THE GENESIS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FRENCH
In fairly clear weather the strip of salt water cleaving England from
France seems so narrow, that to a Brazilian familiar with the Amazon
it might be taken for nothing more than a great river. To a geologist
the English Channel is a recent feature in the formation of Europe of
to-day, while the modern aeronaut regards it as a blue mark on the
landscape as he wings his way from London to Paris. Turbine steamers
plough from shore to shore in less than an hour, so that on a windless
day the crossing is a mere incident in the journey between the
capitals; yet the race which dwells on the chalk uplands terminating
precipitously at Cape Gris Nez is so entirely different from the
people who have for the last thousand years made their homes on the
Kentish Downs, that the twenty miles of sea seem scarcely adequate to
explain the complete severance. The intercourse between the
inhabitants of Gaul and Britain must have been both considerable and
constant for some time before the domination of Rome had swept up to
the Channel, for it is known from Caesar's records that the
Armoricans, who extended from Cape Finisterre to the Straits of Dover,
were able to send 220 large oak built vessels against his galleys.
From the same source one is aware of the large trade carried on across
the narrow sea, and there were Celtic tribes in the south of England
colonised from the Belgae of the Continent. Further than this, the
megalithic remains of Wiltshire and Brittany suggest a very real and
remarkable link between the peoples of Britain and Gaul. Caesar and
Strabo are both very definite in their statements that the people of
Kent were similar to the Gaulish tribes, not only in the way they
built their houses, but also in their appearance and their manners.
The coming of Roman civilisation tended to restrict racial
intermingling, and from the beginning of the Christian era the Channel
became more and more a real frontier. When Norsemen had settled both
in England and in the north of France, this frontier again weakened
and vanished with the Norman Conquest of England, but racially there
was practically no sympathy across the water beyond what might have
been felt for the Welsh and the Britons in Cornwall. Thus, from the
Romanising of Britain onwards, the similarity between the peoples who
faced one another across the Channel waned. It is quite probable that
in neither country was there any appreciable infusion of Italian-Roman
blood among the Celtic populations, for the conquering legions were
composed of troops raised from all parts of the Empire, but in Britain
the Romanised population was swept westwards by new invaders from
northern Europe, while the Romanised Gauls were never ousted from the
territory they had held east of the Rhone and the Rhine. The Latin
tongue had probably made very little headway in Britain, while in Gaul
the Romans had thrust their language upon the Gallic tribes. It was
not, however, the classical Latin of Livy and Virgil, but most
probably the colloquial Latin of the common soldier and camp-follower.
This debased Latin formed the solid foundation of the literary
language of France of to-day.
[Illustration: COMBOURG. A TYPICAL CHATEAU OF THE MEDIAEVAL TYPE.]
The English Channel is therefore a very effective dividing line
between two peoples completely different in every characteristic. But
who were these people whom the Romans called Galli?
Their coming was possibly not earlier than 600 or 700 B.C., and by 300
B.C. they occupied that part of Europe now covered by France, Belgium,
Holland, Rhenish Germany to the Rhine, with Switzerland and northern
Italy. No doubt they had moved westward from southern Russia in that
Aryan stream of which they had formed a part. In the south they
intermingled with the ancient Iberian population; they appear to have
remained fairly pure in the centre, while in the north they became
more or less mixed with Teutonic elements pressing forward across the
Rhine. Besides occupying what is now known as France, these Celts
settled or squatted all over northern Italy, and drove a very
considerable wedge into central Spain, where they formed the fierce
warrior people called Celtiberians, who served in masses in the
Carthaginian and Greek armies, and held out against the Romans until
about 100 B.C. Further than this a wing of these Gaulish Celts made
their way along the Danube, wasted Greece in about 270 B.C., and
formed an important settlement in Asia Minor which was called Galatia
up to about A.D. 500.
The Celts in Italy were the first to come under the heel of Rome
between 300 and 190 B.C. Gaul itself followed, and a Roman province,
named Narbonensis after its chief city Narbo Martius (now Narbonne),
was formed along the Mediterranean coast. All the rest of Gaul was
added between 58 and 50 B.C. by Gaius Julius Caesar, and from that
time until the disruption of the Roman Empire was one of its greatest
and richest provinces.
With the weakening of Roman domination in the 4th century A.D. a
fierce German race or confederacy, calling themselves "Franks" (_i.e._
Freemen), flooded into northern Gaul. They gave their name to the
country they had subjected, and for some five centuries their
Merovingian and Carolingian kings ruled without interruption. The
Franks were numerically a small proportion of the population of France
during this period, and they and other tribes which had irrupted into
Gaul during the same period gradually became completely absorbed by
the stubborn Celto-Roman people, and their language was to a great
extent lost owing, perhaps, to the fascination the splendour of Latin
would exert upon the users of an uncouth tongue. The Franks had
disappeared as a race by the year 1000, but their name had become
permanently attached to the land and the people in whose midst they
had settled--a phenomenon repeated in the case of Bulgaria.
Towards the north and east of France there is a very considerable
Germanic strain, although entirely French in language, customs, and
sympathy. In the south-east the people have much Italic blood in their
veins, while in the extreme south-west the Gascons and the Landais
(the people of Les Landes near Bordeaux) are probably of Iberian
stock, nearly related to the Basques who belong to the pre-Celtic
inhabitants of France, and are therefore more or less distinct from
the main mass of the population who remained Gallic with a Romanised
language. Although it is true that, with one exception, all the
different elements have been quite assimilated, the _patois_ spoken in
some districts is barely comprehensible to the ordinary Parisian. The
exception is Brittany, where the people are an admixture of the
primitive inhabitants with Gauls and Celts from Britain who migrated
to the peninsula during the 4th and 5th centuries, their language
being pure Celtic to this day, and so similar to Welsh that a Breton
onion-seller in Wales can make himself understood without much
difficulty. The seamen Brittany provides for the French navy are
undoubtedly the finest sailors the country possesses, and they have
for some time past formed a very real portion of French sea power.
The people of Normandy have a strong infusion of Scandinavian blood
and certain peculiarities of speech, but they are scarcely greater
than the difference between that of the Londoner and the Yorkshireman.
Whatever has been the stock from which the inhabitants of modern
France has sprung, their extraordinary capacity of assimilation seems
to have endowed them generally with those national characteristics
popularly labelled the genius of the French. This process, discernible
all through the pages of history, seems as vital to-day as ever.
To any one familiar with the French people, it is a matter for
astonishment that the average Briton fails in the most profound
fashion to realise the most obvious of the national characteristics
of his neighbours across the Channel. The popular notion is that the
French are a frivolous people, devoted to pleasure; they are supposed
to be veritable Miss Mowchers for volatility; to speak with extreme
rapidity; to have a taste for queer dishes which the same Briton
regards with abhorrence; and are, generally speaking, a people with
the lowest of morals. All these ideas are more or less erroneous, and
only as the average Englishman comes to learn the truth can the French
character be better understood. In the first place, the French, far
from being a mass of frivolity, are one of the most serious peoples in
the world. They have to such an extent woven a care for the future
into the fabric of the nation, that the humblest _bonne-a-tout-faire_,
the underfed _midinette_, and simplest son of the soil, aim at and
generally succeed in becoming modest holders of State _rentes_.
Instead of the happy-go-lucky methods of the middle and lower class
Anglo-Saxon, who will turn a family of sons and daughters loose upon
the world with very little thought as to their future beyond the bare
necessities of food, clothing, and shelter, the French parent regards
it as his duty to see that each daughter is provided with a _dot_
suitable to her position, and the Civil Code requires a parent to
leave a proportion of his property to each member of his family.
French men and women work out their incomes with such exactness that
they know to a _sou_ what they have to spare for pleasure, and with a
very large mass of the people in town and country that margin is so
microscopically small, that pleasure in the sense of a commodity that
is bought is often only obtainable at long intervals. In Paris, where
the inaccurate ideas of French life are generally gathered, it is the
almost universal custom for a family to dine at a restaurant on
Sundays, in order that the _bonne-a-tout-faire_, who cooks the meals
and waits at table in the average flat, may have most of the day off.
Thus the week-end visitor to the capital sees in every cafe and
restaurant families dining in public, and gathers the impression that
all these people are spending their money on an evening's amusement.
Probably, if the flats to which these people return a little later
were examined, it would be found that there was practically nothing in
the tiny larders, for it is the French custom to buy daily at the
markets in small quantities at the lowest prices, and the meals taken
at a restaurant on Sunday do not entail any loss through deterioration
of food at home.
It is wrong, too, to suppose that the average French people speak more
rapidly than the Anglo-Saxon. They are more vivacious, and they often
put more emphasis and gesticulation into their conversation than their
island neighbours; but there are Englishmen who have a right to speak,
who will affirm with the greatest assurance that the French are the
slower and more deliberate speakers of the two! No doubt it will take
a long time to entirely eradicate from among ill-informed Anglo-Saxons
the notion that a French menu is largely composed of strange creatures
not usually regarded as edible, but the excellence of French food and
cooking is getting so widely known and appreciated that this ancient
misconception is being steadily dissipated.
Perhaps it is because no sooner does the visitor land at Calais or
Boulogne, or step out of the railway terminus in Paris, than he sees a
kiosk where comic papers full of improper drawings are boldly
exhibited, that he comes to the conclusion that the French are an
entirely immoral people. But painful as it is to witness this
flaunting of vulgar suggestion before the casual passer-by, it is not
quite a fair gauge by which to take the standard of morals in France.
There was no wave of Puritanism in France as in England, and the
standard of public decency is therefore lower, but French home life is
probably nearly as moral as in England, and it is a well-known fact
that girls belonging to the middle classes live irreproachable lives
in the almost unnatural seclusion maintained by their parents. The
attitude of the young man towards the other sex before he marries is
certainly lamentably inferior to that of the Anglo-Saxon who may fall
from the ideal to which he has been trained, but nevertheless regards
his failure as a disaster, while the French youth looks upon such
matters as a recognised feature of his adolescence.
Justification for the idea prevalent in Anglo-Saxon countries that the
French are exceptionally lax in their morals, can be found in the fact
that in all ranks of French society there is no secrecy maintained
when irregular relations have been established, and also in the fact
that the illegitimate births are considerably more than twice as
numerous as those of Great Britain and Ireland. It should be
remembered, however, that Germany stands only a trifle better than
France in this matter, while six other European countries are
infinitely worse.
[Illustration: IN THE CAFE ARMENONVILLE IN THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE,
PARIS.]
What are to the man in the street the characteristics of the French
race are, therefore, so wide of the truth, that until simple and
accurate books on this great and talented people are used in all
British schools it will take a considerable time to put matters
straight. In the meantime an opportunity occurs here to do something
in this direction.
More than any other nation on the whole face of the earth the French
are a people of great ideas. They frequently leave their neighbours to
carry out the conceptions with which they enrich the world, but they
think on a great scale, and produce men and women whose agility of
mind is often hugely in advance of the age in which they live. It was
a Frenchman who first thought it feasible to sever Africa from Asia,
and made the first attempt to cut the cord that unites North and South
America; it was the French who led the way in applying the internal
combustion engine to locomotion, and they have dazzled the world with
the brilliant performances of their flying men. A Frenchman was the
pioneer in tunnel boring, and his son Isambard Brunel devised a
railway on such a magnificent scale that it still remains an ideal
which engineers regard with admiration. Another Frenchman, Charles
Bourseul, invented the telephone, and yet another led the way in the
science of bacteriology. As conscious empire-builders on a world-wide
scale the French were also putting their ideas into practice when
England was still thinking commercially in such matters. England as a
whole always does think in pounds, shillings, and pence, and in
empire-building possessions have mainly been added to the British
Empire with the idea of increasing its trade. In naval developments
France recently led the way with the submarine and submersible,
setting an example to the rest of the world which has been followed so
thoroughly that the lead in this arm of sea-power is no longer with
the pioneer country. Innumerable instances could be given of the
initiative in big ideas being taken by Frenchmen, and of other nations
taking them up and developing, perfecting, and sometimes consummating
for the first time projects devised in France.
Mr. C. F. G. Masterman has laid stress on the patience of the British
working man, but that willingness to endure hard circumstance is not
so pronounced in England as in France. There endurance continues too
long, so that when harsh treatment becomes absolutely intolerable
there is not a fraction of patience left, with the inevitable result
that explosions of varying degrees of violence take place. British
workers bestir themselves and demand redress of grievances before they
are at the end of their patience, and can therefore wait while the
country becomes familiar with their new needs. England has thus known
no "Reign of Terror," nor does the Government of the day suddenly
collapse before some public outburst of passionate feeling. The people
who can endure the inconvenience of a Government monopoly in matches,
which makes that commodity vile in quality while costing a penny a
box, must indeed be patient.
The average Frenchman desires to live a quiet and peaceful life
without hurry or bustle. He is content with long hours of work if he
can carry on that occupation at an easy pace, for he is steadily
industrious, and his easy-going nature lets him disregard
misgovernment too long for safety, for when at last he is roused out
of the ambling pace of his normal life, underground elements of
cruelty and bloodthirstiness may come to the surface with sudden and
terrible swiftness. If fair and honest government and tolerable
conditions of labour could be perpetually guaranteed to France, there
is scarcely a people in the world who would live more peaceable and
uneventful lives, for the British relish for adventure and the
enthusiasm for hustle to be found in the United States finds no echo
in the average French mind. Alongside this disinclination to go
helter-skelter through life is the fact that in certain ways the
French people are all artists, and that they have the critical faculty
developed to a most remarkable degree; their capacity for
discrimination and criticism might indeed be singled out as the most
salient characteristic of the whole people. Even the humblest citizen
is seldom prepared to express unqualified admiration for any piece of
handicraft or painting, but will look with thoughtful care on the
object of consideration, and probably supply an intelligent reason for
only giving it partial approval.
On the other hand there is a great tendency to over fondness for
generalising without sufficient data; there is a delight in reasoning
and logic which often leads to false conclusions owing to a want of
real knowledge. This love of reasoning and the capacity for criticism
seem to have given the nation a regard for consequences and a care to
avoid the more or less inevitable economic day of adverse reckoning
which comes to those who are careless and indefinite in their
arrangements. It is the general thriftiness found all through the
peasant and bourgeois class of France that has, to such a great
extent, saved the various grades in the social scale from emulating
the ways of those above them. The disgrace of insolvency is so
terrifying to a French household that a thousand economies are
practised to keep such a contingency afar off, and in following this
rule of life much social intercourse, and nearly all effort to seem
more opulent than the family purse will permit, go overboard. Thus it
has become a characteristic of a most definite order that a
Frenchman's home is his castle in a fashion far more real to the
stranger than is the case in Anglo-Saxon countries.
Briefly it may be stated that the French are a serious, cautious,
patient, and exceedingly industrious and home-loving race, enjoying
their hardly earned hours of pleasure in a more demonstrative fashion
than do the nations whose climates are less sunny. They are critical
and fond of generalisation, are capable of large and splendid moments
of inspiration, and have on the whole feminine rather than masculine
characteristics.