IN THE SOMME--_continued_
AMIENS
Where party names are taken from persons, there we may be sure that the
people are either losing, or have never had, the political instincts
which alone can make popular government a government of law and order.
The Englishmen who are readiest to proclaim themselves 'Gladstonians,'
whatever may be their other merits, are hardly perhaps the most devoted
champions either of the British constitution as it is, or of strictly
constitutional reform. In France to-day, the Republican party is made up
of clans, each taking the name of its chief. There are Ferryists and
Clementists, as there were Gambettists; and the Government of the day is
putting forth all its strength to check the drift over of what I suppose
I may without impropriety call the Republican residuum into Boulangism.
Here in Amiens the tide seems to be too strong for the authorities at
Paris, and for that matter throughout the department of the Somme. At
the election nearly a year ago, on August 19, 1888, of a deputy to fill
the vacancy caused by the death of a Royalist member, M. de Berly,
General Boulanger came forward as a candidate and was elected by an
overwhelming majority. There are 160,400 electors in the department. Of
these, 121,955 voted. General Boulanger received 76,094 votes, and his
Republican competitor, M. Barnot, only 41,371, General Boulanger having
been elected at the same time for the Nord and the Charente-Inférieure.
General Boulanger resigned his seat and his Republican followers cast
their votes for a Royalist, General de Montauban, who was elected. In
the arrondissement of Amiens, with 57,527 registered voters, General
Boulanger had a majority, in 1888, of 15,274 voters, the whole vote
thrown there being 42,609. Yet, in 1881, on a total registration of
47,923 voters, the Republican candidates for Amiens, M. Goblet and M.
Dieu, were elected by a combined majority of 7,094 votes. If the
Boulangists carry Amiens, therefore, at the legislative election this
year, it may be taken for granted, I think, that M. Goblet and his
friend the senatorial mayor have not educated their fellow-citizens into
very staunch and trustworthy supporters of the Republic.
M. Fleury, the editor-in-chief of the Conservative _Echo de la Somme_,
who made a pretty thorough canvass of the department before the election
of August 19, 1888, gives me some curious details as to that election.
The monarchists, both royalists and imperialists, gave a general and
tacit, and in many cases an overt and active, support to General
Boulanger, their object being the same as his--to bring about a repeal
of the existing law of 1884, which was passed to prevent any real
revision of the constitution in a sense hostile to the existing
republican form of government. Of course if the people of the Somme had
really cared anything about the Republic as a form of government, they
ought to have defeated General Boulanger. It is the opinion of M. Fleury
that the people of the Somme, and indeed of Picardy, not only care
little or nothing about the Republic as a form of government, but
actually and by a considerable majority prefer some monarchical
form--probably, on the whole, the Empire.
They are not in the least likely to express this preference at the
polls, because, in common with the vast majority of the electors
throughout France, they have been born and brought up to take their form
of government from Paris. So long as the government at Paris--be it
royal, imperial, or republican--controls the executive, the people of
the provinces are extremely unlikely to make an emphatic effort of their
own to be rid of that government. If Louis Philippe, in 1848, would have
allowed Marshal Bugeaud to use the force at his command in Paris, the
Republic improvised in February of that year would have been strangled
before birth, to the extreme satisfaction of an enormous majority of the
French people. This was afterwards overwhelmingly shown by the election
of Louis Napoleon, when General Cavaignac, with all the advantage of the
control of the machinery of government at Paris, could secure only a
relatively insignificant popular vote at the polls against the
representative of the imperial monarchy. I spent the winter in Paris two
years afterwards as a youth, during my first tour in Europe, and I there
heard an American resident of Paris, well known at that time in the
world of French politics, Mr. George Sumner, a brother of the senator
from Massachusetts, relate in the _salon_ of M. de Tocqueville a curious
story of the days of February, which strikingly illustrates the
disposition of the French provinces at that time to take whatever Paris
might send them in the way either of administration or of revolution.
The king refused to let the Maréchal Duc d'Isly restore order (as there
is no doubt he could easily and quickly have done), on the ground that
he had received the Crown from the National Guard in Paris, and that he
would not allow it to be defended by the line against them. The recently
published letters of his very popular son, the Duc d'Orléans, prove
that, had that prince been then living, he probably would never have
allowed this scruple to stand in the way of averting a social and
political catastrophe. But the duc was in his untimely grave, and the
control of events fell most unexpectedly into the hands of a few men who
had no concerted plan of action, and, indeed, hardly knew whether they
were awake or dreaming. 'They proclaimed a republic,' said Mr. Sumner,
'because they did not know what else to do;' but they were in a state of
utter bewilderment at first, as to how they should get the republic
accepted by the provinces. A happy thought struck M. Armand Marrast. In
those days the French railway system was little developed. Most of the
mails from Paris were carried through the country by malles-postes and
diligences, and every evening an immense number of these coaches left
the central bureau for all parts of France. M. Marrast sent into all the
quarters of Paris and impounded, in one way or another, the services and
the paintpots of every house and furniture painter upon whom his people
could lay hands. These were all set to work upon the mail coaches. The
royal arms, with the Charter and the Crown, were painted over, and the
vehicles which, from Paris, carried to all parts of France the news of
the proclamation of the Republic carried everywhere also an outward and
visible sign of the establishment of the new government in the words
'République Française' brightly blazoned upon their panels.
I recalled this story to Mr. Sumner years afterwards in New York, and he
assured me not only that it was literally correct, but that he had been
consulted himself about it by M. Marrast at the time. This particular
device could not now be used as effectively. But, with the telegraph
wires and the telephones in its control, any government which may get
itself installed to-morrow in Paris would certainly have tremendous odds
in its favour, from one end of France to the other. The immense increase
of the French public debt under the republican administration since 1877
has correspondingly increased, all over France, the number of people
known as _petits rentiers_, who, having invested their savings, in part
or wholly, in the public securities, will be as quick to acquiesce in
any revolution which they believe to have been successful at Paris, as
they are slow to promote any revolution, no matter how desirable
otherwise a change in the government may seem to them to be. So long as
it is not shaken out of the public offices at Paris, the government of
the Republic may probably count upon this vast body of quiet people, as
confidently as the Empire counted upon it twenty years ago, or as the
monarchy or the dictatorship might count upon it to-morrow, were the
king or the dictator acclaimed in the capital.
M. Fleury cites one of General Boulanger's most active supporters, M.
Mermieix, as saying to him during the election in 1888, 'with a few
millions of francs, the liberty of the press and of public billsticking,
and three thousand rowdies, I can change the government of this country
in less than a year.'
The remark is slightly cynical. But the extreme anxiety of the
government of the Republic to get General Boulanger either into a prison
or out of Paris certainly goes far to justify the boast of M. Mermeix.
'I told General Boulanger at Doullens,' said M. Fleury, after going
thither in company with him from Amiens, 'that he was sure of his
election. My reason was that while I saw little real enthusiasm for him
at Amiens, none at all indeed among the middle classes, and no open
display of any on the part of the workmen, I found the peasants for him
almost to a man. They crowded about his railway carriage. They insisted
on shaking hands with him, many of them kissed his hand (that ancient
form of homage lingering still in their traditions), they fired off
guns, and, above all, the women held up their children to be kissed by
him. This settled the question for me. When I saw him kissing the little
girls, I knew that he had captured the mammas, and the mammas govern the
rural regions of Picardy.
'At Doullens I said to him, "You may be sure of your results now. You
will win by twenty-five thousand majority." He was very modest about it;
but, though he certainly is not a great politician, he seemed to
understand the meaning of this unquestionable popular interest in him
and his progress. I could not help, however, calling his attention to
the evidence it gave of what I believe to be the profoundly monarchical
instincts of the peasantry in this part of France.'
'How did he take it?
'Oh! he said nothing, but smiled in a way which might mean anything. Of
course his idea of a republic of honest men means, and can mean, nothing
but a republic with a chief who is beyond the reach of deputies and
contractors.'
'That,' I said, 'seems to have been simply Lafayette's idea, in 1792, of
an American republic for France, with a hereditary executive; or, in
other words, a French edition of the English "republic with a crown."'
M. Fleury replied, that this is rather the aim of the monarchists than
of the Boulangists. One of General Boulanger's lieutenants, M. Mermeix,
already cited, told him frankly that the Boulangists want a sort of
consulate stopping short of the Empire--a strong republic with a
nationally nominated chief, freedom of conscience, freedom of education,
no more parliaments, a simpler public administration, and the cutting
out of the financial cancer which is destroying the resources of France.
The coalition now existing between the royalists, the imperialists, and
the Boulangists, in view of the elections of 1889, obviously rests upon
the conviction, common to all these parties, that the Republic, as at
present constituted, is so far committed to a policy of reckless public
expenditure and of deliberately irreligious propagandism that its
leaders cannot, if they would, either readjust the national finances or
let the religious question alone.
A man of much ability and of very high character, who has filled
important financial posts under the Empire in this part of France, tells
me that there has been no real balancing, now, of the public books for
several years, because the members of the Cour des Comptes whose duty it
is to get this done have found it impossible (and so reported) to get
all the necessary accounts from the Ministry of Finance. As no
Conservative members are permitted to sit on the Committee of the
Budget, even such a monstrous thing as this passes unchecked by the
Chamber. No wonder that he should tell me, M. Bethmont, one of the
members of the Cour des Comptes and a Republican, is of the opinion that
nothing can make matters straight again in France but an Emperor with a
Liberal constitution, or, in other words, a revival of the Ollivier
experiment of 1870.
I tried in vain to get from M. Fleury some definite notion of the
political programme of General Boulanger. As I have been constantly
assured that the General formed his programme from his observation of
the institutions of my own country during the short time which he spent
in America, as one of the chosen representatives of France during the
centennial celebration of the crowning victory of Yorktown, in 1881, I
have long been not unnaturally curious to ascertain precisely how he
proposes to 'Americanise' the actual government of France. But on this
point I can get no more light from M. Fleury in Picardy--though M.
Fleury spent some time with the General as a not unsympathetic
ally--than I have been able to get from any of the General's most
devoted partisans in Paris. In Picardy as in Paris, Boulangism seems to
represent a destructive--or, if the phrase be more polite, a
detergent--rather than a constructive force. It is not the less worthy
of consideration, perhaps, on this account. But on this account it
appears to me more likely to play a subordinate than a leading part in
the political movement of these times. It is rather a broom, if I may so
speak, than a sceptre which the 'brav' général' is expected to wield. In
conversation with M. Fleury, another of General Boulanger's intimate and
confidential lieutenants, M. Turquet, formerly an Under-Secretary of
State in the Ministry of Fine Arts, who ran for a seat as deputy in the
Aisne in 1885, summed up the programme of Boulangism as 'a programme of
liberty.' 'I mean,' he said, 'real liberty, such as exists in America,
not our Liberalism, which is spurious and archaic. Our actual
republicans of to-day are Jacobins, sectarians. Their only notion is to
persecute and proscribe, and they are infinitely further from liberty
than you royalists are, for you have at your head a prince who has a
thoroughly open mind. The form of government, after all, signifies
little. The real question is not whether we shall have a monarchy or an
empire, an autocracy or a democracy. It is whether we shall have
liberty.'[3]
[3] M. Turquet ran in September in the first arrondissement of the
Seine against M. Yves Guyot, and there was no election. At the
election in October the Government proclaimed M. Yves Guyot elected
by a small majority.
'I answered him,' said M. Fleury, 'that what he said was very fine, and
that the friend of Fourier, Victor Considérant, had said it before him.
What I wanted to know, however, was, what the Boulangists proposed to do
with the Catholics, the believers, in France should the General get into
power.'
'We shall begin,' said M. Turquet, 'by suppressing the budget of
worship. We shall do this to satisfy the blockheads who are a noun of
multitude.
'But we shall restore, in another shape, to the clergy the indemnity
which is certainly due to them. We shall give the bishoprics either a
fixed sum, or a revenue proportional to the population of each
bishopric, so that the people may receive gratuitously the offices of
religion. This is a public service, and it shall be remunerated as it
ought to be. As to the Religious Orders, they shall have full liberty to
constitute themselves, to educate children, to care for the sick and
infirm, so long as they keep within the limits of the common law. All
property in mortmain shall be suppressed. A community of teachers, for
instance, may own the college necessary for the students, but not a
forest adjoining that college.'
To M. Fleury's natural question how the college should be maintained, M.
Turquet replied, 'You know as well as I do, that wealth no longer
consists in real estate alone. You can now carry in your pocket a
fortune in bonds payable to the bearer. The Religious Orders may own
these, like other people. A dozen of us in the Chamber hold these views.
You seem to think us Utopianists. But General Boulanger will make it
possible for us to apply these ideas!'
If General Boulanger and M. Turquet really imagine these views to be
'American,' it would be instructive for them to look into the masterly
protests of the Catholic Archbishop of New York, against the doctrines
of Mr. Henry George as adopted and expounded by Father McGlynn. The
Catholic Church in the United States holds its own property, real and
personal, and manages it to suit itself. It would be interesting to see
an attempt made in the legislature of an American State, to carry
through a law like the decrees issued in France in 1881, forbidding
curates and vicars to receive legacies left to them for the benefit of
the poor in their parishes, or to distribute to the poor sums left to
the Bureau of Public Charity, with an express proviso that they should
be distributed by the clergy of the place.
On one very important question of French politics, M. Fleury, as a
practical politician in this great and active department, gives me a
good deal of useful light. This is the question of the expenses of the
electoral machine. In France, as in America, no limit is set by the law
to the possible expenditure of a political candidate. I have already
given the estimate made for me in Artois of the general cost of the
legislative elections, and I have been told by more than one
well-informed French politician in other parts of France, that the
average cost of a candidacy for a seat in the Chamber may be roughly
estimated at twenty-five thousand francs, or a thousand pounds sterling.
This would show, allowing two candidates only for each seat, an
expenditure of thirty millions of francs, or twelve hundred thousand
pounds, at each French parliamentary election, being very nearly the
figure given me in Artois. We send only 330 members to Washington, but
we elect a new House every two years. The British House of Commons,
though more numerous even than the French Chamber, probably spends a
good deal less upon getting itself elected than either the French or the
American House.[4]
[4] At this time (October, 1889) there is a difficulty in New York
about a good candidate for the seat vacated by the death of the late
Mr. S. S. Cox, being a prominent democratic member of Congress,
because the candidate must consent to an annual 'assessment' on his
salary for political purposes. The French Government, I am told,
collects these 'contributions' easily, the deputies 'recouping'
themselves by patronage.
One of the 'working sub-prefects' of the Boulangist party in Picardy
gave M. Fleury a very frank estimate of the expense of electing the
General in 1888, in the Somme. He put it, in round numbers, at nearly or
quite one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs, or five thousand
pounds. This unusual outlay was made necessary by the great efforts of
the Government to defeat the General. Furthermore, it was swollen by the
disinterested devotion of many of the General's friends. Some of these
auxiliaries spent days at the best hotels in Picardy labouring for the
cause, with the result of a special hotel account, amounting to several
thousand francs. Nothing makes men so thirsty as political emotion.
Another partisan, at the head of a journal, sent in a bill for
forty-five thousand francs expended by him upon printing and stationery,
no charge being made for his personal services! The chief agents
received about two thousand francs apiece. One of them must have worked
very hard, for he earned no less than fifteen thousand francs. While all
this expense was incurring in Picardy, furthermore, two other elections
were pending, in each of which the General was a candidate, one in the
Charente and one in the Nord. It would seem to be probable enough,
therefore, that on these three elections In 1888 General Boulanger, or
the Boulangists, must have spent at least two hundred and fifty thousand
francs, or ten thousand pounds.
'Where did all this money come from?' is a not unnatural question. For
M. Fleury tells me the General's bills were paid much more promptly than
the bills of the Government candidates. It is an open secret apparently
that the Government candidates are very bad paymasters when they are
beaten. Some of the bills incurred by them in 1885, when the
Conservatives swept so large a part of Northern France, were still due,
it appears, in 1888. But the bills of General Boulanger were settled
very soon after the close of the campaign.
M. Mermeix insisted to M. Fleury that the General's war-chest was
supplied by voluntary subscriptions. 'Every day,' he said, the General
finds some ten thousand francs in his mails, and his followers 'are all
either beggars or millionaires.'
Another of the General's managers gave M. Fleury the names of two very
rich persons, one of them a cattle merchant at La Villette, who
subscribed between them a hundred and forty thousand francs to carry on
the campaign in Picardy. The enormous importance given to General
Boulanger by his terrified former associates in the Government seems to
me to be a very striking proof of the little confidence they really have
in their own hold upon the country, or in the permanency of 'republican
institutions' as they now exist in France, and this adequately explains
the readiness of speculators to 'invest' in what may be called the
'Boulangist bonds.' Such a report as that presented not very long ago to
the Chamber by M. Gerville-Réache on the state of the navy in France
suffices to show that the speculative maladministration of the French
finances has been so great as to make it quite certain that any 'honest
government' coming into power must reconstruct the system of the public
indebtedness. That is an operation which can hardly be carried out by
the most scrupulously honest government without very great profits to
the financiers concerned in it, and I only set down what is said to me
by respectable Frenchmen when I say that the Boulanger campaign funds
are openly described, by persons not at all hostile to 'Boulangism,' as
'bets on the General.' 'The difference between the managers of the
Boulangist campaign and the managers of the Government campaign,' said a
gentleman to me in Amiens, 'is simply this--that the Boulangist managers
are playing the game with private funds, and the others with public
funds. So the latter, I think, will win, for they have the longest purse
to draw on.' This gentleman is of the opinion, however, that but for
General Saussier, in command of the garrison of Paris, General
Boulanger, after the election of January 27, 1889, in which he took the
capital by storm, might have turned the Government neck and heels out of
doors. The weak point of Boulangism,' he said, 'is Boulanger.' 'He has
no strength with the officers of the army. They have no confidence
either in his character or in his ability; not that they think his
character bad or deny his ability, but only that they regard him as a
shallow, vacillating, and mediocre person who made himself valuable to
the Republican politicians by going into alliances with them to which
other officers of strong character and high ability would not stoop. As
for the quarrel between Boulanger and these politicians, it is a
beggars' quarrel, to be made up over the pot of broth. But it won't be
made up, because they can't agree as to the distribution of the broth.
Meanwhile all the chickens of France are going into the broth, and the
peasant's pot will see them no more, as in the good old days of Henry
IV.!'
As for the absurd story that the Boulangist funds come from America, the
only foundation I can find for that seems to be the intimacy, which, I
believe, is no longer as close as it was, between General Boulanger, M.
de Rochefort, and a French nobleman of an ancient historic family, who
has married a very wealthy American wife, and who has long been known to
entertain the most extreme, not to say revolutionary, notions in
politics. The honest Boulangists who really hope to see a good
government established by putting out M. Carnot and putting in General
Boulanger, swell the tide of his supporters, apparently, here as
elsewhere in France, because they blindly hope for everything from him
which their experience forbids them to hope for from the men actually in
power. As one of his most cynical supporters long ago said in Paris, he
is 'the grand common sewer of the disgust of France.'
His popularity with the common soldiers is another element to be counted
with in estimating the strength of this military French Mahdi.
I have struck up a friendship here at Amiens with an excellent woman who
presides over a shop--not one of the _pâtisseries_ so justly celebrated
by Mr. Ruskin--and who is a very good type of the shrewd, sensible
French '_petite bourgeoise_,' such a woman as, I dare say, Jacqueline
Robins of St.-Omer was in her own time. She has a son in the army, who
is likely soon to be a corporal. '_Dame_, Monsieur,' she said to me, 'if
M. Boulanger is not the best General in France, why did they make him
Minister of War? You do not know what he did for the soldiers! My son
when he gets his stripes is to marry--she is a very nice girl, an only
child, do you know? and her father, who is very solid, will put her in
her own furniture--and more than that! and they will have their own
establishment. They could not have that, you know, but for General
Boulanger, who made the new rule about the wives of the sub-officers.
And they used to shave the soldiers--imagine it!--just like prisoners,
and such beds as they gave them--it was a horror! Well, all that he
changed, and he made the soup fit to eat.'
'The other generals are not very fond of him, you say? _Parbleu!_ that
is likely enough! It is like the _conseillers_ here in the city--one of
them does well, the others always find something to say behind his back!
And that affair on the frontier! You know, Monsieur, he had all the army
in hand--ah, well in hand--a hundred thousand men ready to march; and
those rascals of Germans they knew it, and they gave up our man. I am
glad we had no war. No! I do not want a war, but, _dame_, one must have
teeth, you know, and be ready to show them!'
'You want to see your War Minister made president, then?' I asked.
'President? what does that signify? Chief of the State--Emperor; ah!
those were the good times here in Amiens, Monsieur, not as it is to-day
with the eternal debts that M. Dauphin made us a present of. Eh! an old
hypocrite that man is! and with these _centimes additionnels_ that never
end! And then these water-mètres! Eh! that is a pretty invention to make
water as dear as wine at Amiens, and yet, God knows, wine is not too
cheap, with the octroi of Amiens! It is worse than at Paris! Call him
what you like, Monsieur, _c'est Boulanger qu'il nous faut_--that is to
say, we must have a man at Paris. And you will see he is the man; all
the mothers of soldiers will tell you that!'
From the point of view of the municipal finances, the 'good old times'
of the Empire may well have a charm for the taxpayers of Amiens.
In 1870 Amiens, with 61,063 inhabitants, raised and spent a municipal
revenue of rather more than a million and a half of francs, or, in round
numbers, about 25 francs, or 20 shillings, _per capita_ of the
population. A public loan, made in 1854, had been almost wholly paid
off, and the city treasury still held 600,000 francs of a loan of
1,600,000 francs made in 1862 for certain public improvements. The
municipal government cost 372,000 francs, and 180,000 francs were spent
on the public schools. Of the municipal income, 987,802 francs were
derived from four forms of direct taxation, and 770,000 francs from the
_octroi_. This gave an average of a little less than 13 francs _per
capita_ as the burden of the _octroi_ upon the population.
In 1886 the population had increased to 74,000. The direct taxes brought
in 1,184,724 francs, and the _octroi_, 1,498,459, making the average
burden of the _octroi per capita_ 20 fr. 20 c., or an increase of about
50 per cent. in the pressure of that form of tax upon the population, as
compared with 1870. As the _octroi_ is imposed upon food and beverages
of all kinds--fuel, forage, and building materials--this tax is regarded
in France as a measure for estimating the general well-being of the
inhabitants. Thus measured, there would seem to be a falling off in the
general well-being of the people of Amiens since 1883. For, while the
pressure _per capita_ of the octroi is much greater than it was in 1870,
the actual receipts from the _octroi_ were less with a population of
74,000 in 1886, than they were in 1883. In 1883 the _octroi_ yielded
1,533,140 francs. In 1886 it yielded only 1,498,459 francs. The falling
off was in the receipts from beverages, from provisions, from forage,
and from building materials. The tariff of the _octroi_ meanwhile has
remained substantially without change from 1873 to the present time. It
is an expensive tax to collect, the costs of collection in 1886
amounting to 11.85 per cent. of the receipts.
Adding together now the receipts from the direct taxes and the _octroi_
of Amiens in 1886, we have a sum of 2,683,183 francs, or in round
numbers about 1,100,000 francs more than in 1870. But while, as I have
stated, in 1870 the receipts equalled and balanced the expenses of the
municipal government, this is no longer the case.
In 1886 Amiens, with an income of 2,683,183 francs, spent 4,162,294
francs, giving an average municipal outlay of 56 fr. 10 c. _per capita_
and an excess of expenditure over revenue of no less than 1,479,111
francs, or very nearly the total income and outlay of the city under the
Empire. No wonder that the public debt of the department of the Somme,
of which Amiens is the capital, seems in 1886 to have amounted to
18,303,496 francs! What inequalities of pressure upon the people of the
department this involves may be estimated from the fact that, while
there are in the Somme 836 communes, only 404, or less than half of
these communes, are authorised to raise money by loans, and one-eighth
of them to raise money by _octrois_. Yet we are constantly told that all
inequalities and privileges were abolished throughout France by a stroke
of the pen in the _annus mirabilis_ 1789![5] The taxation in 20 communes
is estimated at 15 centimes, or less; in 87, at from 15 to 30; in 268,
at from 31 to 50; in 428, at from 51 to 100; and in 33, at 100 centimes
and upwards. These are the communal taxes. To these must be added 51
centimes for the departmental taxes, ordinary and extraordinary; 2
centimes for the land-tax; 19 centimes for the personal tax and taxes
on personal property; 18.8 centimes for the doors and windows tax; and
39.6 centimes for licences. For Amiens these fractions taken together
mount up to 119-4/10 centimes.
[5] 'Privileges' were, in fact, abolished only by Napoleon in 1804.
I have no wish to weary myself or my readers with figures. But these
figures tell the story of the difference between the government of
France under the much reviled Empire and under the present government,
which is represented to us as the natural and admirable 'evolution' of
republican institutions in this country. In 1870, as I have stated, the
receipts and expenditure of the city of Amiens balanced one another. The
city paid its way, and lived up to, not beyond, its means.
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 encumbered, to be managed by a municipal 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 municipal 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 préfecture, and they do not get within range of the
taxpayer for at least a twelvemonth afterwards.
But M. Fleury assures 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 assume 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 accumulation 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
'Association 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 Constitution and make an end of the Republic. 'This
association,' 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 municipal 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 Constitution. 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 mediæval 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 _octroyée_ 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
Vendémiaire 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 municipal 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 Assembly 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 document 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 hit 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 _noblesse_ 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 God made for you;
So we'll blow them up with dynamite,
The thieving, hellish 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 gré_ or the _droit de marché_.
Under this custom a tenant-farmer in Picardy considered himself entitled
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 _dépointé_, entitled 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 _dépointé_ 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 régime_ 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 assembly of the Generality of Amiens, by its
president the Duc d'Hâvré, vainly urged the royal government to take
resolute action in this matter. With the Revolution, of course, things
grew worse very rapidly. The _dépointés_ 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 gré_ (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 _noblesse_ and the clergy
long before. The _corvée_, 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 _corvée_, 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 _corvée_ 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 corvéable 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 nobody pays, an impression which is the trusty
shield 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 pass 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 shift 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 circumference 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 passed 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.