IN THE AISNE--_continued_
LAON
The lively little city of Chauny, standing in the heart of the rich and
lovely valley of the Oise, the 'golden vale' of this part of France, has
a history of its own of which I shall presently have something to say,
and which throws some interesting light upon the general history of
France.
But Chauny owes its actual prosperity mainly to its connection with the
Company of St.-Gobain. From a very early period in the annals of the
company, the plate-glass made at St.-Gobain was sent across the country
to Chauny, and thence by water to Paris, where it was polished and
'tinned' at the company's works in the Rue de Reuilly.
When the first machines were invented for saving much of the manual
labour spent upon these processes, it occurred to the managers of the
company that these machines might be advantageously worked with the
water-power of the Oise at Chauny. This was in the beginning of the
present century. About the same time, thanks to the foreign wars
provoked by the Girondists to promote the Revolution, it became very
difficult to obtain the supplies of natural soda necessary for the
manufacture of plate-glass, these supplies having been drawn, down to
that time, almost exclusively from Alicante in Spain; and the chemist
Leblanc hit upon a process for extracting soda on a great scale from
sea-salt. Of this invention the managers of St.-Gobain promptly availed
themselves; and, after a brief and unsatisfactory experiment at a place
called Charlesfontaine, they established at Chauny some soda-works,
which have since been developed into the most extensive chemical works
in France.
Taken in conjunction with the glassworks also now established here,
these works extend over an area of some thirty hectares, fourteen of
which are occupied by buildings. Numerous canals fed from the Oise
traverse this immense area, some of them supplying water-power, others
serving as waterways. The place, in short, is an industrial Amsterdam or
Rotterdam in miniature, lying between the river Oise, the Canal de
St.-Quentin, and the Canal de St.-Lazare. The Cité Ouvrière, built for
the workmen by the company, lies beyond the Canal de St.-Lazare and on
the road from Château Thierry in Champagne (the birthplace of La
Fontaine) to Béthune in Artois.
The streets and areas within the works are most appropriately baptized
by the names of the eminent men of science to whom the company is
indebted for great services either directly or indirectly: the Cour
Lavoisier, the Rue Pelouze, the Rue Guyton de Morvaux, the Rue Leblanc,
the Rue Gay-Lussac, the Cour Scheele, the Rue Hély d'Oisset.
Besides the dwellings put up for the benefit of the workmen at Chauny,
the company has built here a chapel, established a free dispensary, and
organised excellent schools for the children of both sexes, under the
supervision of the devoted Sisters, who have not yet been 'converted'
out of Chauny.
'What is the feeling of the people here on this question of clerical
teaching?' I asked an acquaintance of mine, who formerly filled an
important post in the local administration of this region, and who now
devotes himself to his flowers and his library in a charming old house
of the eighteenth century, the high-walled courtyard of which is
tapestried with luxuriant vines and creepers.
'All the sensible people in Chauny,' he said--'and there are many
sensible people in Chauny, though in the old times our neighbours used
to speak of us as "the monkies of Chauny"--are quite disgusted with all
this newfangled nonsense, and with these incessant attacks on the
clergy. The troublesome element here in Chauny is not to be found among
the workmen: it is to be found among the people who do not work. Of
course, everybody knows that it is the great chemical and glass works
here which make Chauny prosperous. But for St.-Gobain we should be where
we were a hundred years ago. And so there is a tendency all through the
Department to come to Chauny, in hopes of finding work under the
company. Of course, in nine cases out of ten, those who seek it thus do
not get it, for it is the rule of the company always to give the
preference to people from Chauny, or the immediate neighbourhood.
'Of course the unsuccessful "immigrants" linger about the place, and as
they don't find work they go lounging about the town, and take to drink
too often and, in short, soon become the raw material of which in these
days the freemasons are making what they call "Republicans." You have it
all,' he added, 'in the letter which M. Allain-Targé has just written,
refusing to be a candidate this year for the Chambers.'
I remembered very well the energy shown by M. Allain-Targé, as a
Republican Minister of the Interior, at the time of the elections of
October 18, 1885. He then issued an official circular instructing all
the public functionaries that, while they were to be absolutely
'neutral' as between Republican candidates of different colours, they
must exert themselves to the utmost as against all 'reactionary'
candidates. I was much interested, therefore, to learn the present
opinion of M. Allain-Targé as to the outlook of the Republic under his
successor, M. Constans, in 1889. It was very instructive to find that M.
Allain-Targé now declines to be a Republican candidate because, to use
his own words, though the High Court of Justice may 'deliver the
Republic from General Boulanger and his confederates, it is beyond the
power of the High Court of Justice to bring France back--let us not say
to the heroic age, but to the age of good faith, of disinterestedness,
of common sense, and of that prudent, sincere, and loyal policy, thanks
to which, during long years, France passed safely through so many
serious trials.'
'The new generations of electors,' says M. Allain-Targé in this
remarkable letter, 'exact of their representatives conditions to which I
will not submit. I will not undertake to make the promises which it is
now the fashion of candidates to lavish, and which I cannot regard as
serious.' These 'new generations of electors' are the 'new social
strata' about which Gambetta used to declaim so confidently only a few
years ago, and I quite agreed with my philosophic friend near Chauny in
thinking that no slight significance must attach to such a verdict upon
them, pronounced in 1889 by an 'advanced Republican' like M.
Allain-Targé, who only four years ago, in 1885, was the most active
minister of a Government called into existence to carry out the ideas of
Gambetta, and to found a stable republic upon these 'new social strata.'
Put into plain English, this letter of M. Allain-Targé, who had more
than any of his colleagues to do directly and in the way of business
both with the electors and with the elected of France four years ago,
and who now declines to have anything more to do with them all--simply
means that the electors sell their votes to the highest bidder, and that
the man who will make the most unscrupulous bid is likeliest to get the
votes. It is hard to see much difference between such a verdict and the
outspoken declaration of M. Paul de Cassagnac that law, order, property,
and liberty in France are threatened to-day, not by a 'democracy,' but
by a 'voyoucratie' or 'blackguardocracy.'
The 'anti-clerical' agitation here, as elsewhere in France, I am
assured, is plainly under the control of the 'freemasons.' Not that the
'freemasons' are avowedly very numerous here. But they are influential
because they act together, in silence, and on lines common to the
agitation all over France. 'Three or four energetic members of the
order,' said one very intelligent man to me here at Chauny, 'can easily
manage the whole official machinery of a large political district. To
understand their methods and their organisation you must go back to the
worship of Baphomet in the Middle Ages. In some of their lodges they
reproduce with a goat one at least of the abominations which Von Hammer
tells us were charged upon the Knights Templars as Baphometic. They are
a sect--a persecuting sect, and a sect bent on absolutely destroying the
Christian religion. To this end they parody the Christian symbols and
the Christian scheme of charity and of good works. They do not, most of
them, hold office, it being much more to the purpose for them to awe the
officials, and that is their favourite way of working. There are,
however, exceptions to this. If you go to Marmande in the South you will
find a sub-prefect there who is a most energetic and mischievous
"freemason." In the Aisne the Prefect is a freemason, and here all the
public functionaries go in fear of the order. They own the newspaper,
control profitable contracts of all sorts, and can make or mar the
career of public servants, through their occult relations with people at
headquarters in Paris.'
I suggested that in England and Germany and the United States the
'freemasons' are not only regarded as friends of order and of law, but
number among their dignitaries men of the highest official and personal
rank.
'That is quite true, no doubt,' he said. 'But this order in France has,
I believe, no official relations now with the order in either of these
countries. Its affiliations are with the "freemasons" of Italy, of
Belgium, and of Spain, so far as it has any affiliations. There have
been "freemasons," as you must know, among the Radical leaders in
Belgium who have not hesitated, while holding high public positions, to
denounce Christianity in open meetings as a "corpse blocking the way of
modern progress"; and what the freemasonry of Italy and of Spain is I am
sure you must know.'
I told him that in Spanish America and in Brazil I had met priests who
were members of the order; and I particularly cited the case of an
ecclesiastic of considerable importance, who in Costa Rica, some ten or
twelve years ago, was at the head of the Order of Freemasons in that
country.
'That may be,' he replied, 'but officers of our expedition into Mexico
under Maximilian have told me that the freemasons in Mexico were active
allies of the Liberals and of Juarez in their war against the Church.'
This I could not contradict, for while I never heard that President
Juarez was himself a 'freemason,' I know, from my conversations with him
after the fall of the Empire, in 1871, that, though educated by the
priests in Oajaca, as Robespierre was by the priests in Arras, he was an
unbeliever of the type of the advanced Encyclopædists of the last
century, and though not such a fanatic as Condorcet, strongly disposed,
not only to deprive the Mexican clergy of their 'fueros' under the old
Spanish system, but to make an end of Catholicism in Mexico if possible.
Nor was he much more friendly to the Protestants, who were then trying,
under Bishop Riley, to found a Protestant propaganda in Mexico.
'In France, at all events under the Third Republic,' he went on, 'the
"freemasons" are the implacable enemies of religion. It was in full
accord with them, and as a battle-cry in their interest, that Gambetta
uttered his famous declaration that "Clericalism is the enemy!" And if
the "freemasons" of any other country recognise and in any fashion
affiliate with the Grand Orient of France, they ought to understand what
they are doing, and to what objects they are lending themselves,
consciously or unconsciously. You tell me that General Washington was a
freemason. Yes, no doubt, but the freemasonry which he accepted was no
more like the modern "freemasonry" of France than this Third Republic of
ours is like the republic of which he was the founder!'
The processes carried on in the great chemical works at Chauny are in
their way as interesting as the processes carried on at St.-Gobain or in
the glassworks here. But I cannot say they are as pleasant, or even as
picturesque. Commercially speaking, the output of the chemical works of
this great company is at least as important now as the output of its
glassworks. The chemical works grew up out of the necessities of the
glassworks. When the company was led, at the beginning of this century,
by the pressure of the war epoch, to adopt in its glassworks the use of
the artificial soda made by Leblanc, the Director soon found it
advisable to have the artificial soda manufactured by the company
itself. This led to the establishment of the chemical works at Chauny,
and down to 1867 the company itself was the chief consumer of these
chemical products. The Exposition of that year widened the horizon, by
making France acquainted with the agricultural importance of the English
fabrication of 'superphosphates' as fertilisers. At the Exposition of
1878 the Company of St.-Gobain exhibited, and received a gold medal, for
superphosphates, which it was then turning out at the rate of 20,000
tons a year from three establishments--one at Chauny, one at L'Oseraie,
and one at Montluçon. As the company was then turning out a great
production of sulphuric acid, and owned the only important mine of
pyrites in France, it went on with increasing energy, and now, in 1889,
shows an output of 110,000 tons of superphosphates, from no fewer than
six establishments--Chauny, Aubervilliers, Marennes, Saint-Fons near
Lyon, L'Oseraie, and Montluçon. Besides these it possesses salt-works at
Art-sur-Meurthe, its iron pyrites works at Sain-Bel, and some important
deposits of phosphates at Beauval. These give employment to no fewer
than 3,300 workmen, independently of those employed by the company at
its various glassworks in the glass manufacture. At Chauny alone the
chemical works employ 1,350 of these workmen. For these, as for its
glassworkers, the company has established a system of savings
institutions and of pensions. Medical advice and medicines are given
gratuitously to the workmen and their families. The co-operative
association founded by M. Cochin at St.-Gobain has not, I believe, been
extended to the chemical works; but the company maintains
establishments which supply the chief wants of the workpeople at cost
price, and the dwellings provided for them, either gratuitously or at
very low rents, now number more than seven hundred, independently of the
dormitories for unmarried workmen. Retiring pensions, varying from
one-fifth to one-fourth of the wages of the workmen, are granted to all
after a certain number of years of service, and to workmen disabled by
disease or by accidents.
At the pyrites-mine of Sain-Bel, in the South, near Tarare, where more
than 400 workmen are employed--300 as miners and the rest in the works
above named, the former earning on an average 1,309 fr. 25 c., and the
latter on an average 1,114 fr. 90 c. a year--a system exists under which
any workman who chooses to put aside his savings in a _caisse de la
vieillesse_ receives from the company, when he has completed twenty-five
years of service, or has attained the age of fifty-five years, an annual
pension more than equal to the amount at that time of his savings in the
_caisse_.
As I have said, the manufacture of chemical products is not so pleasant
or so picturesque in itself as the manufacture of plate-glass and
mirrors. Within the last decade the output of sulphuric acid alone from
the company's works has more than doubled, and now amounts to more than
200,000 tons a year. The gases disengaged in the manufacture of chemical
fertilisers, such as carbonic acid, sulphuretted hydrogen, fluorine of
silicium, and so on, it was found at Chauny, destroyed entirely in a
very short time the polish of the glass in the window-panes of the
houses opposite to the works, and certainly did not improve either the
respiratory organs or the general health of the workmen. The company
therefore spent a good deal of time and of money in working out a system
for the complete condensation of these gases. I am told that it has
proved completely successful, and is now established in all the
chemical works of the company, to the great advantage not only of the
workmen, but of the company also.
Although Chauny is really a very ancient city--dating back at least to
the age of Charlemagne, when the monks of Cuissy and St.-Eloi-Fontaine,
with the keen eye of those early agriculturists for a good thing,
reclaimed its marshes and turned them into a fat land, yielding, as an
old local _dicton_ tells us, the
'septem commoda vitæ,
Poma, nemus, segetes, linum, pecus, herba, racemus.'
--it has almost nothing to show to-day in the way of antique
architecture. Of the 'seven comforts of life,' the vine has vanished
also; but all the others flourish abundantly, and the people of Chauny
have little to complain of on the score of the natural resources of
their region. During the wars, though, of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, the place was so often taken and retaken that its buildings
were pretty well battered to pieces. The English of Harry the Fifth
stormed it in 1417, and England held it for a quarter of a century,
during which period an incident occurred much more creditable to the
burghers of Chauny than is the taking of the Bastille in 1789 to the
citizens of Paris. Monstrelet tells the story in a quaint and vigorous
fashion. Chauny at that time was part of the appanage of the Duc
d'Orléans, then a prisoner in England, and it was held for the
conquerors by a French, nobleman, 'Messire Collard de Mailly,' who had
accepted the office of Bailli of Vermandois from King Henry of England.
The burghers of Chauny, who had lived for two centuries in the enjoyment
of the rights and privileges granted them in a royal charter by Philip
Augustus, did not like this state of things at all. So they made up
their minds to demolish the castle, lest 'Messire Collard de Mailly'
should fill it with English soldiers and make himself quite unendurable.
It was a rather hardy enterprise, and the burghers went about it with
great coolness and good sense. Theirs was a real rising of the citizens
of a town to abate a nuisance which threatened their liberties, and not,
like the attack on the Bastille, a blow struck at law, order, and the
constituted authorities of a great kingdom by a subsidised mob; and
their leaders were the most respectable men of Chauny--not a crew of
thieves and murderers like the infamous Maillard, that 'hero of the
Bastille,' against whom his own employers and allies were eventually
forced to proceed as the chief of a gang of ruffians, and who, not
content with assassinating political prisoners and stealing their
property in Paris, roamed all over the Departments of the Seine and the
Seine-et-Oise, torturing farmers to make them give up their money, and
maddening the countryside with outrages not to be described.
Jean and Mathieu de Longueval, Pierre Piat,[7] and other 'notable
persons' of Chauny, bound themselves together by an oath, in 1432, to
'take the fortress of the city and demolish it.' They chose an occasion
when the bailli, Collard de Mailly, and his brother, Ferry de Mailly,
with some of their men, went riding out of the fortress 'to take their
pleasure in the town.'
[7] That 'Pierre Piat' was a man of character as well as of
substance appears from the fact that he was charged with seeing that
his wife, the cousin of a rich and charitable lady of Chauny, Marie
Martine de Feure, who died in 1400, should each year receive, under
the will of this good dame, 'a large piece of linen cloth whereof to
make shrouds for the poor who might die in the hospital of the
Hôtel-Dieu at Chauny.' Obviously there was much better stuff for the
making of a true republic among these good burghers of Chauny in the
fifteenth century than was to be
found among the shouting mobs of the Palais-Royal in the eighteenth.
With a few courageous 'companion adventurers,' previously posted in
hiding near the castle, these determined burghers suddenly sallied
'forth from the place where they were watching the castle gates, and, no
one paying any heed to them, entered the castle courtyard, drew up the
bridge after them, and took possession.'
'News of this going after the two brothers, they were sore displeased,
but they could do nothing,' says the chronicler; 'for the citizens who
were in the plot straightway fell to sounding the tocsin, and gathering
about the castle in great numbers, with arms and with sticks, were soon
admitted into it.'
The castle being thus secured, 'sundry notables of the city went to meet
the two knights, and assured them that no harm should come to them or
theirs, for that what had been done was done only for the peace and
prosperity of the city.' Quite different this from the cowardly murder
of the Governor of the Bastille, struck down after his surrender by some
of Maillard's confederates, while that scoundrel himself still had his
hand upon the unfortunate De Launay's collar.
The 'Messires de Mailly' made the best of a bad business, and, with all
their friends and followers, withdrew into an hotel in the town. There
all their property was brought from the castle and delivered to them,
which, having been done, the good people of Chauny 'with one accord fell
to work to slight and demolish the said fortress, and this with such
good-will that in a few days' time it was wholly razed and destroyed
from top to bottom.'
The bailli and his brother soon departed out of the place, and 'Messires
Hector de Flavy and Waleran de Moreul,' who were sent to govern it by
the Comte de Luxembourg, 'found the citizens much more stiff and
disobedient than they had ever been before the desolation of the
aforesaid castle!'
After Joan of Arc had driven the English out of the realm, Charles VII.
had the good sense to pardon the citizens of Chauny for destroying the
castle, and it was never rebuilt. The Spanish occupied Chauny after
their victory of St.-Quentin in 1557. Five years afterwards Condé and
his Huguenots took the place, and did so much proselytising there that
in 1589 Chauny was one of the first towns in France to recognise Henry
of Navarre as King of France. It stood out for him when Laon and other
important towns in this region had joined the League, and during his
long struggle with the House of Guise it was a central point about which
the hostile forces constantly manoeuvred. Henry himself came here
often, and during the siege of La Fère 'La Belle Gabrielle' kept him
company at Chauny, Sinceny, and Folembray.
In the next century the French and the Imperialists fought all around
the place, to the great disgust of the poor peasants, who hid themselves
as eagerly in the woods from the troops of their own sovereign as from
those of his imperial enemy; and in 1652, Chauny, after a sharp but
short siege, surrendered to the Spaniards, who, however, agreed, by the
terms of the capitulation, to 'maintain the burgesses in all their
goods, rights, privileges, charges, and offices.' The Mayor of Chauny,
Claude le Coulteux, behaved so well in the siege, that Louis XIV.
ennobled him; and the curé of the church of St.-Martin, it is recorded,
fought at the ramparts, and 'pointed the cannon with his own hand.'
This was the last deed of arms in the annals of this little city, though
the fortune of war has twice put Chauny under foreign rule. In 1814 the
allies, and in 1870-71 the victorious Germans, occupied it, and laid it
under contribution.
That the Revolution of 1789 left the citizens of Chauny much less
determined to do battle for their rights than their ancestors were in
the days of the English invaders, may be fairly inferred, I think, from
the very curious circumstance that, in 1815, they actually made a public
subscription for the purpose of presenting a very handsome gold medal,
weighing two ounces, to the Prussian Commander of Chauny, Colonel Von
Beulwitz.
This medal bore the inscription, in French, 'The grateful city of Chauny
to M. Von Beulwitz, Commandant of Chauny.' The local authorities also
asked, and obtained, for their Prussian satrap and his secretary the
cross of the Legion of Honour!
All this was no doubt very creditable to the German authorities, and not
discreditable to the good people of Chauny. But it certainly seems to
show that at the end of the Napoleonic era, the French people in the
provinces were thoroughly weary of the Revolution and all its
consequences. They welcomed peace at any price from any quarter. The
testimony of all impartial contemporary observers accords with the
deliberate opinion given by Gouverneur Morris to Alexander Hamilton in
1796, that the French people in general were royalists at heart, and
utterly averse to the general overthrow of their institutions by the
legislative mob at Paris, or, as Mirabeau comprehensively called them,
'that Wild Ass of the National Assembly.'
At Chauny, in 1816, the inhabitants held a meeting under the presidency
of the mayor, at which they declared, with great unanimity, that 'the
people of Chauny had never, in fact and of their own free will, adopted
the impious and seditious principles introduced in France by a factious
minority, and that they regarded the death of the most Christian king,
Louis XVI., as the most execrable of crimes.'
Chauny was a city then of less than 4,000 inhabitants, but the
peripatetic 'patriots' of 1793 had contrived to do mischief enough, even
in this small and quiet corner of France, to earn the detestation of its
people. They desecrated its churches, turning Notre-Dame into a
saltpetre factory, stealing the church bells to sell them, pulling down
the steeples and towers, and defacing the monuments.
They arrested and imprisoned numbers of the best citizens, broke up the
ancient hospitals, driving away the Sisters of Charity, and brought
about the murder, by the revolutionary tribunals, of a celebrated French
admiral, who co-operated in America with Rochambeau to secure the
independence of the United States--the Comte d'Estaing, who was well
known and very popular in Chauny.
When the tribunal, after its fashion, called upon the fearless sailor
for his name, he replied, 'You know my name perfectly well,--it suits
you, perhaps, to pretend that you do not. But when you have cut off my
head, as you mean to do, send it to the English fleet, and they will
tell you my name!'
Here at Chauny, as elsewhere, the first concern of these revolutionary
'friends of the people,' when they got possession of the machinery of
the State, was to confiscate the funds devoted by the piety and the
benevolence of past ages to the service of the people. The more closely
one looks into the social annals of France, the more amazing it is that
the world should so long have swallowed the monstrous misrepresentations
current in our century, as to the condition of the French people before
1789, and especially as to the organisation, under the _ancien régime_,
of public charity and of public education in France.
Chauny possessed, as far back as the beginning of the twelfth century,
a public hospital or Hôtel-Dieu, and a hospital for lepers called the
'Maladrerie.' Who founded the Hôtel-Dieu is not known, for in those
'ages of faith,' so lovingly described by Kenelm Digby, it was not
thought so extraordinary a thing that a man or a woman should devote his
or her substance to benevolent purposes, as it is fast coming to be in
our own times.
The mayor and sworn magistrates of the city were the official governors
of the hospital, and the chaplain was taken from among the monks of
Saint-Eloi-Fontaine. A century and a half afterwards, in 1250, the Abbot
of Saint-Eloi-Fontaine received, under the wills of three burghers of
Chauny, a sum equal to about 40,000 francs of our time for the service
of the hospital of the Hôtel-Dieu. It is worth remembering that the
Third French Republic has passed a law forbidding ecclesiastics to
receive or execute such benevolent trusts as this.
I have already alluded in a note to a subsequent legacy made to this
institution in the fifteenth century by a pious dame of Chauny. A few
years later, in 1419, Colart Le Miroirier, a resident of Chauny, left to
the Hôtel-Dieu all his lands and goods at Chauny, Ognes, and Roy.
The 'religious wars' wrecked the Hôtel-Dieu in the sixteenth century;
but in 1620 a devout woman, Marie Dubuisson, took the work of
reconstruction in hand, and the citizens followed it up; so that, by the
end of the seventeenth century, it was well in order once more, and it
continued to be administered for the benefit of the poor of Chauny till
the 'patriots' confiscated it in 1793.
Under the Empire, in 1811, the re-established hospital was combined with
an orphan asylum, and both were put under the charge of the Sisters of
Charity, one of whom, Sister Renée Canet, had the good sense to found
here a little manufactory of hosiery and caps, which holds its own, I am
told, despite the not very benevolent combinations against it of the
local hosiers. The old buildings of the Hôtel-Dieu, however, no longer
exist, and the chief public hospital of Chauny is installed in a large
edifice put up under the Second Empire in 1865, and known as the
'Hospice-Sainte-Eugénie,' in honour of the Empress. It says something
for the common sense of the local authorities that they have not
insisted on changing the name of the institution.
During the orgies of 1793 the paintpot was busy with all the streets and
places of Chauny. The Rue de Prémontré, so called because some property
there belonging to the famous abbey of the Præmonstratensians, became
the _cul-de-sac_ or 'bag-bottom of Fraternity;' the Rue des Moinets took
the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; while the Rue Ganton, the licensed
abode of the social evil of Chauny, received, with exquisite tact and
propriety, the name of the Roman hero Scævola! The monastery of the Holy
Cross, founded by Mary of Clèves, Duchesse d'Orléans, about the end of
the fifteenth century, was confiscated, and made the headquarters of the
Republican Commission, the street on which it stood receiving the name
of the 'Bag-bottom of Vigilance,' from the banner which was borne upon
public occasions through the streets by this commission, on which was
depicted 'the Eye of Vigilance, a symbol of that exercised by it over
the enemies of the Republic and the people.'
Another street in Chauny, the Rue des Bons Enfans, preserves the memory
of the early foundation in the little city of public schools for the
children of the poor--'les bons enfans escholiers.'
Where now stands the communal school of Chauny stood, I am told, a
public college, founded here in the earliest years of the fourteenth
century. The buildings of this college were restored under the Regency
and Louis XV. They were confiscated, and the establishment swept away by
the worthy Revolutionists of 1793, at the same time that they gave a
public ball in the Church of Notre-Dame in honour of the Tree of
Liberty, which the young girls of the place were expected to attend 'in
dresses of white, symbolic of their innocence, and adorned only with
their virtues!'
Besides this public college, Chauny, before the beneficent epoch of the
Revolution, possessed a public school in each parish of the town. The
schoolmaster, besides his regular scholars, who paid for their
education, was expected to receive and educate eight poor children
nominated by the mayor and sworn magistrates. For this he received,
under Louis XIV., in 1706, forty setiers of wheat and fifty livres in
money. It is interesting, also, to learn that the principal of the
public college, when he happened to be a layman, received a salary,
under Louis XIV., of 400 livres in addition to his dwelling-house. When
he was a priest he received only 300 livres, but he might also receive
172 livres more as chaplain of the Hôtel-Dieu. The well-to-do citizens
who sent their children to the college paid for each child forty sols a
year.
When law and order had been re-established by Napoleon in France, two
citizens of Chauny, Carra and Dumoulin, in December 1802, got permission
to re-open the college, which the Revolution had closed. It has never
recovered its former importance however, and Chauny now possesses only a
communal school, I am told, and two religious or free schools, besides
the establishments maintained by the Company of St.-Gobain. One
educational foundation of the _ancien régime_, however, still survives,
in the bursaries of the Abbé Bouzier.
Antoine Bouzier d'Estouilly, priest, abbot of Notre-Dame-lès-Ardres,
doctor in science, doctor of the Sorbonne, canon and écolâtre of the
collégiale of St.-Quentin, was a noble as well as a priest. He founded,
on October 10, 1713, a fund for endowing two poor boys with the funds
necessary to enable them, in his own words, 'to serve the Church as
ecclesiastics, or the public in civil functions.' This phraseology is
worth noting by people who are tempted to believe the nonsense current
in our day to the effect that 'almost everything we know as modern
civilisation in connection with institutions of a philanthropic sort has
taken shape within the last hundred years, and is due to the influence
of the Revolution of 1789 in France.'
Nothing can be wider of the truth than this. On the contrary, the
progress of modern civilisation in connection with such institutions was
distinctly checked and thwarted for a time in France by the shock of
this Revolution, and in other countries by the horror and indignation
which the follies and crimes of the French Revolutionists excited.
The foundation of the Abbé Bouzier was expressly intended by him to
benefit 'the poorest' of those who should compete for its advantages,
regard being had to their natural ability and aptitudes for study. Each
beneficiary was to enjoy his scholarship for eight consecutive years,
dating from his entrance into the third class. If he had got beyond the
third class when he secured his nomination the difference was to run
against him. For example, a scholar ready to enter the class of rhetoric
who received a nomination was to hold his scholarship for six years
only; if he was ready to enter upon the study of theology, law or
medicine, for three years only; after the expiration of which another
must be appointed to enjoy it. Provisions were also made to secure the
good conduct of the beneficiaries. How this excellent foundation escaped
the cupidity of the Revolutionists is not clear.
From June, 1793, to March, 1795, the _Société Populaire_ of Chauny,
organised by emissaries from Paris, ruled the town absolutely. The
official authorities of the city and of the district went in abject
terror of them; for a denunciation sent to the headquarters in Paris by
this society was like a report sent thither from an army in the field by
one of the legislative spies who accompanied the generals of the
Republic, and swaggered about in the camps wearing the mountebank
costumes which may be studied with amusement and advantage in the museum
of the Revolution established this year in the Pavillon de Flore at
Paris. The members of this _Société Populaire_ openly pillaged the
churches and convents, made domiciliary visits, sold certificates of
'civism,' and dictated the most extraordinary measures of confiscation
and outrage. Their loudest leader was a certain Pierre Gogois, who used
to wind up their meeting by singing songs of his own composition,
addressed to the 'crowned brigands who were trying to re-establish the
abominable monarchy with the help of their anthropophagous hordes!'
These worthies abolished the school kept by the 'Daughters of the
Cross,' confiscated their property, and set up their own headquarters in
the convent.
In some way the Bouzier fund escaped their clutches, and it has been so
well managed that in 1871 the income was found large enough to warrant
the managers in establishing three scholarships instead of two.
The good example of the Abbé has been followed in our own times by a
Christian lady, Madame Lacroix of Sinceny. In memory of her son, a
Councillor-General of the Aisne, who was universally esteemed throughout
the department, and who died at the early age of thirty-five, this lady
founded, a few years ago in perpetuity, eight prizes, to be annually
competed for by the pupils of all the communal schools of the canton of
Chauny, and by the pupils of the schools established here by the Company
of St.-Gobain, as well as four full scholarships at the School of Arts
and Industries in Châlons-sur-Marne.
The prizes are to be competed for in applied geometry, in linear and
ornamental drawing, as well as in all the obligatory studies of the
schools concerned. The competitors for the four Châlons scholarships
must be the sons of workmen, domestic servants, labourers, or persons
employed in agriculture or in manufactures within the canton of Chauny,
whose incomes or earnings do not amount to 2,000 francs a year.
In 1874 the Municipal Council of Chauny founded six purses of 450 francs
a year, each to be competed for by candidates wishing to fit themselves
to compete for the Lacroix scholarships, the successful candidates being
left at liberty to enter any one of the free schools in Chauny. As
Madame Lacroix has made the curates of the churches of Notre-Dame and
St.-Martin _ex-officio_ members of the council of her fund, it is to be
presumed that the Government at Paris will find some way of striking
these clergymen out of the list, as it has already struck all ministers
of religion out of the local committees of supervision in educational
matters throughout France, for a French Republic is nothing if not
logical.
My likening of Chauny to a French Rotterdam or Amsterdam may be excused
when I say that in the middle of the last century the Mayor of Chauny
assured the Intendant of Soissons that the municipality had to keep up
no fewer than twenty-seven bridges. What with the Oise and its
affluents, and the many watercourses created about the place, either
to drain the marsh lands or to facilitate navigation, Chauny really is
an aquatic little capital like Annecy in Savoy. Naturally its citizens
set a certain value on their fishing rights, and it may edify those who
obstinately insist on regarding the feudal ages as ages of brute force,
to know that so early as in 1175 the citizens of Chauny, by the
lieutenant of the bailliage, Messire Regnault Doucet, asserted and
successfully maintained before the royal representatives their right to
fish in all the waters round about their town in all lawful ways against
the pretensions of no less a personage than the Duchesse d'Orléans. In
1540 this right was confirmed to them anew, and it was then shown that
at an inquest held in 1475 the witnesses had testified that from time
whereof the memory of man ran not to the contrary no citizen of Chauny
had ever been molested in the exercise of his right to fish in the
waters of Chauny either on behalf of the Duc d'Orléans or on behalf of
the King. The local archives, which are singularly rich and
well-preserved, are full of instances like this, which show that the
general current of life in this corner of France, long before the
Revolution, was determined neither by the caprices of the great, nor by
the passions of the mob, but by systematic considerations of law and of
tradition, until for the confusion of France, and more or less of the
civilised world, the natural evolution and development of law and order
were suddenly and insanely interrupted through the inconceivable
weakness of a most amiable and useless king, by the 'wild asses' of
Mirabeau, acting in 1789 under the pressure of what so friendly an
eyewitness of their conduct as Gouverneur Morris calls the 'abominable'
populace of Paris.
So complete was the civilisation of this region long before the
Revolution of 1789, that the mayor, the magistrates, and the citizens of
Chauny, early in the seventeenth century, succeeded in breaking down and
ruining an Italian gentleman, Cesare de Rusticis, who, thanks to
Concini, had secured a royal patent for canalising the Oise from La Fère
to Chauny. They got a notable advocate, M. Louis Vrevin, to draw up a
protest against the enterprise in the most florid and elaborate fashion
of the _Plaideurs_ of Racine, and by dint of bombarding the King's
Council with the names of Julius Cæsar, Pompey, Xerxes, Sesostris,
Cleopatra, Cicero, Tertullian, and others, got, in 1625, what we in
America now call an 'injunction,' putting a stop to the works begun by
this foreigner, who 'had come into France to fix the eye of curiosity
upon the river Oyse and to disturb it.' And a century later I find an
operation carried out here for converting a not very satisfactory
private investment into cash at the expense of the State which really
would not discredit the most ingenious American 'railway king' of our
own times. This also concerned a canal, the canal which unites the Oise
with the Somme. This waterway became the property in 1728 of a
celebrated millionaire of that time, Antoine de Crozat, and after his
death fell, in the division of his estates, to the share of his
granddaughter, the Duchesse de Choiseul. It was not very profitable, and
it represented a capital which ought to have yielded 2,200,000 livres a
year. So a certain M. Laurent, who had built for the Duc de Choiseul his
magnificent Château de Chanteloup, near Amboise (pulled down fifty years
ago by Chaptal, the first great producer of beetroot sugar in France),
undertook to get the canal turned into money. The plate-glass works of
St.-Gobain were then under the direction of M. Deslandes, the clever
nominee of Mme. Geoffrin. M. Laurent tried to persuade M. Deslandes to
employ Picard coal (which could be brought by the canal) instead of wood
in the furnaces at St.-Gobain. M. Deslandes made the experiment, but
soon gave it up, as the coal smoke injured the plate-glass. He
consented, however, to take four boatloads of the Picard coal and use it
in the forges connected with the works. This was enough for M. Laurent,
who went to Paris with an invoice of the four boatloads of coal, laid it
before the Council with an elaborate paper setting forth the value to
the canal of a traffic necessary to carry on the manufacture of the
famous plate glass at St.-Gobain, and got the Council finally to
purchase the Duchesse's canal on his own terms. I really do not see what
M. Laurent had to learn either from the 'Contrat Social' of Rousseau or
even from the American Declaration of Independence! If he had lived now
he would have been a sharp competitor with a countryman of mine, of whom
I am told in Chauny that he came here only a few years ago, inspected
the chemical works, looked into the composition of certain heaps of
rubbish thrown aside even by the sagacious managers of these works, and
setting up near one of the canals a genuine wooden American shed, so
applied to what he found in this rubbish certain processes for the
vulcanisation of indiarubber as to produce at very low cost certain
articles for which a great and increasing demand exists, and thus
founded a considerable industry here. He has since turned his
establishment over, I am told, to a company at a great profit to
himself, and gone back 'to the Rocky Mountains.' I am sorry for this,
for I should have been glad to 'interview' him!