the french workman.

The original stuff out of which a French workman is made, is a street boy of fourteen years old, or, perhaps, twelve. That young gamin de Paris can sing as many love ditties and drinking songs as there are hairs upon his head, before he knows how much is nine times seven. He prefers always the agreeable to the useful: he knows how to dance all the quadrilles: he knows how to make grimaces of ten thousand sorts one after the other without stopping, and at the rate of twenty in a minute. Of his other attainments, I say little. It is possible that he may have been to one of the elementary schools set up by the Government; or, it may be that he knows not how to read; although, by Article 10 of a law passed in eighteen hundred and thirty-three, it was determined that no chief town of a department, or chief place of a commune, containing more than six thousand inhabitants, should be without at least one elementary school for public instruction.

Such as the boy may be, he is made an apprentice. He needs no act, or, as you say in England, indenture. His contract has to be attested at the Prefecture of Police, Bureau of Passports, Section of Livrets. Formerly, it was the custom in France for the apprentice to be both fed and lodged by his master; but, as the patron seldom received money with him, he was mainly fed on cuffs. Apprenticeship in Paris, which is France, begins at ages differing according to the nature of the trade. If strength be wanted, the youth is apprenticed at eighteen, but otherwise, perhaps, at fourteen. There are in Paris nineteen thousand apprentices dispersed among two hundred and seventy branches of trade.

Of all the apprentices whose number has been just named, only one in five is bound by a written agreement with his master. The rest have a verbal understanding. The youths commonly are restless; and, since they are apt to change their minds, the business of the master is not so much to teach them as to obtain value for himself as soon as he can out of their labour. It is the apprentice who is sent out to take orders in the town, and to play the part of messenger. In consequence of the looseness of the tie, it often happens that a thoughtless parent, when his son is able to earn wages, tells the youth that his master is sucking him and fattening upon his unpaid labour; that he might earn money for the house at home. The youth is glad to earn, and throws up his apprenticeship for independent work. It soon occurs to him that his parents are sucking him, and that his earnings ought to be for himself, and not for them. He then throws up his home dependence, as he had thrown up dependence on his master, takes a lodging, falls into careless company, and works on, a half-skilled labourer, receiving all his life a less income than he could have assured to himself by a few years of early perseverance.

When I was apprentice, eight years ago, I found that to be a good workman, it was needful to design and model. “Come with me,” said my comrade Gredinot, “I will show you a good school.” It was a winter evening; our work was over; and, with leave of the patron, we left our shop in the Rue Saint Martin, and went by Saint Saviour to the Rue Montorgueil. We bought as we went about twelve pounds of modelling clay. At the upper end of the street, my friend Gredinot turned up a dark passage. I followed him. A single lamp glimmered in the court to which it led us. We went up a few steps to the schoolroom. “Here we are,” said Gredinot, in opening the door. We entered, carrying our caps. There was a low room lighted by flaring oil lamps; but in it were busts and statues of such beauty that it seemed to me to be the most delightful chamber in the world. Boys and youths and a few men, all in blouses like ourselves, laboured there. We threw our clay upon a public heap in a wooden trough near the door. There was only that mud to pay, and there were our own tools to take. Everything else was free. Gredinot introduced me to the master, and I learnt to model from that night. There are other schools—the school of Arts and Trades in the Rue St. Martin, and the Special and Gratuitous School of Design in the Rue du Tourraine, in connection, as I think, with the School of Fine Arts. I might number the museums and the libraries, and I may make mention also of the prizes of the Academy of Industry and of the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry.

The apprentice when out of his time goes to the prefecture of police. There he must obtain a livret, which must have on the face of it the seal of the prefecture, the full name of the admitted workman, his age, his place of birth, and a description of his person, his trade, and the name of the master who employs him. The French workman is taboo, until he is registered by the police and can produce his livret. The book costs him twopence halfpenny. Its first entry is a record of the completion of his apprenticeship. Afterwards every fresh engagement must be set down in it, with the dates of its beginning and its end, each stamped by the prefecture. The employer of a workman holds his livret as a pledge. When he receives money in advance, the sum is written in his book, and it is a debt there chargeable as a deduction of not more than one fifth upon all future employment, until it is paid. The workman when travelling must have his livret visÉd; for, without that, says the law, “he is a vagabond, and can be arrested and punished as such.”

The workman registered and livreted, how does he live, work, and sleep? He is not a great traveller; for, unless forced into exile, the utmost notion of travel that a French workman has, is the removal—if he be a provincial—from his native province to Paris. We pass over the workman’s chance of falling victim to the conscription, if he has no friends rich enough to buy for him a substitute, or if he cannot subscribe for the same object to a Conscription Mutual Assurance Company. When Louis Blanc had his own way in France the workmen did but ten hours’ labour in the day. Now, however, as before, twelve or thirteen hours are regarded as a fair day’s work. I and Friponnet, who are diamond jewellers, work ten hours only. My friend Cornichon, who is a goldsmith, works as long as a painter or a smith. Sunday labour used to be very general in France, but extended seldom beyond the half day; which was paid for at a higher rate. In Paris seven in eight of us used to earn money on the Sunday morning. That necessity could not be pleaded for the act, is proved by the fact, that often we did no work on Monday, but on that day spent the Sunday’s earnings. As for wages, calculated on an average of several years, they are about as follows:—The average pay for a day’s labour is three shillings and twopence. The lowest day’s pay known is five pence, and the highest thirty shillings. About thirty thousand of us receive half-a-crown a day; five or six times as many (the majority) receive some sum between half-a-crown and four and twopence. About ten thousand receive higher wages. The best wages are earned by men whose work is connected with print, paper, and engraving. The workers in jewels and gold are the next best provided for; next to them workers in metal and in fancy ware. Workers on spun and woven fabrics get low wages; the lowest is earned, as in London, by slop-workers and all workers with the needle. The average receipts of Paris needlewomen have not, however, fallen below fourteenpence a day; those of them who work with fashionable dressmakers earn about one and eightpence. While speaking of the ill-paid class of women, I must mention that the most sentimental of our occupations earns the least bread. Those who make crowns of immortelles to hang upon the tombs, only earn about sevenpence-halfpenny a day. That trade is, in very truth, funereal. To come back to ourselves, it should be said that our wages, as a whole, have risen rather than declined during the last quarter of a century. It is a curious fact, however, that the pay for job-work has decreased very decidedly.

And how do we live? it is asked. Well enough. All of us eat two meals a day; but what we eat depends upon our money. We three, who draw up this account, work in one room. We begin fasting, and maintain our fast until eleven o’clock. Then we send the apprentice out to fetch our breakfasts. When he comes back with his stores, he disposes them neatly on a centre table in little groups. I generally have a pennyworth of ham, which certainly is tough, but very full of flavour; bread to the same value; a half share with Friponnet in two-pennyworth of wine, and a half-pennyworth of fried potatoes; thus spending in all threepence-halfpenny. Cornichon spends the same sum generally in another way. He has a pennyworth of cold boiled (unsalted) beef, a pennyworth of bread, a halfpennyworth of cheese and a pennyworth of currant jam. Friponnet is more extravagant. A common breakfast bill of fare with him is two penny sausages, twopennyworth of bread, a pennyworth of wine, a halfpenny paquet de couenne (which is a little parcel of crisply fried strips of bacon rind), and a baked pear. All this is sumptuous; for we are of the aristocracy of workmen. The labourers of Paris do not live so well. They go to the gargottes, where they get threepence halfpennyworth of bouilli—soup, beef and vegetable—which includes the title to a liberal supply of bread. Reeking, dingy dens are those gargottes, where all the poorer classes of Parisian workmen save the beef out of their breakfast bouilli, and carry it away to eat later in the day at the wine-shop; where it will make a dinner with more bread and a pennyworth of wine. Of bread they eat a great deal; and, reckoning that at fourpence and the wine at a penny, we find eightpence to be the daily cost of living to the great body of Parisian workmen.

We aristos among workpeople dine famously. My own practice is to dine in the street du Petit CarrÉ upon dinners for ninepence; or, by taking dinner-tickets for fourteen days in advance, I get one dinner a fortnight given me gratuitously. I dine upon soup, a choice of three plates of meat, about half-a-pint of wine, a dessert and bread at discretion. Our dinner hour is four o’clock, and we are not likely to eat anything more before bedtime; although one of us may win a cup of coffee or a dram of brandy at billiards or dominoes in the evening. Cornichon and Friponnet dine in the street Chabannais; have soup at a penny a portion, small plates of meat at twopence each, dessert at a penny, and halfpenny slips of bread. Each of us when he has dined rolls up a cigarette, and lounges perhaps round the Palais Royal for half an hour.

As for our lodging the poorest of us live by tens in one room, and sleep by fours and fives upon one mattress; paying from twopence to tenpence a night. The ordinary cost of such lodging as the workman in Paris occupies is, for a whole room for one person, nine or ten shillings a month; for more than one, six or seven shillings each; and for half a bed, four shillings. Cornichon lives in room number thirty-six on the third floor of a furnished lodging house in the street du Petit Lion. You must ring for the porter if you would go in to Cornichon; and the porter must, by a jerk at a string, unlatch the street door if Cornichon wishes to come out to you. In a little court at the back are two flights of dirty stairs of red tile edged with wood. They lead to distinct portions of the house. Cornichon’s room is paved with red tiles, polished now and then with beeswax. It is furnished with the bed and a few inches of bedside carpet, forming a small island on the floor, with two chairs, a commode with a black marble top, a washing-basin and a water-bottle. Cornichon has also a cupboard there in which he stores his wood for winter, paying twenty-pence per hundred pounds for logs; and as the room contains no grate, he rents a German stove from his landlord, paying four-and-two-pence for his use of it during the season.

Friponnet rents two unfurnished rooms up four pair of stairs, at the back of a house in the street d’Argenteuil. He pays ten shillings a month. They are furnished in mahogany and black marble bought of a broker, and I think not paid for yet. Fidette visits him there. She is a gold and silver polisher, his bonne amie. She has her own lodging; but she and Friponnet divide their earnings. They belong to one another: although no priest has blessed their voluntary contract. It is so, I am pained to say, with very many of us.

I have a half-bed in a little street, with a man who is a good fellow, considering he is a square-head—a German. The red tiles of my staircase are very clean, and slippery with beeswax. My landlord rents a portion of the third floor of the house, and under-lets it fearfully. One apartment has been penned off into four, and mine is the fourth section at the end. To reach me one must pass through the first pen, which is occupied by Monsieur and Madame. There they work, eat, and sleep; as for Madame, she never leaves it. Monsieur only goes away to wait upon the griffe, his master, when he wants more work; his griffe is a slop tailor. Monsieur and Madame sleep in a recess, which looks like a sarcophagus. A little Italian tailor also sleeps in the same pen; but whereabouts I know not—his bed is a mystery. The next pen is occupied by two carpenters, seldom at home. When they come home, all of us know it; for they are extremely musical. In the third pen live three more tailors, through whose territory I must pass to my own cabinet. But how snug that is! Although only eight feet by ten, it has two corner windows; and, if there is little furniture and but a scanty bed, there is a looking-glass fit for a baron, and some remains of violet-coloured hangings and long muslin curtains; either white or brown, I am not sure. I and the German pay for this apartment fifteen shillings monthly.

There is a kind of lodgers worth especial mention. The men working in the yards of masons, carpenters, and others—masons especially—frequently come from the provinces. They are not part of the fixed population; but are men who have left their wives and families to come up to the town and earn a sum of money. For this they work most energetically; living in the most abstemious manner, in order that they may not break into their hoard. They occupy furnished lodgings, flocking very much together. Thus the masons from the departments of la Creuse and la Haute Vienne occupy houses let out in furnished rooms exclusively to themselves, in the quarters of the Hotel de Ville, the Arsenal, Saint Marcel, and in other parts of Paris. The rigid parsimony of these men is disappointed terribly when any crisis happens. They are forced to eat their savings, to turn their clothing and their tools into food, and, by the revolution of eighteen hundred and forty-eight, were reduced to such great destitution, that in some of the houses occupied by them one dress was all that remained to all the lodgers. They wore it in turn, one going out in it to seek for work while all the rest remained at home in bed. The poor fellows thanked the want of exercise for helping them to want of appetite—the only kind of want that poverty desires.

These men, however, working in the great yards, eating their meals near them in an irregular and restless way, form clubs and associations which lead not seldom to strikes—blunders which we call placing ourselves en GrÈve. They take the name en GrÈve from the place in which one class of builders’ workmen assemble when waiting to be hired. Various places are chosen by sundry workmen and workwomen for this practice of waiting to be hired. Laundresses, for example, are to be found near the church of our Lady of Lorette, where they endure, and too often enjoy, coarse words from passers-by.

Except in the case of the masons and labourers from the departments, it is to be regarded as no good sign when a workman makes a residence of furnished lodgings. The orderly workman marries, and acquires the property of furniture. The mason from the departments lives cheaply, and saves, to go home with money to his family, and acquire in his own village the property of land. The workman bound to Paris, who dwells only in furnished lodgings, and has bought no furniture, has rarely saved, and has rarely made an honest marriage. In most cases he is a lover of pleasure, frequents the theatre and the wine shop. From wine he runs on to the stronger stimulus of brandy; but these leave to him some gleams of his national vivacity. The most degraded does not get so lumpish as the English workman, whose brains have become sodden in the public-houses by long trains of pots of beer. By far the largest portion of the Paris workmen possess furniture: only twenty-one in a hundred—and that includes, of course, the mobile population, the masons, etc.—live in furnished lodgings.

For clothing we spend, according to our means, from four to fourteen pounds a year. Half of us have no coat in addition to the blouse. Before the crisis of eighteen hundred and forty-eight, one sixth of us had money in savings’ banks, and one man in every two was a member of some benefit society. The benefit societies were numerous, each generally containing some two or three hundred members; but even our singing clubs are now suppressed, and we must not meet even to transact the business of a benefit society without giving notice of our design to the police, and receiving into our party at least two of its agents as lookers-on. The result has been the decay of all such societies, and the extinction of most of them. Where they remain, the average monthly subscription is fifteen-pence, which insures the payment of twenty-pence a day during sickness, with gratuitous advice and medicine from the doctor. The funds of such societies are lodged either in savings’ banks, or in the Mont de PietÉ; which, though properly a pawnbroking establishment, has also its uses as a bank. The imperial fist presses everywhere down upon us. It has forced us out of sick clubs, because we sometimes talked in them about the state of the nation: it would build us huge barracks to live in, so that we may be had continually under watch and ward; and it has lately thrust in upon us a president of its own at the head of our Conseil de Prud’hommes, the only tribunal we possess for the adjustment of our internal trade disputes.

Of our pleasures on a Sunday afternoon the world has heard. We devote that to our families, if we have any; Monday, too often, to our friends. There are on Sundays our feats of gymnastics at open-air balls beyond the barriers, and our dancing saloons in the city; such as the Prado, the Bal Montesquieu, and the Dogs’ Ball. There are our pleasant country rambles, and our pleasant little dinners in the fields. There are our games at poule, and dominoes, and piquet; and our pipes with dexterously blackened bowls. There are our theatres, the Funambule and the Porte St. Martin. Gamblers among us play at bowls in the Elysian fields, or they stay at home losing and winning more than they can properly afford to risk at ÉcartÉ.

Then there are our holidays. The best used to be “the three days of July,” but they were lost in the last scramble. Yet we still have no lack of holiday amusement; our puppets to admire, and greasy poles to climb for prizes by men who have been prudently required first to declare and register their ambition at the Bureau of Police. Government so gets something like a list of the men who aspire; who wish to mount. It must be very useful. There are our water tournaments at St. Cloud and at Boulogne-sur-Seine; where they who have informed the police of their combative propensities, may thrust at each other with long-padded poles from boats which are being rowed forcibly into collision. We are not much of water-birds, but when we do undertake boating, we engage in the work like Algerine pirates. We must have a red sash round the waist or not a man of us will pull a stroke.

To go back to our homes and to our wives. When we do marry, we prefer a wife who can support herself by her own labour. If we have children, it is in our power to apply—and very many of us do apply—to the Bureau of Nurses; and, soon after an infant’s birth, it can be sent down into the country at the monthly cost of about ten shillings and two pounds of lump sugar. That prevents the child from hindering our work or pleasure; and, as it is the interest of the nurse to protect the child for which she receives payment, why should we disturb our consciences with qualm or fear?

In Paris there are few factories; some that have existed were removed into the provinces for the sole purpose of avoiding the dictation of the workmen in the town. The Parisian fancy work employs a large number of people who can work at their own homes. In this, and in the whole industry of Paris, the division of labour is very great; but the fancy work offers a good deal of scope for originality and taste, and the workman of Paris is glad to furnish both. He will delight himself by working night and day to execute a sudden order, to be equal to some great occasion; but he cannot so well be depended upon when the work falls again into its even, humdrum pace. On the whole, however, they who receive good wages, and are trusted—as the men working for jewellers are trusted—become raised by the responsibility of their position, shun the wine-shop, live contented with the pleasures of their homes, dress with neatness, and would die rather than betray the confidence reposed in them. With all his faults and oddities, the workman of Paris is essentially a thoroughly good fellow. The solitary work of tailors and of shoemakers causes them of course to brood and think, and to turn out of their body a great number of men who take a foremost place in all political discussions. But the French workman always is a loser by political disturbance. The crisis of eighteen hundred and forty-eight—a workman’s triumph—reduced the value of industry in Paris from sixty to twenty-eight millions of pounds. Fifty-four men in every hundred were at the same time thrown out of employ, or nearly two hundred thousand people in all.

But there are some callings, indeed, wholly untouched by a crisis. The manufacture of street gas goes on, for example, without any change. There are others that are even benefited by a revolution. After the last revolution, while other trades were turning away men to whom there was no longer work to give, the trades concerned in providing military equipment were taking on fresh hands. To that class in Paris, and to that only, there was an increase of business in eighteen hundred and forty-eight to the extent of twenty-nine per cent. The decrease of business among the printers, although few books were printed, did not amount to more than twenty-seven per cent., in consequence of the increased demand for proclamations, handbills, and manifestoes.

Without any extra crisis, men working in all trades have trouble enough to get over the mere natural checks upon industry, which come to most tradesmen twice a year in the shape of the dead seasons. Every month is a dead season to some trade; but the dead seasons which prevail over the largest number of workmen in Paris are the two months, July and August, in summer, and the two months, January and February, in winter. The dead season of summer is the more decided of the two. The periods of greatest activity, on the other hand, are the two months, April and May, and next to those the months, October and November. Printers are busiest in winter, builders are busiest in summer—so there are exceptions to the rule; but, except those who provide certain requisites for eating and drinking which are in continual demand, there are few workmen in Paris or elsewhere in France, who have not every year quite enough slack time to perplex them. They can ill afford the interference of any small crisis in the shape of a strike, or large crisis in the shape of a national tumult.

Finally, let me say that the French workman, take him all in all, is certainly a clever fellow. He is fond of Saint Monday, “solidarity,” and shows; but is quickwitted at his work, and furiously energetic when there is any strong call made upon his industry. In the most debased form he has much more vigour and vivacity than the most debased of English operatives. He may be more immoral; but he is less brutish. If we are a little vain, and very fond of gaiety; and if we are improvident, we are not idle; and, with all our street fighting, we are not a discontented race. Except an Arab, who can be so happy as we know how to make ourselves, upon the smallest possible resources?