beautiful complement to all the content we produce. Think of any travel topic, hotels, tricky itinerary decisions, dealing with or avoiding crowds, and you'll find a world of advice based on real experience. Hey, we're all in the same traveler school of hard knocks, and it's okay to compare notes. See you there at the Travel Forum at ricksteves.com.