'^mmmmmm A T THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES IN MEMORY OF MRS. VIRGINIA B. SPORER FRANCE FRANCE Her People and Her Spirit By LAURENCE JERROLD THE REAL FRANCE, THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH, ETC. WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS COPYRIGHT 1916 THE BOBBS-MEBRILL COMPANY PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH A CO. NTtRS NO BOOKBINDERS " : BROOKLYN. N. Y. CONTENTS CHAPTER FAGB I 1871-1914 1 II THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 18 III THE FRENCH SPIRIT 28 IV THE FUTURE OF THE FRENCH SPIRIT ... 50 V FRANCE AMONG THE NATIONS .... 67 VI GOVERNMENT AUTHORITY 86 VII GOVERNMENT PARLIAMENT 102 VIII GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION . . . .115 IX FRANCE BEYOND THE SEAS 128 X ARMS IN PEACE 138 XI ARMS IN WAR 158 XII CHURCHES 181 XIII EARNERS 203 XIV OWNERS 219 XV THE SOIL 239 XVI THE CITIES 258 XVII MEN AND WOMEN 278 XVIII LETTERS 307 XIX MEN WHO MADE MODERN FRANCE .... 332 XX LESJEUNES 356 BIBLIOGRAPHY 377 INDEX .... 387 2042137 FRANCE FRANCE CHAPTER I 1871-1914. FOB forty-three years France waited. The day came at last. It was not of France's seeking, yet she did not wince when it came. Few Frenchmen on the eve toasted (as the German sailors did) "an den Tag"; all drank to the day when it was there. That the "Re- venge party," the "Revanchards," were a power in France forty-three years after the War of 1870 was an invention of many German and a few English politicians, the latter afterward being wiser and sad- der. Every one knowing France knows that there were hardly any circumstances conceivable in which France would have declared war on Germany, even to win back Alsace-Lorraine. Germany chose the day; France rose like one man, it was revenge at last. The French democracy in all honesty would never have had the heart, for the sake of revenge, to plunge Europe into what was bound to be the worst war in modern history. France feared Germany, but that there was 1 FRANCE more deep humane scruple than cowardice in her re- luctance, no one knowing France doubts. The foe took without turning a hair the onus of blood guilt- iness. "En avant" was the answer : "En avant! Tant pis pour qui tombe, La mort n'est rien. Vive la tombe, Si le pays en sort vivant, En avant! "Si tu veux ma mort, mort a moi, Et vive toi, ma France!" It is not great poetry, this of noble-hearted and simple-minded Paul Deroulede, who, chief of all the Revanchards, died too soon, and knew he would, for he said just before dying, "One never lives to see one's dream come true." But it is poetry of battle- fields, bayonet charges, trenches and storming parties. The passion of "revenge" for 1870 lay, except in a few, dormant. The few never would have had the strength to send the nation to war. But the fire was there, latent, but a fire. The spark set it ablaze, and France flamed up more than even she herself knew she would. After all, one was wrong ; the "revanche" still was a cry to call the French to arms. But one was right, too; the spark did it. If France wanted revenge, she must thank Germany. France herself would never have given herself the chance. Germany, 2 FRANCE with a cynicism that was almost ingenuous, gave her the chance. She took it; she was instantly changed. She was the real France again. She was no longer self-con- scious, petty, frivolous, divided, ironical, cynical; she was the real France, one nation with one heart, the most one-hearted, deeply united nation in the world, the real France that true observers had always seen beneath the surface. She was one huge battalion of soldiers fighting on fields, in trenches, in forts; peas- ants, dukes, millionaires, politicians, priests, bishops, anarchists, all of one mind. War is horrible. A whole people standing against the invader is beautiful. Saturday, August 1, 1914: pictures of Paris and France that one can never forget. "a y est," a piece of paper posted up at the post-office. "Ordre de mobilisation generate. First day of the mobiliza- tion, Sunday, August 2, to date from midnight of Saturday." In Paris the cabman, the concierge, the boulevardier, the man of fashion, side by side reading it; at the seaside the fisherman, the Parisian just arrived for the summer, the village postman, the fishwives, side by side reading it. "Here it is!" nothing more. Not a wince, not a sigh ; a groan, or murmur even, is unthinkable. No tears from wife or mother they come later, quietly, at home, when no one is looking. Not an instant's cowardice or re- volt or doubt in the whole people. 3 FRANCE From that midnight onward through the fifteen idays of mobilization the French nation took up arms. Trains bore troops, troops marched, not a man in a thousand flinched, not a mother or wife in a hundred showed her tears. In men's rifles were stuck flowers, officers took nosegays as they rode, cannons rolled garlanded and wreathed with laurel. The Marseil- laise and Mehul's noble Chant du Depart sounded down the Paris boulevards. No "A Berlin" harking ominously back to 1870; some hoots for the German Emperor; one evening of smashing a dozen German shops in Paris; after that a great quiet determina- tion. The tears came often to one's eyes as one saw in the streets small simple signs of the great upheaval that found every man in the nation suddenly ready: pieces of paper posted on tiny shops' closed shutters, "The cobbler left on the first day of mobilization"; poor little calico tricolor flags hung out from back kitchen windows; the concierge, the cafe waiter, the shop clerk, pictures of comfortable peacefulness, all "going" and saying, "I am for the Ardennes and shall see something," "I for Alsace, which will be just as good," "Better it should come now, we have put up with them long enough." The observer from a nation without conscription understood at last what a nation in arms means; after all, these clerks, these waiters, these concierges, all these small peaceful peo- ple had all been soldiers in their twenties, for two or 4 FRANCE three years, in peace-time : give them back their rifles and they feel twenty again twenty again in a holy cause. n August 4, 1914 : an August 4 that will overshadow in French history the Nuit du 4 Aout of the First Revolution, when 'the nobles renounced their privi- leges. On this August 4 the nation foreswore every- thing except the holy cause of the nation's life. I was early in the Chamber of Deputies. I shook hands with the Chief Usher, who said, "At last we are among ourselves."* In the House old political foes met and shook hands in silence. Royalists and Unified Social- ists, Atheists and Papists grasped one another's hands. I watched from above the bitterest, deadliest enemies of five days before cross the floor toward one another and shake hands, still silently. The President of the Chamber: he speaks first of Jean Jaures (the whole House stands) murdered on the eve of war, at the end of a day when he had done all he could to stave war off; the whole House, those who worshiped Jaures and those who called him traitor, is standing; the President speaks of France attacked without pre- * In the years of peace the foreign press gallery was held like a fort by German newspaper correspondents and the sole official representative of the foreign press accredited to the Parliamentary authorities (and drawing a salary from them) was the correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung. FRANCE tense of an excuse, and as he finishes one great shout of "V'voe la France!" comes from the whole House, from those who once were Royalists, Bonapartists, Republicans, Anti-Clericals, Socialists, and are only Frenchmen now. "All those names are forenames, the surname is Frenchman," Paul Deroulede had said. "A message from the President of the Republic" ; all stand again : it closes with, "Keep we high our hearts and live France!" "Live France!" the whole House echoes in a great shout. The Prime Minister tells with damning baldness the story of the negotiations through which the enemy step by step forced war. The unanimous vote of supplies. "Vive la France!" the House, the public, the press representatives, the Corps Diplomatique, are standing and crying with one voice. The historic 4th of August meeting of the French Parliament is over. The psychology of other peoples was a closed book to the powers that ruled the German Empire in 1914. A month later, day for day, one heard from Paris the German heavy guns. Think of the tragedy of it. Was it all over? Was it to be a worse 1870? Paris did not flinch. Civil authorities, banks, financiers, the Bank of France with its gold, citizens unfortunately prominent enough to be upon the prepared German list of hostages, left in the middle of the night, and the military authorities were glad to be rid of them. Paris herself never had nerves for a moment. Tauben 6 FRANCE flew over Paris, dropping bombs that killed or maimed women and children. Paris never even lost her good humor or her temper. I was writing in rooms on the boulevards at five o'clock one afternoon when one ex- plosion nearly smashed one of my windows and an- other a minute later nearly smashed another. We all ran down-stairs to the boulevards and stood in the middle of the street craning our necks to look at the Taube. That was the first five-o'clock Taube visit, but such visits afterward became a habit. One said: "Time for the Taube. Let us go down toward the Opera; we shall just see it." Others went and sat on the Place de la Concorde of an afternoon, where there is more sky space for watching aeroplanes. One more proof of the German failure in psychology, by the side of so many successes in other less subtle sciences. The Tauben "terrorizing" Paris only kept Paris interested. For weeks they did not even excite Paris enough to induce the taking of any means for stopping them. After a time, Paris suddenly said: "We have had enough of these Tauben. They bore us. Let them be stopped." An aeroplane scout service was started, and no Taube was seen over Paris again. Why was not the aeroplane scout service started before? Paris was too lazy and the military authorities of Paris "had other and more important matters to deal with." So much for "terrorizing" Paris. FRANCE III The battle of the Marne, after Mons and Charleroi, was a supreme retrieval. General Joffre, Commander- in-Chief , to his troops on September 6 said : "Now that a battle begins upon which the fate of the country depends, all must remember this : the time is gone for looking backward; every endeavor must be aimed at attacking and throwing back the enemy; troops un- able to continue advancing will at all costs keep the ground won, and must die rather than yield. In this juncture there can be no mercy for any shortcoming." Later historians may know the whole truth about the battles of Mons and Charleroi of August, 1914. They may determine purposes and accidents, plan and chance, luck and ill luck, achievements and blunders. To us now only some facts are known. France had massed her forces along her eastern, not her north- eastern, frontier. Great Britain had not yet come In. France avoided even the suspicion of an intention to invade Belgium. German forces hacked their way through Belgium. British forces were landed in northern France. Even the Belgian sacrifices at Liege and Namur did not give the Allies time to concentrate efficiently on the Franco-Belgian frontier. The Ger- man forces, after hacking through, swept round in a great circle down the left bank of the Meuse. Why idid they not remain on the right bank and march 8 FRANCE down by Givet through the Trouee de Stenay? Some think that was the initial German blunder, others that the sweep round through the broader and more open road was the better move. It took time, but it found the way clear only too clear. Blunder for blunder; the Allies blundered first, and theirs might have cost them Paris and France. If Belgium had let the in- vader through, Paris must have fallen. The fort- night's delay, bought by the life-blood of the little country that might have held aloof, still found the Allies unready at the crucial point. France had not, for obvious political reasons, concentrated before at the Belgian frontier. But now Great Britain had come in and landed her forces. Why was there no re-concentration there where the German flood poured in ? Fifty years hence it will be known. The German flood poured in, and met on the right the British force, still small; on the left French territorials, a fortnight before clerks in counting-houses, sellers in shops, little tradespeople at their trades. The terri- torials, before the flower of the German army, before the Prussian Guards, broke. Who will blame them? The British troops, trained and seasoned, held as long as one man against five can hold. That was Charleroi and Mons and Le Cateau. Why was not the best French strength opposed to the best German? Why were the British forces left unsupported? Anyhow, General Von Kluck's army came on, marching irre- 9 FRANCE sistibly at thirty and thirty-five miles a day. Was it all up with Paris and France? It seemed so on September 4. On September 13 the Commander-in-Chief, General Joffre, announced to the Minister of War : "Our victory is complete. Our armies, after the fights of September 5 to 12, are in pursuit of the enemy. We have gained one hundred kilometers in six days' battle." The most astonishing counter-blow in perhaps the whole history of warfare had been dealt. The German forces, rushing on irre- sistibly, were at Gonesse, eight miles from Paris. They seemed and thought themselves irresistible. The Allies had retired had literally run before them. Their right (General Von Kluck) turned eastward on Sep- tember 5, the better to encompass Paris. On the sixth General Joffre ordered the Allied armies' attack. Sud- denly the German right discovered an army (General Maunoury) it had never suspected. General Von Kluck turned round with admirable skill to meet it. He maneuvered magnificently and retreated sixty miles to good positions. The Kronprinz on the German left was in difficulties and retired less magnificently. Gen- eral Joffre had won the battle of the Marne. If Gen- eral Von Kluck had guessed the existence of General Maunoury's army on his right, he might have reached Paris. Had he not maneuvered so skilfully as he did when he found out his blunder, the German retreat from the Marne might have been the German rout 10 FRANCE from France. I do not doubt that General Joffre ad- mires German maneuvering in the surprise of the Marne. I am sure that German commanders equally admire General Joffre's great retrieval. Think of it! A retreat from Charleroi to Paris; the enemy per- suaded he has nothing of any count against him ; a rush at thirty-five miles a day without opposition through some of the richest counties of France; a triumphant progress ; Paris is his. Suddenly a new army on his right he had never dreamed of ; fighting, after the conqueror's riotous advance with wine and women, when it was not sottishness and rape; retreat, defeat, the great invasion turned into a general strategic move to the rear; a rout prevented only by discipline and entrenchment. The raid on Paris to September 4, 1914, and the saving of Paris from September 6 to September 12, 1914, will be spoken of by many generations. "We have been able to show the world that an or- ganized democracy can bring strong action to the service of freedom and equality, the ideals that make it great. We have been able to show the world that, in the words of our Commander-in-Chief, who is a great soldier and a noble citizen, the Republic may be proud of the army she made," said the Prime Minister in Parliament on December 22, 1914. The Third French Republic has shown that she has not weakened France. She blundered, she was blind, she buried hep 11 FRANCE head in her own little domestic quarrels, while the Empire next door was putting its last finishing touch to its monster war-machine. She has proved that with all her foibles and faults and backslidings she well preserved still the real France. Do not put it that at the instant of danger the real France found herself in spite, not because, of the Republic. If Re- publican Government had been capable of weakening France, it would have had time to do it in forty-three years. Nineteen years of Empire produced a France that was crushed in a month. The real France of 1870-1 found herself only after the fall of the Em- pire, when Gambetta rallied the country and France made such a stand as no country so defeated made before. In the midst of war the France of the Second Empire fought against herself. From August 4, 1914, the France of the Third Republic stood fast, with one front to the foe. The Republic made many mistakes. I know many now old Republicans whom the war uprooted from the doctrines of a lifetime; good will among men, war against war, the United States of Europe, were blown away like bubbles. The Republic had never been quite unready, but had never been more than half ready for war. Fortifications, heavy guns, am- munition, were only more or less prepared; the re- turn to the three years' military service, bringing up the first French fighting line within measurable dis- FRANCE tance of the German, was passed just a year before the war. IV Less than a week before Germany declared war on France* there was no President of the Republic, no Prime Minister, no Foreign Secretary in France. All Paris, all France, and all the world in so far as it thought of French affairs, was wrapped in the trial of Madame Caillaux for having shot dead the editor of the Figaro, and was wondering whether her husband would or would not prove strong enough (he did) to procure her acquittal, and he always acknowledged himself to be the champion of Franco-German friend- ship for business reasons. A pleasant, peaceful gen- tleman was locum-tenens at the Quai d'Orsay. M. Vivi- ani himself (he told me so in July, 1914) was still shy of handling the foreign policy of France, and he was away in Russia. The amiable locum-tenens re- ceived the visit of Baron von Schoen and said, of course, His Excellency comes to ask for a seat for the Caillaux trial. The Baron came to say that his Imperial Master had decided to uphold Austria to the utmost. Imagine the state of mind of the amiable locum-tenens, perfectly ignorant of the affairs of * The President of the Republic, with the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary M. Viviani, returned from their visit to the Emperor of Russia, planned long before, on Wednes- day, July 29. Baron von Schoen intimated Germany's dec- laration of war on France on Monday, August 3. 13 FRANCE Europe and horribly nervous about the foreign policy of France. On Friday, July 81, at four p. M., I called at the Austro-Hungarian Embassy in Paris, where I then had friends. Count S. told me : "I am confident that an understanding will be come to between us and Rus- sia." At four-thirty the news reached Paris that Germany had declared the Kriegsgefdhrzustand. It is now clear that Germany was trying to lull Russia with the suggestion of continued negotiations between her and Austria-Hungary, and was indeed communi- cating the suggestion to Austria-Hungary herself at the very instant that Germany was declaring the Kriegsgefdhrzustand.* That evening a widely known British pacifist talked to me earnestly over the tele- phone, imploring me to announce that (as he was in- formed, and he knew His Majesty personally) the German Emperor was opposed to war and had threat- ened the German War party that he would abdicate if the latter persisted in its aims. Three days later Germany declared war against France, on the pretext, which Baron von Schoen, who made the declaration at the Quai d'Orsay, scarcely himself feigned to believe, that French aviators had flown over Nuremberg. In the interval Germany had invaded French territory, invaded Luxembourg and sent her ultimatum to Belgium. * British White Paper, August, 1914. Compare Nos. 110, 112, 113. FRANCE That France or England prepared war on Germany is a grim, a German joke. On the Sunday afternoon, August 2, 1914, the French Foreign Office wondered one thing : would the violation of the neutrality of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg by Germany, then just accomplished, be sufficient to bring Great Britain in? Friends at the Quai d'Orsay and I weighed the words of the treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Luxem- bourg, and we doubted. That same day His Britan- nic Majesty's ambassador in Paris was gaily telling all whom he met that Great Britain would remain neutral. Humble subjects of His Majesty like myself spent much less gay hours and sleepless nights. On that Sunday night the editor of Le Matin kept me a half -hour on the telephone with despairing appeals: he had the worst news from London; Great Britain was standing out and letting Germany make the war she wanted ; I must do all I could, I must move heaven and earth. I had done what I could. The next day I met the editor at the Quai d'Orsay and he fell into my arms, for at seven the evening before Germany had sent her ultimatum to Belgium ; England was by France's side. V And England made war on poor Germany ! What grim jokes German jokes are! The French Republic taken unawares, as no State ever was, met the assault as only a real nation can. "German diplomacy has 15 FRANCE ceased to exist," said friends of mine at the Quai d'Orsaj, when Germany sent the ultimatum to Bel- gium. A few hours later my friends, ministers pleni- potentiary, secretaries of embassy, were lieutenants, sergeants, privates in the French army. A few days later they were at the front, and some are buried there. The nation rose to the challenge as one man. The priest waived his "Love one another" and fought and was killed. The Anarchist waived his "Love one another" and shot as many Boches as he could and was killed. The anti-militarist was the hardest fighter ; the Royalist Camelot du Roy, propagandists in peace- time of the Due d'Orleans against the Republic and a thorn in the side of Paris politicians, said, "At last we can fight without being run in"; the Syndicalist trooper, after risking his life to save his lieutenant, whistled the chorus of I 'Internationale, the burthen of which is: "And we keep our bullets to shoot our Generals with." German organization is remarkable, German militarism is wonderful, German psychology is weak. Against German aggression France stood like one man. The Third Republic had not lessened, had perhaps broadened the French people's will. Who thought France would be divided against who at- tacked France was blind. Who thought France was no longer one France was blind. Even Germans never, I believe, thought exactly that France had forgotten how to fight, but they knew 16 FRANCE she was only half ready and they ready to the last gaiter button and the last incendiary bomb for setting houses on fire. They madly imagined she was perma- nently unnerved and had lost her national constancy ; they least of all dreamed that, of old a fighter, she would put up as good a fight as of old in a new way and a way new to her. A furiously dashing French soldier all the world knew; one capable of grimly holding on for days, then weeks, then months, no one had known and he probably himself did not know. The victory of the Marne after the retreat from Charleroi was the last thing the enemy expected the French army capable of. General Joffre was the last sort of Commander-in-Chief Germany expected to find in the field: dashing Murats and Marceaus, if you will, with the ghost of a chance of a new Napo- leon; never a stolid, stout, quiet old gentleman who slept soundly nine hours a night, never turned a hair in retreat, never knew nerves, never fussed, never doubted, stuck fast where he wanted, plodded whither he meant to plod; a bulldog where a snappy, quick- silver, short-breathed fox terrier was expected, and it was the German who turned out to be the fox terrier, biting and dashing hither and thither with astonishing liveliness while the bulldog held on with astonishing endurance. French stamina surprised Germany. CHAPTER II THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE FBANCE is more one country and the French are more one nation than any other country or nation in Europe. Look first at the map. The French soil was the abuttal of the rush of primeval races westward. Successive wander instincts found rest west of the Rhine and of the Alps. France was the most convenient settling place of the hordes of young peo- ples pushed from the east. The British Isles were cut off, because, other things equal, the sea is the most difficult bar. The Spanish peninsula was too distant, round the corner as it were, and round the corner from the opposite side Africa protruded. Many peo- ples were naturally led to pitch their tents finally in France, across the Rhine, down the Rhone, over the sea to Provence. France drew to herself more differ- ent peoples thafl any other country in Europe. Her place on the map was like that of no other country in Europe. She commanded western Europe: she held the Channel against England, she had a great Atlantic seaboard, she spread out on the Mediterranean ; she touched northeastern Europe closely by the Rhine 18 FRANCE and the Rhone, she touched southeastern Europe through the passes of the Alps, she held the only land routes east and west of the Pyrenees to Spain. Geo- graphical France is the most favored country in Eu- rope. To-day, though she has grossly neglected her chances on the sea, France still lives by her place on the map. She ought to be the great maritime power for trade and for war of Europe. She still is, as she was in the primitive history of the westward rush of peoples, a privileged country that links north with south, that looks westward, oceanward, that belongs eastward to the continent. She is a sea power on one side, a land power on the other, a northern power here, a southern power there ; she is, roughly, a Teu- tonic and a Latin country, and she puts out her Celtic foreland into the Atlantic. Diverse by her position, France was also destined clearly by her position to harbor a quickly and closely united people. There is no land in Europe at once so varied and so compact. The British Isles, obviously less diverse, being in touch with only one corner of Europe, were also severed deeply in their anatomy and have been deeply severed in history by the St. George's Channel. Cut off from the north, as the British Isles from the south, the Spanish peninsula was at the same time too perilously near Africa to enjoy the long safety of abode without which a people has not the peace of mind it needs to fashion its house into one 19 FRANCE home, and though Spain and Portugal live together in one house geographically they are two divided na- tional homes as much as ever. The Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine and her three seaboards made France naturally one land. The con- stant French instinct to stretch French power to the Rhine is thus at all events good geography. The steady and complete unifying of the peoples inhabit- ing France was a necessary consequence in history of the life of French land. The constant policy of cen- tralization which the French monarchy pursued for centuries and at last achieved, which the wildest Revo- lutionists of the Terror carried on without an instant's doubt of its necessity, and which the Emperor, come from Corsica to understand certain French national instincts better than any French ruler before, brought to an iron perfection, is finally explained by France's position on the map. n The French are organically one nation, as France is structurally one country. No people in Europe is more one people. It is not a homogeneous people, for it is a greatly varied people, but it is a people organ- ized by time, by chance, by instinct and by conscious purpose to be one people. All the governing powers of the country have for centuries worked toward unit- ing the nation. The chance that began the making Provincial Life Drawn by Ch. Huard FRANCE of one French people was the lie of the land upon which wanderers of different races at last settled. The unifying and centralizing instinct has not been only that of rulers ; the governed also, in spite of long and stubborn holding out of kingdom and province against absorption by the Capetian Crown, gradu- ally were drawn out of the parochial to a broader patriotism. But the unifying of France has certainly also been reasoned, instinct became conscious intuition, and the French nation of deliberate purpose organ- ized itself. France had to throw into the melting-pot (the com- mon, if uncertain terminology of races being ac- cepted) as many Celts as Great Britain, perhaps nearly as many Teutons as what is Germany to-day, perhaps nearly as many Latins as what is Italy to- day. Be problems of true racial descent what they may, Gauls, Norsemen, Franks, Latins, Phoenicians and Basques made up the French people, and for over two centuries it has been, and to-day it is, one indis- soluble people, and no plausible hypothesis of world- change foresees for centuries its dissolution. This perhaps first of all should be considered about France and the French. The French have a national character to a greater extent than any other people in Europe. The political unity of France is easily seen to be at least as com- plete as that of any other country. What is more FRANCE interesting is to look deeper and to find the unity of French national character. Only shallow observers perceive such unity to be greater in the English peo- ple ; the strange and lasting divorce between the deed and the thought, the facts and the dreams of Eng- land, between her prose and her poetry, has escaped them. Between the German fist and German fancy, between the heavy forcefulness and the poetic feeling that Germany has shown to the world, is another and rather similar, but, happily for the English, more violent contrast. The fist may have crushed the fancy, but one can not finally forget the latter, though those who feel the fist may be pardoned for forgetting the fancy, and one will not cease wondering probably as long as one lives that a people, or an assemblage of peoples, which at one time sang some of the greatest and most delicate poetry the world knows should per- fect a system of methodical brutality such as the world never knew before, that "Ueber alien Gipfeln is Ruli 9 . . ."* is in the same tongue as "Krieg 1st Krieg," with which three words old men, women and children were shot. If the poetry of Germany be German, and one supposes it must be, there is no German national character but a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde association, and in the history of to-day the devil has taken the hindmost. No sharp divorce divides, no great confusion dis- * But there is no Goethe now. 22 FRANCE turbs the French national character. Go from Lille to Marseilles, from the French Academy to the fac- tory, from the Champs Elysees and millionaire shop- keepers (barring foreign settlers) to Belleville and its Syndicalists. It is the same country, with the same spirit, the same language, almost the same manners. The French speech first proves to an outsider the unity of the French people. Ill Class distinctions in French speech are perceptible to a foreigner only if he has lived years of French life. The newcomer may quite well take a shop-girl for a duchess, judging by her speech. There is less difference between the accents of an academician and a navvy in France than there is between those of a professional man and a tradesman in many other coun- tries. Provincial accents, dialects, and real languages also, like Breton, Provei^al, Basque, remain. But finally, the Marsellais who sounds all his syllables as in Italian, and the Picard with the broad, fat Flemish intonation, have accepted the same unified French tongue. The French State, with the general consent of the French nation, does not foster or even tolerate but steadily aims at obliterating independent lan- guages : Mistral, who remade Prove^al, had to teach the Proven9aux how to read him ; not a word of Basque 23 FRANCE is allowed to be taught in the schools of the Basque country, and the Basques keep up their ancient and mysterious tongue only by teaching it themselves to their children ; Breton in Brittany is not officially rec- ognized as a language. With the single exception in the world probably of the linguistic marvel of Russia, where the illiterate peasant speaks the best Russian, the French are most the nation of one language. It was not the language of all the French, it was imposed upon them by the masterful He de France, the nucleus round which all modern France was built, and they accepted it and accept its canons, its laws, its style. There are no two opinions on any rule of French grammar, and there are many provincial French acad- emies, but only one French Academy, which many writers pretend to laugh at, but all finally bow to. From Lille to Marseilles, from Brest to Bordeaux, there is a unity of manners, a unity in the way of living and looking at life, completer than in other nations. He who first spoke of "the pleasant land of France" saw that. He saw, almost everywhere, in rich Touraine, in frugal Auvergne, that genial acceptance of things as they are. A bright face to all weathers, a kindly face to the foreigner, a certain inbred polish and pleasant easy way with men and things. On the outside, an agreeable demeanor to- ward whomsoever met or whatever happens; nothing harsh or stiff in behavior or philosophy. One peo- 4 FRANCE pie long versed in the art of savoir-vivre, knowing how to live and let live, old in culture, old especially in social culture, in the art of rounding off corners that men may rub with one another more comfortably. Beneath the surface a corresponding philosophy: a determination not to quarrel with life, but to make the best of it, to show a cheerful face to fate as to the things of every day; but no jocose devil-may-care jauntiness that snaps its fingers, nothing whatever of a sort of Bohemianism that is sometimes supposed to be French; on the contrary, an earnest, almost a deadly earnest intention to make the best of things, a set purpose to get as much out of life as can be got, a persistent realism, perhaps with subconscious roots in an instinct to clutch at what is, for fear what might be would be worse, and in a belief that life must be made the best of because there is nothing else. The pleasant land of France hides a deep ruthless realism beneath its amenities, and its philosophy, which tries to make life as agreeable as may be on the surface, is grave, sometimes bitter, beneath. The silent peasant of the North, the chattering south- erner in his second-rate vineyards, the solemn, priest- like vintner of the great Me"doc, the bullet-headed Auvergnat; the little bourgeois, the big bourgeois, the striving little shopkeeper, the man of big under- takings: they are all realists, they all have a great 25 FRANCE faith in life, perhaps a rather dry, hard, too shrewd faith, but because of it they anyhow try to make life more, not less, worth living. Perhaps the Bretons, who must dream, and the Basques, whose mysterious race has kept to itself, will have to be left out (though the Bretons are being more and more assimilated to France),* but for the rest, all over France every Frenchman thinks the particular polished, intelligent, dry, refined, pleasant, stern French realism the only natural way of looking at things. In two words there is a "French spirit." It has no equivalent as real in other peoples. It is not only a real thing, but it is really conceived by the French people. Others not only have not found themselves so completely, but have not looked for themselves so clear-sightedly. "L'esprit franfais" is a philosophic entity in France. In the arts and in philosophy it has been conscious and deliberate ; in the ways of life it is instinctive and no less strong. French thought always assumes the French spirit to be one of the in- tellectual facts of the world and not seldom considers it the world's intellectual standard. French life not only acts half consciously up to the French standard, but when it turns round and reflects upon itself, ac- knowledges that it so acts and that there is a French * The "Blues" of Brittany are the Republicans, gradually gaining ground over the "Whites," the old Royalists, and Brest, moreover, is a Socialist center. But Breton Republi- cans and Socialists are Bretons still. FRANCE spirit guiding it. I doubt whether, since the Athenian or the Roman, any such complete national spirit has existed. German Imperial thinking is a thing of yes- terday, and there is no correspondence between it and the German thought that has counted in the world. It is difficult to find a common German spirit among the real German thinkers, seers and singers that the world has listened to, and impossible to find among them a common character that can be called that of the modern German Empire.* Russian thought ex- pressed in art has been intensely national in spirit, but political and diplomatic Russia is entirely divorced from the rest of Russia, and there are many Russias, of which one knows some and guesses at others, the Russia of literature, the Russia of European and Asiatic politics, the Russia of the soil which may be the same as the first, but there is no one Russia that the rest of the world knows. The modern Italian spirit is a thing of an even more recent yesterday, in spite of dates, than the German Imperial spirit, and is still a far less real spirit than that of the Ital- ian Renaissance. Italy found herself better, in the things that really matter for the world, when a dozen alien armies overran her and she was a wild fox at bay fighting, than since the modern day of her unity. * Since that became mere militarism, German guns, not German thought, were the only German thing the world knew, and Germany, too. A common character of militar- ism is not a common character of any thinkers, but a com- mon abdication. 27 CHAPTER III THE FRENCH SPIBIT THE French spirit, considered as a national and political spirit, is a passion for national unity. In history the fact stands out that the He de France eventually absorbed Burgundy and Languedoc, Nor- mandy and Provence. All became French and are French to-day. Nice, joined centuries later, is French to-day. Brittany is almost French to-day. Metz, Strasbourg, Mulhouse, become politically German in 1871, were French still forty-three years after. Speak German there and you were a stranger and "bad form"; speak French, in shop or cafe, and you were welcome and a person "who knows how to live." Yet, what is French? What made the French? What are the French by descent that they should overbear- ingly be French? The historical reply only is the tru- ism that several races, several civilizations, several climes joined to form among them a French national and political spirit. The crystallization of countries round the He de France has been a remarkable fact in history. It was not only a process of geographical chemistry. It 28 FRANCE was psychological : the He de France became the will and the mind, and by further-sighted power took the command. Hence the French spirit, which at the beginning was implied in the map of France. Half- baked France was torn by civil wars, by the Fronde, by the wars of religion. They did not matter for the one France. She lost by casting out some of the Hu- guenots ; no matter, she was becoming the one France. A century or two later and the Huguenots remaining at Montpellier Huguenots as ever there were were, if not French first and Huguenots after, at least doubtful at the pinch which they were first. To-day, in the south the Huguenot is Huguenot still, and he and the Roman Catholic would knife each other in times of excitement, but each would call the other a bad Frenchman for an insult. The first French Rev- olution tore up France: from the Girondins to the Terror it always obeyed the French political spirit. Robespierre worshiping the Goddess Reason and Fouquier-Tinville condemning prisoners without a hearing in the name of the higher cause of the Father- land, were only exaggerations of the French charac- ter: they were not at all foreign to the French po- litical and national spirit. Though the Revolution had the Chouans to fight, it was still representatively French ; it represented France much more than is often understood. It was the French spirit at a paroxysm, French thought exasperated, French reason reduced FRANCE to the absurd. Napoleon came: the French passion for unity was satisfied at last. He astoundingly un- derstood France not all France, but a big part of it, at least the French political spirit. It was one of the amazing facts of history that he was identified with France. He led armies made up of a dozen na- tions, and it was France that won. He fell, and it was France that fell. He understood the French na- tional passion for unity, and with the counselors cho- sen and imperiously guided by him planned the or- ganization of France that lasts to this day. The French political spirit thus has persisted through extraordinary vicissitudes. The Terror strengthened it, a Corsican adventurer, by providential chance, kept it up. The gentle Revolution of 1848, the placid Second Empire, the short and sharp Com- mune, the Third Republic, confirmed it. n To-day French political unity is a pattern for so- cial organisms aiming at unity. The purpose and causes of French political centralization are seldom well understood. It is not by chance that the French social fabric has been steadily and rigorously cen- tralized, nor has extreme centralization been merely the device of rulers for ruling more easily and more strongly, were the rulers the Convention of the First SO FRANCE Revolution, Napoleon I, Napoleon III, or the political caucuses of the Third Republic. The system indeed came in handy for every ruling power, and each one in France has in turn used and strengthened it. The French statesman out of power talks of decentraliza- tion, giving freer play to the limbs and relieving the head. In power he does as his predecessors did, and M. Clemenceau in office was the most iron-handed of Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries, wielding with a stringent arm all the array of weapons which the elaborate machinery of the Ministry of the Interior placed at his command throughout French territory and upon which he had called down the indignation of all honest lovers of freedom during the long years he was wrecking Cabinets, not captaining one. But French centralization is neither an accident nor the product of domineering ambitions. It is mainly a natural growth and it is in the main accepted as nat- ural by the French people. The French political mind has a passion for logic, regularity, symmetry and coherence in the arrange- ment of the social fabric. It takes eagerly to the tale of the Belly and the Members, to the neat theory that a People is an organic body like the human body and that it can live well only by carrying out the analogy. An efficient action must be directed from the head; in the body politic the men at the head see furthest, and if a thing is to be done well it must SI FRANCE be done from the top, from the beginning, and all round. Therefore it would be absurd to pay much attention to lower standpoints, narrower views, local interests. The man with the broadest view knows best ; he knows what is good for the smaller horizons better than they know themselves. The portion of fallacy contained in the tale of the Belly and the Members is little considered by the French political mind. The latter tends to build up a loose analogy into a strict system and to waive objections and questions. Will it be all gain for all the parts of a people that the people be dealt with rigorously as one single body politic, in which all the organs are wholly interdepend- ent and all are subordinate to the controlling brain, if any such ideal of organization be realizable ? Mod- ern physiology does not look upon the human body as a strictly hierarchical system of forces and finds much relative independence in many of these. In the body politic may there not also be some virtue in some looseness of organization and even in some strain of anarchy, in the real sense of the word ? The French political mind will almost never think so, but will think it only rational, natural and right to proceed from the- ory to fact, from general plan to particulars. Hence most of the elaborate machinery of the French social fabric: the Home Office, controlling or overseeing by direct telephone wires from the Place Beauvau in Paris every working of the country's administration, FRANCE through prefects and subprefects, who, ever present deputies of the central authority, are ever watching councils general and municipal councils, ever ready to report an "illegal political resolution" of the former, to recommend the dismissal by the Minister of a mayor from the office to which he has been elected by his fel- low villagers ; the Public Roads and Bridges Govern- ment Department superintending with a proportionate measure of authority the carefully classified roads of France, classified by a rule that suffers not one ex- ception, from rural and "vicinal" to national roads, with "departmental" roads and roads "of broad com- munication" in between; the Ministry of Public In- struction, a former chief of which is still remembered as having said proudly, taking out his watch, "At this moment every boy in every Government school of France has been put to his Latin prose." I have elsewhere* tried to describe the sharp con- trast between English and French methods of national organization, between the English and the French po- litical spirit. I am not concerned here with the draw- backs or advantages of either method. The point to bear in mind is the great strength, persistence and vi- tality of the French political spirit. It is perfectly honest to itself and in its belief, call it principle or bias as you will. Almost all French political thinkers, for instance, sincerely deplore, for America's sake, the loose * The French and the English, London, 1913. 33 FRANCE organization of the United States, considered as one body politic, urge centralization and hold that the United States' destiny in the world must compel them eventually toward a more closely knit fabric, toward an hierarchical, disciplined, coordinate and single or- ganism. The French political spirit is perfectly hon- est in its dealings with French colonies, to which it allows not a vestige of self-government, but in many cases representation in the Parliament of the metrop- olis, a measure Great Britain has scarcely thought of ; in the same way at home it has been perfectly honest in its persistent increase of centralization through the vicissitudes of half a dozen different and conflicting forms of government during the modern history of France. The French political spirit is a passion for unity. m To-day France is as determined as ever to be one nation, and more than ever is one nation. The French political spirit is as vigorous as ever. There is no sign of the disintegration of the French nation. Neither the falling birth-rate nor the correspondingly enormous alien immigration seems to make the French less French. The French spirit has a strange and perhaps unique absorbent power. The French mind has probably in- fluenced the world more deeply than any other na- FRANCE tional mind, though French material power has spread little. English influence has been spread by English facts more than by English ideas; France has, with astonishingly little deed, astonishingly affected the world by her thought. The other way round, she ac- cepts much foreign vitality, but it does not change her ways of thinking. She absorbs foreigners more completely than any other nation. The United States does not make a Pole an American so quickly as France makes a Frenchman of him. Patriotic French tubthumpers cry against alien immigration, but aliens receive the French imprint very soon and extraordi- narily deeply. The Polish Jew in Whitechapel may remain an alien all his life and his children remain alien after him. Even Jews become almost essentially French, and an American Jew is less American than a French Jew is French. The tubthumper's bugbears of Semitic and alien invasion are not more real, one than the other in France. The real French patriot recognizes the amazing French power of putting the French stamp once for all upon an alien mind. I have met a Greek lemon merchant who had hardly enough English to explain that he was one and who told us all on board emphatically that he was a cit- izen of the United States. But I have met Russians, Italians, Danes, even English people in Paris, who were more French than the French. The French mind had bewitched them and changed them. Who ever 85 FRANCE heard of a Frenchman in London whom the English mind had bewitched? French Canadians are more French than the French of to-day French of the days of Louis Quinze. The falling birth-rate in France is thus a less important question than hyp- notized statisticians imagine. As long as the French keep the power to stamp the foreigner who settles in their midst in their own image, the French may bear fewer children, but they will adopt and shape those of others to the French fashion, and they will remain French as before. The French national spirit is per- haps the most overweening spirit in the \Vorld. Alsatia German in great part by race and almost wholly by language remained doggedly French in spirit, notwithstanding all that German police domina- tion could do, because Alsatia had been French. The French imprint upon Alsatia had been originally a foreign one: once stamped it was never forgotten, and what Germans could with historical logic claim to be a return to German rule never effaced it. The paradox was seen of the people of Miihlhausen, which is a German name that means something, persisting in calling themselves the people of Mulhouse, which in French is a couple of meaningless syllables. The paradox went further: Alsatians (when German po- licemen were out of hearing) prayed in German to be French again and in German called themselves French at heart, not knowing and never having known 36 FRANCE any other tongue but German and the Alsatian dia- lect. All because they had once been French. There is probably no more astonishing example of the moral and intellectual imprint of a people which all the material might of a materially mighty other people never succeeded in effacing. That the German fist never drove the French spirit out of Alsace is the most galling confession of weakness for the German fist and the most flattering tribute to the French spirit. IV The social and economic character of the French people is of a piece with its political and national spirit, as was to be expected in a logical people. The instinct of racial preservation is probably stronger among the French than in any other nation. They are jealous of their national character and keep it more faithfully than the Jews or the Chinese; they were called the Chinese of Europe by Bjornstjern Bjornson. The Jew remains a Jew through the cen- turies. Yet in spite of all that Anti-Semites say, what in the modern history of the Jews most strikes the unbiased observer is not how little, but relatively how much, they have been assimilated by the peoples among whom they have settled and have assimilated their characteristics. About an English, a German, a French Rothschild, what surprises any student but an 87 FRANCE Anti-Semite is not how Jewish he has remained, but, all things considered, how English, how German, espe- cially how French he has become. The Jew is the obvious type of persistent national character. Yet even the Jew, at least the successful Jew, keeps his national character less in any country than the French- man settled anywhere outside his own country. The Jew in Anglo-Saxondom remains more or less of a Jew ; but he is less Jewish than the French Canadian is French and more of an Anglo-Saxon than the French Canadian is Anglo-Saxon. The deep French instinct of self-preservation shows itself in its social and economic arrangements. It is clear that small ownership of land, capital and all forms of property must make for conservatism much more than latifundia trusts and large capitalism. It is not merely because France to-day has no surplus population that there are no French emigrants. The peasant who owns his field and his farm, who came into them as his equal share of his father's and moth- er's goods, to whom his wife brought probably another field and another farm from her parents, and who will leave, if he can manage it, an improved heritage to his two or three children, is the last man in Europe to dream of emigrating. The French town artisan, though a wage earner, is of the stuff of which small capitalists are made. He may have yet no capital him- self or may have lost the little he had ; he will be a very 38 A Provincial Market F Drawn by Ch. Htiard FRANCE rare French laborer if he has not a father or an uncle or a cousin, or a cousin of his wife, with a small cap- ital, a small stake in the nation's wealth and probably in the people's soil. He almost certainly has "expecta- tions" a thousand francs or so and almost certainly means himself not to reach old age without having become a capitalist. Almost every Frenchman, including the Socialist navvy, feels that the natural and right thing is for him to own a mite of the nation's saved wealth, and saves that he may own that mite. Thus he feels that he belongs really to France, as a portion of France belongs to him. The instinctive judgment that he who owns nothing, even though living well on wages from day to day, is a straw on the waves, a floating thing without a tie to any solid earth, is almost uni- versal among the humblest French people, badly paid clerks, day laborers, unskilled workmen, servant girls. The occasional flares and explosions of French labor unrest are vivid and violent; they are always dis- counted, in the observer's eye, by the fact that the Socialist has some hundreds invested in rentes and the Anarchist a freehold cottage in his native village. The French bourgeoisie is of course the type of a class in which the instinct of social preservation is strongest. It has changed in modern times, it spends its money more, it amuses itself more; but its habits of business, its ways of living, its marriages, its do- 39 FRANCE mestic economy remain the example still of a human group intently bent on self -preservation. I come to the French intellectual spirit, to the spirit of the French people in thought for thought's sake: a higher and deeper, even a startling subject when approached. I think that there is a specifically French mind more than there is any other specifically national mind. The French intellectual spirit is a distinctive and characteristic one in speculation, in art, even in science and especially in the science of living. That in pure thought the French have almost al- ways been builders, will surprise the superficial ob- server who has always called them destroyers. Vol- taire, Diderot, the encyclopedlstes sapped religion, but they might not, if pushed to it, have gone out of their way to stop an enemy of reason from being burned at the stake. There have been in the past al- most no French mystics. The French mind builds solidly on reason. There has been no broad current of mysticism in French thought since the Middle Ages. There was a mystic fashion in a small set of thinkers in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century; it passed and by what was really not an unexpected process the revival of dogmatic and orthodox Roman 40 FRANCE Catholicism among the younger intellectual genera- tion at the beginning of the twentieth century coin- cided with the passing of the mystic fashion. French philosophic thought has seldom trusted to revelation in the search for truth and seldom preferred the di- rect perception of the absolute, which is the principle of mysticism. Existence was a continuous miracle for Malebranche, but he reasoned very reasonably and humanly about it. In philosophy a French Novalis, in philosophy or in poetry a French William Blake, are hardly thinkable. Almost all French philosophy has posited human reason by which unconsciously it meant just human life first, before beginning speculation. French philosophy has built, not destroyed; not, if you will, built high into the air like the skylark drunk with its own song at the zenith, but like the beaver, solidly, serviceably and close to the ground. All representative French philosophy has been human first of all: it will be easily seen to have been not the accelerator on the engine, but the brake on the wheel. It is the mystics who upheave human thought, not the human thinkers with feet of clay. On this earth also, French philosophy has set, not upset, bal- ance. Bacon, Hume, Locke, Darwin were greater rev- olutionists really than the Girondins and Jacobins of the First French Revolution. What was the sapping 41 FRANCE of the Christian religion compared with the invention of Induction, the destruction of innate ideas, the dis- covery of evolution ? A squib to a bombshell. French deeds have been much more revolutionary than French thought. French philosophy has never forsaken the methods of deduction or belief in innate ideas, still a favorite faith at the Sorbonne to-day. It invariably keeps the balance, and the proper trust in human reason. Were all other philosophies finally to reduce our judgments to the product of physical feelings complicated through evolution that roughly has been the lesson of English philosophy it would still (in spite of Condillac, who counts little) hold up the relative absolute of human reason for our guid- ance and our admiration. No mysticism has led it to hold that there is any other proper standard for man's thought than man's mind; no relativist, no as- sociationist, no evolutionist theory has led it to hold that as far as man is concerned man's reason is not absolute. A very safe faith for man. A safe faith for man is the very aim of French thought. Descartes was perhaps the most representative French mind in philosophy. To-day and probably always almost every Frenchman is a Cartesian at heart. Pascal, the mystic? His famous and tragic vision, the abyss often open before him, was mystical. But his Chris- tianity is the type of rigid and logical faiths. His very literary style is beautifully clear reason. A mys- 4* FRANCE tic? He was, but he kept his mysticism down with an iron hand. That was typical of the French intel- lectual spirit : we are human, and it is wrong and fool- ish to take aught but human reason for our guide. VI In literary art the French mind has been particu- larly itself. In the other arts it has well given its share of beauty and pleasure to the world, but it has not been essentially and exclusively French. Great French painters, sculptors, musicians, architects, dec- orators have not been so peculiarly French as the lit- erary artists of France. In these the French spirit is strongest and most self-willed. Save for the herit- age of Greek and Roman art common to all modern peoples, and passing influences from Italy and Spain, the French literary art is self-made. It has not dreamed of going outside the French mind. Pope is un-English, Heine anti-German. What French artist in words is un-French? Not only is French literature essentially French: the French mind has expressed itself in its literature more wholly than any other national mind. Written French by itself shows the people's stamp. Buffon's "Le style c'est Vhomme meme" might, if Buffon had looked at his own nation from the outside (which no Frenchman ever did), have been: "Style in FrencK 43 FRANCE is the very French nation." In prose and in poetry the French language is indeed the image of the French mind. No such wild divorce as between a Shelley, a Blake and the average English national mind : flam- boyant Baudelaire and tender, perverse, exquisite Ver- laine wrote the right, the downright French tongue, the language that agrees so admirably with French thought. The splendid pathos of Lamartine and the splendid gloom of Vigny have the neat, sharp French form. Moliere puts exactly natural talk without an apparent effort into regular French verse. Racine into almost identically the same French verse (there is no English Moliere and no English Racine, but fancy Dickens and Meredith writing in verse of iden- tically the same meter) puts subtle sentiment. This same easy, cool adaptable French verse, capable alike of realism, humor, delicate feeling and some poetry, is an image of the French mind. French prose has the selfsame qualities as French verse : it is clear, pre- cise, subtle and definite. That French verse and French prose have the same qualities gives one a key to the French mind. French thought, like French style, has all the virtues of reason, it has not unrea- sonable virtues. It is supremely human; it is not more than human. The French literary art has reached the highest prose, in verse as well as in prose ; it has not often gone over the border, into the mys- terious and unearthly land of poetry, and it has never 44 FRANCE gone so far in that magic country as other literary arts, such as the English, so much less accomplished in the works of prose. It tallies completely with the French spirit, incomparably alive to all human things, shrinking from any more than human, and inclined to call such less than human; incomparable in the finite, cowardly before the infinite. vn Though no human thought is less national than scientific thought, it would be possible and interesting for a man of science to study what is specifically French in French science: the leaning, as in philo- sophic speculation, toward deduction rather than in- duction, the strong mathematical turn of mind, the strong repugnance for interpreting the world other- wise than in the sole forms of intelligence. But it is the French science of living that is peculiarly French. No people knows so well how to live, how it wants to live and how to live in the way it wants. The great French forte is to posit life first of all as an axiom. No one in France asks whether it is worth living, and very few why it is to be lived. The deep French faith in life is too strong to give such questionings much of a chance. The French believe in life hon- estly as a precious thing, and when they speculate, take its value for granted. Their art is first of all