IN THE NORD
VALENCIENNES
It says but little for what Texans call the 'sabe' of the municipal
authorities of Valenciennes that this, which ought to be one of the most
picturesque and attractive, is really one of the shabbiest historic
towns of North-eastern France. The streets are ill-paved and ill-kept,
the public buildings are untidy, and the whole place contrasts most
unfavourably, from this point of view, with the rich and beautifully
cultivated region through which you reach it by the railway from Douai.
This is the finest agricultural region in France--the old French
Flanders, a 'fat' country as well as a flat. You hardly see a weed
between Douai and Valenciennes. Great fields of beetroot are cultivated
like flower-gardens, and the green and growing crops are as daintily
ordered as the coils and plateaux of flowers with which it is the
fashion to adorn dinner-tables _à la Russe_. It is not pleasant to be
assured that the industrious dwellers in this land of Goshen are as fond
of cock-fighting as the Spaniards, who probably enough introduced the
amusement here during their long domination over what is now known as
French Flanders, and that they are addicted also in a systematic way to
the abominable practice of blinding bullfinches to make them better
singers. I am told that in many communes the authorities actually give
prizes for the best singing birds thus produced, and that 'blind
bullfinch societies' are among the many associations regularly
established and nourishing among the fields and villages. The old
Flemish love of strong drink also survives here, as is shown by the
number and the prosperous appearance of the cabarets.
These average, for the whole Department of the Nord, no fewer than one
to every sixty-six inhabitants, and around Valenciennes, the proportion
rises as high as one to every forty-four. There is much subdivision of
property, but it has not been pushed so far around Valenciennes as in
some other portions of the department, a majority of the small
properties extending to twenty-five hectares, and properties of from one
hundred to three hundred hectares being considered large estates.
Thanks to the energy and intelligence of many considerable landholders,
a great improvement has taken place of late years in the agricultural
methods and instruments in use throughout this department: the open
drains have practically disappeared, the country has become more
wholesome, as well as more fertile, and the farmers in general are
admittedly much better off, despite the crisis. This increasing
prosperity is given as an explanation of the decreasing average number
of children.
But French Flanders is nevertheless one of the densely populated parts
of France, showing a population of 267 to the square league. It is
proper to say, however, that this is chiefly due to the growth of
certain great manufacturing centres. In the rural regions the population
is much less dense, and the population of Valenciennes is actually
declining. It fell from 23,291 in 1881 to 22,919 in 1886. The
explanation is that people are moving out from Valenciennes into the new
suburbs. Anzin, Thiers, Denain, and St.-Amand are increasing with the
development of the manufactories which are growing up here around the
great coal-fields.
While I was at Valenciennes, there was a terrible commotion in the Paris
newspapers over a certain colonel in the army, who, being in the service
of a well-known arms factory, loudly protested against the alleged sale
of that factory to the Germans, and the threatened consequent closing of
its works near Paris.
After much journalistic and parliamentary gunpowder had been burned, it
came to light that the proprietors were simply making up their minds to
transfer their works to the vicinity of Valenciennes as a necessary
measure of economy.
Notwithstanding the slovenly 'edility' of Valenciennes, I found it a
very interesting place. The Hôtel du Commerce there is a very well-kept
old-fashioned hostelry, installed in a stately and spacious house, long
the residence of a considerable family. Indeed, one of my friends in
Valenciennes was quite severe in his comments upon the indifference of
the head of this family, still a man of large property, to this
conversion of the ancestral mansion into an inn. With its fine gateway,
its porter's lodge on either hand, its large courtyard shaded with
well-grown old trees, and its well-proportioned apartments, it is
certainly a specimen worth preserving of such a house as King Louis need
not have disdained to enter, when he made Valenciennes and French
Flanders definitely French in 1677.
'We have a noisy, ignorant set of people in power here now,' said my
friend, 'who pulled down, not long ago, the finest of the only three
good gates we had left, out of sheer stupidity; and you can see how they
let things go at sixes and sevens all over the city. But the
old-established citizens of Valenciennes are to blame also, not for the
decline of our population perhaps, but for the gradual disappearance of
all the features of the city worth preserving. Like the head of this
family, they care nothing about the past.'
In the course of a walk about the city, he showed me, in the Rue
Nôtre-Dame, an edifice, the condition of which certainly excused his
criticism of his fellow-citizens.
It is an ancient dwelling-house of the fifteenth century, standing at
the corner of two streets. A most graceful _tourelle_ markes the façade,
and strikingly resembles that which decorates still the house at Paris
near the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, in the vaulted doorway of which
Louis, Duc d'Orléans, was murdered, a crime avenged by the death, on the
bridge of Montereau, of its real author, Jean Sans-Peur, Duc de
Bourgogne. The exterior ornamentation of this house is admirable, nor is
it too far gone in dilapidation to be successfully restored. The door
was locked, boardings were fixed in some of the beautiful windows, and
advertisements of Amer-Picon and auctions and political meetings defaced
the front. Obviously the house belonged originally to some personage of
importance at a time when Valenciennes, the city of the Emperor
Valentinian, was still one of the great marts of Western Europe and a
capital of the civilisation of the West. Its population was then much
larger than it now is. By the Scheldt, it communicated with the sea, and
in the thirteenth century it was a member of the famous Hanse of London,
which included also, Reims, St.-Quentin, Douai, Arras, St.-Omer,
Abbeville, Amiens, Bruges, Ypres, and Ghent. This league dominated over
the Channel. Its chief, the Count of the Hanse, who seems to have been
in a manner a successor of the Roman Counts of the Saxon Shore, was
chosen by the leagued cities from among the great burghers of Bruges.
The privileges its representatives enjoyed in London were balanced by
sundry rather monastic restrictions; but it was a great commercial
corporation, and it played a great part in the social and economical
history of mediæval Europe. As early as the ninth century Valenciennes
and Mons had been so rich and influential, that they were regarded as
the pillars of the '_noble Comté de Hainault, tenu de Dieu et du
Soleil_.' With the crusades, the importance of Valenciennes notably
increased, and with its importance the independence of its burghers. The
leading part taken by Godfrey de Bouillon in the early crusades is a
proof of the power of these Flemish towns. When Baldwin of Flanders
assumed the imperial purple at Constantinople, he did it expressly to
benefit the commerce of the Flemish cities. At this day it is believed
that there exist, in some palace of the sultan at Constantinople,
tapestries of Oudenarde taken to the East by Baldwin, who was born at
Valenciennes in 1171. At Valenciennes, too, were born his sister,
Isabelle of Hainault, the first wife of Philip Augustus of France, his
brother Henry, Emperor of the East, and his two daughters. One of these
daughters, Marguerite, grown to woman's estate, besieged Valenciennes
because the burghers refused to recognise her as the born Countess of
Hainault. Gilles Miniave, provost of the city, plainly said to her when
he refused to surrender: 'We have taken and we intend to kill your
soldiers, madame, as abettors of tyranny.' This was as much to the
purpose in its way as the firing on the royal troops by the farmers of
Lexington in America in 1775.
In the middle of the fourteenth century Valenciennes was so wealthy that
Jean Party, provost in 1357, was regarded as the richest man in Europe.
He went to Paris during the fair of the Landit, and for his own account
bought up all the goods brought there for sale at one swoop; he then
retailed them at a great profit. He was invited to attend the court of
France, and went there so magnificently attired as to excite the
jealousy of the French nobles, who treated him in consequence with undue
arrogance. He took off his cloak, enriched with fur and jewels, as no
seat was offered him, made it into a roll, and sate down on it. When he
rose with the rest to leave, he left the cloak where he had sate on it.
The royal heralds, dazzled by the splendour of the garment, gathered it
up, and one of them hastened with it after Jean Party, calling out to
him that he had forgotten it.
'In my country,' said the haughty burgher turning towards the herald,
'it is not the custom for people to take their cushions away with them!'
One of the predecessors of this proud citizen, Jean Bernier, gave a
banquet in 1333 to all the allies of the Comte de Flanders, which is
celebrated by the chroniclers as the grandest ever seen in Flanders.
There were sixty-nine guests, including the kings of Bohemia and of
Navarre, and six tables 'so sumptuous with gold and silver plate, that
the like had never been seen.'
In 1473 a chapter was held at Valenciennes of the Golden Fleece. In 1540
the city entertained Charles V., the Dauphin, and the Duc d'Orléans. In
1549 a society called 'the principality of pleasure' gave a festival to
562 guests in the woolstaplers' hall. Each guest was equipped with two
flagons of silver, one for wine and the other for beer, and 1,700 pieces
of silver and gold plate furnished forth the table, of which the
chronicler observes, to the undying glory of the city, that 'all these
vessels of silver and gold belonged to dwellers at Valenciennes; and
also that _not one piece was lost_!'
The glory passed away from Valenciennes with the religious wars. The
place became a headquarters of Protestantism, and the Most Catholic King
sent his armies to deal with it. The Spaniards took Valenciennes and
long held it. In 1656, under Condé, they beat off the French under
Turenne, and it was only in 1677 that Louis XIV. finally captured it,
and turned it over to Vauban to be fortified.
As the town stands much lower than the surrounding country, Vauban
planned his works with an eye to flooding the region, if necessary, by
the waters of the Scheldt. Valenciennes stands at 25.98 mètres above the
sea-level. But Anzin, the chief suburb, is at 39 mètres, and the hills
beyond at 80 mètres above the sea-level.
When the Spaniards got the upper hand fairly in French Flanders,
thousands of the workers in wool emigrated to England, carrying their
industry with them. Many of these emigrants naturally went into the
cloth-making West of England, and to this day I am told by genealogists
Flemish names, translated or curiously transmogrified, are to be found
in Somerset and Devonshire, which attest the extent and value to England
of the exodus. What its real proportions were it is hard now to
estimate. The chroniclers talk of a hundred thousand people going out
from Flanders to England between the defeat of the Armada in 1588 and
the repulse of the French from before Valenciennes in 1656. But the
numbers are obviously conjectural.
What is certain is, that during this period Valenciennes was the centre
of a most interesting spiral movement (to use the phrase of Goethe) in
the history of modern Europe. Coming down later to the contest between
France, under Louis XIV., and the allies, led by Marlborough and Prince
Eugene, we find Valenciennes again playing a leading part. And during
the last blind, desperate effort of France to shake off the domination
of the scoundrels who had fastened themselves upon her vitals at Paris
after the collapse of the monarchy, Valenciennes became the theatre of
the tolerably well-conceived, but intolerably ill-executed, attempt of
Dumouriez to make himself a French Duke of Albemarle. It was quite as
unprincipled as his political operations were at Paris in 1792, and in
both cases he came to grief through his overweening self-confidence and
consequent lack of the most ordinary prudence and forecast.
A morning may be spent with both profit and pleasure in the galleries of
the Hôtel de Ville at Valenciennes. The building is of the early
seventeenth century, and was remodelled and partially reconstructed
under the Second Empire. It is spacious and not without a certain
dignity, but, like the streets and squares, it is ill kept.
The galleries which occupy the whole of the second floor are extensive,
well-lighted, and with a more careful and systematic arrangement of the
pictures would be of considerable value to students of art. Valenciennes
certainly had painters of merit before the sixteenth century. One of
these, celebrated by Froissart, Maître André, was both a sculptor and a
painter. In 1364 he became 'imagier' of Charles V. of France. The
statues of that king, of Jeanne de Bourbon his queen, and of King John
and King Philip, still extant at St.-Denis, are his work. Two exquisite
manuscripts illuminated by him still exist; one in the Bibliothèque
Nationale at Paris, the other at Brussels.
Simon Marmion, who died at Valenciennes on Christmas-day, 1489, was the
court painter of that high and puissant prince, Philippe, Duc de
Bourgogne, and ranked among the chiefs of the Flemish School. Pictures
of his exist at Bruges, Nuremberg, and Paris. The Valenciennes museum
has an _ex-voto_ on wood, the history of which is curious. It was found
broken into two pieces, and hidden away behind a confessional in the
cathedral of Notre-Dame. How it came there no one knows. It may have
been flung there during the pillage of the church, or put there to save
it. At all events, having been carefully (not too carefully) restored
and cleaned, it now presents two interesting pictures, one of St. John,
holding in his right hand a book on which the Paschal Lamb reposes, with
an ecclesiastic kneeling before him in a red robe, covered with a
transparent alb, a palm resting on his right arm. The other represents a
dead body on a rug, half-covered with a shroud. Above, on a scroll, are
the lines
Da requiem cunctis, Deus, hic et ubique sepultis,
Ut sint in requie, propter tua vulnera quinque.
In 1782 the provost of Valenciennes, the baron Pujol de Lagrave, who
served as provost till 1789, and again after the capture of the city by
the Duke of York, established here a school of art not unworthy the
birthplace of Watteau and of Pater. Both of these painters are
represented in the collection, the former by a characteristic little
'Conversation under the Trees in a Park' and by an interesting portrait
of the sculptor Pater, the father of the painter. The two families of
Watteau and of Pater lived on terms of such friendly intimacy at
Valenciennes that the father of Pater sent his son up to Paris, to study
his art under Watteau.
Watteau received his young compatriot so coldly, and made things so
unpleasant for him, that he soon went back discouraged, to resume his
career at home. There he encountered the hostility of the local
corporation of St. Luke, that guild of painters refusing to allow him to
practise his art without regularly passing through his apprenticeship,
and taking his 'master's degree.' Pater resisted, and the case went
before the magistracy of Valenciennes, before the Provincial Council of
Hainault, and finally before the Parliament of Flanders. It was
contested for several years, and finally resulted in an arrangement,
under which Pater bound himself never to paint in Valenciennes, 'under
any pretext whatsoever.' He might go to Paris and paint as much as he
liked, but in Valenciennes painting was the privilege of the corporation
of St. Luke. This has a pre-Adamite sound in modern ears. But even now
no man may lawfully kill or cure the sick in London or Paris or New York
without a diploma, despite the 'epoch-making' principles of 1879. And
the new French Chamber of 1889 apparently intends to forbid all foreign
physicians to attend upon patients in France! In Valenciennes, as a
matter of fact, a liberal School of Art was established in 1782, by
which time both Watteau and Pater had done their life's work and taken
their places among the masters in a world-wide corporation of St. Luke.
Two charming groups by Pater represent this painter in the Museum of his
native city, together with a portrait of his sister, bequeathed by M.
Bertin, the last representative of the Pater family in Valenciennes.
A grand and well-known triptych by Rubens, representing the preaching,
the martyrdom, and the entombment of St. Stephen, in three compartments,
upon the extension of which, when closed, appears a bold and striking
picture of the Annunciation, is one of the chief treasures of the
Museum. It belonged to the noble monastery of St.-Amand, which was
wrecked and pillaged during the Revolution, and, with the valuable
library of the monastery, very rich in missals and manuscripts, was
confiscated by the patriots of Valenciennes.
Another Rubens, of less importance, originally belonged to the church of
Notre-Dame de la Chaussée, which was pulled down, as well as pillaged,
at the same time. It seems to have been rescued from the spoilers by the
good people of the neighbourhood, and was honestly bought for the Museum
in 1866, not magnificently 'presented' to it by official 'receivers,'
not much better than the original thieves.
François Pourbus of Bruges is represented here by two admirable
full-length portraits of Philippe Emanuel de Croy, Comte de Solre, and
of his sister, Marie de Croy, and by a full-length portrait of Dorothée
de Croy, Duchesse d'Arschot, in a stately wedding-dress, painted, in the
full maturity of his powers, at Paris, in 1617. This is the
wedding-dress described, according to M. Foucart, an accomplished
amateur of Valenciennes, one of the Conservators of the Museum, by
Reiffenberg in his valuable book: '_Une existence de Grand Seigneur au
XVI^e Siècle_,' and the Valenciennes Museum is particularly rich in
pictures of interest from this, which may be called the documentary,
point of view.
Among these must be reckoned a curious painting of the mother and the
wife of Henri III., with sundry dames of high degree, and women of the
people violently squabbling together over a pair of trunk-hose, the
property of the king, who lies prostrate in one corner of the canvas,
struck down by the clenched fist of a man in the robes of a member of
the Parliament of Paris.
From this and from another painting on parchment which sets forth, as an
inscription recites, 'the cruel martyrdom of the most reverend Cardinal
de Guise by the inhuman tyrant Henri de Valois,' it may be clearly
gathered that the people of French Flanders had very positive opinions,
and were not slow to express them, long before the Abbé Sieyès
constituted himself the Isaac Newton of political science.
There is a goodly show, too, of historical portraits of interest, one of
the Admiral de Coligny, which was exhibited at Paris in 1878, another of
Fénelon, which came here from the pillage of the Chapterhouse of
Cambray, another of Prince Maurice of Nassau, another of Hortense
Mancini. A good full-length portrait of Bardo Bardi Magalotti, colonel
of the 'Royal Italian' regiment under Louis XIV., is set in a very
remarkable frame of superbly carved oak, part of the woodwork of the
demolished church of St.-Géry. Of historical interest, too, is a large
Van der Meulen, representing the defeat of Turenne before Valenciennes
in 1656, by the Spanish army under Condé. From a bird's-eye view of
Valenciennes in the background of this large canvas, we may see how much
the city has lost by the gradual destruction of its finest architectural
features.
Within the last few years the Museum of Valenciennes has been endowed,
through the munificence chiefly of a Wallachian nobleman, Prince George
Stirbey, well known in Paris, with a unique collection of the works of
Carpeaux, the sculptor of the famous groups which adorn the façade of
the grand Opera House at Paris.
Carpeaux was born at Valenciennes, and the fine statue of Watteau which
stands now in the city was both suggested and executed by him. So long
ago as 1860, when he began to recognise his own place in contemporary
art, he expressed his wish to have his memory perpetuated in his native
place by as complete a collection of his works as could be made; and in
his will, drawn up in 1874, he left to Valenciennes all his models in
plaster, and all the drawings for his works, together with all the
sketch-books he had filled during his artistic life, and which were then
in the keeping of his relations at Auteuil.
In process of time Carpeaux found it necessary to part with a great many
of his drawings, and Prince George Stirbey, who had bought most of them,
after the death of the artist, divided them into three lots, one of
which he gave to the Louvre, another to the School of Fine Arts at
Paris, and the third and richest to Valenciennes. To this princely
liberality, Valenciennes is indebted for the singular fulness and value
of the Carpeaux collection which it now possesses.
Among the portraits in the Museum proper, is one which ought to be sent
to the Musée de la Révolution in Paris. It is a pastel of a typical
Revolutionary personage, who bore the not very attractive name of
Charles Cochon. He was one of the 'patriots' of 1792, and having vowed
irreconcilable hatred to all kings and emperors, he was selected to go
as a Commissary to the Army of the North after Dumouriez had delivered
up Camus and his companions with Beurnonville to the Austrians. After
the advent of Napoleon, this incorruptible Republican became one of the
most serviceable servants of the new master of France, and ended his
career as an Imperial senator, with the queer title of Comte de
Lapparent!
I wisely availed myself of my first morning in Valenciennes to visit
these collections in the Hôtel de Ville, for in the afternoon M. Guary,
the son of the distinguished director of the great coal mines of Anzin,
which I especially desired to see, kindly drove into my comfortable old
hotel and most hospitably insisted on carrying me off to the mines.
At the beginning of the last century there was but a single house in all
the territory now known as the Commune of Anzin. It is now the seat of
a busy and growing town, a suburb, or--to speak more exactly--an
extension beyond the walls of the city of Valenciennes. This town has
been called into existence during the last century and a quarter by the
operations of the Anzin Company, the largest coal-mining company in
France. The concessions held and worked by this company cover an area of
28,054 hectares.
Six years ago, when what is known as the great strike at Anzin attracted
to this important region the attention of all persons interested in that
question of labour, which the excellent M. Doumer tells us the 'true
Republic' has been 'studying' in vain for ten years, the Anzin Company
employed 14,035 workmen, of whom 2,180 were at work on the surface and
11,855 were employed on the subterranean work of the mines. The coal
extracted, which had reached 1,677,366 tons in 1862, amounted in 1883 to
2,210,702 tons, being one-tenth part of all the coal-production of
France. The coal-mining of Anzin is carried on now in the face of a
great and increasing competition almost at its very doors. To the north
and east lie the great coal-fields of Belgium, which in 1882 sent into
France 4,064,625 tons of coal, and in 1883, 4,217,933 tons. On the north
and west lie the great French coal-fields of the Pas-de-Calais, where,
at Lens and other points, great discontent has shown itself during the
current year among the miners, but which increased their output from
5,724,624 tons in 1882 to 6,148,249 tons in 1883. Then, beyond the
Channel, England, which had sent into France, in 1882, 3,560,149 tons of
coal, in 1883 sent in 3,818,205 tons; and, finally, from Germany in 1883
France took 1,186,769 tons against 1,035,418 tons. These figures will
suffice to show the importance of Anzin as a coal-field. It draws its
prosperity from roots struck deep into the soil nearly a century and a
half ago, and long before the traditional institutions of France were
thrown into the melting-pot, amid the cheers of a mob in the streets, by
another mob which called itself a National Assembly.
At the beginning of the last century, when, as I have said, there was
but a single house in all the present territory of Anzin, coal was not
known to exist in this part of France. In the Low Countries, then
Austrian, and just beyond the French frontier, coal was mined, and it
came into the head of an energetic dweller in the little town of Condé
that what was found in Hainault might be found also in French Flanders.
His name was Desambois, and he was not a rich man. But he succeeded in
getting from Louis XV. a concession in 1717 authorising him to seek for
coal within a considerable range of territory till 1740. The Crown even
gave him a small subsidy. But the Mississippi bubble burst while he was
struggling with the difficulties which surrounded him when he first
struck certain imperfect veins of coal; and in the stress of that great
crash he found himself obliged to part with his rights for the sum of
2,400 florins to two gentlemen of the _noblesse_, though not of the
great _noblesse_, the Vicomte Desandrouin de Noelles, and M. Taffin.
There is a portrait in the Musée at Valenciennes of M. Desandrouin which
shows the qualities one would expect to find in a man who so long ago
and in such circumstances undertook such an enterprise with a limit of
no more than eighteen years before him. These two connected with
themselves a brother of Desandrouin, a 'gentleman glassworker' at
Fresnes, and two brothers named Pierre and Christophe Mathieu. They
worked on, undiscouraged but unsuccessful, for twelve years, until,
finally, on June 24, 1734, Pierre Mathieu, who was a trained engineer,
found at Anzin the long-sought vein of bituminous coal.
This auspicious day is commemorated on the simple slab which marks the
burial-place of Mathieu in the communal church of Anzin. When one
considers what the discovery meant, and what its results now mean, to
the welfare and the prosperity of France, one is tempted to regard the
24th of June as a date almost as well worth celebrating by Frenchmen as
the 14th of July.
Marshal Villars is celebrated by a very uncomely obelisk on his
battle-field of Denain near by, and General de Dampierre by a column in
the public square of Anzin itself. Why should not Anzin set up a statue
of Pierre Mathieu?
A comparatively short time sufficed to convince the adventurous
associates that they had indeed found the great veins they had sought.
Pierre Taffin went to Paris and got a considerable extension from the
Crown of their concession. Money was raised and the work went on,
bringing labourers and settlers to Anzin and founding the new industry.
Then came a new danger, which might have been foreseen. The lords of the
soil at Anzin had been quite left out of the calculation, but the lords
of the soil at Anzin in 1734 were quite as well awake to their legal
rights, and to the advantages to be derived from a judicious use of
these rights, as were the small farmers of Pennsylvania long afterwards,
when prospecting engineers began to sink shafts and to pump up oil along
the slopes of the Appalachians. The Prince de Croy-Solre and the Marquis
de Cernay brought forward their title to share in the riches found
beneath their acres. Desandrouin and his associates contested these
claims as long as they could. But the contests ended, as the lawyers had
seen from the first that it must, in a compromise. The Prince and the
Marquis on the one hand with their titles to the land, and the Vicomte
and his associates on the other with their royal concessions, came
together, and in 1757 founded the Anzin Company.
As in the case of St.-Gobain, the capital of the company was divided
into sols and deniers. There were twenty-four deniers, of which the
Prince de Croy-Solre received four for himself and two associates, the
Vicomte Desandrouin five sols and four deniers, the heirs of M. Taffin
three sols nine deniers, the Marquis de Cernay and his six associates
eight sols, and the engineer Mathieu six deniers. The phraseology of the
articles of association is somewhat quaint and ancient, but the spirit
of them is essentially fair and equitable. The recital of the objects
for which the company was formed is a model in its way, and shows that
the authors of these articles--nobles, rôturiers, engineers, and
notaries of the _ancien régime_ in 1757--had nothing to learn from
Jean-Jacques Rousseau or the Abbé Sieyès as to the essential rights and
duties of men in a civilised community. Thus it runs:--
'To bring about a general union of the coal-pits in the territory of
Fresnes, Anzin, Old Condé, Raismes, and St.-Vaast, put an end to all the
differences and proceedings brought before the Council and as yet
unsettled, make it possible to live in good union and a good
understanding, and secure the interests of the State and of the public
by forming solid establishments, there are adopted by this present act,
which shall be duly ratified before a notary, the following articles.'
These articles are nineteen in number, and, as in the case of
St.-Gobain, one article binds the associates always to furnish, in
proportion to their shares, whatever funds may be required for the
enterprise.
The hereditary principle is distinctly recognised in these articles not
only as to the ownership of the shares, but as to the management, and
the Prince de Croy-Solre and the Marquis de Cernay, with their
successors, are accorded certain rights as arbitrators, and in the
election of directors, a circumstance worth noting because I find that,
notwithstanding the supposed abolition by the revolutionists of 1789 of
the hereditary principle, and of titles of nobility and of privileges,
these articles of association, just as they stood when they were signed
and subscribed on November 27, 1757, were quietly recognised and
registered, and a good fee taken for the recognition and the
registration by the proper republican functionary at Paris, on the '11
Pluviôse, An XIII' of the Republic one and indivisible.
The main street of Anzin, through which M. Guary drove me to the offices
of the company, is a broad and well-paved highway, with many
shade-trees, and the houses, for the main part, well built, though not
particularly picturesque. M. Guary tells me there are a good many small
_rentiers_ living here, which seems to show that the place must be
orderly and quiet. Many of the houses are brightly painted, in blue,
green, pink, and other colours not to be expected, and of cabarets the
name is legion. M. Baudrillart pronounces intemperance to be a
characteristic foible of the Flemish French, or French Flemings; but in
these cabarets--which were, so far as I saw, rather exceptionally neat
and even handsome--the customers seemed to be taking light beer and
certain sweet beverages, rather than spirits.
At the main office I found M. de Forcade, a son of the celebrated
minister of Napoleon III., to whom when he retired, on the accession to
power of M. Emile Ollivier, the Emperor addressed a remarkable letter,
recognising, in the strongest terms that could be used, his abilities,
his integrity, and his patriotism. M. de Forcade had just received a
telegram from the father of M. Guary, at Paris, announcing his arrival
at Anzin for the next day, and asking me to prolong my visit, which I
was very glad to do.
There are many factories at work in and around Anzin, but there is
nothing Plutonian in the aspect of the place or of the neighbourhood,
and the grimy side of coal-mining nowhere obtrudes itself. On the
contrary the green fields, under a very high cultivation, everywhere
encroach agreeably upon the town. The residence of M. Guary, the
Director, stands in an exceedingly pretty park, and the mansion, a
handsome modern château, is surrounded with fine and well-grown trees.
You approach the mansion from the busy main streets of Anzin, traversed
by a tramway leading to Denain, but from its windows and balconies which
overlook the park, you gaze out upon the verdure and the spacious peace
of a wide rural landscape.
A certain proportion of the workmen employed in the mines prefer to live
in the town; but it is the policy of the company to encourage the
development of cottage life, and wherever I went throughout its
extensive domain I found families of the workmen installed in
comfortable homes, surrounded by gardens and by what are called in
England 'allotments.' Of these the company now owns no fewer than 2,628.
Originally these houses were built in the form of _cités ouvrières_; but
it has been found by experience that these blocks of contiguous houses
are open to certain objections from the point of view of health, as well
as from the point of view of morals, and the more recent constructions
are detached cottages. A model of one of these cottages was exhibited in
the social economy section of the Exposition at Paris this year, But it
was more satisfactory to see them actually inhabited and on the spot.
Each cottage is built in a field of land of two acres in extent, and the
rent varies from three francs and a half to six francs a month. For the
lesser sum, or for forty-two francs a year, a workman at Anzin earning
an average wage of three francs a day, or in round numbers a thousand
francs a year, may thus secure a well-built house--most of those I saw
were of brick--with proper drainage and cellarage, containing two good
rooms on each of three floors, with closets, and standing in its own
grounds.
Compare this, not with the squalid and noisome single rooms for which in
the worst parts of Spitalfields a rent of tenpence a day, or five
shillings a week (Sunday being thrown in free when the weekly rent is
duly paid), or thirteen pounds sterling a year is exacted--but with the
average rental of lodgings in the manufacturing towns of Massachusetts!
But this is not all. Whatever repairs are needed in these houses are
made, not by the tenants, but by the company, and the company further
leases to its workmen, who choose to avail themselves of them, at very
low rates garden sites within each commune, for cultivation as
kitchen-gardens. No fewer than 2,500 families now have such holdings
under cultivation, making a total of 205 hectares thus put to profit by
the workmen, who take a lively pleasure in cultivating them during their
leisure hours.
Every workman is allowed furthermore by the company seven hectolitres of
ordinary coal per month for his own use. In cases of illness, or where a
workman has a family of more than six persons, this allowance is
increased. In 1888 the coal thus given by the company amounted to
598,550 quintals, representing a money value of 359,150 francs. This is
not only a practical application of the Scriptural injunction 'not to
muzzle the ox which treadeth out the grain;' it is a practical
contribution to the solution of the great 'question' which M. Doumer in
his Report tells us the 'true Republic' has been for ten years making
believe to study--of the participation of the workman in the profits of
the work. It is, indeed, from this economical and practical point of
view, and not from the philanthropic point of view, it seems to me, that
all these advantages conceded by the Anzin Company to its workmen should
be considered.
No man of common sense needs to be told that to deal successfully with
industrial enterprises which require the investment of a large capital
for the production of commodities liable to great fluctuations in price,
the managers of such enterprises must be executive men employing
executive methods. If all the workmen employed in such enterprises are
to be admitted in the ordinary way to a participation in the profits,
they must obviously be admitted to a participation in the councils, and
in the direction of the policy of the managers. How is that to be
brought about without endangering the success of the enterprises? To
consult the workmen of the company on technical questions within the
range of their regular employment is one thing; to consider the
commercial and fiscal policy of the company in its relation with
competing companies, and with the consuming public, in a general
conclave of all the establishment, would be quite another thing. It is a
curious fact that in the original statutes of 1757 the founders of Anzin
expressly provided that the six directors of the company should, when
necessary, consult not only the employés, but the workmen of the
company--the '_ouvriers_;' and this provision was insisted on at a time
when, as the doctrinaires of the nineteenth century would have us
believe, 'labour' was not recognised in France as a social force to be
considered.
Under its existing system of management the Anzin Company makes its
workmen real participants in the profits of its operations, without at
the same time exposing them to participate in the losses.
This is done not only through the singularly low rates at which the
workmen are enabled to house themselves and their families, through the
coal allowance, through the provision of cheap kitchen-gardens, and
particularly through the establishment of a pension fund and of a
savings-bank, but in many other forms.
Advances repayable without interest, for example, are made to workmen
who wish to buy or to build houses for themselves. These advances in
1888 stood in the books of the company at a total of 1,446,604 francs,
of which 1,345,463 fr. 91 c. had been repaid, leaving a balance due to
the company then of 101,140 fr. 9 c. With these funds workmen of the
company had bought or built for themselves 741 houses, being thus
visibly, and unanswerably to the extent of the value of these houses,
participants in the profits of Anzin.
Not less real is the participation of the workmen in the profits through
the various beneficial and educational institutions which I visited with
M. Guary, or with his son, and of which I shall presently speak.
The concessions now possessed by the Anzin Company are eight in number:
those of Vieux-Condé, Fresnes, Raismes, Anzin, Saint-Saulve, Denain,
Odomez, and Hasnon. These concessions cover, in the form of an irregular
polygon, about thirty continuous kilomètres of territory, stretching
from Somain to the Belgian frontier, with a breadth varying from seven
to twelve kilomètres. The total area amounts to 2,805,450 hectares.
Of these concessions the four first-named were the original basis of the
organisation of the company under the controlling influence of the
Prince de Croy-Solre at the Château of l'Hermitage which still belongs
to his family near Condé.
The others have been acquired since 1807; Hasnon, the latest, which
covers about 1,500 hectares, in 1843.
But--and this is a notable fact--the Anzin Company from the beginning to
this day has been organised and managed under the original statutes of
1757. Under these statutes, devised and drawn up absolutely under the
_ancien régime_, and by an association of practical engineers and
enterprising adventurers with feudal seigneurs, this great company has,
for more than a century and a quarter, administered with signal success,
and still administers, what may be fairly called an industrial republic,
carrying on its affairs and developing its resources in the face of the
enormous changes of modern life, and maintaining here, under what are
thought to be the most trying conditions of labour, a most remarkable
measure of harmony between an ever-increasing nation of labourers and a
strictly limited administration, composed not only of capitalists, but
of hereditary capitalists. What becomes of the rights of man and of the
Abbé Sieyès, and of the Tiers-Etat, which 'ought to be everything,' and
of the 'immortal principles of 1789,' in the face of all this?
To the wisdom of the National Assembly the workmen and the Company of
Anzin owe considerably less than nothing. The National Assembly, of
course, meddled with the mines of France, as it meddled with everything
else. It did endless debating over the subject, in the course of which
Mirabeau declaimed eloquently against the doctrine of Turgot, that the
mines belong to the men who find them, a doctrine which, after all, is
much more rational than the more recent contention of sundry modern
Orators of the Human Race that 'the mines belong to the miners'! But
after it had talked itself hoarse, the Assembly had to descend to the
prosaic business of legislation, and in dealing with the mines, as in
dealing with other matters, it made a muddle of the laws which existed
before it met, and left this muddle to be resolved into a new order of
things legal, under the presiding genius of Napoleon.
Under the _ancien régime_ the rights of the feudal lords of the land
over the mines beneath the soil had been contested by the steadily
increasing power of the sovereign. In the case of the Anzin Company, and
of the articles of association adopted in 1757, we see the practical
good sense of the practical men who adopted those articles bringing
about a good working arrangement between the concessions granted by the
Crown and the claims advanced by the lords of the land. The republican
legislators in 1791 concocted a mining law, under which the dominion of
the sovereign, taken over by the State, was brought into perpetual
conflict with the recognised, but undefined, rights of the lords of the
soil. Such was the mischief caused by this ill-digested law that, in
1810, Napoleon made an end of it, and substituted for it an imperial
law, under which the absolute ownership of mines in France might be
conferred by a concession of the Government. 'The act of concession,'
says the seventh article of the law, 'gives a perpetual ownership of the
mine, which from that moment may be disposed of and transmitted like any
other kind of property, and no holder of it can be expropriated, except
in the cases and under the forms prescribed with, regard to all other
properties.' This law of course made an end both of the royalties of
the old French system, and of the English and American doctrine that he
who owns the land owns up to the sky and down to the centre of the
earth. For while the State recognises under this law the owner of the
surface, and provides that the State shall give him what may be called a
kind of 'compensation for disturbance' though on a scale to be fixed by
itself, it recognises in him no ownership whatever of the mine beneath
his soil.
Nor does it recognise under this law any right in the discoverer of a
mine to a proprietary interest in a property which but for him might
never have existed as an available property at all, either for the owner
of the surface, or for the State, or for the concessionary of the State.
The founders of the Anzin Company in 1757, it will be seen, recognised
the right of Pierre Mathieu, the discoverer of bituminous coal at Anzin,
to such a proprietary interest in the mine he had discovered; but they
recognised it with a practical and sensible reference to the concurrent
rights also of other people, and to the general utility. So much more
deftly, it would appear, were practical questions, involving the
interests of labour and of capital, handled under the _ancien régime_ by
practical persons, whether nobles, engineers, or adventurers, who had a
practical interest in settling them wisely, than by theoretical persons,
'philosophers and patriots,' whose only practical interest lay in
'unsettling' them, during the long legislative riot which began in 1789.
The influence of this period upon labour and capital in France is well
illustrated in the records of this company at Anzin.
In 1720, when poor coal, _charbon maigre_, was first found by the
Vicomte Desandrouin and his friends at Fresnes, fifty-five tons of the
mineral were extracted. In 1734, Pierre Mathieu 'struck it rich' at
Anzin, and work began in earnest. By 1744 the yearly output reached
39,685 tons. In 1757, when the Company of Anzin was finally formed, and
the articles of association were signed, the output of the concessions
worked by the company amounted to 102,000 tons. From that time it
increased, not 'by leaps and bounds,' but steadily, till in 1789 it had
reached 290,000 tons. In 1790 it increased again to 310,000 tons. Then
came a decline--gradual at first, but as things grew worse at Paris,
sharp and sudden. The output fell to 291,000 tons in 1791--fell again to
275,500 tons in 1792. With the murder of the king, and the final crash
of law and order throughout France, in 1793 the output dropped suddenly
to 80,000 tons, or less by 20 per cent. than it had been in 1756, the
year before the company was finally formed. In the next year, 1794, it
dropped again to 65,000 tons, a point below that of the production in
1752, four years before the formation of the company, when the lords of
the land were in the thick of their legal battle with the Vicomte
Desandrouin and the concessionnaires.
Things began gradually to look better as it became more and more clear
that the Republic could not last, and with the establishment of the
Consulate and the Empire they grew better still. But it was not till
1813 that the output approached the figure reached in the last year of
the monarchy, 1790.
With the disasters of 1814 and 1815, of course, it fell again; but
within two years after the restoration of the monarchy, in 1818, the
output reached and passed the highest point attained before the
Revolution, and stood at 334,482 tons. In 1830 the output had reached
508,708 tons, but the revolution of that year threw it back again, in
1831, to 460,864 tons. Under the monarchy of July, the production
gradually, though not regularly, increased again, until in 1847 it had
reached 774,896 tons, only to be struck down by the senseless Revolution
of 1848 to 614,900 tons in 1849. It went up with the establishment of
the second Empire in 1852 to 803,812 tons in 1853, and by 1870 had
reached 1,633,818 tons.
Under the governments of M. Thiers and of the Marshal-Duke of Magenta,
during which, according to M. Doumer, the Republic existed 'only in
name,' the output went up till, in 1877, it passed the two million
limit, only to recede again with the advent to power of M. Gambetta and
his friends, with their 'true Republic,' under which it fell in 1884 to
1,720,306 tons. The elections of 1885, marking the rise of a great
conservative and monarchical reaction, were followed, in 1886, by an
increase in the output of the Anzin mines to 2,337,439 tons; and in
1888, when from one end of France to the other, the Republic was
officially and almost hysterically declared by the authorities to be in
deadly peril, and men were speculating as to whether President Carnot,
or General Boulanger, would open the Exposition in 1889, the Anzin
output reached 2,595,581 tons.
Of course, account must be taken of other than political considerations
in estimating the significance of this record, nor do I wish unduly to
dwell upon what may be called its barometrical value in the study of
contemporaneous French history.
But when we consider the relations of coal to all the great industries
of our time, it is certainly noteworthy that for more than a century
every development in Paris of a tendency favourable to republicanism in
France, should appear to have been followed by an unfavourable effect,
and every development unfavourable to republicanism in France by a
favourable effect upon the production, at Anzin, of a mineral which has
come to be the 'staff of life' of all modern industry and commerce.
For during the whole of this period Anzin has been what it still is, the
coal-capital, as St.-Gobain is the glass-capital, and Creuzot the
iron-capital of France. Its mines produce about one-tenth of the total
output of French coal. A falling off, therefore, in the output of the
Anzin mines may be fairly enough taken as an indication of disease in
the body politic of France. The most considerable falling off in this
output of late years was in 1884, when the production fell to 1,720,306,
from 2,210,702 in the preceding year, 1883. Two of the great French
industries, the iron industry and the sugar industry, both of them most
important consumers of coal, were then passing through a period of
depression, the over-production of sugar in Germany having seriously
damaged the French sugar-producers in particular. To meet the pressure
put upon them by the decline in the demand for coal, the directors of
the Anzin Company found it necessary to carry out certain economies,
either through a reduction of wages or through some modification in
their methods of production.
If they had been allowed to do this through an undisturbed arrangement
with their workmen, there is no reason to doubt that it would have been
done with little friction, and with no injustice to anyone. Wages at
Anzin had steadily risen from a daily average, for the surface workmen,
of 3 fr. 67 c. to 4 fr. 52 c. in 1883, concurrently with the development
at Anzin of that system of practical participation in the profits to
which I have already alluded. For the subterranean workmen, the advance
had been from 3 fr. 38 c. in 1879 to 3 fr. 72 c. in 1883.
The spirit in which the Anzin Company has been administered from the
beginning is strikingly illustrated by the steady advance in the wage of
the workmen. In Belgium, one of the chief seats of the competition with
Anzin for the coal-market of France, on the contrary, the wages of the
workmen are subject to the fluctuations of the general market. In 1873,
for example, the average wage of the workmen in the mines of Hainault,
as given to me by M. Guary, was 4 fr. 69 c., or about 25 per cent. above
the average wage of 1883 at Anzin. But 1873 was the year of the great
advance in coal. In 1876 the average Hainault wage fell to 3 fr. 45 c.;
in 1879 it fell to 2 fr. 68 c., and in 1880 it stood at 3 fr. 6 c. By
1880 the average wage at Anzin had risen (and steadily risen) to 4 fr.
23 c.
During the year 1883 the expenditure of the Company upon the assistance
fund, the pension fund, the medical services, the gratuitous supply of
fuel, the cottages, in addition to, and not at the expense of, the wages
paid, reached a total of 1,224,730 francs. During this same year the
profits of the company, as stated after an inquiry by the French
Minister of Public Works, amounted to 1,200,000 francs. This really
seems to warrant the assertion that at Anzin in 1883 the profits of the
mines were virtually divided into two equal portions, one of which went
to Capital and the other to Labour. Assuming this assertion to be, even
roughly speaking, accurate, why should there have been any serious
collision between Capital and Labour, in such an organisation, over a
question of practical economies necessarily advantageous to both?
Yet there was such a collision. In February 1884, what is known as the
great strike at Anzin broke out over a proposed improvement in the
methods of working, the demonstrable effect of which must be to improve
the position of the best workmen employed by the company, without doing
real injustice to others. A similar strike had occurred a quarter of a
century before, when the company insisted on introducing from England
and Belgium the use of ponies in the subterranean galleries. But in 1884
the conservative instinct of the workmen, which predisposes them in all
callings against innovations of any kind, was adroitly worked upon and
influenced by the direct influence of the politicians of the 'true
Republic' at Paris. A workman of the company named Basly, who had taken
an active part in organising a syndicate of mining workmen under a law
passed in 1881 to favour such syndications, put himself into
communication with the advanced Radicals at Paris, constituted himself
the champion of the syndicates of workmen, and, according to the
testimony given before a parliamentary committee, fomented a formidable
exterior pressure upon the workmen at Anzin, to bring about the strike
which eventually took place, and in connection with which M. Basly
became a conspicuous figure in French Republican politics, receiving a
much larger wage as a deputy than he had ever earned in the mines at
Anzin, where, as the books of the company show, though by no means an
exceptionally good workman, he earned, in 1881, 4 fr. 93 c., and in 1882
4 fr. 71 c. a day.
One obvious object of the syndicates of workmen being to establish a
kind of despotic control over all the workmen of any calling, the
syndicate of mining workmen at Anzin set itself, a year before the
strike, in 1883, to break down what is known at Anzin (and elsewhere in
France also, M. Guary tells me) as the system of 'marchandages.'
Under this system the company makes contracts with the workmen at a
fixed price for coal, deliverable during several months. A good
workman, holding one of these contracts and stimulated by it, frequently
gains from 20 to 25 per cent. more than the average daily wage of his
class. The syndicate wished to establish 'equality' of wages, or, in
other words, to put idle or inferior workmen on the same level with
industrious and superior workmen.
To this end, the leaders resorted to the methods usual in all such
cases, of intimidation and actual violence. Workmen at Anzin who had
taken 'marchandages' were attacked and beaten, some of them so severely
as to disable them for weeks.
At the parliamentary inquiry which followed the strike of 1884, such
letters as the following, sent to workmen at Anzin, a year before, in
1883, were produced and read in evidence:--
'CACHAPREZ
'Citizen,--In the name of the syndical chamber of the miners of
Anzin, thou art forewarned that, if thou dost not cease thy
_marchandage_, as we have informed Lagneaux, thou wilt pass, in the
sight of thy brethren coal-miners, for a traitor and a coward, as
well as thy seven comrades, who are worth no more than thyself.
'If thou dost not what we exact of thee, be not surprised to find
thyself stretched out a bit, and to be laid up for three weeks, as
well as the good-for-nothings who are working with thee.
'Receive our great contempt.
'A group of workmen who will caress thee
one of these days if thou dost not give
up thy marchandage.'
Letters like these, which would not discredit the rural terrorists of
Kerry and Clare, were followed, not only by attacks on the obnoxious
workmen, but by the destruction of their flowers and vegetables in the
gardens which, as I have stated, they are enabled by the company to
cultivate. As a workman may go to his work as soon as he likes in the
morning (the gates are closed just before six o'clock), they have their
afternoons to themselves, and those of them who have gardens I found
working there with great evident satisfaction at most of the points
which I visited.
With the outbreak of the 'strike' in 1884, matters grew worse. Dynamite
was then called into play. Fusees were exploded under the windows and in
the doorways of workmen who refused to be coerced into leaving their
work. As nearly nine-tenths of the workmen had gone, or been driven,
into the strike, the cabarets in which the region abounds were filled
with crowds of idle men. Radical speakers and managers hurried down to
Anzin from Paris, to harangue the multitude and stir the people up to
mischief, and the position of the workmen who stood out against an
agitation which they knew to be founded on no grievance of theirs, and
which could have no possible result for them but to injure the company,
with the prosperity of which they felt their own prosperity to be
identified, became really dangerous.
In the thick of the contest thus provoked and carried on, it is
interesting to find M. Allain-Targé, of whom I have already had occasion
to speak, in connection with his conduct as Minister of the Interior
during the elections of 1885, appearing on the Parliamentary Committee
of Inquiry, of 1884, into the situation at Anzin, as a friend and
advocate of the 'syndicate of workmen,' and urging the Anzin Company to
accept the syndicate and its secretary, M. Basly, as an umpire between
itself and the 'strikers,' who had been seduced or coerced into
'striking' by this very syndicate and its secretary!
What possible good, either to Labour or to Capital, can be rationally
expected--what possible harm to both may not be legitimately
feared--from a republic controlled and administered by such men?
One curious and important incidental object of the 'syndicate of
workmen,' and of M. Basly in promoting this strike of 1884 at Anzin,
revealed itself to me in the very full Report of the Parliamentary
inquiry which M. Guary was good enough to put at my service.
After devoting large sums of money to the various institutions and funds
established by it for the benefit of the workmen, the Anzin Company
invited the workmen themselves to contribute to their own savings and
pension fund at the rate of three per cent. of their wages, the expenses
of management being borne, of course, by the company. The 'syndicate of
workmen' and M. Basly did not like this. They preferred that any
contributions to be made by the workmen from their wages should be made,
not to a fund guaranteed and administered by the company, but to a fund
to be handled by the syndicate.
Whereupon M. Basly wrote, and caused to be circulated among the workmen,
a letter signed by himself as secretary of the syndicate, in which he
bade them regard the proposal of the company as 'a snare set for their
liberties.' 'To sign any such agreement as the company suggests,' he
said, 'will be to sign your own death-warrant and that of your
children!'
'Citizens! your enemies see our Union established. They know that we are
on the point of having a pension fund solidly established _under the
guarantee of the State_, which shall leave us all free to work whenever
we like.'
This idea of a Labour Pension Fund under the guarantee of the State is
not, I need hardly say, of M. Basly's invention. It 'trots through the
heads' of all manner of political adherents of M. Doumer's 'true
Republic.' It was very neatly 'thrashed out' in a brief colloquy which.
I noted down one day in Paris between a representative of the 'syndicate
of jewellers' and a deputy, M. Thiessé. 'What would you think?' asked M.
Thiessé, 'of an obligatory assessment on wages, intended to secure, by
the authority of the State and with perfect safety, a certain pension to
the workmen of your corporation?'
Whereunto the jeweller, M. Favelier, replied: 'We prefer freedom in this
respect, as well as from the point of view of our work.'
M. Thiessé returned undismayed to the charge.
'Then you would prefer to organise a pension fund in your syndical
chamber? But if you had not means enough to ensure pensions to your
workmen, what would you think of an institution which would ensure them
a pension and bread for their old age?'
To which M. Favelier, suddenly striking the bull's eye and 'ringing the
bell': 'We do not want the State called in, to lay new taxes upon us!'
M. Basly, who is probably a consumer rather than a payer of taxes, had
more 'advanced' views than the Parisian jeweller. But his chief
immediate object evidently was to secure contributions from the wages of
the Anzin workmen to a fund to be controlled by the syndicate. What the
eventual meaning to the contributing workmen of a fund so controlled is
likely to be may be inferred from an incident which came to my knowledge
not long ago, in London. A question arose between a certain association
of English engineers, and men employed by one of the great English
railway companies, over an issue not unlike that presented at Anzin by
the demand of the 'syndicate of miners,' that the Anzin workmen should
give up their long time and profitable contracts. The men in the
employment of the railway were old and excellent railway men, who were
earning, on a kind of special contract, something like a pound a week
apiece more than the usual rates paid to their class. They were members
of the association referred to, and, as such, had for many years
contributed to its funds under a system which promised them a certain
pension at the expiration of a certain number of years. This being the
situation, these men were notified by the association that if they did
not give up their special contracts and content themselves with the
usual wages earned by others of their class, they would, in the first
instance, be fined, out of their own money in the hands of the
association, a pound a week for a given time, at the end of which, if
they still remained in disobedience, their pensions would be forfeited!
I should be glad to know what 'employer' ever devised a more shameless
plan than this for reducing workmen to slavery, moral and financial?
Probably the laws of England, if called upon, would protect them against
such outrages. But how is a workman in such circumstances to call upon
the laws? How is he to meet the legal cost of defending his rights? How
is he to face the organised hostility of men of his own class?
The 'strike' at Anzin in 1884 ended as 'strikes' are apt to do. A
certain proportion of the men who had been foremost in accepting or
promoting it disappeared from the service of the company; others, and
the majority, escaped from the domination of the 'syndicate' and of M.
Basly. That the conduct of the company throughout the crisis was such as
to commend itself to the workmen in general may, I think, be inferred
from the fact that a fresh attempt to bring about a 'strike' at Anzin,
since I visited the place, completely failed. The attempt originated
with the leaders of a 'strike' which was actually carried out in the
mines of the adjoining Department of the Pas-de-Calais. The means
employed in 1884 to intimidate the workmen at Anzin were again used. The
troops and the gendarmerie were, however, called out at Anzin, not to
protect Capital against Labour, but to protect the working-men of Anzin
who chose to keep out of the 'strike,' against men of their own class
who tried to drive them into it. In this case the original 'strike'
seems to have been provoked by local rather than general causes. The
managers of the mines in the Pas-de-Calais had resolved to increase the
output of their mines. This necessitated a considerable increase in the
number of miners employed, and this augmented demand for mining labour,
not unnaturally, led the men to demand an advance on their wages. They
were encouraged to demand this advance, too, by a somewhat sudden rise
in the market-price of certain descriptions of coal, and it is not
perhaps surprising that it should not have occurred to them to ask
themselves whether the rise in the market price did, or did not, mean a
real increase of profits to their employers, who, of course, could only
take a very partial advantage of the advance, on account of the long
contracts under which by far the greater part of their output had to be
delivered to their customers.