THE FRENCH PEASANT.*
THE French peasant has changed a great deal in a hundred years, more so perhaps than his English contemporary, who is still the hired labourer, and whom we must make some allowances for when we compare him with the little peasant farmers of France. But the peasant has a strong family likeness wherever we find him, and one of his family traits, an intensely practical view of life, cannot be too strongly in- sisted upon. Valombre, Mr. Smith's village, may be said to consist of peasant proprietors, for whose produce Paris pro- vides a ready market. They are terrific workers, and our peasantry when hay-making, or even when they do piecework in harvest can scarcely approach them. In the old days it was different, for the elder generation of our labourers will tell you of times when they rose with the sun, scarcely regarded his setting, and even turned night into day. So great is the contrast between the hours of labour then and the present working day, that the young folks refuse to believe it. This never-ending toil of the peasant proprietor does not shorten his life--nay, it preserves him—such vitalising power has mere contact with the earth. He lives into the eighties, and still plods through the day with bowed back. This very token of age may be regarded as a merciful one, for does it not bring him closer to his beloved earth, and so save some of the suffering which the straightbacked ones feel ? But struck down with illness, and unable to do battle with the weeds, every morning, with its inevitable exodus to the fields, deals a fatal blow to the worn-oat worker. It is not too much to say that, feeling he can no longer be of use, he takes to his bed and dies. This is one of the first differences to be noticed between him and his island contemporary. Our peasant is more of a philosopher, drops more gradually out of the straggle, and towards the end reaches a genuine resignation ; "a man can do what he can, and he can't do no more," we have heard him say. The French peasant really kills himself with overwork, the women especially, who desire recreation less, and whom the passion of saving converts into a machine that is scarcely human.
The thrift of the French peasant has not been exaggerated, and it is most certainly another point of distinction between kim and the English labourer. In France thrift may be said to be universal ; in England the reverse is the rule, and yet, as a matter of fact, it is the field labourer who really represents whatever thrift exists in the labouring class. We know of an old couple, childless it is true, who saved nearly a thousand pounds, and one can assert, without any fear of contradiction, that the woman was the moving spirit in this lifelong effort. It is the women who do these things ; men simply cannot ; there are exceptions, but they only prove the rule. Thrift is not so rare in the country village as some think, and on the whole forms one of the most unpleasant characteristics of the labourer when it does appear. It shuts up the bowels of com- passion from his own kin, and on his death leads to painful scenes. Still, one is thankful to say, it does not give that sordid tinge to the life of the peasant which strikes with painful force and disgust all who know the paysan,. Yet this avarice, coupled with patriotism, has stood him in good stead, as we all know.
The callousness of the paysan, due to his matter-of-fact life and the grudge he bears anybody or anything that takes him away from the soil and the means of accumulating sous, comes
• He Village. By IL Boyd Smith. With Illustrationa by the Author. London: Ward and Downey.
out strongly when Nature exacts payment of her debt. Some of us, too, have noted the brutal plainness with Ni hi& our labouring class discuss the chances for and against a return to health. Mr. Boyd Smith describes this with his usual observa- tion and intuition. "Isn't he tough," exclaims the son admiringly ; and over here the wife of the sufferer, scarcely lowering her voice, asks, "Do you think he'll ever get any better ? "—" No, I don't." This sounds terrible to us, yet it does not exclude true grief; but what place has grief in the life of the paysan? The golden corn and the whitening oats will not ripen with tears, and the paysan knows this ; one day, as with us, is given to the funeral and the funeral feast and regrets, and then on again. At Valombre, being well off, the paysan could give a supper on the occasion of a funeral or a marriage. One woman, earning fifty sous a day, gave a supper, entirely of meat with plenty of cognac, to thirty friends, which must have cost her a hundred francs. In fact, the life of the paysan is a struggle not for bread but for francs ; poverty, as we understand it, does not exist, at any rate in Valombre, and if it were not for this fete and the social events of his life, the paysan would become a maniac. "His egotism," says Mr. Boyd Smith, "is colossal, and the question of patriotism interests him but little." As long as the soil produces, and prices are good, everything else may go to ruin. Alas ! this is not confined to the paysan, and here, where generation after generation work and die, and never in their wildest dreams hear the roar of foreign cannon, a crust of passive selfishness grows and hardens, and, but for enthusiasts, would become as the hide of the hippopotamus.
We take our pleasures sadly, and one has only to compare the villagers' solemn enjoyment of the annual feast, tempered with a beery cheerfulness, with the delirium of joy that possesses Pierre and Jean and Constance and Rosalie at the fete. Even the aged grand-parents trust their octogenarian limbs to the midnight revel. For these few days the paysan neglects his "muck-rake," forgets the object of his existence, and the furious concentration with which he pursues it and transfers it to the fete. He lets himself go completely. He gets drunk, too, at the fête ; but, as a rule, "drinking was confined to the tradesmen of the place," says Mr. Boyd Smith. He has not that extraordinary craving for drink that may overcome the English labourer at any hour of the day, and compel him to leave the plough and horses standing while be gets fuddled at the nearest inn.
Valombre has its Mayor, of course, and its fire-engine and band, and the natural vanity of the people and love of display find an outlet in frequent fire-drills. A uniform, if it is only a blouse, has an irresistible attraction for them, so that the fire brigade tries to justify an uneventful existence by much drilling and an occasional procession. The people sometimes come into contact with the civilisation of Paris, and now and again the city swallows up some aspiring peasant, who finds he has exchanged the labour of the fields for a mental worry on the whole far more depressing. Valombre has known the realities of war, and the old people would talk of the Prussians and their usual con- sideration for the peasantry. But any one who was supposed to be a franc-tireur ran a great risk. One old woman relates how her father's medal, for he had fought with the great Napoleon, brought him instant respect from the soldiers, who would salute him. Old Constance, observing a handsome cashmere shawl in the possession of one soldier, took the opportunity to drop it behind the bed, and related that the owner before leaving turned the house topsy-turvy till he found it. A dangerous game to play with a victorious enemy. Old Constance, as a matter of course, acknowledged the right of the victors to take what they liked, though, as she said, they behaved well enough and only pilfered trifles when the house was occupied.
The paysan is economical with his clothes, and carries the art of patching to an extreme, but he is always neat. Nor does our peasant care about being ragged, only he is by no means so persistent a patcher, though a man will sometimes achieve peculiar results. The paysan, of course, will bargain, and is quite able to hold his own with the Jew pedlars who sell second-hand clothing. Constance's husband had been a. weaver, but those days are long past now. The same tendency to depend more on the tradesmen than themselves for various accessories of life is to be noted among the paysans as it is with us Economy alone drives the peasant to mend his own boots and to patch ; he buys his bread as a matter of coarse. Our French neighbours are too careful to be swindled over prices, but the English labourer will pay a penny more for his bread than the parson, and not be aware of the fact. This is rather an exception, it must be granted, but perhaps not so rare as some imagine. The English peasant is losing whatever home trades he possessed, and he is too lazy and too frightened of the man who gives him credit to protest at being swindled. The labourers' wives are hopelessly ignorant of good material when they see it; the soles and uppers of the boots they buy part company within twenty-four hours if it happens to rain. The paysan, however, is no fool; yet Mr. Boyd Smith relates of one woman who, fairly well off, subscribed for an elaborate cooking-stove, and kept herself poor by the necessary payments for this quite unnecessary luxury and also by keeping pigs and fowls. Well-balanced and intensely material as he is, the paysan has his ambition, and the woman, of course, will starve that her pig may be fat and well-liking; "but then," says Mr. Boyd Smith, "she is a Breton, and the instinct is natural." The instalment plan is a singularly cruel and injurious method, apparently invented for the sole purpose of impoverishing thrifty people. It is nothing less than a slow torture, and whoever originated it should be able to trace his descent direct to the inventor of the thumb-screw.
The love of a uniform has been alluded to, and the chronicler of Valombre cites the postman, a native of Southern France, as an instance of the fascination a Government position has for people. Twenty miles a day for sixty francs a month ! Even with handsome vails at the New Year this is barely enough for him, so he was allowed to cultivate a piece of waste ground, and, despite his daily grind, brought his garden into flourishing condition. What a man and what a system. The man represents, as our author justly says, "the sterling, sturdy qualities of his race." The pay is absurd ; but then French habits are frugal and always were, and not what English habits are ; we have a climate—and some will not allow it to be called such—that is scarcely conducive to economy of living. Forty years ago the butcher's cart was never seen in a village ; now the labourer has good fresh flesh meat at least once a week, and his food generally is infinitely better. French visitors are much struck with the waste that goes on in our households, but they admit that to conduct living on their economical principles is not possible in our climate.
If Mr. Boyd Smith is to be believed, much of the vitality of his religions feeling has left the paysan; here Mr. Boyd Smith expresses himself somewhat cynically, in strong contrast to his general attitude towards the French peasant, which is one of affection and intimate sympathy and shews a correspond- ingly keen insight. The paysan has few ideas, and lacks some of those amenities that relieve the monotony of an English labourer's work. He is no sportsman, and if this is not his fault, it and the fondness for wild life are none the less a deeply-rooted element in the life of "Hodge." The mental horizon of all peasants is narrow, but our friend " Hodge," if he lacks some of the minor virtues of "Jean," can lay claim to be a man of broader sympathies.
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