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

You can step back in time when you visit the pre-Columbian sites of Mexico City,

but you'll also find its Aztec culture is alive and well in the neighborhood of Sochi-Milco.

It's a vibrant, active community that still exists today.

Look at what we're learning about life in the first century Roman Empire

from what they're finding at Pompeii.

You feel as if people had just left a few minutes ago and in truth it's 2000 years.

The director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park tells us how we can witness life in a Roman city as if it was yesterday.

And consider how much of an influence its neighbors have had over the centuries in fashioning today's nation of France.

Immigration and indeed not just the people but the ideas and values and things has a huge history in France

and is an integral part of what we think of as French identity.

Time travel with us for the hour ahead. It's travel with Rick Steves.

We're getting in touch with people who came before us today on travel with Rick Steves.

The director of Italy's Pompeii Archaeological Park returns to share more of what they're uncovering about

first century life in the Roman Empire.

And historian Colin Jones tells us how the historically poorest borders of France

have brought in immigrants and influences over the centuries that have made France

into the kind of country the whole world wants to visit.

Let's start today's travel with Rick Steves with David Lita in Mexico City.

When Cortez and his conquistadors first saw the Aztec capital back in 1519,

the city dazzled them as something beyond what they've ever seen in Europe.

When David Lita first arrived there from New York, he knew he wanted to stay.

David's here to guide us to what we can still see in Mexico City that predates the Spanish conquest.

Hola David.

Thanks for inviting me Rick. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.

You know, we could talk all day about Mexico today, but I'd like to talk about Mexico 600 years ago.

Sure.

And when people say pre-Columbian, the Americas were quite busy when they were,

quote, discovered by white Europeans. And first of all, what was going on?

Who were the big civilizations before the Europeans arrived?

Well, there were a number of different civilizations here in Mexico,

but in the Mexico City area, that was the most important axis of the Aztec empire.

This was where the Aztecs lived.

There are several manifestations of that right inside the city limits.

And if you like, I'll tell you a little bit about them.

Okay, because when we go to Mexico City, we're going to a sprawling modern city of almost like roughly 20 million people.

That's right.

Right.

Right.

But if you can take it all the way down to the roots underneath that sprawling modern city,

you do have a city that was, what, a quarter of a million people?

Yes.

When the Spaniards got here, there were about a quarter of a million people living here,

which was bigger than any city in Europe.

So paint a picture.

What did the first conquistador see when he rode into Mexico City?

He sold this big sprawling city, which had elements that were more sophisticated than any city in Europe,

plumbing, hydraulic engineering, and principally the distribution of goods and services.

Mexico City was built on a lake bed and interspersed throughout the city.

As if there were streets, there were these canals.

And that's how people would get from one place to another or move their goods to sell them in another part of the city.

The Spaniards had never seen anything like that before.

In Spain, the Galleon would come in from Asia, Park in Sevilla.

They'd unload the stuff and then they'd have to take it on a horse and a part and get it to the next place.

But there was the system of distributing goods through canals through a network of canals here.

Now this great city, this trading center, it wasn't called Mexico City, what was its name?

It was called Tenochtitlan.

Tenochtitlan.

And was this the administrative capital of a vast Aztec empire?

Did they actually have an ability to run a big country?

Well, no.

The Aztecs were a warrior group and they did fight and conquer many of the surrounding groups.

But like they were nowhere near the Mayans, they were nowhere near many of the other groups.

So they conquered their area.

But it was more than Mexico City.

This was the center of an empire of some sort.

And my question is, you have this city, well-organized city of a quarter million people.

In a handful of Spanish conquistadors come in on their horses.

How did they beat Mexico?

That was Cortés, right?

Right.

There are several reasons how the Spaniards were hugely outnumbered by the indigenous conquered Mexico.

One, they had things that intimidated and indeed terrified the indigenous Mexicans.

The indigenous Mexicans had never seen horses before.

They came on horseback.

The indigenous Mexicans had never seen armor.

The Spaniards were wearing armor.

The Spaniards had swords.

The indigenous had primitive knives, but they didn't have swords.

And even worse, the Spaniards had guns.

So here's this object that can spit fire and kill someone.

Wow.

And what's more though, I mentioned that the Aztecs were a warrior people.

And they conquered some of the surrounding groups.

And as such, they were disliked and even hated by the surrounding groups.

And some of them joined with Cortés and the conquerors to beat the Aztecs.

This is Travel Thrick Steve's.

We're talking with David Lita.

He's our guide to Mexico City right now.

And we're looking at Mexico City before the arrival of the European conquistadors.

You can learn more about David, who's a guide in Mexico City at his website, DavidLita.com.

That's spelled L-I-D-A.

So David, pre-Columbian Mexico City.

I am fascinated by that because I've sat on top of those pyramids just outside of town.

And you're horrible at pyramids that are as breathtaking as those you find in Egypt.

Right.

Tell us a little bit about the major sites that you could enjoy with Mexico City as your base.

And let's start with the pyramids.

Well, the pyramids are a little bit more than an hour out of town.

And as you said, they're magnificent.

And it will give you a clear idea of what some of their civilization looked like.

And unlike Egypt, you're welcome to climb to the top of them and get that king of the mountain feeling on a pyramid.

Well, they actually stopped letting you climb the pyramid of the sun in the past couple of years.

Because they're worried about the fragility of it.

But each of those buildings had a purpose.

There were churches.

There were schools.

There were the equivalent of government buildings.

There were buildings that were made for human sacrifices because the Aztecs had many, many deities.

And they thought to appease them, they had to kill their own.

You know, just hearing you talk about that, it would seem to me back in the day.

That would be a form of intimidation.

These amazing structures.

So imposing that you just kind of think I better play by the rules here.

Yes, sure.

But it wasn't just people who had misbehaved or didn't follow orders who were sacrifice direct.

There were also important people who were sacrificed because it was considered an honor to be sacrificed to the gods.

It's hard to fathom.

But that's so many things in our travels that we stumble onto.

And when we go to the guide or go to the museum and do our reading, it shines a light on it.

So you have these pyramids that are one hour outside of town and that would be a high on the list.

And then I would love to gain an appreciation of the system of lakes and canals that were there before the conquistadors arrived.

And these actually survived to this day.

What's that neighborhood called and how could we experience that?

That neighborhood is called Sochi Milco.

Within Sochi Milco, there is a network of some 90 miles of canals.

And to me, that's even more important to visit than the pyramids.

Because it's a vibrant, active community that still exists today.

It's not visiting some ancient monument.

People are still living the way more or less that they lived before the Spaniards got here.

In Sochi Milco.

Sochi Milco.

Sochi Milco.

Sochi Milco, starting with an X.

Exactly.

It survives to this day.

Yes.

And a tourist can get on a barge and be taken around this network of canals by a barge man who's got a long pole.

And you get into these pastoral settings where there are cows chewing grass and cranes flying and many flowers and plants grow there.

If you're eating a salad in a nice restaurant in Mexico City, most likely the lettuce was grown in Sochi Milco.

It's a very active community.

So to see the water infrastructure from pre-Columbian times we'd go to Sochi Milco.

Sochi Milco would be number one on my list.

Then the pyramids.

And of course the anthropology museum.

Yeah, let's talk about that.

Because I'm a big fan whenever I go anywhere.

If I'm in Turkey, I go to the National Museum of Archaeology in Ankara.

And then everything in the countryside makes sense.

You know, it's the case all over in our travels.

And clearly, if you're interested in Mexican anthropology, the springboard is this magnificent museum right in your hometown.

So the tricky thing about the anthropology museum, it's the most visited museum in Latin America.

Something like two million people go every year.

But it's enormous.

There's something like 600,000 objects in there.

You can't do it in a day or maybe even in a week.

But there's a pavilion of what was the Aztec Empire, what was Mexico City, which was like a separate museum in itself.

And if you only want to spend a couple of hours in a museum, rather than all day, you can just do that and see incredible sculpture ceramics, a recreation of the center downtown of what it was like before the Spaniards arrived.

That in and of itself is worth the price of admission.

Living in Mexico City since 1990, David Lita is our guide to the pre-Columbian sites of Mexico City right now on Travel with Rick Steves.

Okay, now we're talking about the wonderful dioramas or the wonderful reconstructions of what the everyday person's life would have been like 500 years ago in Mexico City.

And then from there, I would be inspired by those little tiny figurines that show all of the artisan and the cottage industries and the market action.

I would want to go into the streets and see the grandchildren of that in terms of street commerce and marketplaces.

Where would we go?

How would we have that really impactful visit of today's Mexico that you can see drawing from its past?

Well, there's a reconstruction of the Sokolow, the central plaza of downtown Mexico City, which has been the central plaza since the Aztecs.

So in the museum, you see what it looked like when the Aztecs were there.

And you can just get on the metro or the boss or take an Uber right there and see what it's like today.

And it's still alive and it's still slice of life and it's still the most important public square in Mexico City.

And what is that again?

The Sokolow.

The Sokolow, yeah.

Okay, now I just want to be touristy.

Can I want to eat or drink something that they would have ate or drank before Columbus arrived?

What would I, what sort of special food or drinks still is there that we can experience?

You want to find a woman on the street with a stall who is making clacoyos or quesadillas with blue corn.

So the corn paste is blue and she's making quesadillas stuffed with sauteed squash flowers or beans.

And this is precisely what the Aztecs ate.

The Aztecs were mostly vegetarian.

There was not a lot of edible animal life here.

And you can still be eating what they were eating.

David Lita, thank you so much for bringing us to Mexico City and then back five or six hundred years.

We can learn more about David's work at his website, it's DavidLita.com.

Great to see you and I hope to see you in Mexico City.

It's a pleasure.

It would be great to see you again.

You're welcome anytime.

There's information about David Lita's books and tours in Mexico City at DavidLita.com.

We'll look at how its neighbors in Europe and North Africa have influenced France in just a bit.

But first we'll have an update on what they're finding at Pompeii.

That's next on Travel with Rick Steves.

The Earth's shook.

Tremors reverberated through homes and buildings and a towering column of smoke and ash appeared from the nearby mountain which had been asleep for the past 300 years.

Within 24 hours the seaport of Pompeii was covered in volcanic rocks and waves of toxic gas and hot ash would instantly immortalize its residents for the ages.

As the site of a natural disaster that has long captivated our imaginations, nearly two-thirds of the ancient city has now been unearthed as a vast archaeological park.

It draws millions to get a glimpse of daily life that came to a halt in the year AD-79.

The director of the archaeological park of Pompeii is Gabriel Zucktrigal.

He's back with us on Travel with Rick Steves to tell us how recent findings are adding to what we already know about the ancient world and what's been preserved of an entire city.

Frozen in ash yet alive with stories to tell us today.

Gabriel, thanks for being with us.

Thank you for having this on Pompeii.

What an exciting responsibility you have to be the director of this impressive archaeological park that so many people dream of going.

Now you've studied and worked at several ancient sites.

What's special to you about Pompeii?

Well, I think it's really all that we know, thanks to Pompeii, about Roman daily life, about the lies also of people who usually in the great narratives don't really feature so prominently or not at all.

So we learn a lot about poor and maybe also middle class people about enslaved workers, about prostitutes, children, women, workers, shops, small inns, all that, which is really gives life to our imagination how it was living in a Roman town 2000 years ago.

You know, when a visitor goes to Pompeii, it really is and if you can use your imagination a little bit, if you have a good guide with you or if you use the audio guide that Pompeii produces, if you've done your study, you walk down the streets and you can almost resurrect the city.

Paint a picture of what the city was like.

Well, it's an old city already in 79 AD, more than 500 years.

It's a relatively regular street plan and about 1000 and 70 habitation units.

So this could be large houses, but also small apartments, maybe only two rooms and an upper floor where people worked and sleeped and lived.

And so it's socially extremely heterogeneous. So you see really the poor and the wealthy living right next next door to each other.

You could visit beautifully painted houses, usually the paintings show Greek mythological stories, narcissus and Dionysus and Ariapne and so forth.

With huge gardens, maybe 400 square meters. So now you have to translate that, probably in yards or so, but let's say a huge garden and right next door you have just like a two room apartment or an entire family lived.

You get this idea, you enter and it's just as sometimes it's really you feel as if people had just left a few minutes ago and in truth it's 2000 years and some have survived and got away, many died in the eruption.

It is a unique opportunity because of the tragic eruption of Mount Vesuvius to catch a city almost by surprise.

And you see the bakeries, you see the bars, you see the fast food joints, you see the brothels, you see the elegant villas of the wealthy people and then you see sort of a tenement right next door.

Was the city, would you say it's a two story city, obviously with no elevators?

Well, yes, absolutely, we sometimes that you have three stories also.

And this was a relatively new development, but what you see generally in Pompeii and that's interesting because people have made a lot of estimates across the long history of the excavations, which started in 1748.

So Pompeii is really also the history actually of archaeology when they started excavating there really didn't have any idea of how to preserve and to study all that.

But what you see is that people had very different ideas about how many people actually lived in Pompeii.

And today we tend to rather high numbers, at least 20,000 people. And you can see it, if you go through the streets, I highly recommend to look also a small place, small apartments, shops and bakeries and so forth.

You can see that every square meter was used and exploited and they rebuilt houses and put up of floors on top of them.

By the way, this is Travel with Rick Steves, we're speaking with Gabriel Zooktregal. He's the director of the archaeological park of Pompeii.

And he's here sharing his insights on what life was like for the ancient Romans of Pompeii before their world came to a sudden end with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Before his current role, Gabriel was the director of the archaeological park at Pasteum and Gabriel's written a book, it's called The Barried City, Unurthing the Real Pompeii.

You know, when we try to unearth the real Pompeii, our challenge is to find little intimate glimpses. Gabriel, what's an intimate glimpse that you have particularly enjoyed as you've gotten to know Pompeii and worked to make it come alive for visitors?

Talk about a couple of insights we gained from the people by the scratchings on the wall or the grooves on the pavements left by the carriages, by the graffiti. What do you enjoy?

That's, I think, really the special thing about Pompeii. If you think of history, right? The great monuments and artworks is like the official biography.

What they wanted us to see, what was built for eternity. And then you go to Pompeii and you see kind of the unconscious part, what was not meant to be for eternity.

And so you can see in Pompeii two wonderful paintings, colors, mythological, great art of the ancient world.

But maybe the things that touched me most are things like, I talk about this in the book too, the children's drawings.

So, small children, about five, six years we called colleagues from the Department of Psychology from Naples to help us to identify the age of these children based on the drawings and one of them fortunately put his or her little hand.

So, little hand on the wall and made an outline so we could also measure the size of the hand and it fitted all this age five, six years old.

So, they had seen something in the amphitheater, they had seen these brutal gladiator games and then wanted to probably tell their friends and they were drawing it on the wall with a piece of charcoal.

And that's something where you really feel suddenly very close to these people and you start wondering what happened to these children who played there and made drawings, who knows.

And it's somehow it talks to the child in us because we can imagine how it was roaming around and maybe doing something you shouldn't have done, maybe they shouldn't have gone to the amphitheater and seeing these brutal games and then maybe they shouldn't draw on the walls, I think parents know that.

And so, it's suddenly so close and of course it's still 2,000 years but you can recognize the same humanity and the same unconscious life that is in ourselves.

Gabriel Zuckdregal is joining us from his office at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii where he's approaching his fifth anniversary as its director.

He previously oversaw the Archaeological site at Pasteham. Gabriel is helping us appreciate what recent discoveries are unveiling about life in the bustling Roman era seaport before it was covered over by the eruption of Mount Mesuvius in 1879.

His book, The Buried City, Unurthing the Real Pompeii is published by the University of Chicago Press.

I imagine it was fun for you, Gabriel, as the director of Pompeii to write this book because I get a sense that your passion is to take advantage of how Pompeii can give us, can kind of humanize ancient Rome when I think about my experience as a visitor over the last 30 years.

There are a lot of crowds at Pompeii and a lot of people are lining up to see the same things and it seems like the big attractions at Pompeii are the castes of the people who were vaporized by the eruption who just, and what's left is a cast of their body, sort of like statue maker, and then the sex.

If you see a long line, it's either to a fancy villa or to a brothel or to a place where you can see one of these castes, and that's really what attracts the visitor.

I think because we're curious about the everyday life of these people, not just a Roman temple, not just a statue of Caesar, but actually, oh, a brothel.

There were slaves. Oh, here's a real person who, at 1 p.m. on August 24th, 79 years after Christ, his or her life was snuffed out by this eruption.

Well, and I think the sexual and erotic images were really astonishing and somehow disturbing from the beginning, because people had this idea of classical antiquity as a model actually in the 18th century, you know, liberty, freedom, democracy, philosophy, science.

And then they started 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 seemed 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.

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

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 2000 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 Zooktergaugh, and Gabriel is the director of the archaeological park of Pompeii, and his book is the buried city, unearthing the real Pompeii.

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 Pompeys. There's Ostea 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, 7980.

But if you want to see the granddaddy of these sites, you would go to Pompeii. 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 Ostea 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 Ostea, 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, and you actually, in Pompeii, get the picture of a whole city.

Herculaneum is very interesting, but it's much smaller, the excavated part, because it was buried by measures and measures 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 Herculaneum.

Ostea is also a fascinating site. It has a very different story. It lived on into late antiquity, and then it 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.

So 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 and to what the early Middle Ages.

That's right, because Ostea 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 site, seeing the more you'll get out of it.

As the director of Pompeii, let's just close with a thought, 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 sleepers 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 it's not money isn't everything.

It's important, but you also need ideas, and the thing is that there's only one real Pompeii. 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, 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.

It is fascinating, but also somehow urgent. So you feel this urge to do more, to protect this, and to transmit it to future generations.

It's a huge responsibility. And you, it's for the patrimony of Western civilization, more than, more than for Italy or for Naples or whatever.

Gabriel Zittregal, thank you so much for joining us. Best wishes with your, with your book, The Buried City, Underthing the Real Pompeii. I'll be inspired by your work next time I visit.

Thanks a lot.

The Archaeological Park of Pompeii's website is pumpaysights.org. Colin Jones helps us understand the history of France as a global story for our times too. That's next on Travel with Rick Steves.

Begettes, 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.

No one 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.

Colin Jones joins us now on Travel with Rick Steves to sort through the story of France. Colin, 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.

So 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.

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 the France and Frenchness was in the period of the Renaissance.

The great 19th century French historian Jules Michelets said in the late 15th century Europe discovered America, but France discovered Italy.

And he thought that was more important. Culturally in 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,

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.

Well, and in the embodiment of the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci actually decided to finish his life in the court of France while the first didn't he, in the lower valley.

And that's why we see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, rather than in the Ofizio 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 peatling 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. So peatling 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 France, as the Latinist had it, it was a Frank from Germany.

He was crowned in the late fifth century, and the German dynasty lasted really for nearly 500 years in France.

And then when 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, was the first wave coming in in the sixth century.

And the Carolingians, in which Charlemagne was the most important, as you say, the capital was at Aachen or X La Chapelle.

It's very interesting you think of him as a French emperor. I 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 want to own, you know.

They would call him Carlo Magnus, or Charles Magnus. Yeah, Carlos Magnus is the Latin, 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 dates and German dates.

Yes, and I'd also say that Alsace and the neighbouring 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.

So the cultural influence, 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.

Yeah, after the First World War, which of course Germany lost, they passed back into French control and have stayed there, obviously for the period of German occupation in the Second World War, they were reinstated as part of Germany.

And that's where we find people named Jacques Schmidt, I guess, in Alsace.

Yeah, this is Travel the Rick Steves, we're talking with historian Colin 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 Gal to revolution to cultural superpower, a global story of our times.

Colin is a professor emeritus of history at Queen Mary University in London, and he's currently a John and Constance Berkallon fellow at the Coleman Center at the New York Public Library.

You'll find more about Colin and his work in this week's show notes at ricksteves.com slash radio.

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 people of France in the 18th, 19th, or 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, and then many of them stayed.

So, you know, there's still quite a lot of influence.

And I went to a, I went to a bullfight, Colin, in province.

Yeah, I don't think you would now present.

No, but they had been a great bullfighting culture in southern France for a while, and I would imagine that originated with Spanish.

Yeah, and I think the thing we're going way back, 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 Oxytong, which is the language spoken by much, much of southern France until the 19th century really started dying out then.

But 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 on the Sansa Bastien.

But then reaches up on the French side towards Bioritz, and so the Basque, who had their own language moreover, and is still existing, still spoken down there, and their own sort of cultural influences as well.

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 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 Carolinian Empire.

So 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 have crowned in France 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 curious to say,

everyone's shaking hands all the while, well, actually the French copied the English in the 18th century in the habit of shaking hands.

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

That whole idea about frenemies, I remember when the English Channel was, the tunnel was finally unplugged, and it became into use,

and you've got trains going back and forth into 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 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, it's an enormous amount of mutual influence and things like that.

So 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 all together in the case.

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.

Colin 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.

Colin is a fellow of the British Academy, 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.

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 Algerian 1830,

and then they built up the empire through the rest of the century.

And for much of the 19th century, certainly through the two world wars, the North African Connors was 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 the links would be somehow severed was soon put at rest.

And in fact, 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 Africans, to some extent Southeast Asia as well.

So you're seeing 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 things happening, you're looking to former colonies or colonies, as they were then, to provide the labor force for economic expansion.

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?

Well, 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 is 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.

That's one of the reasons I've tried to emphasize in my book that immigration, not just the people, but ideas and values and things,

is something which has a huge, huge history in France and is an integral part of what we think of as French identity.

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 a 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,

colour has been less of a problem. Colour 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.

A great part of my travels in France is going to Marseille and see a vibrant, a vibrant Arab culture right there.

Absolutely. In the home of the Marseille. Colin 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 by, from your point of view, you've done a lot of thinking about France.

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 raining in.

And I thought, well, yes, that is true. But I've always held 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.

That will be the big challenge. And it is the big challenge, I think, which France is currently facing.

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.

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