THE WORKMEN OF PARIS. T HE Pall Mall Gazette of Wednesday
published a remark- able account of an "interview" between its Parisian correspondent—a very able person, with perhaps a faint tendency to pessimism—and one of the Socialist chiefs of the Parisian workmen. His account tallies exactly with an inter- esting though prejudiced description of the same men for- warded to the British Government by Mr. E. B. Malet, ad interim head of the British Chancellerie in Paris, and both together tend to prove that the Empire, with its rigid repres- sion of free political life, its dislike of political discussion, which, though not suppressed, has been vigilantly watched, and its excessive cultivation of a material "progress" leading towards an almost Pagan luxury of manners, has driven in thought amongst the workmen until it has fixed itself almost exclusively upon social questions. Of course, for them, as for all industrial classes, the first of social ques- tions is the relation of capital and labour ; and the result of brooding upon that subject for a generation during which the capitalist has been exceptionally luxurious and tilt workman exceptionally anxious—he has been employed, but has had to face incessantly rising prices, particularly in house-rent—has been to create a conviction that the order of society is bad, that the capitalist is an enemy of the workman, or, to put the idea in more scientific form, that profit is unfairly divided between the employer and employed. The latter, say the workmen, ought to have all, except such salary as the em- ployer's efforts to bring in work and the use of his brain as a directing agent may in their judgment deserve. This conviction is not purely intellectual ; it has passed beyond that stage, and become a faith, a belief so potent, and to the believer's mind so righteous, that in its presence the ordinary moral law gives way as the law of kindness gives way be- fore the faith of an Inquisitor, or Calvinist, or moralist of the high Puritan kind. The Inquisitor sees only sins deserving of the fire in the virtues of heretics ; the Cal- vinist holds the good deeds of the reprobate to be acts almost of impudence ; the extreme Puritan has pleasure in detect- ing and punishing the softer vices or even the levities of mankind more sternly than their crimes ; and the Parisian hates the employer who is generous, that is, who, as the workman thinks, is weak enough to surrender a morsel of the plunder accumulated by robbing him. Mr. Malet says the workmen of Paris have been saturated with Socialism till they have towards capitalists become incapable of grati- tude," that is, of the mental justice which recognizes libera- lity in excess of contract ; and of that form of friendship—a form, though inferior, still good—which is stirred into activity by the consciousness of beneficial sympathy. All men who have studied the condition and peculiarities of the proletariat in the different countries of Europe are aware that Parisian work- men are among themselves exceptionally self-sacrificing, that they have a talent for combination which has its root in a grand virtue, that of all men they succeed in enterprises which require as their first condition a degree of self-efface- ment. Monks in the best period of monasticism did not surpass the ouvriers of . some Parisian associations in the fraternal zeal with which they assisted each other, in the humility with which they obeyed self-made laws, or in the courage with which they encountered the dangers alike of hunger and of constraint from the civil power. In 1849 they died in heaps on the barricade, in 1861, we think, they accepted subsistence-wages yielding mere bread and water to make an associative experiment succeed, and always they have submitted to the discipline which of all others must to Frenchmen be most painful, the discipline which merges the individual and his merits in the society and its success. Nevertheless, reports Mr. Malet, "Their tolerance and friendliness cease when their employers' interests are concerned. No private indulgence—no public legislation—can eradicate from their mind the idea that the capitalist is a vampire feeding upon their blood. In the workshop the discipline may be complete ; beyond it the employer is treated without respect, and his word is without influence. His efforts to make little arrangements which may be useful or agreeable to them are treated not as boons, but as devices to bribe them to additional labour. A large manu- facturer, by the way of doing a kindness to the hands in his employment, turned on a tap of hot and cold water outside the manufactory, at which any of the families living about could come and help themselves. A workman on being asked whether the innovation was well received by his fellows, re- plied simply, without the slightest intention of giving offence, that it appeared to be only a small part of what was due to them. They seem to be incapable of the sentiment of grati- tude for any act of the person whom they enable by their labour to accumulate wealth while they remain poor." The workmen are, they think, being robbed by an external power which is called Society, and which, by duping the peas- antry, is enabled to maintain an armed force sufficient to keep itself in existence and the ourriers in slavery. In Paris particu- larly, where, owing partly to their vices, partly to immigration, and partly to a feeling which we do not profess to understand— the tendency of all prosperous workmen to quit the vivid life of the capital for the vegetable existence of the provinces—the majority of workmen are young, this thought has become a religion, a fanaticism which those who believe would if they could pro- pagate by the sword. A convinced Parisian is never a feeble person. He is probably no braver than other men— though the Zouave regiments are filled with Parisians —and he is a shrewd calculator ; but he is accustomed to see miracles performed by authority, he is impatient, and he has a keen sense of the ridicule which ought to attend the divorce of belief and action. Consequently, holding society evil, he charges on society, and were there the faintest hope of success, would have no more scruple in overturning it by force than his ancestors a thousand years since had in building it up by violence. With almost every other vice under the sun, the selfish care for his own dirty carcase which is the prim ma mobile of most human beings, is not, when once moved by an emotion, in the Parisian blouse. He is, however, sufficiently a born soldier not to attempt impossibilities, and the interlocutor of the Pall Mall Gazette confesses, " with a sigh," that the establishment of the Republic, "Democratic and Social," by force is, for the moment, beyond hope. A Parisian, however, with a conviction cannot sit down and do nothing, and there is reason to believe, reason other than the "Socialist leader's" remarks, that a desperate scheme of passive resistance, the universal halt of toil, has been for some time in organization. This halt would, of course, be confined to the towns, for the peasants, being proprietors, will not cease from working in their own service ; but within the town it will be, the leaders hope, almost universal. Then, says the Socialist, the capitalists' money "would absolutely be no more use to them than a twenty-franc piece would have been to Robinson Crusoe in his desert island. We should take care to make the strike particularly strict and universal in all trades having relation to the food supply,—when the butchers would not kill meat or the bakers bake bread, it would be a question of who could fast longest." That such a strike could be carried out for a few days we have very little doubt. The French can organize, the socialists have no hesitation about employing terror, there is no instinctive aversion to a holiday in France, and money for a few days' maintenance would be attainable. It is possible if men are excited to save in a fortnight of toil what would keep those who save alive for a week of idleness, and a general strike, say for a fortnight, is by no means incon- ceivable. What is inconceivable in the present condition of affairs is its use. The idea, of course, is to coerce those who dispose of the armed force into a certain course of action, but, in the first place, it is doubtful if a strikewould coerce them. Hunger will coerce anybody to anything, but a total suppression of bakers and butchers is impossible without starving those who coerce first of all, indeed impossible alto- gether with a conscript army comprising men of every possible trade. Force alone could prevent the garrison of Paris from obtaining food and water, and force is the one agent which the authors of the scheme, by the Tory act of framing such a scheme, confess that they cannot apply. Of course they can injure trade, but they would not injure it so much as a blockade would, and nations ere now have borne blockades without hinting at surrender, and are, moreover, when in a state of siege, very' apt to resort to desperate expedients. Suppose the bakers, for example, hung on the lampposts or fusilladed by the soldiery for not baking ! Or let us imagine a nearly impossible success secured by defection among the soldiery, and still how much nearer are the Socialists to their end ? They must call an assembly, and they cannot go below uni- versal suffrage ; and universal suffrage in France, being a suffrage of landed proprietors, is always conservative of pro- perty. The Socialists are hemmed in by the facts, and must either depart from one of their own principles by imposing their will on the majority by force, or see all the remainder remain infructuous.
Nevertheless, this continued agitation among the workmen deserves the most careful attention of all politicians. Men who have risen to the temper which could suggest, much more carry out, a national strike with the object of altering society, usually succeed in effecting somewhat, if it be only destruction. The movement shows that the Empire has in no way succeeded in conciliating the wage-receivers of France ; that the sons of the ouvriers of 1849 are, like their fathers, convinced that the first object of a wise and just Republic should be, not to consolidate, or even to ameliorate, existing society, but to recast it in some new mould still undefined, but apparently to be based upon a conversion of " labour " in its multifarious forms into a department of the State ; an official taking the place of the employer, and a national revenue of his capital. If any Socialist change on a grand scale is ever effected, it must be by that Peruvian expedient, which is only too consonant to the French genius. No such transmu- tation is, in a society of proprietors, seriously to be feared ; but in the effort to secure it the workmen may overturn much, may even—and this is a practical danger—induce the Emperor, always more or less of a Socialist, to favour some of their schemes. There are lines of policy possible even now, which might for the moment lay his enemies in the dust before him. Two decrees, one cancelling the mortgages which drown the peasantry, another acknowledging and regulating the right of labour, would for a day make him autocrat once more, though only to hear on the morrow logical pitiless Paris saying that a Republic could forgive debts and open workshops just as well as a Bonaparte. It is in that direction, towards equality of condition as the necessary supplement to equality of rights, that the thought of the French proletariat tends ; and their thought is now, as ever since 1798, of the first importance to European society. There is not a country in Europe, not even England, in which a French revolt against capital, even if successful only for three days, and if it only took the form of a decree that rent do cease, would not convulse the population, and throw half the national institu- tions into a crucible, to emerge better or worse, but unrecog- nizable.
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