My second country (France)

Contents

Introduction vii

Chapter I

British mistakes about France — The paradox of the French character — Individual and collective intelligence — The difference between Paris and France — The democratic spirit — Respect for authority — Social and political liberty — French intellectuahsm — French Chauvinism and British Imperialism.

CHAPTER II PROBLEMS or RECONSTRUCTION .... 40

France an agricultural country — The peasantry and the proletariat — Limitation of the family— Effects of the war on the population — Economic and financial situation — Should France become an industrial nation ? — Protection and its results — The colonial system — Economic Malthusianism — The Government and the profiteers — The power of finance.

Chapter III The Administrative And Political Systems . 73

French institutions not democratic — The centralized administration — Examples of bureaucratic methods — The real rulers of France — The political police— The French Constitution — Secret Treaties — The French Parliament — Methods of election — The power of the Senate — Proposed constitutional reforms.

iv CONTENTS

Chapter IV

THE DISCREDIT OF PARLIAMENT AND ITS CAUSES. Ill

Anti-parliamentarism — Causes of the decadence of Parliament — Backwardness of social legislation — Neglect of economic questions — Powers of French landlords — Criminal procedure : the secret instruction — Influence of politics on the administration of justice — What the Third Republic has done — Secularization of the schools — Separation of Church and State — The Associations Law of 1901 — The Religious Orders — Present impotence of Parliament — The group system — Failure of the Radical Party — Fear of responsibility — Corruption in French politics : its causes — Arbitrary powers of the Executive — How deputies are corrupted — The choice between revolution and reaction.

Chapter V

Mistakes of the Revolution chiefly due to external interference — Jacobinism and the Terror — Causes of French militarism — Social and economic results of the Revolution — The abolition of the old provinces — Natural and mystical patriotism — Necessity of decentralization — M. Jean Hennessy's proposals.

Chapter VI

. SMALL PROPERTY AND ITS RESULTS . . .183

"^he bourgeoisie and the peasants — Subdivision of property — Demoralizing influence of small property— The petit bourgeois spirit — Selfishness of the wealthy classes — Large and small landlords — Thrift — Economic results of small property — The fear of taking risks — Backwardness of French business methods — The banking system — The petit bourgeois spirit in national finance — Conservatism in practical matters of life — Lack of initiative and enterprise — Effects of small property on wages and salaries — Failure of jjeasant proprietorship — Obsolete agriciiltural methods — Waste of labour — Decrease of the rural population — The critical situation of agriculture — The great qualities of the peasants — Ideals of the proletariat^ — The intellectual bourgeoisie.

CONTENTS

Chapter VII Socialism, Syndicalism And State Capitalism. 235

Why France needs Socialism — Socialism and Etatisme — The railway system — Tramways and omnibuses — The postal service — State monopolies in practice — The pawnbroking monopoly — The vices of State Capitalism — Reaction against Etatisme — The Syndicalist theory — The C.G.T. — Communist and individualist Anarchism — Reformist and revolutionary Socialism — Effects of the war on Socialism and Syndicalism — Revolutionary Socialism and Liberalism — The reaction in the bourgeoisie — Probability of revolution — French Socialists and direct action — The dictatorship of the proletariat — Example of the Paris Commiine — The Federative Communist Republic — Realism of French Socialism — Mr. Wilson's failure and its results — The bourgeois proletariat — Dangers of the present situatioia.

Chapter VIII

Voltaire the representative of the " True France " — The other France : Pascal, Chateaubriand, Joseph de Maistre — The Liberal Catholic movement : Lamennais, Montalembert, Lacordaire — Puritanism in French Catholicism — The non-religious character of the French — Political Catholicism — The Modernist movement : its failure — Identification of the Church with reaction — Catholic revival in the bourgeoisie — Bruneti^re — Decline of religious practice — Effect of the war on religion — Bergsonism and Pragmatism — The Church and M. Bergson — Henri Barbusse — The revival of Rationalism.

Index 319

Introduction

The title of this book has not been chosen at random : it is Hterally true. France has been my home for more than twelve years, but it was already my second country long before I went to live there. Indeed I cannot remember a time when France had not a large place in my affections. Among my earliest recollections are the pictures of the Franco- German War of 1870 in the bound volumes of the Illustrated London News which we had at home. Perhaps my elders who showed and explained the pictures to me were themselves Francophile ; they must have been, or how should I at that early age have been filled, as I was, with enthusiasm for the cause of France and indignation at the wrongs that she had suffered ? Later on Victor Hugo and Swinburne intensified my love and admiration for France and gave it a more reasoned basis ; France became for me the country of the Revolution, the symbol of democracy and republicanism. Since then my opinions on almost every subject have changed more than once, as must the opinions of any man that has lived more than fifty years in this world, unless his existence has been that of a vegetable, but the enthusiasm for revolutionary and republican France has never changed or diminished.

The love of France in the abstract took a concrete form as I came to know French people. I went to live in France of my own choice, not because any viii INTRODUCTION

circumstances obliged me to do so. Since then it is almost too little to say that France has been my second country. When circumstances made me an involuntary exile in my native land, I found myself less at home there than in my adopted country. For I have not merely lived in France : I have lived with and among French people. Most foreigners that go to live in France fail through no fault of their own to get into close contact with the French people. Many of them remain in France for years without ever getting to know the French in their own homes, and mix almost entirely with other immigrants of their own nationality ; their acquaintance with Frenchmen is restricted to business or official relations. For the French, although far from inhospitable, are slow in making friends and reluctant to open their doors to strangers.

It was, however, my good fortune to have several French friends — two or three of them even intimate — before I went to live in the country. I was, therefore, able soon to make more friends and from the first I have lived almost entirely in the society of French people. Moreover, although my home is in Paris, I have friends and acquaintances in many other parts of France, and they include people of various classes and opinions. I have intimate friends among the Parisian proletariat ^ and long

^ Although it is true that the situation of the modern workman is not identical with that of the Roman proletarius and that all workmen are not absolutely indigent, I agree with M. Emile Vandervelde (" Le Socia.hsme centre I'Etat," pp. 70-72) that there is no sufficient reason for abandoning a technical term which is convenient, universally understood and sanctioned by seventy years of usage. The proletariat was defined by Marx and Engels as " that class of modern workers who have no means of subsistence except in so far as they find work and who find work only so far as the work is profitable to capitalists." There are workers that do not belong to that class and some word is necessary to make the distinction.

INTRODUCTION ix

stays in various country districts have enabled me to know the peasants and that admirable body of men and women to whom France owes so much — the country school teachers. The more I know the French people the fonder I become of them. Like all human beings, they have the defects of their qualities, but they have one quality which makes them the most charming people in the world to live with — they understand the art of living.

In these pages, which are intended to be a slight contribution to the study of some aspects of French life, attention will be drawn to certain defects, as they seem to me, in French institutions and methods. I shall make no apology for drawing attention to them. Their existence is recognized by all the thoughtful Frenchmen that I know, although they would not all agree as to their causes and possible remedies. Indeed, if I venture to write about them, it is only because I have been repeatedly urged to do so by French friends who have been good enough to say that my peculiar position enables me to combine the detachment of an outsider with some amount of inside knowledge. Their opinion is, no doubt, too flattering, but at least I can claim to speak with sincerity and sympathy. The first suggestion of a book of this kind was made to me before the war. So long as the war continued it would have been inopportune, but at this critical moment in the history of France, when she will need all her intellectual and materia] resources to recover from the terrible blows which the war has dealt her, it is useful to consider what changes may be necessary to the solution of the vast and difficult problem of reconstruction. The political situation in France appears to me to give every sign that she is nearing the end of a regime. I do not believe that the political

X INTRODUCTION

institutions which have now existed for nearly fifty years can survive, without radical alterations, the social and economic upheaval which the war has brought about in Europe. They have never worked satisfactorily, for they were falsified in their origin, and the war has revealed in a glaring light their fundamental inconsistencies. In some other than political respects France is behind the times and drastic changes are needed if she is to recover herself and hold her own in the world. Much may be hoped from the marvellous recuperative power of the French people, of which so striking an example was given after 1871 ; but the injury inflicted on France by the war of 1870 was trivial in comparison with that which the war just ended has inflicted upon her. All the good sense and all the intelligence of the French people will be needed to repair that injury. And this time, if the recovery is to be as complete as it was half a century ago, there must be a far more searching examination into economic and political conditions and far more drastic measures must be taken with abuses and with the obstacles to progress raised by the obscurantist conservatism of certain classes. If, in however small a degree, I can contribute to the necessary examination, I shall feel that I have repaid a fraction of the debt which I owe to the country which I have chosen as my home and in which I hope to spend the rest of my days.

Robert Deli,.

London, 29 September, 1919.

Chapter I

British opinion in regard to France has completely changed since the war. Before the war the French were popularly regarded in England as a frivolous people. Most Englishmen's knowledge of France was derived from trips to Paris, often undertaken for the purpose of indulging in amusements which their reputation for respectability and an observant conjugal eye prevented them from enjoying in London, Manchester, or Birmingham, although those places give just as many opportunities for them in a rather more sordid form. Nothing has amused me more than the comments of English friends on the immorality of France, comments made with a sublime unconsciousness of the fact that, if they found what they call immorality in Paris, it was for the reason that they would find it in any large town, namely, because they went to look for it. For them France was Paris ; and Paris was the Grand Boulevard, the showy restaurants, the Folies Bergere and the night cafes in the neighbourhood of the Place Pigalle. The French were, therefore, a people in the habit of sitting up in cafes half the night with hospitable ladies on their knees. Hence the legend that the French were frivolous and dissolute. In fact, they are an extremely serious and hardworking people, less eager for amusements than the English and more capable of amusing themselves. Nowadays too many English people never seem happy without set amusement ; they must be at a theatre, a musichall, or at least a cinematograph. The braying band in nearly every London restaurant betrays the sad fact that conversation is a lost art. In France it is still the amusement that all intelligent people like best, for in France even smart society has not killed conversation by declaring it " bad form " to talk about anything but golf or the idiosyncrasies of one's acquaintances. The French are gay, they are witty, but they are less frivolous than the English in the true sense of the term. Young Frenchmen perhaps took life too seriously even before the war ; they have had too much reason for taking it seriously during the last five years.

According to popular legend before the war, the French were not only frivolous and immoral, they were also a decadent race. It must be admitted that this legend was encouraged by certain political parties in France and by their organs in the Press. The French reactionary papers, in their hatred for the Republic, had been preaching for years that republican institutions had demoralised their country and reduced it to decadence. For some reason, which I have never been able to fathom, foreign correspondents in France quote almost exclusively the reactionary Press ; it is not, therefore, surprising that foreign opinion was misled. The result of these errors was general amazement in England and other foreign countries at the way in which the French people rallied to the defence of France and at their heroic conduct in the war.

THE FRENCH CHAKACTER 15

These decadents turned out to be the best soldiers in the world. More than once the bravery of the French soldiers alone saved the Allies from defeat ; the defence of Verdun will ever be counted one of the most splendid examples of human courage and tenacity in the history of the world.

Nobody that knew France was surprised. More than ten years ago, when the 17th Regiment refused to fire on the revolting wine-growers in the South of France, I protested in an article published in the London Nation against the deduction that the soldiers of that regiment would refuse to defend France against attack. I maintained, on the contrary, that their conduct was a proof of superior intelligence which would make them all the better soldiers in a cause which they believed to be just. They held that they had been called upon for military service only for the purpose of national defence, and they refused quite rightly to be used as a police force against their own relatives and friends. As citizen-soldiers they regarded themselves as free men and not as slaves. The war has justified my opinion.

French reactionaries have tried to account for a phenomenon which belled their prophecies by the theory of beneficent war which changes hearts and characters by a miracle. Miracles do not happen and a great crisis such as the war does not change people : it reveals their true characters. In France, as elsewhere, the war has shown people as they really are — has laid bare their qualities and defects. On the whole, it has not given us in any country a very pleasing view of human nature, but it has at least proved that the French are not a decadent race.

The discovery that they are not has caused English opinion suddenly to veer round from one extreme to the other — from ill-informed criticism to equally ill-informed and indiscriminating laudation. Frivolous and immoral France has become a sort of hermaphrodite deity made up of Joan d'Arc and M. Clemenceau. I am not sure that this extravagant adulation is more complimentary to the French than the extravagant depreciation of the past, for the latter at least allowed them to be human. The present attitude of the British public towards France is rather like that of those men who regard women as angels too good for this world, and consequently treat them as imbeciles. Some fate will have it that we in England almost invariably praise the French for qualities that they do not possess and blame them for defects which are not theirs — or else applaud their defects and condemn their qualities.

Perhaps it is not surprising after all that the French are not understood by other peoples, for they are not easy to understand. The French character is a paradox : it combines elements apparently opposed to one another. For instance, the French in the majority are conservative in all that matters, but at the same time they are \J ruthlessly iconoclast and indifferent to historical

associations. So there is no country in which such closeness in money matters and such generosity are to be found side by side, sometimes in the same individuals. Again, one of the most striking qualities of the French is their innate good sense ; it is most conspicuous perhaps in the peasants, but most Frenchmen have in them something of the peasant. The bourgeois ^ is usually the descendant of

1 I shall use the terms " bourgeois " and " bourgeoisie " throughout this book. They have almost becomie English words and there are no synonyms for them. The term " middle class " is not a S3monym for the bourgeoisie, which includes the upper class. (See page 26.)

peasants and so is the workman of the towns ; both retain traces of the soil. This good sense is conspicuous in all the ordinary affairs of daily life. It is rationalist, even materialist — as positivist as the philosophy of Auguste Comte, that essentially French intellect. But in politics the good sense of the Frenchman often seems to desert him and he becomes the sport of words and phrases. This is more true of the bourgeoisie than of the other classes and least true of the peasantry; even in politics the peasant retains his shrewd scepticism and sense of realities. The bourgeois has suffered from a too purely literary education which has made him attach more importance to words than to things. The total ignorance of economic questions, for example, that one finds even among Frenchmen of high intelligence and great knowledge is astonishing. Nowhere is that ignorance more general than among politicians ; not one of the most prominent men in French politics outside the Socialist party, except M. Caillaux, has any real knowledge of economics or seems to pay much attention to them. M. Clemenceau is a case in point. His greatest admirer would not venture to say that he ever grasped even the elementary data of an economic problem or ever thought it worth while to try to do so ; his attitude towards such problems is purely romantic and literary. Oratory, too, has a fatal influence in French politics ; French orators are many, and among them are some consummate artists — M. Briand, for instance. The taste for rhetoric is as dangerous as a craving for drugs and has much the same effect on the mind as have drugs on the body. Hence the tendency to desert realities for metaphysical abstractions which leads a Chamber of Deputies to greet with frantic applause the declaration of a Minister that France is " the most beautiful moral person " that the world has ever seen. Hence, too, the obsession of victory as a sort of metaphysical conception, an end in itself, which led to a disastrous refusal to count the cost of victory or to consider its practical results. And now that the victory has been won, French good sense reasserts itself, too late, in the declaration of M. Clemenceau that it is only a Pyrrhic victory for France.

Probably in no country is the level of individual intelligence so high as in France ; certainly in none is the interest in intellectual matters so widespread. The contrast with England in this regard is very marked. In England knowledge and intellect are regarded with suspicion by the majority of people and any manifestation of them is bad form in polite society. If a " gentleman " happens to be learned or intellectual, it is his business to hide the fact and pretend to be interested in golf scores or cricketing records. The arid waste of the London suburbs is weekly refreshed by numerous periodical publications chiefly devoted to the movements of titled people and to photographs of duchesses and their babies. Such papers would have no readers in France, where nobody knows the name of a duke unless he should happen to be remarkable for something else than his title, but where the names of great artists, great writers, great savants, and great men of science are household words. The only aristocracy that counts in France is the intellectual aristocracy. When in England has any great man of letters been the object of popular adoration like tHat given to Victor Hugo and Beranger, who could hardly walk the streets of Paris without being mobbed ? Wliere except in Paris would a taxi-driver refuse to take his fare from a great writer, saying that it was enough to have the honour of driving Anatole France ? If there were an Anatole France in London no taxi-driver would know him by sight. The Parisian piidinette makes pilgrimages to the grave of the original " Dame aux Camelias " in Montmartre cemetery and lays violets on the tomb of Abelard and Heloise in Pere-Lachaise. Nothing more endears to one the French people than their passionate cult of genius and their immense respect for intellectual superiority. But, like all human qualities, this respect for intellect has its drawbacks; literature and men of letters have had too great an influence in France. Their influence is one of the causes of the excessive importance attached to words and to ideas in themselves. It has led to a notion that, when one has had a fine idea and has expressed it in fine language, one has done all that is necessary. It may be true that the success of the Germans was in great measure due to their faculty for giving practical expression to the ideas of others, and that may be, as the French are inclined to think, a proof of inferiority. But that faculty is likely to prove more profitable in this world of hard facts than a capacity for producing ideas without the power of giving them practical application. The mission of the French has been to provide the world with ideas. It is a noble mission which makes the existence of the French more important to the world than that of any other nation; but the practical application of the ideas has sometimes been the work of other peoples.

Perhaps the excessive influence of the written or spoken word accounts, at least in part, for one of the greatest French paradoxes — the striking contrast between individual and collective intelligence. All collectivities are less intelligent than most of the individuals that compose them ; for some reason

c 2 which has never yet been satisfactorily explained, the intellectual and moral level of the crowd is never higher, and often lower, than that of the least intelligent and least moral individuals of which it is composed. The war has proved that. All men except the very lowest are better than their Church or nation. The greatest crimes in history have been committed, not by individuals, but by Churches and States, and even Christians attribute to their God barbarities of which none of them would be individually capable; for gods have the mentality of the crowd. All human progress is due to the revolt of the individual against the collectivity; in other words, to the revolt of reason against faith. Faith is essentially an attribute of the crowd and the faith of each individual really depends on that of the others. Hence the extraordinary manifestations of collective credulity which appear at all periods of great tension, such as the year 1000 and the recent war. The myth of the Russians in England was a striking example which showed that the mentality of the crowd is much the same in the twentieth century as it was in the tenth. Nowhere is this contrast between individual and collective intelligence so marked as in France. Whereas the French are individually more intelligent than any other people and are conspicuous for their good sense, they are collectively inferior in both qualities to some other peoples whose individual level is lower than theirs. This explains certain phenomena in French politics which invariably puzzle the foreigner with a knowledge of France, who cannot understand how people so intelligent and sensible individually can be so easily led astray by political will-o'-the-wisps and induced to forget realities in the pursuit of abstractions.

The French respect for mtellect is perhaps a manifestation of their essentially democratic spirit. More than any other people they judge a man by his capacities rather than by the accidents of birth or fortune. They are remarkably free from the snobbery which is so prominent a characteristic of the English and the Americans; there is snohisme in France, but that is not the same thing. What there is not, is the ludicrous respect for titles and descent. Here, however, one must distinguish. One of the greatest obstacles to the real understanding of France is the great difference between the various classes on the one hand and the various parts of the country on the other. The ancient provinces, abolished legally, survive in fact and are inhabited by different races. The old natural patriotism — the attachment of a man to the village or the town or the province where he was born — has not been eradicated by the mystical patriotism invented by the Revolution.^ Again, in no country is the difference between the classes so great as in France; the gulf between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is so wide that they are almost like two nations. For these reasons it is very difficult to generalise about the French character. A commor. civilisation, common political institutions, and a common educational system have produced certain characteristics which may be called national, since they are prevalent all over France, but even they are not universal. No true judgment can be formed about France without taking into account the regional and class differences. One has to ask not merely whether a man is a Frenchman, but also from what part of France he comes and whether he is a bourgeois, a peasant, or a workman. To give an example, the question

* See page 174.

whether the French are a sober or a drunken people cannot be answered by a simple affirmative or negative. In the wine-growing districts they are sober on the whole, and what drunkenness there has been was chiefly due to absinthe, the manufacture of which is now suppressed. In Normandy, Brittany, and French Flanders, which have the misfortune to have no wine, drunkenness is very prevalent. For wine maketh glad the heart of man, but spirits make him drunk and too much beer makes him stupid.

One of the mistakes most often made by foreigners is that of identifying France with Paris, In fact, Paris is strangely unlike the rest of France and the Parisian is a type apart, very different from other Frenchmen. He that knows only Paris does not know France. Parisians are recruited from every part of France ; every one of the races that make up the French people is represented among them and there is a constant immigration into Paris from the provinces. If the population of Paris (the city within the fortifications) rose from 1,851,792 in 1872 to 2,888,110 in 1911, the increase was certainly not due to excess of births over deaths, which is smaller in Paris than in France generally — indeed, there is sometimes in Paris an excess of deaths over births. It was due to immigration from France itself, for the foreign population of the department of the Seine was actually slightly smaller in 1911 than it had been in 1886. In the second generation at least the provincials that settle in Paris become Parisians — indeed, the immigrants themselves often undergo the change and become indistinguishable from " Parisiens de Paris." The faculty of assimilation which is a characteristic of France as a whole is peculiarly strong in Paris, Of course, no country is really represented by its capital. Since the capital is the seat of government and the centre of pleasure-seeking, the proportion of wealthy people is always much larger in the capital than elsewhere, especially of wealthy people with no occupation. Nowhere in England is there so large an idle class as in London. In every capital there is an exceptionally large number of parasites and hangerson of the ruling classes and the rich and a large miscellaneous and more or less worthless population. The capital is often the spoiled child of the Government; at any rate it comes in for most of the official fetes and functions. Perhaps this is the reason why the capital of a country is usually more patriotic than the rest ; it may be that London tends to be Imperialist and Paris to be Chauvinist because the Londoners and the Parisians see most of the outward pomp and show of imperialism and militarism.