Offences against persons and property are not relatively numerous here.
On the contrary, while the proportion of persons accused of crime is 12 to the hundred thousand, for all France, in this Department of the Nord it falls to 8-1/3 to the hundred thousand, and this notwithstanding the numbers crowded into the great manufacturing towns of the department. In the Department of the Seine, which includes Paris, the proportion rises to 28 to the hundred thousand, and in the agricultural Department of the Eure, which is the champion criminal Department of France, to 30 to the hundred thousand. One might almost imagine that M. Zola must have gone to the Eure for his studies of French peasant-life.
Without being particularly devout, the people of this region, I am told, are fond of their religious observances, and much dislike the persecution of the Church and the laicisation of the schools.
At Thiers the church, which is a large one, fronting on an extensive Place Publique, was very handsomely decorated on Corpus Christi Sunday by the people of the commune. Flags and garlands were put up, too, all about the Place Publique. The Anzin Company are now building a large school for girls very near this church; and I visited, with M. Guary, one afternoon, the boys" school at Thiers. It is very well installed in a large building, with a playground and a gymnasium roofed in, but not walled. The teacher--a lay teacher, and a very quiet, sensible man--who lives in the school-building with his wife, told me he preferred to keep it thus, and the boys liked it better. They were at their lessons when I visited the school, and a very st.u.r.dy, comely lot of lads they were.
Some of them were _en penitence_, having slighted their lessons, as the teacher slily intimated, by reason of the great Church festival. This I thought not unlikely, and he did not appear to regard it as an absolutely unpardonable offence, while the juvenile criminals themselves were evidently quite cheery in their minds. In a room near the gymnasium were racks filled with wooden guns. These the teachers pointed out with pride. They were a gift from the company to his battalion of boys, who delighted in their regular military drill. He thought them, after only eighteen months" training, one of the best boy-battalions in the department, and would have liked to take them to Paris to compete for the athletic prizes. But to take up even a picked company of ten would have cost 400 francs, which he thought, and I agreed with him, might be better spent in Thiers. "And then," he said with a smile, "what a life I should have led in Paris, with those ten boys to look after!"
The Anzin Company used to spend 80,000 francs a year on keeping up its own schools. But it is so heavily taxed for the "school palaces" which have been put up, and for the public schools, that it has materially reduced this outlay, though it still expends a large sum in various ways for the advantage of the children of its own workmen attending the public schools; and still keeps up certain religious schools, especially for the little children and the girls.
One of these schools for little children which I visited at St.-Waast, kept by the Sisters, was a model. The little creatures, ranged in categories according to their years, were pictures of health and good humour, as they sate in rows at their little desks, or marched about, singing in choruses. One exercise, through which a number of them, from six to eight years old, were conducted by two of the Sisters, might have been studied from a fres...o...b.. Fra Angelico representing the heavenly choirs, and gave the most intense delight evidently to the singing children as well as to the smiling and kindly Sisters. There is a large church, too, at St.-Waast and a _cite ouvriere_.
The commune, I believe, formerly was a part of the wide domain of the famous Abbey of St.-Waast which grew up near Arras over the burial-place of St.-Vadasius, to whom after the victory of Clovis over the Germans at Tolbiac in 495 the duty was confided of teaching the Frankish king his Christian catechism. He had a tough pupil, but he taught him, so well that King Clovis conceived a great affection for him, and got St.-Remi to make him bishop, first of Arras, and then of Cambrai.
At the time of the Revolution the great abbey near Arras, which bore his name, was one of the richest of the religious communities which, according to the very important _Avis aux deputes des trois ordres de la province d"Artois_, so thoroughly and instructively a.n.a.lysed by M.
Baudrillart, held among them in 1789 two-thirds of the land of that province. M. Baudrillart"s a.n.a.lysis of this _Avis_ shows conclusively that a judicious and systematic overhauling of these ecclesiastical properties was absolutely necessary; but it also shows conclusively that the people of Artois who desired this wished to see it done decently and in order. They had a strong love of their provincial independence. Even Maximilian Robespierre, who was then bestirring himself in public matters at Arras, addressed his first political publication, which he called a "manifesto," not to the people of Artois, but to "the Artesian nation." This from the future executioner of the French federalists is sufficiently edifying as to the great "national" impulse to which we are asked by a certain school of political rhapsodists to attribute that outbreak of chaos in France called the "great French Revolution."
What the Tiers-Etat of the great and solidly const.i.tuted province of Artois really wanted before 1789 is clearly set forth in this remarkable _Avis_. They did not want the "Rights of Man," or the downfall of tyrants, or any vague nonsense of that sort. They wanted a more fair and equitable system of taxation, and a better system of agriculture. They had some practical ideas, too, as to how these things could be got, for they knew that these things had been got in England. "The Englishman of our times," they said, "gets an income of 48,000 pounds from a square mile of land, whereas the Artesian can hardly get 12,000 pounds from the same area. Yet the soil of Artois is in nowise inferior to that of England. The enormous difference can only be attributed to the encouragement and the distinctions which the English Government bestows upon agriculture, and to the better system of the English administration."
This pa.s.sage reads almost like an extract from the diary of Arthur Young, and it is noteworthy that Arthur Young at this same time, while he was commending in his diary the admirable quality of the deep, "level, fertile plain of Flanders and Artois," also expressed his opinion that "nowhere in the world was human labour better rewarded than there." Taken together, however, the _Avis_ and the diary of Arthur Young prove that the leaders of the Tiers-Etat of Artois in 1787 were neither radicals nor revolutionists, but practical men, who wished to see the value of their property improved, and the natural advantages of their province more adequately developed. To this end they thought it necessary that the const.i.tution of the Provincial Estates should be reformed. Thanks to a combination, as the _Avis_ declares, of the munic.i.p.alities of the towns with the _n.o.blesse_ and the higher order of the clergy, the _cures_--"that most interesting cla.s.s of men who are alone in a position to make the needs of the people understood and to work for their relief--were entirely excluded from the Provincial Estates in 1669, as were also the farmers, who alone can supply the means of perfecting our agriculture."
"Here," said the _Avis_, "is the true cause of the prostration of our rural interests." They proposed to apply a remedy by recasting the representation in the Provincial Estates, and giving "two deputies out of three to the rural population."
This having been done, so that agriculture might get in Artois the voice which the author of the _Avis_ believed it to have in England, they then proposed a reconstruction of the system of taxation. On this point they inclined to adopt, from the South of France, the system of paying the taxes not in money but in kind. The system of the t.i.thes, too, needed a complete overhauling, not with the mere object of abolishing the t.i.thes, but in order that the gross inequalities which the _Avis_ sets forth as existing, in regard to the impact of the t.i.thes, both territorial and personal, might be done away with, and the support of religion put upon a sound basis. This led naturally to a demand for the release of great areas of valuable soil in Artois from the control of religious communities, like the Abbey of St.-Waast, not a few of which were no longer in a condition to put these possessions to the best uses, either for the Church or for the country. In Artois, as in French Flanders, the extent of these ecclesiastical domains which had once been an advantage to the people, is admitted to have become disadvantageous to French agriculture with the decline of the feudal aristocracy and the growth of the royal power. Short leases only were granted in general by the Church and the monasteries, and under these short leases the farmers hesitated to improve their holdings.
The authors of the _Avis_ desire that it may be made possible to obtain leases of even twenty-five years which should not be treated by the Treasury as an "alienation" of the property leased. With such leases, they say, "the farmer would not hesitate to lay out money upon his land, because he would feel sure of getting the benefit of the outlay. This,"
they add, "is one of the princ.i.p.al means which the English Government has employed in bringing agriculture to the state of perfection in which we now see it in that monarchy."
As the greater part of the _cahiers_ of grievances prepared by the Tiers-Etat of Artois for the States-General of 1789 have been lost, this _Avis_ is of great value, as setting before us the real objects of that order in Artois. The _cahiers_ of the Artesian _n.o.blesse_ and the clergy for the States-General are all preserved, and in respect of the general objects to be aimed at in the States-General, these _cahiers_ go much farther than the _Avis_. They seem to show that in Artois, as throughout the kingdom, the _n.o.blesse_ and the clergy were much more enamoured of what are now called the "principles of 1789" than were the body of the agricultural population.
The _n.o.blesse_ and the clergy of Artois wished to see the States-General called at regular intervals, like the English Parliament. They wished the Provincial Estates to be maintained and to be convened annually, and they wished a provincial administration to be established under a system which should give the Tiers-Etat a representation equal to that of both the other orders united, and in which decisions should be reached not by a vote of the orders collectively, but by the members of the whole body voting individually, so that a measure as to which all the members for the Tiers-Etat should be of one mind, might at any time be carried if they could secure the adhesion of even a small number of the members from either of the other orders. Clearly it was not necessary, in the case of Artois, that the Tiers-Etat should be declared to be "everything," in order that justice might there be done to the wishes and the interests of the Tiers-Etat! And if not in the case of Artois, why in the case of any other French province?
The _Avis_ shows that in Artois before 1789 the representatives of the Tiers-Etat had confidence in the liberality and the common sense of the _n.o.blesse_ and of the clergy, and that they were disposed to consider all the abuses there needing reformation in the spirit of practical compromise which had presided over and made possible the development of liberty and of progress in Holland and in England, but of which no traces are to be found in the chaotic history of the "National a.s.sembly"
of 1789. The authors of the _Avis_, for example, point out, in dealing with the questions of the t.i.thes and of the seignorial dues in Artois, that it is the unequal and irregular impact, above all, of those impositions to which most of the evils flowing from them must be imputed; the ill-feeling they engender between the farmer and his landlord or his pastor, the bad blood they breed between the different orders. If the charges of one sort and another upon one field of a farmer"s holding amounted, as was sometimes the case, to one-fifth of the value of the crop, while upon other fields of his holding the charges amounted to no more than one-thirtieth of the value of the crop, the farmer not unnaturally gave his chief care to the fields which were least heavily enc.u.mbered, without much troubling himself as to their agricultural merits relatively to the other fields.
But while the authors of the _Avis_ earnestly desired to see all this changed, and called for the most complete revision and re-organisation of the agricultural system in Artois, they raised no philosophical clamour against privileges as privileges, and they had sense enough to see that no community could afford to bring about the abolition of the most obnoxious "privileges" at the cost of any flagrant violations of the Rights of Property. "Whatever may have been the origin of these rights," say the authors of the _Avis_, "their antiquity has made them property to be respected in the hands of those who possess it. To deprive these owners of these rights would be an injustice and an act of violence of which no citizen can possibly dream. The privileged orders must be asked to divest themselves of their privileges."
Here is a recognition of "vested interests" for which we may look in vain from the motley mob of the "National a.s.sembly" into which the States-General of 1789 so rapidly resolved, or--to speak more exactly--dissolved, themselves! With men of the Tiers-Etat, in a province like Artois, who could see things so plainly and state them so fairly before the convocation of the States-General, what became the French Revolution, plunging the whole realm into anarchy, might surely have been made a reasonable and orderly evolution of liberty. Such a doc.u.ment goes a good way in support of the contention that with ordinary firmness, consistency, and courage on the part of the luckless Louis XVI., the convocation of the States-General in 1789, instead of leading France, as it actually led her, through a quagmire of blood and rapine, into what George Sand felicitously called the "merciless practical joke of the Consulate," and the stern reality of the despotic First Empire, might easily have resulted in converting the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. into such a limited and const.i.tutional monarchy as France really enjoyed under Louis XVIII. The pathway to the Inferno of the Terror was really paved with the good intentions of the king.
Beyond St.-Waast lies the considerable town of St.-Amand-aux-Eaux, to which General Dumouriez transferred himself, on the pretence of taking the waters there, while he was working out his plans for saving France by marching on Paris and upsetting the a.s.sembly. The plans miscarried mainly through his own fault, but it is a curious vindication of the patriotism of Dumouriez in making them that, while he was explaining to the lunatics in Paris, in January 1793, the absurdity of attempting to overthrow the English power in India, and the German empire in Europe, before feeding and clothing their armies on the frontier, de Beurnonville, whom Dumouriez was destined to seize and arrest at St.-Amand, was himself writing from the headquarters at Sarrelouis to Cochon Lapparent at Paris that everything was going to the dogs, and that the Government was mad about chimeras. "We think of nothing," he said, "but giving liberty to people who don"t ask us to do it, and with all the will in the world to be free ourselves, we don"t know how to be!"
St.-Amand now has a population of ten or twelve thousand souls. Part of the Anzin property lies within the communal limits, but the place is a busy place and has industries of its own. It is connected with Anzin and with Valenciennes by a steam tramway, and I went there with M. Guary one fine summer morning to see what is left of the once magnificent Benedictine monastery of the seventeenth century, which was the great feature of St.-Amand a hundred years ago. A picture preserved in the collection at Valenciennes gives a fair notion of the extent and magnificence of the abbey, the demolition of which has been going on from 1793 to this day. M. Guary remembers the stately ruins as much more extensive in his youth than they now are, and as the good people of St.-Amand have very recently allowed the local architect to put up, under the very shadow of the exquisitely beautiful belfry still standing, one of the most dismal and commonplace brick school-houses I have seen in France, it is to be presumed that a few more years will see everything pulled down, and replaced, perhaps, by a miniature reproduction in steel and iron of the Eiffel Tower.
Before the deviltries of 1789 began, the marketplace of St.-Amand must have been one of the most picturesque in Northern Europe. The market is still held there, and the place was full when we crossed it of peasant women and peasants, carts laden with vegetables, tables set out with all manner of utensils, with fruits, with knicknacks. All was bustle and animation. It was the old picture, save for the uncomely modifications of our modern costume. But of the splendid architectural frame in which that picture once was set, how little now is left!
Beside the lofty belfry, one of the most graceful seventeenth-century buildings now to be anywhere seen, a few arches of one of the cloisters and one of the great abbatial gatehouses converted into a town-hall! The Vandal Directory of Chauny dealt more rationally with Premontre than the "patriots" of St.-Amand with their superb abbey. Had they preserved it, their town would now have possessed not only an architectural monument of interest and importance, but ample s.p.a.ce and the best possible "installations" for all its public uses and offices.
Like all the Benedictine abbeys, St.-Amand was a home of letters and of arts. What remains of its n.o.ble library is to be found, as I have said, in the collection at Valenciennes. Of the treasury which the abbey contained in the way of sculpture, painting, bra.s.s and iron work, carving in wood, no such account can be given. Such of these as escaped destruction were looted, sold, and dispersed. There is a tradition, well or ill-founded, that some exceedingly fine sixteenth-century monuments executed by Guyot de Beaugrant, the sculptor of the matchless chimney-piece which, in the Chambre echevinale at Bruges, commemorates the expulsion of the French under Francis I. from Flanders, were brought here and set up in the abbey. If so, no trace of them remains. In the gatehouse, of which the local authorities have taken possession, a few fine old books, relics of the abbatial library, are still kept, and the vaulted chapter-room on the upper floor, used now as a council chamber, contains four interesting _dessus de porte_ painted here by Watteau. The subjects are scriptural, of course; but as, in spite of all her efforts, the obliging damsel who acted as our cicerone could not possibly manage the blinds and sashes of the lofty window in the octagonal room which they adorn, it was impossible to make out to what period of the artist"s career they belong. Upon one of them--the "Woman taken in Adultery"--we got light enough thrown to show that its colouring is admirable. It can hardly have been painted while Watteau was at work in Paris on his endless reproductions of the then popular St.-Nicholas, but must probably have been executed after his study of Rubens in the Luxembourg, and his failure to win the first prize at Rome had opened to him his true path to fame, and carried him into the French Academy of Fine Arts as "the painter of festivals and of gallantry."
The fine old church of St.-Amand has fared better than the abbey. It has been judiciously restored, and the third Napoleon made it an historical monument. Despite the Radicalism of the place, we found it thronged with people of both s.e.xes--the men, indeed, almost in a majority--attending a high ma.s.s. It was rather startling, as we emerged from this service on our way back to Anzin, to come upon a large cabaret which bore for its sign the words, in glaring gilt letters, "Au Nouveau Bethlehem, Estaminet Barbes." Whether this is the conventicle of a sect of believers in the revolutionary Barbes I could not learn. But it is just possible that the Barbes, whom it celebrates, may be the enterprising proprietor of the place, and that the sacred name he has given it is a relic of that familiar use of holy things which never scandalised the good people of the Middle Ages, particularly in Flanders and in France. Does not the best old inn in the comfortable town of Chalons-sur-Marne to this day bear the name of "La Haute Mere de Dieu"?
I have already said that the miners of Anzin have been practically enjoying all the advantages of co-operation, while the "true Republicans" of M. Doumer have been "studying" and going to sleep over that "beautiful and generous idea." As a matter of fact, the "Co-operative Society of the Anzin Miners," now known in commerce as "Leon Lemaire et Cie of Anzin," was founded, I find, even before the Co-operative a.s.sociation of the Gla.s.s-workers at St.-Gobain.
It was organised in 1865, two years before the pa.s.sage of the Imperial law affecting co-operation.
M. Casimir Perier, a son of the Minister of Louis Philippe, and the father of the present Republican deputy of the same name, was then a director of the Anzin Company. He had seen what M. Doumer fantastically imagines to be the purely French and republican "idea" of co-operation carried out in England, the "beautiful and generous idea," as even every French schoolboy ought to know, being of English and not of French origin.
M. Perier had been particularly struck by the great success of the Rochdale experiment--an experiment begun and carried out, as Mr.
Holyoake has set forth at length, by weavers, who, being nearly at the end of their tether, and worn out with distress, had a.s.sociated themselves into a company under the name of the "Equitable Pioneers of Rochdale." He looked thoroughly into the history of this experiment, and having convinced himself that the "beautiful and generous" idea might bear as good fruit at Anzin as at Rochdale, he went to work in earnest, got the society organised, accepted the honorary chairmanship of it, and set it on its feet on February 21, 1865. M. Cochin took the same matter up at St.-Gobain, and in 1867 the Imperial law, about which M. Doumer and his "true Republicans" have been cackling and dabbling for ten consecutive years, was enacted, and the co-operative a.s.sociations became legally const.i.tuted bodies. The statutes which now govern the Anzin a.s.sociation were adopted on December 8, 1867, and the a.s.sociation was formally launched.
The authorities at first could not be made to understand that a co-operative a.s.sociation was not a mercantile speculation, and for some time the Anzin a.s.sociation was compelled to pay a regular fee for a licence, or "patent," as it is called in France. This exaction, however, was long ago given up.
Under the original statutes the profits derived from the sale to the members of the a.s.sociation, and to them only (a rule never departed from), of all the goods purchased by the a.s.sociation, were to be divided into a hundred parts. Of these, seventy parts were to be distributed at the end of each year to the members, proportionally to the sales and deliveries made to each of them. Twenty parts were to be set aside for a reserve fund; and the remaining ten parts were to be used by the governing committee chiefly in paying the salaries of the manager and employees of the a.s.sociation.
Such was the success from the outset of the Anzin experiment that within six years, at a general meeting held on April 24, 1872, the a.s.sociation adopted a resolution suspending the payment over into the reserve fund of the twenty parts of the profits set aside to be so paid, and ordering these twenty parts also to be paid over to the members semi-annually.
The reserve fund had already reached proportions which made it unnecessary and even undesirable to increase it.
The a.s.sociation was originally const.i.tuted for a term of twenty years, from December 10, 1867. At a general meeting held on March 27, 1887, its life was prolonged for another twenty years, or to December 10, 1907.
It might edify M. Doumer as to the nationality of the "beautiful and generous" idea which his "true Republicans" find it so difficult to "study," if he would take the trouble to visit this Anzin region. He would find the establishments of the a.s.sociation currently known by the English name of "stores." I found one of them flourishing in every commune which I visited in the vicinity of Anzin; at St.-Waast, where the experiment was first made, at Denain, where during the past year it has been found necessary to establish two stores instead of one--at Anzin, at Fresnes, at Thiers, at Abscon, at Vieux-Conde! The a.s.sociation, indeed, which began in 1865 with fifty-one members and a subscribed capital of 2,150 francs, now conducts no fewer than fifteen "stores," and now consists of no fewer than 3,118 families.
The capital of the a.s.sociation, originally fixed at 30,000 francs, in 600 shares of fifty francs each, was increased by a vote of a general meeting in April 1882 to 250,000 francs. The "firm-name" is now "Lemaire and Company," the present manager being M. Leon Lemaire, who can use this "firm-name" only for the affairs of the a.s.sociation. The manager (or _gerant_) is elected at a general meeting to serve for three years, but he is always re-eligible. His salary is fixed by the governing committee, and the amount of it is charged to the general expenses. The governing committee has power also to present the manager, if it thinks proper, with a certain sum each year taken from the ten parts of the profits which are set apart by the statutes of the a.s.sociation to be used for such purposes by the Committee. All the persons employed by the a.s.sociation in various capacities are taken, as far as is found compatible with the interests of the business, from among the families of the members. This is particularly the case with regard to the young girls, of whom forty-eight are now employed in the different drapery and mercery stores, and an excellent practice has been adopted of calling in a certain number of girls when there is a special pressure of business to serve for a short period, these girls being regularly registered, and thus const.i.tuting a sort of reserve corps, from which the permanent employees are taken as vacancies are made.
The operations of the a.s.sociation cover all manner of commodities excepting butcher"s meat, it having been found that there are insuperable difficulties in the way of dealing in butcher"s meat over so wide an area. These difficulties do not exist in the case of what the French call _charcuterie_. A central pork butchery has been established just outside the _octroi_ at Anzin, and the business done in that line now averages about 30,000 kilogrammes a year, the difference per kilogramme between the buying and the selling prices averaging about eighteen francs. It is the iron rule of the a.s.sociation never to sell at a figure beyond the average ruling retail prices in the shops, it being quite clear that if it should now and then be necessary, in order to cover the a.s.sociation, to sell at prices equivalent with the shop prices, the members would still have a real advantage in the eventual distribution of the profits.
It is impossible to examine the statutes, and the rules adopted under them, without being struck by the precision, clearness, and efficiency of the methods prescribed to keep the accountability of all the different agents of the a.s.sociation within easily definable limits, and to simplify, in the final adjustment, the necessarily complicated accounts of so many stores dealing with customers many of whom must, from the force of circ.u.mstances, be allowed a credit of a fortnight as cash. The proof of all such methods, of course, is the net result. In the case of the Co-operative a.s.sociation of Anzin this proof is conclusive in favour both of the methods and of the men by whom they have for now more than twenty years been administered.
The operations of the a.s.sociation for the first semester of its existence closed on February 22, 1866, with sales amounting to 71,020 fr. 10 c., and with the payment to the members of an 8 per cent.
dividend, amounting in all to 8,228 francs. From that day to this, the semi-annual dividend has never fallen below eight per cent., excepting for the half-year ending August 22, 1868, when it was declared at 7-1/2 per cent. By August 1872 it readied 12 per cent. and stood there for three semesters. It then fell to 10 per cent., and stood there from February 28, 1874, to August 28, 1878, when it rose to 11. By August 31, 1879, it rose to 12, and by February 29, 1884, to 13 per cent., at which figure it has stood ever since down to February 28, 1889, with two exceptions--August 31, 1884, when it rose to 14, and February 28, 1887, when it fell to 12-1/4.
The total amount of sales made to the members between February 1866 and February 1889 was 38,864,999 francs; and the total amount of dividends paid to the members during that period has been 4,585,557 fr. 69 c., showing an average dividend during these twenty-three years of 11.80 per cent.
It appears to me that this is a very good account rendered of a very good stewardship, and involves, for the workmen interested, a number of useful practical lessons on the true relations of capital to labour, including the relations of their own capital to their own labour. There are now about 800 Co-operative a.s.sociations of Consumers in France; but the Anzin a.s.sociation is by far the most important of them all. As the existing a.s.sociations are estimated to consist on an average of 550 members each, we have 440,000 heads of families, and a total presumable population, therefore, of not far from 2,000,000, more or less successfully availing themselves of the co-operative principle in France. The net profits vary greatly in the returns of these a.s.sociations, from 1 to 14 per cent. The Co-operative Coal a.s.sociation of Roubaix shows a net profit of 21 per cent., and the Co-operative Bakery of the same busy and thriving city a profit of 23 per cent. But the Anzin a.s.sociation not only covers more ground than any of the rest: it covers it in a more equably satisfactory fashion. During the past year, on an employed capital of 156,150 francs, it made sales amounting to 2,303,836 francs, with a gross profit of 450,497 fr. 61 c., and a net profit of 310,106 fr. 30 c. Each man had spent an average of 738 fr. 28 c., and received a net profit of 99 fr. 45 c. In other words, every holder of a 50 franc share paid for his share out of a single year"s net profit, and pocketed 49 francs to boot!
As indicating the scale of comfort attained in their daily life by these miners and their families, it is of interest to glance over the schedule of the goods and commodities supplied by these co-operative stores, it being premised that the stores do not keep or sell what are regarded as "articles of luxury," so that in these schedules we have the present scale of the necessaries and comforts of ordinary life among the more industrious and thrifty of the French working-cla.s.ses. That even in the seventeenth century the French artisans, and the more prosperous of the French peasants, lived much more comfortably than one would infer from the pictures usually painted even by such historians as Michelet, who, with all his theories and all his imagination, took more trouble than M. Thiers to keep within hailing distance of the facts, would seem to be shown by the inventories and the wills of artisans and peasants disinterred during the last quarter of a century from the local archives of Troyes and other important towns.
Here, in the Anzin district, to-day, we find these co-operative stores supplying to 3,000 families of the working-cla.s.s 12,000 metrical quintals or bales of the finest quality of wheat flour, 3,000 of these going to the houses of the members, and 9,000 to the bakery of the a.s.sociation, which turns out, on an average, 1,100 loaves, of 3 kilos each, per day. With this bread the members take from the stores annually 110,000 kilos of the best b.u.t.ter, 50,000 kilos of coffee, 37,000 kilos of chicory, 4,000 kilos of chocolate, 13,000 Marolles cheeses from the land of Bretigny--where Edward III. was scared by a tremendous thunderstorm, which made him "think of the day of judgment," into giving peace to France and liberty to her captive king--200,000 kilos of potatoes, 6,000 kilos of prunes d"Ente, 11,000 kilos of rice, 15,000 bottles of wine, 12,000 bottles of vinegar, 33,000 bottles of spirits of various sorts, 45,000 kilos of salt, 6,000 boxes of sardines, 100,000 kilos of maize and corn, 34,000 kilos of bran, 90,000 kilos of sugar, 20,000 kilos of beans, 30,000 kilos of ham, sausages, and other products of the pork-butchery. That butcher"s meat, which, for the reasons I have mentioned, the stores cannot supply, plays a large proportional part in the obviously good dietary of these families, may, I think, be inferred from the fact that the stores annually dispose of 10,000 pots of the best French mustard, and of 1,000 kilos of white pepper. Vegetables and fruits are supplied in abundance by the country, and in many cases by the allotments of the workmen themselves, while beer, as I have said, is everywhere abundant and cheap.
That the miners and working-people of Anzin are well lodged and well fed may be considered to be beyond a doubt. Let us now see what they do in the way of clothing themselves, and of furnishing their houses.
They buy from the stores annually 30,000 francs"-worth of kitchen and household utensils, which are both well made and cheap in all this part of France, 600 kilos of mattra.s.s wool, 4,400 yards of sheeting, 500 wool and cotton blankets and bedspreads, 9,000 towels, 44,000 pairs of sabots, 10,000 pairs of shoes, 4,600 caps and hats, 2,200 pairs of stockings, 3,700 shirts and 6,000 metres of shirting, 17,000 metres of _pique_, 2,000 undervests and 2,000 metres of flannel, 6,000 handkerchiefs, 52,000 metres of linen goods, 17,000 metres of l.u.s.trines; 7,200 metres of merinos, 7,000 metres of muslins, 14,000 metres of _Indiennes_, 57,000 francs"-worth of mercers" wares, 24,000 metres of calicoes, and, finally, 3,100 yards of velvet. When we remember that this is the annual outlay for keeping up the household wardrobe, not the original outlay in establishing it, it seems to me that the workpeople of Anzin ought to be, and indeed one need only walk and drive about the region to see that they are, at least as well clothed as they are housed and fed.
Umbrellas even have come to be regarded as "necessities" here, and the stores annually supply 1,300 of these useful but essentially fugitive articles. The men are clothed by their village tailors and bootmakers chiefly, so that the masculine wardrobe is represented in the accounts of the stores less extensively than the feminine. But the Anzin miners nevertheless annually invest in scarves and cravats to the number of more than 4,000. Each man on going into the employ of the company receives, as I have said, a complete mining outfit, the cost of which is not defrayed out of his wages. But the miners annually buy, on an average, 500 new mining-suits for themselves.
Tables, chairs, bedsteads, bureaux, well made and often handsome, are to be had in all these communes at very low prices; and I went into no house in any of them which did not seem to me well equipped in these particulars. Engravings, coloured and plain and lithographs, are to be found in them all, and though the people are obviously not much addicted to literature, I found in one miner"s house at Thiers quite a collection of books, and most of them good, sensible, and instructive books, installed in an upper chamber, in which the housewife said, her "man"
liked to sit and read when it was too hot out of doors in the garden.
This good dame, by the way, was of the opinion that "the house gives you the character of the wife," and that "the conduct of the husband depends upon the character of the wife." Her own "man" was evidently an excellent and orderly person, so I considered it a legitimate compliment to a.s.sure her that I entirely agreed with her.