CORRESPONDENCE.
PARIS REVISITED, 1874.—IL
I skin in my last that France was ready to obey any ruler, provided it can only. make money and be at peace. I do not thereby mean to say that there are no wars in store for France. I am, on the contrary, convinced that the old struggle between Gaul and Teuton is not yet ended, that sooner or later the fight for Alsace-Lorraine must be renewed, that France cannot per- manently be France, with Metz, at least, German. Even if France tried to think otherwise, the habitual roughness of German diplo- macy and of the German Press will not allow her to forget that the present peace is but a truce. The self-restraint of France now towards Germany is indeed an altogether new phenomenon in the development of the French character. It is not like 1814 or 1815, when the victory of the Allies was also the victory of a large French party, and there was consequently a certain amount of real, and the ground for a much larger amount of simulated sympathy with the foreign conquerors. Every Frenchman now, to whatever party he may belong, feels that it is France which has been defeated and dismembered, France which the foreign enemy has sought to crush, and which he is bitterly disappointed to find he has not crushed altogether. Every Frenchman feels that Germany would fain goad France into a new war, in order to gain the opportunity of so altogether crushing her. I said before that in the very public conveyances you could see that Frenchmen were training to be silent. And as against Germany, all France is doing so,—keeping her counsel, biding her time. She does not wish for war. She will not enter into it, when the time comes, with "a light heart" She will accept it as a necessary struggle for life or death.
I had full opportunity of observing the feelings which the German occupation had left behind it. I was in a lovely village which I knew of old, only a few miles from Versailles, but which might be fifty miles from Paris, so old-fashioned is it, —the very customs of tenancy being entirely different from those of Paris or Versailles itself. It had felt the full weight of invasion. It has 1,500 inhabitants; it had to lodge habitually 3,000 German soldiers ; on one or two occasions, as many as 5,000 or 7,000. It had existed for four months without the very slightest news from Paris beyond that contained in the German official Moniteur, or such as could be got from the few English newspapers reved at Versailles, by the very few who could gain access to them a d knew enough English to profit thereby. The house where I was dining—which its owners had bad the good sense not to desert— had had always an officer and three soldiers, at least, quartered there. In this case the family had lost only their plate and a few other valuables, carried off by the last officer, a Berliner. But at the table sat the owner of another house in the village who had taken refuge in Paris. Here, beyond a clock and a few articles which had been carried away immediately after the first German reconnaissance by my hosts to their own house, not a single fragment of furniture, pictures, household effects of any sort, had been left behind ; all that had not been taken had been utterly destroyed. I was told that I might still see some cart- loads of rubbish that had been only recently cleared out of another house wrecked by the Germans, to be used as rubbish for road-mending, full of fragments of the choicest porcelain.
Now, I could see that the Geiinan occupation had sunk into the very souls of my hosts ; that the subject was always present to their minds, that their thoughts flowed back to it from all others. It was admitted that the German officers were, with few exceptions, well-educated, polite, and con- siderate, personally. But this only strengthened their conviction that the destruction, and where it had taken place, the plunder, had been systematic, carried On by order of the higher powers, with the express view to ruin France. This view had been openly avowed by more than one of their imposed guests, who were, moreover, never tired of dwelling upon French demoralisation and the superior virtue of the German race. In short, the impression which the German has left behind him this time is that of a cold, calculating, pitiless destroyer. Already, forty or more years ago, the bitterest recollections of the invaders of 1814-15 were those of "lea Prussiens," but those were mainly of wrongs committed in hot-blood. The late war will, I fear, leave behind it a bitterness of a far more lasting nature. The generation which has seen it cannot forget it, and will teach the next not to do so.
In Paris, on the other hand—though the miseries of the siege are vividly present to the memory of those who lived through them--the Commune, and the scenes which followed its downfall, are a much more engrossing subject. Indeed, the patient heroism with which famine was endured makes the recollection of the siege itself a subject of pride rather than otherwise. Hence, in Paris, there is often much less bitterness towards Germany than I might have expected. But very bitter, on the other hand, was the feeling in reference to the Commune period. Here I heard of young men hunted from house to house in order to force them to take up arms on behalf of the Commune ; there, an eye-witness, whom I can fully trust, described to me how, when the Versaillais occupied the city, a party of soldiers entered a cafe, at the door of which the limonadier was quietly sitting with his son, a boy of about fourteen, drank all they pleased without paying, then proceeded to break everything in the place ; and when the boy uttered some expression of indignation, shot him before his father's eyes, then took away the latter and shot him. I am indeed convinced—and I beg leave to say that the accounts I have received came in no case from persons who sympathised with the Commune—that for any one life which was taken by the Communists, at least ten were taken by the Ver- saillais. The number of victims of the first week of Versaillais occupation in Paris alone I have nowhere heard estimated at less than 20,000, and probably at least half of these were innocent of all participation in disorder. The clerk of a friend of mine, an elderly man, entirely unconnected with politics, who had passed through the Commune unmolested, and had no reason for leaving his place or his family, disappeared from the day the troops entered. There are said to have been scores of such disappearances at the time, and they are only accounted for on the supposition that the persons who have thus vanished into blank space were "shot for Communards." The inference may be a wrong one, but that it should be drawn by persons who are by no means Communists shows the wholesale character of the massacres which were perpetrated in the name of law and order. It will need, I fear, more than one generation to blot out such memories from the minds of the people.
I have mitten gloomily hitherto, and yet I did not leave Paris without seeing something to cheer me, and that in the very same direction in which I found most to cheer me twenty-five years ago, at a time when the temper of the people was generally as buoyant as it is now depressed. I know nothing more remark- able or more hopeful than the steadfastness with which a portion of the elite of the Parisian working-class has clung through all
di ulties to the practice of co-operative production. In our eaceful London, I have seen three or four co-operative asso- ciations of tailors start into life, flourish or vegetate for a few months or years, and then go to wreck, leaving absolutely nothing behind. In Paris, if the excellent "Association des Tailleurs," which I knew in 1849, could not keep head against the storms of the coup d'Itat, and had to dissolve (paying indeed every debt to the full), some of its late members succeeded in reconstituting a new association' in 1863, which is now in full success (Rue Turbigo 33, and Boulevard Sebastopol 72), both in the bespoke and ready-made clothing trade. At its head is a man (one of the old associates of 1849), the very pattern of the first-rate French ouvrier, with the manners and the mind of a thorough gentleman ; and during the eleven years of their existence, there has never been a single internal broil amongst the 220 associates who now compose the body, and of whom about a third, if I recollect, are employed by it. At the time of my visit, they had just purchased for a very low figure a property at Joinville-le-Pont, which is not only intended to be used as a place of pleasurable resort and sanatorium for the members, but where they have also in contemplation to build a large workshop for the ready-made clothing trade. The association has a library, now of more than 300 volumes, to which each member subscribes 2d. a month ; and a pension fund (caisse de retraite), to which each subscribes 10d. a month, but to which the manager has given a stun of nearly 11,600, whilst the capitalisation of the bonus due to labour for the year 1872 has added over 1900 more, so.that the fund starts with a capital of over 12,500. The right to a pen- sion accrues at the age of fifty, but only after twenty years' membership ; half, or three-quarters pensions may, however, be granted in case of absolute disability, after ten years' mem ber- ship. Surely this is real faith, and the self-sacrifice which grows out of faith.
Twenty-one other co-operative bodies are named on the cards of the Tailors' Association, and two or three new ones have been founded since these were printed. If the famous old "Associa- tion des Macons," sapped by Imperialist cajolery, broke up to divide its gains, and if its chiefs have set up for themselves, a new one has sprung up in its place, composed of the best among its late associates, and within six months, it is said, will rival the extent of its predecessor's business. Several of the, old associations of 1849, file-makers, spectacle-makers, &c., are still in existence. The Spectacle-makers, indeed,—who now manufac- ture all manner of optical instruments, have glass-works in Lor- raine, and are quite at the head of the Paris trade,—have become a kind of close corporation. They are, if I recollect aright, fifty- two in number ; they require no money to be paid down on admis- sion, but the strictest selection is exercised, and every member has to leave his dividends in the assteiation till they amount to no less than 25,000 francs, or say /1,000, to which the figure of the share has gradually risen (with the Tailors it is 100 francs,— £4). Hence, the admissions of new members do not amount to more than two or three a year. This is the very aristocracy of labour—a close guild like this cannot affect the condition of the masses,—and yet what a sense of permanence, in the midst of all the political vicissitudes of France, of faith in their own work and their own method of doing it, do such regulations imply ! I may mention, as rather a curious fact, that the Spectacle-makers had preceded the Tailors in buying property at Joinville-le- Pont, and that it was only whilst I was in Paris that the two associations discovered that they were next-door country neighbours.
I had not time to examine into another co-operative body of rather a new character recently formed, and said to be prospering, of hackney-coachmen. In this case, the members are, I was told, furnished at starting with both carriage and horse, but are held responsible for both, and must renew them in case of accidents, so that they are stated to be singularly careful of them. Another singularity which was quoted to me was that of a shoemakers' association, formed actually during the siege. On the other hand, certain workshops established on a trade-society basis in certain trades, for the employment of members out of work, the whole profit of the labour going to the trade at large, are said to be failures.
I return, therefore, in 1874, as I did in 1849, with the convic- tion that the best and most hopeful element in the Parisian population is to be found in a certain portion of its working-
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