^^^\^ THE FRANCE I KNOW Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/franceiknowOOwhalrich 1 i W" Ifllv'ii^-l \ ^ Anatole France in 1914. [Frontispiece. THE FRANCE I KNOW or WINIFRED STEPHENS lATVUii^ AUTHOR OF "from THE CRUSADES TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION," "FRENCH NOVELISTS OF TO-DAY," "THE LIFE OF MADAME ADAM" LONDON CHAPMAN AND HALL, Ltd. 1918 FOREWORD This book tells among other things of seven visits to France in War-time : three in the winter, spring, and summer of 1915, two in 1916, one in the autumn of 1917, and one in the spring of 1918. It recalls some passages in past French history suggested by this intermittent obser- vation of the present, and— rashly perhaps— it endeavours to forecast certain phases of French national development after the War. It will be found that, in dealing with Anglo- French relations, differences of temperament, opinion, and general attitude towards life are not ignored. They are referred to chiefly in order to show how marvellous has been the con- cord between two nations so diverse and so long separated in the past by rivalry and hostility. Their mutual forbearance and charity in cir- cumstances which must have often strained those virtues almost to breaking point reflect the highest credit on both allies. Well do they augur for the fulfilment after this War of the wish Shakespeare put into the mouth of a French Queen at the close of an earlier conflict, terminated vii viii FOREWORD by the marriage of an English King with a French Princess — " God, the best Maker of all marriages, Combine your hearts in one, your realms in one ! As man and wife, being two, are one in love, So be there 'twixt your kingdoms such a spousal, That never may ill office, or fell jealousy . . . Thrust in between the paction of these kingdoms To make divorce of their incorporate league ; That English may as French, French Enghshmen, Receive each other ! — God speak this Amen ! " CONTENTS CHIP. I. n. in. IV. V. VI. vn. vm. IX. X. XI. xn. xni. XIV. XV. OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE . FRENCH PATRIOTISM THROUGH THE AGES WAR IN THE WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE AFTER THE FIRST BATTLE OF THE MARNE . WITH THE FRENCH RED CROSS . TALKS BY THE WAY THE PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY . IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS . POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE . RELIGIOUS OPINION IN FRANCE . A NEW FRANCE ..... woman's position in FRANCE . THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND . THE CULT OF JEANNE d'aRC AND THE FRENCH woman's war-work .... THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN INDEX . PAQE 1 14 32 44 50 57 76 87 107 121 182 156 164 191 209 229 IX LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ANATOLE FRANCE IN 1914 .... Frontitpiece Facing pttge LA MAISON DE WATTEAU, NOW h6pITAL AUXILIAIEE, NO. 73, AT NOGENT-SUR-MARNE .... 50 MADAME MENARD DORIAN, AT THE HOSPITAL IN LE GRAND PALAIS, VISITING WOUNDED SOLDIERS ON WHOM DR. LAURENT HAS PERFORMED THE OPER- ATION OF "SIAMESE grafting" .... 56 PLASTER CAST ILLUSTRATING ONE OF THE SURGICAL OPERATIONS KNOWN AS " SIAMESE GRAFTING " . 68 THE CHATEAU OF COUCY BEFORE ITS DESTRUCTION BY THE GERat^NS IN 1917 132 THE GREAT KEEP OF COUCY ChAteAU, DESTROYED BY THE GERMANS DURING THEIR RETREAT BEFORE THE FRENCH IN 1917 . • 152 A CORSICAN POILU IN A TRENCH ON THE SOMME . 190 MONSIEUR FERDINAND BUISSON, PRESIDENT OF THE LEAGUE OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN .... 208 XI THE FRANCE I KNOW CHAPTER II OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE The War has brought to many of us brutal awakenings from too sanguine dreams of human progress. It has also brought us visions of fair human quaUties never suspected before. But it has not yet completely taught us to know France; though it is teaching the French to know themselves. " To think," writes a popu- lar French author, " that people believed us to be, and that we believed ourselves to be, light minded ! On the contrary, we are almost too serious." There have been Frenchmen, however, who did not need the War to reveal to them the true seriousness of the national character. Serious- ness of conviction was for Jean Jaures one of the fundamental characteristics of his race. Peuple, les peuples de la terre te dirent leger, cried Charles Peguy. Parce que tu es un peuple prompt . . . Mais moif je fai pese, dit DieUf et je ne Vai point trouv^ Uger, ^ To the courtesy of the Editor of " Land and Water," in which this chapter first api^eared, I am indebted for permission to reproduce it here. 2 THE FRANCE I KNOW But we English, after years of comradeship, while we admire the gallantry and heroism of our Allies still find it difficult to regard them as essentially serious. An English lawyer, settled in Canada, whom I used to think intelligent, writes to me that he found Paris " vicious and materialistic. French literature neither elevat- ing nor instructive and much of it puerile." Then he adds a sentence which may explain, if not excuse, his error : " Out here we have French both from France and Canadian born, and there are some charming people among them; but we don't mix much. There is a difference. They are clever and tasty in many ways, but seem lacking in that vision or idealism, or whatever it is, that makes the average Anglo- Saxon strive more or less for better things." Here persists the age-old prejudice, arising doubtless from long centuries of military warfare and commercial rivalry, proceeding also, as we shall show, from our own and from the French national temperament ; and not unconnected with the intrigues of our common enemy. Our British insularity blinds us. It renders us almost as incapable of grasping the psycho- logy of other people as the German, whose dullness in this respect we are so fond of decry- ing. We are too prone to judge everything by British standards, to adopt a Podsnapian atti- tude and to condemn wholesale all that does not exactly correspond with the ideas prevailing OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE 3 in these northern islands. " Not until we have ceased to urge our schemes of morality or our habits of thought on our charming and beloved neighbours," writes Mr. Edmund Gosse, '' can we regard the Entente as not merely cordial but complete." Nevertheless, in mitigation of our error, it must be admitted that the French people are not easy to know. And we have been content with a superficial acquaintance, based for the most part on what we have seen on the Paris boulevards, read in the latest French novel, ^ or witnessed on the boards of some Paris theatre. When on such trivial, superficial evidence we ventured to pass sentence on a whole nation we were no better than the man who tried to sell his house by producing a sample brick from his pocket. How should we in England like our nation to be judged from what goes on in Piccadilly, from the shady side of life dwelt on in some popular novel, from the dramas on the stage of some second-rate theatre? Moreover, in judging any nation we shall inevitably go astray if we consider it merely from the metropolitan point of view. Life in great metropolitan cities — whether Paris, Lon- don, New York, Vienna, or Berlin — is not only ^ See G. Rudlcr, Professor of French Literature at the University of London, on la Moralite de la Litteraiure Fran^aise, a lecture deUvered to the Anglo-French Society in London, published (1918) by " le Fran9ais." 4 THE FRANCE I KNOW more or less identical, but it is totally unrepre- sentative of the life of either the French, British, American, Austrian, or Prussian nation as a whole. One of the English writers who has best understood certain phases of French life is Mr. J. E. C. Bodley. How did this eminent student of French manners and institutions prepare himself for his book on France ? Did he content himself with a study of Paris ? No, he travelled ceaselessly up and down the Provinces, from Marseilles to Bordeaux, from Concarneau to Lyons, from Toulouse to Lille. And when, having collected his material, he settled down to write, instead of establishing himself in Paris, he took up his abode in a country chateau. Other writers, to whom France has revealed her heart, Gilbert Hamerton, Mme. Duclaux, for example, have not neglected the provinces. For through French provincial life runs the main stream of French national characteristics and tendencies. I have always been glad that my parents sent me to school, not to some fashionable Parisian pensionnat, but to Protes- tant Provence. In that remote Cevennes community, an Eng- lish girl was a curiosity. And as such she was brought down into the salon in the evening when on high days and holidays friends came and China tea with its delicate perfume was handed round, and punch was brewed in a great silver OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE 5 bowl, stirred with a ' long-handled silver spoon. She was taken by Monsieur and Madame to similar functions in the houses of relatives and friends. And it was in these simple social gather- ings that she learnt to appreciate the cultured salon life, driven out of fashionable Paris by iVmerican restlessness and passion for card- playing. There she was first initiated into that intimate family circle, which we English have too often believed to be non-existent in France. Si vous parlez de la famille frangaise a un etranger meme hienveillant, writes Rene Bazin, vous apercevrez, a ses paroles, a son sourire ou a son silence, qiCil croit a la famille allemande, a la famille anglaise, peut-etre mime a la famille americaine, mais quHl ne croit pas quHl existe encore une famille frangaise, " Nevertheless,*' he continues, " nowhere is the family more united and more affectionate than in France." ^ In this circle the young EngHsh girl heard freely discussed fundamental questions which Anglo-Saxon shyness, to call it by its most charitable name, causes to be tabooed in British drawing-rooms. Occasionally, when it was pro- posed to read aloud some rather advanced play, or to discuss some progressive book, the youthful- ness of Mees might be called in question. But the touchstone was : " Have you read Shake- speare?" And her affirmative reply banished 1 " Echo de Paris," August 22, 1915. 6 THE FRANCE I KNOW all misgivings. If Mees had read Shakespeare, then she might read anything, discuss anything. Mees refrained from explaining that her know- ledge of her great national poet had been gained from the well- expurgated Clarendon Press Edi- tion. Indeed at that time she had probably never even heard of the estimable Mr. Bowdler. Seldom, however, did such questions arise; for the favourite entertainments were the reading aloud by a grand-daughter of Guizot of some new poem, or the declaiming by the Pastor, with all the gusto of his Gascon exuberance, of some classic scene from Moliere. / Such tranquil, cultured existences, however, were not confined to the provinces. Even in Paris, down to the very eve of the War, in quarters remote from the noise and glitter of the boule- vards, far from the fashionable Champs Elysees or Pare Monceau, away in some side street on the left bank or out beyond the Luxembourg Gardens, there were hundreds of salons like those I have described. In one of them only a few weeks before the mobilisation I heard a young historian read his introduction to a work that would have created a sensation in the academic world had not the author's call to the trenches intervened to prevent its completion. But well concealed were these sequestered lives of people who loved things of the mind from the throngs of British tourists who flocked over to France for a gay week-end, or spent a OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE 7 few crowded days in Paris en route for Switzer- land or Italy, and who returned to their native islands with a sense of superiority, not un- mingled with secret relish at having witnessed, if not participated in, the frivolity of modern Babylon. Nevertheless, for the prevailing belief in French decadence we have not only ourselves to blame; the French, as we have said, were partly respon- sible. ^ They perhaps more than any other race, more even than ourselves — and we are not immune from such a weakness — are addicted to self -depreciation. The reason for this is not far to seek. They are essentially of a logical tem- perament. And it is this quality which makes them face the worst of everything. In personal matters they may be tempted to veil truths for the sake of politeness, but in questions of prin- ciple their intellectual sincerity is uncompromis- ing. They are fearlessly honest thinkers, and so averse from comfortable self-delusion that they take a sort of bitter pleasure in believing the worst. We English, a sentimental, poetical race, are content to dwell in a more or less cloudy intel- lectual sphere. When we depreciate ourselves it is through inverted pride, not through our logical temperament or fondness for reality. We are inclined to run away from facts. ^ See la Troisieme France^ by Victor Giraud (Hachctte, 1917), pp. 11, 12, 18. 8 THE FRANCE I KNOW In our literature we like things to be repre- sented not as they are, but as they should be. We skim and film the ulcerous part. We have our realists, but even they are not as frankly and vividly realistic as their literary brethren across the Channel. We have never had a Zola. He was so convinced of the importance of con- cealing nothing that he insisted on fixing with his microscopic eye and in photographing with his consummate literary art those dregs of society which Anglo-Saxons are so careful to ignore. Zola of set purpose constituted himself the man with the muck-rake. And by riveting his readers' attention on the foul spots, which defile, not only French, but every form of our so-called " modern civilisation," he created an impression that his country was rotten to the core. Never- theless Zola was a high-minded man. His object in the twenty volumes of Les Rougon Macquart series was to reform society by revealing its depravity. Many of Zola's contemporaries realised the disastrous effect that his novels would produce abroad. Mme. Adam (Juliette Lamber) writes in her Souvenirs : " One's gorge rises as one reads his pages. Not only is he a danger for French morality, but he serves our enemies better than any of their paid agents. More than any of our authors he is read abroad, where his writings are cited to prove our degeneracy proclaimed by one of our greatest writers." OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE 9 It was not in England alone, that this myth of French degeneracy was credited. In Germany the pernicious seed fell upon fruitful soil. The Pan-Germans, puffed up by their victory over France, were glad to attribute her defeat to her moral inferiority. France was hopelessly decadent, they proudly affirmed, and not France alone, but the whole Latin race. It was im- perative, therefore, that for the world's welfare Latin civilisation should be superseded by Teutonic Kultur. According to these arrogant super-men, it was the women of France who were chiefly responsible for the degeneracy of the French race. On the Frenchwomen, to whose industry, frugality and courage not France only, but the whole Allied cause is so deeply indebted, the Pan-Germans laid the chief blame for French decadence. Frenchwomen themselves were painfully con- scious of the unjust indictment that was being brought against them. And now for the credit of France they have deemed it necessary to rehabiUtate themselves in the eyes of the world. For this purpose they have, during this War, organised a movement, which is known as la Croisade des Femmes frangaises. Led by some of the most distinguished of their compatriots (Mme. Poincare, la Duchesse d'Uzes, Mme. Adam, Mme. Alphonse Daudet), the Crusaders appeal to women throughout 10 THE FRANCE I KNOW France to make known in the world what Frenchwomen really are, what they have done and are doing in this War. They describe in their manifesto how women of all classes have com- bined for national service, how all distinctions of rank and creed have vanished, how in their nurse's costume, their last year's tailor-made, or, alas ! too often in their widow's weeds, they labour side by side for the national cause. " We are all here," they cry, " all except one : that doll without heart, without morals, without courage, that creature of pleasure, of coquetry, of perdition. Where is she? " they ask. "We cannot find her, she is not here, she was but the invention of our enemy's jealousy." But so diligently did the Teutons before the War promulgate this fiction of French decadence that we find in France itself certain writers beginning to believe it. France dying. La France qui meurt was the ominous title of a book (by M. Alcide Ebray) pubhshed in 1910. About the same time the academician, the late M. Emile Faguet, in a series of volumes, was mourning over his country's lack of initiative, enterprise, and will power. The depressing effect of this pessimistic view of France may even be traced during the first two weeks of the War. Many of the intellectual young Frenchmen, who, in those August days went forth to fight for their country, believed, as Renan had believed in 1870, that France was OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE 11 on her death-bed. With their hearts over- clouded by the shadow of the 1870 defeat, they were convinced that the Germans would march swiftly into Paris, and thence overrun the whole of France. The German boast of "in three weeks in Paris, in three months in London, in three years in New York " did not seem to them entirely without reason. " I saw the terrible siege of 1871," wrote a Frenchman at the end of July, 1914. " Am I again about to experience the horror of be- holding the Germans in the suburbs of our capital? How will Paris behave faced by the menace of war? Will the socialists revolt? Shall we have a general strike ? Will the working classes refuse to mobilise as they have so often threatened ? Will the Revolutionary party de- liver us without a blow into the hand of the German, while our Russian and English Allies helplessly look on at our death agony?" ^ The perfection of German military organisa- tion was well known in France. And the French realised they were not ready. Every one was saying : " Why, the German army will devour the French army in one mouthful." ^ Not with- out foundation appeared the bragging of the '' Berliner Tageblatt " : " Poor little Frenchmen, we are going to break every bone in your little ^ Georges Ohnet, Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris pendant la guerre de 1914. Fascicule I, p. 9. * Ibid., p. 49. 12 THE FRANCE I KNOW bodies." And until the battle of the Marne misgivings continued to overcloud the horizon of many patriotic Frenchmen. But the brilliant defence of the capital, the glorious victory on the banks of the Ourcq, the sudden volte-face of the invading army saved Paris and saved France. Henceforth French hearts were filled with confidence, assured of ultimate triumph. But Frenchmen need not have despaired. A glance at the history of the French nation would have shown them that France has ever been the land of reawakenings and recommencements. " No sooner do her enemies believe her to be dying, and, full of hatred and glee, rush to bury her corpse, than she arises all aglow with life and vigour from her death-bed, and brandishing her sword she cries : ' Here I am, behold me, young like Joan of Arc, like the great Conde at Rocroi, like Marceau the Republican, like General Buonaparte.' " ^ There is no better school of optimism than the history of the French nation. Hopefulness has well been called the " Dauphin of France." For his heart to thrill with hope and con- fidence in the future the Frenchman need only carry his mind back to his country conquered and occupied by the English, then delivered by Joan of Arc; to his nation distracted by civil strife, torn asunder by religious disputes, then united and made prosperous by Henri Quatre; ^ Maurice Barres, V Union Sacrie, p. 76. OUR BLUNDER ABOUT FRANCE 13 to his land a prey to factions of the nobility, laid waste with fire and sword, then blossoming into all the glories of le Grand Siecle. He has only to remember the menace from foreign powers successfully averted during the Revolu- tion, the humiliation, the dismemberment, the civil war of 1871, succeeded by the magnificent recovery of the last forty years. If he thinks of these things, no Frenchman can fail to assent to Gambetta's words, uttered in the darkest hour of defeat : " No, it is impossible for the spirit of France to be overcast for ever." Especially may he take courage when he con- siders the part played by France in the present War; when he sees the unity and patriotism of the mobilisation days even surpassed by the tenacity, the fortitude, the heroic energy, the valour displayed throughout four years of war; when in the future he shall carry his mind back to this blessed day on which I write, which brings the news of Marshal Foch's glorious counter- attack and the French recapture of Soissons. CHAPTER II FRENCH PATRIOTISM THROUGH THE AGES ^ What is patriotism? The question is almost as difficult to answer as that historic inquiry, What is truth ? We hear frequently of the real and the unreal patriotism. And every modern State includes parties, each of which arrogates to itself the title of the only real patriots, and describes as the only real patriotism its own political programme, denouncing as unpatriotic all those who refuse to accept it. In France there are many types of patriotism, but mainly two : the nationalist type and the cosmopolitan. For I hope here to show that though cosmo- politanism may be anti-patriotic, there exists a patriotism not inconsistent with cosmopolitan ideals. On ne sert efficacement la republique uni- verselle qu^en servant d^abord la sienne, writes M. Alfred Loisy.^ The meaning of the term patriotism varies not only as between party and party, but from age to age. Joan of Arc, the incarnation of 1 The courtesy of the Editor of " The Fortnightly Review " permits me here to reproduce an article which appeared in that pubhcation in September, 1916. 2 Guerre et Religion, p. 107. 14 FRENCH PATRIOTISM 15 patriotism, probably never heard the word patriotisme and its root patrie. Where the modem Frenchman would employ the term patrie, Joan spoke of le royaume de France. And it was la pitie quHl y avail au royaume de France which inspired her heroic mission. " Isabelle Romee's daughter," writes Anatole France,^ " had no more notion of la patrie as it is conceived to-day than she had of the idea of landed property which lies at its base. That is something quite modern. But Joan did conceive of the heritage of kings and of the demesne of the House of France. And it was there, in that demesne and in that heritage, that the French gathered together before forming themselves into la patrie.'' " To a man of the Middle Ages," writes Wester- marck,^ " ^ his country ' meant little more than the neighbourhood in which he lived. Kingdoms existed, but no nations. The first duty of a vassal was to be loyal to his lord." It was in or about Joan's own time that the word patrie was first coined. I believe it was first used by Joan's contemporary, Jean Chartier, historiographer to the Dauphin, who having been crowned by the Maid became King Charles VII. But the term was long regarded as somewhat fantastic. When Joachim du Bellay, a century later, employed it in his Defense et Illus- tration de la Langue frangaise, he was condemned * La Vie de Jeanne d'ArCy Introduction, pp. Ixiv-lxv. * Origin and Development of the Moral IdeaSy II, p. 180. 16 THE FRANCE I KNOW for using a newfangled expression which was quite unnecessary when the French language possessed such a good word as "pays. Qui a 'pais n*a que faire de patrie, wrote one of Du Bellay's critics, Charles Fontaine. But — pace Charles Fontaine — pays and patrie are not exact equi- valents. For, as Hamerton, in his book, French and English,^ points out, patrie is never employed for common purposes ; it always has an emotional significance. Pays, or country, may be used in cold blood, as when a Minister appeals to the country by a general election, or a huntsman rides across country, or a gentleman resides in the country or is a country squire. The word cam- pagne may also be used in this connection, but not patrie ; that word never stands for anything but the land we should be ready to die for. It is an expression which in a time of national strain like the present often brings tears to the eyes. " What a little thing in comparison with la patrie is one's own life when one comes to think of it," said a working man during the siege of Paris, and in such a connection no word save patrie could have served ; none other could have conveyed such an impression of fervour and devotion. In its power of appealing to the emotions, only one other word in the French language is worthy to be ranked with patrie. That other word is mere, mother. And the two words have more 1 Pase 75. FRENCH PATRIOTISM 17 than this in common. For patrie, with its derivation from pater, suggests family ties and family affection. We may notice in passing that persons who, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, pride themselves on having outgrown so primitive and crude a sentiment as that of family solidarity are also pleased to think that they have outgrown patriotism. The patriotic sentiment in France is essentially an extension of family affection. La patrie is loved as a mother, with a passionate and personal adoration. And the circumstance that by her geographical position, through the weakness of her north-eastern frontier, la patrie has been so often assailed and invaded, endears her all the more to her children. Multitudes of examples of the Frenchman's filial attitude towards la patrie are afforded by the present War. Referring to the mobilisation of August, 1914, a Frenchman said to me, unconsciously perhaps reproducing almost word for word Theophile Gau tier's famous mot in 1870 : ^ " When the Boches invaded our territory it was as if our mother were being beaten, and all her children flocked to deliver her." On a glorious summer day in that same August, travelling through the fields of France, white unto the harvest, past orchards laden with mellow fruitfulness, was a train filled with French soldiers. They were on their way to join their ^ On bat maman : faccours, c 18 THE FRANCE I KNOW regiment. Looking from the carriage window one of them exclaimed : " Yes, France is so beautiful that she is well worth dying for." Mme. Adam (Juliette Lamber), one of the most ardent of French patriots, told me that she was pitying her grandson, who has since died on the battlefield, for having been summoned to the Front so suddenly that he had no time to go and bid farewell to his wife and child in another part of the country. " Don't pity me too much, grand' mere, ""^ he said; " I love my wife and child dearly, but I love France more." A father, on hearing of the death of his son in the Argonne, said to his wife : " We cannot give to God and to France any offering purer, nobler, more beautiful than this child." In truth, this personal note in the Frenchman's love of his country was sounded early in French history, even before the actual word patriotisme had been invented. The seventeenth-century poet Chapelain, in his epic on Joan of Arc, la Pucelle, ou France Delivree, wrote of la patrie as " the common mother of Frenchmen," and " a mother who has need of all her children." Three years after Chapelain, Corneille took this jewel of a word and set it in the crown of his tragedy (Edipe, Thus enshrined, patrie began to bear fruit and multiply. In the next century the encyclo- paedists gave it two children— the derivatives, patriate and patriotisme. Now this triad of FRENCH PATRIOTISM 19 words was complete; it was ready for the part it was to play during the French Revolution ; it was ready to be the clarion cry of the sans- culottes, who, shouting Vive la patrie /, charged Brunswick's invading army; it was ready for the patriot knitters (les tricoteuses) ; it was ready for that howling, red-capped, carmagnole dancing mob which burst into the Tuileries and for the old cry of Vive le roi ! substituted that of Vive la nation ! ; it was ready for those patriots who, at the King's trial, growled like angry dogs for fear lest some Girondin or Jesuit should snatch their royal victim from their clutches. " O Patriotism, what crimes have been com- mitted in thy name ! " we exclaim, slightly varying the words of one of those very patriots when her turn came to mount the scaffold. But it is obvious that for the minds of French- men during the Revolution the words patrie and patriotisme had a meaning very different from that which they had implied earlier. For this change the King and Queen were largely responsible. When they were found to be plotting with foreign Powers for the invasion of France, in order to prop up against the will of the nation a tottering and discredited monarchy, a feeling arose entirely new to French hearts and intellects. It was now that la patrie came to have a definite existence apart from the sovereign. Patriotism caine to be so completely dissociated from royalty that in Robespierre's words, " the 20 THE FRANCE I KNOW King had to die in order that la patrie might live." While shorn of one of its meanings, the word patrie, dm^ng the Revolution, gained another. Throughout the eighteenth century there had gradually been extended to all ranks of the French nation the right, hitherto reserved to the aristocracy, of holding landed property. And large numbers of French peasants had been availing themselves of this new privilege. La patrie, as a French writer has put it, " was becoming divided up among her citizens." And there began to burn in the hearts of the peasant proprietors that passionate love of the actual soil of la patrie, that land himger which has ever since been so marked a characteristic of the French nation. But with the right to possess the soil came also the duty of defending it. The peasant proprietor became a patriot soldier. Joan had fought for France because it was her King's country, a land of which her Prince had been robbed ; the sansculotte fought for la patrie because it was his own possession. Thus by the time of the Revolution in the patriotism of France there were already three dominant notes : (1) love of la patrie as the common mother, to which all Frenchmen are attached by the bonds of an ardent affection; (2) the possession of la patrie as the inheritance of every French- man; (3) the duty of defending la patrie from foreign aggression. Moreover, the necessity of FRENCH PATRIOTISM 21 guarding la patrie tended to render the patriot suspicious of all who were outside it, especially of those foreigners, notably the English on the one hand, the Germans on the other, who most threatened it. Pitt and Coburg were ever the bogies of these Revolutionists. This type of French patriot inclined to agree with our own Dr. Johnson, and to regard every foreigner as a fool, if not a knave. That was what we now call the nationalist or Chauvinist type of patriot. Nationalism en- trenches itself behind frontiers, and where natural frontiers do not exist, as in the north-east of France, it raises strong fortifications. But throughout the eighteenth century, side by side with patriotism of this nationalist type, there was growing a sentiment of a very different kind, but one equally typical of the Revolution period. This was the cosmopolitanism which was blind to any distinction between the cause of France and that of mankind, which reached out across frontiers to a conception of the brotherhood of humanity. Voltaire deplored that patriotism too often makes us the enemies of our fellow-men. Other emancipated French- men of that time dreamed of being citizens of every nation, and of not belonging to one's native country alone. As Frenchmen their ideal was "to be the motive power of progress, the organ of civilisation, pillars of the human race, citizens of the world." Many patriots of the 22 THE FRANCE I KNOW Revolution were possessed by this idea. It found expression when the Legislative Assembly, opening the ranks of French citizenship to dis- tinguished foreigners, naturalised Klopstock, Jeremy Bentham, and Tom Paine, and when Baron Clootz, with what Carlyle calls " his babble of a universal republic," claimed and was granted seats for his bizarre representatives of the himian species at the Fete of the Federation. Both types of patriots, nationalist and inter- nationalist, were represented in Napoleon's armies and at a later date in the French Parlia- ment. There not infrequently they came into conflict. There, in 1868, Jules Favre, the leader of the Opposition, during a debate on army reform, said to Marshal Niel : " You want to turn France into barracks," and the Marshal retorted, " And you must take care you don't turn her into a cemetery." The gulf between these two patriotisms was widened by the Franco-Prussian War. After the loss of Alsace-Lorraine the nationalists be- came Revanchards. They clamoured, at any cost, to regain the lost provinces; while the internationalists acquiesced in the loss, and turned their attention elsewhere, either to what they called La Revanche IntelleCtuelle or to the building up of a great colonial empire beyond the seas. The Government of France has never been ) revanchard. Since 1870 French Ministers have FRENCH PATRIOTISM 23 been more or less inspired by the internationalist ideal. And there is little doubt that in the Young France of the last three decades of the nineteenth century internationalist and pacifist ideas were the vogue. Tolstoy was widely read. Cosmopolitanism was growing and Pacifism of an extreme anti-militarist type was not un- common. "What is la patrie ? '^ a pacifist working man is said to have asked a soldier. " La patrie,'' replied the soldier, " is killing Prussians." " Then down with la patrie ! " was the pacifist's retort. Incited by this anti- patriotic attitude, nationalists became more and more extreme and demonstrative. They grouped themselves under Paul Deroulede into the Chau- vinist League of Patriots. These leaguers, in order to win public opinion to their side and to seize the Government, did not hesitate to resort to violence; they engineered the Boulangist movement and its continuation, the anti-Drey- fusard campaign. Their efforts in a measure met with success. For at the opening of the twentieth century nationalism seemed to be gaining ground in France. The growth of this aggressive patriotism was furthered by three causes : two rather subtle and limited in their action; the last perfectly obvious and far- reaching. The first was the issue of the Dreyfus affair. That famous lawsuit had divided France into two camps, arraying on the one hand nationalists, 24 THE FRANCE I KNOW anti-Dreyfusards, whose watchword was " My country, right or wrong," " My country above everything " {Frankreich iiber alles), and over against them the cosmopolitans, the humani- |;arians, the Dreyfusards, who cried : " Justice, humanity, truth above everything." No one was more disgusted with the issue of the Dreyfus affair than the more thoughtful Dreyfusards. For the lawsuit, as we remember, ended in a compromise. Dreyfus was pardoned for an offence he had never committed. And to the intellectual Frenchman nothing is more abhorrent than a compromise. To devout souls, like Charles Peguy and Daniel Halevy, for whom Dreyfusism had been a religion, this compromise was absolutely loath- some. It seemed to them merely engineered by politicians, who were eager to grasp at the loaves and fishes of office which it brought within their reach. More worthy of respect to that ardent intelligentsia seemed even the irreconcilable atti- tude of the anti-Dreyfusards. And henceforth some of the irreconcilable Dreyfusards began to evince a certain sympathy with their former foes, with that nationalist movement which the anti-Dreyfusards were promoting, and even with nationalist leaders like Paul Deroulede and \ Maurice Barres, who, after Deroulede's death, ' succeeded him as President of the League of Patriots. From the support of these dis- appointed intellectuals nationahsm sucked no FRENCH PATRIOTISM 25 small advantage. From another movement also it was gaining strength. Nationalism in France has always been closely associated with Catholi- cism. And the Catholic revival, which set in about the beginning of the century, was at once a cause and an effect of the growth of nationalism. Into the origins of that revival I cannot here enter at any length.^ But we may notice that a number of Dreyfusard free-thinkers were driven into the arms of the Church when their fellow- Dreyfusards, such as M. Combes, while posing as champions of liberty, began to attack Catho- lic institutions. Nationalist Catholic converts pleaded their nationalism as the ground for their adherence to the religion of their country. " Every truly patriotic Frenchman must be a Catholic," said a nationalist to me the other day, " just as every patriotic Turk must be a Mussulman." But more pronounced and wider in its effect than either the issue of the Dreyfus campaign or the Catholic revival was another cause of the growth of nationalism. That cause was the attitude which Germany began to assume towards France when, after 1890, William II took over from Bismarck the control of German foreign politics. To French patriots of the nationalist type it * See French Novelists of To-day (second series), " Intro- duction," by Winifred Stephens. (London and New York : John Lane.) 26 THE FRANCE I KNOW seemed that la patrie was more than ever in danger. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century France, as we all know, had with marvellous rapidity built up for herself a great colonial empire. It had largely been by the instigation or encouragement of Bismarck that she had done this. " Let France go to Tunis, let her go to Morocco," said Bismarck ; " it will help her to forget Alsace-Lorraine." ^ JBut Bismarck's successor at the Wilhelmstrasse had other views. The Kaiser cast covetous eyes on the French colonial dominions : he wanted his share of Morocco ; he demanded, and obtained, a part of the French Congo. Meanwhile, by the provocative action of his officials in the lost provinces he was bringing back the gaze of Frenchmen to that eastern frontier from which Bismarck had so shrewdly diverted it. The affairs of Tangier, 1906, and of Agadir, 1911, inflamed French nationalism, and raised amongst certain classes a wave of patriotism of the Chauvinist type. It was chiefly among the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals that this nationalist form of patriotism gained ground. Those who were possessed by it exulted in the death of inter- nationalism, which they condemned as " mere scholastic sentimentality " and " hopelessly out ^ Thus the Duke of Wellington some forty years earlier is said to have assured his fellow-countrymen that Europe would have nothing to fear from France as long as she was occupied with Algeria. FRENCH PATRIOTISM 27 of date." Only a few months before the War we find the academician, M. Alfred Capus, writing in the " Figaro " that '' before M. d'Estournelles de Constant and his pacifists can bring the nations of the world to The Hague tribunal, many a port — perhaps The Hague itself— will have been bombarded." But although these words have proved partly prophetic, M. Capus and his friends exaggerated. Internationalism was not dead. Far from it; on the rank and file of the French nation internationalist and anti-militarist ideas were taking a stronger and stronger hold. This was proved by the anti-militarist demonstrations which occurred throughout the country on the passing of the three years' military service law in 1913. Of this measure Anatole France wrote : Elle n'a pour elle ni Vunite de Varmee ni meme Vunanimite de la bourgeoisie, elle a contre elle le proletariat tout entier et tous les paysans,^ The socialist party, led in the French Chamber by that great orator, Jean Jaures, was pacifist to a man. Pacifist also was the spirit of the great syndicalist movement.^ Les classes populaires, again to quote Anatole France, sont pacifistes ; elles sont en totalitS pad- fistes, Tous les ouvriers de la grande industrie, tout le proletariat , , . est enti^rement hostile a Vidie d'agression, de conqu^te^ dHmperialisme, 1 Article, Pour la PaiXy " English Review," August, 1918. * See yosty pp. 112, 117. 28 THE FRANCE I KNOW Elle est penetree de la maxime socialiste " V union des travailleurs sera la paix du monde'"' ^ Never was anti-militarism stronger in France than in the years which immediately preceded the War, when syndicalists were protesting against the burden of a permanent army ; when Gustav Herve, the editor of " la Guerre Sociale," ^ suffered imprisonment for his extreme pacifism; when the late Remy de Gourmont lost his appointment at the Bibliotheque Nationale as the result of an article in the " Mercure de France," in which he denounced patriotism, exclaiming, " To die for la patrie ! we sing another song, we cultivate a different kind of poetry. If we were to be frank, we should say we are not patriots." Reactionaries at the same time were equally extreme; nationalist republi- cans were loudly clamouring for La Revanche ; royalists, led by Charles Maurras and the news- paper '^r Action fran9aise," were declaring that France would never be herself again until she had brought back the King and the Pope. Never at any period of French history had the waves of party strife risen higher or beaten more furiously. Then suddenly one summer day the tocsin rang over the fields of France ; and instantly at that sound, which announced that la patrie was in danger, every other voice was still, the noise ^ Article cit. Pour la Paix. 2 Now " la Victoire." See post, p. 116. FRENCH PATRIOTISM 29 of discord ceased; for in all minds, were they socialist, nationalist, anarchist, or pacifist, there was but one thought, la patrie, the deliverance of la patrie from that German peril which for centuries has lowered through the gap in the Vosges. At the tocsin's first peal there vanished, or rather there merged into one, all those various aspects of France of which we used to hear so much before the War : the New France, the Young France, the Real France, the False France, the France of Rome, the France of Geneva, the France of the Classicists, the France of the Romanticists, the France of Combes, the France of Barres ; there remained only la France. All through the centuries, from the days of Sparta downwards, never has the world seen a more absolute, a more perfect union of hitherto warring factions in the bonds of patriotism. None were more amazed by this unanimity than Frenchmen themselves. They could hardly be- lieve their own ears when they heard socialists responding to the mobilisation order with the words, " We'll settle accounts among ourselves afterwards, but now we must be off." They marvelled to see Catholic priest and Jewish rabbi going forth to the trenches arm in arm, the socialist Vaillant shaking hands with the national- ist deputy, the revanchard Barres addressed as mon cher Barris by the arch-pacifist, Herve; Remy de Gourmont, on his death-bed, with- 30 THE FRANCE I KNOW drawing his denunciations of patriotism ; Joseph Reinach, that ardent champion of Dreyfus, joining the League of Patriots; the Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, most zealous of internationahsts, proclaiming that this War must be fought to the finish, i, e,, until " Prussian domination " and " German militarism " have been destroyed. No wonder that Barres, writing of the historic meeting of the French Chamber on August 5, 1914, exclaimed : " We knew that there would be no wide divergence of opinion among us, but this prodigious union of hearts and minds transcends all our hopes." That there exist in France many conflicting opinions as to the conduct of the War no one can deny. But the complete suspension of party discord as to all the main issues was proved by the constitution of the Coalition Ministry of 1916. There we saw sitting side by side in amicable conference moderate republicans like M. de Freycinet, ardent anti-clericals like M. Emile Combes, socialists like M. Albert Thomas and M. Marcel Sembat, who did not refuse to serve in a Cabinet presided over by a Prime Minister once regarded by them and their comrades as a renegade.^ Again, in 1918, during the German offensive even socialist deputies suspended their opposition to M. Clemenceau's government. This unanimity of the governing classes extends throughout the whole French nation — to men, ^ See posty p. 117. FRENCH PATRIOTISM 81 women, and children, to aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and proletariat. Few of us in England have any idea how completely, how intensely, during this war-time, the whole mind and heart of France are set upon one thing, one thing only : the deliverance of la patrie. All barriers of class and creed and opinion have been broken down; and now at length the two hitherto divergent nationalist and internationalist currents flow in one broad stream of patriotism. Well may cosmopolitans and nationalists now fight side by side, for they see, as we see, that the German peril, which for so long threatened France, threatens the whole civilised world ; that the cause of France is indeed the cause of humanity. They and we have proved the truth of Jaures' words : Un peu dHnternationalisme eloigne de la patrie : beaucoup d'internationalisme y ramene, Un peu de patriotisme eloigne de V Internationale ; beaucoup de patriotisme y ra- mene. Said a French soldier, writing to me from the trenches : " We shall never give in, because our defeat would be the defeat of humanity." CHAPTER III WAR IN THE WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE To many famous French writers the War has proved an abundant inspiration. Their names — Bourget, Bordeaux, Bazin, Prevost, Barres— on yellow volumes encircled with the pink label, " vient de paraitre,^^ grow more and more familiar to the English reader. But Anatole France is not of these. Son of a member of Charles X's bodyguard, himself at twenty-six a soldier of 1870, at the beginning of this War he announced his intention of exchanging his pen- for the sword. When the French Government refused him permission to wear the soldier's uniform, M. France retired into the provinces. There he observes keenly, talks brilliantly, but writes little. Now and again he pays Paris a brief visit. After an absence of many years, he attended a meeting of the French Academy, and he laughed to see the world Press attaching high significance to what he himself regarded as an unimportant and accidental occurrence. The other day he quitted his rural retreat to witness the reproduction at a Parisian theatre of his Noces Corinthiennes, only to find it interrupted by the firing of the long-range gun. WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 33 Since August, 1914, he has signed his name to two volumes only. In 1915 appeared Sur la Vote Glorieuse, a collection of articles and letters to poilus, published (by Edouard Champion) for the benefit of wounded soldiers; and in 1917 le Genie Latin, a series of prefaces, utterly remote from the War, having been written long ago and collected and published by Lemerre in 1913, but now reissued by Calmann Levy, with a few alterations, chiefly suppressions. How can one account, in the face of the greatest conflict humanity has ever witnessed, for the com- parative silence of so shrewd and philosophic a writer, who is more famous, perhaps, than any other living European author? With the deli- cate taste that has always distinguished him M. France may regard the present as not a time for that satire and irony which are his greatest gifts. For many years before 1914, obsessed by a sense of the impending calamity, he had dis- cussed it; and I heard him foretell it as far back as 1908. Speaking of the Franco-British Entente, he then said to me : "In the great European conflagration now approaching, England and France will fight side by side against Ger- many. You will do all the work on sea, we on land." Not an unnatural prognostication, con- sidering the size of our army and the French ideas of their own military strength ! Then, with a mischievous smile, he added : " And by way 34 THE FRANCE I KNOW of reward you will send us some of your excellent Chester cheese." The Maitre had then just completed his Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, in the introduction to which are some of the finest pages he has ever written. In the year of Austria's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, two years after Algeciras, three before Agadir, we find him, in common with other leading European statesmen of that day, gazing on the war cloud which was even then lowering over Europe.^ After enumerat- ing the forces which might conduce to the maintenance of peace, M. France writes : Mais que nous soyons assures des a present d^une paix que rien ne troublera, il faudra etre insense pour le pretendre, Les terribles rivalites industrielles et commerciales qui grandissent autour de nous font pressentir au contraire, de futurs conflits et rien 1 See What is Austria^ By Henry Wickham Steed, "Edinburgh Review," October, 1917, p. 367. "I was in Vienna throughout the Bosnian annexation crisis of 1908. ... I repeatedly discussed with prominent Austrians and with members of the Austro-Hungarian Staff the hkelihood of a general European War. From them I gained the impression that war was probable, if not certain, in a comparatively near future, that the pretext chosen would be some Austro- Serbian dispute, and that while the Austro- Hungarian forces engaged Serbia and withstood or invaded Russia, the German army would attack France swiftly through Belgium. This plan of campaign was by no means new. M. Clemenceau had discussed it with Sir Edward Grey in London after the funeral of Sir Henry Campbell- Bannerman in April, 1908, and, as I have reason to know, it was again mentioned by M. Clemenceau during his inter- view with King Edward at Marienbad in the August of the same year." WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 85 ne nous assure que la France ne se verra pas un jour enveloppee dans une conflagration europeenne ou mondiale. Et V obligation ou elle se trouve de pourvoir a sa defense n'accroit pas peu les diffi- cultes qu£ lui cause un ordre social profondement trouble par la concurrence de la production et V antagonisme des classes,^ From almost every possible angle M. France had regarded this stupendous modern problem of war. He had dealt with it in much the same way as for many years he had been accustomed to deal with his own house in the little cul-de-sac, known as the Villa Said, which turns out of the Bois de Boulogne. That house was always in the hands of work- men, forever undergoing reconstruction, passing from one style to another as the interests of its master shifted. When he had finished his Jeanne d'Arc, for instance, and was turning from the Italian art of the fifteenth century to the French and English painters of the eighteenth, beginning a work on Proud' hon, which, if com- pleted, has as far as I know never been published, he exchanged the massive chests and cabinets of the Renaissance period for the lighter and more graceful furniture of Louis XV. Shortly before the war, having bought a house at Versailles, he was about to leave the Villa Said. On a Sunday in May, 1914, we were gathered, several of us, in his library. Everything spoke * La Vie de Jeanne d'ArCy p. Ixxiv. 36 THE FRANCE I KNOW of departure. The shelves had been stripped of their books, which had been packed into huge cases, ranged all round the room. There reigned an atmosphere of crisis and upheaval, like that of M. Bergeret's removal. Though M. France explained that he was not abandoning the house, only leaving it temporarily for the purpose of certain reconstructions, we could not help feeling oppressed by a sense of finality, which imparted significance to the most trivial remark. Thus, when the lady who directs his household, making a step towards the door, being asked, " Where are you going? " and replying " Merely to close the door," received the rejoinder, " Do not close it upon yourself," one felt how more than one door was being closed that morning. After seven months of war, in February, 1915, I saw the house again. Passing down the Villa Said, instinctively, though I knew le maitre was not in Paris, I looked for his house. I looked in vain. In vain I sought the well-known door with its bronze knocker, the head of a woman delicately carved, and the peep-hole, that "Judas " through which used to peer suspiciously the eye of his old servant, a member of the Reformed Church of Geneva. "Madame is seeking the house of M. Anatole France ? " said a butler, comirig out on to a neighbour's doorstep. " There it is." I looked and saw nothing but a blank wall. Knocker, door, windows even, all had disappeared. WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 37 Blind and dumb remained the master's house. More struck by this sight than by anything I had seen or heard in Paris since the War, I lingered in front of this transmogrified fa9ade. Gradually it grew expressive. Was not the house, which had once spoken so eloquently of its owner's varying moods, now even more silent than the Master himself? If we would discover, therefore, the Master's views on that difficult problem of peace and war we must turn not so much to the rare letters and articles he has published since 1914 — interesting and significant as these may be, and from some of them we shall quote later— but rather must we consult that goodly array of his some forty pre- War volumes. And here we shall find him, with his well-nigh unique capacity for consider- ing things from varying points of view, turning the question about and about, foreseeing a future from which a League of Nations would banish war; also foreseeing one in which strife, if not between nations between classes, might kill civilisation. Wars he condemns as execrable, and, with his Abbe, Jerome Coignard, he jeers at man as un animal d mousquet. But those are wars of conquest. Now, on rare occasions when he takes up his pen, he glorifies as une guerre de defense, de libiration, this War, which " the Germans have made the most hideous the world has ever seen." Readers of Sur la Pierre Blanche will remember 38 THE FRANCE I KNOW that in one of those conversations, which by the way actually took place in the little wooden house of the archaeologist, M. Boni, dominating the Palatine, Nicole Langelier expresses his belief in the establishment of universal peace. It will come, he says, not because men will grow better (that one may not venture to hope), but because a new order, a new science, new economic necessi- ties will impose a state of peace, as formerly other conditions imposed a state of belligerence. Among these new necessities Langelier mentions : increased and perfected means of communica- tion between all races and all peoples, a stronger and more general sentiment of human solidarity, the methodical organisation of labour and the establishment of the United States of the World. But Langelier is not enough of an optimist to believe that any one there present would live to see the dawn of that pacific era in the world's history. Nevertheless, may we not surmise that this War has begun to inspire the author of Sur la Pierre Blanche with the hope of witness- ing that glorious day, for do we not find him entitling one of his articles Debout pour la derniere guerre ! ^ Of soldiers and sailors, M. France before the war expressed varying opinions. Once he won- dered whether the dangers to which they were exposed were really greater than those run by civilian workers, constantly threatened, through ^ Contributed to the Book of France, Macmillan, 1915. WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 89 our wretched industrial conditions, with death from disease and poverty. Elsewhere he had pronounced confidently that c'est aux soldats que revient Vhonneur des plus beaux et des plus penibles sacrifices. Now he writes : " We bear them all upon our hearts from the commander- in-chief ... to the humblest soldier of the second class, who freely offers his life to that patrie of which he knew but a single village, and in which his sole possession was a shake-down in a stable." ^ There is only one class of soldiers with whom to-day M. France does not sympathise : that is the military caste, the Junkers, who are so largely responsible for this War. Long ago they had suffered from the trenchant irony of the Abbe Jerome Coignard. He inquires ^ whether en realite cette gentilhommerie militaire roidie avec tant d'orgueil au dessus de nous is anything but les restes degeneres de ces malheureux chasseurs des hois que le poete Lucrece a peints de telle maniere qu'on doute si ce sont des hommes ou des betes. Writing in " le Petit Parisien " ^ on le Quatorze Juillet, 1915, M. France thus addresses the brave defenders of la patrie — " Dear soldiers, heroic children of the Father- ^ Sur la Vote Glorieuse, p. 22. 2 Les opinions de VAbM Jerome Coignardy p. 165. ^ The following translation by the present writer appeared in 21ie Daily Chronicle, 40 THE FRANCE I KNOW land, to-day is your festival, for it is the festival of France. The 14th of July breaks in a dawn of blood and glory. We celebrate and we honour your brethren fallen in immortal battles, and you, to whom we send our good wishes, with this heartfelt cry : Live ! Triumph ! " One hundred and twenty-six years ago to- day the people of Paris, armed with pikes and guns, to the beating of drums and the ringing of the tocsin, pressed in a long line down the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, attacked the Bastille, and, after five hours' conflict beneath deadly fire, took possession of the hated fortress. A sym- bolical victory won over tyranny and despotism, a victory by which the French people inaugurated a new regime. Dear soldiers, dear fellow-citizens, I address you on this solemn festival because I love you and honour you and think of you unceasingly. '' I am entitled to speak to you heart to heart because I have a right to speak for France, being one of those who have ever sought, in freedom of judgment and uprightness of conscience, the best means of making their country strong. I am entitled to speak to you because, not having desired war, but being compelled to suffer it, I, like you, like all Frenchmen, am resolved to wage it till the end, until justice shall have conquered iniquity, civilisation barbarism, and the nations are delivered from the monstrous menace of an oppressive mihtarism. I have a WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 41 right to speak to you because I am one of the few who have never deceived you, and who have never beHeved that you needed Hes for the maintenance of your courage ; one of the few who, rejecting as unworthy of you deceptive fictions and misleading silence, have told you the truth. '* I told you in December last year : ' This War will be cruel and long.' I tell you now : ' You have done much, but all is not over. The end of your labours approaches, but is not yet.' You are fighting against an enemy fortified by long preparation and immense material. Your foe is unscrupulous. He has learned from his leaders that inhumanity is the soldier's first virtue. Arming himself in a manner undreamed of hitherto by the most formidable of conquerors, he causes rivers of blood to flow and breathes forth vapours charged with torpor and with death. En- dure, persevere, dare. Remain what you are and none shall prevail against you. You are fighting for your native land, that laughing, fertile land, the most beautiful in the world : for your fields and your meadows. For the august mother, who, crowned with vine-leaves and with ears of corn, waits to welcome you and to feed you with all the inexhaustible treasures of her breast. You are fighting for your village belfry, your roofs of slate or tile, with wreaths of smoke curling up into the serene sky, for your fathers' graves, your children's cradles. " You are fighting for our august cities, on the 42 THE FRANCE I KNOW banks of whose rivers rise the monuments of generations — romanesque churches, cathedrals, minsters, abbeys, palaces, triumphal arches, columns of bronze, theatres, museums, town halls, hospitals, statues of sages and of heroes— whose walls, whether modest or magnificent, shelter alike commerce, industry, science and the arts, all that constitutes the beauty of life. " You are fighting for our nioral heritage, our manners, our uses, our laws, our customs, our beliefs, our traditions. For the works of our sculptors, our architects, our painters, our en- gravers, our goldsmiths, our enamellers, our glass- cutters, our weavers. For the songs of our musicians. For our mother tongue which, with ineffable sweetness, for eight centuries has flowed from the lips of our poets, our orators, our -historians, our philosophers. For the knowledge of man and of nature. For that encyclopaedic learning which attained among us the high- water mark of precision and lucidity. You are fighting for the genius of France, which enlightened the world and gave freedom to the nations. By this noble spirit bastilles are overthrown. And lastly, you are fighting for the homes of Belgians, English, Russians, Italians, Serbians, not for France merely, but for Europe, ceaselessly dis- turbed, and furiously threatened, by Germany's devouring ambition. " The Fatherland ! Liberty ! Beloved children WRITINGS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 43 of France, these are the sacred treasures com- mitted to your keeping; for their sakes you endure without complaint prolonged fatigue and constant danger ; for their sakes you will conquer. " And you, women, children, old men, strew with flowers and foliage all the roads of France : our soldiers will return triumphant." Since July, 1915, when Anatole France wrote these stirring lines, dark and sometimes desperate has often appeared the cause of the Allies. To so voluptuous, sensitive and pitiful a soul the horrors of this war have brought an agony of suffering. Nevertheless, when the Master has taken up his pen, it has always been in a spirit of courage and of hope. For never would he allow to escape from him a gesture of discoxu^age- ment. And now in the fullness of his years he is permitted to witness the victory his stout- heartedness has helped to win. CHAPTER IV AFTER THE FIRST BATTLE OF THE MARNE In peace-time, those who were in the habit of constantly crossing the Channel found little to distinguish one journey from another. Now monotony has vanished : every crossing brings a new set of experiences. To begin with, as the War advances the route changes. At first civilians were permitted to cross by the short passage, military and non-military in the same trains and steamers. On my first War departure, in January, 1915, I set out from Victoria in a carriage full of officers bound for the front. And one seemed to be quite near " the real thing " when, on entering the Paris train at Boulogne, one saw standing parallel with it another, the destination of which was the firing line. In those days the eight-hour railway journey to Paris took one round by Beauvais. The old four hours route by Amiens was impracticable on account of the destruction of bridges during the battle of the Marne. Once arrived in Paris, the scene was altogether unusual. Londoners had been saying that since its 44 AFTER FIRST BATTLE OF MARNE 45 removal from the War-zone the French capital had become normal. And thus it seemed at first as in the rare sunshine of dull January one sauntered through the Palais Royal. But out in the broad thoroughfares this impression of normality vanished. Indeed, everything was so changed, the comparatively empty streets pre- sented such an unfamiliar aspect, that it was almost difficult to find one's way about. In the Avenue de 1' Opera it was obvious that a large part of the populace had not yet returned from its exodus during the previous autumn. There were few pedestrians on the pavements, fewer vehicles in the roadway. On the Boulevard des Capucines, not a single motor-bus— they had all been requisitioned for the front. In com- mercial quarters, round the General Post Office, for example, at eleven o'clock on a working-day morning it was like the City of London on Sunday or a bank holiday. The narrow thorough- fares connecting the Grands Boulevards might have been streets in some quiet country town. Standing near the Pantheon— looking Seine-wards down the long incline of the Rue St. Jacques, usually thronged with traffic, nothing was visible along the whole extent of the roadway but three drays and one cart. When the clock struck noon, one missed the joyful rush of clerks and artisans, of trim midi- nettes and shop-girls, all pressing along the narrow streets hastening to the first meal of the 46 THE FRANCE I KNOW day, as gaily and loquaciously as children let out of school — all that merry jostling and bustling, which in peace-time was one of the pleasantest of Paris sights, had disappeared. A stream of quiet serious folk, mostly women, poured into the restaurants, once overcrowded, now comfort- ably filled or half empty. In the afternoon, especially in shopping quarters, there were a few more people in the streets. Sometimes the Printemps, the Louvre, and the Bon March6 would seem almost as thronged as in peace-time—" not with purchasers, though," I was told by my Parisian companion; " most of these people merely come to look at things." Parisian women, neat as ever, were dressing plainly, and affecting **le Sportif." Feminine head-gear throughout the War has always been that of the soldier of the nation most popular for the hour. In January, 1915, it was a tasselled cap modelled on the Belgian soldier's, later it was to be the Russian kepi, later still the American sailor's quaint little hat with the button in the middle. The shop windows dis- played wares suggestive of the War— Red Cross nurses' uniforms, huge stacks of wool, all kinds of woollen comforts for men in the trenches, tins of sweets and preserves labelled for " our soldiers." The book-shops in those early War days showed few new books.^ But there were rows of pre- War ^ For how different it became later, see post, pp. 87, 88. AFTER FIRST BATTLE OF MARNE 47 Alsatian stories, such as Barres' Colette Baudoche, Lichtenberger's Juste Lobel, Acker's Exiles. On the Left Bank many shops, as the notice on the shutters indicated, were '' closed on account of mobilisation." Before one of these, the office of the famous Cahiers de la Quinzaine in the Rue de la Sorbonne, I stood and thought how those closed shutters signified the closing not of one house only, not merely the end of a ; literary periodical, but the passing of a whole i literary epoch. For in the pages of les Cahiers, founded by Charles Peguy in 1900, blossomed the finest flower of twentieth-century French literature. There Crainquehille and Jean Christophe both made their first appearance. The Cahiers might have rested their reputation on that. But as time went on the poet founder and editor came to preside over a literary circle, including besides Anatole France and Romain Rolland, many minor briUiant lights : the brothers Tharaud, for example, the Halevys and Julien Benda. It was, as Barres has called it, la chapelle ou il [Peguy] etait aime jusqu'd Vidolatrie, It was round one of the most humble-minded of men that the worshippers in that chapel used to gather every Thursday afternoon in the little back parlour of the Rue de la Sorbonne office. There, desiring to subscribe to les Cahiers, I had the honour of a few minutes' talk with Peguy shortly before the outbreak of the War. 48 THE FRANCE I KNOW Little did I then dream that in a few months this shy, insignificant-looking little man would be glorified by a hero's death. For he fell during the first battle of the Marne, in September, 1914, commanding as lieutenant, leading his men to attack; and one hundred of his little company of 250 perished with him. Already a year ago rain and wind beating upon the tricolour which waves over his grave at Villeroy had washed it almost white, and the little heap of earth mark- ing the place of his burial had been worn almost level with the surrounding soil. But Peguy's memory has not faded, neither has his monu- ment perished. They live in the memorials of a humble life passionately devoted to all that is good and noble and in the poetic dignity and charm of his literary work.^ In France no profession has suffered more from the War than that of literature. The Bulletin des Ecrivains, a publication destined for free circula- tion among writers at the front, in November, 1914, recorded the names of seventeen French authors who had fallen on the field of honour. By the following February there were fifty, and towards the end of the year the number was creeping up to two hundred. How many a familiar figure has vanished from ^ For his biography, see Charles Peguy CEuvres Choisies (Bernard Grasset). For his life and letters during the War, Avec Charles Piguy. De la Lorraine a la Marne. Aout- Septembre, 1914 (Hachette). AFTER FIRST BATTLE OF MARNE 49 the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, from the book-stall galleries beneath the Odeon, from the book-boxes on those quays which now gleam so picturesquely in the moonlight with a beauty unsuspected in the glaring nights of peace. By nine o'clock Paris streets and even the boulevards were almost deserted. But one might wander along them without fear of apaches, for they were all at the front. " Have you ever commanded apaches .? " I inquired of a French officer. " Madame," he replied, *' I have never com- manded anything else." " And how do you find them ? " " In the attack they are magnificent, but when they are resting they turn your hair grey." CHAPTER V WITH THE FRENCH RED CROSS Nowhere was the once familiar scene more changed than in a suburban house, where, before the War, I had spent many a deUghtful hohday. The house stands on the banks of the Marne a few miles out of Paris. The Metro takes you to a yellow tram-car, which, after carrying you along the narrow, winding streets of the hanlieue, sets you down at the top of a steep, ill-paved incline. A little way down you come on a high stone wall broken by a massive gate, inscribed with the words Maison de Watteau, Here, in a typically French seventeenth- century house, died that typical French eighteenth- century painter. As the concierge opens the gate, Watteau's house appears in the harmony of its classic proportions, in the dignity of its austere lines. Que c^est beau, que c^est frangais, exclaimed in my hearing, as he crossed its threshold, a famous French artist of to-day. Traversing a noble courtyard, you enter beneath a tympanum of sculptured angels, blowing trumpet blasts, and heralding, as we liked to think, the approaching victory. In the hall is a beautiful low relief representing the 60 » • • • • -» * ' ' WITH THE FRENCH RED CROSS 51 Passage of the Rhine. Through the glass of the oppv)site door you perceive the terrace over- looking a vast expanse of undulating lawns and woods leading down to the Marne and away beyond the river to the battlefield of Champigny, where the old trenches speak of the inrush of an earlier German peril. Here, barely an hour's journey from the turmoil of Paris, yet in the perfect calm of a sequestered existence, surrounded by memorials eloquent of the past history of their race, Monsieur and Madame — he one of the most eminent among the younger French historians, she a well-known Salon artist — used to spend the summer in rural pursuits and rustic solitude. Now what a transformation I - " How different from the quiet lives of Mon- sieur, Madame, and me ! " plaintively sighed the maitre d'hotel, as he laid the table for forty. For in that once reposeful house is to-day the ceaseless bustle of a military hospital. Monsieur is with the colours, Madame has laid aside her brush and pallet : she has exchanged the painter's blouse for a Red Cross nurse's uniform. In almost every room, in Monsieur's study, in Madame' s studio, are hospital beds — fifty in those early days, but gradually increasing as the need grew until now, in 1918, they number seventy. Monsieur's dressing-room is a dispensary, one of the bath-rooms an operating theatre. In the park, which one used to people with Watteau's 52 THE FRANCE I KNOW airy nymphs and gallants, there now lounge or hobble the substantial figures of convalescent soldiers. They are wearing any nondescript gar- ments obtainable, while busy figures cleanse and repair their own poor tattered, blood-stained, and mud-bespattered uniforms. Already, in those early weeks, Madame had received 113 patients, including a few grands blessSs, some dozen typhoid cases, isolated in one of her houses on the other side of the park, and four of tetanus. All, save two, had recovered. Such a fact in itself is enough to prove the French- woman's capacity and adaptability. For, with the exception of a nun, there was no member of the staff whom we in England should regard as a " trained nurse." Madame and her sister hold their French Red Cross diploma, which is roughly equivalent to the certificate granted by our St. John Ambulance Society; and no further qualifications are possessed by the ladies of the neighbourhood, who, with admirable devotion, labour day and night to tend the wounded. All through these long years they have remained at their posts. The same bright familiar faces greet me whenever I return to the hospital. The equipment, organisation, and direction, in these difficult War days, of such an institution, by two ladies, hitherto totally inexperienced in the matter, has been a veritable tour de force. I have often heard them say that without the help of the local doctor, one of the finest types of WITH THE FRENCH RED CROSS 53 Frenchmen, they could not have accompHshed it. He, alas ! was called to the firing line soon after the battle of the Marne. His friends at the hospital treasure a letter written at the close of the battle of Soissons. " We have come out of the furnace," he wrote, '' to re-form our division. Oh, the marmites " (literally " saucepans," but equivalent to what our boys call " Jack Johnsons "), " and yet the soup was cold when we got time to eat it. Our bed is the earth, or a rock, or a cave floor. But with it all we are thoroughly up to our work, and our moral is good. The regiment has not suffered so much. We have not lost any guns, and not even our ambulance. As soon as we have re-formed, we return. Vive la France ! Three doctors killed in the infantry ! I shall never have that luck ! " Only a few weeks later that " luck," as he patriotically calls it, did fall to his lot. Every detail of hospital management, in those days of complete mobilisation, was supremely difficult. Not only doctors were wanting, but helpers of every kind. The maitre d' hotel, after having been overlooked for the first few months, was eventually called up. Then his wife, the cook, assumed her husband's duties as well as her own, and she has performed them extremely well. At first it seemed almost impossible to find a competent driver for the ambulance. " It's 54 THE FRANCE I KNOW aeroplanes he understands ! " the cook would say apologetically, when the chauffeur returned by tram, announcing that he had abandoned la voiture somewhere on the road to Paris. It was in the ambulance that we went to market. And seldom did we accomplish the journey to town without some mishap. We used to start for Paris at seven, reckoning to be back by ten, in time for cook to prepare the patients' eleven o'clock dejeuner. Never shall I forget one glorious winter morn- ing, when the hoar frost clothed the park in crystal- line beauty and the rosy dawn was creeping up from the mists of the valley. Everything seemed perfectly peaceful as we sped through the invi- gorating morning air, down through the village into the glades of the great wood. Here, however, there were signs of war, for the sheep and cows, which had been brought to the outskirts of the city to provide food in case of siege, were still in their pens near the road-side, and the bright uniforms of soldiers exercising or on the march glimmered through the yellow green of mossy tree-trunks. At the Paris Gate things were as usual. For the defences hastily constructed when the Germans were marching towards the city had recently been removed. In the outer boule- vards the day's business had already begun, and long before we actually reached the market- place we were in the thick of the market melee. WITH THE FRENCH RED CROSS 55 Leaving our car at a street corner, the proces- sion of us — i.e. Madame, the cook, the lodge- keeper, the chauffeur, a gardener, and myself— all bearing baskets, started to wend our way through the bargaining throng. Most pleasing was the colour scheme which here enlivened the grey of midwinter. No one who enters a market or a greengrocer's shop in France can fail to be struck by the artistic taste possessed by every class of the French nation. Here in les halles the orange pumpkins had their hollows filled with parsley. Pink carrots scraped to spotless perfection, creamy turnips of every size and shape, white and green leeks, rosy red apples, were picturesquely arranged and contrasted in groups of mathematical precision. Past these luscious things we followed the cook in a preliminary tour of inspection and inquiry. For we had over fifty mouths to fill, and it was necessary to buy to the best advan- tage. Having completed her first round, and ascertained with many a head-shake and shoulder- shrug the prevailing prices, our pilot began her purchases and our baskets filled rapidly. It was the price of cheese and of salad ingredients that seemed to fill this shrewd buyer with most dismay. But she admitted to me afterwards that, although prices have risen, it may not be due entirely to the War, for they always do rise at this time of year. Indeed, in those early war- days one heard few 56 THE FRANCE I KNOW complaints of the increased cost of living. Parisians cheerfully adapted their requirements to war-time conditions. Their excellent and \ economical cooking made the very best of every- thing at their disposal. Only the most nourish- ing food was served, and the dishes absent from the Parisian menu were generally those elaborate sweets and savouries which doctors would say one was better without. Of course on the return journey our " aero- planist " did not fail to provide us with the inevitable accident. And he chose for its occur- rence the most crowded thoroughfare and one in which no taxi was visible. Eventually, however, one was discovered ; we hastily filled it with the cook and the most immediately necessary of our purchases, ourselves returning by tram. CHAPTER VI TALKS BY THE WAY Does any reader object that parts of this chapter are too trivial, let him pause and recall his Montaigne, who tells the historian to register everything, sans chois [sic] et sans triage. Let him reflect whether anything can be too slight to form " a living link in that Tissue of History, which inweaves all Being." " The English are so noisy ! " (Us sont si hruyants, les Anglais !) Startling was such a \ complaint on the lips of those belonging to a race, which we in this country have been accus- tomed to regard as nothing if not lively. Yet such was the charge the French brought against us in the early months of the War. For then \ there brooded over France a silence, like the 1 hush of some great cathedral. Paris was mar- vellously still. Stifled by a police regulation forbidding the crying of newspapers, dumb even were those strident pre-War voices shrieking along boulevard curb-stones " la Patrie," " la Presse," " I'lntransigeant." So complete was the silence that it was almost a shock one winter day to hear it broken 67 58 THE FRANCE I KNOW by loud laughter echoing down the boulevard Malesherbes. The guffaws were not French, how- ever. They proceeded from a lorry rattling along the boulevard and packed full to overflowing with British soldiers. Nevertheless, in shops, trams, trains, and salons, there was some talk of a quiet kind. At the Printemps, or Bon Marche, no sooner were you understood to be English than you were asked : " What are they saying over there ? How long do they think it will last?" If the questions were put at the shop counter, other assistants quickly gathered round, eager to catch the answer. When, from some little fitting cubicle the news of an Englishwoman's presence spread through the department, attendants made various excuses for looking in, holding pins, or taking down an address, hoping meanwhile to learn how the War was affecting their chers allies on the other side of the Channel. In the hospital there was not much conversa- tion. Most of the patients who were well enough to play were absorbed in the unfailing recreation of dominoes. The poilu, in those literary and pictorial presentations of him which flooded French book-shops in the early years of the War, was represented as gay and talkative. I have not found him to be so. With his country invaded, his family in the occupied regions, his cottage destroyed, or his business ruined, how could he be either mirthful or loquacious? TALKS BY THE WAY 59 Rather was he reserved, silent, serious. And he shared these quahties with his leaders, with the taciturn Joffre and the Puritan Petain. All the world over the peasant is reserved, especially with foreigners. And seventy-five per cent, of the wounded in French hospitals are peasants.^ Townsmen have a little more to say. Some Parisian artillerymen had come from Arras to have their guns repaired in a neighbouring munition factory. Their gun-carriages were down in a meadow by the Marne; and these men, forbidden by military regulations to join their families in Paris, were glad to pass the time in conversation. Their regiment, after its for- mation in an adjoining suburb, had been on the Aisne and at Ypres as well as at Arras. The gunners told me they had seen many of my countrymen. Apparently they had formed a high opinion of them in one respect at least — lis sont tris donnants les Anglais (''They are very generous, the English"). " But then. Mademoiselle, they are paid better than we, and they are better fed." " We are learning to understand one another well. The Englishman he learns French more quickly than we do English. But I know some sentences." Then I was given two samples of such complete Anglo-French that, alas ! the words sounded to me mere gibberish. After- ^ The last census before the War showed the agricultural population of France to be fifty-two per cent, of the whole. 60 THE FRANCE I KNOW wards a French friend, who had been present, interpreted them as : " Will you have a brandy- and-soda ? I have no tobacco." Not for worlds would I have had my ally suspect how incom- prehensible he had rendered my mother tongue. So I tried to look intelligent. Always in public vehicles, people seemed inclined to talk. The novel or the newspaper was instantly laid aside whenever an opportunity for conversation presented itself. I had the good luck on a journey from Paris to a cathedral town to find myself in a com- partment with two officers — one French, the other Belgian. From them I learned that the route we were following was that of the army of taxi-cabs which, issuing forth from the capital in the previous autumn, had helped to win the battle of the Marne. To my otherwise undis- cerning civilian glance were pointed out objects of interest on the line of advance, the stumps of trees cut down to facilitate firing, a bridge blown up by the French and trenches flooded by the recent heavy rains. The Belgian, a cavalry officer, was returning to his command at Pervyse after a week's leave in Paris. A fine tall figure of a man, over six feet, he seemed to revel in the hardships of war. The only thing that troubled him was his separa- tion from his family, who were in the invaded part of Belgium and from whom he had heard nothing for weeks. He had been in the fighting TALKS BY THE WAY 61 line since the beginning of the War. He was in Antwerp before and during the siege; and he told of the persistent Belgian attacks made on the German forces as soon as news was received that the enemy had sent reinforcements south. It was this continuous harrying of the German lines by the troops of Antwerp, he thought, which decided the enemy to take the city. The officer described those hideous thirteen days when the poor little Belgian army, half- clothed and half-starved, held out on the Iser, encouraged to hope every day that they would be reinforced and every day disappointed. At length on the thirteenth day, at nine o'clock on a dark moon- less night, an army of French arrived. They had never been under fire and were absolutely worn out with marching. But their arrival in the Belgian lines was welcomed with the greatest enthusiasm. At that moment the enemy's guns were silent. Belgian and French were chatting together, when suddenly the Germans, having got wind, doubtless by their spies, of the French arrival, opened a terrible bombardment. It was more terrible than any the Belgians had hitherto experienced, and to the new French arrivals it seemed a veritable inferno. At once in the black darkness there was chaos and panic. In the jostling and battling some were pushed into the Iser, and the Belgian giant heard a French soldier exclaiming : " Take care, you are treading on the feet of the poor little Belgians." It was 62 THE FRANCE I KNOW obviously impossible for the Belgians that night to take their well-earned repose; they were compelled to remain to encourage their French comrades. And it was not until morning dawned that they were able to retire. Refugees from the invaded departments had many a thrilling tale to tell. Some friends of mine were spending the summer in their cottage at Coucy when the War broke out. My friend's husband is an artist of a type now rare, though common in Renaissance days. Like William Morris, he practises many crafts. He is sculptor, engraver, painter, architect, wood-carver, cabinet- maker, and even stone-mason. An intimate friend of Viollet-le-Duc, with that famous archae- ologist he had often visited the august mediaeval / fortress of Coucy, one of the finest specimens of [ mediaeval military architecture in Europe. Fas- cinated by that superb keep, two hundred feet high and one hundred feet in diameter, sur- rounded by four towers each a hundred feet high, proudly dominating the Aisne Valley, the architect longed to build himself a house under the shadow of the ramparts of that castle on whose lordly walls one of the sires of Coucy had haughtily inscribed these words : Roi ne suy, Ne Prince, ne Due, Ne Comte aussi Je suis le Sire de Coucy. But land in that neighbourhood was not easily procurable. My friend waited twenty-five years before he could purchase a site. Then, having procured some ground, he designed a perfect little TALKS BY THE WAY 63 Gothic model of a house to harmonise with the thirteenth- century style of the fortress. Slowly, deliberately, he began to build, often with his own hands laying lovingly one stone upon another. Journeying from Paris from time to time, he would carve a capital or fashion a quaint piece of Gothic furniture. With its beautiful pillared studio like a church, its spacious gallery leading to the upper rooms, its artistic furniture, its mediaeval decorations in the old colours of brown and blue, never did dwelling more completely express its creator's personality. The man was putting his whole soul into it. It grew gradually like a human being. And when I visited the house the year before the War it was still incomplete. On the outbreak of war, my friend, who was old enough to remember 1870, said to his wife : " We will stay here; the Germans, even if they penetrate so far, will not molest us." But as reports came in of German behaviour, he grew uneasy. The invader of 1914 was evidently different from the invader of forty-four years earlier. There seemed, however, no need for immediate alarm. News travelled slowly to that remote countryside. At Coucy on the 24th of August the Boche was believed to have advanced no further than Maubeuge. But that night my friends were awakened by the noise of a loud explosion. They learnt in the morning that one of the bridges over the Aisnc had been blown up. A few hours later my friend's wife, who 64 THE FRANCE I KNOW speaks English perfectly, saw, coming through her garden gate, figures in khaki. " We are British troops," they said to her, " and we are in full retreat from Mons; the Germans are behind us." The artist and his wife conferred together and decided to flee. But when they went down to the little railway station of Coucy- le-Chateau, at the foot of the castle hill, they found that trains had ceased to run. It was necessary to drive fifteen miles to Soissons. There the railway platform was packed with fugitives. The last train to Paris, when it came in, was packed too. Happily it carried a superintendent of the line, whom my friends knew. He found them a corner in the luggage van. From another Coucy refugee, they heard a few days later that the British had only occupied the place for a few hours, having continued their retreat before the advancing Germans. Some months afterwards a Coucy man whom the Germans had taken prisoner, having corresponded from his German prison with relatives in the village, wrote from Germany to my friends that their house was occupied by the invaders. Then all was silence until the French advance in the spring of 1917. What happened at that time has been graphically related by the " Morning Post " correspondent, Mr. Warner Allen, writing from Coucy-le-Chateau on March 28, 1917— " About ten days ago a French infantry TALKS BY THE WAY 65 captain, pressing forward with his men over the crest of the hills that rise above the valley of the Ailette, looked out over the new stretch of .country that opened to his view a further vision of the promised land that was to be won back for France from the pollution of the invader. In front of him he saw rising nearly two hundred feet from the valley on its steep acropolis the castle of Coucy, with its great keep and the towers that crowned the angles of its walls. The captain had for the moment but scant time to waste on the contemplation of the wonderful view that opened to his gaze. He was pursuing the Germans and his first thought had to be for his men. A few minutes after reaching the crest, however, the essential orders had been given, and he turned again to admire the castle. He was the last Frenchman to see Coucy in its perfection. As he looked, there came from the midst of the castle a blinding blaze of flame. The keep and the towers and battlements flew asunder, and everything vanished under an impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke. When after long minutes the cloud cleared away, keep and towers and battlements had disappeared as utterly as ' many- towered Camelot.' All that remained of that fairy dream was a ragged piece of wall pierced by a window or two, and piles of white, fresh broken stone that poured down the steep hill-side like a landslip." ^ 1 " The Morning Post," April 3, 1917. 66 THE FRANCE I KNOW Not content with so colossal a work of destruc- / tion as the annihilation of this grand fortress, the barbarians, who seemed to possess an un- limited supply of explosives, proceeded to blow up every house in the village. Marvellously the artist's house escaped complete annihilation. A photograph, taken by a French officer in 1917, shows part of the facade still standing. The remainder of the building has perished. And behind it, where that immense mass of masonry had once stood, there is nothing. I am told that during the German occupation an article on Coucy appeared in a German , magazine. It ended with these words : " We regret to state that the charming little artist's house, situated close to the chateau, has been terribly pillaged by the English " ! To us who know that the English when in full retreat halted there but a few hours, while the Germans remained in possession for two years, such a statement seems slightly lacking in verisimilitude. The winning of the War has from the beginning been the all-absorbing concern of the French; those words la defense nationale have never failed to thrill every heart. Yet other minor matters, not unconnected with it, have from time to time been discussed in all circles : the prevalence of spies, the question of the shirkers (embusques), Boloism, Defaitism, the re-education of the TALKS BY THE WAY 67 wounded, some ministerial crisis, or the activities of " Big Bertha." It was edifying to follow the various spy stories across the Channel : in a Montparnasse studio to be told the not un- familiar tale of the horrible treachery of a German governess employed — according to one in Mr. Asquith's household, to another in Mr. Lloyd George's, to yet another in that of a famous St. John's Wood artist. The officer disguised in British uniform, whose foot was trodden on by some ardent patriot, and who swore in German, seemed strangely ubiquitous; for apparently he indulged in this incriminating language in the Paris Metro, a Leamington tram-car, and an Oxford Street 'bus ! At a luncheon party given by a well-known Parisian hostess the talk was all of the re- education of the wounded. Lying on the drawing- room table was a curious object, a false leg in basket-work. " They used to bring her bouquets, now they bring her legs," pathetically murmured in my ear a fellow-guest. But it was not without a purpose that the wicker-work limb lay there on the table. It was no mere casual litter, like the wicker-work dressmaker's' model of Anatole France, le Mannequin d'Osier, the presence of which in his study so much distressed M. Ber- geret. No, my friend's piece of wicker-work was proudly exhibited to all eyes; and she was as eager to tell as we were to hear the story. The limb had been devised and fashioned for 68 THE FRANCE I KNOW his own use by a humble French soldier, a crippled poilu. To while away tedious months in a hospital ward he had learned basket-work. And as his wounded comrades, limping to his bedside, groaned over the heaviness and dis- comfort of the surgical appliances they wore, there flashed through this nian's brain the thought : " Why should I not out of these willow- wands fashion legs as well as baskets ? " So he experimented on himself. In four days, and with an outlay of eight francs, the leg was made— light, with cushioned lining, adapting itself and fitting like a glove without strap or buckle. His thoughtful benefactress, our hos- tess, at once patented the invention for him. After lunch she introduced to us the inventor, proudly wearing his own invention. At another time all Paris would be talking of the miracles of medicine and surgery worked during the War. In 1916 people were flocking out to Issy-les-Moulineaux to see Dr. Barthe de Sanfort healing burns and frostbites with his soothing wax, known as Ambrine, Then Paris- ians journeyed to Compiegne to see Dr. Carrel's new treatment of wounds. In 1917 they were passing round a series of photographs illustrating the astounding operations known as " Siamese Grafting " ^ that Dr. Laurent was performing at ^ Siamese Grafting is only new in the sense of being applied to bone. In connection with the soft parts it dates back almost to the Middle Ages. TALKS BY THE WAY 69 le Grand Palais, Instead of wasting the pro- jecting fragments of bone which it is frequently necessary to remove from the stump after a Hmb's amputation, Dr. Laurent unites the patient with the superfluous bone to another suffering from the lack of just that osseous morsel. And when, after the lapse of some days, the bone of A has grown into that of B, the doctor effects an amputation which sets the patients free of one another. In 1918 Dr. Laurent's experiments on the heart provided Parisians with yet another sen- sation, opening up a still wider vista of life. For he is said to have restored the heart beats of a dead dog by introducing into it a large blood vessel of a living animal. Each change of ministry opened the flood-gates of conversation, and recalled Mr. Henry James's remark that every French dinner-party resembles a meeting of the National Convention. I happened to be in Paris in the autumn of 1917, when M. Clemenceau was forming his government. Arriving a little early at a lun- cheon party, I found my hostess seated at her telephone. At the other end of the wire was an under-secretary of the former ministry, who gave her the names of the members of the new cabinet as they were nominated. Consequently, when a few minutes later several ex-ministers arrived they learnt from their hostess who were their successors. The talk that morning was all 70 THE FRANCE I KNOW of Clemenceau. Ever full in the limelight, " the Tiger," as he is called, has long been one of the most picturesque figures of French life. Pro- bably more stories have been told about him than of any other living Frenchman. One of the best relates to his early years, when he was combining with the practice of a medical man the functions of Mayor of Montmartre. The double career led to some confusion. One morn- ing, much pressed for time, M. le Maire-Docteur, rushing into his consulting-room, found two men awaiting him and took them both for patients. " While I talk to this gentleman, you, sir, may undress," said Dr. Clemenceau. The second monsieur, somewhat amazed, but hypnotised into obedience, did as he was told. It was only after a shivering quarter of an hour that he had his first chance to explain that what he wanted was employment in the Post Office. M. Clemenceau has always enjoyed the repu- tation of a wit. And the foundation of his ministry provided him with more than one mot I Not a bad one was made at the expense of M. Leygues, the new Minister of Marine. M. Ley- gues, in return for certain services rendered, is said to have become the legatee (legataire) of Henriot, proprietor of the Magasins du Louvre. Asked why he had made Leygues Minister of the Navy, Clemenceau replied : Je ne pouvais pas laisser Leygues a terre (legataire) — ^" I could not leave Leygues on land." TALKS BY THE WAY 71 During my next visit " Big Bertha " was busy at work. The German newspapers were describing the population of the capital as fleeing in' terror, and the rare Parisians who remained as waiting trembling with fright for the entrance of the conqueror. I failed to perceive any such panic. The first explosion I heard was on Good Friday, as I was crossing the Place Vendome. It was the shell which wrecked the church of St. Gervais. The first two persons I spoke to afterwards happened to be men — and not French- men. Kindly considerate of feminine nerves, one tried to convince me that the firing came from a French gun which was practising, the other that there had been no explosion at all. Much less considerate was an aristocratic French lady with whom I was talking a few minutes later. She casually let fall the remark, " You hear la grosse caisse has begun to fire again." I bore this brutal announcement as well, perhaps even better, than might have been expected. And summoning up my courage, went on to spend the evening with two English- women, who were far too concerned about the great offensive to discuss at any length the firing of a few shells into Paris. On the next day, a Saturday, while I was cashing a cheque at my bank, there was an especially resonant explosion. Standing round the counter were three or four men and a woman clerk. The same expression was on every face. 72 THE FRANCE I KNOW We looked at one another with sardonic smiles, as if to say, " There is no doubt about that." At the next thud, a French girl serving at a shop counter remarked quietly : "I hope they are not firing in the Fontainebleau direction. My grandfather lives there. He is all I have in the world. For myself it does not matter." " You should not talk like that," firmly remonstrated one of her colleagues. All day long, from one of the most seriously threatened quarters, a stalwart young French chauffeuse — who, by the way, is the great-grand-* daughter of Victor Hugo — was fetching to the shelters prepared for them outside the city the children of refugees — now, many of them for the second time, flocking into Paris. A charming young mother, who was away in the south when the bombardment opened, leaving her husband behind, hurried back to Paris to her baby boy, who was there with his nurse. On Sunday, at the sound of the first shell, I overheard a concierge say: "Ah! I thought they would not leave us in peace to-day. But it is quite right we should know what war is like and what the little ones {les petits) have to bear at the front." No fear of shells deterred Parisians from going out to the Bois on Easter Monday. If the enemy thought to terrify Paris into desiring a peace without victory, he was never more utterly mistaken. TALKS BY THE WAY 73 " All the cowards and useless people have left Paris," wrote my friend from her hospital during the July bombardment. " The city was never so agreeable. For thOse who remain are all good- tempered and cheerful." The tide of British popularity in France has ebbed and flowed throughout the War. Probably we have never been in higher favour than in the days following the first battle of the Marne. " How glad I am to find myself with your brave conipatriots in the great battle we are fighting for justice and liberty," wrote a French officer to me in October, 1914. " Had it not been for our valiant Allies, Arras would have shared the fate of poor Rheims," wrote another. Alighting from a taxi-cab in Paris, I found myself with nothing in my purse save two sous and a gold twenty-franc piece. I showed the latter to the driver, and asked for change : "What, madame," he exclaimed, "a piece of gold ! " " Yes ! " I replied ; " this was given me in London, at Cook's. You don't see much gold here, I imagine." " No," he answered, " and over there your gold must be getting scarce. You are spending so much of it, and all for us." As the War went on, as the French losses increased and the strain on all their resources became severe, they grew a little impatient of us, especially as they failed to understand why we did not at once adopt universal military service. Certain newspapers, patriotic no doubt 74 THE FRANCE I KNOW but misguided, spared no effort to encourage this state of mind among the French. And they succeeded so well that, arriving late after a long tiring journey at the house of some French friends, I found myself sitting up until the small hours of the morning endeavouring to meet the accusations that England was half-hearted in the War because she did not immediately institute conscription. My ex- planations involved so much praise of the British that I loathed myself for bragging like a Boche. On the whole, however, our French Allies have shown a hearty and enthusiastic appreci- ation of all our efforts. Even when, as was inevitable, we did not always come up to their expectations, their courtesy generally prevented them from expressing their disappointment in my presence. Collaboration in works of mercy and recon- , struction forms a bond of union between us. 1 One might mention many Franco-British labours of love. One of them is a Parisian hospital for blind soldiers run by a French sisterhood, but which has been largely equipped by English ladies. Mrs. Walter Hearne, the wife of his Majesty's Consul- General at Paris, and the Hon. Mrs. Henry Yarde-Buller, besides constantly furnishing the hospital wards with comforts and luxuries, care for the patients when they leave. They establish many of them in homes of their own. Though hardly keeping a matrimonial TALKS BY THE WAY 75 agency, these ladies have been known to find wives for some of the departing patients. And in these cases they have proved fairy god- mothers, including among their benefactions the provision of the layette when a baby is expected. It is delightful to see the mutual esteem and sympathy of these Englishwomen and the French sisters. CHAPTER VII THE PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY The first real sense of the immensity of this stupendous world conflict was borne in upon me when travelling through the north of France in January, 1915. Then' I saw on each side of the railway once familiar fields being rapidly con- verted into a huge military camp. Interminably, so it seemed, a veritable town extended on both sides of the line. In our own country, in this fourth year of the War, such a sight is not uur common. In France it was to be seen not in the fourth year only, but in the fourth month. Emerging from this busy scene, from this maze of huts and sheds, out into the open fields, those broad cultivated stretches such as Millet loved to paint, unbroken by any tree or hedgerow, the discerning eye might there also detect signs of war. Busily intent on agricultural tasks, were family groups — mother, children, grandparents; but those circles were incomplete : the father, the bread-winner, on whose labours in peace- time the family had mainly depended, was invariably absent. A voice from those fields of France comes to me in a letter from a French 76 PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY 77 novelist, Mme. Marcelle Tinayre, "It is a mov- ing spectacle," she writes,^ " to see the ground being tilled by women and children, who are serving their country in their own way. The entire rural population, which has given such a multitude of combatants to the army,^ is admir- able in its courage and resignation. No one complains. No one ever utters the word ' Peace.' You may tell our friends in England that no wavering will come from us, whatever we have to suffer. We shall continue to the end to destroy war, if it ever can be destroyed." Through the length and breadth of France, through country and town during these four long years, has throbbed the pulse of a mighty resolve. And nowhere does it beat more powerfully than in the great provincial cities of the Republic. They have given to the Allied Cause some of its most energetic and gifted organisers. In the first rank of these stands an ardent friend of England, one who has frequently visited London since the War, M. Edouard Herriot, Minister of Transport towards the end of M. Briand's govern- ment in 1917, representative of the Rhone Department in the Senate, and, though he is still young, for eleven years Mayor of Lyons. In this country he was best known before the War ^ La Clairiere — Grosrouvre — Seine et Oise. August 17, 1915. 2 For the percentage of peasants in the French army, see ante, p. 59 and n. 78 THE FRANCE I KNOW as the author of the standard work on that charming Lyonnaise, Mme. Recamier. In early years a professor, of Greek, he may now be regarded as a professor of Energy. In a stirring address at the Sorbonne, in February, 1916, I heard him speak of Lyons as " calm, brave, laborious, working with all its heart, energy, and will for the glorious day of victory." His words fired me with a desire to visit that city. I went to Lyons. And I found it even as the Mayor had said. • " First to face the truth, and last to leave old truths behind," Lyons has ever been in the swirl of things. One of the last strongholds of paganism and still in this twentieth century, in certain circles, clinging to the Catholic Church, it has numbered among its citizens the first Christians, the firgt Protestants, the first anti- clericals, the first republicans, the first com- munists, the first salonnieres,^ the first women university students, and the first syndicalists in France. Now the ancient city is converted into a vast arsenal of war, with wagon-loads of munitions passing constantly over the light railways laid down in the busy streets, along the spacious quays and over many of its twenty-two bridges. Of all this seething activity the Mayor is at once the inspirer and director. Everything ^ In Lyons Louise Labe, in the sixteenth century, estab- lished the earliest French salon. PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY 79 centres in the palatial seventeenth-century Hotel de Ville, once the residence of kings and em- perors. The whole building is a busy hive of workers. Every one of its lofty reception rooms is the scene of some branch of war-work. To the clothing of destitute refugees are devoted those grand apartments which were the abode of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie when they were at Lyons. Little would our British mayors and town councillors, who, at M. Herriot's invita- tion, visited Lyons shortly before the War, now recognise the salle des fetes where they were entertained with so much brilliance. For that magnificent reception hall is now completely transformed : it is a vast work-room, where ladies of the city, directed by the Mayoress, pack the five hundred parcels which Lyons despatches daily to French prisoners of war and soldiers at the front. There is no town in the world, not even Paris, where patriotism is more of a religion than Lyons. And the Lyonese, therefore, can have felt it no desecration to convert the chapel adjoining the salle des fetes into a veritable larder, to store it with slabs of bread, tins of meat, jars of jam, fringes of sausages, all destined for the defenders of la patrie. When the War broke out the townhall was about to be invested with a peal of bells. The bells themselves were ready, so also was the mechanism of the belfry ; but the latter, alas ! 80 THE FRANCE I KNOW had been made in Belgium, where it fell into the hands of les Boches, Consequently the city remains without its carillon. From the Hotel de Ville all kinds of war activities radiate through the city. Second to none is that re-education of the wounded in which Lyons has led the way. The first school of re-education in France was the " ficole Joffre," opened under the authority of the Lyons Municipal Council on December 16, 1914. It is situated in a historic house, formerly the seat of a religious order in the Rue Rachais. Later a second school was opened at Tourvielle, on that superb height of Fourvieres, rising one thousand two hundred feet above the sea, crowned by the miracle-working image pf Notre Dame and dominating Lyons as Fiesole does Florence. When I visited these two institutions, in February, 1916, some four hundred crippled men were receiving instruction in gardening, toy- making, shoe-making, book-binding, book-keep- ing, modern languages, tailoring, surgical instru- ment-making, and even wireless telegraphy. While I was at La Rachais school there came into the office a professor of Esperanto, who proposed to open a course on that universal language. What was decided I don't know. But one would imagine that such an idea might appeal to one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world and to the Mayor, who, before the War, was an ardent PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY 81 internationalist. Perhaps at La Rachais Es- peranto may replace Russian, for I hear that the pupils are finding the difficulties of that language almost insuperable. The school at Fourvieres is in the fine old farmhouse of Tourvielle surrounded by some seventeen acres of ground. Here, in June, 1915, was instituted a horticultural department. At first the president, Mme. Monod, daughter-in- law of the great historian, the late Gabriel Monod, was not sanguine as to the capacity of crippled soldiers for heavy outdoor work. She expected to find those who had lost an arm or a leg capable of nothing but the lighter forms of gardening. Then the difficulty of procuring labourers for the heavy work and the eagerness of the crippled themselves to undertake it induced her to let them, try. When I visited the school they had just dug up and prepared for the plantation of fruit trees about half an acre of ground. And the moral effect of this achieve- ment upon the spirits of these heroic workers shone on their faces and expressed itself in their hopeful talk. They were delighted to find them- selves capable of such hard work.^ There is another school for re-education four miles out of the city. Nestling in a hollow of the ^ For further details conceniing these schools, see The Treatment of Disabled and Discharged Soldiers in France, Report by Captain Sir Henry Norman, M.P. (H.M. Stationery Office, 1917. 4d. nett), pp. 17-19. o 82 THE FRANCE I KNOW beautiful Lyonnais Mountains, is the Agricultural College of Sandar, now run in connection with the South-Eastern Agricultural Syndicate. There I saw numbers of stalwart young peasants, many of whom had sacrificed a hand or an arm in their country's service, rising superior to their in- firmities by means of various locally manu- factured contrivances, which enabled them to clip hedges, hoe turnips, plant or dig up vege- tables, and perform many other agricultural tasks. One healthy-looking youth, whose .right arm had been amputated, was proud to show me how with one of these instruments he could dig, rake, hoe, and, when his work was done, throw his tool over his shoulder like any two- armed man. The scientific training, which for the first time in his life he had received at the college, filled him with new hope for the future. Though belonging to that class of peasant pro- prietors which in France is generally inseparable from its native soil, he declared his intention of emigrating. " Our bit of land in Meurthe-et- Moselle," he said, " is not enough for my brother and me. I shall go to Morocco." It is impossible for me here to describe all the various activities of this great city, initiated most of them by the Mayor's inventiveness and energy. In two other directions, however, we must not neglect to follow them. From the beginning of the War M. Herriot has realised that the Allies in their resistance to Germany PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY 83 must employ the economic as well as the military weapon. For the use of the former few cities are better equipped than Lyons, situated at the cross-roads of France, at the junction of numerous landways and waterways, notably of two great rivers, the Rhone and the Saone, connecting it at once with Switzerland and with the Medi- terranean Basin. As a nucleus of this economic warfare and as a rival to the Great Fair, of Leipzig, the Mayor and the manufacturers of Lyons conceived the idea of reviving the old Fairs of their city. It was at a desperate moment of French history, during the Hundred Years' War, when the English invader dominated northern France, that the mediaeval Lyons Fair obtained its charter from the Dauphin. So now, the revival of the Fair takes place during another great war, and is initiated also at a critical period of the struggle, in March, 1916, during the heroic defence of Verdun. " While busy over our preparations," wrote the Mayor, ^ " we trembled. In our brief intervals of leisure, we bent anxiously over the military map; Douaumont, Vaux, Bethincourt, sacred names, how our hearts leapt at the sight of them ! Nevertheless not unconnected appeared the heroic drama over there and our commercial battle. Less gloriously, yet not without merit, we pursue the same object : we strive to liberate 1 Agir, by Edouard Herriot (Payot, 1917), p. 895. 84 THE FRANCE I KNOW and protect the spirit of France, her products and her labour." When I visited the city, preparations for the first Fair were well advanced. Gracefully con- structed booths in light woods already lined the banks of both rivers. Manufacturers of the Allied and Neutral countries showed themselves eager to take advantage of this opportunity of displaying their wares and of increasing their business. No less than 1342 took part : 1199 were French, one Alsatian, fourteen British, four Canadian, forty-three Italian, seventy-three Swiss, two Spanish, one Dutch, one Russian. The brilliant success of the 1916 Fair, as well as those of the two succeeding years, surpassing all the hopes of its promoters, proves that this institution has come to stay. The Fair con- tributes to raise high that tide of business pros- perity .which began to flow in Lyons after the depression of the first few months of the war. Towards the end of 1915 the silk industry, largely, through American and British purchases, revived amazingly, the majority of the looms thrown out of action on the outbreak of war resumed work, and those that remained were adapted to the woollen industry, so that Lyons is rapidly taking the place of Roubaix, once the French Bradford, now in German occupation. It is not surprising that this enterprising city, which never closes its eyes to the main chance, should have been one of the first to make good PROVINCES ORGANISED FOR VICTORY 85 use of its German prisoners. They are now busy on works of construction, which strikes had con- siderably retarded before the War, for Lyons is the stronghold of syndicalism. Two hundred prisoners I saw at work on an enormous stadium on the Rhone bank a little way out of the town. It was one of the Mayor's flashes of genius to set " his Boches," as he calls them, to this task, which, he says, is to be " War's gift to Peace." For here in the race-courses which the enemy himself is constructing, in the football fields, gymnastic grounds, tennis courts, in the raised seats for fifteen thousand men, with promenades for another twenty-five thousand, the Boche must see that France, far from being exhausted, is preparing to amuse herself on a stupendous scale after victory. I hardly know which interested nie the most — the colossal circle of the stadium, looming like another Colosseum out of the river mist, or- the camp of its constructors. The prisoners looked well and sturdy. Their rations are those of the French soldier. Responding to the word of command, when we entered the long sheds where they sleep and eat, they stood to attention, each man at the foot of his mattress. Dogged brutality was stamped on most faces, defiance on a few, but some appeared merely sheepish, while one, tall, thin, with blue eyes gazing benevolently from behind spectacles, looked the typical German professor, a veritable Teufelsdrockh. Even in 86 THE FRANCE I KNOW captivity Germans cannot exist without music, and the prisoners showed me the violins they had themselves ingeniously fashioned out of nothing but cardboard. Bound to England by close commercial ties, we number among the citizens of Lyons some of our most faithful friends in France. They have shown their appreciation of England's part in the War by naming one of their bridges after Lord Kitchener and by erecting a hospital in memory of Nurse Cavell. The Mayor never tires of impressing upon the Lyonese the import- ance to world civilisation of the continuance of the Entente after the War. CHAPTER VIII IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS During a quite recent visit to Paris it was my good fortune to be entertained by a French lady, whose house is an intellectual centre. Having been temporarily forbidden by her doctor to use her eyes, she was accustomed to spend every evening after dinner cutting the new volumes received from her bookseller. Every evening her swift paper-knife went in and out among the pages, laying them open for her secretary to scan in the morning and to mark the passages which her liseuse would read aloud in the afternoon. New books were always pouring in. Neither scarcity of labour and paper, nor the proximity of the Germans to the capital seemed to stem the tide. Many are writing books, and to facilitate their distribution and sale in these difficult war- \ days French publishers resort more and more to ^ co-operation. They are grouping themselves into various societies, the most important of which is ^ la SociStS d" Exportation des iSditions Frangaises, \ including most of the large publishing firms, and issuing a monthly catalogue. There has also lately been inaugurated in the Boulevard St. 87 88 THE FRANCE I KNOW 1 Michel an enterprising publishing house and agency, la Renaissance du Livre which supplies booksellers with new books and which issues monthly a lively and useful little leaflet, calling itself " Organe de Bibliographic et de Bibliophilie." Now in March every year, at the great Lyons Fair,^ instituted in 1916 as a rival to the Leipzig Fair, representatives of these and other societies, together with authors and printers, meet in congress, le Congres du ^ lAvre.^ To do anything like justice to the increasing stream of new books within the narrow limits of this chapter is^ of course, impossible. We can only dive down here and there into the flood, bringing up a miscellaneous packet of prose books and booklets, and concluding with a handful of novels. With regard to poetry we must content ourselves with referring the reader to Mr. Edmund Gosse's admirable articles on contemporary French poets which have . appeared from time to time in the " Edinburgh Review." More perhaps than ever before in France is there a tendency to issue books in series. One of the most solid of these, which Professor Charles Andler is editing for Alcan, deals with aspects of Pan-Germanism. Appealing to a more popular ^ See ante, pp. 83, 84. 2 See VAvenir du Livre Frangais, by M. Louis Hachette, a director of the great publishing house. (" Revue des Deux Mondes," May 1, 1917.) IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 89 public are the numerous war-series of Berger Levrault and M. Bernard Grasset's informative weekly 75 cent, pamphlets, " le Fait de la Semaine," treating of public affairs, both at home and abroad. Here eminent authors discuss such domestic problems as the ideal police or tell their readers what they ought to know about the history of Alsace-Lorraine or political develop- ments during the War in the Near East, the great European countries, and America. While M. Grasset's publications represent the opinions of the Left, those of the Right find expression in the books of la Grande Librairie Nationale, Here M. Charles Maurras, that gifted contributor to the royalist newspaper, " T Action Frangaise," with his customary dogmatism, lays down the conditions of victory in four volumes. The melting-pot into which this War has plunged the state system of Europe, inevitably calls for numerous works on diplomacy. Some are retrospective like the Commandant Weil's two large volumes, les Dessous du Congres de Vienne (Payot), others prospective like the solu- tion to the Turkish question propounded by the anonymous author of le ProhUme Turc (Fayard),^ others again combine the two points of view. To this last class belong three illuminating works from the pen of a brilliant diplomatist, M. Augusta ^ In the English translation The Turkish Enigma (Chatto & Windus), the author, Count Leon Ostrorog, emerges from his anonymity. 90 THE FRANCE I KNOW Gerard, sometime French Ambassador in China and later in Japan. In la Triple Entente et la Guerre (Calmann Levy), Nos Allies en Extreme Orient (Payot), Ma Mission en Chine (Plon), to be followed almost immediately by Ma Mission en Japon, M. Gerard describes the significance in the past of the entrance of these two great eastern powers into the arejia of world politics and the significance for the future of Germany's exclusion, since the War, from the Pacific Basin. In France, as in England, the importance of forming a League or Society of Nations is re- garded as second only to the winning of the War. On this subject two suggestive pamphlets have recently -appeared : one, " les Principes de la Societe des Nations," by M. Ferdinand Buisson, the President of the League of the Rights of Man, and another, " la Societe des Nations," by a distinguished barrister, M. Andre Mater. In the latter we find a much more detailed and comprehensive scheme for the construction of an international state system than is contained in any English publication on this all-important theme, at least than any other with which I am acquainted. M. Mater is also the author of another well-documented work, Projet de Legisla- tion sur les Operations et Ameliorations d'Interet Collectif, which, with other works on the same subject — for example, M. Andre Macaigne's Notre France d^apres Guerre, will be of considerable value when the time comes to rebuild the IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 91 civilisation which now seems falling about our ears. That harvest of new books through which wandered my hostess's deft fingers, on those spring evenings, included several reprints and translations. When she came to the reminis- cences of her friend Renan in Jules Lemaitre's posthumous volume of Contemporains (SociSte Frangaise d" Imprimerie et de Librairie), the book- cutter had hard work not to disobey her doctor's orders. The progress of the knife slackened, to quicken again when she took up the weighty volume of Sidney Webb's History of Trade Unions, translated by an ex-Under Secretary of Blockade, the late M. Albert Metin. But there was another audible slackening when the turn came of Mr. Britling, with his French title of M, Britling commence a voir clair,^ Mr. Wells's novel was the only new work of fiction I saw in that house. Its mistress, though a friend of many distinguished novelists— of Flaubert and of Victor Hugo, for example— has possibly never been greatly addicted to novel reading. Now, at any rate, the actualities of this life-Tand-death struggle so completely absorb her as to leave neither time nor inclination for works of pure imagination. But we English readers who would know ^ Since the appearance of this translation in volume, it has been running as a serial in the daily newspaper, ** I'Humanite." 92 THE FRANCE I KNOW France in war-time cannot afford to neglect her war-time novels. For in the France of to-day it is as it has ever been — or at least for two centuries : the novel presents the clearest and the most faithful picture of the nation's life and thought. On the covers of to-day's novels we seek in vain certain names constantly recurring in times of peace : most conspicuous by its absence, as we have already indicated, is the name of Anatole France. In the immense output of war-novels other familiar signatures, however, we find in abun- dance : Abel Hermant, the Margueritte Brothers, who now write separately, J. H. Rosny (aine), Marcel Prevost, the Tharauds, Tinayre; and then the long procession of the B.'s (strange the persistence of that initial among French novelists) : Barres, Bazin, Bertrand, Bordeaux, Boulenger, Bourget,^ Boylesve. And side by side with those are new names— the B again : Barbusse and Benjamin, but also Geraldy,^ Jaloux,^ Larbaud,^ Marbro, Meyran, Sonolet.^ Let us open four of these novels. And, place aux dames, we will begin with Meyran and ^ For Bourget's war hovels, le Sens de la Mort, LazarinCy Nemesis, see " la Revue Hebdomadaire," June 15, 1918, article by Felicien Pascal. 2 La Guerre Madame^ published anonymously in France, but signed in its English version. 3 Fumees dans la Campagne, par Edmond Jaloux. * EnfantineSy par Valery Larbaud. ^ Pout titer le Cafard, par Louis Sonolet. IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 93 Marbro, both of whom, veiling their identity beneath * pseudonyms, have chosen to disguise their sex by the ambiguous prenom of " Camille." It was inevitable that not in France only, but on both sides of the Atlantic, Camille Meyran's volume of two war-tales, botton Connixloo and rOubliee (Plon Nourrit), should attract consider- able attention. For this writer, who by the way, is Taine's grand-niece, contrives to blend with a fine and delicate literary art a faculty for bold, impressive description, and what Carlyle calls " creative perspicacity." Certain figures and scenes in these stories stand out like some Italian primitive, so simple is their drawing, so magical their presentment. They fix themselves in the mind's eye : the austere. Puritanical Connixloo, bell-ringer and cobbler, his voluptuous, mother- less daughter Cotton, who is fair as a Rubens model, her meeting in the harvest-field with her broad-shouldered', lame lover, Luc, the black- smith, the idyll of their passion, with its tem- pestuous undertone, ever threatening the tragedy, which ultimately flames forth and attains horrible but heroic consummation during and partly through the horrors of the German invasion. Then, winding through it all, there persists that conflict, old as humanity, between the flesh and the spirit, between Cotton's sensuality, which comes to her from her beautiful mother, and the ascetic's craving for martyrdom which she had inherited from her father. 94 THE FRANCE I KNOW Perhaps the most memorable scene in the book is where the childless Gotton receives into, her home her lover's five children, rescued from unspeakable terrors after their mother had fallen a victim to the invader's f rightfulness. Gotton fed them. Gotton undressed them, kissed them and put them all five, side by side, into her bed. She and Luc slept on the floor. But every quarter of an hour she rose to look at the children as they slumbered, the eldest flushed, restless, feverish, the others sleeping peacefully. With the barren woman's child-hunger, she gazes caressingly on their infantile beauty, on the gold and auburn curls mingling on the pillow. The thought strikes her that in a few days they might forget her who had born and suckled them, that they might even transfer their affections to their father's mistress. " But no," she reflects, " that would be impossible." And, rather than stand between the father and his children, Gotton, in an act of supreme self-sacrifice, effaces herself. " Having gone to the remotest extremity of love, she likewise went to the remotest extremity of expiation." The tragedy is too long to be told here. But it is in effect this : taking upon herself the burden of another's deed, she offers herself up as a scapegoat and by her death delivers her village out of the invader's avenging hand. On a plane less heroic, though not less pathetic, is the second story in this book, the tragedy of rOubliee, the orphan girl, isolated in a town IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 95 occupied by the enemy. Repatriated by the invader, on her return to Paris she finds her lover married to another woman. Camille Marbro's le Surivant (Fayard) chal- lenges comparison not only, as the preface indicates, with VEnigme de Givreuse, by J. H. Rosny {aine), but with an English novel, Miss Rebecca West's Return of the Soldier, While Miss West's story deals with that phenomenon with which the War is rendering us familiar, with a lapse of memory and its embarrassing results, Camille Marbro treats of something even less explicable, something which in more ordinary times one might incline to regard as preposterous. Yet in these days when we realise as never before that " we are such stuff as dreams are made of," may we not. regard with indulgence the boldest flights of the imagination into that unexplored, shadowy and mysterious region of our being, whence flow tendency, inclination, all that we define as temperament ! With such elusive things is concerned Camille Marbro's remarkable psychological study. In the case of Miss West's soldier, memory retrogrades fifteen years. In the French novel one man's memory persists in another's body. A bullet carries a fragment of the brain of a dead lieutenant, Jacques Breton, into the skull of his friend, the sub-lieutenant. Marcel Lauret. The fragment apparently bears with it the mind of its original 96 THE FRANCE I KNOW proprietor, Breton, which henceforth inhabits and dominates Lauret's body. Consequently the reader is confronted by an unheard-of phenomenon, a most curious personaUty, one in which the mind is Breton's, while the body and its senses are Lauret's. What happens to Lauret's mind under these fantastic conditions we are not told. But there are indications that it had never before been very active. The author makes the best of this anomalous situation, using it to reveal facts of a deep psychological significance, cleverly tracing the twists and turns, the shocks and surprises of human temperament. First, she describes how this astounding and perplexing transformation gradually dawns upon Jacques Breton (for, all through, the living personality is distinctly Breton's) as, in Lauret's body, he lies in his hospital bed and emerges from prolonged unconsciousness. His brain whirls, that is the old brain in the new body. Yet he does not lose his reason. But, fearing to be thought mad, he never confides the terrible truth to a single soul. Every one persists in regarding him, the serious, reserved Jacques Breton, if such we may still call him, as being in reality the much more sensuous, impetuous and virile Marcel Lauret. In the semblance of Marcel Lauret, Breton wooes and marries his own wife, acts as stepfather to his own child and grows jealous of himself because IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 97 his wife loves her new husband with a more passionate ardour than she had ever displayed to the old. But subtler still than this situation is the battle which Jacques Breton's cold-blooded soul, if one may use such a term, has to wage with Marcel Lauret's ardent physical desires, which are, alas ! sexual and alcoholic. Of such a cruel enigma no solution is possible this side of the grave. And the story breaks off where this dual personality returns to the war. An equally puzzling enigma is that of Givreuse by J. H. Rosny (aine),^ Here, briefly, if we follow it, is the story : Pierre de Givreuse, a soldier wounded on the western fr.ont, drags himself in a fainting condition into the neigh- bouring laboratory of an obscure but marvellously gifted physicist, Antoine de Grantaigle. This man of science, after years of experimental research, had acquired powers as amazing as any ever attributed by the credulous to mediaeval sorcerer or magician. He had learnt, by means of mysterious electric currents or energies, to effect wonderful bipartitions, at least, as far as atoms were concerned. But Pierre de Givreuse is to experience to his undoing that this faculty may extend further than to mere atoms. Shortly after his arrival in Grantaigle's laboratory, an exploding shell destroys the chateau, buries the physicist beneath its ruins, but leaves a re- duplicated Pierre de Givreuse to be, in his 1 VEnignie de Givreuse (Flammarion) 98 THE FRANCE I KNOW bifurcated person, one being in two distinct bodies, the hero or the heroes of this astounding story. In roughly summarising it thus, we have begun at the end, by accounting in a measure for the mystery, which the author artistically leaves unexplained to the tantalised reader until the last pages of the novel. Rosny has been called the French H. G. Wells. That is to pay him a great compliment; for in few of his books does he attain to the convincing, enthralling power of his English contemporary. While possessed of a powerful imagination, he has not the faculty of carrying one along on its wings. He rarely succeeds in gripping >the reader. Like the author of God, the Invisible King, he grows more and more occupied with the Beyond or the Perhaps. But his mechanical theory of Immortality, hinted at in this novel, fails to excite our curiosity, or to make us pant with impatience for the promised further develop- ment of the theory. * We now leave these mysteries of consciousness and identity for more solid ground. One of the latest elected to a seat among " the Immortals," M. Rene Boylesve (whose real name is Tardiveau), gives us a novel, Tu n'es plus rien (Albin Michel). Unlike the collection of short and slight stories. Cinq sous de Bonheur (Calmann Levy), which preceded it and which was hardly worthy IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 99 of the author, this book may be ranked with Madeleine Jeune Femme as one of M. Boylesve's .best and most characteristic works. First, we must congratulate the author on his title. It fits the subject like a glove. The heroine, Odette, a beautiful young wife, is bereft of her adoring husband in one of the earliest engagements of the War. In the beginning a complete egoist, incapable, even in her noblest moments of considering anything save in its relation to herself, Odette in the end completely reverses that position; she comes only to con- sider her ego in relation to the incalculable number of those who are outside it. Je ne suis plus rien, she cries : "I am nothing save the servant of sorrow." The successive steps of this renunciation, completed when out of pity Odette marries a blinded soldier, the author depicts in his subtlest and most delicate manner. It is precisely in this kind of treatment that he is always at his best. By the way, he casts many a sidelight on the French war-time atmosphere both in Paris and in a seaside military hospital, modelled doubtless on that of Deauville, where the novelist himself worked as infirmier during the first months of the War. In the portrayal of his secondary characters, he penetrates deep into human nature, revealing 100 THE FRANCE I KNOW how various are the effects of the War on different temperaments. He contrasts, for instance, the patriotic Blauve family, who, with marvellous stoicism, soar to the pinnacles of self-sacrifice, with the self-centred Clotilde, whose one aim is to erect a rampart behind which she may shelter from every echo of strife. But to my mind — and pace that eminent critic of " le Temps," M. Paul Souday,^ who finds him a bore — the most interesting character in the book is the middle- aged La Villaumer. Being beyond military age, Villaumer does what he can behind the lines, and, above all, he never ceases to observe and to reflect. Those who have carefully followed this author's work will have no difficulty in recognising in La Villaumer's attitude towards life that of M. Boylesve himself. In a country where partisan- ship ^ runs riot, the new Academician has ever succeeded in maintaining his neutrality. As far a& religious and political factions are concerned, he remains the most unlabelled of living French- men. Yet who can entirely escape from every stream of tendency? Who can avoid being sucked in by one current of thought or another ? Among writers in all countries both before and during the war, there runs a dividing line, on this or that side of which they tend to range themselves. His position with regard to such 1 Feuilleton '' du Temps," Les Livres, 23 mai, 1918. IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 101 a line may be indicated by an author's answer to this question : Which should one venerate most in the conflict of diverging human ten- dencies—the heart or the head, reason or instinct, intelligence or sentiment? While such authors as Anatole France and Julien Benda are on the side of reason, writers like Barres declare openly for the heart, instinct, sentiment. They glorify the subconscious and set little store on intelli- gence, considering it quite superficial because of recent development in humanity's evolution. Boylesve takes a middle course. Through La Villaumer, he reminds his readers that he has always prized intelligence above everything. ' But at the same time he renounces the hope that it can ever govern mankind. " Cruelty, absurdity, injustice, superstition, the shedding of rivers of blood," he believes, " may be the inevitable conditions of that mystery which we admire under the name of Lifey ^ If such be humanity's unhappy lot, what remains for it, he asks, but to fall back upon the heart and to cultivate its virtues, affection and pity ? ^ ^ Compare a" passage in Professor Gilbert Murray's Presidential Address to the Classical Association, Religio Grammatici, p. 47 (London : Allen & Unwin. 1918), where he writes of " man's way onward to the great triumph or the great tragedy.'''' * Tlie eighteenth-century moralist, Vauvenargues, har- monised the two opinions when he ^v^ote : " Great thoughts proceed from the heart." In other words : to be truly great thought must be fired with emotion. 102 THE FRANCE I KNOW A more pronounced, though hardly a more * hopeful devotee of intelligence is Henri Barbusse, whose books are more discussed than any which have appeared in France since the War. Before August, 1914, few had heard of him. It was the brilliant success of his war-book, le Feu, which made him suddenly famous, and encouraged him to re-publish two volumes which had already appeared before the War : a philo- sophical novel, VEnfer (1908), and a collection of short stories. Nous Autres (1914). To the grey monotone of Boylesve's work it would be difficult to discover a more glaring con- trast than the pages of VEnfer, which are almost as lurid as the title. Not a few British readers will consider this book, as indeed its title might suggest, to be nothing more or less than satanic. They will be tempted to treat it as Lord Morleyin his Recollec- tions, tells us that, during a railway journey, he treated several French novels : he threw them out of the carriage window, devoutly hoping that the dwellers in that countryside did not know how to read. We wonder whether VEnfer, despite its Zolaesque audacity, would thus have suffered in Lord Morley's hands. At any rate we happen to know that one English publisher, at least, has refused an English version. On the other hand, from Maeterlinck and Anatole France it wins high praise. Few, however, will deny IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 103 that one needs to be the most ultra of realists to tolerate the intrusion into a work of art of long passages only suitable for some pathological or biological treatise, such for example, as those which describe in detail the preying upon the human body of various forms of cancer and the progress of decomposition in cemeteries. The obsessing sexuality of the book one may regard as symptomatic of that exaggeration which the author makes one of his characters find so " fruitful in discussion." Despite the hero's assertion si je suis trouble au contact des amours, c^est a cause d'une grande pensSe et non pas d'un instinct, one doubts whether it is mind alone that renders it impossible for him to look at a woman without hearing within himself the sex cry, without conceiving what he calls un affreux commencement du bonheur. These important reservations, however, do not shake our conviction that no one honestly concerned with ultimate questions will fail to be favourably impressed by the candour and boldness with which they are faced in this book. It is this courage, the courage of Rabelais, Voltaire, Renan, Anatole France and many others, combined with a radiant lucidity of mind which renders the best French literature the most thought-compelling in the world. In this book, Barbusse, with relentless scalpel, seeks to 104 THE FRANCE I KNOW lay bare Vimpudeur de la verite^ to shame "the angels' veiling wings." He probes deep into the mysteries of life, birth, love, disease, and death. His hero, a bank-clerk, looking through a chink in his hotel bedroom wall, observes them as they are enacted in an adjoining chamber. They suggest to him deeper problems still, questions of the divine, the infinite, of Paradise, and Hell. He tries to free them from the bondage of tradi- tion. He endeavours, succeeding all too well, to strip from them every convention of piety and of decency. He aims at constituting himself a weigher of hearts. And all the while, he is haunted by a sense of merely losing himself on the surface of things. Tepele le profond de la vie, mais je me sens perdu a la surface du monde. While, through his hole in the wall, he witnesses secret* things, while he listens to the cry of the flesh and watches its recoil, he also overhears philosophic discussions; he observes illusions dominant, then decaying; he becomes con- vinced of the unceasing changeableness and the utter loneliness of man. And what is the conclusion of the whole matter? Nothing either new or really final. It may be summarised in Descartes' ^axiom : Je pense done je suis. Beyond that dictum Barbusse refuses to go. Assuming what he calls a Kantian attitude, he writes : Je ne sais, si Vunivers a en IN THE BOOK WORLD OF PARIS 105 dehors de moi une realite quelconque. Ce que je sais, c'est que la realite n'a lieu que par Vinter- mediaire de ma pensee, et que tout d'abord, il rCexiste que par Vidie que fen ai. This book, wherein mau has often appeared little better than a brute wallowing in the toils of sexual desire, concludes by exalting him to the position in which others place God. " We possess the divinity," he writes, " of our great suffering. And our solitude, with its travail of ideas, of tears, of smiles, in its perfect extent and radiation is inevitably divine. ... It is the realisation of this which glorifies and inspires us, which beautifies our pride and which in spite of everything will console us. when we have grown accustomed, each in his own poor way, to occupy the place which. once was God's." Already before the War not a few French critics pronounced the intellectualist stream in French literature to be running dry. Julienv Benda, the author of a widely read novel,' V Ordination,^ the opponent in numerous volumes of Bergson's philosophy, is one of the ablest French intellectualists of to-day. In his last book, les Sentiments de Critias,^ after proving that the German, with his adoration of the will, is the most dangerous enemy of intelligence, ^ Emile Paul, 1913. English translation by Gilbert Canaan, The Yoke of Pity, 1913. * Emile Paid, 1917. 106 THE FRANCE I KNOW he writes bitterly:^ "Ah, I know well who to- morrow, in that battle of parties now opening, will be the most despised. It will not be the Protestant, nor the Catholic, nor the Jew, nor the Frenchman, nor even the German ... it will be the Intellectualist.'^ But may not the attention now aroused by the republication of VEnfer—Si work ignored on its first appearance ten years ago— indicate a turning of the tide ? ^ Page 108. See also Benda's article in the " Figaro," June 80, 1917, entitled En Marge cfun Discourse the discourse in question being that delivered by Alfred Capus when he was xeceived into the Academy. Here Benda refers to the present generation as hostile to the scientific spirit toute rSv^rente de mysticiU et de lyrisme, adding, " But we dare not presume to judge it, for one thing dominates all others : it has saved France." CHAPTER IX POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE Nowhere do differences of opinion cut more deeply than in France. This is because the French are a serious nation. Their intensity of feeUng is no less than their lucidity and audacity of thought. They cannot understand our Anglo- Saxon indifference and phlegm. They are amazed to hear that in England members of hostile political parties meet in one another's houses and even break bread together. In France it was nothing short of a miracle, the miracle of Joan of Arc, Veternel miracle frangais, when, in August, 1914, all differences were sunk, when at la patrie^s call every echo of internal strife, religious, political, social, was silenced. Uunion sacree, therefore, is no mere empty term, no m6re flourish of rhetoric. Had it not existed in reality the French would long ago have been out of the War. They could never through four interminable years have resisted the most formidable foe it has ever fallen to the lot of any nation to face. Had Vunion sacrie not been a fact they must inevitably have succumbed ere 107 108 THE FRANCE I KNOW now to war- weariness, or fallen a victim to those numerous snares laid by the Boches with the intention both of dividing them among them- selves and detaching them from their Allies. Nevertheless, there are things which even the sacred union, even the miracle of Joan of Arc, is powerless to accomplish. It cannot blunt ■ the acuteness of the French mind nor dull the intensity of French feeling. It cannot make all Frenchmen think and feel alike. As long as France remains a living nation she will stand " united yet divided." As long as Frenchmen think and feel they will range themselves in different political and religious camps. To give some idea of this varied and often confused political scene — the religious scene we describe in another chapter — is the object of the following pages. First, we must note that in more than one respect the world of French politics differs from our own. The deputies meeting in the Palais Bourbon do not, like those who assemble at West- minster, belong to one of two or three great political parties, but rather to one among a con- siderable number of groups, which may them- selves be sub-divided, and which are constantly now breaking off from, now merging in, one another. Passing from the conservative right to the progressive left, we shall find this kaleido- scopic character of the political scene accentuated and these subdivisions of groups increasing. POLITICAL PARTfES IN FRANCE 109 There is nothing unusual in such conditions. For, while it is inevitable for a certain uniformity to characterise those who, obedient to the voice of habit, tradition, and authority, follow the beaten track, it is equally inevitable that idiosyncrasies should abound among those bold pioneers who in thought and deed venture into " fresh woods and pastures new." The energy and initiative of the latter frequently proceed from and result in combativeness and nonconformity. But this does not necessarily weaken their party allegi- ance. " What I object to in the socialist party is, that you lack unity, you are always quarrel- ling," said a distinguished French philosopher in my hearing to a well-known socialist lady. " No, my friend," was her reply; "you interpret our differences too seriously. We resemble a large family, in which one or other of the members cannot fail at times to be annoying. Some one talks too loud, another sneezes, another coughs. It irritates his brothers and sisters, they object, rather angrily perhaps. But such trifles are far from destroying the family affection or unity." ^ Some light on the various shades of opinion in the socialist party before the War has been thrown by M. Levasseur in his compendious ^ Nevertheless, as we go to press, there are ominous signs of an inevitable split in the socialist party. Whether the majoritaires and fninoriiaires can continue to act together will be decided by the great socialist congress summoned for October. It looks as if the numerical proportions of the sections were changing, and as if minoritaires were about to become maforiiaires. 110 THE FRANCE I KNOW work, Questions Ouvrieres.^ But to see them as they appear in this fourth year of the War one should read the reports of the sociaUst and syn- dieahst congresses which met in Paris in July 1918. " Le Journal des Debats " ^ presents, from an impartial outsider's point of view, an excellent picture of the present sections of the socialist party, which appear to have superseded the older divisions of Independent and Unified referred to later in this chapter. On the extreme left we now see a small but noisy group of pacifists, or " kienthaliens," so-called because, early in the War, they conferred at Kienthal in Switzerland with certain .German socialists. These " kien- thaliens " constitute the extreme wing of the minority socialist party, which is led by Longuet. Then come the centristes, led by Marcel Cachin, and further to the right the majority section led by Albert Thomas. This last is represented by that powerful newspaper, "I'Humanite," which is edited by Renaudel. Of a slightly centriste tinge is another socialist daily newspaper, " I'Heure," while the evening paper, " le Popu- laire" — edited by Longuet and inscribed with the words of Anatole France in his introduction to Jeanne d^Arc, Vunion des travailleurs fera la paix du monde — is frankly minoritaire,^ While all, save the " kienthaliens," agree as 1 Rousseau, 1907, p. 887. 2 j^iy 17^ 1918. ^ As indicated on the previous page, these terms are now reversed : Thomas' party is minoritaire, Longuet's majoritaire. Marcel Cachin,instead of Renaudel, now directs " I'Humanite." POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE 111 to the importance above everything of la defense nationale, the sections differ on the questions of an international working-men's conference, advocated by Longuet, opposed by Thomas, and of the AUies' attitude towards the Bolsheviks, whom the majority condemn, sympathising with Kerensky, but with whom the minority incline to be sympathetic. This War, however, has taught us not to attribute too great importance to French party divisions. In the face of supreme national danger? we know they count for little. In France, as in England, we have seen old party barriers pulled down. We may also discern, if we look closely, new ones being set up. Only the other day we heard the conservative Barr^s, President of the League of Patriots, loudly acclaim that stalwart radical, the French Prime Minister, for his campaign against difaitisme. Coupling the name of Clemenceau with that of a fiery patriot with whom the Prime Minister once fought a duel, Barr^s cried : " Long live Clemenceau ! Long live D^roul^de ! " i Broadly speaking, French political parties seem to be at present about seven in number. Passing from left to right, they comprise syndical- ists, independent socialists, unified socialists, radical socialists, radicals, liberals, or moderate republicans, and royalists. Familiar to English readers as will be some of 1 See " Echo de Paris," July 15, 1918. 112 THE FRANCE I KNOW these terms, others— syndicalists, independent socialists, unified socialists, radical socialists — may require a few words of explanation. Littre, in his great dictionary,^ defines the word syndic as "one elected to guard the interests of a corporate body. There are syndics in working- men's societies." Syndicat he defines as " a union of capitalists interested in the same enter- prise." But since Littre's day the term has beeti extended to include unions of workmen, in some respects resembling, but in others widely differing from, our trade unions. The term Syndicalisme, which does not occur in Littre, has come to denote the policy of these various syndicats, united in what is known as la Confederation Generale du Travail (generally expressed by the letters " C. G. T."), which was founded at Limoges in 1895, and which seven years later absorbed the Federation des Societes Ouvrieres, which had been founded in 1880. In the C. G. T., representing now no less than one million workers, centre the activities and the doctrines of syndicalism, voiced by the newspaper, " la Bataille Syndical- iste." The avowed object of the movement before the War was the transference of industrial capital from the masters to the men. As a means to this end the syndicalists depended not on any political machinery, with which they professed to have nothing to do, but on direct action through strikes, above all through a general strike. 1 Ed. 1869. POLITICAL. PARTIES IN FRANCE 113 During the Malvy Trial of August, 1918, M. Jouhaux defined the after- war programme of the C. G. T. as maximum de production dans le minimum du temps pour le maximum de salaire. The division of sociahsts into Independent and Unified formally occurred at the Amsterdam Socialist Congress, in 1905, over the question of the participation of socialists in bourgeois govern- ments. The independents were those who were prepared to participate. Led by Millerand, Briand, Viviani, and Augagneur, they withdrew from the ranks of their brethren. The latter, under the leadership of Jaures, now began to call themselves " unified." Meanwhile a large fraction of the radical party, which, while still adhering to the principle of private ownership, was prepared to go some distance in the direction of state socialism, tagged the word " socialist " to its title and called itself parti radical socialists The tendency in France for more than a genera- tion has been towards grouping together in what is known as le bloc some of the least divergent parties. On such a union many French minis- tries have depended for their support. And to- day it is not difficult to discover a principle on which a group of parties otherwise distinct, if not hostile, may unite. Thus, for instance, as recently as April 4, 1918, radicals, radical socialists, independent and 114 THE FRANCE I KNOW unified socialists and syndicalists, meeting on the common platform of a desire to make this the last war, and to establish a League of Nations, formed what is known as la Coalition RSpublicaine. Sympathising with if not actually members of the union are the veteran radical aiid ex-Prime Minister, M. L^on Bourgeois, and the socialist leader and ex-Minister of Munitions, M. Albert Thomas. Both of sterling worth, there are no two men in France who are more respected and more influential. M. Bourgeois is the author of the first modern French book to advocate a League of Nations, Pour la Societe des Nations (1910). He is the president of the commission recently appointed by the French Government to inquire into the conditions under which a League of Nations might be formed. M. Albert Thomas is well known in England, where we have listened to his brilliant oratory and read his illuminating articles contributed to the London Press. In France, the influence he exercises over the socialist party entitles him to be regarded as the successor of his friend Jaures, with whom he collaborated in that monumental work VHistoire du Socialisme, But to go further back. During the first six years of this century a union between the various socialist parties and the syndicalists succeeded in forcing the Government to carry out a series of labour reforms : viz. the establishment of an eleven-hours day, of a weekly rest-day, of com- POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE 115 pulsory assistance for the aged and incurable, of a system of old age pensions, and, most impor- tant of all, of a labour ministry. At the same time there are — or there were before the War— now, as we have said, all parties, except the kienthaliens, rally to the cry la difense nationale d'ahord — political principles which cut athwart politics. Such were nationalism and internationalism, the struggle between Id raison d'Etat, upheld by la Ligue des Patriotes, pre- sided over by M. Maurice Barres ; and les droits de Vhomme, professed by la Ligue des Droits de VHomme et du Citoyen, of which M. Ferdinand Buisson is president. The nationalist party, represented by three leading newspapers : the royalist " 1' Action frangaise," the republican " Gaulois," and " Echo de Paris," included, be- sides the entire royalist and conservative groups, a large number of moderate republicans. This republican section of the nationalist party is also represented in the Press by " le Figaro," and to a certain extent by " le Temps," though in certain respects, as, for instance, in its advocacy of free trade, the latter differs from the main body of party opinion. The internationalists included, besides the socialist and syndicalist groups, certain radicals of the type of le Baron d'Estournelles de Con- stant, and M. Yves Guyot, who was the apostle of free trade. The Baron d'Estournelles, who had represented France at the various Hague 116 THE FRANCE I KNOW Conferences, founded, in 1903, the French parlia- mentary group for international arbitration, which included deputies of almost every shade of political opinion, from the moderate republican- ism of M. Barthou to the socialism of Jaures. The internationalist party was divided into those who, like Jaures, the founder and editor of " I'Hu- manite," put la patrie first, and those who, like M. Gustav Herve, put la patrie nowhere. Again, we only refer to pre- War days, for the War has completely transmogrified M. Herve, converting him from an internationalist and pacifist, who suffered imprisonment for his anti-militarist opinions, into a patriot, almost as fiery as Derou- lede. The newspaper he edits, once " la Guerre Sociale," is now " la Victoire." ^ Some principles, while they divide members of the same party, may unite members of other- wise hostile groups. Thus we find that in one respect the French political organism describes a circle (again I refer only to ante- War days), for on its two extreme wings syndicalists and royal- ists joined hands to advocate recourse to violence in the pursuit of their widely divergent but equally revolutionary political aims. Not all syndicalists, not all royalists would have gone so far. But there is little doubt that many were prepared to do so. ^ Other French newspapers have changed their titles during the War, notably that which M. Clemenceau directed until he became Prime Minister. Originally " TAurore," the paper became '* I'Homme Enchaine." It is now " I'Homme Libre." POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE 117 The syndicalists were divided into Syndicats Rouges, approving of violence, and Syndicats Jaunes, who were content with constitutional methods. Some independent socialists, led by the most learned among them, Georges Sorcl, author of Reflections sur la Violence, sided with the Syndicats Rouges, But Jaures condemned their attitude. At a famous' trial, that of Bousquet- Levy, in June, 1907, Jaures advised the working- men to employ legal methods alone. Car la violence, he added, est un signe de faiblesse passagere. Certain well-known syndicahsts, notably M. Briand and M. Jules Guesde, who, in their early years, approved of violence, have since altered their opinions. It was in 1899 that M. Briand made the famous speech, which won for him the title of " Father of the General Strike." " Enter the battle with the voting ticket, if you think well," he counselled the workers; "but," he added, "if you enter it with pikes, sabres, pistols, and guns, far from disapproving of your action, I shall feel it my duty, should the necessity arise, to take my place in your ranks." Few ironies are more striking than that with which Briand's career presents us. Ten years after his invention of the General Strike, he, the sometime syndicalist, became Prime Minister of France, the responsible guardian of the social organisation which sjoi- dicalism proposes to destroy. During his term of office he had to deal with a strike, that of the 118 THE FRANCE I KNOW postal employes, which if not general was at least the most formidable ever known. And Briand suppressed that strike by mobilising the workers themselves, a course of action which, in his syndicalist days, he had often said the bourgeoisie would never dare to adopt. The royalist gospel of violence counts for less than that of the syndicalists, because the royal- ists, despite rumours to the contrary, are a feeble folk. It is true that before the War many young university students in Paris thought it chic to pose as royalists, to boast of being camelots du roi, and of belonging to the royalist society V Action frangaise. In fashionable restaurants they liked to drink the health of King Philip VIII, as they called the Due d' Orleans. But I doubt whether their opinions were anything more than academic; and I wonder whether they would have raised a finger to withdraw him from his retirement in England. The other day, when I was making a purchase in a French shop in London, the French salesman, leaving his post behind the counter, mysteriously came round to my side, and much to my astonishment, whispered in my ear : " Would you Uke to see the King of France? There he is," pointing to an elegant person wearing a typical French beard, but otherwise accoutred in the top note of fashion. An eye-witness describes in ''I'Action fran- 9aise," a pretty scene said to have been enacted in London on France's Day. On the threshold POLITICAL PARTIES IN FRANCE 119 of Westminster Cathedral, at the close of the Requiem Mass for French soldiers who fell on the field of battle, from the hand of a Zouave bearing the tricolour, le Due d' Orleans is said to have taken the national emblem and, kissing it, to have cried : " Let me, after thirty-two years of exile, embrace the colours of my country." " Dead and buried," was the verdict of a stalwart old French royalist, a friend of the late Comte de Paris, when I questioned him not long ago as to the future of the royalist movement in France. And I believe we should never hear of the royalists at all were they not led by that abusive journalist, le dimentfurieux, L^on Daudet, and by an author, Charles Maurras, who is no less a master of invective, though, when he keeps away from the field of political and religious controversy, he can write with restraint, dignity, and charm. These two, with the nominal editor, Henri Vaugeois, control the royalist newspaper, " r Action fran9aise," the organ not only of the • society of that name, but, as it announces, of le iiationalisme inUgral, In its columns before the War violent action was frequently advocated. " We must form energetic minorities," wrote Maurras, " the crowd always follows them. It is they who make history. We must establish monarchy by force." ^ " We must create such a movement of public opinion as will be intense enough, when the day comes, to cause a great 1 " L' Action fran9aise,'* September 24, 1918. 120 THE FRANCE I KNOW rising," cried Vaugeois. That was in 1900.^ And ever since, the day of that " great rising " has been growing more and more remote. It was never more remote than in the present hour. Never in the forty-eight years of its existence has the Third RepubHc been so firmly estab- lished as to-day. Whether it be the miracle of Joan of Arc or the involuntary miracle of les Bodies, France, throughout the War, has pre- sented a united front to the enemy. Whatever her diversity of opinion in certain directions, she stands now, as always, the bulwark of civilisation against barbarism. ^ " L' Action fran9aise," September 1, 1900. CHAPTER X RELIGIOUS OPINION IN FRANCE If it was a blunder to regard French energy and endurance in resisting the foe as. betokening a new France, it would be no less a blunder to deny that certain ideals and tendencies now discernible in the French people point to a future unlike any other chapter in French history. " France is the country of re-awakenings and recommencements," wrote, as we have said, one of her living statesmen. And on the autho- rity of a greater Frenchman we may add it is in periods of convulsion rather than of calm that those re-awakenings occur. Une revolution de trois jours, cried Renan, fait plus pour le progrds de Vesprit humain qu'une generation de VAcademie des Inscriptions, In his Avenir de la Science this acute philosopher expresses the belief that toutes les grandes creations de la pen- see sont apparu£s dans des situations troublees, '* What an epoch was the sixteenth century ! " he exclaims. " The cradle of the modern spirit ! The century of Luther, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Ariosto, Montaigne, Erasmus, Galileo, 121 122 THE FRANCE I KNOW Copernicus ! ^ Yet that century was the century of perpetual conflict, religious, political, literary, scientific." Though we may find it difficult to point to the Raphaels, the Luthers, the Galileos of to-day, many are beginning to realise that in the birth of new ideas and new tendencies our present generation may not be inferior to theirs. While in the political, economic, social, and international world of France to-day, we may easily discover tendencies which point in no uncertain direction, in the religious world, it is not easy even for the shrewdest prophet to predict the future. Few will deny that for twenty years before the War the intellectual classes in France were moving towards a Catholic revival.^ At first the War not immaterially accelerated and ex- tended that movement. The emotions evoked by so great a national crisis found expression in religious fervour. Catholics lost no opportunity of pointing to the patriotism and valour dis- played by the priests who fought side by side with laymen in the trenches. " See," they cried to their agnostic fellow-countrymen, refer- ring to the separation laws and those against the ^ Why does Renan omit Shakespeare ? Is he not entitled to rank side by side with these giants of art, Hterature, philosophy, and science ? Does he not essentially belong to that sixteenth century in which he lived the greater part of his Hfe ? * See ante, p. 25 ; and for a discussion of the causes and extent of this revival see " Introduction " to French Novelists of To-day, second series, by Winifred Stephens (John Lane). RELIGIOUS OPINIONS IN FRANCE 123 religious congregations, " how these ecclesiastics whom you persecuted forget their wrongs and lay down their lives for their country." But those who spoke thus were careful to forget that when it was first passed Catholics had bitterly resented the law of 1905, which had obliged priests and pastors to serve in the army. Nevertheless, far be it from us to question the patriotism of the French priesthood. It is recog- nised by all the Allied Governments, notably by our own. For the last two years our Govern- ment has been sending French ecclesiastics, among them at least two bishops and one arch- deacon, to Ireland in order there to counter- act the pro-German tendencies of the native priesthood. That the Catholics should be eager to suck every advantage from this turn in the religious tide was perfectly natural. Not unnatural also was their tendency to exaggerate its extent. They were too prone to ascribe the wounded poilu^s eagerness to attend mass to religious zeal rather than to the inevitable desire for a break in the dull routine of hospital life. To the same religious sentiment . they attributed his wearing of religious medals and symbols, to which in reality he was often attached merely because they were the gifts of his women relatives and friends. Misinterpreting these signs, and confident that the nation was about to return to the bosom of 124 THE FRANCE I KNOW the Church, French Catholics began to give themselves airs, to assume a pontifical manner, which, so I am told by an impartial observer, reacted against them. This, combined with what was believed to be the Pope's pro-German attitude, began, about the second year of the war, to impose a check on the Catholic Reaction. To-day, however, there are indications that an extremely well-organised propaganda may be producing a new Catholic revival. No matter of what shade of opinion, orthodox and heterodox alike, ^ the one outcry of French Catholics is for unity.- They deplore the bitter- ness of religious divisions. They demand la paix religieuse. But the peace they desire is a pax caiholica; and I doubt whether such a peace be possible in France either to-day or to-morrow. This does not mean, however, that the much- vaunted union sacree is nothing but an empty term. Were it not something more than that the French would, as we have said, never have been able so persistently, so strenuously, so gallantly, to resist the most formidable foe they have ever had to face. It is true that their ardent patriotism, Veternel miracle frangais^ le miracle de Jeanne d'Arc, has enabled them, in this supreme hour to sink their differences of opinion, 1 See the ex- Abbe Loisy in Mors et Vita (Emile Nourry), p. 71. He mourns over the religious strife of the last years of the nineteenth century. RELIGIOUS OPINIONS IN FRANCE 125 to sink but not to forget them. M. Alfred Loisy strikes to the very heart of the matter when in Mors et Vita} he writes : On pent mime dire que, dans Vordre de la pensee, qui est une partie non negligeable de la vie humaine, tous les ponts sont coupes entre la societe contemporaine et VEglise catholique. . . . Dans Vordre du senti- ment et de Vaction, les communications ne sont pas interrompues. If this be true of the present, what of the future? Though orthodox Chris- tianity may be loosening its hold on the thought of France, it would seem that for a considerable time, perhaps for several generations, a strong current of sentiment may run in the direction of some form of Catholicism. We may refer again to M. Loisy, whom, let us remember, a papal decree has banished from the Church. He believes ^ that il faut aux dmes des foyers autres que ceux d^une science dont la lumiere ne rechauffe pas. And he holds that, '' despite its antiquated doctrine, its overbearing hierarchy, and its frequently puerile mysticism, Vtlglise catholique en France est encore apparemment le mieux organisee de ces Foyers, celui qui donne encore a beaucoup d^entre nous, du moins a cer- tains moments, la meilleure et la plus chaude impression de Vhumanite^ In these words M. Loisy no doubt speaks for a large number of Frenchmen, many of whom, ^ Mors et Vita, p. 75. 2 Md., p. 125. 126 THE FRANCE I KNOW though they have long ceased to be practising CathoHcs, though they would hesitate to sub- Scribe to any Catholic dogma, have still, as a Frenchman put it to me, '' their Catholic mo- ments." But, on the other hand, there are many others — Protestants, who, though insignifi- cant in number, play an important part in the intellectual and political life of the nation, and the descendants of the old irreconcilable anti- clericals of the Voltaire or Gambetta type — whom tradition and sentiment lead away from the Church. They can have no " Catholic moments," for their ancestors, in the case of the Protes- tants for centuries, in that of the anti-clericals for generations, have been the bitter opponents of Catholicism. Some, like Anatole France, who had a Voltairean grandmother and Catholic parents, inherit both strains, clerical and anti- clerical. Consequently, while the intelligence of France rejects Catholic doctrine, the heart of an im- portant, if not a large, part of the French nation no longer thrills with Catholic sentiment. And when in many directions one observes the dying down of the old bitterness between clerical and anti-clerical, one inclines to believe that the stiff est battles for freedom of thought have been already won. Consequently young radicals and socialists of to-day are less aggressively anti- clerical than their elders. In the French Parlia- ment jokes at the expense of Christianity are RELIGIOUS OPINIONS IN FRANCE 127 less frequent than they were twenty years ago. Shortly before the War, when, during a parlia- mentary debate, M. Barr^s was urging the Govern- ment to preserve the religious fabrics of the country as national monuments, M. Beauquier, a free-thinker of the old-fashioned Voltairean type, indulged in a vulgar jest at the expense of the divinity, whereupon a^ more modern agnostic, M. Marcel Sembat, retorted : ' If you were a monument, Beauquier, M. Barres would want to preserve you, you are so antique. Your ideas, let me assure you, have had their day." A more recent sign of the religious tolerance which is creeping over France may be found in a letter addressed in June, 1918,^ by M. C16men- ceau (president du Conseil, or, as we should say, Prime Minister), to the Cardinal Lu^on, Bishop of Lu9on, in reply to his request that the Govern- ment would order official prayers in all the churches. The present Prime Minister of France was in earlier years one of the most virulent of anti-clericals, the friend of Gambetta, to whom is attributed the famous cry le clericalisme voila Vennemi, and of Paul Bert, who used to describe Catholic influence as le phylloxera noir. Yet, under the reconciling influence of Vunion sacrie M. Clemenceau, while pleading that the law prevents him from granting what the Car- dinal asks, has so far forgotten his old hatred as to assure his correspondent that he appreciates ^ See " rHumanite," June 28, 1918. 128 THE FRANCE I KNOW the high motives which have inspired his request. " Especially," he writes, " I entreat you to believe that the sympathy of the Government, as of all Frenchmen, is entirely with all those who, in whatsoever direction, wish in thought or in deed to contribute to the triumph of la patrie. It is in this direction that we shall realise that unanimity of heart to which we all aspire." M. Clemenceau's words probably represent the nearest approach to intellectual unity that the French nation is capable of achieving. Few advocates of free thought would wish it to go further. And they will agree with the Catholic, M. Victor Giraud, who, having remarked that differences of belief cut more deeply in France than elsewhere, asks mais cela meme n'est il pas a Vhonneur du genie frangais ? ^ Such differ- ences arise from the fact that the French are a serious nation. It is their frank facing of funda- mental problems that arouses the old passions and prejudices which in other countries often exist unsuspected because they are undisturbed. So long as primitive emotions continue to be' confronted with more philosophic views, so long will there be divergent opinions in France. It would be a bad sign for the country did. that divergence disappear. Unity in that case would mean stagnation or retrogression. Very striking evidence of the new religious ^ La Troisieme France (Hachette), p. 26. RELIGIOUS OPINIONS IN FRANCE 129 spirit now pervading France may be found in a lecture, le Fond Religieux de la Morale Ldique, delivered by M. Ferdinand Buisson, President of the League of the Rights of Man, to la Ligue de I'Enseignement, on the 13th of March, 1917.^ Here M. Buisson pleads for something more than tolerance of adverse opinions. Nous demandons mieux que la tolerance : le respect pour la conviction d^autrui ; plus encore, la sympathie pour ce quHl y a de verite dans les expressions imparfaites de la verite, " We may take," he continues, " all the con- flicting ideas and sentiments, aspirations and interests which divide mankind, and we shall not find a single one in which all the good is on one side and all the evil on the other." The purely negative and critical position which in isome minds might result from such a con- sideration is far from being that of this lecture. The duty of every free thinker, says M. Buisson, is to examine his heart and see whether he has discovered a morality superior to that of the Gospel. And he concludes that, rejecting the supernatural and the biblical system of punish- ments and rewards, lay morality cannot do better than turn for inspiration to the Sermon on the Mount. Above all things must those to whom is entrusted the education of French youth beware of destroying one ideal without setting up ^ Paris : Fischbacher. K 130 THE FRANCE I KNOW another and a higher. For this reason, ,in secular schools, any irreverence on the part of the children towards the services and the church of their family should be discouraged. " Jeers and hostile criticism stick fast in the mind of the child. And one cannot be sure that he will replace the letter by the spirit, ritual by deeds, mechanical prayers by exaltation of soul, worship by duty." " Thus," continued the lecturer, " before I praise a young man brought up in orthodoxy, who boasts that he believes in nothing, I should wish to be sure that at least he believes in his conscience and in duty ; for in truth had he lost faith in those he would be more to be pitied than if he had retained all his superstitions." Such are the high moral ideals, such is the broad spirit of sympathy, animating the best secular teaching in France to-day. M. Buisson is far from agreeing with certain agnostic teachers, with M. Maurras and M. Barres, for example, who, while rejecting Christianity for themselves, urge it upon other people. The highest ideals of lay morality, according to M. Buisson, should suffice for all classes of men. De toute evidence ; la seule loi possible pour tous c^est celle de la sincerite absolue. In common with the great socialist leader, Edouard Vaillant, the President of the League of the Rights of Man, looks forward to the day. wh6n school-children shall be taught the various RELIGIOUS OPINIONS IN FRANCE 131 phases of man's mental and moral evolution, the various conquests achieved by man's mind from the Bronze Age to the Hebrew Prophets, from them to Pericles and Plato, and so on to Christianity and the development of modern ideas. Above all things, instead of being taught to despise the fetiches and superstitions of humanity's childhood, they should be encouraged to regard them as an endeavour on the part of the savage to explain the mysterious forces of the universe. One can only hope that the day may not be far distant when so elevating a programme of instruction may be introduced into all our schools. CHAPTER XI A NEW FRANCE Les vrais chef-d^ oeuvres smit nes dans les larmes ; les institu- tions puissantes out He forgoes en des heures de arise. — Herriot, Agir., 184. In July, 1918, at the close of the annual congress of the Confederation Generale du Travail, the Secretary, M. Jouhaux, appealed to the workers of France to collaborate in that reconstitution of society which is being born in the sufferings of war (la reconstitution sociale qui s^enfante dans les douleurs de la guerre).^ It is difficult for us in this country to realise how stupendous is the task that these words portend : " The reconstitution of society," by a nation the manhood of which, in numbers more vast than we can tell, has fallen on the battlefield : " The reconstitution of society," in a country whose ten richest departments paying before the War one-eleventh of the Republic's taxes, now through four years occupied by the enemy, lie in ruins, their very soil ploughed up by the shells of contending armies. The mere thought of a work so enormous might well paralyse the 1 '' Le Petit Journal," August 21, 1918. 132 ::••.:: ••' • -a: :::rr::i:M:P i- A NEW FRANCE 133 activities of any people less courageous than the French. But one of the greatest marvels in these days of wonder is the infinite energy of this nation. There never was a more absurd caricature than the German newspaper's descrip- tion of Parisians as awaiting panic-stricken, during the spring offensive of 1918, the coming of the conqueror. Not only are our gallant Allies straining every sinew to liberate la patrie from the incubus of the German bully, but with their far-seeing imagination, fixing their gaze on the future, as well as on the present, they prepare for the blessed days of peace. Already they are laying the foundations of a new France — not in the reconquered territory alone, but throughout the land, in town and in country. So tremen- dous a rebuilding humanity has seldom, if ever, been called to undertake. It involves, besides the reconstruction of homes, villages, and towns destroyed by the enemy, the setting straight of many a disorder the War has at once revealed and aggravated. Countless were the schemes for national recon- sti-uction I heard discussed in Paris drawing- rooms and round Paris dinner- tables while " Big Bertha " was busy at work and the Great Offen- sive at its most desperate moment. Ranging through vast fields, administrative, economic, educational, and hygienic, they filled in the intervals of talk about the unity of command and the danger of the Germans entering Amiens. / 134 THE FRANCE I KNOW These varied projects can be but briefly noticed here. Any adequate account of them would require at least a whole volume. Some reforms long over-due, like the bitterly opposed income tax, instituted by the laws of December, 1916, and July, 1917, the War has already accomplished. Every Frenchman and every foreigner domiciled in France is now required to furnish a declaration of his income, and, if it be over 3000 francs, to pay a tax of 12 J per cent. Those living in the army zone are necessarily exempted for the present. But they will be called upon for a declaration within three months of the cessation of hostilities. In the way of many other necessary improve- ments, the obstacles, even apart from the War, are neither few nor slight. The most serious arises from the over-centralisation of French government. All parties agree in demanding the reform of administration. The bureaucracy, that grand Napoleonic machine, of perfectly symmetrical design, in which the minutest wheels received their impulse from Paris, now that the personal rule on which it depended is removed, grows sluggish and wasteful. " Initiative is discouraged; routine rules supreme; mediocrity is a condition of regular promotion, and favourit- ism is rife." ^ There is hardly a French writer on public affairs who does not deplore the inertia ^ A. L. Guerard, French Civilisation in the Nineteenth Century^ p. 68. A NEW FRANCE 135 of government offices, especially lamentable in a country where the civil servant is supreme, where "he is determined to change nothing, though everything needs changing." ^ " What we need," writes a Frenchman, " est un me- canisme administratif souple, adaptS aux realites de noire epoque.^' ^ Countless are the instances of industrial enterprises retarded or destroyed by official delays. Here is one of them : re- corded in " le Journal Officiel " of the 21st of February, 1917, it occurred during one of the most serious industrial crises of the War : the coal faniine in the winter of 1916-17, which arose from internal difficulties of transport com- plicated by a falling-off in the coal supply from Great Britain, owing to the commencement of the German submarine campaign. During the bitter cold of those winter months even the most expensive Paris hotels discontinued their central heating, while in the humbler walks of lif^ people were suffering terrible hardships. It seems almost incredible, tjierefore, that during that very time a French coal merchant should have been vainly appealing for permission to erect a steam crane to discharge on to the quay at Honfleur such cargoes of fuel as he was able to obtain. Yet so it was; and through nine interminable months he was compelled to carry 1 Pierre Mille, " The Observer," July 14, 1918. * Biard d'Aunet, la Politiqtie et les A jf aires (Payot, 1918), p. 23. 136 THE FRANCE I KNOW his request to no less than eight pubhe authorities one after the other, ranging from the Hon- fleur Chalnber of Commerce to the President of the RepubHc.' And by the time he received the necessary authorisation the worst of the crisis was past. This incident alone would suffice to prove the crying necessity for some measure of decen- tralisation if France is to develop her natural wealth and derive full advantage from the indus- try, the thrift, and the ability of her people. In one direction a beginning has already been made. It is the outcome of a tendency visible in France before the War and affecting not only economics, industry, and commerce, but also literature and art. I refer to the movement known as " Regionalism." It branches far and wide. With its literary aspect, represented by the work of Maurice Barres for Lorraine, of Le Goffic and Anatole le Braz for Brittany, of Mistral for Languedoc, we are not concerned here. But we shall attempt briefly to indicate some of the effects of regionalism on economic, industrial, and educational reform. The ten- dency, discernible as we know not only in France, but also in Spain, England, Ireland and elsewhere, is towards the equality or self- dependence of regions, but without any sug- gestion of separatism. One might describe regionalism as the principle of self-determina- tion applied to local government. In France, A NEW FRANCE 137 regionalism is represented by four distinct schools,^ two of which, as they are purely philosophical and aesthetic, we may pass over. The remaining two are la Ligue d^ Action fran- gaise, with M. Charles Maurras as its moving spirit, and la Ligue de Representation Professionelle, / presided over by the Deputy M. Jean Henessy. U Action frangaise we have already consi- dered as a royalist organisation.^ From that point of view it is comparatively unimportant. Much more significant is its regionalist tendency, as represented, for example, in an interesting . book, VEtang de Berre?' by M. Charles Maurras. ' The volume derives its title from an Arlesian proverb, Avangons toujours et nous verrons Berre. Berre is a Proven9al village. VEtang de Berre has much the same significance as Lord Rose- bery's parish pump. In the -book which bears this title we find the objects of the regionalists clearly stated by one of themselves — " Before everything we demand the liberty of our Communes. We desire them to control their own officials and to regulate their work. We protest against their being mere administrative districts. We want them to live their indi- 1 vidual lives, to have a personality of their own, ^ See The New French Regionalism, article by Huntley- Carter in the " Contemporary Review," July, 1918. 2 See ante, p. 118. . 5 Paris : Edouard Champion, 1915. Sold for the benefit of the wounded of the XV^th Corps. 138 THE FRANCE I KNOW to become, so to speak, the mothers of their sons, inspiring them with the virtues and passions of their race. " That our Communes should be united by chance, according to the mere whim of some soldier or official we consider lamentable. Their relations should be determined by affinities, historical, economic, national and — if rightly regarded — eternal . " Let us speak frankly. We would liberate from their departmental cages the souls of those provinces, whose glorious names we, Gascons, Auvergnats, Limousins, Bearnais, Dauphinois, Roussillonais, Provenyaux, Languedociens, are so proud to bear. . . . We are autonomists, \ we are federalists; and if anywhere in northern France there are those who desire to join us, to them we hold out our hands. Recently a group of Breton peasants demanded for their illustrious province the re-establishment of the ancient estates. We are with those Bretons. Yes, we \ desire an assembly . . . (merely for local pur- poses not entrenching on the central authority) at Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpelier, also at Mar- seilles, or at Aix. These assemblies should regulate our administration, our public works, our country courts, schools, and universities. If it be objected that a nation can never retrace its steps, we reply : ' That is true. But our intention is not to copy the past, but rather to complete and develop it.' A NEW FRANCE 139 "... For, after all, it is the national interest that inspires us. We believe that the realisation of our ideas would result in the intellectual and moral renaissance of the south. But we desire something more : the complete development of the wealth of our soil. Provinciahsm alone can carry through the great enterprises contemplated for centuries, but never executed : such, for example, as the canal through Gascony and Languedoc uniting the Atlantic with the Medi- terranean, the canal from the Rhone to Marseilles, through Provence and Dauphine. . . . And who knows ! perhaps the economic disputes now rending France might then be settled for the good of each and of all." » It is precisely the settlement of those economic disputes by new provincial or regional assemblies, designed to replace the present departmental Conseils Generaux that is the object of the other regional school, which is directed by M. Henessy; It counts among its adherents members of all political parties, from the syndicalists to moderate or conservative republicans. The regional repre- sentatives in these assemblies are to be ranged in six categories according to occupation : agri- culturists, manufacturers, merchants, and mem- bers of the three liberal professions. M. Henessy submitted his proposal to the Chamber in 1913. / It proceeded no further than discussion. But since the War, in October, 1915, the Government 140 THE FRANCE I KNOW has adopted it in a modified form. And through- out France there now exist regional economic 1 councils designed to promote the economic in- terests and to develop the economic resources of each particular region. It is possible that these councils may form the nucleus for a new and more elastic administrative system, in which "the labour union, rather than the city would be the social unit " and " the political hierarchy would be replaced by economic federalism." ! In certain districts, notably in Lorraine, the work of these councils is ably seconded by .' regional banks, which make a point of encourag- ing and supporting local enterprise. These banks, however, have not been general enough to correct two disastrous national tendencies. One is a spirit of excessive caution which leads to hoarding; the other, the opposite extreme, the glamour of the unknown, which leads to rash speculation. So far has the spirit of caution gone in France, that I know of large landed proprietors who, mistrustful of banks, refuse to renounce the traditional stocking. One of these considers her diffidence well justified by the difficulty many of her friends experienced in obtaining money from their banks on the outbreak of hostilities. We in England are accustomed to regard this financial timidity as inherent in the French race. We ascribe it to their vivid imagination con- juring up before them all manner of terrors THE NEW FRANCE 141 that never occur to our duller Anglo-Saxon minds, which require to run bolt up against a calamity before they can realise it. French writers, however, incline to regard this economy, amounting frequently to parsimony, as having become more pronounced of late, especially since Guizot's famous admonition Enrichissez- votes: It was then, writes a Frenchman, that cette tendance bourgeoise a commence a se con- stituer en dogme social et politique.^ How blight- . ing an influence such a tendency exercised on commercial and industrial enterprise will readily be imagined. At the opposite extreme was another type of Frenchman. He, far from wishing to hoard, united to his cupidity a passion for adventure. Scorning to lay up his talent in a napkin, he risked his capital abroad. France thus became the world's banker, lending enormous sums, not only to Russia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey, but to Austria and Germany. " It is horrible to ^ think," wrote a contributor to " I'Action fran- 9aise " on the 31st of July, 1911, " that in case of war, those very shells which slaughter our sons will have been paid for with French money." ^ ^ See le Devoir de VAraenty by Novus. No. 7, " le Fait de la Semaine " series. Paris : Bernard Grasset. Novem- ber 24, 1917. * This subject has been ably dealt with by numerous French writers. To mention three only : Novus, op. cit, ; Biard d'Aunet, op. cit., p. 18 passim ; Andre Cheradame, la Crise frangaise (Plon Nourrit, 1912), pp. 547 et seq. 142 THE FRANCE I KNOW * Meanwhile French commercial and industrial \ enterprises languished for lack of this talent which was being invested abroad. There are signs, however, that the War is already bringing the nation into a middle course between parsi- mony on the one hand and rash speculation on the other. For the War is teaching us all the I intimate relation and interdependence of personal i and public affairs. It is bringing home to us the obligations of capital. In successive war- loans it is offering every citizen an investment which is at once patriotic and personally advan- tageous, which in the words of M. Albert Thomas,^ realises the ideal of a financial enterprise for the general good which shall also benefit private savings ; Des comhinaisons financieres qui per- mettraient tout a la fois de realiser Voeuvre col- lective et de remunerer Vepargne particulidre. The forty-four and a half milliards of francs subscribed in the two first war-loans prove that the French are beginning to recognise this com- munity of personal and public interest. Education of the right sort may help to demon- istrate this important truth. There are few countries where education is so well appreciated as in France, where the mass of the townsfolk are so cultured, or possess so wide a knowledge of their own history and so profound a respect for correct language. How far culture has per- meated the whole urban, and especially Parisian, 1 Quoted by Novus, op. cit, 24. A NEW FRANCE 143 population may be illustrated by an incident of my own childhood : a friend who was to take me to le Theatre fran^ais was prevented from^ coming at the last mofnent; she sent as my chaperon her femme de menage, a worthy person who had never received anything but an elemen- tary school education and who had never before set foot in the national theatre. I expected her to be bored. But no, she sat enthralled through that somewhat heavy tragedy of les Burgraves, and at the end astonished me by exclaiming : " What a pleasure it is, Mademoiselle, to hear one's language so well pronounced." I doubt whether such an incident could have occurred in any country but France, and even in France outside Paris. In the country it is different. There educa- t tion lags far behind that in the towns, despite the admirable efforts of the village schoolmaster, who is generally a fine type of citizen. A Frenchwoman of my acquaintance was recently, appalled to find village children on the 14th of July who were totally ignorant of what the national festival celebrated. Many thoughtful Frenchmen now demand that the whole of the national education should be recast from top to bottom : first, that professors and teachers should be better paid. Their salaries in England are poor enough, but not so inadequate as in France, where the average salary of a university pro- fessor is £200 a year. Secondly, they demand 144 THE FRANCE I KNOW the setting up of a complete educational ladder, enabling the poorest child, if suitably endowed, to share with the richest every educational advantage. Finally, many think that the aims and principles of education are wrong, that while cultivating the memory it neglects to 1 foster the faculty of observation. " We are too much dominated by le scribe accroupi,^^ writes a statesman, who was formerly a professor of Greek. ^ " Do you believe," he asks, " in clog- ging a child's mind with all the adventures of the Pepins and all the deeds of Louis le Debon- naire? Would it not be more useful for him to know the clauses of the Treaty of Frankfort? - Were it not better to give hirn some knowledge ' of space rather than of time, for the latter can only be effectually learnt from experience? Our baccalaureat (examination corresponding roughly to the Oxford or Cambridge Senior) has filled France with ignorant encyclopaedias, good for anything, ^. e, good for nothing." Though educational reforms would help to remove some of the evils from which French country life is suffering they need to be accom- panied by agrarian, hygienic, and moral changes. ' How little France, the most completely agri- cultural country of western Europe has done for her rural districts comes home to those who strike away from tourists' beaten paths, away from the trim farms of the north, the cider ^ M. Edouard Herriot, ex-Minister, Agir., pp. 30 et seq. A NEW FRANCE 145 orchards of Normandy, the rich vineyards of Touraine, into the tumble-down hamlets, the untidy peasant holdings, and the depopulated villages of the south and of the eastern marches. Here we realise the aptness of the title, The Dying Countryside {la terre qui meurt), which M. Bazin has given to one of his novels. No doubt one of the main causes of this de- pression is to be found in the land system. Most reformers agree that agrarian changes are imperative if la patrie is to resist the severe economic strain which will be put upon her for many years after the War. Old Quesnai's motto pauvre paysan, pauvre royaume is as true of the > Third Republic as it was of Louis XIV' s kingdom ; for nearly two-thirds of the thirty-nine millions j of the present population live in the country. And it was a French philosopher, Le Play, who demonstrated the nation's dependence on the corn-sack, which the peasant brings to market with such pathetic regularity.^ There is no better proof that the fresh breeze of a new life is blowing over the fields of France than the seven r bills proposing agrarian reform now before the French Chamber. We in this country have been accustomed to see the small peasant holding of France held up to us as a model. But even models may * For an exposition of Le Play's social theories and their application to present conditions, see The Coming Polity by P. Geddes and V. Branford (Williams & Norgate, 1917). L 146 THE FRANCE I KNOW degenerate, and the most excellent systems may be abused if carried too far. This has happened in France. The division of heritages, according to clauses 826 and 832 of the Code Napoleon, has resulted in an infinite distribution (mor- cellement et parcellement) of the land, until certain holdings to employ a current hyperbole are no broader than a scythe {n'ont plus que la largeur de la faucille). Moreover these tiny heritages are frequently dispersed in different parts of the commune, rendering impossible that motor cultivation and motor traction which are now the first necessities of successful farming. That the French Government recognises this is proved by a provision of September, 1915, permitting the formation of state-aided Syndi- cats de culture mecanique. Already many years ago, when the evil was not so pronounced as it is to-day, Balzac saw the danger. For into the mouth of his Cure de Village he puts these words : " The whole evil resides in the system of inheritance prescribed by the Civil Code . . . that is the mortar which, perpetually pounding up the land, . . . will end by killing France." It is this system which in France accentuates the tendency more or less present in all civilised states, for the population to desert the country and to congregate in towns ; it is this system which is partly accountable for the limitation of French families. But how is the evil to be remedied? ** Life A NEW FRANCE 147 is so healthful," writes Carlyle, " that it even finds nourishment in death." Thus out of the death of northern France, out of its invasion and devastation, out of the obliteration by the enemy of old barriers and landmarks, there bids fair to arise a redistribution of land which, extended to the whole country, may result in a rebirth of the countryside. Not unknown in other European countries, and in France itself in earlier epochs, has been a general pooling of the land in the district, a temporary holding in com- mon, effected at the request of the inhabitants of certain neighbourhoods and followed by a redistribution. This is the kind of measure now contemplated in France. Into all the details of the various proposals now before the French Parliament I cannot enter here. They may be found in a pamphlet, " le Statut do la Torre et du Parlement," ^ by a French deputy. Member of the Conseil Superieur de I'Agriculture, M. Bouilloux Lafont. Among the many evils this War is revealing is the extent to which tuberculosis and alcoholism are ravaging the population. Before the War, though the victims of tuber- culosis alone were one hundred thousand a year, to speak against these scourges was to cry in ^ Paris : Bernard Grasset. " Le Fait de la Semaine " series. 148 THE FRANCE I KNOW the desert. Throughout the nineteenth century, while the toll of war amounted to two millions, that of tuberculosis was ten millions. Yet it is only now that something really effectual is being done to check the progress of this terrible disease. The law has taken the tuberculous under its protection. The government is erecting in every department general sanatoria and agri- cultural colonies specially destined for tuber- culous soldiers. Also, in the state dispensaries now being established precautions against this and another yet more serious disease are now being taught. That the government has done so little to check the progress of one of the chief causes of tuberculosis, alcoholism, is occasioning serious discontent in France. True, absinthe has been prohibited. But other measures are urgently needed. Certain reformers demand prohibition. " Under the increasing pressure of all healthy opinion, will not some decisive measure be taken?" asks M. Victor Giraud.^ " Will not a courageous minister save the country by decreeing pro- hibition?" "We are spending annually one / milliard four hundred millions of francs on alco- hoi," said M. Herriot, addressing I'Uniyersite des Annales.2 " Impose your will, good people, and insist during the next election on the ^ La Troisieme France (Hachette, 1917), p. 220. 2 In April, 1916. See Agir.,p. 28. A NEW FRANCE 149 suppression of this scourge, of this disgrace. The future of France depends on it." Closely associated with the problem of alco- holism is that other problem of depopulation. It should not be exaggerated. To hear some^ people talk one^might think that the population of France was diminishing. That is not the case. With the one exception of 1872, after the Franco-Prussian War, every census, since the first in 1801, has shown an increase.^ The cause for anxiety lies in the fact that the rate of increase has been declining and that it has not kept pace with the increase of neighbouring nations, with that of Germany especially. In 1871 the population of France was thirty-six millions, that of Germany forty-one. In 1910, in France it was thirty-nine millions, in Germany sixty-five. " How many political events — and first and foremost the present War — does not this explain," cries one French social reformer ;2 while another prophesies that the soldiers who return from the trenches will tell us that the War would have been averted had the inhabi- tants of France been increasing in numbers as rapidly as those of Germany.^ But there is an- other point of view, viz. : that a rapidly increas- ing population is one of the main causes of war. A far-seeing contributor to " The Nineteenth ^ Levasseur, Questions Ouvrieres (1907), p. 208. '^ M. Herriot, Agir.y p. 26. * Giraud, la Troisiime France, p. 216. 150 THE FRANCE I KNOW Century," writing in January, 1910, asked : " Is Germany keenly desirous of annexing new lands? Of course she is. How could she be otherwise with a population of seventy- millions, which in time to come will be nigh on one hundred millions, confined within narrow limits? Germany must find an outlet for her people." To the rapid growth of the German popula- 1 tion are largely due the horrors from which the world is suffering to-day. " Progress, roughly speaking," ^ writes Havelock Ellis, " has proved incompatible with high fertility." For the French realise that as civilisation advances, as science develops, quality becomes . more im- portant than quantity, one man's brains more effectual than hundreds of hands. To see one of the effects of the adoption of this idea by the French working- classes you have only to compare the absence of squalor in the poorest part of Paris with the condition of our London slums. In France the loudest outcry for a large increase of population proceeds from the least progressive section of the community : from the Catholics. ^ The main argument in favour of an increase of the population of any country is military. If the barbaric institution of war is to continue, 1 Essays in War-Time (1916), pp. 68-9. ^ See the articles on depopulation contributed by M. Rene Bazin to the " Echo de Paris " during the war. A NEW FRANCE 151 then it is to the interest of every nation to produce as much fodder for cannon as possible. But if at the close of the present War humanity has not progressed beyond this stage, then it is useless to talk about " a new France " or a new anything. The old order will persist with all the old evils. Happily for the world the most enlightened French statesmen, among whom are M. Gabriel Hanotaux and M. Albert Thomas, and two ex- Prime Ministers, M. Ribot, M. L^on Bourgeois,^ realise keenly that we are now at the turning- point of the world's history; that this War is presenting us with a unique opportunity for in- augurating a new international order, a Society of Nations, which may save from utter destruction all that is worth saving in mankind. M. Ribot was the first French Prime Minister to declare officially in 1917 in favour of a League of Nations. On the 5th of June the Chambre des Deputes unanimously supported him. And, on the 22nd of July, a commission was appointed under the presidency of M. Leon Bourgeois to consider the conditions under which a Society of Nations may be established. The Committee has now completed its report and submitted it to M. Clemenceau. As I write its discussion in the Chamber is eagerly awaited. ^ Author of one of the first modem French- books advocat- ing a League of Nations : Pour la SocUU des Nations (1910). 152 THE FRANCE I KNOW Meanwhile French poHtieians of all parties strongly advocate the immediate formation of a solid league between the twenty-four nations now allied against the Central Powers. Such an association, if both economic and diplomatic, would, in their opinion, serve as an excellent foundation for a Society of Nations.^ A be- ginning has already been made in the various economic conferences between the Allied Powers, the first of which was held at Paris, in 1916. But these conferences are not enough. It is even more important that the various Allied Governments should confer together on matters of foreign policy. If it be objected that certain differences might result from such a conference, is that not another reason for holding it? If these differences exist to-day, will they not also present themselves at the Peace Congress? Would it not be wiser for the Allies to attempt to reconcile them now than to appear before the Central Empires at the Peace Congress divided among themselves, and incapable of forming even a nucleus of a Society of Nations ? In such a case there would be no hope of a new France, and, in the words of a French deputy, e'en serait fait de Vhumanite, du "pr ogres et de la civilisation (''it would be all over with humanity, progress and civilisation "). ^ See "le Petit Parisien," July 13, 1918, for the views on this matter of M. Doumergue, former Prime Minister, M. Bienvenu-Martin, ex-Minister of Justice, and M. Marcel Cachin, Deputy. • • • • • • • •!•!• • • • • ;• ••• • •• • I !• • • ••; • »i t. » . The Great Keep of Coucy Chateau, destroyed by the Germans during their retreat before the French in 1917. ITo face page 152. A NEW FRANCE 153 " For," argued M. Ferdinand Buisson/ in a speech delivered in August, 1918, to the Executive Committee of the radical and radical- socialist party, " the establishment of a Society of Nations is no longer one of the solutions of the problem, it has become the only possible solution. If the formidable duel between the allied democracies and the Central Empires is not to end by destroy- ing the liberty of the people — that is to say, civilisation — two conditions must be realised : " First, Germany must fail in her attempt to dominate by force of arms. *' Second, she must be rendered incapable of making another attempt. ''The first condition is in course of being real- ised. . . . Before long the world will see the final failure of the greatest coup de force it has ever witnessed. " But when this victory has been won it will be necessary to gain yet another. . . . the de- finitive abandonment of recourse to arms as a means of settling international disputes." In this glorious autumn of 1918, as day by day the news comes of the magnificent victories won by our heroic warriors on the western front, from some of the most thoughtful among the French people the cry goes up : Why this delay in creating the machinery of a society of nations ? 1 President of the League of the Rights of Man and President d'Honneur of the Executive Committee of the Radical and Radical-SociaUst party. 154 THE FRANCE I KNOW That alone can realise the ideal for which our valiant defenders are laying down their lives. " To bless them, to admire them is not enough. They must know, they must feel, they must understand that their efforts will not be in vain, that liberty and peace are assured for their younger brethren." On the eve of the reassembling of the French Parliament, in an article contributed to " FHumanite," 1 M. Marcel Cachin, the Socialist leader, demanded that the Chamber of Deputies should consider without delay the Government commission's report, especially that part of it said to deal with the employment of an econo- mic weapon in case Germany should refuse to abandon her regime of militarism and violence. Some measure of encouragement has been given to these nobly impatient reformers by an authorised report ^ that in conversation with M. Leon Bourgeois, the Prime Minister of France has declared in favour of a society of nations. M. Bourgeois had reproached M. Clemenceau with the ironic terms in which he had referred to the movement. " You must not take too literally words to which I never attached the importance apparently attributed to them by others," was the Prime Minister's reply. " If you regard me as opposed to a society of nations, you commit a very grave error." 1 August 28, 1918. 2 See " l^venement," August 26, 1918, A NEW FRANCE 155 Then, taking a paper from his desk, he handed it to M. Bourgeois. " Here," he said, " are the resolutions passed at a recent conference of the AlHes. Read the last lines. After that phrase : ' to put an end to violence,' you will observe these few words written in my own hand, and added at my special request : et your introduire dans le monde le regime du droit organise. The regime of organised law in the world is the society of nations." CHAPTER XII woman's position in FRANCE The comparative position of the married woman in America, France, and Germany has been briefly summed up by the current saying ; In America the wife walks in front of her husband, in France at his side, in Germany behind him. The married woman's position in England is evidently too complex for definition by so con- cise a formula. But in France, as we shall see, there are many who would dissent from so sweeping a generalisation. Legalement mineure, socialement majeure. Thus does Victor Hugo tersely, and not inaccurately, describe his fellow-countrywoman's position. In other words, socially the Frenchwoman is man's equal, legally she is his ward. To a superficial observer of French family life the wife ^ may in all things appear her husband's equal. In domestic affairs they run in double harness to an extent unknown in this country. Have you ever, at some lower middle-class French resort, watched both parents busy on the sands ^ Of the unmarried Frenchwoman we shall have something to say in our last chapter. 156 WOMAN'S POSITION IN FRANCE 157 fussing over their children's bathe or paddle, father as well as mother taking off tiny shoes and tucking up little skirts, when the average British father would at such a moment carefully avoid his family circle? There is no country in the world where family life is more intense than in France or where motherhood is more beautiful. Owing partly to the institution of marriages of convenience, it is in maternity that the average Frenchwoman expresses all the passion of her nature. Alexandre Dumas (fils) when with no delicate pen he is about to expose the weaknesses and failings of women, announces that woman as mother is to be excepted from his criticism. He will regard woman as merely wife or courtesan. Woman as mother is too sacred for dissection. La M^re, he writes, est la seule maniere d'etre de la Femme que V amour de VHomme ne puisse recon- stitu£r, une fois qu'elle n'est plus ; Vhomme rem- place Vepouse, Vamante, la soeur, la fille, il ne remplace jamais la mere. II y a entre la m^e et Venfant une complicite d'organes et de chair, une vie Vun dans V autre qui for gent un lien que rien ne peut plus rompre, meme la mort. . , , La mere n*a pas de sexe dans la pensee de VHomme ; elle y est d'ordre divin. Aussi reservons-nous une fois pour toutes, dans cette etude de la Femme, cet argument de la Mire par lequel on a coutume d'arreter toute discussion sur ce sujet de discussions iternelles. Nous nous 158 THE FRANCE I KNOW agenouillons devant la Mere, mais nous ne tomhons pas pour ga aux pieds de la Femme^ The closeness of the tie between mother and children is doubtless largely responsible for the reluctance with which Frenchmen emigrate. For one part of a family to leave its nest and move, even from the left to the right bank of the Seine, causes far more heartrending and shedding of tears than for an English son to leave his parents and go to the opposite end of the world. I know middle-aged married men in France who are unhappy if they pass a single day without going to see their mother. Only their passionate patriotism has enabled French mothers to endure the agony of parting with their sons during the War. The French mother is a queen in her home : the older she grows the more she is reverenced. Her children and grandchildren, and often great- grandchildren, adore her, and her old age, sur- rounded by her offspring, is very beautiful. The French mother possesses that rare gift of retain- ing all her parental authority and yet never ceasing to be a comrade and a confidante. Almost equally is the Frenchwoman a queen in society. George Meredith, writing ^ of the Germans, whom he describes as "a growing people " and " conversable as well," foretells 1 Preface to VAmi des Femmes (1869). See Alexandre Dumas {fils)y Thedtre complete Vol. IV, p. 5. 2 An Essay on Comedy, WOMAN'S POSITION IN FRANCE 159 that '* when their men, as in France . . . consent to talk on equal terms with their women, and to listen to them, their growth will be accelerated and shapeHer." Frenchmen have been talking and listening to their women for centuries. Hence France is the only country in the world which has produced anything worthy to be called " polite society." For, to quote Meredith again, where women are kept in the background, or, as he puts it, " where the veil is over women's faces, you cannot have society, without which the senses are barbarous and the comic spirit is driven to the gutters of grossness to slake its thirst." A foreigner who mixes with French people is struck by the absence of hard and fast barriers between the sexes. It is perhaps the feminine note that dominates. And Michelet may not have been far wrong when- he wrote : la France est femme. At any rate, men and women talk about the same things, are interested in the same things. At a dinner-party, they do not invariably separate when the meal is done — some men may go to the smoking-room, but the majority follow their hostess to the salon. The separation in England for what the French visitor to this country describes as that curious ceremony, the pass wine, has always struck him as odd. The reason why men's clubs are so often failures in France is that Frenchmen do not habitually seek one another's society. The 160 THE FRANCE I KNOW most successful French club is the Paris Rane- lagh, the Racing Club of France; and it partly owes its success to the fact that a large propor- tion of its fifteen hundred members are women. Every Frenchwoman is a potential salonniere. She knows how to set men talking ; and in some measure she invariably knows how to practise Mme. Recamier's art of " listening with seduc- tion." For the part of inspiratrice she is without a rival all the world over. In the sphere of business no less than in family and social life, the Frenchwoman is man's comrade. In affairs, she long ago established her reputation for shrewdness, energy, and method. In 1907 it was calculated that nine out of every ten prosperous little businesses in France owed their success to woman's co-operation.^ English tourists have always been struck by the leading part Madame plays in small restaurants and shops, where she sits at the cash desk taking the money and directing everything, while her husband's function, as he flits about making him- self agreeable to customers, appears to be chiefly ornamental. But in large as well as in small business houses la Grande Samaritaine and la Maison Paquin, for example, a woman is often found directing side by side with a man. That Mme. Paquin is the most successful business woman in the world ^ See le Feminisme frangais, by Charles Turgeon (1907),' Vol. II, p. 167. WOMAN'S POSITION IN FRANCE 161 was probably recognised by the French Govern- ment when it created her un chevalier de la legion d'honneur. Such being the domestic, social, and business ; position of the Frenchwoman, what is her legal i standing ? How does the Code Napoleon, or that part of it known as le code civil, treat woman? Better, replies Michelet,^ than any other code in the world (la loi la favorise plus qu'aucune femme d^ Europe), But then we must consider what was Michelet's view of woman's role and destiny. Elle ne fait son salut, he writes, qu'en faisant le bonheur de Vhomme? So Michelet agrees with the Book of Genesis, and. with its . interpreter Bossuet, who, declaring woman to have originated in man's superfluous bone,^ maintained that she was only evoked as his " aid " and " complement." This admirer of the Code Napoleon as it affects women would not probably have disagreed with, its framer or inspirer when he asserted that woman is as much the absolute property of some man as the gooseberry bush is the property of the gardener. For those who, like Augustus Bebel, take a different view of woman's position, for those who are capable of regarding her as a human being independent of the functions of wife and mother, many of the Code's enactments seem to / 1 La Femme (1860), p. 157. 2 Ibid., p. 48. ^ Cf. Sir Thomas Browne, who describes woman as " the rib, the crooked piece of man." M 162 THE FRANCE I KNOW f degrade her into nothing more than the merest ' chattel. The late Emile Faguet, a member of the French Academy, throughout his book le Feminisme deplores the subordinate position in which the Code places women. He considers it / injurious to the whole of French society. An- ) other academician, M. Etienne Lamy, suggests that Napoleon endeavoured to compensate men for the loss of their political liberties by making them tyrants in their own homes. ^ At best, the Code's attitude towards women is patronising, paternal, protective. In oi^e clause, that requiring a father to bequeath a certain portion of his estate in equal shares to his children* of both sexes, it would seem to favour woman's independence, did it not in another clause deprive her of any power to control the property thus inherited. So utterly irresponsible did it regard her that, not content with depriving her of the right to act as guardian to her own children, it even refused to recognise her as a witness to any legal document, it denied her right to open legal proceedings without her hus- band's consent, it compelled her to live under the- same roof as her husband, it deprived her of the control of her own earnings. There are those in this country who regard the French dowry system as encouraging woman's independence, and who would like to see it intro- duced into our own land. ^ La Femme de Demain (1907), p. 168. WOMAN'S POSITION IN FRANCE 163 From certain points of view it may enhance her prestige, but it hardly conduces to her independ- ence, because, as long as her husband lives, though her capital is nominally her own, le systeme dotal denies her the right to dispose of it. If her husband were in financial straits she could not lend it to him or even raise a mortgage on it for his benefit. The root idea of all the Code's enactments concerning women is that every female is in- capable of managing her own affairs, at any rate as long as her husband lives. After his death she may obtain almost absolute control of her dowry. But it was only through widowhood (divorce was illegal until the passing of Naquet's Law in 1884) that, according to the original enactments of the Code, woman could arrive at independence, or, to employ Victor Hugo's term, attain her majority. To remove these disabilities, to reconcile the two conflicting aspects of woman's lot, to make j her legally what she is naturally, has been the main object of the feminist movement in France. How far it has succeeded we shall attempt to show in another chapter. CHAPTER XIII THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND An inquiry among the circulating libraries of England and France to-day would probably prove that from the general reading public there is no great demand for the works of George Sand. Among literary people, however, the case is different. Literary critics from Sainte- Beuve to Mr. Edmund Gosse, from Thackeray to Matthew Arnold, from Taine to W. H. Myers and Lord Morley, have never ceased to be occu- pied with her novels. Sainte-Beuve, her life- long friend, was one of the- first to discern her genius. Thackeray, though his Victorian mind revolted from what he called her " philosophical f riskiness," her " topsyturvy fication of morality," though Lelia seemed to him " a thieves' and pros- titutes' apotheosis," was, notwithstanding, com- pelled to admit that of the novelist's craft she was " the very ablest practitioner in France," that her prose was " exquisite," that " her brief, rich, melancholy sentences " had a charm " like the sound of country bells — provoking I don't know what vein of musing and meditation and falling sweetly and sadly on the ear." Matthew Arnold considered her " the greatest literary 164 THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 165 force in Europe," W. H. Myers describes her as " the most noteworthy woman, with perhaps one exception, who has appeared in Hterature since Sappho." Lord Morley finds in her writ- ings " the high- water mark of prose," ^ and in the attitude of her mind " a stirring rebuke to loitering quietism of brain and all cowardice of soul." ^ To some of us who to-day take down from their shelves long- closed volumes, Consuelo for example, le Compagnon du Tour de France, le Peche de M, Antoine, Spiridiori, Mile, la Quin- tinie, les Lettres d'un Voyageur, le Journal d^un Voyageur pendant la Guerre, it may seem that the problems there discussed are much the same as those which agitate us to-day, and that the solutions there propounded are not unlike those after which we ourselves are striving. And in any case, in her unconquerable hopefulness, her complete sincerity, and her unflinching intel- lectual courage we shall never fail to find in- spiration and encouragement. Servants of the Ideal is the title bestowed by a French professor ^ of to-day on many of the contemporaries of George Sand, Lamennais, Lacordaire, Lamartine, Leroux, and others. She, too, may lay claim to that title. For in the world of ideals she lived, moved, and had her being. It is one of many proofs of the richness of 1 Recollections, I, 66. « Ibid,, I, 80-81. ^ Albert Leon Gucrard, Assistant Professor of French in the Leland Stanford Junior University, California ; French Prophets of Y ester day ^ pp. 130 ^ seq. 166 THE FRANCE I KNOW French fiction that its history presents us with two contemporaries, each in his own way master of one of the two divergent tendencies of his art: George Sand unsurpassed in the ideahstic romance, Honore de Balzac, equally unsurpassed in the real- istic novel. Few critics of either have been able to resist drawing a comparison between these two writers. Among those who have yielded to the temptation are Taine, C. Bronte, Thackeray, and W. H. Myers. Charlotte Bronte, though she finds many of George Sand's views of life untruth- ful, herself fantastical, fanatical, impractical, misled by her feelings, nevertheless thinks she has a better nature than M. de Balzac, that her brain is larger, her heart warmer.^ But no one has stated the contrast better than the writers themselves : Mme. Sand" and M. de Balzac in conversation with one another admirably summed up the difference. The great George had sug- gested that the title of Balzac's work, instead of la Cvmedie humaine should have been la Tragedie humaine, " Yes," he replied, " and you write VJSpopee humaine,'' " But what I should like to write," retorted George Sand, " is VEglogue humaine^ le Poeme, le Roman humain. You, in short, wish and know how to paint man as you see him. So be it. I feel constrained to paint him as I wish him to be, as I believe he will be." 2 1 Charlotte Bronte to G. H. Lewes, October 8, 1850. See Clement Shorter, The Brontes — Life and Letters, IIj 473. 2 Preface to le Compagnon du Tour de France. THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 167 Thus, appealing more to the emotions than to the intellect, she endeavours, in her novels, to set up before mankind a standard of perfectibility. " The emotions of reality are as nothing," she maintains, " in comparison with those we may derive from imagination." ^ There is one of her books which no one who would understand the working of her mind and the quality of her genius can afford to neglect. I refer to les Lettres d'un Voyageur. Though not avowedly autobiographical, it sheds as bright a light on her life as VHistoire de ma Vie or her published correspondence and souvenirs. For in les Lettres d'un Voyageur we find her under the thinnest of disguises corresponding frankly with her friends, whom it is not difficult to identify. Especially interesting are those letters in which she recalls scenes and experiences of her childhood. " When I was young," she writes, ^ *' and kept my flocks in the most peaceful and rustic country in the world, I had all manner of grand ideas about Versailles, Saint-Cloud, Trianon, and the palaces which my grandmother was for ever describing to me as the most beautiful under the sun. I used to wander along the field-paths at nightfall or in the early morning, and in lofty lines build Trianon, Versailles, Saint-Cloud out of the white mist hovering over the meadows. ^ VHistoire de ma Vie, IX, 7. * Xouvelle Edition (1869), pp. 40-41. 168 THE FRANCE I KNOW A hedge of old half-hewn trees rising out of a ditch would become a whole people of marble tritons and naiads. . . . the copses and vine- yards of our hills beds of yew and box ; nut trees bordering our fields the majestic elms of vast royal parks ; and a ribbon of smoke rising from the roof of a cottage half hidden in the trees, drawing a blue, trembling line through the verdure, would seem to my eyes that magnificent jet d'eau which the humble citizen of Paris was permitted to see playing on high days and holi- days, but which for me was one of the marvels in the world of my imagination." Here, in the allegorical manner she loved, George Sand analyses the working of her own mind, not in childhood only, but more or less throughout her whole life, and especially during the first thirty of her seventy-two years. The dangers of this idealising method are obvious. That the idealist herself was conscious of some of them, appears in the following sentence which succeeds that quoted above. " Thus," she continues, " I drew in lofty lines the exaggerated model of the little ^ things I have since seen. It is owing to my faculty for making my brain a microscope that actuality has appeared to me so small and so mean. I have been long in learning to accept it without disdain and to find in it individual beauties and objects for admiration quite different from those sought." ^ The italics are "mine. THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 169 These words may explain a somewhat discon- certing phrase of Ferdinand Brunetiere.^ One is astonished to find him referring to "the realism which George Sand helped to bring into exist- ence." Many of us have not been accustomed to associate in any way the word " realism " with George Sand. And indeed it hardly went further than taking reality as her starting-point. For reality, at any rate during the first part of her literary life, was not enough for her. Dans le vrai, quelque beau quHl soit, faime a bdtir encore, she wrote. That, in her endeavour to control her soaring imagination, she often failed is proved by the fact that the first part of her long novels is almost invariably the best. As they continue they are inclined to fall away into vagueness. The same may be said of some of her -ideals. Founded on solid rock they soar high, until they become mere castles in the air. But in order to understand them, it will be necessary briefly to summarise the chief events in her life. Armandine Lucile Aurore Dupin, known to the world under her nom de plume of George Sand, was born at Paris on the 1st of July, 1804. Her descent is one of the most interesting and signifi- cant in the history of literature. For it offers an almost complete explanation of many of her most saKent qualities. It affords a striking justifica- tion of the theory of inheritance first applied in literature by Sainte-Beuve and enthusiastically ^ Manuel de Vllistoire de la LiUerature FraiK^aise, p. 475. 170 THE FRANCE I KNOW adopted by Taine. For George Sand, the apostle of solidarity, the advocate of social equality, was in herself a bond of union between the classes. Her great-great-grandfather was Frederick Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland,^ himself the grandfather of Louis XVI of France. The natural son of Frederick Augus- tus II was that famous hero of romance, le Marechal de Saxe. By a lady-in-waiting of the French Court", Mile, de Verrieres, he had a daugh- ter who married M. Dupin de Francueil, who figures as a celebrated beau in Mme. d'Epinay's Memoirs, M. and Mme. Dupin de Francueil were the grandparents of George Sand. Her father, Maurice Dupin, was an officer distinguished in the wars of the Republic alid the Empire. Her mother was a Parisian grisette, a milliner, Sophie Delaborde, granddaughter of one of those bird- fanciers, with whose quaint little shops on the Quai des Marchands d'Oiseaux every tourist in Paris is familiar. 1 Frederick Augustus II F. Augustus III Maurice, Marechal I de Saxe Marie Josepha m. , 1 Dauphin, son of ' Mme. Dupin de Louis XV Francueil Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, Charles X Maurice Dupin George Sand. THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 171 From her noble, even royal, ancestors Aurore Dupin inherited distinction of thought and man- ner. However frankly she may deal with certain aspects of life she is never vulgar. Despite her insignificant appearance, her taille chetive, she was always une grande dame, very impressive with those wondrous piercing eyes, into which, said de Tocqueville, when he met her in 1848, her whole mind seemed to have gone. From her humble maternal ancestors on the other hand, she inherited a simplicity of manner, an ardour for the people's cause, a deep sense of. the people's wrongs, and a passionate love for Nature— embracing • the whole creation, rocks, stones, plants, and animals. Geology and botany were among the favourite pursuits of her later years. Aurore's father died in 1808. For the next fourteen years of her life she lived mainly with her paternal grandmother. She spent most of her days at the family country seat of Nohant, in Berry, on the upper reaches of the Indre River and not far from the ancient city of Bourges. The delights of that rustic existence, the charms of her native province, inspired many of the most beautiful pages of her novels and autobiography. In this latter work, rilistoire de ma Vie, she relates in minute detail the events and impressions of her childhood, how her grandmother brought her up on the principles of Rousseau's Emile, letting her run 172 THE FRANCE I KNOW wild through the woods and fields, encouraging her to associate freely with the peasant children, abstaining from instilling into her youthful mind any definite religious dogma. The author of VHistoire de ma Vie tells also how occasionally she and her grandmother travelled in their cumbrous berline to Paris. The journey in those early years of the nineteenth century was not lacking in adventure. The great Forest of Orleans, through which the travellers had to pass, was still infested with brigands, and Mme. Dupin loved to relate how she remembered not long ago having seen the corpses of highwaymen hanging from the trees whereon they had been gibbeted.^ At Paris she was allowed to see her mother, whom she adored. The young Mme. Dupin came every day to take her little girl delicious rambles through the city which she knew so well. Paris, however, could not replace Nohant in Aur ore's affection. '^ L^air de Paris,\^ she writes, " m 'a ton jours eti contrairey At thirteen this free, open-air life ended. Aurore was sent for three years (1817-20) to the convent of the English Augustines at Paris. Here her mind took that mystic bent from which it never completely recovered. Here for a . while Aurore became an orthodox Christian. And after she had passed out of the orthodox phase she continued to respect Christian influence, 1 VHistoire de ma Vie (ed. 1879), Vol. I, Part III, p. 290. THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 173 both on the development of her own mind and on that of her generation. Writing in 1841 she asks : " What was it that mysteriously detached our young souls from the somewhat deified egoism, which, we must admit, was inculcated in our families ? Was it not . , . the Christian idea, that is, the distant .reflection of an ancient philosophy, which had passed into a religion, as must any philosophy which is at all profound? "1 For two years after leaving the convent, Aurore lived at Nohant, by day absorbed in rural pursuits, rambling on foot or horseback over the countryside, by night plunged in de- sultory and diverse reading. Her favourite con- vent book. The Imitation, was now abandoned for le GSnie du Christianisme, Then metaphysics enthralled her — Aristotle, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon, Pascal, Bossuet, but above all Leibnitz, who remained her philosopher of .predilection. It was in these days that she acquired the habit of reading or writing far into the night and rising late in the morning. " Beranger called to see me," she wrote in 1833 to Sainte-Beuve, " but, as it was before two o'clock, I was not up." 2 Thirty-five years later, when visiting her friend Mme. Adam (Juliette Lamber) in the ^ Correspondancey II, 185. * Letter, November 14, 1833, quoted by Sainte-Beuve, Portraits Contemporains, p. 519. 174 THE FRANCE I KNOW south of France, she used not 4:o appear before the mid-day meal. At ten in the evening she wished her guests good-night, and retired to her room to work until the small hours of the morning. Mme. Adam, whose room was beneath her guest's, used to hear her moving about. Her cigarettes and a glass of water were all she needed for her long vigils.^ But we are anticipating. To return to her youth. In 1822, her grandmother's death left Aurore on the hands of her father's family. She was a troublesome, wayward girl of eighteen, moody even to the point of wishing at times to commit suicide. With her mother she found it impossible to live. Visiting some friends of her father's she met a somewhat mysterious person, Casimir Dudevant, whom she was ultimately to marry. According to her own account in VHistoire de ma Vie, their sentiments for one another were little more than platonic. Dude- vant never spoke to her of love, and brutally avowed that he considered her neither beautiful nor pretty. Yet she cared for him, but only as a brother. With some surprise she recorded twenty years later that he had inspired her neither with instinctive loathing nor with moral aversion. Certain critics ^ mistrust this narra- ^ Life of Mme, Adam, by Winifred Stephens, p. 127. 2 See le Premier Amour de George Sand, by Ernest Seilli^re, "la Revue Hebdomadaire," March 30, 1918. THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 175 tive, written when the narrator found it necessary to justify her separation from her husband. At any rate, if the Dudevants were mutually in love the passion soon faded. Their marriage proved unfortunate in every way. After nine years of a miserable existence, husband and wife agreed to live apart for six months of every year. The other six months Mme. Dudevant, who could not tolerate the idea of being parted from her little son Maurice, was to spend under the same roof as her husband. Dudevant kept control of all his wife's property, granting her, out of her own estate, a meagre allowance of 300 francs a month. Out of this she was supposed to keep herself and her baby girl, Solange, whom she was permitted to take with her to Paris. Later the separation became definitive; di- vorce, in the days before Naquet's Law (1884), was illegal ; and it was only after a series of law- suits that Mme. Dudevant regained her property and was able to return to her beloved Nohant. Dudevant lived to be an old man, dying in 1871, five years before his wife, whom he had not met since their separation in 1836. In the early days of her independence at Paris Mme. Dudevant was living a Bohemian life. She might have been seen in caf6s, law-courts, and theatres, smoking a pipe and taking snuff, wearing a long frock coat, a woollen muffler and a soft felt hat over the black locks which fell on to her 176 THE FRANCE I KNOW shoulders. She was hard put to it to support herself and baby Solange. By first one occupation, then another, she tried to add to her slender income. Translation, painting snuff-boxes, drawing portraits, were some of the. arts she practised before she found that she could write. Then in collaboration with a young fellow Berrichon, Jules Sandeau, under the name of Jules Sand, she contributed articles to le Figaro, published a short story, la Prima Donna, in *'la Revue de Paris," and in 1831 a novel. Rose et Blanche, The editor of ''la Revue de Paris," H. Dupuy, having discovered which part of this work came from Mme. Dudevant's pen, was struck by her talent. He proposed to her to write a novel on her own account. This suggestion resulted in Indiana, written at Nohant in a few months, and published in 1832 in two volumes under the nom de plume of George Sand. At one bound its author became famous. Every one talked of Indiana, Every one read Indiana, To the horror of her critic^and later her lifelong friend — Sainte-Beuve, another novel; Valentine, fol- lowed in two months. But Sainte-Beuve's mis- givings were ill-founded. Valentine was from every point of view a stronger, a wider, a more artistic production than its predecessor. Aurore Dudevant, under the name of George Sand, was now completely launched on that literary career, one of the most prolific in the THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 177 whole history of literature, which was to last forty-six years, and to produce considerably more than one hundred volumes.^ Her early works, comprising Indiana (1832), Valentine (1832), Lelia (1833), Leone Leoni (1834), Jacques (1834) and a later volume Elle et Lui (1858), are essentially novels of passions. Having become deeply interested in religious and social questions, she wrote her philosophical and so- cialist romances: among. the chief of which are Spiridion (1840), les Sept Cordes de la Lyre (1840), Mile, la Quintinie (1863), le Compagnon du Tour de France (1840), Mauprat (1836), Consuelo (1842-4^), la Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1844), le Peche de Monsieur Antoine (1845). In 1843 she published a novel, Teverino, which is little more than a charming dialogue on art, specially music, while Lucrezia Floriani (1847) and its sequel le Chateau des Desertes are con- cerned with dramatic art, chiefly with comedy. But her most finished masterpieces are the pastoral romances la Mare au Diable (1846), la petite Fadette (1849), Frangois le Champi (1850), les Maitres Sonneurs (1853). In all these stories the scene is laid in the author's beloved Berry, among the humble peasants whom she never ceased to love. For she was then living at ^ Cf. Brunetidre, Manuel de VHistoire de la LitUrature Fran^aise, p. 476, n. 3. Her complete works form over a hundred volumes (Michel Levy's edition), not including the four volumes of VHistoire de ma Vie and the six volumes that have appeared up to now of her correspondence. N 178 THE FRANCE I KNOW Nohant, and the worst storms and tempests of her Hfe were over. During the passionate period of her career she had remained, to use her own expression, un esprit chercheur. Her novels of that period Mr. W. H. Mye«s has happily termed romances of search. She had, however, gradually been evolv- ing toward something more positive. In 1838 she had written : Je suis un pen plus vieille quHl y a deux ans, et je crois que je suis en voie de me reconcilier, ou. de vouloir Men me reconcilier avec mes contraires ? ^ Here we find the first glimmering of a new dawn, of a new view of life. By mes contraires she probably means the actual as opposed to the ideal, the utilitarian or ethical as opposed to the purely artistic view of art for art's sake. Hitherto she had professed to despise la sphere glacee de ce qu'on appelle la vie positive,^ She had posed as being utterly without le sens de la vie pratique, though in reality she was skilled in many practical matters; for we surprise her hemming handkerchiefs in a Paris salon, though she had mocked at stitchery as woman's amuse- ment de captivite. We know that at Nohant she won a reputation for succulent confitures, and that she always proved herself an excellent business woman and a first-rate mattresse de maison. Moreover she was now beginning to take an ^ Correspondance, II, 105. 2 ConsuelOy I, Chap. XXXIII, p. 294. THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 179 interest in wider concerns. Under the influence of the celebrated lawyer and journalist, Michel de Bourges, she was becoming fervently repub- lican. Later she out-distanced de Bourges ; and, while he settled down into a moderate radical, his political disciple continued her progress towards the left until we find her embracing the socialist doctrinejs of Pierre Leroux. The chief article in her political creed was now belief in the people, but the people educated. " France needs institutions," she wrote to her friend Michel Duvemet,^ one of the chief con- tributors to the liberal newspaper, le National ; " and who will give them to her? A Messiah? We don't believe in him. Prophets? We have not seen any. We ourselves? We cannot peer into the future. We know not what shape will be assumed by human thought at any given moment. Who, then? Why, all of us, the people first, you and I also. The moment will inspire the masses. " Yes, the masses will be inspired, but on what condition? Only on condition that they are enlightened. Enlightened on what? On every- thing : on truth, justice, the religious idea, equality, liberty, fraternity, in a word on rights and on duties." These matters, she tells Duvernet, are the things you must write about. " You must show us where right ends and duty begins, how far ^ Correspondance, II, 189. 180 THE FRANCE I KNOW the individual's liberty extends and how far the authority of society. It is for you to give us our political programme, to define the family, to discuss wages, the division of labour, the forms of property." For the solution of many of these problems, after which we are still groping to-day, George Sand looked to the Republic which would be established by the Revolution of 1848. She and her friends had helped to prepare it, and they staked upon it all their most fervent hopes. It brought to George Sand her first big political disappointment. She had thrown in her lot with the advanced revolutionaries of the Louis Blanc and Barbes type. For them she had written several Bulletins de la Republique, mani- festoes circulated throughout France, read by the mayors and posted on the doors of public buildings ; for them also she had edited a short- lived newspaper, " la Vraie Republique." Never had even her ecstatic soul experienced a more burning fervour of hope than that which glowed within her heart in the early weeks of the Revolution. Vive la Republique! Quel reve, quel enthou- siasme ! she writes, et en meme temps, quelle tenue, quel ordre a Paris,^ Nous Vaimons, va, la Republique, en depit de tous, Le peuple est debout et diablement beau id, Tous les jours et sur tous les points, on plante des ^ Correspondancey III, 9. THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 181 arhres de la liberie. Ten ai rencontre trois hier en diverses rues, des pins immenses portes sur les epaules de cinquante ouvriers. En tete le tambour, le drapeau, et des bandes de ces beaux travailleurs de terre, forts, graves, couronnes de feuillage, la^ beche, la pioche ou la cognee sur Vepaule ; c^est rnagnifique, c'est plus beau qu£ tous les Robert du monde. In a few weeks, however, these radiant hopes were extinguished. The failure of the national^ workshops, the terrible June riots, resulting in the victory of the moderate party, in the im- prisonment or exile of her friends, in the election of Louis Bonaparte as President of the Republic, finally, two years later, in the coup d^etat which established the Empire. All these events brought home to her the sad consciousness that the con- summation of her desires was not yet. Never- theless at no time does the invincible optimism of George Sand burn more brightly than in the face of such disappointments. When to the on- looker idealism * seemed doomed, Vive Videe ! cried this unconquerable idealist. Compelled to admit that the Republican principle had sustained a serious defeat,^ she can write notwithstanding : " Of course every revolutionary must meet with reaction, hatred, threats. Could it be otherwise ? And what would be the merit of being a revolu- tionary if everything went on smoothly, and if one had only to will in order to succeed? No, ^ Correspondance, III, 30. 182 THE FRANCE I KNOW we are now, and perhaps we always shall be, engaged in a stubborn conflict." The convulsions of 1848 which shook European Society to its foundations, seemed to her the idea of the future grappling with that of the past. Writing to Slazzini, she said : Ce vaste mouve- ment, c^est V effort de la vie, qui veut sortir du tombeau et briser la pierre du sepulcre, sauf a se briser elle-meme avec les debris. II serait done insense de se desesperer ; car, si Dieu meme a souffle sur notre poussiere pour la ranimer, il ne la laisser a pas se disperser au vent, Mais est-ce une resurrection definitive vers laquelle nous nous elancons, ou bien n'est-ce qu'une agitation prophe- tique, un tressaillement precurseur de la vie, apres lequel nous dormirons encore un peu de temps, d'un sommeil moins lourd, il est vrai, mais encore accables d^une langueur fatale ? Je le crains.^ Alas ! the decadence and jobbery of the Second Empire, culminating in the debacle of 1870, proved her fears to be only too well founded. In these our own war-days the reflections of this noble, valiant soul, suffering under that scourge beneath which we are now smarting, assume the deepest significance. Je ne doute pas de Vavenir, she writes, mais le present est fort laid.^ Repoussez Vennemi avant tout. . . . Tuons les Prussiens, mais ne les haissons pas.^ Above all things do not despair of France, she is expiat- ing her folly. Whatever happens she will be ^ Correspondance, III, 69. - Ibid., VI, 3. ^ /^^-^.^ 27. THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 183 born again, elle renaitra, quoiquHl arrived At the time of the armistice, she cries Vive la France ! plus que jamais elle est grande, bonne surtout, patiente, facile a gouverner.^ Si la France est dans le sang, elle n'est pas dans la bou£,^ Le Beau est toujours possible en France,^ Not even the horrors of the Commune could destroy her faith in her country and in humanity. She regards it as a horrible and regrettable episode, the result of excessive material civilisa- tion casting its foam to the surface, the cauldron boiling over, on a day when the cook's back was turned, but not fundamentally affecting the democratic movement, and powerless to shake her faith in the people.* Can George Sand be called a feminist? This is a question that has often been asked. But in such an idealist we must not expect to find a partisan. Sainte-Beuve hoped that so rich, versatile, impetuous a talent " would never serve any party." His wish was fulfilled : there never was a person more difficult to label. And she herself strongly objected to the process. Inconsistent as it may seem, she protests that she is without any philosophic or political mis- sion. Ce n'est pas aux artistes et au^ reveurs de vous dire comment on influence ses contemporains 1 Correspondence, VI, 88. « Ibid., 71. » /^^^ 74^ * Ibid., 88. 8 Ibid., 115. 184 THE FRANCE I KNOW dans le sens politique, she writes.^ " I am too ignorant to write anything but stories," she pleads 2 when urging her friend, Daniel Stern {la Comtesse d'Agoult), to take up her pen in the feminist cause. Les politiques purs ^ George Sand always despises. Elections and wire-pulling bored her. Mon role de femme s'y oppose, she protests. Ideas, not methods and machinery, were her concern. So she declined to join any feminist society,^ and refused an invitation to take what was then the revolutionary step of standing as candidate for a local government election. One can hardly believe that had she lived to- day she would have been an ant i- suffragist. Albeit the idea of woman's political emancipation never seems to have entered her head. She could write a long letter ^ advocating votes for .men as a cure for all their ills and describing it as universal suffrage without the misnomer ever occurring to her. Neither was she actively con- cerned with the economic enfranchisement of her sex. The all-important question of woman's work and wages do not seem to have interested her. How comes it, then, that George Sand can ever have been regarded as a feminist? And in what way may her writings be said to have promoted the enfranchisement of women ? Chiefly ^ Journal d'un Voyageur, p. 214. 2 Correspondance, II, 229. ^ in^^^ 283. * Ibid., I, 250. 5 See Souvenirs, pp. 107-125. THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 185 for the very reason that she was too broad- minded to be a mere feminist, that she regarded the woman question not from the feminist, but from the humanitarian point of view. Never was there a more fervent advocate of human soli- darity. " Let the dawn of justice surprise us working for all, not conspiring for a few," ^ she wrote. Je suis nee, cries Lelia, dans la vallee des larmes et tons les malheureux qui rampent sur la terre sont mes freres. Anything approaching to a sex war ^ filled Mme. Sand with alarm. Men and women must unite, she pleaded, if only for the child's sake.^ In her earlier years so bitterly did she resent the injustice towards women of the French marriage laws, that in reply to a young French girl who asked her advice, she wrote : "I cannot advise any one to contract a marriage sanctioned by a civil law which endorses woman's depend- ence, inferiority, and social nullity." ^ Yet in her later works we find her a strong advocate of the family. Briser la famille, non jamais, she cries.^ Her novel, Mauprat, is a paean in honour of the eternity of love between husband and wife. Family joys, domestic happiness, the prima donna, Consuelo, prizes more highly than the intoxica- tion of glory and the raptures of an artist's life.^ Referring to her novels, Jean de la Roche and * 1 Souvenirs, p. 116. 2 /^^-^^^ p^ 117, 3 /^^-^^ p 270. * Correspandunce, II, 230. The letter is dated August 28, 1842. 5 Souvenirs, p. 270. • Consuelo, Vol.' Ill, Chap. LXXXII. p. 95. 186 THE FRANCE I KNOW le Marquis de Villemer, one of her biographers writes : On n'a jamais eccposS plus eloquemment la theorie de Vamour dans le manage et du bon sens dans Vamour. On the other hand, George Sand's realisation of the importance of the preservation of the family did not blind her to the servile position in which that institution too often placed women. With her friends the Saint-Simonians, she believed that every social reform should aim at the physical, moral, and intellectual development of the most numerous and the most oppressed, that it should tend to replace inequality and the privi- leges of one sex or one class by common obliga- tions and common responsibilities. Tyranny she loathed, wheresoever it was exer- cised, in church, state, or family. And woman she saw to be the victim of tyranny, through man-made laws and man-made prejudice.^ Like every true-hearted woman she was loyal to her sex ; and she grew furious when she heard it abused by her anti-feminist friend, Lamennais, who was a latter-day St. Paul. But in reality she was under no illusion with regard to woman's weaknesses and failings. " Weak and inquisi- tive, easy victims of caprice, agitated by whimsical fancies," is the description given of them by Porpora in Consuelo,^ As friends and ^ Mauprat, p. 211. Souvenirs, p. 262. 2 Vol. I, Chap. XX, p. 169. See also Correspondance (1839), p. 145. THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 187 acquaintances Mme. Sand herself always pre- ferred men to women. But, as she points out, woman is what men have made her. Her in- feriority results from man's refusal to grant her educational facilities. By education alone, she maintains, can effectually be eradicated the de- plorable results of the social position to which men had relegated women. But George Sand's own history proves that after all life itself may be the best educator. The following letter, ^ written to her would-be biographer Louis Ulbach, shows how in iier storm-tossed soul there came to reign the eventual element of calm. " Nohant, " November 26, 1869. " As for the last twenty-five years, they are not interesting. They represent a very calm and very happy old age spent with my family. My time passed in amusing the children, botanising a little in the summer, taking long walks (I am still a famous pedestrian) and writing novels when I can find two hours in the day and two hours in the evening. I write with ease and with pleasure. It is my recreation. For my corre- spondence is enormous. That is hard work . . . a veritable scourge ! But who is without one ? After my death, I hope to go to a planet where reading and writing are unknown. To do without them one will need to be fairly perfect." ^ Corres'pondancey V, 829 et seq. 188 THE FRANCE I KNOW Then she writes of her financial resources, telling how she has made over to her children the bulk of her fortune, keeping back only a small capital (20,000 francs) to lighten the burden of the expense of her tisanes when she falls ill. " Now that my children " [her son Maurice and his wife Lina] ** keep house, I have time to make little excursions into • France, for the remote corners of iFrance are little known, and they have beauties as great as those which are more distant. Thus I find the backgrounds of my novels. I like to have seen what I describe : it simplifies research and study. If I have only three words to say about a place, I like to visualise it in my memory and to get as niuch local colour as I can." Here is the realism to which Brunetiere refers.^ " All this is quite trivial, dear friend. And when one is invited by so distinguished a biogra- pher as yourself, one would wish. to be as great as a pyramid in order to merit the honour of occupying it. But I cannot rise to it. I am nothing but an ordinary woman, to whom has been ascribed fearsome characteristics, which are quite imaginary. I have . been accused • of not having loved passionately. My life seems to me to have been all affection. And I should have thought that would have contented them. ... ^ Ante, p. 169. THE IDEALS OF GEORGE SAND 189 " I have remained very cheerful, without enough initiative to entertain others, but knowing how to help them to entertain themselves. I must have serious faults. I am like other people, I do not realise them. Neither do I know whether I have good qualities and virtues. My mind has been much occupied with truth, and in seeking it consciousness of the ego wanes day by day. You must know this from your own experience. If one does right, one does not praise oneself for it. One merely regards- oneself as logical, that is all. If one does wrong, it is because one does not realise what one is doing. More enlightened, one would never do it again. This is what we should all aim at. ' ^ I do not believe in evil, I only believe in ignorance. " George Sand." Written half a century ago, this explanation of conduct differs little from that of the most modern psychologists. The serene atmosphere of this letter suggests that the writer had attained to that ideal old age, to that sense of calm and freedom, which, in the words of Plato's Cephalus, comes, " when the passions release their hold " and " we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master but of many." Thus, in 1835, a brief interval between two of her numerous heart adventures, George Sand writes : ^ ^ To Everard, in Lettres d'un Voyageur, p. 158. 190 THE FRANCE I KNOW " Passions and infatuations have in days gone by rendered me extremely unhappy. Now of in- fatuations I am thoroughly" [an expression at that time somewhat premature] '* cured by the exercise of my will, of passion I shall soon be by age and reflection. In every other respect I have always been and always shall be perfectly happy, consequently just and good, except in my love affairs, in which I am worse than the devil, because then I become ill, splenetic, and rash." Here Mme. Sand, on the verge of maturity, accurately foresees her own old age, and on the whole faithfully describes her own temperament. " Libertinism," writes one of her English critics, John Oliver Hobbes,^ " was not her character, it was only a characteristic. Her character was tender, exquisitely patient, and good-natured. She would take cross humanity in her arms and carry it out into the sunshine of the fields, she would show it flowers and birds, sing songs to it, tell it stories, recall its original beauty." ^ In her " Introduction " to the English translation of Mauprat (Heinemann, 1901). • • • • •• • • • < •..•;•'.:..:: -.•.•..••. A Corsioan Poilu in a Trench on the Somme. [To face page 190. CHAPTER XIV THE CULT OF JEANNE d'aRC AND THE FRENCH- WOMAN'S WAR- WORK The cult of Jeanne d'Arc was part of that wave of patriotic sentiment which increasing German aggressiveness caused to sweep over France during the decade immediately preceding the War. During all the five hundred years since her martyrdom never before had she been so passion- ately adored by all classes and creeds. The Maid became the symbol of la patrie ; and in her presence, as a foretaste of that sacred union the War was to accomplish, many party differences were forgotten. In eloquent pages she was celebrated alike by Anatole France the socialist, Gabriel Hanotaux the radical, Maurice Barres the reactionary, proving the truth of Deroulede's device : Republicc^inSy royalistes, bonapartistes, ce sont des prinoms, Frangais est le nom defamille. The year before the War, in December, 1913, Maurice Barres, on the battle-field of Champigny, celebrating the anniversary of an earlier defense nationaUy cried, " There is not to-day a single Frenchman, to whose profoundest veneration Jeanne d'Arc does not appeal. For every one 191 192 THE FRANCE I KNOW of us she expresses one ideal. For royalists she is the loyal subject eager to defend her sovereign ; for caesarists, the providential leader arising for the deliverance of the nation in its hour of need ; for republicans the child of the people in greatness of soul rising superior to all principalities and powers. Even revolutionaries may march be- neath her banner proclaiming that, having first appeared as a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence, she became an instrument of salvation." Of all the figures in the noble pageant of French history Joan is the saintliest. Nevertheless, if we would speak by the card, Joan is not a saint. Catholics tell us that her canonisation is as yet incomplete. She has but attained to its pen- ultimate stage, beatification. There are three rung^ in the ladder of sainthood : Veneration, Beatification, Sanctification. This second round, which Joan has reached, entitles her to have her image placed in churches and to intercede with the Almighty for the faithful. " I never cease to pray to Joan of Arc for my son," said the mother of a French writer serving in the trenches. " He has done so much for her that she ought to protect him." If before the War the cult of Joan united Frenchmen, in these days of resistance to a foreign foe it binds them closer still. Now for the French nation Joan is pre-eminently " the sister of all who have died for their country." Nothing touches our French Allies more than THE CULT OF JEANNE D'ARC 193 the tributes of veneration with which EngHshmen honour the Maid whom their ancestors burned. Those flowers, tied with the British colours and reverently, ever since the beginning of the War, laid by British hands upon the scene of her martyrdom in Rouen market-place, have found their way to French hearts. For four years now throughout the length and breadth of France, in church and cathedral, in market-place and public-square, the second Sunday in May has been celebrated as Joan of Arc's Festival. . In Paris, round Joan's statue in the Place de Rivoli, a great concourse gathers on the spot where, during her siege of the capital, then in the enemy's hands, the Maid fell wounded by an arrow from the ramparts. Orleans, of course, has an imposing procession. Even in poor bombarded Rheims, in cette ville cadavre, there are maimed rites around that image of la Pucelle which, before the gaunt, battered skeleton of the cathedral, still stands proudly intact save for the loss of half her sword. ^ When, in the Chambre des Deputes , in 1915, Maurice Barres first proposed the institution of this national festival, he was met by the objection : " How can you mention Joan of Arc while the English are in France? Do you wish to offend them? " ^ As I write comes the news that this revered and mar- vellously preserved statue is being removed to a place of safety. 194 THE FRANCE I KNOW Barrds replied by quoting Rudyard Kipling's lines — " Pardoning old necessity — no pardon can efface That undying sin we shared in Rouen market-place." " Those who raised this outcry," he writes, in his Autour de Jeanne d^Arc,^ " grossly misjudged the seriousness, the sincerity, and the religious conscience of modern England." And he recalls Joan's summons to the English to cease fighting against her countrymen and unite with them in a crusade against the Turk. Now that with our beloved Ally, once " our sweet enemy," we do battle for civilisation against barbarism, we are indeed obeying Joan's behest. Days of many kinds we have had in England since the beginning of the War. Why should we not add to their number a Joan of Arc's Day? We would then celebrate not only Joan's pity for the realm of France, but her pity for all who suffer, remembering how at the battle of Pathay she was seen supporting with her arm the head of a wounded English soldier ! If Joan's memory has thus served to bind the men of France in bonds of brotherhood, much more even has it inspired and united her women. Shortly before the May Festival, in X916, the President of the French League of Patriots received the following letter. ^ Paris : Edouard Champion, 1916. Vendu au profit de la Fidiration des Mutiles de la Guerre. THE CULT OF JEANNE D'ARC 195 " Monswur le President de la Ligue des Patriotes — " The maids of France are possessed by a desire to devote themselves to their country and her soldiers. Despite their eagerness, how- ever, there are many tasks in which they find themselves powerless to assist those who fight. At Joan, of Arc's Festival it has been the charming custom of the youths of Paris to cover her statues with flowers. Might we not this year take their place and offer their homage to the victorious woman warrior? Occupied by sacred duties, they would be pleased to know how their sisters are preserving their tradition. Joan of Arc should not be without flowers in the year of victory. For we are confident she will grant us that success which the courage and suffering of so many Frenchmen have deserved." . . . The signatures affixed to this letter are as interesting and as significant as the letter itself. I select a few to show how various were the classes and occupations represented. Suzanne Guillemot, pupil of the Scola Can- torum; Louise Beneton, member of the Women Students Society, " les Amies de Sainte Gene- vieve " ; E. Boubrila, Societe" Generale ; M. Colange, bank-clerk; M. Martin, of the Credit Lyonnais; J. Lagelle, painter; H. Fery, art student; R. Trudon, student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts; M. Pellet, elementary school 196 THE FRANCE I KNOW teacher; L. Regraff, draughtswoman; E. Gaubert, typist; B. Vautier, telephone superintendent; M. Besombes, dressmaker; M. Saisse, student of painting. Never, throughout the ages, have French- women been deaf to their country's call. And in this War their patriotism has surpassed itself. Perhaps we English hardly realise how much we owe to our French sisters, how France could not possibly have continued her resistance through these four years, constituting herself the bulwark between us and the enemy, had it not been for the unfailing courage and indefatig- able perseverance of her women in cultivating the land, carrying on industry and commerce, and manufacturing munitions. Summoning his fellow-countrymen to brace themselves for, a yet more arduous struggle against the foe, Anatole France writes : "I don't speak of our women. They have already made every effort and performed every deed of devotion." Of course there are exceptions to prove the rule. And we may be sure that they have not passed unnoticed by writers of French novels. The authors, for example, of la Guerre Madame and Tu n^es plus rien,^ inspired by the irresis- tible tendency of their race to reveal the most ^ G6raldy and Boylesve. See ante, p. 100, for a character in M. Boylesve's novel who refuses to be disturbed or in an)^ way affected by the War. THE CULT OF JEANNE D'ARC 197 unpleasant truths, doubtless base their fiction on fact. But as the past history of France has presented a long procession of brave patriotic women, , so they have not been lacking in this War. First on the roll of honour must stand the noble nuns of Gerbeviller. The chatelaine of Gerbeviller had established a hospital in her beautiful Louis XIV chateau. Over it, visible to a great distance, floated the Red Cross Flag. But, as it has so pften happened in this War, the standard of healing afforded no protection. During the German bombardment of the village, the chateau suffered first and most terribly. Its utter de- struction, followed by the systematic burning of the village with petroleum and by the slaughter of thirty of its inhabitants— men, women, and children — provoked even a German officer to exclaim : " This is pure Vandalism." Through- out this frightfulness, amidst the smoking ruins, the nuns, tranquil and undismayed, directed by the valiant Soeur Julie, whose name has now become a household word in France, laboured unceasingly, binding up wounds, carrying succour to the dyings and performing countless other deeds of mercy. Interminable almost would be the list of the gallant nurses, lay and religious, who, in the face of the advancing enemy, have sacrificed life and limb in their country's service. Neither does the nursing profession enjoy the monopoly of 198 THE FRANCE I KNOW having produced heroines. We must not forget the brave Mme. Macherez, whose decision and courage saved Soissons from destruction; the vaHant telephonists ^f the east who refused to forsake their posts when the Germans were advancing; and that courageous little Parisian girl, who, maimed for life by a zeppelin bomb, as soon as she could speak said, " Tell Mother it is not serious." Not less courageous were the women outside the zone des armees. They have not flinched before the most painful duties. And, when the mayors of Paris appealed for persons willing to break the news of their bereavement to the relatives of those who had fallen, volunteers were not lacking. One of them in "la Grande Revue " ^ has told with infinite delicacy and tenderness the story of her sorrowful ministra- tions. These touching pages, revealing the very heart of the French people, are an eloquent testimony to the women's heroic endurance and self-sacrifice. " My mission," she writes, " took me chiefly to the houses of small shopkeepers ^nd labourers, to people who do not know how to be anything but themselves, who are impulsive and simple. . . . Their solidarity is admirable. They do not always agree. . . . But when misfortune comes, they cling together and help one another. And now when. sorrow visits every street, every ^ The article is entitled " L'Arriere tragi que." Sep- tember, 1916. . THE CULT OF JEANNE D'ARC 199 house, every tenement, never was mutual help and sympathy more prompt and efficacious." The strong fraternal bonds uniting the poor proved invaluable to this gentle visitor in enabling her to discover how best to approach and to break the news to the bereaved. Her inquiries, however . discreet, quickly aroused the sense of compassion — appealing to that eagerness to render service which characterises those who are constantly confronted by life's difficulties. Not even the concierge, that most maligned and ridiculed type. of female, proved an exception to this rule. Her advice in suggesting which member of the family should be first approached, or perhaps brought down into the office to be spoken to apart, was most useful. Nowhere in the world is there a more passionate mother than the Frenchwoman. And the breaking of the sorrowful tidings to her was the most agonising part of this sad service. " They are lacerated," writes the visitor, " to the depths of their being. . . . Whether a grown man or a youth, the dead son instantly becomes the child again, the little child, who was bom, suckled, cared for, loved with a woman's secret pride in her male off- spring. . . . More than the wife or the sister, the mother thinks of the body, of that flesh of her flesh, which she cannot tolerate the idea of forsaking. ' Where have they laid him ? Do you know ? Is he in a cemetery where I can go and visit his grave ? ' . . . And if for once you 200 THE FRANCE I KNOW can tell them their child rests in a real cemetery, one of those peaceful little village burying- grounds ou Von est Men, they sigh, relieved, soothed for the moment." Then there were the widows. The writer of the article proudly testifies to the loyalty and devotion she discovered among the stricken reci- pients of her sorrowful tidings, and to tell how often, in the course of her preliminary inquiries, she heard the expression : " What a pity ! They were such a united couple ! " And where, as among the poor, there is little privacy, where everything is known such testimony may be trusted. " There are far more united couples among our people than is often thought," she remarks. " There is more sexual morality among the populace of Paris than you might believe." " I be faithless to my husband whilst he is at the front ! "" exclaimed a Paris washerwoman. " No, indeed, he could not protect himself." This messenger of grief, going hither and thither for two whole years on her sad errands, finding sorrow everywhere, heard no accent of revolt. The sufferers accepted la guerre sacree. They cried even in the depths of thieir anguish, Vive la France I How many of those who have suffered find work their supreme consolation. Promptly and courageously in the first days of mobilisation the women of France took up the tasks of the hus- bands, sons,5.brothers they sent to the fronts THE CULT OF JEANNE D'ARC 201 doing just what was most needed, through all classes of the population, from the duchess who scoured . pots and pans in the hospital kitchen, and the banker's wife,, rising at four o'clock in the morning to make herself acquainted with the books before customers arrived, down to the working man's wife, who did her husband's work on the. farm, or filled his post in bakehouse, shop, omnibus, tramway, or railway station. Few are the Frenchwomen upon whom the War has not left its mark! Not even the most excitable have escaped its steadying sobering influence. Thus, at the Conservatoire, during the annual Concours de Comedie, the popular dramatist, M. Maurice Donnay, notices that Phedre and Celimene, even at the end of a long day of suspense, no longer indulge in crises de nerfs or break forth into violent vituperations when the jury fail to crown their favourite candidate. " No," he writes,^ " those young girl students have seen around them too much mourning, suffering, and sorrow. In the intervals between their classes and their study, they have found time to play to the woujided in the hospitals or at matinees in aid of some war-work. Their leisure hours have been occupied with the care of children, of old people and of other sufferers, to whom they are sisters, friends, marraines. And it has all given them brave hearts and strong nerves." ^ Notes sur la Guerre, " Revue Hebdomadaire," March 80, 1918. 202 THE FRANCE I KNOW Many French actresses, thrown out of employ- ment by the closing of the theatres, have devoted themselves to war-work. Some have taken up nursing. One graceful stage beauty I saw helping Dr. Barthe de Sanfort, the inventor of Ambrine,^ in his hospital at Issy-les-Moulineaux. I watched her delicate fingers spray the healing salve on to the wounds of a stalwart blacksmith; and it was a joy to witness the poor sufferer's relief from pain. Another winsome comedienne, follow- ing the example of Marie Antoinette, has become a dairymaid. To-day in Paris markets she is as renowned for her butter and her cheeses as she was on the stage for her understudying of Mme. Bartet. Latin women everywhere have been slower than their Anglo-Saxon sisters to learn the importance of united action. Such a thing, I am told, was unknown among Frenchwomen in the 1870 War. Now, however, the women of France are finding one another. And in the vanguard of this significant movement are the French Feminist. Societies, notably, the Conseil National des Femmes Fran^aises, presided over by Mme. Jules Siegfried, and the Union Fran^aise pour le Suffrage des Femmes, the president of which, Mme. de Witt-Schlumberger, has five sons and one son-in-law in the army. For some years a section of the National Council, under the presidency of Mme. Julien 1 See ante, p. 68. THE CULT OF JEANNE D'ARC 203 Koechlin, had been occupied with the organisa- tion of women's labour. In the first days of the War, Mme. KoechHn's committee approached the Minister of t^abour, who put it in touch with the War Office. At the end of August M. Marcel Sembat, Minister of Public Works, placed at its disposal the beautiful old palace in the Rue des Saints-Peres, which before ^the War was the .Government School of Bridges and High- ways. Here the committee established its depot. In these fine, lofty halls were the cutting-out rooms, the weighing rooms, and the secretary's office. Here work was given out to the affiliated sixty-five self-supporting workrooms of Paris, which employed three thousand five hundred women. The War Office was the committee's chief customer. In the first three months of the War it had been supplied with one hundred and twenty-seven thousand garments. At the- invitation of the organiser, Mme. Louise Compain, vice-president of the National Council of French Women, I visited one of the affiliated workrooms, occupying two iiooms on the ground floor of a house in a typical workingrclass quarter. The windows, giving on a courtyard planted with plane trees, were wide open to admit the gor- geous sunlight and tKe breath of spring in the air. Beyond was a vast clearing, made for the construction of new buildings, and revealing in gaunt nakedness the sky-scrapers, seven storeys high, in the next street. 204 THE FRANCE I KNOW Within sounded merrily the dick of knitting- needles and the buzz of conversation. The twenty women then assembled (forty were on the books) were either the wives of soldiers at the front or workers thrown out of employment by the War. Some were stout and elderly, of the cook class ; some of uncertain age, prim and neat, looked like book-keepers or manageresses of dressmaking departments ; the youth and smart- ness of others suggested the midinettes, who in peace days, at noon, used to flock gaily through Paris streets. Most of the work was done at home. But the women met two afternoons a week to give in the garments (in this workroom all knitted or crocheted), to receive payment and new work, and to hear a reading or a talk by Mme. Compain. The reading that afternoon was one of Pierre Mille's humorous stories. The prices paid were 3 fcs. for socks, 2 fcs. mittens, 2.75 fcs. knitted and 2.45 fcs. crocheted gloves, 8.50 fcs. scarves, and 12 fcs. jerseys. The workers received these sums less the cost of the wool and five per cent, deducted for expenses. As the War dragged on, as its. demands in- creased, and as industrial conditions, dislocated in the first days of mobilisation, righted themselves, the need for these workrooms ceased. In 1916 there were few, if any, left open. The workers had found employment in the munition factories which had sprung up all-over France. THE CULT OF JEANNE D'ARC 205 One of these I visited in the autumn of 1916. It was a world in itself, employing no fewer than nine thousand workers, five thousand four hun- dred of whom were women. There, in the midst of these novel surroundings, one may see the pre- War midinette preserving, in grime and dust and glare and oil, much of that daintiness which used to delight the eyes of noontide Paris. She has not forgotten how to twist her hair to a bewitching angle, how to wear her collar with a becoming grace. She refuses to submit to the black overall's uniformity.' If it suits her she affects it. If not, she substitutes a pinafore of khaki, blue or lilac, or she may even wear un- protected her blouse and skirt. From beneath her smock she allows to peep a frill or a ruffle. And if she wears a cap it is like those in Rowland- son's pictures. She loves to pin a flower into her beli and to decorate her lathe with roses. In their incongruous framework of steel and iron a whole row of fragrant blossoms that October afternoon were suggesting the glory and the sunshine of the autumn day without. The workshop's din and turmoil seemed power- less to damp the midinette's spirits. Through the whirring of machinery, her laughter rang almost as marrily as when the striking of the noonday clock let her loose from her embroidery frame into the streets of Paris. The gay smile that greeted nfie seemed to say that she was pleased and proud to be seen toiling so bravely. 206 THE FRANCE I KNOW And when I asked, " But don't you find this work terribly hard ? " the answer was invari- ably, Mais pas du tout, madame. Of course, the hardness of the work varies considerably; for in every process of shell- making — drop-forging, machining, testing, etc. — women are employed. And in France, by the way, our dilution of labour difficulty is unknown. The pleasantest and easiest work was that of the girls who guided the little electric cars laden with shells. They tipped their Joads auto- matically into a railway wagon which conveyed them to another factory, where they were fitted with fuses. The cheerfulness of these girl-drivers reminded me of the hilarity of the pit-boys, riding in the tiny trucks which circulateji through the galleries of a North of England coal-mine I once visited. "You like this work?" I asked one of these youngsters. " Oh, it's a lark, Missie ! " he exclaimed, while his eyes twinkled and his black little face expanded into a grin. But to represent even the midinette turned munition worker as always merry would be to give a very false impression. My visit to this huge Paris factory was in the early afternoon when the workers had been refreshed by their midday meal and an hour's rest. Jt requires no effort of imagination to realise that, as the ten- hours' day or night drags on, there arrives a time when " the grasshopper becomes a burden," when every bone in the body aches, when the tired THE CULT OF JEANNE D'ARC 207 worker, as she passes through the factory turnstile on her way homewards, feels like a washed-out rag, too fatigued even to eat, desiring one thing only— to sink into a long, untroubled sleep. Nevertheless, the workers' healthy faces and sprightly forms do not suggest that this fatigue is permanently injurious. I can see now the magnificent figure of a tall, handsome brunette. Clad in black from head to foot, her brown eyes flashing, she stood, like a veritable goddess, superbly drop-forging, while the attendant men, bared to the waist, worked around her. I paused to watch her. She was far too busy to talk, had the din permitted conversation. But it was with a pleased . and proud glance that she answered my appreciative smile. While admiring these courageous war-workers one's heart bleeds to see the creatures who ought to be creating life, wearing out their strength in forging implements for life's destruction. And especially does this reflection come home as one talks to the mothers at work in these factories. For not a few to the question, " What was your work before you came here ? " answered, " I looked after my children, madame." And the one plaintive note came from the mothers. " What have you done with your children? " I asked. " Ah, madame," was the wistful reply, " I have to pay some one to look after them. It is expensive, arid how do I know whether my bairns are properly cared for? " 208 THE FRANCE I KNOW The absence of a creche and also of a restaurant from this factory, and from many others through- out France, seemed a serious neglect. It is, however, being gradually remedied. To many numerous war-works of naercy, ably carried on by Frenchwomen, it is unnecessary for me to refer in this chapter, because the subject has already been admirably treated by Mrs. Gertrude Atherton in her book. The Living Present,^ Just a word, however, as to an ever-widening field of activity, which 1 do not think Mrs. Atherton mentions : this is the Society for Assisting Prisoners of War and the occupants of internment camps in Germany. There is no more convincing proof of French- women's organising capacity than' the Society's busy, spacious rooms in the Champs Elysees, where hundreds of feminine fingers are ceaselessly preparing and packing parcels destined now, not only for the enemy's country, but for France, for those whom the invader, having despoiled of all they possess, is sending out of the occupied regions. ^ London : John Murray, 1917. • ;*• • • ••• • • • • •• • Phot. Henri M mud. -rCv [To face page 208. CHAPTER XV THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN The history of woman's emancipation in France is not likely to refute Renan's contention that a. few days of revolution may carry humanity farther on the path of progress than a generation of peace. For we can already say without exaggera- tion that the cause of woman's freedom and independence has advanced . in these four war years more papidly than in the previous half- century. During those fifty years, however, the cause was not stationary, for at least the founda- tions of progress were being laid. Thus, in 1884, the Loi Naquet, by legalising divorce, although not on equal grounds for both sexes, granted a certain liberty to women who were victims of some unhappy marriage of con- venience. In 1896 married women received the right to dispose of their own earnings; and in 1897 they were recognised as competent to witness legal documents. But more important even than these legal measures was the changed attitude towards life which came over the young Frenchwoman of the 'eighties. It was due partly to the supei^seding P '209 210 THE FRANCE I KNOW of the convent school by the girls' lycee and to the admission of women to university courses and lectures. To realise the magnitude of this revolu- tion one has only to compare the young French girl of 1910 with her grandmother at a similar age. The latter had been brought up with her mind padlocked securely according to the principle approved by Moliere in the well-known lines — II n'est pas Men honnSte, et pour beaucoup de causes Qu'une femme etudie et sache tant de choses?- Consequently the young French girl's ignorance on fundamental matters made her the laughing- stock of novelists and dramatists, who jeered at her as la petite oie blanche (" little white goose)." In almost oriental seclusion, remote from life's actualities, she was kept until the day of her marriage with a husband whom she hardly knew and whom her family took care should be old enough to assume the position of guardian now relinquished by her father or some male relative.^ On the rare occasions when mademoiselle was permitted to emerge from her seclusion she was under the strictest family supervision : " Father on the right, mother on the left, brother in front, uncle behind, governess all round." ^ See also our own poet, Prior — " Be to her virtues very kind, Be to her faults a Httle bhnd, And clap a padlock on her mind." * It is only since the War, in 1917, that the law has permitted women to act as guardians to their own children. THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 211 Horrified would those protectors of feminine innocence have been to see the independence and freedom of the young French lycee girl of to-day, as she walks or bicycles unchaperoned to school or college. In the evolution of French girlhood the bicycle's role cannot be ignored.^ It has certainly helped to untie the family apron-strings. "It is the bicycle," writes Mme. Simone Bodeve,^ " which has educated our young people." Elle les a lancees sur la grande route, Elle les a grisees de la folie de Vespace, Pedalling away on the magic wheel the French girl escaped from the super- vision of her family, she even out-distanced her chaperon. Bowling along with her brother and his friends she formed comradeships, which, threaten- ing the time-honoured institution of le manage de convenance, are introducing into France the Anglo-Saxon mode of early engagements and love-marriages. Mademoiselle who had been brought up to regard a draught as fatal, learned to love fresh air and exercise. Her muscles grew supple, her chest expanded, swoons and megrims faded into the past. Diderot's definition of a woman, ^ **I cannot but think," writes William James (Selected Papers on Philosophy, p. 25), '* that the tennis . . . and the bicycle craze, which arc so rapidly extending among our dear sisters and daughters in this country are going to lead to a sounder and heartier moral tone." 2 Celles qui I'ravaillentf with an Introduction by Romain Holland, p. 160. 212 THE FRANCE I KNOW as a creature who faints at the sight of a mouse or a spider, began to sound ridiculous. Rarer and rarer became the Lydia Languish type of female, the fragile being whom the sentimentalist, Michelet, would raise out of the grime and the dust of everyday life on to the pedestal of idealism where somehow should be handed up to her suaves nourritures qui flattent V odor at autant que le gout. It was the bicycle that first began to revo- lutionise feminine attire. Tight-lacing went out and bloomers came in. Then tennis, following the bicycle, required la jeune fille sportive to don the comfortable loose blouse and skirt. Finally, came the vogue of the tailor-made, now so indis- pensable an item of a French girl's wardrobe. From the lyceenne and the bicycliste garconniere to the avocute and the doctoresse seemed but a step. It was a step, however, which could not be taken without a hard struggle against mascu- line jealousy, prejudice, and that ridicule which ever since Moliere has clung to la femme savante. Women themselves in this matter were their own worst enemies. Even that witty woman, Mme. Emile de Girardin,^ was evidently on the side of la petite oie blanche, for she wrote : " Toutes les femmes ont de V esprit sauf les has hleus^ ^ Her husband, that king among journaUsts, Emile de Girardin, was wiser. He supported the cause of woman's independence and education (cf . his books, VEgale de V Homme, V Homme et la Femme), and converted so bitter an opponent as Alexandre Dumas {fils). THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 213 The prejudice against educated women was a very old one, older even than Moliere, for we find Montaigne, who himself liked to talk to learned ladies, compelled to admit that he was an excep- tion, and that neither Frenchmen nor theologians required much learning from women. But from Montaigne to la Rochefoucauld and from Con- dorcet to Brieux the cause of woman's educa- tion and independence in France has seldom been without some among the elite of French manhood to champion it. Ah ! les braves petites, exclaims Romain RoUand as he admires the courage and energy with which les vierges guer- rieres of 1910 were carving out for themselves careers in literature, science, and art. ~By that year these warring virgins had already won many a hardly contested battle. In 1897, women students had been admitted to the Ecole des Beaux Arts. In 1900, the first woman. Mile. Chauvin, was called to the French Bar, and immediately many others began to qualify for that legal profession, in which these War years have proved them indispensable. More than a score of women barristers are now practising in Paris, and the barrister's toque crowning a feminine coiffure is to-day a familiar sight in the Palais de Justice. Many years earlier French medical faculties had been thrown open to women, but until the present century it seems to have been chiefly foreign women, English and American, who.qualified there. By 1907, however, 214 THE FRANCE I KNOW tliere were four hundred and fifty qualified women doctors practising up and down France. Now that number has considerably increased. Many medical women hold government posts, serving as inspectresses, officers of health, and so forth. Not a few at the beginning of the War were com- pelled to serve as nurses as well as doctors. For it is only within the last few years that there has been any movement towards the establishment of anything resembling the English nursing pro- fession. That calling in France had long been regarded as the monopoly of nuns and sisters of charity. Frenchwomen, unlike their English sisters, have always attached more importance to the economic than to the political side of their emancipation. One of the earliest manifestoes of modern French feminism, a petition presented to Louis XVI by women of the third estate, on the eve of the Revolution (January 1, 1789), begins by renounc- ing all desire for political power. " We do not ask, Sire," it runs, *'for permission to send our deputies to the States-General. We know too well that favour would control their election, for we realise with what ease one may infringe on the liberty of voting." . Then the petitioners proceed to relate the hardships of woman's lot, whether married or single. Many vieilles filles have been driven ♦ into convents, not constrained by the call of a religious vocation, but in order to escape the THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 215 penury to which, in those days before le Code Napoleon, they had been reduced through their parents having expended upon the sons the whole of the family fortune. As a remedy for their sufferings, the petitioners requested that nien should be forbidden to exer- cise callings, espepially suitable for women, that they should cease to be dressmakers, embroiderers, milliners, etc. ** If they will leave us the needle and the distaff we engage not to usurp the compass and the plane." Further the women demanded the restoration for feminine occupations of something like the old craft guilds, to which artificers should only be admitted after severe examinations and an inquiry as to morals. They wished prostitutes to be compelled to wear some badge or uniform, in order that they might not be mistaken for honest women. Further they implored the king to establish schools where they might acquire a scientific knowledge of their language, as well as the principles of religion and ethics, divested of all pettiness, and where characters might be formed, adorned by such virtues as are especially becoming to the feminine Sex — sweetness, modesty, patience, charity. As for the arts, the petitioners continue, women will acquire those without a master. Science, they add, showing themselves docile to Moli^re's influence, would but serve to inspire them with 216 THE FRANCE I KNOW foolish pride. " It would but make pedants, and, contrary to Nature's design, transform us into hybrid creatures,* who are seldom faithful wives, and still more seldom good mothers of families." " We* demand knowledge," they continued, " in order to educate our children on reasonable and healthy lines and to make them subjects worthy to serve you. We shall teach them to cherish the glorious name of France. We shall inspire them with our own love of your Majesty. For while we are content to leave genius and valour to men, we shall ever dispute with them the precious gift of sensibility. We defy them "to love you better than we do. They flock to Versailles, most of them for their own interests, but we. Sire, in order to see you. When after much difficulty, and with a palpitating heart, we succeed, if only for an instant, in fixing our gaze upon your Illustrious Person, then our tears flow, and, oblivious of the idea of majesty and sovereignty, we only behold in you a tender Father, for whom a thousand times we would sacrifice our lives." ^ This interesting document strikes the true feminist note, and, with the exception of its cringing royalism and its scorn of science, forecasts the programme of the French Feminist Movement for many years to come. ^ See Considerations sur les Interits du Tiers Etat addressees au Peuple des Provinces 'par un Proprietaire Fonder (1789). THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 217 George Sand, as we have seen, resembled these petitioners in her total unconcern about votes for women. George Sand's disciple, Mme. Adam (Juliette Lamber), although a suffragist, in her first book, I dees Anti-Prudhoniennes (1858), rele- gated political enfranchisement to the second place. " Work alone," she wrote, " has emanci- pated man, work alone will emanicipate women." Half a century later we find M. Romain Rowland regarding the woman question as un fait , , . de Vordre economique, and another writer ^ ascribing the triumph of feminism to the bread-and-cheese question, estimating that, in 1913, out of the | nineteen millions of Frenchwomen seven millions were earning their own living. Possibly it was their innate business capacity, '/ united to their social success and to the disrepute i ^ into which politics have fallen in France, that led many emancipated Frenchwomen to regard as of no account their complete votelessness, their exclusion both from the local and parliamentary franchise. Nevertheless France, even before the War, was not without a women's suffrage movements In 1913, the Academy of Political and Moral Science offered a prize for the best work on women's suffrage. One or two suffragists had gone so far as to refuse to pay taxes. " Why should I, the landowner, pay the land tax when it is only my tenants who vote?" protested one of these ^ Simone Bod^ve iii Celles qui Travaillent 218 THE FRANCE I KNOW militants. Out of the one hundred and eighty feminist societies fifty were suffrage. Some of them, however, numbered but a score or two of members. By far the largest and most impor- tant, with branches throughout the length and breadth of the land, was V Union Frangaise pour le Suffrage des Femmes, presided over by Mme. de Witt Schlumberger. In the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies the cause was not without supporters. Two of the most enthusiastic were M. Jules Siegfried, husband of the president of the French National Council of Frenchwomen, and M. Ferdinand Buisson, president of the Ligue des Droits de VHomme, which also advocates the rights of women in Parliament. M. Buisson presided over a group formed to promote legisla- tion on behalf of women, and, more especially, their enfranchisement. The War has at length opened the eyes of enlightened French womanhood and of a large number of men also to the importance of the vote. For the first time in the history of the movement their claim to it has been publicly acknowledged in Parliament. At the beginning of the 1918 session, in their opening speeches, M. Latapie, the doyen of the Senate, and M. Jules Siegfried, the doyen of the Chambre des Deputes, proclaimed woman's right to parliamentary en- franchisement. On the 21st of June, 1918, M. Louis Martin, Senator of the Var Department, proposed in THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 219 the Senate, a bill including women over twenty- five in the communal electoral lists and in cases of a senatorial election (the French Senate being elected by indirect suffrage) enabling munici- palities to nominate women as members of the electoral college. In the following October, however, the parliamentary commission on uni- versal suffrage declared in favour of the local government franchise and eligibility to municipal councils for women over thirty, but against the parliamentary vote. Many a woman war-worker is now beginning to realise how serious are the disabilities her votelessness imposes upon her. She is also com- ing to regard her enfranchisement not as a privi- lege alone, but as a duty to the nation. The founders of the first great French Salon, the famous Blue Room, used to boast centuries ago that women had* debrutalised French Society. The president of the French Suffrage Union, ad- dressing the annual congress of her society in 1918, called on .women to " humanise French politics." She also bade them take courage from the thought that outside France their demand is now supported by an army of no less than twenty- one million women voters. The victory of English suffragists has heartened their French sisters, whose task, however, is much more difficult than was ours. For we must not forget that while with us the case of large numbers- of disenfran- chised men enforced our demand, in France men 220 THE FRANCE I KNOW have already achieved universal suffrage, so that, apart from women, there is no need for any extension of the franchise. Close are the bonds of sympathy, which in this matter, as in so many others, unite America and France. L'Union Fran9aise recently sent a deputation to visit suffrage societies in the United States and to report on their methods of organisation. The deputation presented a me- morial to President Wilson, signed on behalf of all the suffrage societies in the Allied Countries, expressing the hope that the United States Senate will this session pass the Women's Suf- frage amendment to the constitution which is now before it. In reply the President of the American Republic has addressed to all the signa- tories of the document an expression of opin- ion so significant that I am glad — ^through the kindness of Mme. de Witt Schlumberger, the president of F Union Frangaise to be able to reproduce it here — " White House, Washington, " 7 June, 1918. "... I have read your message with the deepest interest. And with pleasure I take this opportunity of making unreservedly the following declaration. The entire reconstruction of the world on a democratic basis, for. which we are now fighting and which we are determined to achieve at any cost, can only be completely and satisfactorily attained when women have re- THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 221 ceivcd the vote. . . . The services they have rendered in this supreme crisis of the world's history are most remarkable. Without them the War could not have been carried on. Without them its sacrifices could not have been borne. It is high time that a part of our debt to them should be acknowledged and paid. The only acknowledgment they ask is the vote. Can we with justice refuse it ? "WooDRow Wilson." At a time when President Wilson is almost idolised in France, when la Ligue des Droits de r Homme prints on its envelopes a portrait of the American President, inscribed with the words. Pour la Justice, contre la Barbarie, such a pro- nouncement, widely circulated as it has been by the French Press, cannot fail to strengthen the tendency, daily increasing, to give women the vote. Even in reactionary circles their exclu- sion from the local government franchise is now regarded as a gross injustice. • Suffrage is by no means the only woman's question that the War is revolutionising in France. Society's attitude towards woman's lot and woman's destiny in general is changing. Before the War, despite the educational progress recorded in the foregoing pages, the rank and file of French people considered marriage as the one career possible for women. They regarded the unmarried woman, who remained outside a 222 THE FRANCE I KNOW convent, as a pitiable anomaly. " I shall take you to England to learn English, for your husbands are being killed at the front." These were the words I heard a comfortable Parisian lady ad- dressing to her two little grand-daughters of nine and eleven. So exhilarating did the little girls find the prospect of their English travels that the gloom of an unmated future seemed powerless to depress them. I meanwhile reflected on the social revolution such a remark portended, nothing more nor less than the collapse of the dowry system, that corner-stone of French society. For what use would it be now, when potential husbands are being killed at the front, for French parents in the time-honoured manner to begin from the day of their daughter's birth to accumu- late for her that dowry, without which she would be unable to marry ? And what is to happen to families in the invaded departments? They have lost their all. For their daughters, dowries as well as husbands are out of the question. The disparity in the numbers of the sexes, which before the War existed only slightly in France — in 1907 there were 270,000 more women than men^ — is now increasing to an enormous extent. The destiny of these superfluous women is a question pressing for an answer throughout the length and breadth of the land. I doubt whether even Catholics will consider satisfactory an answer ^ See Charles Turgeon, le Feminisme frangais (1907), Vol. I, p. 400. THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 223 recently given by a Catholic writer, M. Victor Giraud. M. Giraud's solution is tlie convent; ** and the government," he writes, ** will find itself forced to make peace with the exiled Orders, to recall them to France, and to restore the con- ventual houses," in order that they may receive the feminine blessings whom the War will leave unappropriated. To few who know anything of the spirit of France to-day will such a solution seem likely to be accepted. The mass of enlightened French opinion pro- mises to deal with the question in a less retrograde fashion. Many years before the War, in his vision of Europe in the year 2270, Anatole France conceived the feminine sex as divided into mothers and neuters {neiitres). The latter he. saw capably engaging in all kinds of useful activities outside the home. " The dreams of philosophers are the facts of the future," writes M. France; and already conditions point to the realisation of the philosopher's dream in a period much less remote that he fancied. Up and down France parents capable of endowing their daughters now realise that rather than accumulate a hoard to be settled on the girl on a wedding- day, which may never arrive, it will be better to render her independent, with or without marriage, by expending their savings in training her for one of those numerous careers which the War is opening up to women. It is characteristic of French lucidity from the 224 THE FRANCE I KNOW Revolution downwards/ that, among all women's questions this matter of training should hold the first place. The amateur is tabooed. And the methodical thoroughness with which the new Frenchwoman seeks to equip herself for her new tasks augurs well for the future. It may be illustrated by an incident which occurred in 1917. In collaboration with the women's section of our own National War Museum Committee, a committee of French ladies with title of V Effort Feminin Frangais ^pendant la Guerre, has recently been formed to inquire into and record the war- work of their compatriots. When, soon after the inauguration of this French committee, its members were invited to come to England to inspect and report on the war-work of British women, they gave the characteristic reply that they were not yet ready, they must, render themselves thoroughly conversant with that which had been accomplished in their own land before they could profit by the experience and achieve- ments of other countries. In a hke spirit of thoroughness are being founded, both in Paris and the provinces, numer- ous technical and professional schools for women. A few existed before the War, a women's law college for example, and some trade schools, including one for women printers. But to this movement the War has given an ^ See ante, p. 215, for the manifesto of Frenchwomen on the eve of the Revolution. THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 225 immense impetus. It is revealing a wholesome tendency to accompany the opening of any new channel for women's activity with the foundation of a training school for that special department. For example, in 1916, a deputation of French- women visited our munition factories, where they were impressed by the excellent work of our female welfare supervisors. Their first step on returning to France was to establish a school for the training of such workers. This school has now for a year or more been sending out, not to munition factories only but to various govern- ment offices, a band of well-equipped women, many of whom have abandoned brilliant pro- fessional careers to devote themselves to this patriotic work. Another instance of the blending of patriotic and individualistic motives is presented by the recent inauguration of la SocietS des Educatrices Franco- AnglaiseSy designed to equip women for the teaching of French and the explanation of the French point of view in England. Our Allies now realise that the inferiority of the type of person who crossed the Channel to teach French in this Island was partly responsible for the failure of the two races to understand one another, and that it had driven many of the best English schools to confide instruction in French to English, Swiss, Belgian — or, in some cases, even German—teachers. To-day these Anglo-French governesses are being instructed not only in the Q 226 THE FRANCE I KNOW latest methods of teaching, but in British litera- ture and in British points of view. The society has also established an employment bureau. The important question of woman's wages the War is also bringing to the fore. In France they / have been even more grossly inadequate than in this country. In 1915 a law was passed, institut- ing something very like our trade boards to regu- late wages in industries carried on at home. In the dressmaking and milhnery trades before the War, apprentices received fivepence a day, the majority of other employees from two shillings and fivepence to three shillings and seven pence. Mme. Paquin has stated the maxi- mum wage to be seven shillings. But no one ever heard of an employee who earned that sum. The famous midinette strike of 1917 arose from the fact that these wages were still being paid, though the cost of living had doubled. The employers consented to a rise of one franc all round. In September 1918, prices having con- tinued to rise to such an extent that nuts — an important item in the midinette' s menu — cost twopence halfpenny each, a further increase of wages was demanded; and its refusal has led to another strike.^ Women are permitted to join certain of the men's syndicates — that of the elementary teachers, for example — as well as the syndicates of hat- 1 See "Manchester Guardian," September 27, 1918, The Paris Midinettes. THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 227 makers, coachbuilders, and aeroplane manufac- turers. There have also ever since 1884, when the law was passed authorising the formation of syndicates, been those which comprise women only. And in the general syndicalist movement, as recent conferences in Paris prove, women are playing a prominent part. In every direction, therefore, we may descry the dawn of a classic age of womanhood. The Frenchwoman's natural ability, enhanced by technical training and the widening of her mental horizon, is fitting her to collaborate with her fellow-countrymen in the most stupendous task of national rebuilding Humanity has ever been called upon to accomplish. Q 2 INDEX Academy, French, 162 Anatole France at a meeting of, 32 Acker, novelist, 47 Action Fran9aise, la Ligue de 1', 137 newspaper, 28, 89, 116, 119, 141 royalist society, 118 Adam, Mme., 8, 9, 18, 173, 174, 217 Agadir, affair of, 26, 34 Ailette, valley of the, 65 Aisne, the, 69, 63 Aix, 138 Alcoholism, 147, 148 Algeciras, Council of, 34 Allen, Mr. Warner, 64 Ambrine, 68, 202 Amiens, 44, 133 Amsterdam, socialist congress at, 113 Andler, Professor Charles, 88 Angelo, Michael, 121 Anglo-Saxon, 2, 6, 107, 141, 202, 211 Anglo-Saxons, 8 Annales, 1' University des, 148 Anti-militarism, 27, 28 Antoinette, Queen Marie, 202 Antwerp, 61 Arc, Joan of, 12, 14, 16, 20, 107, 108, 120. Sec also Jeanne d'Arc. Argonne, 18 Ariosto, 121 Aristotle, 173 Arnold, Matthew, 164 Arras, 69, 73 Asquith, Mr., 67 Atherton, Mrs. Gertrude, 208 Atlantic, the, 139 Augagneur, 113 Augustines, English, the convent of, 172 Bacon, 173 Balzac, Honor6 de, 146 Barbes, 180 Barbusse, Henri, 92, 102, 103, 104 Barres, Maurice, 12 n., 29, 30, 32, 92, 101, 127, 130, 136, 191, 194 President of the League of Patriots, 24, 111, 115 Bartet, Mme., 202 Barthou, 116 Bastille, the Fall of, 40 Bazin, Ren6, 5, 32, 92, 146 articles on depopulation, 160 n. 2 Beauquier, 127 Beauvais, 44 Beaux Arts, :ficole des, 213 Bebel, Augustus, 161 Bellay, Joachim du, 16, 16 Benda, Julien, 47, 106, 106 n. Benjamin, Ren6, 92 Bentham, Jeremy, 22 B6ranger, 173 Bergson, Henri, 105 Berre, I'fitang de, 137 Berry, 171 Bert, Paul, 127 " Bertha," 67, 71, 133 Bertrand, Louis, 92 B^thincourt, 83 Bismarck, 26, 26 Blanc, Louis, 180 Bloc, /€, 113 229 230 INDEX Boche, the, 17, 63, 74, 80, 85, 120 Bod^ve, Mme. Simone, 211, 217 n. Bodley, Mr. J. E. C, 4 Boloism, 66 Bolsheviks, 111 Bonaparte, Louis, 181 Boni, Giacomo, 38 Bon March6, the, 46, 58 Bordeaux, 138 Henri, 32, 92 Bosnia, Austria's annexation of, 34 Bossuet, 161, 173 Bouilloux Lafont, 147 Boulangist, 23 Boulenger, 92 Boulogne-sur-Mer, 44 Bourbon, Palais, 108 Bourgeois, L6on, 114, 151, 154 Bourges, 171 Michel de, 179 Bourget, Paul, 32, 92 Bousquet-L6vy, trial of, 117 Bowdler, Mr., 6 Boylesve, R«n6, 92, 98, 99, 100, 102, 196 n. Braz, Anatole le, 136 Briand, Aristide, 77, 113, 117 Brieux, 213 Britling, Mr., 91 Brittany, 136 Bronte, Charlotte, 166 and n. Brunetidre, Ferdinand, 169 and n., 177 n., 188 Brunswick, 19 Buisson, M. Ferdinand, 90, 115, 129, 130, 153, 218 Buonaparte, General, 12 Cachin, Marcel, 110, 154 Cahiers de la Quinzaine, periodical, 47 Camelot, 65 Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, 34 ». Canada, 2 Capucines, boulevard des, 45 Capus, Alfred, 27, 106 n. Carlyle, Thomas, 22, 93, 147 Carrel, Dr., 68 Cavell, Nurse, 86 Cevennes, the, 4 Champigny, battlefield of, 51, 191 Champs Elys6es, 6, 208 Chapelain, 18 Character, French national, 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 12, 103, 107, 108 Charles VII, King of France, 15 Chartier, Jean, 15 Chauvin, MUe., 213 Cl^menceau, M., 30, 34 w., 70, 111, 116 n., 127, 128 and the Society of Nations, 154 becomes Prime Minister, (1917), 69 Clootz, Baron, 22 Coalition Repvblicaine, 114 Coburg, 21 Code Napol6on, 146, 161, 162, 163 Colonial Empire, French, 26 Combes, Emilo, 25, 29, 30 Command, unity of, 133 Compain, Mme. Louise, 203, 204 Compi^gne, 68 Cond6, the Great, 12 Condillac, 173 Condorcet, 213 Confederation Genkrale du Travail^ 112-113, 132 Congo, French, 26 Conseils G6n6raux, 139 Constant, Baron d'Estournelles de, 27, 30, 115 Convenience, marriage of, 157, 209, 211 Copernicus, 122 Comeille, 18 Coucy, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66 Ebray, M. Alcide, 10 " Echo de Paris," newspaper, 115 Educatrices franco-anglaises, So- ciete des, 225 Edward VII, King, 34 n. Ellis, Havelock, 150 Enseignement, lAgue de V, 129 Entente, Franco-British, 86 Triple, 90 Epinay, Mme. d', 170 Erasmus, 121 INDEX 281 Esperanto, 80 Eugdnie, Empress, 79 Faguet, M. Emile, 10 Family, the French, 6, 17, 167, 158 Favre, Jules, 22 Federalism, economic, 140 Federation, fete of, 22 Feminism. See Sand, George. Feminist, 163, 202, 216 Femmes Francises, Conseil Na- tional des, 202, 21S Fiesolo, 80 " Figaro, le," newspaper, 27, 115 Flaubert, 91 Florence, 80 Foch, Marshal, 13 Fontaine, Charles, 16 Fontainebleau, 72 Fourvidres, 80, 81 France, Anatole. 15, 27, 47, 67, 92, 102, 103, 110, 126, 191, 196, 223 War in the writings of, 32^3 Francueil, M. Dupin de, 170 Mme. Dupin de, 170 and n. Frankfort, Treaty of, 144 Frederick Augustus II, Elector of Saxony, 170 and n. Freycinet, M. de, 30 Galileo, 121 Galileos, 122 Gambetta, 13, 126, 127 Gascony, 139 " Gaulois, le," newspaper, 115 Gautier, Th6ophile, 17 Genesis, book of, 161 G6raldy, 92 and n. 2, 196 n. Gerard, M. Auguste, 89, 90 Gerb6villier, 197 Gervais, Saint, church of, 71 Girardin, Emile de, 212 n. Mme. Emile de, 212 Giraud, Victor, 7 n., 128, 148, 222 Girondin, 19 Goffic, Ijd, 136 Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 3, 88, 164 Gourmont, Remy de, 28, 29 Grande Si^cle, le, 13 Grey, Sir Edward, now Viscount, 34 n. " Guerre Sociale," newspaper, 28 Guesde, Jules, 117 Guizot, 6, 141 Guyot, Yves, 115 Hague, the, 27, 116 Hal^vy, Daniel, 24 Halevys, the, 47 Hamerton, Gilbert, 4, 16 Hanotaux, Gabriel, 191 Heame, Mrs. Walter, 74 Henessy, M. Jean, 137, 139 Henri Quatre, 12 Henriot, 70 Hermant, Abel, 92 Herriot, Edouard, 77, 79, 82, 83 w., 1^2, 144, 148 Herv6, Gustav, 28, 29, 116 Herzegovina, Austria's annexa- tion of, 34 Hobbes, John Oliver, 190 " Homme Libre, 1'," newspaper, 11671. Honfleur, 135, 136 Hugo, Victor, 72, 91, 156, 163 "Humanity, 1'," newspaper, 110, 116, 154 Indre, River, 171 " Intransigeant, 1'," newspaper, 67 Iser, the, 61 Issy-le-Moulineaux, 68, 202 Jaloux, 92 James, Henry, 69 William, 211 n. 1 Jaur6s, Jean, 1, 27, 31, 113, 114, 116, 117 Jeanne d'Arc, 124 cult of, 191-196 Viede, 16 and n., 34, 36, 110 See also Arc, Joan of. Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 21 Joffro, ^Marshal, 69 Ecole at Lyons, 80 Jouhaux, 113, 132 " Journal Officiel, le," 136 282 INDEX Julie, Soeur, 197 Junkers, 39 Justice, Palais de, 213 Kerensky, 111 Kienthal, 110 Kienthaliens, 110 Kipling, Rudyard, 194 Kitchener, Lord, 86 Klopstock, 22 Koechlin, Mme., 203 Kultur, 9 Lab6, Louise, 78 n. Lacordaire, 165 Lamartine, 165 Lamennais, 165, 186 Lamy, Etienne, 162 Languedoc, 136, 139 La Rachais, 80, 81 Larbaud, Valery, 92 La Rochefoucauld, 213 Latapie, M., 218 Laurent, Dr., 68 Leibnitz, 173 Leipzig, fair at, 83 Lemaitre, Jules, 91 Le Play, 145 and n. Leroux, 165, 179 Levasseur, 110 Leygues, M., 70 Lichtenberger, Andr6, novelist, 47 Ligue des Droits de VHomme ei du Citoyen, 115, 218, 221 Limoges, 112 Littr^, 112 Lloyd George, Mr., 67 Locke, 173 Loisy, M. Alfred, 14, 124 w., 125 Longuet, 110, 111 Lorrame, 136, 140 . Louis XIV, King of France, 145 Louis XVI, King of France, 170 and n., 214 Louis le D6bonnaire, King of France, 144 Louvre, Magasin du, 46 Lu9on, Cardinal Bishop of, 127 Luther, 121 Luthers, the, 122 Luxembourg Gardens, 6 Lyons, arsenal of war, 78 British mayors at, 79 Congr^s du livre at, 88 German prison camp at, 85, 86 Great Fair of, 83, 84, 88 M. Herriot mayor of, 77 re-education of wounded at, 80, 81, 82 Macaigne, M. Andr6, 90 Mslcherez, Mme., 198 Maeterlinck, 102 Malesherbes, boulevard, 58 Malvy, trial of, 113 Marbro, Camille, 92, 95 Marceau, 12 Mar6chal de Saxe, Maurice, 170 and n. Margueritte, the brothers, 92 Marienbad, 34 n. Mame, the banks of, 50, 51, 59 battle of, 12, 48, 53, 60, 73 after the first battle of, 44- 49 Marseilles, 138, 139 Mater, M. Andr6, 90 Maubeuge, 63 Maurras, Charles, 28, 89, 119, 130, 137 Mazzini, 182 Mediterranean, the, 139 Meredith, George, 158, 159 M6tin, Albert, 91 Meurthe-et-Moselle, 82 Meyran, Camille, 92, 93 Michelet, Jules, 159, 161, 212 Midinettes, 45, 204, 205, 206, 226 Millerand, 113 Millet, 76 Mistral, 136 MoHere, 6, 210, 212, 215 Monod, Gabriel, 81 ' Mme., 81 Mons, retreat from, 64 Montaigne, 67, 121, 213 Montesquieu, 173 Montmartre, 70 Montpamasse, 67 Montpelier, 138 INDEX 238 Morcellementy 146 Morley, Lord, 102, 164, 165 Morocco, 26, 82 Murray, Professor Gilbert, 101 n. Myers, W. H., 164, 165, 178 Napoleon I, 22, 162 Napoleon III, 79 Naquet's law, 163, 209 Nations, League of, 37, 114 SocUte desy 90 Society of, 90, 151, 162, 153, 154, 155 Niel, Marshal, 22 Nohant, 171, 172, 173, 176, 178 Norman, Captain Sir Henry, M.P., 81 n. Normandy, 146 Od6on, theatre, 49 (Kcitpe, .tragedy, 18 Ohnet, Georges, 11 Orleans, le Due d', 119 Ostrorog, Count L^n, 89 n. Ourcq, victory of, 12 Pacifist, 27 Paine, Tom, 22 Palais, le Grand, 69 Royal, 45 Pan-Germans, 9 Pantheon, 46 Paquin, Mme., 160 Pare Monceau, 6 ParceUementy 146 Paris, la Revue de, 176 le Comte de, 119 Pascal, 173 ** Patrie, la," newspaper, 57 Patriotism, cosmopolitan, 14, 21, 22, 23, 31 nationalist, 14, 21, 22, 23, 26, 31 of Frenchwomen, 196, 208 passionate, 158 real and unreal, 14 Patriots, League of, 23, 24, 30, 111, 116, 196 P6guy, Charles, 1, 24, 47, 48 Pepins, the, 144 Pericles, 131 Pervyse, 60 P6tain, General, 69 Piccadilly, 3 Pitt, 21 Plato, 131, 189 Poilu, 68, 68, 123 Poincar6, Mme., 9 *' Presse, la," newspaper, 57 Provost, Marcel, novelist, 32, 92 Printemps, Magasin du, 46, 58 Proud'hon, 35 Provence, 4, 139 Raphael, 121 Raphaels, 122 R^camier, Mme., 78 " Regional," 139, 140 " Regionahsm," 136, 137 and n. " Regionalist," 137 Reinach, Joseph, 30 R«nan, Ernest, 10, 91, 103, 121, 122 n. 1, 209 Representation Profe8sionelle,Ligue de, 137 Revanchard, 22, 29 Revanche, la, 22, 28 Revival, Catholic, 25, 122, 124 " Revue, la Grande," 198 Rheims, 73, 193 Rhine, Passage of, 51 Rhone, the, 83, 86, 139 Ribot, 151 Rights of Man, League of, 90 Rivoli, Place de, 193 Rolland, Romain, 47, 211 and n., 213, 217 Rom6e, Isabelle, 15 Rosebery, Lord, 137 Rosny {aine), J. H., 92, 95, 97, 98 Roubaix, 84 Rouen, 193, 194 Rougon Macquart, 8 Rousseau, 171 Rudler, Professor G., 3 n. Said, ViUa, 36, 36 Saint-Antoine, faubourg de, 40 Saint Cloud, 167 Saint Jacques, rue de, 46 Saint Michel, boulevard, 88 Saint Simonians, 186 234 INDEX Sainte-Beuve, 164, 169, 173, 176, 183 Saints Pdres, rue des, 203 Samaritaine, la Grande, 160 Sand, George, allegorical manner of, 168 and the Commune, 183 and the war of 1870, 182 apostle of soHdarity, 170 contemporaries of, 165, 166 critics of, 164, 166, 174 descent of, 170 and n. events in life of, 169-176 feminism of, 183-187 genius of, 164 idealising method of, 168 letters of, 167, 187, 188, 189 literary life, periods of, 169 marriage of, 175 old age of, 189, 190 personal appearance of, 171 personal manner of, 171 prose of, 164, 165 reading of, 173 realism of, 169, 188 republicanism of, 179, 180, 181, 182 separation from husband, 175 works of, 164, 165, 176, 177 Sandar, agricultural college at, 82 Sandeau, Jules, 176 Sanfort, Dr. Barthe de, 68, 202 Sansculotte, 20 Saone, the, 83 Sappho, 165 Sembat, Marcel, 30, 127, 203 Shakespeare, 5, 6, 122 n. 1 Shaw, Mr. Bernard, 17 " Siamese grafting," surgical oper- ation of, 68 Siegfried, Jules, 218 Mme., 202 Socialists, independent, 110, 113, 117 radical, 113 unified, 110, 113 Societea, Ouvrieres, Federation de, 112 Soissons, battle of, 53 Mme. Macherez saves, from destruction, 198 Soissons, retaking of, 13 Sonolet, Louis, novelist, 92 Sorbonne, rue de la, 47 Sorel, Georges, 117 Souday, Paul, 100 Steed, Henry Wickham, 34 n. Stern, Daniel, Comtesse d'Agoult, 184 Suffrage des Femmes, Union Fran- gaisepour le, 218, 219, 220 Syndicalism, 85, 112 Syndicalist, 27, 28, 110, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 227 " Syndicaliste, la Bataille," news- paper, 112 "Tageblatt, the Berliner," news- paper, 11 Taine, Hippolyte, 93, 164, 170 Tangier, affair of, 26 Tardiveau. See Boylesve, Ren6. " Temps, le," newspaper, 115 Thackeray, 164 Tharaud, the brothers, novelists, 47, 92 Theatre Fran9ais, le, 143 Thomas, Albert, 110, 111, 114, 142, 151 enters Coalition Ministry (1916), 30 Tinayre, Mme. Marcelle, 77, 92 Tocqueville, de, 171 Tolstoy, 23 Toulouse, 138 Touraine, 145 Tourvielle, school for re-educating crippled soldiers at, 80, 81 Trianon, 167 Tricoteuses, 19 Tuberculosis, 147, 148 Tunis, 26 Ulbach, Louis, 187 Uzes, la Duchesse d', douairiere, 9 Vaillant, Edouard, socialist leader, 29 130 Vaugeois, Henri, 119, 120 Vauvenargues, 101 n. Vaux, 83 Vendome, Place, 71 INDEX 235 Verdun, defence of, 83 Verri^res, Mile, de, 170 VersaiUes, 36, 167, 216 " Victoiro, la," newspaper, 116 Villeroy, 48 Viollet-le-Duc, 62 Voltaire, 21, 103, 126 Vosges, gap in the, 29 Watteau, 61 Maison de, 60 Webb, Sidney, 91 Weil, Commandant, 89 Wells, H. G., 91, 98 West, Rebecca, 96 Westermarck, 16 Westminster Cathedral, 119 William II, Emperor of Germany, 26, 26 Wilson, Woodrow, President, 220. 221 Witt-Schlumberger, Mme. de, 202, 218, 220 Yarde-Buller, Mrs. Henry, 74 Ypres, 59 Zola, 8 Printed in Grkat Britain by Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, brunswick st., stamford st., s.e. 1, and bungay, suffolk. 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