CHAPTER THE LAST. Agriculture in France--Its Backward State--Centralising Tendency--Subdivision of Property--Its Effects--French "Encumbered Estates.

In the foregoing pages I have sketched, with as much regard to a readable liveliness, and to vivid local colouring as I could command, the features and incidents of part—the most interesting one—of an extended journey through France. My primary purpose in undertaking the latter was, to prepare a view of the social and agricultural condition of the peasantry, for publication in the columns of the Morning Chronicle; and accordingly a series of letters, devoted to that important subject, duly appeared. These communications, however, were necessarily confined to statements of agricultural progress, and the investigation of solid social subjects, to the exclusion of those matters of personal incident and artistic, literary, and legendary significance, which naturally occur in the prosecution of a desultory and inquiring journey. To this latter field—that of the tourist rather than the commissioner—then, I have devoted the foregoing chapters; but I am unwilling to send them forth without appending to them—extracted from my concluding Letter in the Morning Chronicle—a summary of my impressions of the social condition of the French agricultural population, and the effects of the system of the infinitesimal division of the land. These impressions are founded upon a five months' journey through France, keeping mainly in the country places, being constantly in communication with the people themselves, and hearing also the opinions of the priests and men of business engaged in rural affairs, as well as reading authors upon all sides of the question. My conclusions I have summed up carefully, and with great deliberation; and I offer them as an honest, and not ill-founded estimate of the present state and future prospects of rural France.

The French are undoubtedly at least a century behind us in agricultural science and skill. This remark applies alike to breeding cattle and to raising crops. Agriculture in France is rather a handicraft than what it ought to be—a science. As a general rule, the farmers of France are about on a level with the ploughmen of England. When I say this, I mean that the immense majority of the cultivators are unlettered peasants—hinds—who till the land in the unvarying, mechanical routine handed down to them from their forefathers. Of agriculture, in any other sense than the rule-of-thumb practice of ploughing, sowing, reaping, and threshing, they know literally nothing. Of the rationale of the management of land—of the reasons why so and so should be done—they think no more than honest La BalafrÈ, whose only notion of a final cause was the command of his superior officer. Thus they are bound down in the most abject submission to every custom, for no other reason than that it is a custom: their fathers did so and so, and therefore, and for no other reason, the sons do the same. I could see no struggling upwards, no longing for a better condition, no discontent, even with the vegetable food upon which they lived. All over the land there brooded one almost unvaried mist of dull, unenlightened, passive content—I do not mean social—but industrial content.

There are two causes principally chargeable with this. In the first place, strange as it may seem in a country in which two-thirds of the population are agriculturists, agriculture is a very unhonoured occupation. Develop, in the slightest degree, a Frenchman's mental faculties, and he flies to a town as surely as steel filings fly to a loadstone. He has no rural tastes—no delight in rural habits. A French amateur farmer would, indeed, be a sight to see. Again, this national tendency is directly encouraged by the centralizing system of government—by the multitude of officials, and by the payment of all functionaries. From all parts of France, men of great energy and resource struggle up and fling themselves on the world of Paris. There they try to become great functionaries. Through every department of the eighty-four, men of less energy and resource struggle up to the chef-lieu—the provincial capital. There they try to become little functionaries. Go still lower—deal with a still smaller scale—and the result will be the same. As is the department to France, so is the arrondissement to the department, and the commune to the arrondissement. Nine-tenths of those who have, or think they have, heads on their shoulders, struggle into towns to fight for office. Nine-tenths of those who are, or are deemed by themselves or others, too stupid for anything else, are left at home to till the fields, and breed the cattle, and prune the vines, as their ancestors did for generations before them. Thus there is singularly little intelligence left in the country. The whole energy, and knowledge, and resource of the land are barrelled up in the towns. You leave one city, and, in many cases, you will not meet an educated or cultivated individual until you arrive at another—all between is utter intellectual barrenness. The English country gentleman, we all know, is not a faultless character, but his useful qualities far prevail over his defects; and it is only when traversing a land all but destitute of any such order that the fatal effects of the blank are fully realized. Were there more country gentlemen in France, there would be more animal food and more wheaten bread in the country. The very idea of a great proprietor living upon his estates implies the fact of an educated person—an individual more or less rubbed and polished and enlightened by society—taking his place amongst a class who must naturally look up to him, and whose mass he must necessarily, to a greater or less degree, leaven. It is easy to joke about English country gentlemen—about their foibles, and prejudices, and absurd points; but to the jokers I would seriously say, "Go to France; examine its agriculture, and the structure and calibre of its rural society, and see the result of the utter absence of a class of men—certainly not Solomons, and as certainly not Chesterfields, but, for all that, most useful personages—individuals with capital, with, at all events, a certain degree of enlightenment—taking an active interest in farming—often amateur farmers themselves—the patrons of district clubs, and ploughing matches, and cattle-shows—and, above all, living daily among their tenantry, and having an active and direct interest in that tenantry's prosperity." I do not mean to say that here and there, all over France, there may not be found active and intelligent resident landlords, nor that, in the north of France, there may not be discovered intelligent and clear-headed tenant-farmers; but the rule is as I have stated. Utterly ignorant boors are allowed to plod on from generation to generation, wrapped in the most dismal mists of agricultural superstition; while what in America would be called the "smart" part of the population, are intriguing, and constructing and undoing complots, in the towns. To all present appearance, a score of dynasties may succeed each other in France before La VendÉe takes its place beside Norfolk, or before Limousin rivals the Lothians.

A word as to the subdivision of property. I know the extreme difficulties of the subject, and the moral considerations which, in connection with it, are often placed in opposition to admitted physical and economical disadvantages. I shall, therefore, without discussing the question at any length, mention two or three personally ascertained facts:—

The tendency of landed properties, under the system in question, is to continual diminution of seize.

This tendency does not stop with the interests of the parties concerned—it goes on in spite of them.

And the only practical check is nothing but a new evil. When a man finds that his patch of land is insufficient to support his family, he borrows money and buys more land. In nine cases out of ten, the interest to be paid to the lender is greater than the profit which the borrower can extract from the land—and bankruptcy, and reduction to the condition of a day-labourer, is sooner or later the inevitable result.

The infinitesimal patches of land are cultivated in the most rude and uneconomical fashion. Not a franc of capital, further than that sunk in the purchase of spades, picks, and hoes, is expended on them. They are undrained, ill-manured, expensively worked, and they would often produce no profit whatever, were it not that the proprietor is the labourer, and that he looks for little or nothing save a recompense for his toil in a bare subsistence. It is easy to see how the consumer must fare if the producer possess little or no surplus after his own necessities are satisfied.

It is not to be supposed from the above remarks, that I conceive that in no circumstances, and under no conditions, can the soil be advantageously divided into minute properties. The rule which strikes me as applying to the matter is this:—where spade-husbandry, can be legitimately adopted, then the extreme subdivision of land loses much, if not all, of its evils. The reason is plain: spade-husbandry, while it pays the proprietor fair wages, also, in certain cases, develops in an economical manner the resources of the soil. The instance of market-gardens near a populous town is a case in point. But in a remote district, removed from markets, ill provided with the means of locomotion—where cereals, not vegetables, must be raised—spade-labour is so far mere toil flung away. Near Nismes I found a man digging a field which ought to have been ploughed. He told me that the spade produced more than the plough. Then why did not the farmers use spade-husbandry? "Because, although spade-husbandry was very productive, it was still more expensive. It paid a small proprietor who could do the work himself, but not a large proprietor, who had to remunerate his labourers." Herein, then, lies the fallacy. Truly considered, a mode of cultivation unprofitable for the great proprietor, must be unprofitable, in the long run, for the small proprietor also. The former, by spade-husbandry, loses his profit by paying extravagantly for labour; the latter must pay for labour as well, but he pays himself, and is therefore unconscious of the outlay—an outlay which is, nevertheless, not the less real. If the plough, at an expense of 5s., can produce 20s. worth of produce—and if the spade, at an expense of 20s., can produce 30s. worth of produce—the difference between the proportionate outlays is so much deducted from the resources of the country in which the transaction takes place; and this because that difference of labour, or of money representing labour, if otherwise applied—as by the agency of the plough it would be free to be applied—might, profitably to its proprietor, still raise the sum total of the production to the stated amount of 30s.

Are small properties, then, in cases in which spade-husbandry cannot be economically applied, injurious to the social and industrial interests of the community in which they exist?

The following propositions appear to me to sum up what may be said on either side of the question:

Small landed holdings undoubtedly tend to produce an industrious population. A man always works hardest for himself.

Small landed holdings tend to breed a spirit of independence, and wholesome moral self-appreciation and reliance.

On the other hand—

Small landed holdings, by breeding a poor and ignorant race of proprietors, keep back agriculture, and injure the whole community of consumers; and—

Small landed holdings tend to grow smaller than it is the interest of their owners that they should become. Capital, borrowed at usurious rates of interest, is then had recourse to for the purpose of enlarging individual properties—and the result is the production of a race of involved, mortgaged, and frequently bankrupt proprietors.

At this present moment, I believe the proprietorship of France to be as bankrupt as that of the south-west of Ireland. The number of "Encumbered Estates" across the Channel would stagger the stoutest calculator. The capitalists, notaries, land-agents, and others in the towns, and not the peasantry, are the real owners of the mortgaged soil. The nominal proprietors are sinking deeper and deeper at every struggle, and they see no hope before them—save one—Socialism. French Socialism is simply the result of French poverty. A ruined labourer has no resource but casual charity. No law stands between him and starvation. He has no right to his life unless he can support himself; and as the ponderous machine of the law gradually grinds down his property to an extent too small for him to exist on, and as the increasing interest swallows up the comparatively diminishing products, he sees nothing for it but a scramble. There is property—there is food—and it will go hard but he shall have a share of them. Herein is the whole problem of the dreaded Socialism. I cannot put the matter better than in the words of the old song—

Whether a Poor-law, and a change in the law of heritage might not check the evil, I am not, of course, going to inquire; but the present state of rural France—all political considerations left aside—appears to me to point to the possibility, if not the probability, of the world seeing a greater and bloodier Jacquerie yet than it ever saw before.

THE END.

HENRY VIZETELLY, PRINTER AND ENGRAVER, GOUGH SQUARE, FLEET STREET, LONDON.