Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

Absolute monarchy was the ruin of the French peasant; or at least it was his _moral_ ruin; for the absence of his lord, while depriving him of his one glimpse into a world a little larger than his own, was sometimes incidentally the occasion of enlarging Jacques Bonhomme’s narrow field. My lord spent a terrible deal at Versailles. Dress, play, an outfit for the wars, soon ran away with the income of parental inheritance. Often enough the agent had to sell (and pretty much for what it would fetch) a strip of meadow here, a spinney there. Now, while my lord was always spending, the peasant, on the other hand, was in a peculiarly favourable position for saving. Money scarcely ever left his horny grasp. He paid his rent chiefly in kind, stock, _corvées_, and quit-rents of one sort or another; but he sold his cattle and crops for coin, at the fair, and put the treasured sols and livres in some safe place behind the rafter or beneath the hearthstone. The _corvée_ was the making of the peasant: pure profit, as he thought, since he only paid in sweat and sinew, instead of lessening his hoard of secret silver. He mowed his lord’s meadows, mended his roads, carried his grist, and wood, and fodder, lent his cart and horse for transport, worked on the estate so many days a month with nary a penny of wage, was harassed, hampered, overworked, if you like; but the _corvée_ was a form of rent, and the form his soul preferred. In exchange he had his cot and his fields, the right to fatten his porkers in the oakwood, the right to pasture his cow on the grassy edges of the lane, the right of gleaning his master’s corn in the fields, his faggots in the forest, and also the dried beech-leaves which stuffed his bed, and foddered his kine. Every _corvée_ brought him in some specific advantage; so that, while his masters were running a break-neck race to ruin at Court, Jacques Bonhomme was buying, out of their parental acres, here a strip of rye and there a cabbage-patch: inconsiderable snippets of land scattered here and there, up and down the country-side, presenting no importance to the eye, but representing a small estate increasing with every generation. Jacques’ grandson may be Georges Dandin, even as the great-grandsire of my Lord, perhaps, may have been the wealthy boor of the “Lai de l’Oiselet.” The seventeenth century has little but mockery for the peasant-parvenu who marries the squire’s daughter, yet their son, ennobled by the mother’s gentlehood (for there are many houses _où le ventre anoblit_), may carry arms and be a gentleman. Even without this maternal warrant, there are short cuts to rank; for the snob is of no generation or society, but pan-endemic, so to speak, in all highly civilized centres. Does not Madame de Sévigné paint for us a certain little Lord “who is all honey, especially to dukes and peers”? Does not Molière show us his Arnolphe, who ennobles himself with scant ado and calls himself M. de la Souche?

“Et d’un vieux tronc pourri de votre métairie
Vous faites dans le monde un nom de seigneurie.

* * * * *

Je sais un paysan qu’on appelait Gros-Pierre,
Qui, n’ayant pour tout bien qu’un seul quartier de terre,
Y fit tout à l’entour faire un fossé bourbeux
Et de Monsieur de l’Isle en prit le nom pompeux.”

IV

While Molière shows us the peasant growing fat on the fruits of his master’s recklessness and absence, La Bruyère, with his profound and moral vision of things, reveals the other face of absenteeism: the diminished standard of virtue, decency, comfort, in the deserted villages; the peasants sinking almost to the condition of savages, spending nothing on themselves, and living only in one thought--how to save enough to buy another rood of land. Meanwhile the soil itself, ill cultivated, and prized by its absent owners merely as a game-preserve or an investment, was soon overgrown with rush and bramble, and returned to marsh or bog or forest, as of old. Few spectacles can have been more harrowing to the social or moral eye than the French villages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

“There be certain fierce and shy wild animals, male and female, which are scattered up and down our country-side. They are sunburned to a sort of dull black, and walk bent towards the earth they delve; on straightening themselves, they show, it is true, a human face, and, in fact, they are men and women; they withdraw from the fields at nightfall to their dens, where they sup on black bread, roots, and water. They spare their fellow-men the labours of seed-time and harvest, and do not deserve to lack the bread they sow.”

Could Swift have exhaled more generously his _sæva indignatio_? La Bruyère, the deepest and tenderest mind of his generation, was therefore a man of wrath. “Seizures for debt, and the bailiff’s man in the house, the removal of furniture distrained, prisons, punishment, tortures, all these things may be just and legal. But what I can never see without the renewal of astonishment is the ferocity of man to man.”

But especially was La Bruyère a man of wrath when his mind’s eye fell on rural France. The Italian and Spanish travellers of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, who showed themselves so sensible to the charm of country life in France, would no longer, could they have revisited the scene, have found the least occasion for their praises. The nobles of France no longer dwelt in their castles, among their peasants, protecting the village at their gates; and our philosopher wonders how lords, who might have lodged at home in a spacious palace, with a suite for the summer planned to the north, and winter quarters open to the sun, should count themselves happy to lie in a miserable entresol at the Louvre, with scarce a closet for their wives to receive their guests in. During the eternal round from Paris to Versailles, Versailles to Marly, Marly to Fontainebleau, and thence to Paris, what time has my lord to think of the hundred poor households whose labours bring in his hundred thousand livres of revenue? An agent collects the rents; and if the peasant be too poor to light a fire in winter, within sight of my lord’s forests; if he go clad in a sheepskin or a ragged sack; if he go without bread to eat--be sure it’s not the fault of my lord Duke. He is the kindest soul alive. He has not the slightest wish to oppress his tenants. He has only forgotten them! “And is not all this a presage for the future?” breaks off La Bruyère.

Again and again he reiterates his warning, finding something unnatural and shocking in the complete divorce between town and country. Scarce a man at court could tell a flax plant from hemp, or wheat from barley--don’t speak to them of fallow fields or aftermath, of laying down a vine or of marking a young tree fit for the axe: “provignage” and “baliveau” are no longer French, it seems. If, once in a way, on the occasion of a hunting party or a Royal progress, my lord duke proceeds to the home of his ancestors, and decides to open his purse-strings and spend money on the place, be sure he has some fine scheme for an avenue right through the heart of the forest, or a terrace raised on arcades with an orangery, or a fountain with a piece of artificial water which he takes the village brooks to feed. But reclaim a marsh, clear a wood, rebuild the tenants’ cottages? Never! These be pursuits for rustics. Nay, cries La Bruyère, and we hear the tears in his prophetic voice: “Rendre un cœur content, combler une âme de joie, prévenir d’extrêmes besoins ou y remédier?--la curiosité des grands ne s’étend pas jusque là!”

Immured in the circle of their own delights and interests, the nobles of France had lost touch with the peasants. The country, to please them, must be all in moor and forest, good for game; and the fertile plains of Brie are less to their fancy than the wastes of Champagne. They would turn the crofters from a sheeprun to make room for the deer. The landlord’s house stands untenanted, though now and then he may use a shooting-box. And if in his old age (after twenty, thirty, forty years of hard service) the old soldier, the disgraced or disillusioned courtier, should haply retire to his paternal acres, too often he finds them weed-grown and desolate, the manor half in ruins, the turret and pigeon-cote tumbling about his ears. He no longer knows by sight the peasants on the estate; he has lost his taste for the land; and the first wet season sends him packing, if he can. Meanwhile, in his abandoned village, Jacques Bonhomme--whose landlord is no longer the friend, protector, justice of the peace, but just a tom-fool in a laced coat, who cannot tell a blade of wheat when he sees it--Jacques Bonhomme continues to starve, to sweat, to diddle my lord’s agent, to curb his back to the blow and his heart to the sod, to suffer, labour, spare, till his stocking is full of hard-earned pence and pounds; till his mind is a wilderness of savage and sordid squalor, without an idea, an ideal, nay, a hope or a feeling, beyond the land. What wonder if the son of the rich peasant be so often the vulgar parvenu we meet in Molière and Marivaux? Rather let us marvel that sometimes he turns out a capable man, soldier or statesman, who quits the glebe to save his country. But a Colbert, for instance, or even a Georges Dandin, is no longer a French peasant. Let us return to our sheep and their shepherds.

V

A hundred years later than La Bruyère, in 1787, another generous mind, another traveller of liberal views, less profound than the French philosopher, yet accurate, alert, and well-informed: brief, an English country gentleman--a

certain Mr. Arthur Young, of Bradfield Hall, Suffolk--was to visit the provinces of France and to give us his impressions of the French peasant. Arthur Young, like his forerunner, is a man of feeling. The social state of the poor preoccupies him no less than the condition of French agriculture, which was the original cause of his journey. Great is his wrath against the noble absentees who neglect the lands which their extravagance exhausts. For still Versailles, like some deep-rooted ulcer, absorbs and corrupts the forces of France; and the noble continues to spend the revenues of a farm on the lace and ribbons of a coat, or to turn out a country-side of crofters in order to enlarge a deer forest. Of late a new fashion had indeed revived the prestige of the long-neglected country-house. Two writers--Rousseau and the elder Mirabeau--had expressed perhaps, rather than directed, a movement of reaction; people began to think again of the life of the fields, of country pleasures, and country freedom. So Arthur Young shows us a France where many of the great nobles were agriculturists; the mode, says he, obliges the great of the earth to spend a summer month or two in rusticating at their rural seats; the Queen has a dairy-farm at Trianon; milkmaids and shepherds are the rage. The Duke of Larochefoucauld-Liancourt shares Young’s enthusiasm for turnips, and His Grace’s sister-in-law is no less passionate for luzern, of which, says Young, she grew more than any other person in Europe: “What was my surprise at finding this young Viscountess a great farmer!” No subject in France was then more modish than the rotation of crops. And no doubt even this superficial contact between the noble and Nature, the peasant and his landlord, was better than an absolute divorce; only it came too late. Both the noble and the peasant had deteriorated during the two centuries that they have lived apart. On the one hand, the careless selfishness of the cavalier; on the other, a rancorous squalor, a sordid if sometimes a servile disrespect. The “foppery and nonsense” of the country gentry struck Arthur Young no less painfully than the folly of those “glittering beings of Versailles,” to whose fine coats the well-being and decency of rural France were sacrificed. There were, no doubt, in the number of them a fair percentage of good landlords, just and coarse, proud and poor, such as M. Pierre de Vaissière shows us in his recent volume, “Les Gentilhommes Campagnards,” and a few great souls, like Liancourt. But an honourable and mediocre minority could not suffice to heal the breach, widened by centuries of absence, which divided peasant from landlord.

The new-fangled residence of the rich in their summer seats did, as a rule, but little to ameliorate the condition of their poorer neighbours. Too often, the peasants to them were as the pigs, for whom a sty is all sufficient. Our English gentleman-farmer pauses at Combourg, the old patrimonial hall of Chateaubriand, at that time a youth under twenty, occupied with his earliest literary efforts. This is how the historic manor of René’s father strikes the owner of Bradfield Hall:--

“One of the most brutal, filthy places that can be seen: mud houses, no windows, and a broken pavement. Yet here is a château, and inhabited. Who is this Mons. de Chateaubriand, the owner, that has nerves strung for a residence amidst such filth and poverty?... Below this hideous heap of wretchedness is a fine lake, surrounded by well-wooded inclosures.” Nor is this an isolated instance. Everywhere in France he tells the same tale--“the poor people seem poor indeed!”--“what a vice is it, and even a crime that the gentry, instead of being the cherishers and benefactors of their poor neighbours, should thus, by the abomination of feudal rights, prove mere tyrants.”

Thus the landlord’s summer residence on this estate was too often merely a convenience to himself and no advantage to the tenantry. He went home to wear out his old clothes, to consume the produce of his lands, to economize more or less sordidly for a forthcoming burst of splendour at Versailles. The only country luxury he cared for was the game-preserve or the deer-forest. In many districts the peasants might not weed or hoe their crops lest they disturb the young partridges; nor manure their lands near the forest, lest the flavour of the game be impaired; nor mow their hay before a certain date, however favourable the season; nor plough the stubble after harvest, lest they ruin the shelter of the young birds. Should the wild boar or the deer quit their native glades, and take to the fields, destroying the farmer’s crops, he might not shoot them or do them any injury. Such things, in any country, demand a revolution. Says Arthur Young: “Great lords love too much an environ of forest, boars, and huntsmen, instead of marking their residence by the accompaniment of neat and well-cultivated farms, clean cottages, and happy peasants.” Had the nobles planted turnips on the waste heaths and moors, there might (he thought) have been no Reign of Terror.

The feudal privileges of the French nobles seemed as shocking and unnatural to our free-born English squire as, early in the sixteenth century, they had appeared to Erasmus. The privileged classes were exempt from all taxation, of which the burden fell chiefly on the humbler sort. The _corvées_ had originally been a convenient exchange of service between master and man--so much toil for so much land or so much protection, or so many specified perquisites and privileges; but they had degenerated into a tyrannous abuse, enforced with endless fines and quit-rents. The poor farmer or cotter had to manage countless payments of so many fowls, so much butter, so much corn, so much transport, due to the landlord; mend the manorial roads and weirs; pay death-duties and marriage-dues; submit to the servitude of employing only the manorial mill, the manorial winepress, the manorial baking-oven. Moreover, in addition to all this (which was, in fact, his rent paid in kind and labour), the peasant of the eighteenth century was abusively charged a fixed and heavy rent in coin. In this way he paid twice over for his miserable cabin and few acres of land; while, as time went on, fresh _corvées_--_corvées_ by custom, _corvées_ by usage of the fief, _corvées_ by seigneurial decree, and servitudes of every sort, complicated his intolerable condition. No wonder that Jacques Bonhomme began to murmur and, in his dim slow way, to meditate the possibility of a change.

On the 12th of July, 1787, our kind apostle of turnips was walking up a long hill near Chalons in order to relieve his tired beast, and, so walking, was joined by a woman of the people, with whom he entered into conversation. She began, as is the manner of her sort, to complain of hard times, and said that France was indeed a most distressful country. This woman at no great distance might have been taken for sixty or seventy, so bent was her figure, her face so furrowed and roughened by labour in the fields. “Demanding her reasons, she said that her husband had but a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse; yet they had a _franchar_ of wheat (about 42 lbs.) and three chickens to pay as a quit-rent to one seigneur, and four _franchars_ of oats, one chicken and a sol to pay to another, besides very heavy _tailles_ and other taxes. She had seven children, and the cow’s milk helped to make the soup.

“‘But why, instead of a horse, do you not keep another cow?’

“‘Oh, her husband could not carry his produce so well without a horse, and asses are little used in the country. It was said at present’, she went on, ‘that something was to be done by some great folks for the poor, but she did not know how or who. But God send us better, _car les tailles et les droits nous écrasent_.’”

And these words recall to our minds another picture--that of the family of humble peasants whose furniture is seized, who are turned out of house and home by the king’s officers, in Laclos’ _Liaisons Dangereuses_ “par ce qu’elle ne pouvoit payer la taille.” Valmont, that worse Don Juan, in order to seduce the chaste and lovely Présidente de Tourvel, essays the talisman of virtue. By stealth, to all appearance (and yet well aware that he is followed) he hurries to the rescue, reaching the woodland village at the very moment when the peasants, in silent yet indignant groups, witness their neighbour’s eviction.

“Je fais venir le Collecteur; et cédant à ma généreuse compassion, je paye noblement cinquante-six livres (about £2 4_s._) pour lesquelles on réduisit cinq personnes à la paille et au désespoir. Quelles larmes de reconnaissance coulaient des yeux du vieux chef de cette famille et embellissaient cette figure de Patriarche qu’un moment auparavant l’empreinte farouche du désespoir rendait vraiment hideuse!... J’ai senti en moimême un mouvement involontaire mais délicieux; et j’ai été étonné du plaisir qu’on éprouve en faisant le bien.”

Here, good reader, is a companion picture to Aucassin and his driver of a team.

Yet, even before ’89, the French peasant was, most often, a merry lout. For, by nature, the blood of a Frenchman runs an alert and mirthful course, so that he takes advantage of the least excuse for cheerfulness. The Duke of Larochefoucauld-Liancourt, that virtuous Revolutionary, was exiled from his country by the Reign of Terror because, although a Revolutionary, he was a Duke; standing among the fields of free America in the harvest month of 1793, he marvelled at the mournfulness of that land of Liberty. These grim, gaunt Yankee farmers, counting their stooks of corn in silence, filled the good Gaul with something like dismay:

“Quelle différence du travail grave de ce peuple et de l’activité gaie, riante, chantante, des moissoneurs de mon pays. Tout le monde y était content!... Les rires, quoique perpétuels, ne dérangeaient pas le travail! Et les foins! Et les vendanges! Quel peuple au monde sait plus jouir du bonheur.”

VI

Young, with some slight exaggeration, rated one-third of the French territory as belonging to the peasant on the eve of the great Revolution. His editress, Miss Betham Edwards, has taken pains to verify this assumption, and in consequence assures us that not more than one-fourth of French land belonged to the labourer in 1787. Be sure that this quarter of the kingdom was the richest and the most highly cultivated. Here was no waste land, no marsh, no deer-forest, no game-preserve. Not far from Montpellier our traveller was struck with the luxuriant vegetation of a rocky district, a landslip composed for the chief part of huge boulders, yet enclosed and planted with the most industrious attention: “Every man has an olive, a mulberry, an almond or a peach tree scattered among the rocks, so that the whole ground is covered with the oddest mixture of these plants and bulging roots.... Such a knot of active husbandmen, who turn their rocks into scenes of fertility, because, I suppose, _their own_, would do the same by the wastes if animated by the same beneficent principle.” Again, one day, near Pau, he came across a scene “so new to me in France that I could scarce believe my eyes: a succession of many well-built, tight and _comfortable_ farming cottages, built of stone and covered with tiles, each having its little garden enclosed by clipt thorn-hedges, with plenty of peach and other fruit trees, some fine oaks scattered in the hedges, and young trees nursed up with so much care that nothing but the fostering love of the owner could effect anything like it. An air of neatness, warmth and comfort breathes over the whole. It is all in the hands of little proprietors, without the farms being so small as to occasion a vicious and miserable population. Proprietorship is visible in the new-built houses and stables, the little gardens, the hedges, the courts before the doors, even in the crops for poultry and the sties for pigs.”

More than a hundred years after the Revolution we may pause and admire the picture of these little farmsteads, as they flourished on the very eve of that great upheaval, for we may consider the condition that they represent as the happiest and most favourable for a rural district.

While Arthur Young was visiting and graphically describing the villages of France, a man of considerable gifts, but always, in those days as in these, an obscure individual, without renown or influence, was actually living in one of these hamlets and constantly observing what went on before his eyes. Even to-day, even among the students of his period, few had heard the name of J. J. Gauthier, Curé de la Lande de Gul, when, in February, 1903, a young historian, M. Pierre La Lande, attracted, perhaps, by a similarity of name, exhumed his “Essai sur les Moeurs Champêtres,” and printed a series of extracts from it in the _Revue Bleue_. Published for the first time in 1787--the very year of Young’s travels--the essay of the Curé de la Lande never attained the least celebrity; the whirlwind of the Revolution caught it in its eddy, and engulfed it along with drift of more importance. The tiny book, preserved in one sole copy, existing in the Municipal Library of Alençon, has to-day more value and more interest than it could have possessed a hundred years ago. It is a series of rustic portraits in the taste of the time, but obviously drawn from life, and betraying in their lively unpractised touch the hand of the gifted amateur, who often has that knack of catching a likeness which escapes your heaven-born artist’s skill. We see the curé, himself a peasant--avaricious by nature and breeding, yet charitable by grace--as he tramps the windy downs at lambing-time to count his tithe, implacable in the assertion of his rights, were it merely to half a calf’s head or a dozen starveling pears, yet capable of sharing his food and dividing his last faggot with the poorest of his flock. He looks not much wealthier himself, as he strides across the scene, his stalwart limbs clad in an old patched cassock, with his summer soutane flung across his shoulders, to serve as a plaid, above a worn-out judge’s gown, picked up second-hand. From his rusty wig to his vast and heavy high-low shoes, the curé is as ill-accoutred as any peasant of his flock. And he is scarce possessed of a more liberal education; he exorcises the thunderbolt with bell and book, and sprinkles with holy water the unfertile field.

The curé’s parishioners are as superstitious as himself, but singularly devoid of any real religious feeling. “The farmer is Christian enough in outward things. The Holy Virgin has a niche over his door, and he lights a taper there on feast days. He goes to church on high days and holidays, and takes the communion at Easter. But he has no great opinion of his parish priest, who rates him for beating his wife and forbids him to place out his money at usury. And as for his morals ... he holds that an act is bad or good according to what you risk by it, so that, if he see no rope a-dangling as the consequence of the deed, he will suppose it good, or at least indifferent.... Yon farmer in the market-place is an honest man; he has not stolen the heifer he pushes before him. Only he knows the beastie’s weak points, and will contrive to sell it you before _you_ find them out. He has fed it up, curled and combed it, chosen the propitious moment--be sure he will not acquaint you with anything which may not meet the eye.... The vet is more thought of than the doctor in our village. If a cow sickens, the farmer is anxious and worried, tries this drug and that, sends for the horse-leech. But if old Gaffer in the ingle droop and die, no one thinks of the doctor, nor would any one of the household stay at home in harvest-time to wait on his last hour.... There goes Goodman What’s-your-name! He is well-to-do, and has added field to field. But hear him talk, you’ld suppose him poorer than the very beggar in the church porch. He’s always grumbling. Corn for sowing costs a mint of money; times are hard; _he_ never has the luck to make a bargain at the Fair. Tell him he is comfortably off, and you’ll offend him mortally. Call him a poor beggar as loud as you please; he will like you all the better.”

Well, such is our poor fallen human nature! We could make such thumbnail sketches in many a village anywhere to-day. What is peculiar to pre-Revolutionary France is the respective attitudes of rich and poor. The poorest of the rich are sustained by a proper pride, a sense of their superiority, inconceivable to-day. The poor gentleman may live in a tawdry manor, tumbling about his ears for lack of due repairs; in his sordid seclusion, with no betters and few equals to enlarge his mind by their society, one thing alone emerges from the squalid round of his privations, and that is his ancestral pride.

“He holds the art of writing a mere mechanical exercise” (says our curé), “and thinks he knows enough for a gentleman if he can sign his name. He has a high idea of his birth and his prerogatives, and keeps his painted coat of arms bright and fresh in the church porch. He treats his peasant like a despot, dispenses justice, extorts his manorial rights, exacts his thirteenth with rigour.... He is exempt from taxes. But his old manor has neither turret nor dovecot (the outward signs of _noblesse_), and he can boast neither of fiefs nor vassals. Still, he is none the less a noble. Madame is never seen without her Fontange (a lace head-dress), though she be busy with her housekeeping--nay, though we find her in the stable, milking the cows. There is no woman-servant at the manor-house; an odd-lad-about cooks and gardens, serves at table and rubs down the horse. Monsieur, in constant alarm lest he be taken for a commoner, goes, on Sunday mornings, not indeed to church, where he has no pew (another country gentleman having, probably, a vested right to that public preference known as _les Honneurs de l’Eglise_), but to the churchyard, where he sits during service, his hound and his gun beside him, careful that some pale beam of his superior rank may set off his condition in every circumstance.”

The pride and the poverty of the good old country gentleman struck many a disinterested observer. The French _Revue_ (the late _Revue des Revues_) published, on May 15th, 1903, some most interesting letters, written from the little town of Fezensagnet between 1774 and 1776 by a Protestant lady, born in Germany, but French by race, and living in Gascony on the eve of the Revolution. The squalor, the sordid ways, the crass ignorance of the smaller rural gentry appalled this Madame Leclerc, though she has nothing but praise for the peasants and for the nobles of high rank. But these needy gentry, the shabby-genteel--the “half-sirs,” as they say in Ireland--are almost the only nobles to be met with in rural districts, “et je ne crois pas qu’il y ait rien d’aussi manant, d’aussi ignorant et d’aussi brute.” She finds the village peasants better dressed and better mannered as a class, with among them, here and there, individuals really superior: “il ne leur manquerait que de la pondre pour avoir l’air d’élégants,” barefoot though they be. The castle is shut up from time immemorial; its great solid walls and huge keep stand empty, save for the agent’s residence. My lord Duke, meanwhile, is at Versailles, and the French peasant never gives a thought to his absent Grace. Listen to the Curé of La Lande:--

“Came ye straight in descent from Bernard the Dane, or the faithful Osmond; though your ancestors were liege men of Merowig or Charlemagne, yet hope not, poor gentleman! that Hodge shall have any reverence for your rank and title. Wear your orders, gird on your sword, and go to the cattle fair; the best of you will meet with less respect than John the Burgess, with his good cloak and leather wallet stuffed with coin. I know not why, but this brutish herd has lost all confidence in the word of a man of rank, of old so much esteemed.” This stubborn and stalwart disrespect, this frank irreverence of the French peasant, struck more than one acute observer, on the eve of ’89. Mirabeau, in his _L’Ami des Hommes_ has remarked the same trait, but not without supplying an explanation: “In my own lifetime” (he writes) “I have seen a great change in the relations of landlord and peasant. Our lords, always absent at court, are no longer of any use or service to their tenantry, and it is natural that, forgetting, they should also be forgot.”

VII

Then came the Revolution, an event so great that I cannot hope to give the faintest, smallest image of it in this tiny frame. A world perished, and rose anew from its ashes, purified of many abuses, deprived of some valuable relics. But the substance of that world, which is French society, reappeared, after seeming annihilation, not greatly changed, nor absolutely renovated.

Of this there are a cloud of witnesses. Among them let us choose Larochefoucauld-Liancourt, whom we left an exile in America. Restored to his native country in 1800, after some ten years’ absence, he notes the progress of agricultural reform. Large estates have given place to very small ones, which, as a rule, produce a yield at least one-fourth more abundant than the old. Everywhere cultivation is more intelligent, for the owner puts his mind into his tillage. The homes of the peasants are improved, more spacious and cleaner; the labourers themselves are certainly less ignorant than their fathers.

“Ils sont plus qu’eux en état de réfléchir, de combiner, un peu moins éloignés de toute innovation.”

So writes, disinterestedly, the dispossessed Duke, as he sets the plough in the stately lawns and avenues planted by Le Nôtre, content to farm a corner of his old estate, camped in the servant’s quarters of his ruined palace. We could not have a more able or a more conscientious authority. But these were but the beginnings of a general reform.

In 1815 another philosophic English traveller passing through France--one Thomas Hodgskin--was struck by the sordid misery of the French peasant. And, in fact, the Revolution is not over even yet.

The _corvée_ is supposed to be extinct, but the smaller country roads are still mended by “prestation,” that is to say, by the personal labour of the farmer or his men, and he must find both the material and the means of transport. The feudal _banalités_ were solemnly declared defunct in 1789--that is to say, the peasant no longer could be forced to grind his corn, or to press his wine, olives, and walnuts, in the seigneurial mills. Yet, to take one contemporary instance among many: the farmers of the Isle of Bouin in Vendée are compelled by contract to bring their sheaves to the thrashing machines of their landlord; the only difference being that this landlord is no longer a noble, but a great agricultural syndicate--the Société des Polders. In the same commune, the same society exacts the feudal rights of terrage--that is to say, it requires a sum of money, a yearly premium, paid in addition to the annual rent in kind--and it also levies a tax on the winepress, just as if the Revolution had never taken place. “C’est l’Ancien Régime à peine modifié,” writes M. Léon Dubreuil.[2]

At Olmet, our village in the Cantal, the farmers pay a quit-rent, or _redevance_, to their landlords in addition to the rent: so many brace of poultry, so many cheeses, so many pounds of butter; a special kind of cheese, the most delicate if the smallest, weighing from two to twenty kilos, is made for this purpose, and still bears its ancient name, the _fromage de maître_. To-day, even as six score years ago, the farmers of the Bourbonnais do all their landlord’s carrying--wood from the forest, corn to and from the mill, stones from the quarry, according to the mediæval _corvée de transport_; and here, too, the quit-rent flourishes undiminished: butter, fowls, turkeys, are exacted in tribute from the tenant. It may happen that he sell his milk straight from the cow to a dealer in Paris or to an hotel at Vichy; in this case, he must buy milk from his neighbours in order to churn the seigneurial butter, as nearly always he buys his turkeys, the birds being very delicate and difficult to rear. Here, also, reigns the right of terrage under the name of _impôt colonique_. And, in this part of the country, the game laws seem scarcely altered by the Revolution; the crops being often destroyed by the abundance of wild creatures, without any indemnity offered to the farmer.

But everywhere in rural France an eye educated in feudal custom sees the survival of the Elder Order. Readers of Zola’s novel, _La Terre_ (scarcely, one would think, a treatise of seigneurial rights), will remember the telling scene when the old peasant, no longer able to cultivate his lands, cedes them to his children in return for a yearly rent of four and twenty pounds. “You’ll pay me the rent,” says he, “and then, besides, there’s the quit-rent: a barrel of wine _per annum_, a hundred faggots, and every week ten litres of milk, a dozen eggs and three cream cheeses.”

The children protest, but the village notary declares: “The wine, the faggots, the cheese and the eggs are objects of use and custom. People would point at you in the street if you did not pay the _redevances en nature_.”

Of all these survivals from the mediæval times the most frequent is the habit of letting farms _en métayage_, that is to say, paying the rent in kind, on the system of half profits. It is, I imagine, a very ancient and natural custom; for I read in the Talmud: “Four shares to the labourer, and four shares to the owner of the soil;” yet, for some mysterious reason, this arrangement, which seems on the face of it so fair and equitable, is as disastrous to the farmer, in hiring a farm, as it is to the author in publishing a book. In all the South of France,--in the Landes, Dordogne, Gironde, especially--a great part of the country still is cultivated in this sort of partnership. At the close of the eighteenth century, two-thirds of the soil of France--according to some authorities as much as five-sixths--were occupied in this fashion, for the labourers were, as a rule, too poor to rent their holdings in solid coin. Even to-day you may roughly gauge the prosperity of a district in this fashion: if the agricultural classes are prosperous, then they are farmers or peasant owners; if they are sunk in poverty, be sure they are _métayers_. Too often in this case the landlord is an absentee, and consequently careless of improvements; too often the _colons_ are penniless and ill nourished, and so ignorant that the soil, perforce, is poorly tilled, the barns and stables ill repaired, the stock badly managed. For what is no one’s property is no one’s pride. The landlord gives the land, and the capital, or _cheptel_--which comprises the stock and barns, etc.; an inventory of these is taken when a tenant enters into possession, and he is compelled to keep them in repair. On his side, the peasant gives his work. And the harvest is divided, either in kind--grain, wine, olives, cattle, at the time of their maturity--or more often in money, when the peasant brings to his landlord half of the profits after the fair or market at which he has sold the produce. The arrangement is simple, and this is the chief argument in its favour and the only reason why it endures.... A farm hand and a dairymaid fall in love and marry; they have no capital, but they can work, and in a dozen years they hope that their children will aid their efforts; for a child of eight or ten can be of much use on a small farm. They hire an acre or two of land, which they undertake to cultivate _à moitié fruits_, hoping to economize enough to purchase little by little a freehold of their own. A man and his wife, both working in the fields, can cultivate about three acres of cornland; if they have the wherewithal to buy a cow they will probably add three or four acres of pasture, paying the rent in produce. With such poor farming as they can bestow,--scant labour, less knowledge, little manure,--their holding of six or seven acres may bring them in some twenty pounds a year. How can they save on such an income? For they must renew stock and tools, tide over a bad season, bring up their children, tend their sick, bury their dead. They will just scrape along, deeming themselves fortunate indeed if they lay by a small provision for their extreme old age. “In the isle of Bouin,” writes M. Dubreuil, “such is the fertility of the soil that landlords and farmers alike are certain of prosperity. Only the _métayer_ languishes in poverty.”

But _métayage_ is slowly and steadily dying out. It lingers in the west and south; it languishes in the centre. In France to-day, on an average, if you take a hundred farms, you may count some seventy landlords managing their own estates, a score of farmers, and only ten _métayers_. By the middle of this century it is probable that rural France will be divided between the large farmer and the small peasant owner.

VIII

When the Bourbons returned to France after Waterloo they had, as the phrase runs, learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The nobles took possession of the remains of their estates, and thought to restore the habits and privileges of their forefathers, or at least to adapt to modern manners the principles of the _ancien régime_. But they found in the peasant a sleepless suspicion, a silent energy and cunning, which thwarted all their efforts, and which, if they persisted, would often turn to violence, maintaining the rights of the people by the horrors of a _Jacquerie_. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed more than one peasants’ revolt. And if some plot of the reactionaries should one day place again upon the throne of France a son of the House of Orleans, or a Bonaparte Pretender, be sure the _croquants_ of the South, the _Jacques_ of the North, would defend their liberties again as violently to-morrow.

Two fine novels, each a masterpiece, treat, from different points of view, this resistance of the peasant class, and the consequent disintegration of the great feudal domains. _Jacquou le Croquant_, by an almost unknown novelist, Eugène Le Roy, is the work of a man over sixty, a native of Périgord, working on the traditions of his native place and the tales of his grandfathers. Published in the last years of the nineteenth century, it gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of rural Southern France, as the author may have seen it in his earliest childhood, before 1848. The book is written from the peasants’ point of view, and full of enthusiastic Republican sentiment. Balzac’s _Les Paysans_ hold a brief for the other side. One of Napoleon’s generals, the Comte de Montcornet, purchases in 1815 a feudal estate on the borders of Burgundy and the Morvan, and attempts to dwell there in the due state and pomp of a great noble. He preserves game, vows vengeance on poachers, protects his forest trees against the customary thefts of the village, and, like the farmer in Wordsworth’s ballad, forbids the old women to filch his faggots. And naturally he attracts the hatred and suspicion of the peasant. Even his own agent sides with them against him:--

“On veut vous forcer à vendre les Aigues. Sachez le: depuis Conches jusqu’à la Ville-aux-Fayes, il n’est pas de paysan, de petit bourgeois, de fermier, de cabaretier, qui n’ait son argent prêt pour le jour de la curée.”

And the book ends with the triumph of the peasants and the parcelling of the domain.

“Le pays n’était plus reconnaissable. Les bois mystérieux, les avenues du parc, tout avait été défriché; la campagne ressemblait à la carte d’échantillons d’un tailleur. Le paysan avait pris possession de la terre en vainqueur et en conquérant. Elle était déjà divisée en plus de mille lots et la population avait triplé entre Conches et Blangy.”

“Such is progress!” exclaims Emile Blondet, on an impulse of passionate irony.

It is not picturesque certainly. And yet I remember a magnificent picture of Sisley’s, representing just such a scene: small fields of cabbage, and strips of rye, with one bouquet of poplars, basking in the hot blue of a July noonday; and I know no finer landscape. Still, we will admit with Emile Blondet that the mysterious forest glades were infinitely lovelier. On one side, the utmost beauty and luxury reserved for one man; on the other, a thousand fields, and a tripled population living in tripled comfort. On which side is progress? On which side is the price too dear to pay? That is the question.

An old French lady, who could recall the _ancien régime_, was wont to say, when invited on a country visit: “No, I never go into the provinces, since they have turned all the castles into farms.” She had a prophetic eye. If the castles are to survive, they must be turned, more or less, into farms, and their owners are becoming increasingly aware of the fact.

Among the young gentlemen of France to-day there is a spirit of return to the land. The Institut Agronomique instructs every year a bevy of eager agriculturists, many of them belonging to the upper classes and possessing landed estates of their own. These young men at five and twenty are content to leave Paris and cultivate their acres in Normandy or Languedoc. For myself, I think them wise. I would be, if I could, a large farmer in a grass country, raising cattle and cheese (a crop less chancy than corn), with plenty of children, all employed on the estate, and a handsome wife, ever the first to rise and the last a-bed. Only the life of an inspector of forests (no one has ever said all that the Fables of La Fontaine owe to his employment as a Master of Waters and Forests), or that of a university don (which latter existence, indeed, much resembles my own), appear to me quite as pleasant as this. I know one or two such farmers, and think them aware of their good fortune; their neighbours eye them with envy, for such men are rare, since few of the farming class possess hereditary acres, while few can afford to pay the rent of a farm large enough to prosper--some £400 a year, for instance, such as my neighbour, Farmer Langeac, pays for Olmet. It is true that less land is needed to make a large income from cereal land or vineyards; but, when we come to crops, if the rent is less, the expenses of farming are much greater. The accounts of a farm in the isle of Bouin are lying on my writing-table: I find that when his rent is paid to the utmost farthing, the farmer must still reckon on spending some four guineas an acre on such necessary processes as ploughing, sowing, manuring, reaping, carrying, threshing, etc. Doubtless he may reap a considerable profit, for the polders of Vendée are among the most fertile fields of France. But only a man of substance can make so large a stake, or may afford to renew it annually, to tide over a bad season, keep his barns and machines in repair, and pay every week no paltry sum in wages.

IX

More frequent and less ample is the lot of the peasant owner. No fields are so prosperous as his, for no fields are tilled and dug with such untiring devotion: spade-culture forms the staple of his art on the tiny strips of land he is so proud to call his own. If, at the Revolution, one-fourth of the soil was in the hands of the peasant, the proportion to-day is certainly far greater; but the farms are smaller. In the plains of Beauce, round Orleans, the peasant freeholds compose more than three-fourths of the land, but the constant division of property by equal inheritance has reduced every little farm by multiplying its owners. The soil of this thickly populated district is so fertile that a farm in Beauce, however tiny, may be supposed sufficient to support a family; and in all rich and teeming countrysides, such as abound in France, the excessive division of property, consequent on the application of the Code Napoléon, has perhaps, up to the last twenty years or so, done more good than harm. An acre of strawberry gardens at Plougastel, of vegetables at Roscoff, of carnations at St. Remy de Provence, is still a valuable piece of property, an exceeding artistry and skill in cultivation compensating here the narrow limits of the field. But in such a case the soil, the climate, the economic conditions must all work for the farmer and conspire to crown his efforts. In ordinary pasture, in light soils too poor for wheat, too chilly for the vine, the peasant owner needs a larger glebe. Three acres and a cow are not sufficient to maintain a family in constant well-being, unless the circumstances be exceptionally favourable.

A small Socialist review, unusually well written and well informed, _Pages Libres_, has recently published a series of rural studies, each the monography of some small village in the provinces of France. In this way, the hamlet of Voulangis-en-Brie, the fertile polders of the Isle of Bouin, the villages of the Bourbonnais, so dear to the shades of Sterne and Arthur Young, each and all become known to us almost as if we had passed a summer there, for the schoolmaster, the large farmer, the local poet and archæologist, have each had a hand in these humble but not unimportant annals, and faithfully reproduce the various world before their eyes.

Voulangis, a village in Brie, counts five hundred inhabitants, almost all of them living on the land as farmers or agricultural labourers; the commune comprises 958 hectares. For clearer comprehension, let us say that it contains about 2700 English acres, of which a quarter are forest and woodland. Subtract again some three-score acres occupied by roads and lanes, and there remain 1750 acres devoted to practical agriculture. The odd thing is that these 1750 acres are divided into no less than 10,600 lots of land!

Few indeed are the peasant owners who have their scanty acres, so to speak, in a ring fence. No, with a strip here and a paddock there, according to the hazard of heritage or purchase, their tiny possessions are generally scattered over an area of several miles, thus greatly enhancing the fatigue and expense of the farmer. More than mere chance has presided at this minute dispersion. In all classes in France (and not only since the Revolution, but by a very ancient law and custom which dates back to the early Middle Ages), all the children inherit equally. Even in noble families, the law of primogeniture, as we understand it in England, has never obtained in France. In some rare cases, a _majorat_ favoured the elder son; but as a rule he had nothing beyond the very modest privilege which awarded him the family chateau and the land immediately adjacent--the _vol du chapon_--the surroundings “as far as a cock can flutter.” As for the farming class, and even the class of country gentry, from time immemorial their lands have been divided between all their progeny alike. Suppose that a peasant farmer in Brie has so many acres of meadow, so many acres of forest, so many acres of rich arable land and a good-sized vineyard; do you imagine that on his death one son will take the pastures, another the cornland, and so forth? Not a bit of it! Each child will claim a slice of each sort of soil; and their children again will subdivide, till the strips of meadow, rye, cabbage, or vine, are not fields at all, but merely gardens. During the first seventy years or so of the nineteenth century, this morselling of the land suited well enough with the habits of agriculture in rural France. The plots of land were tilled with the tiny one-pronged _araire_, or Roman plough, just a tooth of wood tearing the fertile earth; more often they were not tilled at all, but merely worked with spade and hoe and pitchfork. Comparatively few peasant-farmers owned a horse--some weather-beaten patient ass or cow carried in panniers the wood from the forest, the manure from the stable, and the corn to the mill. The women and the children fed the beasts--there were but one or two of them in the byre--with handfuls of long grass, or leaves of trees, plucked by the roadsides or in the forest glades, and rolled to a bundle in their apron--even as Arthur Young remarked them of old, and thought it a great sign of poverty. No need, however, to grow much clover, or maize, or vetch or mangel-wurzel, for the cows in those days. These cows, fed on weeds and grass, these tiny plots turned over with spade and fork, afforded a considerable profit in times when the small farmer, owing to the difficulty of transport, had not to reckon with the products of the model-farm in a distant district. But railways and machines have changed all that. The plough, and especially the steam-plough, the thrashing-machine, the reaping-machine, are useless in these garden-grounds, while the expense of manual labour increases every year. A peasant-farmer now can only prosper where his holding is so small that he can cultivate it _en famille_. At Voulangis, for instance, a haymaker earns from 5 to 6 francs a day, a harvester from 7 to 10, while the thrashers, even in winter time, average 4 francs of daily wage. These prices are beyond the reach of small owners. And no less beyond their reach are the machines which do the same work so rapidly and cheaply. Yet they must sell their grain at the price set by the large farms where corn is sown, reaped, thrashed, and carried by steam labour. Moreover, the agricultural colleges and model-farms have raised the public standard, and buyers are no longer satisfied with the produce which contented an earlier generation; while transport is so easy that an establishment of repute can diffuse its fruits, milk, or butter, far and wide. At Olmet, for instance, I do not eat the butter of the farm, ill-churned and made from clotted cream, but that supplied by the Etablissement Agricole de Roche-sur-Loue, hundreds of miles away in Franche Comté.