William Henry Hurlbert

“ It would surprise him, I fancy, to look on the people and the land of Artois to-day. The land has become one of the most fertile and prosperous regions of France; the people, unaffected to any appreciable extent by immigration, and unchanged alike in race and in religion, increase and multiply as of old. The well-tilled fields, the well-kept and beautiful roads, the neat, green hedgerows, the orchards bear witness on every side to the intelligence, the activity, the practical sense of the inhabitants. ”

“ Of course it is possible that the laicised, unbaptized, and atheistic French citizen of the future may come to regard the hegira of M. Gambetta from Paris to Tours in a balloon, and the occupation of Tonkin, as events of greater importance to mankind than the creation of France by Clotilde and Clovis, or the rescue of France from conquest and dismemberment by the pious peasant-girl of Domrémy, or the rolling back of Islam from the domination of the world by Urban II. Heaven forbid that I should assume to set any limit to the things which a truly scientific unbeliever is likely to believe! ”

“ So grateful was France to the Emperor for restoring the reign of law, that she never troubled herself about liberty, and but for the indomitable defence of constitutional liberty and national independence which England maintained, often single-handed, from the rupture of the peace of Amiens to the victory of Waterloo, the very names of the chief actors in the odious and ridiculous dramas of the Revolution would have long since faded, as Napoleon intended they should fade, out of the memory of the masses of mankind. ”

“ And, after all, when one looks into the practical production of any of these great marvels of human industry, it is in this economy of time that the real advance of modern science beyond the results of ancient invention seems to consist. With all our nineteenth-century chorus of 'self-praising, self-admiring,' where should we be if certain—for the most part, uncertain and forgotten—men of genius had not invented the primordial processes which made art and civilisation possible? The workshop came first, and was the real marvel in the case of every great industry. ”

“ For now more than two centuries the name of De Broglie has been made historical in France, not by the favour of princes—for neither in the camp nor in the cabinet have the De Broglies ever been courtiers—nor yet by the applause of the populace, but by the personal ability, the personal character, and the public services of the men who have borne it. If ever a man died for his loyalty to liberty and the law, it was Victor Charles de Broglie in 1794. ”

“ Can you possibly suppose, after all you have seen and known of France, that the people in a place like Château Thierry are such simpletons as to believe that it makes the slightest difference what name you give to a government? They leave that sort of thing to the journalists and the village actors! They have long memories in the provinces! And they judge governments, not at all by their names, but by their men. They know the functionaries by heart. ”

“ Is it "clericalism" which shuts up your schools? Is it "clericalism" which transforms all the actions and relations of life into matters of contract and of calculation? Do you imagine that Christianity, if it be your enemy, is an enemy as terrible as Nihilism? And what other end but Nihilism can there be of your "neutral" obligatory schools and your atheistic laws? Already you go in fear of the very phrase which recognises the duties of man to God! You think it dangerous, you think it equivocal! You do not know that when you recoil before the name of God you abandon the traditions of France! ”

“ It would be hard to find in France, or out of France, on a pleasant summer's day, a more charming drive than the highway which leads from Chauny, with its great modern industries and its lively, bustling people, to the little feudal town of Coucy-le-Château, perched upon its lofty hill and dominated by one of the grandest, if not, indeed, the grandest, of feudal fortress-homes. ”

“ Take away from the narrow Republican majority of 1889 the public functionaries, high and low, now counted in France by tens of thousands, with all who depend upon and are connected with them; give to the ballot in France the sanctity, freedom, and security which it has in England; compel the public authorities in France to abstain, as they are compelled in England to abstain, from direct interference with the exercise by the voters of the right of suffrage, and the evidence is overwhelming which goes to show that the Third Republic would be voted into limbo to-morrow! ”

“ But, unfortunately for them, the centralised administrative machinery of government in France by which the French people are now and have for a century past been prevented from governing themselves, though not indeed of Imperial origin, was so developed and perfected by the genius of the first Napoleon as to become identified in a sense with the Napoleonic dynasty.
It is a great misfortune of the French people that all great changes in their political system, no matter how promoted or in what spirit, must be wrought out within the vicious circle of this centralized administrative machinery. ”

“ As nearly nine-tenths of the workmen had gone, or been driven, into the strike, the cabarets in which the region abounds were filled with crowds of idle men. Radical speakers and managers hurried down to Anzin from Paris, to harangue the multitude and stir the people up to mischief, and the position of the workmen who stood out against an agitation which they knew to be founded on no grievance of theirs, and which could have no possible result for them but to injure the company, with the prosperity of which they felt their own prosperity to be identified, became really dangerous. ”

“ There are a hundred families we will say in a village. Ninety-nine of these families are Christian families, not families of saints—I wish I knew such a village as that!—but Christian families. Go into their homes, and you will see the crucifix hanging in the chambers, religious prints upon the walls. One family is a family of atheists. I suppose the case, for as a matter of fact I know no such family. But I will suppose it. There is a school in the village, and in that school there hangs a crucifix, the gift of some pious resident. ”

“ The people I passed, singly or in groups, saluted the director's carriage in a friendly, good-natured way, which seemed to show that here, at least, the 'irrepressible conflict' between capital and labour has not yet passed into the acute stage. A fine old church of the thirteenth century, with a tower of the sixteenth, and the noble trees which cover the slopes and shade the roadway of St.-Gobain, are no more in keeping with the standard English and American type of a manufacturing town than is the parklike domain in the midst of which rise the main buildings of the great manufactory itself. ”

“ If the Senate and the Government succeed in putting about the impression that General Boulanger is no better than they are, they will no doubt weaken him with the people, but they will not strengthen themselves. This Third Republic is dying, not of any passion for the monarchy, not even of the Imperialist legend, which is very strong in the country—more because France was so prosperous under the third Napoleon than because France dominated Europe under the first Napoleon: it is dying of popular contempt. ”

“ If it has not been reached, the influence of the Government upon the voters must be very formidable. For the average French voter is hemmed in and hedged about by innumerable small functionaries who have it in their power to oblige or to disoblige him, to gratify or to vex him in all sorts of ways; and though the ballot is supposed to be sacred and secret in France, it can hardly be more sacred or more secret there than in other countries. And whatever protection against annoyance the ballot may give to the voter, nothing can protect the candidate. ”

“ It was in the order of Nature that it should deify Mirabeau in the Pantheon, only to dig up his dishonoured remains and trundle them under an unmarked stone at the meeting of four streets, that it should set Bailly on a civic throne, only to drag him forth, under a freezing sky, to his long and dismal martyrdom amid a howling mob, that it should acclaim Lafayette as the Saviour of France, only to hunt him across the frontier into an Austrian prison. ”

“ The 'true Republicans,' as they call themselves, must be kept in power, the Republicans who hold it to be their mission—no, not their mission, for that word smacks of a Deity—but their proud prerogative, to rid France and the world of the Christian religion, to abolish all forms of worship and of monarchy from off the face of the earth, and generally to fashion the felicity of mankind, in and out of France, after their own mind. ”

“ In this way it touches the central province of the Ile-de-France, the main body of which is now divided into the three Departments of the Seine, the Seine-et-Oise, and the Seine-et-Marne. From Amiens to La Fère, therefore, the pulse of the French capital may be said to throb visibly about you in the rural beauty of a region which owes its value and its fertility less to the natural qualities of the soil than to the quickening influences of the great metropolis. For centuries Paris lived mainly on the Ile-de-France, and the Ile-de-France on Paris. ”

“ If France wins, if she recovers the Executive unity and stability essential to her life as a nation, recovers the historic sense of her national growth into greatness, recovers for every man, woman, and child in France the simple human right to believe and to hope, then the Republic must inevitably vanish, for with all these things the Republic has made itself incompatible. ”

“ In the course of a walk about the city, he showed me, in the Rue Nôtre-Dame, an edifice, the condition of which certainly excused his criticism of his fellow-citizens.
It is an ancient dwelling-house of the fifteenth century, standing at the corner of two streets. A most graceful tourelle markes the façade, and strikingly resembles that which decorates still the house at Paris near the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, in the vaulted doorway of which Louis, Duc d'Orléans, was murdered, a crime avenged by the death, on the bridge of Montereau, of its real author, Jean Sans-Peur, Duc de Bourgogne. ”

“ What is called 'le high-life' of Paris is neither Royalist nor Republican. It is merely shallow and vulgar, like the 'high-life' of sundry other places ruled by governments of divers forms. But when young men born to names which in the popular mind represent the history of France show themselves as athletes in a Parisian circus, or appear as grooms on the carriages of cocottes in the Bois de Boulogne, their folly naturally damages more or less in the public estimation the principles with which the names they bear are associated. ”

“ The traits and the tendencies of France, on the contrary, must be studied in the provinces. There was always more wit than wisdom in the famous saying of Heine—that to talk about the opinion of the provinces in France was like talking about the opinion of a man's legs—the head being the seat of thought, and Paris being the head. But the saying was uttered during the reign of Louis Philippe, and long before the establishment of universal suffrage by the Second Empire. ”

“ With the help of an inspired daughter of the people, King Charles had driven the English into the sea, and delivered the land. With the help of the people, King Louis had broken the power of Burgundy, and put the barons under his foot. 'Vive Labeur, Vive le Roy Louys!' I do not wonder this skilful craftsman 'of the empire and the rule' lamented on his death-bed in 1483, at Plessis-les-Tours, that he could not live to crown the edifice he had so well begun. We in England and America know him only in the magic mirror of the Wizard of the North. But France owes him a great debt. ”

“ That is to say the peasants, the rural people. It is in the towns—here in Calais, for example, at Boulogne, at Amiens—that they clamour for Boulanger. In the towns they read all manner of trash and listen to all manner of lies. You can get up a legend in the French towns for anybody or anything as easily to-day as in the middle ages—perhaps more easily. Look at this legend of Boulanger. It is a real legend to-day. You may be sure of that, and that is the real danger of it. The people who are fighting against it to-day are the people who made it. ”

“ But so late as 1877 the local history of the Department of the Pas-de-Calais, in which I am now writing, could be described as 'unique in France,' and this local history is really a history, not of the department at all, but of the two important and interesting provinces of which it consists—Artois, namely, and the Boulonnais—each of which still preserves, after nearly a century, its own distinctive character in the physiognomy of the people, in their habits, their turn of mind, and their traditions. The attempt to fuse them into a new political entity has completely failed. ”

“ The history of this great and flourishing industry, stretching back now over two centuries and a half, is a history of evolution without revolution.
There is nothing in France more thoroughly French than St.-Gobain, nothing which has suffered less from the successive Parisian earthquakes of the past century, nothing which has preserved through them all more of what was good in its original constitution and objects. ”

“ The framers of the American Republic were Americans first and then Republicans. The Republic which they framed was an experiment imposed upon the American people, not by philosophers and fanatics, but by the force of circumstances. The ablest of the men who framed it were not Republicans by theory. On the contrary, they had been born and bred under a monarchy. Under that monarchy they had enjoyed a measure of civil and religious liberty which the Third Republic certainly refuses to Frenchmen in France to-day. ”

“ Its grand Cathedral, the most consummate type which exists of the great ogival architecture of the thirteenth century, stands, the archæologists tell us, on the spot where the Romans planted their citadel sixteen centuries ago. Like a citadel, it dominates the whole city to-day; a fortress no longer, like the Roman citadel, of armed force, but of faith, charity, and hope. Seven centuries have not shaken the solidity of its massive fabric. ”