LIFE IN THE FRENCH COUNTRY HOUSE.

By Mark Girouard. London: Cassell. 2000. [pounds]25

Just visible at the oars of a small boat on the moat of the idyllic French ch[hat{a}]teau pictured on the cover is Girouard himself, perhaps rowing through raw sewage to get a better view of the charming eighteenth-century privy turret he shows in a chapter called 'Plumbing -- or the lack of it'. Undaunted by the opaque mix of fact and fantasy surrounding the French noblesse and their ch[hat{a}]teaux, he has transposed to France the lines of enquiry pioneered in his acclaimed Life in the English Country House (1978).

A preliminary 'run round the French noblesse' explains with admirable clarity how the legal status, privileges and importance of nobles in France developed within a feudal structure so complex that 'few Englishmen (and not all that many Frenchmen) know or knew how the French system worked'. Small wonder. By the end of the Ancien R[acute{e}]gime, the pedigrees of the noblesse ranged from impressively old to brand new, and their privileges as nobles often surpassed those confined in England to holders of the peerage -- whom they outnumbered in 1789 by about 1000:1.

Through the centuries, the noblesse -- old, new and bogus -- tended to cling to the medieval symbols that set them apart as a class: 'a ch[hat{a}]teau, with a moat, towers and spires, and perhaps a donjon -- or the square, high-roofed pavilions which were the sixteenth century development on round medieval towers -- all adding up to a recognisable and valued silhouette with feudal resonances, even if without feudal details'. According to Girouard, by the fourteenth century the language of fortifications had come to mean more than military might: towers, battlements, moats, drawbridges, gatehouses and windvanes enriched with a coat of arms became symbols of noble status and spoke, too, of the judicial and economic strength wielded by powerful seigneurs.

As the military importance of ch[hat{a}]teaux dwindled and social status and domestic convenience came to the fore, so windows increased in size, towers grew fatter and shorter, staircases became more spacious and elegant, and living spaces -- previously stacked vertically -- spread out into horizontal sequences. But spectacular innovation was generally eschewed. The example set by Vaux-le-Vicomte was scarcely followed, though one element of it did catch on: the double-height salon giving directly on to the garden, which was often redeployed in conjunction with flanking entresols housing more intimate rooms. Why? 'The satisfaction of a building in which the exterior mirrors and expresses the interior has seldom appealed to the French; they have preferred insides and outsides which play different games, so that the exquisite exterior does not reveal how the requisite interior fitted into it'.

Contrary to popular belief, a great many French nobles survived the Revolution to become the nucleus of a new ch[hat{a}]teau-owning upper class, now without feudal privileges and no longer exclusively of noble descent, but keen as mustard to revive and perpetuate the noblesse and its traditional values. From 1800 to 1914, quantities of chateaux were restored, extended or rebuilt and many entirely new ones erected, often in forms intended to evoke 'rightful traditions of honour, religion and faithfulness to the past'. Coats of arms and private chapels proliferated, as did steeply sloping roofs bristling with spiky windvanes.

The book explores the way life was organized in ch[hat{a}]teaux from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, and how changing living habits were reflected in architecture and planning. This time span picks up more or less where E. E. Viollet le Duc left off in his magisterial essay on the ch[hat{a}]teau in the Dictionnaire Raisonn[acute{e}] de l'Architecture Francaise du XVe an XVe Si[grave{e}]cle (1854-1868). Girouard continues the story from a different viewpoint, with a narrative just as limpid and readable -- no mean feat.