Part 12 (2/2)

With the war came upon it, of course, heavy and unexpected burdens: German local exactions, its share of the general German ransom of France, local war expenses, and its share of the general war expenditure. For three years the citizens left their affairs, thus disturbed and enc.u.mbered, to be managed by a munic.i.p.al council trained in the methodical habits of the imperial administration, with the result that in 1874 the expenses of Amiens amounted to 2,479,802 francs, and its revenues to 2,016,130 francs, leaving thus a deficit of 463,672 francs, substantially accounted for by the necessary payments on a loan of 5,000,000 francs negotiated in Brussels by M. Dauphin at the very high rate of 7-1/2 per cent. The affairs of Amiens were arranged three years afterwards by a munic.i.p.al Commission, which turned them over, in 1878, to the 'Republicans of Gambetta,' with a budget involving an expenditure of 2,686,660 francs, against a revenue from taxation of 2,249,245 fr. 52 c., showing a reduced deficit of no more than 437,405 francs.

By 1880 the expenditure had risen to 3,156,616 francs, while the revenue stood at 2,531,762, showing a deficit of 624,854 francs, being an increase of nearly fifty per cent, in two years! From that time the gulf has gone on widening between the receipts and the expenditure of the ancient capital of Picardy, until the figures laid before me, as taken from the official reports, show during the seven years 1880-86, a total of 18,530,477.01 francs of receipts against a total of 24,551,977 francs of expenditure, leaving a deficit for these seven years of 5,021,500 francs, or more than the amount of the Dauphin loan incurred by Amiens as a consequence of the German occupation, and of the exactions of Count Lehndorff!

What has been done during the past three years can only as yet be conjectured. The accounts are made up at the mayoralty office, and thence sent to the prefecture, and they do not get within range of the taxpayer for at least a twelvemonth afterwards.

But M. Fleury a.s.sures me that between the years 1884 and 1888 the city expended in buildings, chiefly 'scholastic palaces' erected as batteries of aggressive atheism from which to beat down the temples of religion, no less than 1,700,000 francs; so that the total of deficit of the budget of Amiens, from 1880 to the present time, in all probability exceeds six millions of francs.

If we a.s.sume the local finances of the rest of France to have been handled during the last decade on the same lines, there is nothing extravagant in the estimate made by a friend of mine, who formerly held a very high post in the Treasury, and who puts the acc.u.mulation of local deficits and the local indebtedness in France, independently of the national deficits and the national loans, since 1880, at two milliards of francs, or eighty millions of pounds sterling. For, although Amiens is an important city, it represents only about one four-hundred-and-fiftieth part of the population of France.

While I was at Amiens in June M. Goblet came there and made a rather remarkable speech. It was in the main aimed at a society called the 'a.s.sociation of the Conservative Young Men of Amiens,' all of whom, I am told, except the president, are young working men--mechanics, clerks, or the sons of clerks, mechanics, and working men--in short, a kind of French 'Tory democracy.' They are not Boulangists at all, but outspoken royalists. They support Boulanger simply and avowedly in order to get at a revision of the Const.i.tution and make an end of the Republic. 'This a.s.sociation,' said M. Goblet, 'is making a tremendous stir. I admit its right to do this. It holds meetings and conferences; it listens to speeches in the city and the suburbs; it attacks both democracy and the Republic in no measured terms; it does not hesitate to denounce its enemies personally and by name, and neglects no means of acting on public opinion. These conservative young men speak and act energetically. They believe in the re-establishment of the monarchy; they desire it; they preach a reaction against all that we have done for twenty years past!'

There could hardly be a more signal proof given of the reality and vitality of the anti-Republican movement in this part of France than these words of a Republican leader who began his political career, as I have shown, twenty years ago in a hopeless minority of Republicans under the Empire, who has since worked his way up the munic.i.p.al ladder at Amiens and up the legislative ladder in Paris; and who, after reaching the top of the tree, now finds himself in imminent peril of slipping down again to the point from which he started. The force of the testimony is certainly not weakened by the fact that at the legislative elections in September, M. Goblet, standing as a candidate for the Chamber, was completely beaten.

I have shown what a large part the _octroi_ plays in the revenue of a city like Amiens. Nothing resembling it, I believe, exists in England since the abolition, two or three years ago, of the coal dues in London; and, though I suppose it would be within the power of any American State to establish a tax of this sort within its own boundaries, it would be practically impossible to enforce it without coming into collision with the commercial rights of other States under the Federal Const.i.tution. I once had to pay the _octroi_ tax on two brace of Maryland canvas-back ducks, which I was taking over from London to a Christmas dinner in Paris. But Maryland would not submit to an _octroi_ upon her birds entering New York.

The importance of the _octroi_ at this time in the financial system of France is one of the most conclusive and most amusing proofs of the essentially superficial and ephemeral character of the alleged 'Great Revolution' of 1789. The _octroi_ was a revival in mediaeval France of the Roman _portorium_ which survives in the Italian offices of the _dazio consume_ and in the _garitas_ of Spain and Spanish America. It was originally imposed as a local tax by a city, under the sanction of a royal charter. To get such a charter from a sovereign strong enough to enforce respect for it was essential to the citizens who bound themselves to one another to maintain their local independence against the barons in their neighbourhood; and when such a charter was granted by a sovereign it was said to be _octroyee_ by him. The tax therefore is rooted in a privilege. Amiens obtained the right to impose it in the fourteenth century. Of course the 'Great Revolution of 1789' swept this right away, one of the most obvious 'rights of man' being to pluck an apple in an orchard, take it into a town in his pocket, and eat it there. But equally, of course, the Republic in the year VII. on the 29th Vendemiaire re-established it; and in the next year, VIII., provided that the privilege should be exercised as under the sanction of the National Government, the National Government reserving the right to revise the tariffs fixed by the munic.i.p.al councils, and thereby making the restored privilege of the _octrois_ another string whereby to fetter and control the local action of the people on their own affairs. The _octroi_ of Amiens was re-established on the 3rd of Brumaire next following. Under the Empire, the Restoration, and the Monarchy of July, the Council of State granted the _octrois_. Under the Republic of 1848 this power naturally went to the National a.s.sembly as a means of legislative pressure and corruption. The Second Empire restored it to the Council of State; and it has now, naturally, gone back to the Chambers. Neither the people of the cities nor the rural populations like the _octroi_, but, in the immortal words of the late Mr. Tweed of New York, 'What can they do about it?' It is a ready-money tax, from which the taxpayer receives no visible equivalent, as he does when he pays a penny for a postage stamp. When he has paid it, he is simply allowed to take his own property where he wishes to take it, and do with it what he wishes to do. It is quite likely that this _octroi_ may have something to do with the disinclination of the common people in France to part with small change as readily as do the Americans, and even the English. They must always have 'money in the pocket' if they want to bring a sausage and a bottle of beer through a 'barrier,' whereas an American is never called upon to pay cash down to his Government except at a custom-house when he returns to his country from a foreign trip, or in exchange for a licence or a doc.u.ment of some sort which represents value received in one or another form.

The time wasted over this tax in a city like Amiens is an extraordinary burden on the patience of the people, trained as the French people are to submit to a torment of eternal red tape, a week of which would drive an American or English town into open revolt. At Amiens, for example, there is a central bureau of the _octroi_, where the tax is received from the great breweries and warehouses after the amounts have been fixed by the officers on duty at those establishments. Then there are ten bureaux or 'barriers' at the railway stations, the slaughter-houses, and the fish-markets; and then again eight secondary bureaux, where the people must go and pay amounts of less than one franc. There are, and I am told have long been, loud complaints as to the inconvenient location of the bureaux; but nothing comes of these outcries as yet, and I presume nothing ever will come of them until something like an independent local administrative life exists in the provinces of France.

The elements of such a life ought surely to be found, if anywhere, in this ancient province of Picardy. You cannot traverse it in any direction without being struck by the evident prosperity of the people.

Arthur Young, a hundred years ago, travelling from Boulogne to Amiens, found only 'misery and miserable harvests.' He would find now only comfort and excellent crops. Possibly he would think of the country what he then thought of the region about Clermont and Liancourt, where, under the fostering care of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, the farmers had developed a highly-diversified cultivation; 'here a field of wheat; there one of luzerne; clover in one direction, vetches in another; vines, cherry and other fruit trees making up a charming picture, which must, however, yield poor results.'

But he would be wrong. This diversified culture of modern Picardy has been highly remunerative, and the extensive kitchen-gardening of the province is so still. The 'agricultural crisis' has doubtless. .h.i.t the large farmers rather hard, but I am told they are standing up well under it--thanks to their past savings, and to French protection--better, indeed, than the large farmers in England; while the peasants proper are actually profiting by it. They not only get as much for their labour as when the large farmers were making money, but they are buying up land at lower rates. This may very possibly help the Republicans in the coming elections, for the peasants always give the credit of a state of things which is satisfactory to them to the Government of the day--be that Government what it may--so that while the larger farmers tend to Conservatism, the peasants will probably lean the other way. It is next to impossible to get a political opinion out of a Picard peasant, but I have more than once heard a peasant speak of the farmers in his neighbourhood as 'aristocrats,' which I took to be as precise a formula of political opinion as one was likely to get from him. It seemed to me to represent, among the peasants of to-day, the enlightened 'principles of 1889,' very much as the same formula, applied to the _n.o.blesse_ of a century ago, represented, among the large farmers of that day, the 'principles of 1789.'

Both then and now the formula simply means 'the man who has what I want to have is an aristocrat.' I think I have observed something like this in other countries--as, for example, in Ireland--where the guilty possessor of acres, however, is not only an 'aristocrat' but an 'alien,'

as appears from a song popular in Kerry:--

The alien landlords have no right To the land G.o.d made for you; So we'll blow them up with dynamite, The thieving, h.e.l.lish crew!

Dynamite was unknown in Picardy a century and a half ago. And the Picard has very little, except his religion, in common with the Irish Celt. But the sentiment of this simple and pleasing little ditty glowed deep in the Picard heart long before the Revolution of 1789. The 'earth hunger,'

which has given the act of 'land-grabbing' the first place in the category of human crimes, invented, long ago in Picardy, and especially in that part of Picardy now known as the Department of the Somme, a custom called the _coutume de mauvais gre_ or the _droit de marche_.

Under this custom a tenant-farmer in Picardy considered himself ent.i.tled to sell the right to till his landlord's fields to anybody he liked, to give it as a dowry to his daughter, or to leave it to be divided among his heirs; and all this without reference to the expiration of his lease. If the landlord objected and went so far as to lease his land to another person, the previous tenant was regarded by his friends and by other farmers as a _depointe_, ent.i.tled to take summary vengeance upon the 'land-grabber.' He might kill off his cattle, burn his crops and his buildings, and, if occasion served, shoot or knock him in the head. As the whole country was in a conspiracy, either of terror or of sympathy, to protect the _depointe_ against the vengeance of the law, this cheerful 'custom' had a liberalising effect upon the Picard landholders.

Rents fell, and if the value of landed property rose the landed proprietor got no advantage from that. The torch and the musket kept down the demand, which was equivalent practically to increasing the supply. The results of this 'custom' were such that in 1764, a quarter of a century before the Revolution of 1789, the king intervened, but in vain, to put a stop to it. The 'oppressed and downtrodden peasant' of Picardy under the _ancien regime_ did what he liked with his neighbour's property--that neighbour being a landlord--as cheerily as the manacled Celt of Mayo or Tipperary in our own times. Two years before the Revolution, in 1787, the a.s.sembly of the Generality of Amiens, by its president the Duc d'Havre, vainly urged the royal government to take resolute action in this matter. With the Revolution, of course, things grew worse very rapidly. The _depointes_ became ardent lovers of liberty, equality, and fraternity; tore up all their leases, sent their landlords and the land-grabbers to the guillotine, or into emigration as traitors, and made themselves proprietors, in fee simple. There seems to be no doubt that the traditions of this _coutume de mauvais gre_ (which obviously had much more to do with the politics of Picardy a century ago than either Voltaire or Rousseau) still survive in the Department of the Somme, and every now and then break out in agrarian outrages, rick-burnings, and general incendiarism, whenever leases fall in and landlords try to raise their rents on the shallow pretext that land has risen in value.

While these traditions show that there was no lack of energy and force among the 'downtrodden' Picard peasantry before the Revolution of 1789, the local history of the province also proves that the liberal ideas which are commonly supposed to have been introduced into France by the Revolution were at work in Picardy among the _n.o.blesse_ and the clergy long before. The _corvee_, for example, of which we hear so much in many so-called histories of the French Revolution, was abolished under Louis XVI. in Picardy, before the States-General of 1789 were convened.

That the _corvee_, in itself, cannot have been the absolutely intolerable thing it is commonly supposed to have been may be inferred, I think, from the fact that, under the name of _prestation en nature_, it still exists in many parts of the French Republic. It figures in all the schedules of departmental taxation which I have seen down to the year 1889; and, for that matter, it existed in New England down to a very recent date, if it does not now exist there. It was obviously liable to abuse, and doubtless was abused, and the Intendant of Picardy, M. d'Aguay, made a striking speech, on the benefits to be expected from its abolition, to the Provincial Parliament in 1787. From this speech we learn that the money value of the _corvee_ in hand had been computed at 900,000 livres, but that the Intendant working out the details of the abolition of the system, with the help of a number of the local landholders (commonly supposed to have been the tyrants who profited by the abuse), had reduced this estimate to 300,000 livres, at which sum the tax had been converted into a money payment for the maintenance of the roads, the province being thus relieved of two-thirds of the burden borne by it. It is instructive to learn that attempts to bring about similar results elsewhere in France were resented and resisted, not by the great landholders, but by the corveable peasants themselves! What they really wanted, it would seem, was not so much to be relieved of the obligation of forced labour by a payment of money, as to have their roads made for them at the expense of the State, under the impression, ineradicable down to our own day, and elsewhere than in France, that what everybody pays n.o.body pays, an impression which is the trusty s.h.i.+eld and weapon at once of the Socialists and of the Protectionists all over the world.

Public education in Picardy, as well as elsewhere in France, long antedates the Revolution of 1789. Three centuries ago Olivier de Serre and Bernard Palissy lamented the foolish disposition of French peasants in the Limousin and in Picardy to give their elder sons a better education than they had themselves received. 'The poor man will spend a great part of what he has earned in the sweat of his brow, to make his son a gentleman; and at last this same gentleman will be ashamed to be found in company with his father, and will be displeased to be called the son of a labouring man. And if by chance the good man has other children, this gentleman it will be who will devour the others and have the best of everything; he never concerns himself to think how much he cost at school while his brothers were working at home with their father.' This reads like a complaint of the nineteenth century in democratic America, but it is, in fact, a complaint of the sixteenth century in feudal France. It must have been frequent enough in this part of Picardy, now the Department of the Somme. For from a very early time this region has been full of small farmers bent on bettering their own condition or that of their sons. In the public library of Abbeville there is a land register drawn up in 1312 for the service of the officers of King Edward II. of England, who had married Isabel of France, from which it appears that the small tenants in this part of Picardy were then as numerous as the small proprietors now are. 'One is led to believe,' says M. Baudrillart, 'that the only difference between the condition of the country then and now in this respect is, that the enfranchised labourer has in many cases simply taken the place of the feudal tenant and become proprietor of the soil.' So great has long been the number of small landholders in Picardy that in the province, taken generally, a holding of sixty hectares may pa.s.s for a large property, one of fifteen for a moderate estate, and one of ten for a small holding. The action of the French code upon this state of things since the Revolution and the Empire has, in the opinion of many intelligent observers, been mischievous. It has made it difficult to check the excessive subdivision of the land into holdings too small to be profitably and intelligently cultivated. There is no provision in the French law it seems, as there is in the German law, making it obligatory upon the heirs of a small landed property so to arrange their respective shares as not to impede the proper cultivation of the land. The great prosperity of kitchen-gardening in modern Picardy modifies the evils flowing from this state of things however, and those who know the country best tell me that, taken as a body, the small landholders of Picardy, thanks to their thrift in regard both of time and of money, are substantially well off. They don't like the townspeople, for the old traditions are not yet forgotten of the time in which Amiens and the other large towns used to s.h.i.+ft the main burden of the expenses of the province upon the shoulders of the peasantry; and if anything like a genuine provincial legislature could be established, with a working system of 'Home Rule,' all the elements are here which might be developed into a healthy political activity. The system of working on France from the centre at Paris to the circ.u.mference has certainly been tried long enough, and thoroughly enough, to show that nothing but evil, and that continually, can be expected from it.

More than fifty years have pa.s.sed since Heine said: 'When I speak of France I speak of Paris--not of the provinces; just as when I speak of a man, I speak of his head, not of his legs. To talk about the opinion of the provinces is like talking about the opinion of a man's legs.'

In this spirit France is still judged abroad, for in this spirit France is still governed at home. But if, on some fine morning, the legs should suddenly wake up with a very positive opinion of their own, the results may be awkward--not only for the government at Paris but for the rest of Europe.

CHAPTER VII

IN THE AISNE

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