A FRENCH OPTIMIST PAMPHLET.

WE desire to call the attention of our readers to a pamphlet that has been attracting some attention in France, from the light it throws on the present phase both of rural life and of rural opinion. The author is the Comte de Montalivet, a large landed proprietor in the Department of the Cher, the son of a Minister of the Interior under the First Empire, and him- self, we believe, one of the three Moderate Republican can- didates who were defeated in the last co-optative election in the Senate. The title of his pamphlet is " 1.7n Heureux Coin de Terre " (Quantin, Paris), and its design is to trace in a simple and homely fashion the progress that has been made dur- ing the last sixty years in the health, wealth, and happiness of the people of his communes. The author asserts that he wrote his little book with no special partisan intent ; and indeed we can well believe him, for so uninterrupted has been the progress he describes, that it would be open to any of the parties which have ruled France during the last half-century to claim as much share in causing it as any other. But his friends rightly thought that the publication at the particular moment would be a strong argument in favour of the status quo,—in favour, that is, of a good working Republic ; and be was accordingly prevailed upon to pub- lish the pamphlet, and to dedicate it to the Senatorial electors, in the hope that this example of peaceful and independent advance might convince them of the wisdom of allowing the French people to manage their own affairs, without the interven- tion of kings or emperors, " If," says the veteran writer, " the delegates trust to the blind and passionate counsels of the false Conservatives who till now have ruled the Senate, the result will be the prolongation of uncertainty, an incessant menace of fatal crisis, which will assuredly sooner or later involve the authors of them, in spite of themselves, in civil war. If, on the other hand, they obey both the wishes of France and their own interests, they will send to the Senate a strong majority, loyally determined to maintain the Republican Constitution. Only in this manner can the Senate exercise its proper function of a controlling body ; for only so will its control be accepted without distrust, and the two bodies work together to a common end,—the strength and permanence of the Republic."

The communes of Saint-Bouize and Couargues are situated near the upper Loire, in the department of the Cher, which forms

1 the eastern part of the old province of Berry, so well known to the readers of George Sand. Indeed, M. de Montalivet's earlier pages, in which he describes the district as he first knew it fifty or sixty years ago, recall in the most vivid way the landscape and the life of " Valentine " and "le Meunier d'Angibault." In those days it was sixty hours from Paris, and the journey ended in a ferry across the Loire, which occupied three hours, and in a weary struggle through the wet and scarcely passable by- paths, " decorated with the name of ' roads,'" that led to the village and the château. Roads, in fact, were the great want, the one crying want, of the people. Only during the summer was there easy communication either between the scat- tered hamlets of the district, or between each of them and the parish church. The church was falling into ruin ; so was the presbytere, so was the cemetery. The chateau was a specimen of architecture untouched since Henry IV.'s day, but not so tm- touched, adds M. de Montalivet with grim humour, as the routes which led to it. The houses of the 700 inhabitants of the two communes were all thatched, the rooms were low, and the floor was almost always a foot or two below the level of the ground. "It was for the sake of warmth, they used to answer in all seriousness, that they dug out their abodes in the damp earth." The cattle were of a minute breed that is now almost extinct ; the plough required six oxen to work it. Rotation of crops was unknown, the land being allowed to rest in fallowa or pasturage. The hedges were allowed to spread till they had become strips of woodland, extremely picturesque but extremely wasteful ; and the country abounded in roads, called " rues," fifty yards from side to side, of little use as roads, but producing a kind of poor pasturage for the cattle of the commune. The woods, in the same way, were ill tended, and the brushwood trodden down by cattle. The pleasant variety of the landscape was completed by four hundred acres of marsh, out of which came fever which annually decimated the population.

The writer of the pamphlet is careful to give an exact account of the material conditions of the peasant life at that period,—a life of which, from his rambles through the country and his per- sonal acquaintance with each family, be knew every detail. What seems to strike him most in the retrospect is the total absence of many kinds of culture,—beetroot, colza, sainfoin, vines were nowhere to be seen, though underneath the wretched cultivation you could readily perceive the great natural fertility of the soil. So, too, with the people ; entirely uncultivated as they were, there were not wanting elements of promise,—keen mother- wit, and that resolute economy that is everywhere the mark of the French peasant. As the young sportsman wandered over the district, divided as it was between the large estate of his father and the small holdings of the peasants, he found everywhere a heartywelcome and a hospitable table, such as it was. But the fare was more than simple ; bread, half of wheat and half of rye, was the whole of the meal, washed down with atrocious perry or cider, made of wild pears and apples ; or in the case of the better-to-do in- habitants, with rape, an unfermented drink of water in which grapes had been steeped. The clothes were almost wholly of home-made linen, except in the depth of winter, when some- thing woollen was worn. Sabots were, of course, the rule, and only a few women had stockings. Nothing in the way of dress was imported into the district ; the geese of the canton supplied feathers for the beds, the sheep supplied wool, the flax-fields supplied linen. On the other hand, the working-up of these home materials, and indeed all the higher work, was left to outsiders, more clever and more robust. Masons came from La Creuse, sawyers from the forest-lands of Auvergne, charcoal-burners from Burgundy, harvesters from the Nievre. Lastly, the tenure of hired lands was that of the m6tayer system, well known to be one of the worst possible ; tenant-farmers, in the ordinary sense, were unknown. And mdtayers and peasant-proprietors lived as they had lived for ages past, separated from the rest of the world by barriers that no man ever thought of crossing, living a bard life, though not a discontented one, and dying of marsh-fever, or of ague, or of semi-starvation, when their turn came.

There is a charming simplicity about the way in which M. de Montalivet draws this picture of the past, and there is just as little exaggeration in his sketch of the present. With some dramatic skill he brings on the scene a friend of his youth, who pays him at the present time his first visit since 1819. The in- cidents of the journey from Paris may be imagined ; the railway that takes the place of the diligence, the suspension bridge of 300 metres long, that has superseded the terrible bac the road, with its three "triumphal arches," as he calls the bridges over the tributaries of the Loire. These, it may be said, are only examples of the material progress that has taken place everywhere ; but the point of M. de Montalivet's argument is that if you once convince the people of his commune,—i.e., the French peasants generally—that such and such a step is for their interest, they will take it. The only way of proving this is by tracing the history of what has actually been done ; and this story of the roads and bridges of Couargues and Saint - Bouize is a part of it. When the undertaking was first started, the Department subscribed for 170 shares ; but very soon the locality itself actually bought out the Department. The work- men engaged on the road willingly accepted fractions of shares as payment, and the peasants themselves gave many thousands of francs to the work. The description of the landscape which meets the view of his guest is a piece of graceful and enthusiastic writing, in which M. de Montalivet seems for the moment to have borrowed the pen of Madame Sand. But we are more concerned with the details which he gives of the actual change that has passed over the life of his people. In the first place, the population has doubled,—the result, not of improvidence, as is too often the case in England, but of the development of the resources of the country, and still more, of its sanitary improve- ment. The marshes are drained ; the houses have been, if not rebuilt, at least altered so as to keep out the " pleine humidit6 " which they formerly seemed to prefer ; the food and clothing are different from of old. Rye has almost disappeared from the bread; a butcher, the vegetarians will be sorry to learn, now makes a good livelihood from the villages where, fifty years ago, no meat was ever seen ; wholesome wine has taken the place of the cider

of old date. As to clothing, wool is now general ; and though the sabot still asserts its rights, every one has shoes and stockings for Sundays and holidays. But the great advance of all—the step which has brought these communes into relation with the rest of the world—was the construction of the departmental roads, and the reseau vicinal, which has made it possible for the

remotest village to utilise them ; and still more, perhaps, the snaking of the lateral canal of the Loire. A foreigner travelling in France, and amazed, as he well may be, by the goodness of the French roads, commonly puts them down to centralisation and

the two Napoleons. The truth, as appears from such evidence as this pamphlet, is that centralisation has had less to do, at all events, with the re'seau vicinal, than local initiative, the delibera- tions of the councils-general, and the patriotism (so much under- rated in England) of the local grandees. " The real origin of the 4-eseau vicinal," says M. de Montalivet, with pardonable pride, " only dates from the law of 1836, a law to which the author of this notice had the great honour of attaching his name."

The writer guards himself against dwelling exclusively upon the physical and material improvement of his district, great as that is, and great as is the importance of such a rise in revenues as has during the last forty years fallen to the lot of proprietors, tenants, and labourers, alike. This part of his case is proved by figures, to which it would be difficult to find anything analogous in rural England. Here, for example, is his compara- tive table of the yearly wages paid to hired servants, boarded in the farm-houses :— 1825. 1878.

Shepherdesses ... ... 30 to 50 fr... 120 to 130 fr.

Cow-boys ... 60 to 70 ... 180 to 200 Cattle-minders ... ... 120 to 130 ... 280 to 300 Labourers ... ... 130 to 150 ... 450 to 500 Waggoners ... 200 to 250 450 to 500 Maidservants 90 to 120 ... 260 to 300 But the statistics of progress of another kind are even more striking. In 1820, there was absolutely no education whatever known to the commune, except the voluntary lessons in reading and writing which the priest gave to his choir-boys. In 1864,

fifty-five per cent were under instruction at the primary school ; in 1878, the proportion was eighty-two per cent. Meantime, the cure is far from dissatisfied with the state of things, and is prepared to admit that "the good old times" were not so good as the new ones. His flock is as devout and simple-minded as of old. Instead of the ruinous church and presbytere of old days, he has buildings

that answer every requirement ; the municipal council has given him a walled cemetery, which contains, among other graves and monuments, a noble list of the youth of the district who fell in

the war of 1870. Neither in peace nor 'war has progress dulled the virtues of this heureux coin de terre.

We have called this an optimist pamphlet, and what is avowedly optimist is, in the opinions of some, discredited. We ourselves both accept this plain, rustic utterance as more attractive and as more true than the volumes of pessimist literature, works of

fiction in the fullest sense, which swarm from the Parisian press, and profess to reflect the life of the capital. M. de Montalivet's plea with the electors is, if such progress as this is tolerably general in France, if all that it requires for its continuance is peace and a freedom from uneasiness, why attempt to perpetuate uneasiness and to jeopardise peace, by sending to the Senate of the Republic persons who are hostile to the Republic, and who will secretly or openly work for its destruc- tion? We in England are not primarily concerned with this question, to which the electors have now given their answer ; but for us, too, there is both food for reflection in his facts, and plea- sure to be derived from his way of putting them. In these gloomy days, when over-speculation and the selfish pursuit of class-interests are bringing their natural reward, they help us to answer the question that was lately so forcibly put by Mr. Arnold, —whether the French people are not, as a whole, more rational, more simple, and happier than ourselves ; and if they are, what is the reason ?