IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS--_continued_
AIRE-SUR-LA-LYS.
My host at St.-Quentin being a councillor-general, his term of office
expires with the elections fixed to take place on July 28. There is no
reason in the nature of things why councillors-general should be elected
on the same lines with deputies and senators. On the contrary, it would
seem to be very desirable that local rather than national considerations
should govern the election of such functionaries. But it has been found
difficult, even in England and Wales, to keep national party politics
out of the election of the new county councillors, whose duties are
modelled in some important respects upon those assigned to the
councillors-general in France; and it is evident that the French local
elections in July will be largely determined by considerations affecting
the national elections which must take place in September and October.
M. Labitte, who was elected a councillor-general by the Conservatives in
this department six years ago, was defeated in 1886, as I have already
said, in a by-election, held to fill a vacancy in the Chamber of
Deputies. It is the wish of his party friends that he should offer
himself as a candidate for re-election as a councillor-general on July
28; but he does not seem disposed to do this, preferring, I think, to
keep himself quite free to do his very best to bring about a
Conservative victory in the national elections in September, with the
importance of which to the future of France he is deeply impressed.
Meanwhile, he is giving a personal account of his stewardship as a
councillor-general to his constituents in a series of 'conferences.' One
of these conferences he was good enough to invite me to attend.
It was held in a commune, distant some ten or twelve miles from
St.-Quentin-par-Aire, and, as the custom of France is, it was held on a
Sunday afternoon. M. Labitte's son-in-law drove out from Aire with his
wife to dine and spend the evening with us. And about three o'clock M.
Labitte, his son-in-law, and myself set out for the conference. Our road
lay through a level but richly cultivated and, in its way, very
beautiful region. In the last century, Artois seems to have been a kind
of Ireland. The climate was excessively damp, the lack of forests and
the undeveloped coal-mines left the peasantry dependent upon turf and
peat for fuel; the roads were few and bad. There were good crops of
grain; but the Intendant Bignon, drawing up a report on the province at
the close of the seventeenth century, for the Duke of Burgundy, tells us
the wars had made an end of all the manufactures, including the
long-famous tapestry-works of Arras. 'There were few fruit-trees, little
hay, and little manure.' Here and there some linen was made; but the
trade of the province was carried on almost exclusively in grain, hops,
flax, and wool. Iron and copper utensils, and coal and slates came to
Artois from Flanders, cod-fish and cheese from the Low Countries, butter
and all kinds of manufactured goods from England. Yet the population
steadily increased all through the eighteenth century, while it was
falling off in the neighbouring provinces of France. The worthy
intendant thought the people sadly wanting in 'intelligence, activity,
and practical sense,' and seems indeed, like a Malthusian before
Malthus, half-inclined to attribute the phenomena of increase and
multiplication in Artois to these defects. It would surprise him, I
fancy, to look on the people and the land of Artois to-day. The land has
become one of the most fertile and prosperous regions of France; the
people, unaffected to any appreciable extent by immigration, and
unchanged alike in race and in religion, increase and multiply as of
old. The well-tilled fields, the well-kept and beautiful roads, the
neat, green hedgerows, the orchards bear witness on every side to the
intelligence, the activity, the practical sense of the inhabitants.
M. Baudrillart in one of his invaluable treatises on the condition of
France before the Revolution of 1789, gives us the main key of this
great difference between the condition of agricultural Artois in the
eighteenth century and its condition to-day. He cites a most curious
appeal to the estates of Artois in behalf of the rural populations, from
which it appears that the citizens of the chief towns had combined with
the _noblesse_ and the higher clergy to keep the village curates and the
farmers out of the provincial assemblies, and to throw the whole burden
of taxation upon the agriculturists. 'The soil of Artois,' say the
authors of this appeal, 'is quite as good as the soil of England; and
yet the Artesian farmers can only get out of their labour on it one
quarter as much as the English do.' It was the fiscal maladministration,
they maintain, which checked the progress of agriculture and depressed
the condition of the farmers; and it is interesting to observe that
these rural reformers proposed to remedy the evils of which they
complained, not by abolishing all the privileges of the privileged
classes in a night, as did the headlong mob of the States-General at
Paris in 1789, but by securing a fairer representation of the rural
regions in the Provincial Estates, limiting the duration of the
Provincial Parliaments to three years, and deciding that one-third of
the seats should be vacated and refilled every year. This does not look
as if the Artesians of the last century were particularly deficient
either in intelligence or in practical sense.
On our way to the conference we saw several sugar factories, most of
them now abandoned, though the beet crops of Artois are still very
important; and my companions told me that the people here, with all
their traditional conservatism, are very quick to abandon any industry
which ceases to promise good returns, and to change their crops as the
conditions of the market change. We saw but few châteaux. One of the
most considerable, standing well in view from the road in the midst of
an extensive park, and approached by a long avenue of well-grown trees,
seemed to be shut up. The proprietor, the Count de----, I was told had
not visited it for two years past, one of his gamekeepers having been
murdered in a conflict with some poachers.
Under the existing laws in France, political conferences must be held
within four walls. Trafalgar Square meetings would be as impossible in
republican France as in monarchical Germany. As the commune in which M.
Labitte was to meet his constituents possesses no convenient hall, and
the local authorities were not particularly eager to facilitate the
conference, one of the local Conservatives, a well-to-do farmer, had
taken it upon himself to provide, at his own expense, a proper place of
meeting, by fitting up a fine large barn with seats, and putting up a
simple rustic platform in one corner of it for the speaker. It struck me
that this was a symptom of genuine interest in the politics of his
region not likely to be shown in similar circumstances by many English
or American farmers. He was a man of middle age, with the quiet,
self-possessed carriage, general among his class in all parts of France,
and received us, in the large and neatly-furnished best room of his
old-fashioned and very comfortable house, with frank and simple
courtesy. On the walls hung a number of engravings and two or three
small paintings. One of these represented the Duc d'Orléans, the father
of the Comte de Paris, in the uniform of the celebrated corps of
Chasseurs which he organised and to which he gave his name. 'That
picture,' said the farmer, 'was given to my father by the prince. He
used to stop here often while he was at the camp of the Chasseurs, and
take his breakfast. I remember him perfectly, for I was then a
well-grown lad, and he was always full of kindness and good spirits. Ah!
if he had lived! We should not be where we are to-day in France, with
all these debts and all these dangers!'
The constituents of my host, all of them specially invited by letter to
attend the conference, had already begun to assemble when we arrived,
but some of them had two or three miles to walk after service in their
respective churches, and it was nearly six o'clock when the conference
began. By that time the large farmyard and the rooms of the house were
filled with a company of perhaps a hundred and fifty men, almost all of
them farmers. Among them was only one landowner of the aristocratic
class, the Comte de----, who had walked over from his château about
three miles off. He was a type of the old-fashioned French country
gentleman, tall and sinewy, with finely cut features, simply, not to say
carelessly, dressed, but with an unmistakable air of distinction, and a
certain peremptory courtesy of manner which would infallibly have got
him into trouble in the days when, near Baume-les-Dames, Arthur Young
had to clear himself of the suspicion that he was a gentleman on pain of
being promptly hanged from a lantern hook.
The seats in the barn once filled, some fifty auditors grouped
themselves in the farmyard about the wide-open doors of the barn, and M.
Labitte mounted the extemporised platform. The proceedings had to be
suspended for a few moments as the attention of the audience was
suddenly drawn to the high road by the galloping past of two generals in
full uniform, with their staff officers, from St.-Omer. There was no
nomination of a chairman or a secretary, none of the inevitable
formalities of an English or American political gathering. M. Labitte
called the meeting to order by the simple process of beginning to
address it. Nothing could be more direct and business-like than his
speech. It was exactly what he told his hearers he meant it to be, an
account of his stewardship as their councillor-general. He said not a
word about the personal aspects of the party conflicts raging in France,
and very little about the national aspects of that conflict. Speaking in
a frank conversational way, and referring to his notes only for figures
and dates, he gave his constituents a succinct picture of the effect
upon their own local interests of the policy pursued by the Government
of the Republic. He told them how much of their money had been spent
under the action of the Council-General during the six years of his
term, and on what it had been spent, and with what results. If they
liked the picture, well and good; if not, the remedy was in their own
hands at the next election. He had forewarned me to expect nothing
demonstrative in the attitude of his audience. 'They listen most
attentively,' he said, 'but they give you no sign either of agreement
or disagreement, of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. At night, after the
meeting is over, they will break up into little knots and coteries, and
talk it all over among themselves. If they are pleased on the whole, one
of the group finally will say: "Well, Labitte told us the truth," and
that being admitted by the rest, the conference will be a success!'
On this occasion the auditors were much more outspoken during the
conference. Speaking of the unequal pressure upon the different communes
of the military service, M. Labitte told them a story of a youth who
came to him to get an exemption from service. 'I told him,' said M.
Labitte, 'that I should be very glad to get it for him, but that his
commune was not at that moment entitled to an exemption, and that I
could not be a party to putting an injustice upon another commune. He
was annoyed at this, and thought I ought to do him a favour, no matter
at whose cost. I declined, and he went away. Some time after I met him,
when he exultingly told me that he had seen one of my colleagues, a
Republican, and had got from him the exemption he wanted. After that I
heard stories put about to the effect that Labitte cared nothing about
the pressure of the military service on the labouring people! Was I not
right? Was it not my duty to see no favouritism shown to one commune at
the expense of another?'
To these queries there was a prompt and general response, 'Yes! yes! You
were quite right,' and several voices cried out, 'Bravo!--quite right,
Labitte.'
Again, in dealing with the question of education, M. Labitte told his
hearers of three instances in which small communes had been made to
expend sums inordinately disproportionate to their resources upon what
he called 'scholastic palaces,' although a great majority of the people
in each instance distinctly refused to send their children to the lay
schools established in these 'palaces.' One case was that of a commune
of some seven hundred souls compelled to expend more than sixty thousand
francs, or 2,400_l._ sterling, upon a 'scholastic palace'! 'I opposed
these expenditures,' he said, 'for I think it is part of the duty of a
councillor-general to look closely into the use made of your money.'
This, also, the hearers applauded, not noisily at all, but with a kind
of gratified murmur, not unlike the very loud purring of a very large
cat. By this time it was evident that the speaker had his audience well
in hand, and M. Labitte took up some points of attack made on himself.
One of these was that he was a 'clerical.' He said that he certainly was
a 'clerical,' if that meant a man who had a religion and respected it,
and wished to see the religion of other people respected; and gliding on
from this to the question of the religious education of children, he
asked the people whether they wished to see the curates forbidden to
teach their children the principles of their religion. He was instantly
answered by a man standing in the crowd just outside the door of the
barn, who, in a loud and rather husky voice, shouted out that 'the
priest had no business in the school.' Several of the audience met this
interruption with derisive laughter, and two or three of them sharply
invited the man to hold his tongue and go about his business. For a
moment it seemed as if we were about to have a scene. But M. Labitte
interposed. With perfect good temper he replied to the man that he was
quite of his opinion as to the proper place of a priest, and that he had
no wish to see the children at school interfered with in their school
hours by any instruction not a part of the school programme. He
suggested, however, that, instead of shouting and clamouring, the man
should wait till he, M. Labitte, had got through, and then come up
'amiably and prettily' on the platform and state his own views as fully
as he liked. This made the man in the doorway angrier than ever, and as
the audience good-naturedly laughed at him, he began to use rather
abusive language. Upon this several stalwart peasants rose and made
their way towards him with very plain intimations that if he did not
take to the highway he would be carried there. The uproar was all over
in five minutes. Some companions of the anti-clerical gentleman, not
liking the look of the audience, contrived to surround him and led him
off, and he disappeared uttering a threat or two of incoherent defiance
as he went out of the farmyard. A burly farmer seated near me explained
that 'the fellow was drunk. But,' he added, 'he was sent here to do all
this, and I know who sent him. Do you see that high chimney across the
road some way off among the trees? Well, he is a factory hand there.
There are a number of them--they don't belong to this country, and the
manufacturer is an intriguer. He wanted to be a councillor-general, and
we beat him off. He doesn't like it--and that's at the bottom of it
all.'
M. Labitte spoke for about an hour, the audience gradually increasing
and listening with close attention. At the end the farmer, who had
arranged the conference, got up and thanked the councillor-general for
the account he had given of his services, and then the meeting broke up
as quietly as it had assembled, and with as little ceremony.
Before the company began to leave the barn, a young man near the door
asked for some information as to the duties likely to be imposed to
protect the farmers, and getting a brief and clear reply, he said that
would be very satisfactory--if only 'some proprietors would not put such
high prices on their land.' The Count, who sat just in front of me and
who had kept his hawk eye fixed on the speaker, chuckled to himself and
said to me, 'That shot was meant for me!'
Altogether the proceedings gave me a very favourable notion of the
intelligence and the practical sense of the people. If all the
constituencies in France could be handled in this direct fashion at the
national elections in September, the result of those elections might be
at least the approximative expression of the sense of the nation.
But this is not to be expected. There is much more canvassing done, I
think, by legislative candidates in France, and much less public
speaking than in America or in England, and the pressure of the
Government upon the voters is very much greater here even than it is in
America. The proportion of office-holders to the population is much more
considerable, and the recent governments have made the tenure of office
in France even more dependent upon the political activity of the
officials than it has ever been in the United States. This is one of the
many evil legacies of the First Republic. The maxim that, 'to the
victors belong the spoils,' I am sorry to say has been pretty
extensively reduced to practice on my side of the Atlantic; but it was
first formulated, not by Jackson, but by Danton. Louis Blanc tells us
that this brutal Boanerges of the Jacobins startled even his allies one
day, by cynically declaring that 'the revolution was a battle, and, like
all battles, ought to end by the division of the spoils among the
victors.'
Gabriel Charmes, a republican of the republicans, reviewing the conduct
of the governments which have succeeded each other in France with such
kaleidoscope rapidity since the death of Thiers, deliberately declares
that 'epuration is the watchword, and the true aim of Republican
politics' in France. And 'epuration' is the euphemism invented to
describe the simple process of kicking out the office-holder who is in,
to make room for the office-seeker who is out. Gambetta began this
process in December 1870, when he wrote to the Government at Paris:
'Authorise me and all my colleagues to "purify" the _personnel_ of the
public administration, and it shall be done in very short order.' Within
a month, the Minister of the Interior telegraphed to the prefects, 'you
are authorised to make all the changes among the public school teachers,
which, from a republican and political point of view, you may think
desirable.' M. Crémieux, Minister of Justice, followed the work up so
energetically, that by the end of the year 1871 he declared that he had
'weeded out eighteen hundred justices of the peace, and two hundred and
eighty-nine magistrates of the courts and tribunals.' When the
republicans of the different Radical shades got into power in 1877, the
newly elected deputies, according to M. Floquet, held a meeting, and
insisted upon a further 'epuration.' They were of the mind of the
sub-prefect of Roanne, who telegraphed to his superior, 'If Republicans
alone are not put into office, the Republicans will rise and we shall
have civil war.' In January 1880, M. de Freycinet, then, as now, a
Minister, loudly called for a 'reform of the _personnel_ of the
Administration; and M. Gabriel Charmes, speaking of the then
situation in France, tells us that only one prefect of the previous
Republican Administration had escaped 'purification,' and not one
procureur-general. 'Has a single justice of the peace,' he added, 'or a
single public school teacher in the slightest degree open to suspicion,
escaped the avenging hands of MM. Le Royes and Jules Ferry? Certainly
not.'
This was nine years ago. So thorough was the weeding, M. Charmes tells
us, that, 'even the rural constables had not escaped, and the epuration
policy had carried terror and anarchy into all branches of the public
service.'
In 1885 more than three millions of voters recorded their protest
against these methods of government, and against the deputies who had
identified these methods with the Republican form of government. This
protest was met by M. de Freycinet, on January 16, 1886, with a speech,
in the course of which he calmly said, 'Let no one henceforth forget
that liberty to oppose the Government does not exist for the servants of
the State.'
That is to say, the Republican Government, which is itself the servant,
and the paid servant, of the State, will not permit any of its
fellow-servants and subordinates, who are also presumably French
citizens and taxpayers, to form and express at the polls any opinion on
public affairs differing from the opinions held by the ministers who
make up the Government.
It was upon this simple and beautiful principle that Mr. Tweed and his
colleagues consolidated the local administration of affairs of the city
of New York. Applied to the administration of the affairs of thirty-six
millions of people in France, it ought certainly to produce results far
transcending in splendour any achieved by the Tammany Ring. For M.
Gabriel Charmes is quite in the right when he says that 'under this word
of "epuration" lie concealed the most deplorable forms of personal
greed, and the least avowable personal spites and rancours.' Like other
clever devices, however, 'epuration' may possibly be carried too far. If
it comes to pass that no actual functionary thinks his head safe, while,
at the same time, every office the Government has to give represents a
dozen or twenty 'expurgated,' and therefore exasperated and disaffected,
previous holders of that office, the confidence of the garrison may be
shaken while the animosity of the assailants is intensified. This point
may possibly have been reached in France. If it has not been reached,
the influence of the Government upon the voters must be very formidable.
For the average French voter is hemmed in and hedged about by
innumerable small functionaries who have it in their power to oblige or
to disoblige him, to gratify or to vex him in all sorts of ways; and
though the ballot is supposed to be sacred and secret in France, it can
hardly be more sacred or more secret there than in other countries. And
whatever protection against annoyance the ballot may give to the voter,
nothing can protect the candidate.
What I have heard in other regions I hear in Artois, that nothing is so
difficult as to persuade men of position and character to take upon
themselves the troubles, and expose themselves to the inconveniences, of
an important political candidacy. There are a hundred ways in which a
triumphant Administration conducted on the principles of the 'epuration'
policy may harass and annoy an unsuccessful banner-bearer of the
Opposition. The question of expense is another obstacle in the way of a
thorough organisation of public opinion against such a Government.
An average outlay of 400,000 francs per department would be required, I
was told by an experienced friend in Paris, adequately to put into the
line of political battle all the departments of France, large and small
together. As there are eighty-three departments in France, this gives us
a total of 33,200,000 francs, or some 1,300,000_l._ sterling, as the
cost of a thorough political campaign against an established French
Government. If we suppose each deputy to make a personal contribution of
20,000 francs to this war-chest, that will give us only about one-third
of the necessary amount. The rest must be made up by the personal
contributions of public-spirited citizens, and my own observation of
public affairs, going back, now, over a good many lively and interesting
political conflicts in the United States, leads me to believe that
liberal contributions of this sort are, as a rule, more easily collected
by the beneficiaries of a more or less unscrupulous Government actually
in power, than by the disinterested advocates of a real political
reformation.
We wound up the day of the Conference with a delightful little dinner at
St.-Quentin. The traditions of the old French _cuisine_ are not yet
extinct in the provinces, nor, for that matter, in the private life of
the true Parisians of Paris. They all centre in the famous saying of
Brillat-Savarin, that a man may learn how to cook, but must be born to
roast--a saying worthy of the philosophic magistrate who, coming to
America, under the impression that he was to be fed upon roots and raw
meat, went back to France convinced that a New England roast turkey and
an Indian pudding were not to be matched in the old world. It is one of
the many curious things of this curious world of the nineteenth century,
that a _cuisine_ of made dishes of which Grimod de La Reynière long ago
gave us the origin, in the downfall of the kitchens of the
prince-bishops along the Rhine, should be gravely and generally accepted
by Frenchmen themselves, or at least by the Parisians of literature and
the boulevards, as the national _cuisine_ of France. The charming
daughter of my host at St.-Quentin knew better; and she received with a
graceful, housewifely satisfaction the neatly-turned compliments which
one of the guests was old-fashioned and sensible enough to pay her upon
the skill of her cook.
The city of Aire-sur-la-Lys itself, like St.-Omer, shows traces still of
its connection with Flanders and with Spain. I do not know if it is true
of Aire as M. Lauwereyns de Roosendaele, writing about Jacqueline
Robins, declares it to be of St.-Omer, that there are people there, even
now, who think of the days of the Spanish rule as the 'good old times.'
But there is a certain Castilian stateliness about the older buildings
of Aire; and the portals of the larger residences, leading from the
street into charming secluded courts, gay with trees and flowers, remind
one of the zaguans of the Andalusian houses. Very Spanish, too, is the
Jesuit Church, despite some extraordinary decorations due to the zeal of
its more recent possessors.
The Flemish past of the city is commemorated especially by a very
remarkable little building known as the Corps de Garde, and by certain
portions of the Church of St.-Pierre.
Aire formerly had a cathedral, but during the worst period of the Terror
that exemplary ruffian, Joseph Lebon of Arras, the unfrocked priest, who
organised pillage and massacre throughout the Pas-de-Calais, frightened
the good people of Aire into a frenzy of destruction and devilry. The
Church of St.-Pierre was then a collegiate church, but it was turned
over to the worship of the Supreme Being invented by Robespierre,
desecrated and defaced and left in a deplorable state. It had already
suffered, like so many other churches all over France and England, from
the ingenious 'restorers' of the eighteenth century, who have left their
sign-manual on the upper part of the edifice and on the mass of a huge
organ loft which crushes and disfigures the main entrance. The greater
part of the building is of the fifteenth century; and it has been
restored within our own times as tastefully and effectively as in the
circumstances was possible, under the supervision and in part, I
believe, at the cost of a devoted and conscientious curate, a member of
a Scotch family long fixed in Artois, the Abbé Scott, who took charge of
the church at the end of the reign of Charles X. and who now lies buried
in the building he did so much to preserve. It is a very considerable
church, measuring three hundred feet in length and a hundred-and-twenty
in width; with a height of seventy feet in the main nave. The ogival
windows are filled with rich, stained glass; all the ancient monuments
which escaped the fury of 1793 have been excellently restored, and the
church bears witness in its condition to the active piety of the
faithful of Aire.
The 'Corps de Garde' is a quadrilateral jewel of Flemish architecture of
the end of the sixteenth century. It was of old the central point of the
city, where the armed citizens met who patrolled the streets like the
burghers of Rembrandt's magnificent 'Ronde de Nuit.' A gallery runs
round it of arcades, and brickwork supported by monolithic columns.
Above these arcades runs a frieze of trophies of arms with the
attributes of St. James--the mayor of the city in whose time it was
built bore the name of this apostle--and the cross of Burgundy.
The principal façade fronts the 'Grande Place,' and is surmounted by a
picturesque pointed roof. An attic storey, running all around the
building, is richly decorated with sculptures of the Theological and
Cardinal Virtues, the Four Elements, and the patron saints of Aire--St.
Nicholas and St. Anthony. On another façade is the sculptured niche, now
vacant, wherein stood a statue of the Virgin, before which all the
great processions, civic and military, were used to halt and do
obeisance.
In 1482, after the death of Charles the Bold, Louis XI. of France
succeeded, 'by treachery and corruptions,' in annexing Aire for a time
to the French crown, and the local records give a picturesque account of
a French tournament held here in 1492, the year of the discovery of
America, under the auspices of no less a person than the Chevalier 'sans
peur et sans reproche.' Pierre du Terrail, dit le Bayard, came to Aire
on July 19 in that year, and at once sent a trumpeter to proclaim
through all the streets and squares that on the morrow, being July 20,
he would hold a tournay under the walls of Aire, for all comers, 'of
three charges with the lance, the steel points dulled; and twelve sword
strokes to be exchanged, with no lists drawn, and on horseback in
harness of battle.' The next day the combat to be renewed 'afoot with
the lance until the breaking of the lance, and after that with the
battle-axe so long as the judges might think fit.' The chroniclers
celebrate in superlatives the valour and skill shown by the hero in
these gentle and joyous assaults of arms, and the beauty of the Artesian
dames and damsels who thronged from all the country round into Aire to
witness the tournay, and take part in the dances and banquets which
followed it. But the hearts of the people were evidently Flemish and
Spanish, not French; for they hailed the restoration of the Austrian
authority by Charles the Fifth with all manner of rejoicings. Charles,
with his usual sagacity, confirmed all the ancient rights and privileges
of the city and its corporations, which had been a good deal disturbed
under the centralising rule of the French sovereigns, and a record of
the year 1538 tells us that on the proclamation in that year of the
truce of Borny, the Austrian authorities paid the treasurer of the city
'lxxviii. sols' for silver money 'thrown in joy to the people.' The
treasurer himself seems to have been so enthusiastic on this occasion
that he threw his own cap after the silver money, for the record adds a
further payment to him 'for a certain cap belonging to him, which was
likewise thrown to the people.' All the records of this age at Aire are
picturesque with lively accounts of all manner of junketings, carousals,
and festivities, and the good people seem to have passed no small part
of their lives in merry-making. There is a curious entry on the occasion
of the marriage of the Archduke Philip to Mary of England. This
auspicious event was celebrated at Aire by a grand procession, followed
by 'songs and ballads in honour of the married pair;' and the treasurer
paid to 'Johan Gallant, goldsmith, iiii. livres iiii. sols for the
silver presents, to wit, an eagle, a leopard, a lion, and a fool--all in
silver--which were given to those who made the songs, ballads, and games
in honour of the said good news!'
Like Calais, St.-Omer, and other cities of this region, Aire offered a
refuge in 1553 to the unfortunate inhabitants of the ancient historic
city of Thérouanne, which, after a heroic defence by d'Essé de
Montmorency, was taken in that year, five days after the death on the
ramparts of the gallant commander, by the troops of Charles the Fifth,
and by his orders razed to the ground. The details of this merciless
destruction recall the sack of Rome by the Imperialists; and it is the
blackest feature in the black record of the First French Revolution that
the men who then got control for a time of the government of France, in
the names of Liberty and Progress, deliberately and wantonly rivalled
the most unscrupulous of the kings and emperors whom they were
constantly denouncing, in their treatment, not of foreign fortresses
conquered in war, but of French cities, of the lives and the property of
French citizens, and of the most precious monuments of French history.
Charles the Bold at Dinant and Charles the Fifth at Thérouanne were
outdone, in the prostituted name of the French people, by the younger
Robespierre at Toulon and by the paralytic Couthon at Lyons.
The annals of these north-eastern cities of modern France are full of
most curious and valuable materials for a really instructive history of
the French people. The most cursory acquaintance with them suffices to
show how much worse than worthless are the huge political pamphlets
which during the last hundred years have passed current with the world
as histories of the French Revolution, and how important to the future,
not of France alone but of civilisation, is the work begun in our own
times by writers like Mortimer-Ternaux, Granier de Cassagnac,
Baudrillart, Biré, and Henri Taine. Here in Artois, under the
conflicting influences of Flemish, Spanish, and French laws and customs,
a genuine development of social and political life may be traced as
clearly as in Scotland or in England, down to the sudden and violent
strangulation of French progress by the incompetent States-General and
the not less incompetent king in 1789.
The archives of Aire show that the question of public education was a
practical question there, at least as far back as at the beginning of
the seventeenth century. In 1613, the magistrates asked and obtained the
permission of the Archduke Albert and the Archduchess Isabella to lay a
special tax on the city of Aire and two adjoining villages, for the
purpose of founding a college, private citizens having already given an
endowment of 750 florins a year for this object. The importance of this
contribution may be estimated from the fact that after the siege of Aire
by the French in 1641, a sum of I,000 florins left to the Collegiate
Church of Aire by a canon of Tournay was found sufficient to restore the
chapel of Our Lady, the whole right wing of the church, and many houses
belonging to the canons, which had all been destroyed by the French
artillery. No time was lost in opening the college to the youth of the
city and the suburbs, and only a few years afterwards the priests in
charge of it wrote to the Seigneur de Thiennes, asking for further
endowments in order to increase the number of the teachers to twenty, so
great was the affluence of scholars from all the country around, 'to the
number at that time of more than three hundred.' The collegiate chapter
of Aire appointed one of its canons superintendent of the school, under
the title of the 'Ecolâtre.' There really seems to be as little
foundation in fact for the common notion that there was no provision
made for the education of the people in France before 1789, as for the
notion, not less common, that there were no peasant proprietors in
France before 1789. It is hardly excusable even that Mr. Carlyle,
rhapsodising more than fifty years ago about the 'dumb despairing
millions,' should have fallen into this error. For though De Tocqueville
and Taine had not then exploded it in detail, Necker, in whose career
Carlyle took so much interest, not only declared officially that there
was 'an immense number' of such proprietors in France, but took the
trouble to explain how it had come about. The law of 1790 establishing
the land-tax required every parish to furnish a detailed account of the
then existing properties in land, and it is shown by these that there
then existed in France nearly two-thirds as many landholders as now
exist, although the population of the country is now about twenty-five
per cent. greater than it then was.