Normandy and the Normans by Hilaire Belloc

There is no understanding a country unless one gets to know the nature of its sub-units. In some way not easy to comprehend, impossible to define, and yet very manifest, each of the great national organisms of which Christendom is built up is itself a body of many regions whose differences and interaction endow it with a corporate life. No one could understand the past of England who did not grasp the local genius of the counties-Lancashire, cut off eastward by the Pennines, southward by the belt of marsh, with no natural entry save by the gate of Stockport; Sussex, which was and is a bishopric and a kingdom; Kent, Devon, the East Anglian meres. No one could (or does) understand modern England who does not see its sub-units to have become by now the great industrial towns, or who fails to seize the spirit of each group of such towns-with London lying isolated in the south, a negative to the rest.

France is built of such sub-units: it is the peculiarity of French development that these are not small territories mainly of an average extent with government answerable in a long day's ride to one centre, such as most English counties are; nor city States such as form the piles upon which the structure of Italy has been raised; nor kingdoms such as coalesced to reform the Spanish people; but _provinces_, differing greatly in area, from little plains enclosed, like the Rousillon, to great stretches of landscape succeeding landscape like the Bourbonnais or the Périgord.