The Discovery of France (14 page)

As a literate, atheist Breton peasant with a passion for agricultural innovation, Déguignet was not entirely typical, but the world that wore him down was familiar to thousands of people: the precariousness of hard-won fortune and the weakness of family ties in the face of hardship. The modern edition of Déguignet’s memoirs appeals to a muddled sense of rustic nostalgia and suggests that the subject of the book is ‘The Waning of Rural France’. It describes him as a witness to ‘the start of the breakdown of traditional Breton society’. In fact, his memoirs describe the exact opposite. The society into which he was born was always on the verge of collapse – not just because of war or anarchy but also because of hunger, disease, bad weather, bad luck, ignorance and migration. Poverty pushed his family onto the road; fear and envy turned his neighbours into enemies; fire and feudal privilege destroyed his livelihood.

There is something beautifully appropriate in Déguignet’s circular career. The boy who began his professional life as a beggar and ended it as an insurance salesman is a better symbol of his age than all the famous parvenus who left their place of birth and returned – if they returned at all – decades later, as a bust in the town hall or a statue in the square. As a beggar boy, Déguignet worked for a single mistress, lived from day to day and exploited the superstitions of his clients: they gave him the customary measure of oats or buckwheat
flour because ‘they were convinced that they would get it back a hundredfold’, not in heaven, but quite literally, in the next few weeks or months. As a fire-insurance salesman, he worked for a company with offices in a city, followed set procedures and exploited his clients’ rational fears.

It was thanks to innovations like insurance that families were able to plan for the future and to treat the next generation as something more precious than a source of cheap labour. In ‘traditional’ society, fairy tales presented child labour as something normal and necessary. In ‘The Three Spinners’, a father quite rightly decides to get rid of his daughter because ‘she ate [crêpes] but did no work’. Tearful tales of devoted children and family reunions were popular with bourgeois readers because they reflected aspirations, not because they were true to life. In Burgundy, until the eve of the First World War, relations between parents and children were distinctly unsentimental, according to a local historian: ‘The son was usually treated as a servant, minus the wages.’ Until the Second World War, peasant photograph albums almost never contained pictures of children.

Déguignet was fortunate in having parents who wanted to keep him. Thousands of children – like Tom Thumb in the French fairy tale – were abandoned every year. At Provins, between 1854 and 1859, 1,258 children were deposited in the rotating barrel built into the wall of the general hospital. (It can now be seen in the local museum.) These
tours d’abandon
, which contained a straw bed and some ets, made it possible for mothers to abandon their babies anonymously and safely. They were outlawed as a public disgrace in 1861, which simply meant that more babies than before were left to die on doorsteps. In 1869, over 7 per cent of births in France were illegitimate, and one-third of those children were abandoned. Each year, fifty thousand human beings started life in France without a parent. Many were sent to the enterprising women known as ‘angel-makers’ who performed what can most kindly be described as postnatal abortions. A report on the hospice at Rennes defined them as ‘women who have no milk and who – doubtless for a fee – feloniously take care of several children at the same time. The children perish almost immediately.’

Before 1779, the nuns who ran the foundling hospital in Paris were
obliged by law to take the infant overflow from the provinces. This emergency regulation produced one of the strangest sights on the main roads of France. Long-distance donkeys carrying panniers stuffed with babies came to the capital from as far away as Brittany, Lorraine and the Auvergne. The carters set out on their two-hundred-and-fifty-mile journeys with four or five babies to a basket, but in towns and villages along the route they struck deals with midwives and parents. For a small fee, they would push in a few extra babies. To make the load more tractable and easier on the ears, the babies were given wine instead of milk. Those that died were dumped at the roadside like rotten apples. In Paris, the carters were paid by the head and evidently delivered enough to make it worth their while. But for every ten living babies that reached the capital, only one survived more than three days.

These tiny, drunken creatures made epic journeys that dwarfed the journeys of most adults. The part they played in the history of France is microscopic and immense. Some of the few that survived would have joined the army of vagrants and labourers that eventually swelled the suburbs of industrial cities and helped to fuel a more stable French economy. Life for these landless servants of industry would be even more precarious than it had been for their parents in the fields.

6

Living in France, II: A Simple Life

T
HE FEW TRAVELLERS
who explored this suffering land of fragmented village states inevitably came to wonder how the geographical entity known as France could function as a political and economic unit. Perhaps, after all, things were not as bad as they seemed? As French historians have been pointing out ever since the English farmer Arthur Young made his agricultural tours of France in 1787, 1788 and 1789, not everyone was drowning in poverty. Not all French towns were full of ‘crooked, dirty, stinking streets’ (Brive) and ‘excrementitious lanes’ (Clermont-Ferrand). Some of them, as Young observed, had ‘foot-pavements’ or
trottoirs
(Dijon and Tours). Not every tavern toilet was a ‘temple of abomination’ and not every serving-girl a ‘walking dung-hill’. Sometimes the traveller was spared the agony of eating his meal on a straight-backed, straw-bottomed chair, and sometimes a glimpse of the greasy, dog-fouled kitchen did not instantly remove his appetite. Many rural houses had windows, quite a few peasants wore shoes and stockings, and if the women of Languedoc went barefoot, at least they had the ‘superb consolation’ of walking on magnificent new roads.

The lasting value of Arthur Young’s accounts, which were translated into French and widely read, lay in the fact that he confronted his agronomic theories with the evidence of his senses. The discovery of France by educated people made it possible to place the fragile existence of the majority in a wider picture, though the colour of individual lives was often lost in the landscape of economic abstraction. Those ‘walking dung-hills’ were, after all, human beings. They lived by the habits and beliefs of a particular society which had,
however implausibly, survived for centuries. This society may not have matched the aspirations and convictions of middle-class observers, but it had a logic and efficiency of its own. The population of France was never a shapeless mass of human raw material, waiting to be processed by the huge, mutating machine of political interference and turned into the people conveniently known as ‘the French’.

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I
T WAS UNFORTUNATE
for his reputation in France that Arthur Young happened to choose the Château de Combourg in Brittany as a prime example of ignorance and waste. He could not have known that the boy who grew up in the castle towers would become one of France’s greatest Romantic writers, François-René de Chateaubriand:

Years later, Chateaubriand commented on this passage in his memoirs: ‘This M. de Chateaubriand was my father. The retreat that seemed so hideous to the ill-tempered agronomist was a fine and noble dwelling, albeit dark and solemn.’ He said nothing, however, about Young’s description of the town.

This was not just a matter of personal pride. The underlying problem was that France, like other countries, came to be judged by the degree to which it met the standards of the middle class. It was as if the nation could have no adult identity until it cleaned its streets and citizens and enjoyed the benefits of international trade. Until then, the masses would be more vegetable than human:

Arthur Young was a perceptive man with good, practical knowledge of his subject. On the castle lawn at Nangis, he showed the Marquis de Guerchy how to make a proper haystack. His faults were those of most observers, both French and foreign, who mistook the obscure logic of daily life for ignorance and exaggerated the plight of the common people in order to show how much they had to gain from civilization. They observed, without always knowing what they saw.

Wealthy men from northern cities pitied the half of France where the prehistoric plough was little better than a hoe – but indispensable on thin and rocky ground. They pitied the huddled masses whose windows were holes in the wall or panes of oil-soaked paper – though many in the warmer south felt no need of glass and spared themselves the cost of window tax and wafery panes that were shattered by wind and hail. They patronized the toothless, stunted peasants of the ‘Chestnut Belt’ who preferred the meaty fruit of their useful forests to the tasteless, warty potato, and who lived in smoky hovels, cheek by jowl with livestock – who provided them with companionship and warmth. They felt a sense of patriotic shame when they saw their compatriots carrying their shoes on a string around their neck on the way to church or market, and ploughmen who preferred the supple leather of bare feet to the abrasive weight of a mud-caked clog.

This was simplicity rather than deprivation, and even a kind of inoculation against true poverty. Most people lived in prudent anticipation of misfortune. Sayings of the ‘knowing my luck’ variety warned against the folly of trying too hard and expecting too much:

Compared to the moral marquetry of Parisian epigrammatists, these proverbs are rough-hewn blocks, but they express the experience of a whole nation, not just the neuroses of a tiny elite. Even the elite was not immune from the Devil’s tricks. Two years after Arthur Young’s last tour of France, one summer night in 1791, a large green coach trundled out of Paris by the eastern gate. It was carrying a valet who called himself M. Durand, some women and children and an extraordinary amount of luggage. After a night and a day, it reached the little town of Sainte-Menehould on the edge of the Argonne forest. While the horses were being changed, the postmaster’s son peered through the window at the occupants of the carriage. Then he looked at the coin in his hand and recognized the face. Twenty miles further on, at Varennes, the coach was stopped and the royal family was escorted back to Paris.

The meteoric fall of King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette came to be seen as a horrible exception in French history. Their little son, the Dauphin, was imprisoned in the Temple in Paris, mistreated by his jailers and died in wretched obscurity. Yet the tale of his martyrdom became a national myth, not because it was so out of the ordinary but because it expressed a common fear and a common reality. Anyone, even a royal prince, could be reduced to prison rations and wiped from the face of the earth.

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A
S LONG AS HISTORIANS
were unwilling to sacrifice the grand view from Paris for the humbler horizons of their native town or village, the mystery would remain unsolved and, for that matter, unnoticed: how, in these conditions, did a society that was recognizably French survive and, eventually, prosper? Perhaps the question should have been: did it survive, or is the continuity of French society – rather than Breton, Burgundian, Mediterranean or Alpine society – a historical illusion?

Even ignoring the tribal loyalties of the population, their different languages and the continental size of the land, the political basis of the union was remarkably fragile. Civil order broke down altogether in the west of France during the Revolution, in parts of Provence during the 1832–35 cholera epidemic and in Paris itself at almost regular intervals. Lyon rebelled in 1831 and 1834 and had to be subdued by government troops. In 1841, a census created rumours that everything from furniture to unborn babies was to be taxed. Riots ensued, and for several weeks large parts of the country from Lille to Toulouse were out of control. In 1871, Paris became a separate people’s republic and the country was governed from Bordeaux while seven other cities declared their independence.

The Revolution itself was not a storm that came and went but an earthquake that followed long-established fault-lines. In 1793, when the nation was in danger of collapsing into anarchy, the cities of Arras, Brest, Lyon, Marseille and Nantes had to be recaptured by the republican army and were treated as rebel colonies: