Correspondence
A LETTER FROM PARIS. [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—These are not happy days for the Englishman in Paris. Well he knows, of course, that they are not happy days at home, but here he reads so many things that are hard to read, hears so many things that are hard to hear, and yet at most times must discreetly hold his peace. Let it be said at the outset, however, that deep down in the French people there is a real sympathy with England in her hour of crisis. In the Frenchman's heart there is a warm sentiment for la vieille Angleterre, the proud, cold old England whose word is her bond and who always pays her debts. The sympathy is still there, but to-day one has to confess it is clouded.
For this, in some degree, a fortuitous combination of cir- cumstances has been responsible. France, of course, to sup- port the pound, has lent England gold. For her, however, the loan was far more than a mere business transaction, and it may be difficult for the Englishman in England to realize just what it meant to her. She was very self-conscious about it. After years of financial sickness in which England had been the strong friend upon whose clemency she depended she was supporting England with French credit. In the act there was pride and much sentiment. Then came the pro- posal to prohibit the importation of luxury goods into Great Britain. The Frenchman read the news in amazement. After lending his gold, after that fine flush of warm feeling, England was going to knock millions off his trade ! He might be told it was after all only a proposal, only one of many suggested measures to meet a nation's desperate need, but for these arguments he had no ear. He was horribly hurt and even to- day French newspapers that should know better are chewing the cud of this incident. Thus the tendency in Paris is to take a severe and gloomy view of affairs in England. The reports in the French newspapers of the trouble in the Fleet gave a far more serious complexion to the matter than did the British Press. There were ironical headlines : all was quiet in the British Navy, for the admirals had allowed the men to have their way. Doubts arc expressed whether the fibre of the British people to-day will stand the sacrifices demanded of the nation. The view is expressed that the people still do not realize what has happened. Great Britain, it is said, lacks a Poineare. Thus runs the comment in newspaper and cafe.
Now in all this, of course, there may be a measure of truth ; but one may wonder whether the chilled atmosphere in which these things are said is not very largely due to a lurking feeling in the Frenchman's heart that the British people have misunderstood him, have judged him harshly in circum- stances somewhat similar to their own. France compared with other nations is thriving. Unemployment is not yet a problem. French finances are flourishing. Socially and industrially the country is settled and fairly content. The Englishman comes to Paris and sees the surface of this cheerful, well-dressed city, and he thinks perhaps that the Frenchman slipped out of his difficulties very easily—repudiated four- fifths of his debts by debasing the currency, left England to pay America while he with his smart little family went for a stroll in the Bois de Boulogne.
Now the Frenchman resents this view of things. He says it is not a true view, and that any nation which acts as though it were true will itself finally come to disaster. In this anyone who lives in France must feel that the Frenchman is very largely right. The Frenchman is not having an easy time. What he has achieved is a certain successful adjustment of the social and economic organism, but it has been achieved at a price. A peep beneath the surface of things reveals almost incredible hardship and privation. Thousands of people who have saved a little money which with care would have kept them in their old age have found that sum by the process of inflation reduced to one-fifth of its value. To-day they are living in attics or they are sharing little flats with a married son or daughter, and as a consequence the over- crowding—not the squalid overcrowding of the slum, but the overcrowding of cultured people in tiny, well-kept homes —would shock English people with their own ideas of what is necessary to human dignity and decency. Again, the visitor to Paris may go to one of the State subsidized theatres, let us say the Opera Comique. He will hear music as good as anywhere else in the world. The place will be packed with a respectably dressed crowd. The arts, he will say, are flourishing in Paris. So they are, but at a price. The Opera Comique is so poor that the manager often wonders where the next week's salaries are coming from. The total State subsidy to the Opera, the Opera Comique, the Theatre Francais and the Odeon is only £64,000 a year. (The Berlin Opera alone receives £80,000 a year from the State). One hears of composers of repute living on less than a labourer earns in England. One of them the other day confessed to a friend that his new symphony would not be performed simply because he could not meet the cost, by no means high, of having the parts copied for the orchestra. Salaries are incredibly low in France. A judge earns something like £500 a year. Clerks in Paris are bringing up fainilies on £2 a week. Some by working overtime and addressing envelopes on Sundays bring their income up to £3 a week. A first-class mechanic will earn perhaps £2 17s. a week. A labourer and his family will somehow manage on £1 10s. The purchasing power of these sums may be taken as about the same as in England. Indeed, if anything, living is dearer here than in London. While the matter of taxation is too intricate to be dealt with here, it may be mentioned as some guide that the judge with £500 a year would, in income tax alone, pay about a twelfth of his salary to the State.
Of the Frenchman, too, it must be said that he works hard and for long hours. Not only will he work hard but he will do any kind of work. He has no false pride and trade unions do not hamper him. He values greatly economic independence and will do anything to maintain it. An example may be permitted. At the office of a Paris daily newspaper a pale youth was recently engaged as a messenger boy. His wages were about 500 frs. a month and his hours from 8 p.m. to 1 in the morning. He was evidently not of the class from which messenger boys are usually taken. He explained that during the day he was an outfitter's salesman, but in a few months' time he would be called up to do his military service and he had come as a messenger to earn extra money so that while he was in the army—the pay of the conscript is only a few sous a day—he would be no charge upon his parents and would have a little to keep himself until he found a job when he came out of the army. This is not an exceptional case. One finds the same spirit running through the whole national life of France. It is by no means the writer's intention to hold up France as the paragon of all the economic and indus- trial virtues. For this economic and moral self-sufficiency of the French nation is perhaps one of the causes of much of the political trouble in Europe to-day. While other nations which were involved in the Great War are in various processes of transition, France, the very anvil of that dread hammering of Thor, has emerged almost unchanged from the ordeal. Once again she is content to live frugally on the produce of her own land, content so long as there is gold in the long stocking and her genius gives her songs to sing. Solid, powerful, changeless, she weighs upon a Europe in the throes of change.
From her, however, there is much to learn, and it may be because she feels that English people have misjudged her achievement, and because she thinks—rightly or wrongly— that Great Britain has thought more of her standard of living than of working for a living that the sympathy for her old ally is a little clouded.—I am, Sir, &c.,
YOUR CORRESPONDENT IN PARIS.
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