On one very important question of French politics, M. Fleury, as a practical politician in this great and active department, gives me a good deal of useful light. This is the question of the expenses of the electoral machine. In France, as in America, no limit is set by the law to the possible expenditure of a political candidate. I have already given the estimate made for me in Artois of the general cost of the legislative elections, and I have been told by more than one well-informed French politician in other parts of France, that the average cost of a candidacy for a seat in the Chamber may be roughly estimated at twenty-five thousand francs, or a thousand pounds sterling.
This would show, allowing two candidates only for each seat, an expenditure of thirty millions of francs, or twelve hundred thousand pounds, at each French parliamentary election, being very nearly the figure given me in Artois. We send only 330 members to Washington, but we elect a new House every two years. The British House of Commons, though more numerous even than the French Chamber, probably spends a good deal less upon getting itself elected than either the French or the American House.[4]
[4] At this time (October, 1889) there is a difficulty in New York about a good candidate for the seat vacated by the death of the late Mr. S. S. c.o.x, being a prominent democratic member of Congress, because the candidate must consent to an annual "a.s.sessment" on his salary for political purposes. The French Government, I am told, collects these "contributions" easily, the deputies "recouping"
themselves by patronage.
One of the "working sub-prefects" of the Boulangist party in Picardy gave M. Fleury a very frank estimate of the expense of electing the General in 1888, in the Somme. He put it, in round numbers, at nearly or quite one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs, or five thousand pounds. This unusual outlay was made necessary by the great efforts of the Government to defeat the General. Furthermore, it was swollen by the disinterested devotion of many of the General"s friends. Some of these auxiliaries spent days at the best hotels in Picardy labouring for the cause, with the result of a special hotel account, amounting to several thousand francs. Nothing makes men so thirsty as political emotion.
Another partisan, at the head of a journal, sent in a bill for forty-five thousand francs expended by him upon printing and stationery, no charge being made for his personal services! The chief agents received about two thousand francs apiece. One of them must have worked very hard, for he earned no less than fifteen thousand francs. While all this expense was incurring in Picardy, furthermore, two other elections were pending, in each of which the General was a candidate, one in the Charente and one in the Nord. It would seem to be probable enough, therefore, that on these three elections In 1888 General Boulanger, or the Boulangists, must have spent at least two hundred and fifty thousand francs, or ten thousand pounds.
"Where did all this money come from?" is a not unnatural question. For M. Fleury tells me the General"s bills were paid much more promptly than the bills of the Government candidates. It is an open secret apparently that the Government candidates are very bad paymasters when they are beaten. Some of the bills incurred by them in 1885, when the Conservatives swept so large a part of Northern France, were still due, it appears, in 1888. But the bills of General Boulanger were settled very soon after the close of the campaign.
M. Mermeix insisted to M. Fleury that the General"s war-chest was supplied by voluntary subscriptions. "Every day," he said, the General finds some ten thousand francs in his mails, and his followers "are all either beggars or millionaires."
Another of the General"s managers gave M. Fleury the names of two very rich persons, one of them a cattle merchant at La Villette, who subscribed between them a hundred and forty thousand francs to carry on the campaign in Picardy. The enormous importance given to General Boulanger by his terrified former a.s.sociates in the Government seems to me to be a very striking proof of the little confidence they really have in their own hold upon the country, or in the permanency of "republican inst.i.tutions" as they now exist in France, and this adequately explains the readiness of speculators to "invest" in what may be called the "Boulangist bonds." Such a report as that presented not very long ago to the Chamber by M. Gerville-Reache on the state of the navy in France suffices to show that the speculative maladministration of the French finances has been so great as to make it quite certain that any "honest government" coming into power must reconstruct the system of the public indebtedness. That is an operation which can hardly be carried out by the most scrupulously honest government without very great profits to the financiers concerned in it, and I only set down what is said to me by respectable Frenchmen when I say that the Boulanger campaign funds are openly described, by persons not at all hostile to "Boulangism," as "bets on the General." "The difference between the managers of the Boulangist campaign and the managers of the Government campaign," said a gentleman to me in Amiens, "is simply this--that the Boulangist managers are playing the game with private funds, and the others with public funds. So the latter, I think, will win, for they have the longest purse to draw on." This gentleman is of the opinion, however, that but for General Saussier, in command of the garrison of Paris, General Boulanger, after the election of January 27, 1889, in which he took the capital by storm, might have turned the Government neck and heels out of doors. The weak point of Boulangism," he said, "is Boulanger." "He has no strength with the officers of the army. They have no confidence either in his character or in his ability; not that they think his character bad or deny his ability, but only that they regard him as a shallow, vacillating, and mediocre person who made himself valuable to the Republican politicians by going into alliances with them to which other officers of strong character and high ability would not stoop. As for the quarrel between Boulanger and these politicians, it is a beggars" quarrel, to be made up over the pot of broth. But it won"t be made up, because they can"t agree as to the distribution of the broth.
Meanwhile all the chickens of France are going into the broth, and the peasant"s pot will see them no more, as in the good old days of Henry IV.!"
As for the absurd story that the Boulangist funds come from America, the only foundation I can find for that seems to be the intimacy, which, I believe, is no longer as close as it was, between General Boulanger, M.
de Rochefort, and a French n.o.bleman of an ancient historic family, who has married a very wealthy American wife, and who has long been known to entertain the most extreme, not to say revolutionary, notions in politics. The honest Boulangists who really hope to see a good government established by putting out M. Carnot and putting in General Boulanger, swell the tide of his supporters, apparently, here as elsewhere in France, because they blindly hope for everything from him which their experience forbids them to hope for from the men actually in power. As one of his most cynical supporters long ago said in Paris, he is "the grand common sewer of the disgust of France."
His popularity with the common soldiers is another element to be counted with in estimating the strength of this military French Mahdi.
I have struck up a friendship here at Amiens with an excellent woman who presides over a shop--not one of the _patisseries_ so justly celebrated by Mr. Ruskin--and who is a very good type of the shrewd, sensible French "_pet.i.te bourgeoise_," such a woman as, I dare say, Jacqueline Robins of St.-Omer was in her own time. She has a son in the army, who is likely soon to be a corporal. "_Dame_, Monsieur," she said to me, "if M. Boulanger is not the best General in France, why did they make him Minister of War? You do not know what he did for the soldiers! My son when he gets his stripes is to marry--she is a very nice girl, an only child, do you know? and her father, who is very solid, will put her in her own furniture--and more than that! and they will have their own establishment. They could not have that, you know, but for General Boulanger, who made the new rule about the wives of the sub-officers.
And they used to shave the soldiers--imagine it!--just like prisoners, and such beds as they gave them--it was a horror! Well, all that he changed, and he made the soup fit to eat."
"The other generals are not very fond of him, you say? _Parbleu!_ that is likely enough! It is like the _conseillers_ here in the city--one of them does well, the others always find something to say behind his back!
And that affair on the frontier! You know, Monsieur, he had all the army in hand--ah, well in hand--a hundred thousand men ready to march; and those rascals of Germans they knew it, and they gave up our man. I am glad we had no war. No! I do not want a war, but, _dame_, one must have teeth, you know, and be ready to show them!"
"You want to see your War Minister made president, then?" I asked.
"President? what does that signify? Chief of the State--Emperor; ah!
those were the good times here in Amiens, Monsieur, not as it is to-day with the eternal debts that M. Dauphin made us a present of. Eh! an old hypocrite that man is! and with these _centimes additionnels_ that never end! And then these water-metres! Eh! that is a pretty invention to make water as dear as wine at Amiens, and yet, G.o.d knows, wine is not too cheap, with the octroi of Amiens! It is worse than at Paris! Call him what you like, Monsieur, _c"est Boulanger qu"il nous faut_--that is to say, we must have a man at Paris. And you will see he is the man; all the mothers of soldiers will tell you that!"
From the point of view of the munic.i.p.al finances, the "good old times"
of the Empire may well have a charm for the taxpayers of Amiens.
In 1870 Amiens, with 61,063 inhabitants, raised and spent a munic.i.p.al revenue of rather more than a million and a half of francs, or, in round numbers, about 25 francs, or 20 shillings, _per capita_ of the population. A public loan, made in 1854, had been almost wholly paid off, and the city treasury still held 600,000 francs of a loan of 1,600,000 francs made in 1862 for certain public improvements. The munic.i.p.al government cost 372,000 francs, and 180,000 francs were spent on the public schools. Of the munic.i.p.al income, 987,802 francs were derived from four forms of direct taxation, and 770,000 francs from the _octroi_. This gave an average of a little less than 13 francs _per capita_ as the burden of the _octroi_ upon the population.
In 1886 the population had increased to 74,000. The direct taxes brought in 1,184,724 francs, and the _octroi_, 1,498,459, making the average burden of the _octroi per capita_ 20 fr. 20 c., or an increase of about 50 per cent. in the pressure of that form of tax upon the population, as compared with 1870. As the _octroi_ is imposed upon food and beverages of all kinds--fuel, forage, and building materials--this tax is regarded in France as a measure for estimating the general well-being of the inhabitants. Thus measured, there would seem to be a falling off in the general well-being of the people of Amiens since 1883. For, while the pressure _per capita_ of the octroi is much greater than it was in 1870, the actual receipts from the _octroi_ were less with a population of 74,000 in 1886, than they were in 1883. In 1883 the _octroi_ yielded 1,533,140 francs. In 1886 it yielded only 1,498,459 francs. The falling off was in the receipts from beverages, from provisions, from forage, and from building materials. The tariff of the _octroi_ meanwhile has remained substantially without change from 1873 to the present time. It is an expensive tax to collect, the costs of collection in 1886 amounting to 11.85 per cent. of the receipts.
Adding together now the receipts from the direct taxes and the _octroi_ of Amiens in 1886, we have a sum of 2,683,183 francs, or in round numbers about 1,100,000 francs more than in 1870. But while, as I have stated, in 1870 the receipts equalled and balanced the expenses of the munic.i.p.al government, this is no longer the case.
In 1886 Amiens, with an income of 2,683,183 francs, spent 4,162,294 francs, giving an average munic.i.p.al outlay of 56 fr. 10 c. _per capita_ and an excess of expenditure over revenue of no less than 1,479,111 francs, or very nearly the total income and outlay of the city under the Empire. No wonder that the public debt of the department of the Somme, of which Amiens is the capital, seems in 1886 to have amounted to 18,303,496 francs! What inequalities of pressure upon the people of the department this involves may be estimated from the fact that, while there are in the Somme 836 communes, only 404, or less than half of these communes, are authorised to raise money by loans, and one-eighth of them to raise money by _octrois_. Yet we are constantly told that all inequalities and privileges were abolished throughout France by a stroke of the pen in the _annus mirabilis_ 1789![5] The taxation in 20 communes is estimated at 15 centimes, or less; in 87, at from 15 to 30; in 268, at from 31 to 50; in 428, at from 51 to 100; and in 33, at 100 centimes and upwards. These are the communal taxes. To these must be added 51 centimes for the departmental taxes, ordinary and extraordinary; 2 centimes for the land-tax; 19 centimes for the personal tax and taxes on personal property; 18.8 centimes for the doors and windows tax; and 39.6 centimes for licences. For Amiens these fractions taken together mount up to 119-4/10 centimes.
[5] "Privileges" were, in fact, abolished only by Napoleon in 1804.
I have no wish to weary myself or my readers with figures. But these figures tell the story of the difference between the government of France under the much reviled Empire and under the present government, which is represented to us as the natural and admirable "evolution" of republican inst.i.tutions in this country. In 1870, as I have stated, the receipts and expenditure of the city of Amiens balanced one another. The city paid its way, and lived up to, not beyond, its means.
With the war came upon it, of course, heavy and unexpected burdens: German local exactions, its share of the general German ransom of France, local war expenses, and its share of the general war expenditure. For three years the citizens left their affairs, thus disturbed and enc.u.mbered, to be managed by a munic.i.p.al council trained in the methodical habits of the imperial administration, with the result that in 1874 the expenses of Amiens amounted to 2,479,802 francs, and its revenues to 2,016,130 francs, leaving thus a deficit of 463,672 francs, substantially accounted for by the necessary payments on a loan of 5,000,000 francs negotiated in Brussels by M. Dauphin at the very high rate of 7-1/2 per cent. The affairs of Amiens were arranged three years afterwards by a munic.i.p.al Commission, which turned them over, in 1878, to the "Republicans of Gambetta," with a budget involving an expenditure of 2,686,660 francs, against a revenue from taxation of 2,249,245 fr. 52 c., showing a reduced deficit of no more than 437,405 francs.
By 1880 the expenditure had risen to 3,156,616 francs, while the revenue stood at 2,531,762, showing a deficit of 624,854 francs, being an increase of nearly fifty per cent, in two years! From that time the gulf has gone on widening between the receipts and the expenditure of the ancient capital of Picardy, until the figures laid before me, as taken from the official reports, show during the seven years 1880-86, a total of 18,530,477.01 francs of receipts against a total of 24,551,977 francs of expenditure, leaving a deficit for these seven years of 5,021,500 francs, or more than the amount of the Dauphin loan incurred by Amiens as a consequence of the German occupation, and of the exactions of Count Lehndorff!
What has been done during the past three years can only as yet be conjectured. The accounts are made up at the mayoralty office, and thence sent to the prefecture, and they do not get within range of the taxpayer for at least a twelvemonth afterwards.
But M. Fleury a.s.sures me that between the years 1884 and 1888 the city expended in buildings, chiefly "scholastic palaces" erected as batteries of aggressive atheism from which to beat down the temples of religion, no less than 1,700,000 francs; so that the total of deficit of the budget of Amiens, from 1880 to the present time, in all probability exceeds six millions of francs.
If we a.s.sume the local finances of the rest of France to have been handled during the last decade on the same lines, there is nothing extravagant in the estimate made by a friend of mine, who formerly held a very high post in the Treasury, and who puts the acc.u.mulation of local deficits and the local indebtedness in France, independently of the national deficits and the national loans, since 1880, at two milliards of francs, or eighty millions of pounds sterling. For, although Amiens is an important city, it represents only about one four-hundred-and-fiftieth part of the population of France.
While I was at Amiens in June M. Goblet came there and made a rather remarkable speech. It was in the main aimed at a society called the "a.s.sociation of the Conservative Young Men of Amiens," all of whom, I am told, except the president, are young working men--mechanics, clerks, or the sons of clerks, mechanics, and working men--in short, a kind of French "Tory democracy." They are not Boulangists at all, but outspoken royalists. They support Boulanger simply and avowedly in order to get at a revision of the Const.i.tution and make an end of the Republic. "This a.s.sociation," said M. Goblet, "is making a tremendous stir. I admit its right to do this. It holds meetings and conferences; it listens to speeches in the city and the suburbs; it attacks both democracy and the Republic in no measured terms; it does not hesitate to denounce its enemies personally and by name, and neglects no means of acting on public opinion. These conservative young men speak and act energetically. They believe in the re-establishment of the monarchy; they desire it; they preach a reaction against all that we have done for twenty years past!"
There could hardly be a more signal proof given of the reality and vitality of the anti-Republican movement in this part of France than these words of a Republican leader who began his political career, as I have shown, twenty years ago in a hopeless minority of Republicans under the Empire, who has since worked his way up the munic.i.p.al ladder at Amiens and up the legislative ladder in Paris; and who, after reaching the top of the tree, now finds himself in imminent peril of slipping down again to the point from which he started. The force of the testimony is certainly not weakened by the fact that at the legislative elections in September, M. Goblet, standing as a candidate for the Chamber, was completely beaten.
I have shown what a large part the _octroi_ plays in the revenue of a city like Amiens. Nothing resembling it, I believe, exists in England since the abolition, two or three years ago, of the coal dues in London; and, though I suppose it would be within the power of any American State to establish a tax of this sort within its own boundaries, it would be practically impossible to enforce it without coming into collision with the commercial rights of other States under the Federal Const.i.tution. I once had to pay the _octroi_ tax on two brace of Maryland canvas-back ducks, which I was taking over from London to a Christmas dinner in Paris. But Maryland would not submit to an _octroi_ upon her birds entering New York.
The importance of the _octroi_ at this time in the financial system of France is one of the most conclusive and most amusing proofs of the essentially superficial and ephemeral character of the alleged "Great Revolution" of 1789. The _octroi_ was a revival in mediaeval France of the Roman _portorium_ which survives in the Italian offices of the _dazio consume_ and in the _garitas_ of Spain and Spanish America. It was originally imposed as a local tax by a city, under the sanction of a royal charter. To get such a charter from a sovereign strong enough to enforce respect for it was essential to the citizens who bound themselves to one another to maintain their local independence against the barons in their neighbourhood; and when such a charter was granted by a sovereign it was said to be _octroyee_ by him. The tax therefore is rooted in a privilege. Amiens obtained the right to impose it in the fourteenth century. Of course the "Great Revolution of 1789" swept this right away, one of the most obvious "rights of man" being to pluck an apple in an orchard, take it into a town in his pocket, and eat it there. But equally, of course, the Republic in the year VII. on the 29th Vendemiaire re-established it; and in the next year, VIII., provided that the privilege should be exercised as under the sanction of the National Government, the National Government reserving the right to revise the tariffs fixed by the munic.i.p.al councils, and thereby making the restored privilege of the _octrois_ another string whereby to fetter and control the local action of the people on their own affairs. The _octroi_ of Amiens was re-established on the 3rd of Brumaire next following. Under the Empire, the Restoration, and the Monarchy of July, the Council of State granted the _octrois_. Under the Republic of 1848 this power naturally went to the National a.s.sembly as a means of legislative pressure and corruption. The Second Empire restored it to the Council of State; and it has now, naturally, gone back to the Chambers. Neither the people of the cities nor the rural populations like the _octroi_, but, in the immortal words of the late Mr. Tweed of New York, "What can they do about it?" It is a ready-money tax, from which the taxpayer receives no visible equivalent, as he does when he pays a penny for a postage stamp. When he has paid it, he is simply allowed to take his own property where he wishes to take it, and do with it what he wishes to do. It is quite likely that this _octroi_ may have something to do with the disinclination of the common people in France to part with small change as readily as do the Americans, and even the English. They must always have "money in the pocket" if they want to bring a sausage and a bottle of beer through a "barrier," whereas an American is never called upon to pay cash down to his Government except at a custom-house when he returns to his country from a foreign trip, or in exchange for a licence or a doc.u.ment of some sort which represents value received in one or another form.
The time wasted over this tax in a city like Amiens is an extraordinary burden on the patience of the people, trained as the French people are to submit to a torment of eternal red tape, a week of which would drive an American or English town into open revolt. At Amiens, for example, there is a central bureau of the _octroi_, where the tax is received from the great breweries and warehouses after the amounts have been fixed by the officers on duty at those establishments. Then there are ten bureaux or "barriers" at the railway stations, the slaughter-houses, and the fish-markets; and then again eight secondary bureaux, where the people must go and pay amounts of less than one franc. There are, and I am told have long been, loud complaints as to the inconvenient location of the bureaux; but nothing comes of these outcries as yet, and I presume nothing ever will come of them until something like an independent local administrative life exists in the provinces of France.
The elements of such a life ought surely to be found, if anywhere, in this ancient province of Picardy. You cannot traverse it in any direction without being struck by the evident prosperity of the people.
Arthur Young, a hundred years ago, travelling from Boulogne to Amiens, found only "misery and miserable harvests." He would find now only comfort and excellent crops. Possibly he would think of the country what he then thought of the region about Clermont and Liancourt, where, under the fostering care of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, the farmers had developed a highly-diversified cultivation; "here a field of wheat; there one of luzerne; clover in one direction, vetches in another; vines, cherry and other fruit trees making up a charming picture, which must, however, yield poor results."
But he would be wrong. This diversified culture of modern Picardy has been highly remunerative, and the extensive kitchen-gardening of the province is so still. The "agricultural crisis" has doubtless. .h.i.t the large farmers rather hard, but I am told they are standing up well under it--thanks to their past savings, and to French protection--better, indeed, than the large farmers in England; while the peasants proper are actually profiting by it. They not only get as much for their labour as when the large farmers were making money, but they are buying up land at lower rates. This may very possibly help the Republicans in the coming elections, for the peasants always give the credit of a state of things which is satisfactory to them to the Government of the day--be that Government what it may--so that while the larger farmers tend to Conservatism, the peasants will probably lean the other way. It is next to impossible to get a political opinion out of a Picard peasant, but I have more than once heard a peasant speak of the farmers in his neighbourhood as "aristocrats," which I took to be as precise a formula of political opinion as one was likely to get from him. It seemed to me to represent, among the peasants of to-day, the enlightened "principles of 1889," very much as the same formula, applied to the _n.o.blesse_ of a century ago, represented, among the large farmers of that day, the "principles of 1789."
Both then and now the formula simply means "the man who has what I want to have is an aristocrat." I think I have observed something like this in other countries--as, for example, in Ireland--where the guilty possessor of acres, however, is not only an "aristocrat" but an "alien,"
as appears from a song popular in Kerry:--
The alien landlords have no right To the land G.o.d made for you; So we"ll blow them up with dynamite, The thieving, h.e.l.lish crew!
Dynamite was unknown in Picardy a century and a half ago. And the Picard has very little, except his religion, in common with the Irish Celt. But the sentiment of this simple and pleasing little ditty glowed deep in the Picard heart long before the Revolution of 1789. The "earth hunger,"
which has given the act of "land-grabbing" the first place in the category of human crimes, invented, long ago in Picardy, and especially in that part of Picardy now known as the Department of the Somme, a custom called the _coutume de mauvais gre_ or the _droit de marche_.
Under this custom a tenant-farmer in Picardy considered himself ent.i.tled to sell the right to till his landlord"s fields to anybody he liked, to give it as a dowry to his daughter, or to leave it to be divided among his heirs; and all this without reference to the expiration of his lease. If the landlord objected and went so far as to lease his land to another person, the previous tenant was regarded by his friends and by other farmers as a _depointe_, ent.i.tled to take summary vengeance upon the "land-grabber." He might kill off his cattle, burn his crops and his buildings, and, if occasion served, shoot or knock him in the head. As the whole country was in a conspiracy, either of terror or of sympathy, to protect the _depointe_ against the vengeance of the law, this cheerful "custom" had a liberalising effect upon the Picard landholders.
Rents fell, and if the value of landed property rose the landed proprietor got no advantage from that. The torch and the musket kept down the demand, which was equivalent practically to increasing the supply. The results of this "custom" were such that in 1764, a quarter of a century before the Revolution of 1789, the king intervened, but in vain, to put a stop to it. The "oppressed and downtrodden peasant" of Picardy under the _ancien regime_ did what he liked with his neighbour"s property--that neighbour being a landlord--as cheerily as the manacled Celt of Mayo or Tipperary in our own times. Two years before the Revolution, in 1787, the a.s.sembly of the Generality of Amiens, by its president the Duc d"Havre, vainly urged the royal government to take resolute action in this matter. With the Revolution, of course, things grew worse very rapidly. The _depointes_ became ardent lovers of liberty, equality, and fraternity; tore up all their leases, sent their landlords and the land-grabbers to the guillotine, or into emigration as traitors, and made themselves proprietors, in fee simple. There seems to be no doubt that the traditions of this _coutume de mauvais gre_ (which obviously had much more to do with the politics of Picardy a century ago than either Voltaire or Rousseau) still survive in the Department of the Somme, and every now and then break out in agrarian outrages, rick-burnings, and general incendiarism, whenever leases fall in and landlords try to raise their rents on the shallow pretext that land has risen in value.
While these traditions show that there was no lack of energy and force among the "downtrodden" Picard peasantry before the Revolution of 1789, the local history of the province also proves that the liberal ideas which are commonly supposed to have been introduced into France by the Revolution were at work in Picardy among the _n.o.blesse_ and the clergy long before. The _corvee_, for example, of which we hear so much in many so-called histories of the French Revolution, was abolished under Louis XVI. in Picardy, before the States-General of 1789 were convened.
That the _corvee_, in itself, cannot have been the absolutely intolerable thing it is commonly supposed to have been may be inferred, I think, from the fact that, under the name of _prestation en nature_, it still exists in many parts of the French Republic. It figures in all the schedules of departmental taxation which I have seen down to the year 1889; and, for that matter, it existed in New England down to a very recent date, if it does not now exist there. It was obviously liable to abuse, and doubtless was abused, and the Intendant of Picardy, M. d"Aguay, made a striking speech, on the benefits to be expected from its abolition, to the Provincial Parliament in 1787. From this speech we learn that the money value of the _corvee_ in hand had been computed at 900,000 livres, but that the Intendant working out the details of the abolition of the system, with the help of a number of the local landholders (commonly supposed to have been the tyrants who profited by the abuse), had reduced this estimate to 300,000 livres, at which sum the tax had been converted into a money payment for the maintenance of the roads, the province being thus relieved of two-thirds of the burden borne by it. It is instructive to learn that attempts to bring about similar results elsewhere in France were resented and resisted, not by the great landholders, but by the corveable peasants themselves! What they really wanted, it would seem, was not so much to be relieved of the obligation of forced labour by a payment of money, as to have their roads made for them at the expense of the State, under the impression, ineradicable down to our own day, and elsewhere than in France, that what everybody pays n.o.body pays, an impression which is the trusty shield and weapon at once of the Socialists and of the Protectionists all over the world.
Public education in Picardy, as well as elsewhere in France, long antedates the Revolution of 1789. Three centuries ago Olivier de Serre and Bernard Palissy lamented the foolish disposition of French peasants in the Limousin and in Picardy to give their elder sons a better education than they had themselves received. "The poor man will spend a great part of what he has earned in the sweat of his brow, to make his son a gentleman; and at last this same gentleman will be ashamed to be found in company with his father, and will be displeased to be called the son of a labouring man. And if by chance the good man has other children, this gentleman it will be who will devour the others and have the best of everything; he never concerns himself to think how much he cost at school while his brothers were working at home with their father." This reads like a complaint of the nineteenth century in democratic America, but it is, in fact, a complaint of the sixteenth century in feudal France. It must have been frequent enough in this part of Picardy, now the Department of the Somme. For from a very early time this region has been full of small farmers bent on bettering their own condition or that of their sons. In the public library of Abbeville there is a land register drawn up in 1312 for the service of the officers of King Edward II. of England, who had married Isabel of France, from which it appears that the small tenants in this part of Picardy were then as numerous as the small proprietors now are. "One is led to believe," says M. Baudrillart, "that the only difference between the condition of the country then and now in this respect is, that the enfranchised labourer has in many cases simply taken the place of the feudal tenant and become proprietor of the soil." So great has long been the number of small landholders in Picardy that in the province, taken generally, a holding of sixty hectares may pa.s.s for a large property, one of fifteen for a moderate estate, and one of ten for a small holding. The action of the French code upon this state of things since the Revolution and the Empire has, in the opinion of many intelligent observers, been mischievous. It has made it difficult to check the excessive subdivision of the land into holdings too small to be profitably and intelligently cultivated. There is no provision in the French law it seems, as there is in the German law, making it obligatory upon the heirs of a small landed property so to arrange their respective shares as not to impede the proper cultivation of the land. The great prosperity of kitchen-gardening in modern Picardy modifies the evils flowing from this state of things however, and those who know the country best tell me that, taken as a body, the small landholders of Picardy, thanks to their thrift in regard both of time and of money, are substantially well off. They don"t like the townspeople, for the old traditions are not yet forgotten of the time in which Amiens and the other large towns used to shift the main burden of the expenses of the province upon the shoulders of the peasantry; and if anything like a genuine provincial legislature could be established, with a working system of "Home Rule," all the elements are here which might be developed into a healthy political activity. The system of working on France from the centre at Paris to the circ.u.mference has certainly been tried long enough, and thoroughly enough, to show that nothing but evil, and that continually, can be expected from it.
More than fifty years have pa.s.sed since Heine said: "When I speak of France I speak of Paris--not of the provinces; just as when I speak of a man, I speak of his head, not of his legs. To talk about the opinion of the provinces is like talking about the opinion of a man"s legs."
In this spirit France is still judged abroad, for in this spirit France is still governed at home. But if, on some fine morning, the legs should suddenly wake up with a very positive opinion of their own, the results may be awkward--not only for the government at Paris but for the rest of Europe.
CHAPTER VII
IN THE AISNE