Adolphe Renouard; or, Peasant Life and Political Clubs in France ... With numerous engravings

Introduction

. The object of the following tale is to reveal the internal workings of the political and social institutions of France. The writer has chosen the Revolution of 1848 as the in cident of his tale, because it brought out in stronger relief the character, the feelings, and the opinions of the working classes, and showed the precise line of demarcation between them and the classes immediately above them. The causes that produced those feelings and opinions are still in operation, and cannot fail ultimately to produce results of a still more startling and afflicting nature. We allude to the minute division of the soil, which is ever at war with the accumulation of property, and is continually restricting the resources for the employment of labour. The disproportion between the means of employment and the numbers who require it, must strike every one who has even cursorily studied the condition of France; but to the close observer — to those who, like the writer, have sojourned long in that country, and have made the subject an especial object of study — it suggests a train of thought which leads to the solution of the difficulties that surround it.

INTRODUCTION.

. VI The mistake which the social architects of the first Revolution committed, was in enacting the compulsory division of the soil, although the people at large regarded this alteration in the law as the means which would in time realize their dream of a partage egal des biens et des revenus — of that universal equality which would consist in all sharing alike in the wealth and income of the country. But had the legislators themselves ever contemplated the consummation of such a regime, they would certainly have provided for the interrupted process, and the final stability of the work, by securing property against mortgage. From this, however, they abstained ; and France, under the operation of its partage egal des heritages during little more than half a century, has been split into thirteen million titles, encumbered with mortgages amounting to thirteen milliards of francs, or 520 millions of our money !

The agriculture of France — which should do more than support itself ; for, by the laws of nature, agriculture is the origin of all capital, and in every civilized country is capable of acquiring some savings of income which supply capital for other pursuits — has been a continual drain upon the resources of the country. Instead of contributing any thing from its savings to the extension of commerce, the facilities of trade, or the progress of manufactures, it has required an annual subsidy, from the other branches of the community, of not less than ten millions sterling, for which the soil has no more to show than the sandy desert of Sahara has of last year's showers. The result of this fearful

INTRODUCTION.

. VII experiment, of attempting to elevate the lower orders by destroying the aristocracy, — without which it was as impos sible for a middle class to grow up under a monarchy, as without a lower class itself, — was sufficiently manifest under Louis Philippe's reign. The influence of real property was so pulverized, if I may use the expression, by the attempt to bring about the fondly cherished principle of equality, that a people of 35,000,000 only furnished 200,000 electors, while the Crown fed 60,000 placemen, and was supported by 400,000 men-at-arms ! From the preceding remarks, it will readily be inferred that France, so long as she is under the influence of the pernicious law of a compulsory division of property, cannot relieve herself from the mass of poverty which drains her resources, and threatens periodically her political and social vitality.

It is from this surging mass of poverty, that her towns are continuously filled with the elements of revolutionary outbreaks, and which furnish the characters we have attempted to illustrate in the following tale. Adolphe Renouard, Andre- Jacquot, and Gaspard Ferrete, are but types of some thousands of individuals which, more or less, are numbered amongst the industrial classes of France. J. W. London, 3<M Nov. 1852. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. THE PARTY AT M. BOISSON'S Frontitpiece . ADOLPHE AND MARIE Title THE SUNDAY VILLAGE DANCE p. 3 ADOLPHE'S

INTRODUCTION.

TO WIDOW CREMY IN HER CABARET . 47 THE MEETING AT FATHER CHOISEUIL's 157 THE BAL MASQUE 222 THE AGENT DENOUNCING LAFONT IN THE HALL OF THE SOCIETE ROUGE 250 HEATH OF THE LOCKSMITH AND THE COLONEL ADOLPHE RENOUAUD.

Chapter I

" Ye sad-faced men, people and sons of Rome, By uproars sever'd like a fijglit of fowl ; Scattered bv winds and high tempestuous gusts, Oh, let me teach you how to knit again This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf — These broken limbs again into one body." Titus Axdroxicvs TN the little village of Autun, in the commune of Artois, lived and had lived, for sixty years, Jean Renouard. Jean was one of that class which is rare in England, though we have something analogous to it in the Arcadian notion of a forty-shilling free holder ; that is to say, Jean was a petit prop-ietaire of about six acres of land, which he occupied himself, and upon which he contrived to live without any other industrial resource. In Switzerland such a man would have been a weaver, or a watchmaker, as well as a farmer; and in England he would have found additional employment on the larger farms of the parish; but for poor Jean, in France, there were no such opportunities.

There were no manufactures within the commune; nor in the village was any farm larger than his own, though many were considerably less. Indeed, Jean was comparatively rich, for he B ADOLPHE RENOUAKD. kept a cow, and, what is more, a horse ; though it would hardly have passed muster for a horse in this country, even with a sand-boy. The English reader will suppose that Jean's little farm must have been beautifully cultivated; and especially when we inform him that Jean, besides his own pair of hands, had two well-grown sons to assist him. But such was far from being the case. The fences just denned the limits of his little estate, without affording it any protection; and the standing corn grew thin and wiry on the ridges, and refused to grow altogether in the furrows. The bit of fallow lay in lumps, matted together by twitch-weed; and in the meadow the mown grass lay in almost imperceptible swaths, foreboding a winter of sad privation to the two already half-starved animals, whose condition showed that they were too well accustomed to such scanty provision.

Was Jean, then, a sluggard? Or were his two hulking sons content to share the old man's loaf, without sharing in his labour? No; father and sons alike toiled from sunrise to sunset upon the sulky soil, and heroically too, for they never expected any better return from it. Why should they? Why should they expect more than their neighbours, whose httle plots were, all around for miles, as stubborn and as unproductive as their own? It is now about thirty years since I first visited Jean's com mune. Wars, aud even rumours of wars, had then ceased; and all had become reconciled to the peaceful pursuits of a laborious industry. The soil was gradually recovering from the neglect of a quarter of a century; for although the iron heel of the enemy had not defaced it during the horrible ravages to which every fair portion of the continent, except France, had been exposed, the merciless conscription had proved more injurious to it than fire and sword : yes, if the soil of France was so long sacred from invasion, while Frenchmen were devastating the soil of every other country into which they could cut their way, it paid dearly THE SUNDAY VILLAGE DANCE for the security and repose which it enjoyed.

The blood which was shed at Marengo or Austerlitz did not fertilize the fields of France. The false patriotism of the people, and the false glory of their ruler, blinded both to the madness of a conscription, which desolated their own country in order to carry desolation into others ; and France herself was fast becoming a desert while endeavouring to conquer, by depopulating, the world ! Bootless security ! Fatal repose ! Better that the rich harvest had been trodden down, or given to conflagration on the soil, for that would have been a fructifying devastation ; and the truly patriotic soil — oh, that matter should be thus superior to mind !— would have avenged itself on the barbarity of its enemies by yielding twofold and threefold to its sons when the storm of invasion should have passed away.

The soil abhors such repose as tyrants and con querors can bestow upon it. Solitudinem faciunt — pacem appel lant ! Other conquerors have inflicted this cruel mockery upon the countries they have subdued : Napoleon inflicted it upon his own! But the fields of Autun, as I have said, were now recovering from the long neglect to which the conscription had doomed them; and everything indicated the gradual progress of rural prosperity. It was on a Sunday afternoon that I entered the village ; the devotions of the day had been duly discharged, and now all was rustic gaiety and mirth. In the midst of the Place, the lads and lasses were " dancing to tire each other down," to the music of three tolerable violins ; while the damsels, with their pretendus, or lovers, y/ere chaffering for ribands at the stall of an eloquent marchaiul en boutique, joking with the good natured gendarme, or holding filial-like converse with the aged cure.

Yes, reader; be not shocked that the aged pastor was there, watching with placid delight the innocent gambols of his flock, and enhancing their pleasures, as at other times he soothed their sorrows, by his sympathy. b ADOLPHE RENOUARD. The cure, like him of Veretz, described by Paul Louis Courier, was a sensible and well-informed man, verging upon fourscore, and yet fond of youth, and too reasonable to wish to reform them according to the pattern of a by-gone age, or to rule them in the spirit of the bulls of Boniface or Hildebrand. It was before hi3 door that they danced, and mostly in his presence. So far from rebuking these amusements, he made himself a party to them; rightly judging that the influence of his presence, and the respecS with which he was invested, would impart to them additional propriety and virtuousness.

Wise and truly pious pastor ! May his example be followed for the comfort of the poor, and the edifi cation of his fellow-creatures, and the repose of his commune ; where his prudence kept all in peace, in calm, in union, and concord ! The history of this amiable man, as he imparted it to me himself, was a simple but interesting one. He was a cadet of the seignorial family which had once reigned over the commune as feudal lords. He had been originally educated for the Church, with a view to the rich benefice of the commune; but the Revolution came, and, while it swept away all the rest of his family, left him, by the decree of March 1790, a poor rector, with onlytwelve hundred francs a year, exclusive of his glebe-house and garden. He was, even at that time, past the meridian of life, and he had therefore tasted of its luxuries; hut he had scarcely ever regretted them, except when his poverty stood in the way of his charity.

" It must be a great satisfaction to you, my good cureV' I observed to him one day, " to have lived to see the Restoration." "What makes you think so?" he replied. "You do not suppose that I covet — much less expect — the restoration of anything which once belonged to me?" " No," I returned. " I was thinking of anything less than that. But is it nothing to see the restoration of that moral simplicity ■ t of manners, which was once so fearfully corrupted by the revolutionary contagion, which for a season infected all France?" The cure shook his head, and sighed. " You have fallen into a very common error, my friend," he said, after a pause. " There are few things, indeed, of all that the Revolution has effaced, which I should wish to see restored ; and last of all, the simplicity of rural manners, which you imagine to have distinguished the old regime.

Before the Revo lution came, like a tempest to purify the land, it was afflicted with a worse plague than the plague of locusts in Egypt : the land swarmed with beggars, with human beings, who were regarded by the lords of the soil as destructive and as offensive as vermin ! The high roads and avenues to towns — for a cordon was drawn round to prevent their incursions — were infested with them: the chateaus and convents were perpetually besieged by them. Locusts, did I say ? They were to the class who fared sumptuously, and who were clothed in fine linen, as the plague of lice ! And then, as to those whom the dissipation of the noblesse could still afford to support in a state of serfdom on the land, read La Bruyere's too faithful description of them. ' By day,' he says, ' scattered over our fields, you may see certain wild animals, male and female, black, livid, naked and sun-burnt, tearing up the soil with invincible perseverance.

They utter articulate sounds, like human beings, and when they stand upright exhibit a human counte nance ; and, in fact, they are human beings. At night they retire to their dens, where they live on black bread, water, and roots.' Do you think, my friend, that there could be much rural simplicity of manners amongst a population like this?'' " And how do you account," I asked, " for the great improve ment which has taken place in their moral and physical condition?" " Physically," he replied, " the improvement is easily accounted for. Remember how we have been thinned, and to what extent ADOLPHE RENOUARD. the soil has, by a momentous experiment in legislation, been set free to the independent possession of labour. And morally, too, the Revolution and the events which sprang from it have done good.

They have shaken out of the French peasant all the hisouciance and indolence which centuries of abject and hopeless dependence had engendered in him. They have sharpened not only his wits, but his senses. If he has been doomed to suffer, suffering has taught him to enjoy; and if you see him now so blithe and so happy in the bosom of his family and friends, it is the recollection of the cruel separations to which he was formerly doomed, which mainly contributes to make him so." " Henceforth, then," I observed, with a smile, " we may expect him to become a peaceable citizen of the world, if the world will only allow him to be at peace. I think I can say as much for my own humble countrymen." " Tliat will depend upon the ultimate result of the legislative experiment to which I have alluded," he rephed.

" Hitherto, the continued sub-division of the soil, enforced by our law of inheritance, has done much good, because it has given compe tence to many at the expense of the few. But I fear, that when competence comes to be split into shares, as opulence has been, all will alike labour under an ever-decreasing insufficiency, until general poverty will be the result. Indeed, I see something of this already. Fifteen years hence, when all the patriarchs of the present generation are gone, I fear that the evil -will become more imminent, and that the legislative power will not have the courage, or the power, to arrest it." " And in fifteen years more " I interposed. " I shudder, at times," he said, " when I consider what must be the consequences. Depend upon this, sir, — all revolutions in modern times, may be traced to some rottenness in the founda tion of society.

If the moral and material condition of the masses be sound, their mere existence is a barrier against any violent change ; but these once undermined, any bold and mis chievous hand may precipitate the whole body politic into confusion. And what I apprehend from the present material condition of the great masses in France (who comprise nearly three-fourths of the entire population) is, that it cannot last. Insolvency is already undermining it." I expressed my astonishment that people, seemingly so frugal and industrious, should be guilty of such wretched economy as to encumber themselves with debt. " Yes," he continued, " they are both temperate and laborious ; but, unfortunately, it is one of the worst effects of our law of succession, that on the death of every proprietor, the land is too frequently subjected to a fresh mortgage.

That law, in fact, is at war with a passion which prevails in all civilized communities — ■ a passion for the possession and acquisition of property in the soil. On the death of the parent, the law compels an equal distribution of the land, or its value, amongst the children ; while the eldest, or some member of the family, will make any sacrifice to preserve it from division, as much as possible. He is anxious to buy up the shares of his co-heirs ; but he has no capital for the purchase, and the usurious mortgagee is his only resource. And the same thing occurs whenever there is a plot of land in the market. There are twenty competitors for it, not one of whom has the means to pay for it, except by mortgaging what he already possesses. Before the period you have named — thirty years hence — unless the State forbears from compelling this arbitrary division of the soil, it will be parcelled out amongst millions of pauper proprietors, who will be encumbered with a mortgage-debt, as heavy as the national debt of Great Britain.

And this is not all. It will be impossible for agriculture to flourish under such an incubus ; and the produce of the soil will gradually dimmish as the burdens upon it increase. Indeed, this is perceptible already. Our live stock, which should replenish ADOLPHE RENOUARD. the soil, is disappearing; and every year there is a greater breadth brought into tillage. And how can it be otherwise, when the needy heir of a few acres will part with even his last cow, to obtain a greater share of the patrimony than the law will allow him to take by inheritance ?" " Surely," I observed, " the statesmen of France will recognise and remedy such an evil, before it becomes altogether incurable." "Hem!" replied the cure, with a smile; "we have plenty of statists — we have always been famous for them ; but statesmen, in the true sense of the term, we could never boast much of.

They do not, with us, profess to study the cause of the wealth of nations, as they do with you. If they can keep Paris and the other great centres of population quiet, they think they have achieved all that is comprehended under the category of good government. They pay very little attention to the simple villager's welfare; and in a few years they will pay still less, for we are daily losing all political consideration in the State. The sub-divi-oion of the soil is disfranchising us hourly." '■ And if your simple villagers are contented with their political insignificance," I observed, " do you not think that their exemp tion from party strife is a positive addition to their happiness?" " Perhaps it is," he replied, "for the present; and ' sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.' But the time may come when their indifference may prove dangerous to the State.

The spirit of our large towns, which engross all political influence, rs especially democratic; and the time is coming, when that of the agricultural classes will be democratic too, or anything for a change." " On the contrary, one would have supposed," I remarked, " that their mode of life — their continuous occupation — their domestic habits, and above all, their isolation from the political world — would have strongly prejudiced them against anything like innovation." '■ You must not judge of my countrymen by your own," he returned. " There is this striking difference between them : that the rural population of France have no traditions to prejudice them in favour of established institutions ; and when there are no traditions, there can be none of those instinctive attachments which are repugnant to changes.

Amongst us, everything is new. Our old men know nothing of a constitutional monarch)', and our young men, nothing of monarchy of any sort." " Still, though they may not comprehend the theory, or care much about the working of their present constitution," I rejoined, " I do not see how their ignorance or apathy can prove dangerous to it, so long as they are contented with their condition." "But how long," observed the cure, " will they remain so?" " As long as the State abstains from oppressing them," I replied. " Exactly so," was the answer ; " remember that the State may oppress the people as much by even popular laws, if they are unwise laws, as by the most arbitrary acts of spoliation. When the people find themselves universally impoverished, their impatience of the system will not permit them very nicely to analyze its errors.

In nine cases out of ten, the fundamental error has been one which they fondly cherish as a peculiar privilege or blessing — a popular error, with which it would be almost perilous for the government to interfere. You see something of this kind at home in your Poor Law. Your legislature know, that while it is robbing the owner of all beneficial property in the soil, it is reducing the masses of the lower orders to universal and depraving pauperism; aud yet they fear to create a revolt by reforming it. Fatal as that law is to industry, the working classes cling to it as their Magna Cliarta. Enacted in the spirit of charity, and jealously cherished by your agricultural labourers as their natural inheritance, it has been the source of all their degradation, and of all the oppressive laws which have been found necessary to curb the licentious spirit which it has engendered.

No possible despotism of modern days could have rendered their condition so dangerous and so wretched as that well-meaning and most popular law." " But you have no Poor Law here," I observed. " No," he continued, " we have no Poor Law ; but we too have had our vota dies ex audita malignis; and though the gratification of its desires is hastening society to its dissolution, the legislature dare not dash the poisonous cup from our lips." "You allude again to your law of inheritance; but if the people are so attached to it, I do not see how the governmemt can incur their resentment or dislike by abstaining from meddling with it." " It is their blind attachment to this law," he replied, " which will create all the danger. They will not believe that it has pro duced the monstrous evils which it will most assuredly entail upon them : all their suffering will be ascribed to misgovernment.

And if the opulent landed gentry of England groan under a Poor Law tax of six or seven millions a year, what will be the disposition of the pauper proprielaire of France under a mortgage-debt four or five times as great? Do you not -think — as there are no dynasti cal or constitutional prestiges to keep them in the straight path of loyalty and order — that they will accept any change in the hope of ridding themselves of this intolerable burden in the scuffle ?" I walked silently by the cure's side for some distance, musing upon the melancholy future which he foreboded for his country. At length, wishing to draw him round to the brightest side of the picture — the present — I said, " At any rate, my dear cure, you may thank God that all is as yet innocence, cheerfulness, and repose." " But how long -will that last, even in my own little commune ?" he asked; " and from how many once happy spots has it not been already banished by mistaken zeal or bigoted intolerance !"

" You surprise me," I exclaimed. " Surely no one would be mad enough to undertake a crusade against the harmless recrea tions of such an unsophisticated people !" " It is even »o," he replied, with a deep sigh. " You would see much more of it further south; but even here the society has its missionaries. How long their secret influences will prevail at court, I know not ; but if they make their footing sure in that quarter they will extinguish every spark of religion in the country." '-' I always thought," I observed, " that they were men of an austere example, and rigorous in exacting religious observances to a fault." " Yes," he returned; " their fanaticism is unsparing; they have undertaken nothing less than what you call a crusade — a spiritual crusade to subjugate the whole people under their yoke — and a heavy yoke it is.

The French villager is constitutionally of a pious cast ; but his devotion is of a cheerful, hoping, confiding character. His heaven is a heaven of sunshine; but these young Jesuits, who now monopolize every vacant cure, would discipline him on earth for a heaven of gloom. They will permit no reunions on Sunday evenings and saint days, for the innocent dance or open and honest courtship ; for I should tell you that wherever a seminarist has taken up his abode, the preset and gendarme are entirely under his control. They forbid all manly games, anathematize the harmless scrapers of catgut, place cabarets under a ban, and banish the poor ambulants with their trinkets and finery; and worst of all, they have revived, in all its exacting despotism, the moral counterpart of the Inquisition — the Confes sional."

" And what has been the result ?" " Why, the women have become unhappy, and the men cross and brutal. For the latter there is no longer any pastime abroad, or any comfort at home. They abandon the house of God altogether, because they cannot endure the sight of His minister — and, in fact, are becoming downright reprobates in disgust. Be lieve me, sir, that there is no tyranny so galling to a man as the tyranny of religion, when it is practised upon him through the woman he loves. The Jesuit catches every word she whispers into his ear — marks every mute expression of tenderness and passion — and the husband cannot avenge himself upon the licensed spy on the dearest secrets of his heart. As for the poor damsels, they yield to the spiritual spell, and are miserable ; and the men can hardly believe that the curious confessor improves their purity bv skilfully catechizing them as to their proficiency in sin.

Sweet and sanctified indeed is the confession of a heart overflowing with penitence and remorse ; but extorted inquisitively and wantonly, it is as suggestive of as many evil thoughts and loose desires as Satan could have insinuated into the ear of our mother Eve." "You think, then, that the religious character of your humbler countrymen will be damaged by this vexatious and fruitless attempt at spiritually enslaving them ?" " Not only their religious, but their moral and domestic cha racter will be irretrievably damaged, if the persecution be continued long. And most unwisely has the government acted in the matter, by placing the temporal at the disposal of the spiritual authority. The preset and the gendarme, who disperse a dance, or close a cabaret at the bidding of the seminarist, instead of being looked up to as protectors, are regarded as tyrants; and as they both derive their power from the government, the government itself becomes obnoxious and hateful."

" What can be the motive," I inquired, " for this movement on the part of the restored dynasty?" " The truth is," he answered, " that the men of the Restoration are extremely ignorant of the state of public feeling. I do not say of public opinion, for there exists none — in the rural dis tricts. After an absence of a quarter of a century, they have brought back with them nothing but the remembrance of the agrarian outrages, by which the peasantry revenged their long oppression during the sudden frenzy of the Revolution; and it is fashionable error to attribute all the excesses which distinguished that remarkable crisis to the infidel doctrines of the encyclo pædists. I doubt whether the encyclopædists — the school of Voltaire, Bressen, and D'Alemhert — would not have written in vain, even to the higher classes in France, had they not already been thoroughly demoralized by the corruption and licentiousness of the court.

The encyclopædists only interpreted, and, if I may so s&\,formularized, the practical infidelity which had long been the secret charm of fashionable society before it could be decently avowed, and was the 'national rdigion of our salons, our coteries, and our learned professions, far anterior to its open propagation as a creed. But the contamination was only infectious in the atmospheres of cities, where a loose and sketchy education just qualified the higher orders for the reception of a meretricious and convenient philosophy, and where the lower classes, without affecting to understand the spiritual speculations of the scoffers, could not fail to be infected by the gross immorality which they ultimately licensed in the public conduct of the beau monde. But the peasantry were protected from the infection by the wretched state of ignorance which was an unavoidable charac teristic of their servile condition.