The Idea of the French Hexagon

Abstract

Though I'Hexagone has only within the last two decades become generally recognized as synonymous with France, the idea of France as a hexagon has a history whose length and variety will prove surprising to most. An equally long prehistory of the hexagon witnessed the slow development of a tendency to regard France geometrically. One must not, of course, exaggerate: although it has been held since classical times (Strabo, IV, 1, 14; Ammianus Marcellinus, XV, 10, 1; etc.) that Nature has particularly favored Gaul, no classical geometrical considerations on Gaul's geography are to be found. And although history manuals enjoy comparing the Capetian kings to le paysan qui arrondit son champ, in fact any geometrical vision of the then fluctuating and even indefinable frontiers would be foreign to the medieval mentality and political realities and still highly impractical in the sixteenth century. Only during the reign of Henry IV did national consciousness and boundaries become sufficiently settled to make figurative speculation on the unity of French territory at all plausible. The traditional, practical, and obvious method of geographical description treats a land according to the four points of the compass and according to greatest length and breadth. Such a logical reduction of natural irregularities is awkward for countries like Italy or Switzerland but easy for a country of France's regular proportions. Thus nearly without exception seventeenthand eighteenth-century geographers first list the countries or bodies of water adjoining France on the north, east, south, and west, and then give her length from some point on the North Sea to one on the Mediterranean and her breadth from the tip of Britanny to where Germany began at any given time. The approximate equality of these measurements cannot fail to strike the observer. Thus Pierre Duval, geographe du roi, writes, according to Ferrand Spence's English translation of Geogra-