IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS--_continued_
AIRE-SUR-LA-LYS
It is a local tradition at Aire-sur-la-Lys that, about half a century
ago, the good people of this ancient and picturesque town (which, like
St.-Omer, remained a part of the Spanish dominions when all the rest of
the Artois became French by the treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659) turned
out with flags and music to welcome their mayor back from Paris,
bringing the good news that the projected Northern railway should not
pass through their territory, to disturb their settled trade.
This unique incident is often cited to show the tenacious conservatism
of the Artesians. I believe, however, it only proves that the people of
Aire, dwelling in a region which has been fought over from time
immemorial, had a well-grounded objection to the exclusively military
views with which Marshal Soult then desired that the Government of Louis
Philippe should take up and carry out the projected enterprise.
At all events, Aire-sur-la-Lys now rejoices in a comfortable little
railway station, which makes it an important point in the system of the
Northern Railway of France.
There, on a lovely evening in June, I found the carriage of M. Labitte,
one of the Councillors-General of the department, waiting to take me to
his charming and hospitable home in the richly-cultivated agricultural
commune of St.-Quentin.
It was on the eve of Pentecost when, as the German poet tells us, 'the
woods and fields put off all sadness,' and a lovelier summer evening it
would be hard to find even in England.
M. Labitte is a Conservative and a devout Catholic. As I have already
mentioned, he was a candidate in the Pas-de-Calais in 1886 for the seat
in the Chamber now held by M. Camescasse, and received 74,554 votes
against 86,356 for his opponent. In Aire he was beaten by only 22 votes
out of a total of 3,536. His influence in the country here is, in a
certain sense, hereditary, for he came of a family which in the last
century gave many excellent ecclesiastics to the service of the Church,
among a population then, as now, remarkable for its strong religious
feeling. When the States-General were convened by Louis XVI. a century
ago, the first date fixed for the elections in Artois had to be
postponed, at the request of the Duc de Guines, because it interfered
with Easter. The Artesians cared more for the Church than for the State.
Yet, in no part of France was the calling of the States-General more
popular, and nowhere were more efforts made before 1789 than in Artois
to improve the condition of the people and to secure a more just and
liberal fiscal administration. The clergy were extraordinarily powerful
in Artois, alike by reason of their property and of the religious
disposition of the people; and it is a curious and interesting fact that
under the constitution of the Estates of Artois it was established
(thanks to the union of the clergy with the Third Estate) that, while no
votes of the nobility and the clergy united should bind the Third
Estate, any joint vote of the Third Estate with either of the other two
orders should bind them all. Here, long before the much-bewritten date
of 1789, we have the Church in Artois arraying itself on the side of the
tax-paying people against the privileged classes. Modern inquiries show,
indeed, that this was the attitude of the great body of the French
clergy long before what is called the 'Revolution.' The majority of the
representatives of the clergy in the States-General of 1789 did not wait
for the theatrical demonstrations in the Tennis Court of Versailles,
about which so much nonsense has been talked and written, to join the
Third Estate in insisting upon a real reform of the public service. No
French historian has ventured to make such a picture of the Catholic
clergy of France under the Bourbons as Lord Macaulay thought himself
authorised to paint of the Protestant clergy of England under the
Stuarts. There were flagrant scandals among the higher orders of the
Church in France, no doubt, as there were in England. The names of
Dubois, of Loménie de Brienne, of De Rohan are not associated with the
cardinal virtues. De Jarente, Bishop of Orleans, driving Mdlle. Guimard
to the opera in his coronetted and mitred coach, is not an edifying
figure, nor is Louis de Grimaldi, Bishop of Mans, saying Mass in his red
hunting-coat and breeches. But the Protestant Dean of St. Patrick's
thought the execution for felony of another Protestant dean a capital
theme for a merry ballad; and at the end of the eighteenth century
Arthur Young painted the English rural clergy in very dark colours. The
curates, the rectors, the monks of France as a body, showed under the
old régime the same qualities of devout faith and Christian sympathy
with the people with which they met and baffled their persecutors after
the crash of the monarchy. The three representatives of the clergy who
first struck hands with the Third Estate on June 13, 1789, were curates
sent to Paris by a province more intensely Catholic than Artois. They
were Poitevin priests from the region which we now know as La Vendée,
and which only four years afterwards rose in arms to defend its altars
and its homes against the intolerable despotism of the 'patriots' of
Paris.
When Turgot was put in charge of that work of fiscal reform which might
have spared France the horrors and the disasters of the Revolution, had
Louis XVI. been capable of standing even by Turgot to the end, he
carried on an extensive correspondence with curates in Artois as well as
in the other provinces of France, as the best means of educating the
people to an intelligent appreciation of his purposes and of his plans.
Condorcet, who treated the brutal murderers of the Duc de la
Rochefoucauld with a complaisance which entitles him to the confidence
of the most advanced anti-clerical philosophers of our own day, bears
witness to the good intentions of Turgot's correspondents. He says, in
his memoir of Turgot, printed at Philadelphia seven years before the
Revolution of '89, that 'the curates, accustomed to preach sound morals,
to appease the quarrels of the people, and to encourage peace and
concord, were in a better position than any other men in France to
prepare the minds of the people for the good work it was the intents of
the ministers to do.'
What was true of the French curates a hundred years ago is true of them
to-day, the duties prescribed to them by the Church being still
precisely what they were when Condorcet bore this testimony to the good
dispositions of men much more conscientious than himself. Then, too, as
now, the curates were required to look carefully after the education of
the children in their parishes. France is indebted, not to the
Revolution, but to a great Protestant historian and statesman, Guizot,
and to King Louis Philippe for the foundation of her system of public
education. The revolutionists of 1789 left the country worse off in this
matter than they found it. The royal ordinance of Louis XIV. in 1698,
which required the establishment of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses
in every parish in which they were not then to be found, and fixed the
salaries to be paid these masters and mistresses out of a public tax in
every parish in which no foundations for their support existed, was
distinctly a public-school law. This ordinance made it incumbent upon
all parents and other persons who had charge of children to send them to
the schools until they were fourteen years of age, and it also enjoined
upon the curates the duty of 'watching with particular attention over
the education of the children in their respective parishes.' The spirit
in which the clergy of Artois, at least, discharged this duty appears in
an ordinance of the Bishop of Arras issued in 1740, half a century
before the Revolution of 1789, in which the bishop lays it down as a
maxim that 'the greatest charity which can be shown the poor is to
ensure them the means of obtaining an education.'
This, down to thirty years ago, was the principle of legislation in
Virginia upon the public school question, the State not attempting to
interfere with the authority of parents over their children in the
matter of education, but making an appropriation for the instruction of
the children of the poor. That mischievous wind-bag Lakanal lived in
Mississippi and Louisiana during his exile in America, and it is
possible that his influence may have had something to do with the early
adoption by another southern State, Louisiana, of the general public
school system. However that may be, Louisiana in 1850 spent upon her
public schools three times as much money annually as any of the New
England States, with the result that, out of a native white population
of 186,577, she had in her prisons 240 native white criminals, or 1 in
777 of the whole number, being 'the largest proportion of criminals to
population at that time to be found in America, if not in the world.'
Virginia, out of a native white population of 1,070,395 in 1860, had no
more than 163 native white criminals in her prisons, or 1 in 6,566 of
her native white population.
It is a curious fact, by the way, that but for the fidelity of the
French clergy before 1789, in carrying out the work imposed upon them by
the ordinance of Louis XIV., and commended in the ordinance of the
Bishop of Arras in 1740, two of the most conspicuous actors in the
grotesquely horrible drama of the French Revolution would have starved
to death in the streets of Arras, or grown up there in vagabondage. The
clergy of St.-Vaast in the diocese of Arras found, in 1768, two wretched
urchins thrown upon the world by an unnatural father. One of these,
Maximilian Isidore de Robespierre, was born in 1758; the other, Augustus
Bai Joseph de Robespierre, in 1764. The good priests picked them up,
cared for them, and put them in the way of getting a good education,
which they turned to such purpose that both of them eventually came to
the guillotine in the flower of their years, and amid the cordially
contemptuous execrations of decent people all over the world. One of the
most accomplished public men in Massachusetts told me years ago, that he
was stopped on his way to school one morning in 1794, by a friend of the
family, who bade him run back at once and tell his father the news had
come from Europe that 'the head of Robert Spear had been cut off.' 'Make
haste,' said this gentleman, 'and your papa will give you a silver
dollar, he will be so glad to hear it!'
It was rather instructive to think of the 'sea-green incorruptible' and
his idiotic 'Feast of the Supreme Being' on that beautiful clay of
Pentecost, in the charming rural commune of St.-Quentin, the peace and
happiness of which was for a time so cruelly broken up by his atrocities
and follies a hundred years ago. The fine old church, near by my host's
residence, has been restored with great taste and good sense. It was
crowded at early mass with the farmers and their families, many of the
men wearing their blouses, but all well-to-do, for this region is one of
the richest and best cultivated districts of Northern France. The
service was celebrated with much simplicity, but with no lack of due
ceremony; the singing was excellent; and the priest's homily, a brief
and very good discourse on the spirit of Christian charity, was listened
to with great attention.
The pretty custom prevails here, as in Normandy, of handing about in the
congregation, at a certain point in the service, a basket of bread. Two
gravely courteous old peasants presented the baskets in turn to all the
people. The service over, the farmers stood and chatted together in
groups in the churchyard and about the porch, and I heard much talk of
the outlook for the crops, of the price of cattle, and of certain
properties which had recently changed hands. Of politics next to
nothing.
My host was for many years a notary at Aire. He has transferred this
position now to the husband of his only daughter, and occupies himself
mainly with his agricultural interests. The notary, who is a personage
everywhere in France, is especially a personage in Artois. This has come
about in part through the great changes which have taken place in the
proprietorship of land in this province during the last three centuries.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, after the province was
substantially united with France by Louis XIV., great numbers of small
proprietors, who had done well enough under the Spanish rule, found
themselves forced, by the pressure of taxation, to part with their
land, and there was a marked increase in the great estates, not only of
the clergy but of the laity. After the First Consul took the country in
hand, and began to reorganise it socially, on the principle laid down by
him so often and so energetically, in his dealings with his councillors,
that 'true civil liberty in a State depends upon the absolute safety of
property,' there began to grow up in Artois a great middle class of
landholders, corresponding in many conditions to the 'strong farmers' of
Ireland. With the increase of this class came a natural increase in the
importance and influence of the notaries, already and through the
Spanish traditions very considerable in this region. In many parts of
the province the notary is recognised as an unofficial, but
authoritative, social arbiter, to whom may be safely referred for
settlement all sorts of disputes, including very often questions of
property which would elsewhere be taken before the courts of law. It was
pleasant to see that the relation thus established between M. Labitte
and the people generally had not been affected by the political
agitation of the last ten years. When I drove about the country with
him, I observed that he was saluted everywhere in the friendliest
fashion, and that, as he more than once told me, by persons politically
quite hostile to his re-election as councillor-general.
After luncheon on Pentecost, a most interesting ceremony took place at
St.-Quentin. A long procession made up of the inhabitants of the
commune, the men wearing their best clothes, the young girls garlanded
and dressed in white, set forth from the porch of the church, after a
brief service there, and marched around the commune. It was the English
beating of the bounds without the beating, and with the old religious
rites. In the midst of the procession, which extended perhaps a quarter
of a mile, the parish priest walked alone under an embroidered canopy
borne up by young villagers. Acolytes, with lighted candles, moved on
either side of the canopy. Before it was borne a white silk banner of
the Virgin, and behind it a banner embroidered in gold. All the park and
grounds of M. Labitte lying within the commune, and being thrown open to
the people, a very beautiful altar of verdure and roses had been set up
under a bower in the great garden behind the house, by the daughter of
M. Labitte. Before this altar the procession paused, a brief service was
performed there, and then the long line resumed its march, a chorus of
some twenty male voices chanting, as it went, the Magnificat. Nothing
could exceed the unaffected simplicity and seriousness of the people of
both sexes and of all ages. The day was one of those perfect days,
which, as Mr. Lowell says, come to the world in June, if ever they come
at all; and as the long line wound its way around the fields, green with
the prospering crops, beneath the orchards and the groves, and between
the fragrant hedgerows, the silvery chiming of the bells in the old
church alternated with the far-off chanting of the choristers, and the
fitful breeze brought us, from time to time, the grave deep voice of the
priest reciting, as he moved, the ancient prayers of hope and of
thanksgiving.
It was interesting to remember that under the first French attempt at a
republic, this lovely rural spectacle would have been as impossible as
it would be to-day under the rule of the Mahdi in the Soudan; and also,
to reflect that France is governed to-day by men who dream of making it
thus impossible once more.