Children of the Revolution Page 37

  The notion that affection for the petite patrie did not threaten affection for the grande patrie, and could indeed nurture it, had in fact been developing for some time in French educational circles. The Tour de France par deux enfants explored each region of France in turn, praising the beauty of the countryside, listing the variety of trades in which people were engaged, and recalling the names and deeds of local heroes. Visual education or ‘l’enseignement par l’aspect’ became popular, so that geography was taught to primary school children less out of books, more on school walks to inspect local industry or agriculture, waterways and railways, and local historical sites such as battlefields. Hachette, which found a mass market in schools, circulated maps of the local department which highlighted notable sites and, through the new technology of the slide show, lent 3,548 collections of slides to schools in 1895–6, of which 57 per cent were geographical.50 Although Lavisse’s History of France was standard in all schools, the study of local history was now seen as complementary. In the preface of an 1891 History of Brittany the historian Charles Langlois wrote,

  France is one and indivisible, but it is composed of parts which each have a unity. We are French, but we are also Bretons, Normans, Picards, Flemish, Lorrainers, Burgundians, Provençals, Languedocians, Gascons. Each of us has a petite patrie of whose familiar landscape, customs, costumes and accent we are proud. In order to strengthen our love of France, our common fatherland, nothing is more legitimate, more natural, more proper than to love this petite patrie.51

  Local geographical societies were founded in Normandy in 1879, the Nord in 1880, the east in 1882 and Brittany in 1889, nearly half of whose members were instituteurs. Many of these were also secretaries to the mairie and used local knowledge and archives to write the history and geography of their commune for a national competition in 1900. By 1911 the republican government had changed its tune and Briand’s education minister Maurice Faure was complaining that ‘most pupils and too many French people are almost entirely ignorant of the history and geography of their commune, of the department in which they were born and the old province to which the department belonged before the Revolution,’ although ‘love of our native soil, as I told the Chamber of Deputies, is the strongest foundation of our love of the fatherland.’52 He duly set up a Society for Local Studies in Public Education which was headed by historians Lavisse and Langlois and geographer Vidal de la Blache, together with Charles Beauquier, deputy of the Doubs and vice-president of the Fédération Régionaliste Française.53

  The legitimation of the petite patrie was echoed by a greater acceptance of the need for decentralization in mainstream republican circles. Although it was still being preached by Félibres around Mistral and by monarchists around Maurras, after 1900 decentralization was no longer identified with reaction. One reason was the achievement of Jean Charles-Brun, whose Fédération Régionaliste Français of 1901 popularized the geographical notion of the region rather than the historic one of the province and sought to attract all political schools to the cause. Another was the Republic’s survival of the crisis provoked by the Dreyfus Affair and the arrival in political circles of a generation of activists who had not been shaped by the republican–reactionary contests of the 1870s and 1880s but had a less ideological and more sociological approach to organizing the Republic. They included Joseph Paul-Boncour, a brilliant young lawyer who professed independent socialist ideas and argued in his law thesis on economic federalism that strong trade unions and co-operatives should be developed alongside regionalism, and a young diplomat André Tardieu, both of whom were recruited to Waldeck-Rousseau’s political office in 1899 and met Charles-Brun in 1900.54

  In response to the centralizing thrust of Émile Combes in 1903, these young republicans triggered a debate on the question of decentralization. Paul-Boncour argued against the reactionaries that the Republic had a long and honourable decentralizing tradition, including the laws of 1871, 1882 and 1884, and reminded Radicals that decentralization had long been part of their manifesto, along with the election of judges and the abolition of the presidency of the Republic.55 André Tardieu backed him up by arguing that ‘while decentralization is not opposed to the Republic it is irreconcilable with Radical-socialism’, for ‘nothing is more odious to the Jacobin spirit now in control of France than these [historical] diversities.’56 Georges Clemenceau, replying for the Radicals, claimed at first to agree with Paul-Boncour that ‘we have to be done with Napoleonic centralization that has fallen into the hands of anonymous bureaucrats whose routine stifles all initiative and responsibility.’ However, after the intervention of Charles Maurras who argued that the Republic was incapable of decentralizing because it relied on the centralized administration of ministers, prefects and mayors to ‘make’ elections in the interest of the ruling republican party, Clemenceau warned, ‘interrogate these wild decentralizers and you will soon find that their aim is to decentralize not liberty but reaction.’57 Administrative decentralization found its way back on to the government agenda under Briand in 1909–10, but even he was too dependent on Radical support to achieve anything concrete.

  TOURISM AND THE REDISCOVERY

  OF THE PROVINCES

  The development of tourism took huge strides forward with the advent of the railway network and then, at the turn of the century, of the motor car. Paris and the provinces were brought closer together in terms of time and ease of transport. However, a study of guidebooks published to help the traveller suggests that little was done to undermine long-held stereotypes about the inhabitants of far-flung parts of France.

  Paul Joanne’s guides to France were geared to the railway traveller and were readily on sale in the railway kiosks owned by Hachette. The 1892 guide to Brittany proposed two possible itineraries, the Chemin de Fer d’Orléans leaving the Gare d’Austerlitz and reaching Nantes in eight hours, or the Chemin de Fer de l’Ouest leaving the Gare Montparnasse and reaching Brest in between fourteen and twenty hours. This was a good deal faster than the three days and nights it took Victor Hugo to reach Brest by mail-post in 1834. Prices from Paris to Brest were 82 francs first class, 55 francs second class. Joanne recommended a travel budget of 12 or 15 francs a day for ‘young people who travel in threes and fours, go some of the way on foot and can carry their own baggage. For a woman, who may never carry her own luggage, daily expenditure may rise to an average of 20–25 francs.’ When travelling on foot, Joanne advised the tourist seeking his or her way from a peasant always to ask for the ‘bourg’ or ‘parish’ of a village since ‘Breton communes are generally vast and are composed of a centre, or parish, with the church and numerous scattered hamlets.’ Curiously, the guide’s descriptions of the Bretons who might be encountered differed little from descriptions current in the days of Hugo or Balzac.

  The Bretons descend from a mixture of Celts and Kymris, nations of Indo-Germanic origin… The Breton is stubborn, and loves his native soil passionately. The charm of the Breton environment acts just as powerfully on their children, since most of them have not transformed it by labour or opened their minds by study. That is why Bretons removed from home are often overtaken by nostalgia. Enclosing their thoughts in memories of their homeland they are dead to what surrounds them and they die without having escaped from the grip of their dreams.58

  Within twenty years the advent of the motor car made provincial France even more accessible. The tyre manufacturers André and Édouard Michelin were among the founders of both the Touring Club de France, founded in 1890 and boasting 104,000 members in 1906, and the more exclusive Automobile Club de France, founded in 1895. The Touring Club published its first handbook in 1891, listing its members, approved hotels and mechanics. The first Michelin red guide was published in 1900, a 400-page book with thirteen city maps, indicating train stations and post and telegraph offices by symbols, and listing hotels by price range. The 1900 edition had a print run of 35,000; that of 1912, with 750 pages and 600 town maps, sold 86,000 copies. After 1907 the guide include
d seventy-two pages of maps for planning trips. The Touring Club, with the help of the Ponts et Chaussées department, produced its own maps for motorists and cyclists after 1897, and in 1908 produced a series of forty-seven maps of France, 1 centimetre for every 2 kilometres, folding concertina-style, priced at a franc each on paper, 2 francs on cloth.59

  The availability of maps and guides did not necessarily break down the barriers between Paris and the provinces. The first touring maps to be produced were for the Paris region, Lyon and the Riviera; others followed. Asking directions from local people, many of whom spoke patois, was to be avoided. To this end Michelin sponsored a petition which in 1912 gathered 200,000 signatures, at a time when there were 125,000 cars on the road, for the government to number roads, erect signposts and paint the road numbers and distances from towns on milestones. Presented to the government at the Paris airshow in November 1912, it became the official policy of the Ministry of Public Works in 1913.60 The Touring Club guidebook on Brittany 1901 argued that with the spread of French the Celtic language would have vanished in a hundred years, or be spoken only by ‘a few old people’. Local fashions such as men with shoulder-length hair, wide felt hats and embroidered waistcoats would also go, although women’s lace headdresses would be slower to disappear, since women were ‘more tenacious, more conservative than their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons’. The Breton character was sturdy, but it was about to be destroyed not by schools or roads or the market, but by drink.

  The soul of the Breton-speaking Breton echoes the grey stones, dark by day, sinister by night, under the watery moon, the granite outcrops, the moorland, the old oaks, the mist, the rain, the sighing sea, all that pessimistic nature. He is sad like his moor and his mist, sometimes stormy, like the sea, always tenacious like his rocks. He dreams and he acts. He is a poet and warrior, but above all a man of the sea. But now error, injustice and the abomination of solitude have had their effect. Honesty, uprightness, the spirit of sacrifice, devotion, fidelity, honour, passive courage and active bravery, will, faith, the flower of poetry, all this perishes and dies under the tap of barrels of alcohol.61

  11

  Class Cohesion

  PEASANTS: CHANGE AND RESISTANCE

  Echoing Balzac’s Les Paysans, Émile Zola set the peasants’ greed for the land at the centre of his novel of 1887, La Terre. The Fouan family, former serfs living in the Beauce, had struggled for 400 years to defend and extend their property, ‘with an obstinate passion that father bequeathed to son’. The old patriarch Fouan, rather like King Lear, is about to divide his 50 acres between two sons and two daughters, and there is not enough to go round. One daughter, Lise, has married her thuggish cousin, Buteau, who has been working as a farmhand in the Orgères district, from which during the Revolution a notorious band of brigands terrorized the peaceful farmers of the Beauce. Buteau and Lise confront another daughter, Françoise, in a field. Buteau rapes her, Lise attacks her, and in the ensuing struggle Françoise falls on a scythe and dies. Fouan has observed this scene and is likely to disinherit Lise and Buteau, so Buteau beats him to death in his bed and sets fire to the house, to make it look like an accident. Only the great worker earth, observes the seed-sower Jean, Françoise’s intended, remains impassive in the sight of ‘our engaged-insect quarrels, taking no more notice of us than of ants’.1

  Zola was a city-dweller from Avignon who bought a house in the country at Médan on the Seine in 1878. Émile Guillaumin, by contrast, was brought up on his grandparents’ farm of Neverdière in the Bourbonnais, where his father, Gilbert, had married the old couple’s daughter and worked on the farm. In 1892 Gilbert inherited his own father’s farm, Les Vignes, to which he became the sole heir after the death of his brother. Although the father had come into his own, Émile Guillaumin was reluctant to move and the fate of the peasant, displaced repeatedly from one plot to another, sometimes to inherit but more often evicted by some rapacious landowner, was one of the themes of his 1904 novel, The Life of a Simple Man. Schooled until first communion aged twelve and thereafter self-taught, Guillaumin tells the story of Étienne Bertin or ‘Tiennon’, a métayer or sharecropper whose lot was to put capital into a farm alongside the landowner’s contribution and share the produce and profits, although without enjoying security of tenure. Tiennon rented his first farm, Les Craux, when he married, aged twenty-two, and eight years later his second farm, La Creuserie, large enough to require him to employ two farmhands, an agricultural labourer for the summer, and a servant girl. However after twenty-five years he was evicted by a landlord who declared ‘métayers are like servants; with time they become bold and have to be changed.’ At fifty-five he rented a third farm from which he was evicted six years later on the death of the landowner, and at sixty-one he was left with a ‘little plot with three cows, about the same size as that with which I started at Les Craux’. Ever rehearsing the cycle of the seasons, The Life of a Simple Man also teaches that a peasant’s life is also cyclical, with little hope of making progress.2

  France was in many ways a peasant democracy, a country of small farms rather than sharply stratified, as in eastern and southern Europe, between large landowners and peasants with little or no land. In 1892, the year Guillaumin’s father inherited his own farm, 75 per cent of French farms were owner-occupied, that is owned by the peasants who worked them, the others being rented as farms or, in certain areas like the Allier, from which Guillaumin came, under métayage. Farms, whether owned or rented, were small, 53 per cent between 1 and 5 hectares, 23 per cent between 5 and 10 hectares in 1892.3 There was a general tendency towards an increase in the number of and area covered by small farms and the erosion of large estates. In the village of Mazières-en-Gâtine (Deux-Sèvres), studied between the wars by Roger Thabault, the proportion of farms under 5 hectares increased from 67.5 per cent in 1860 to 70.5 per cent in 1913, while that of farms between 5 and 10 hectares grew from 13.3 to 16.3 per cent. The largest estate in the village, owned by the Vicomte de Tusseau, was gradually sold off in 1881–6, the biggest portions picked up by a bourgeois landowner of Niort and a Paris lawyer who was a deputy of the Deux-Sèvres. ‘In spite of the growing prosperity of farmers in the commune,’ noted Thabault, ‘none of them was rich enough to become involved in this sale of a property that had belonged to local notables for at least three centuries.’4 In the Beauce, where Zola set his novel, small properties (under 19 hectares) which accounted for 40 per cent of the land in 1820–30 developed to cover 49 per cent of the land in 1914, while in the same period large properties (over 30 hectares) lost 18 per cent of the land. Within that group, large properties owned by nobles shrank from 46 to 36 per cent over the century, the Duc de Luynes being left with 3,540 hectares in the Marchenoir region in 1914 compared to 4,200 held by his ancestors in the 1820s.5 In winegrowing areas, the division of land was even more intense, landholdings being often just plots providing a supplementary income to artisans and industrial workers. In Courson (Aude) in 1911, alongside wine barons employing agricultural labourers, 24 per cent of landholders owned between 1 and 5 hectares, but 24 per cent owned under 1 hectare.6

  The world of the peasant was not unchanging, as some fantasies of rural life believed, and at the end of the nineteenth century the challenges facing the countryside were greater than ever. Industry which for so long had provided handwork for seasonally employed peasants was increasingly based in the towns, powered by steam and then electricity. Rural industries collapsed, destroying the balance between agricultural and industrial incomes that had sustained so many rural communities, so that what was now a surplus of rural labour moved to the towns. The rate of migration to the towns rose from 85,000–100,000 per annum in 1881–91 to 100,000–130,000 in 1891–1913. The rural population, defined as living in communities of under 2,000 inhabitants, declined from 69 per cent of the total population in 1872 to 56 per cent in 1911. The proportion of the working population employed in agriculture fell from 53 per cent in 1856 to 49 per cent in 1876 and 41 per cent in 1
911.7 Those who left were not so much farmers as rural artisans such as coopers, wheelwrights, basket-makers, clogmakers and saddlers, together with farmhands and agricultural labourers, often the sons and daughters of farmers, who saw more employment possibilities in the towns than in the countryside. Young Bretons used to seek additional income by going to harvest in the Beauce and Normandy. They were charged only on the outward trip by railway companies and were paid 5 francs a day. They took the steamer in the autumn in gangs of twenty to sell onions in the south of England. After 1880 they went to work in the arsenals of Brest, on the transatlantic steamers of Le Havre, and above all in the railway yards and the tanning, gas and chemical factories of the heavily industrial Paris suburbs, such as Saint-Denis, becoming permanent immigrants. Breton girls, former lacemakers or farm servants, also went to Paris to work as maids, hoping to save enough to return home with a dowry to marry a farmer, but often staying for good.8 That said, France remained an agricultural country in a way in which many other European countries had ceased to be by the Great War. The proportion of the working population employed in agriculture in 1909–11 was only 9 per cent in Great Britain, 23 per cent in Belgium and 37 per cent in Germany, with France’s 41 per cent only a little lower than Ireland’s 43 per cent.9