The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

H >> Hippolyte A. Taine >> The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

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In Auvergne, the country is depopulated daily; many of the
villages have lost, since the beginning of the century, more than one-
third of their inhabitants[19].

"Had not steps been promptly taken to lighten the burden of a
down-trodden people," says the provincial assembly in 1787, "Auvergne
would have forever lost its population and its cultivation."

In Comminges, at the outbreak of the Revolution, certain
communities threaten to abandon their possessions, should they obtain
no relief[20].

"It is a well-known fact," says the assembly of Haute-Guyenne, in
1784," that the lot of the most severely taxed communities is so
rigorous as to have led their proprietors frequently to abandon their
property[21]. Who is not aware of the inhabitants of Saint-Servin
having abandoned their property ten times, and of their threats to
resort again to this painful proceeding in their recourse to the
administration? Only a few years ago an abandonment of the community
of Boisse took place through the combined action of the inhabitants,
the seignior and the décimateur of that community;" and the desertion
would be still greater if the law did not forbid persons liable to the
taille abandoning over-taxed property, except by renouncing whatever
they possessed in the community. In the Soissonais, according to the
report of the provincial assembly,[22] "misery is excessive." In
Gascony the spectacle is "heartrending." In the environs of Toul, the
cultivator, after paying his taxes, tithes and other dues, remains
empty-handed.

"Agriculture is an occupation of steady anxiety and privation, in
which thousands of men are obliged to painfully vegetate."[23] In a
village in Normandy, "nearly all the inhabitants, not excepting the
farmers and proprietors, eat barley bread and drink water, living like
the most wretched of men, so as to provide for the payment of the
taxes with which they are overburdened." In the same province, at
Forges, "many poor creatures eat oat bread, and others bread of soaked
bran, this nourishment causing many deaths among infants."[24] People
evidently live from day to day; whenever the crop proves poor they
lack bread. Let a frost come, a hailstorm, an inundation, and an
entire province is incapable of supporting itself until the coming
year; in many places even an ordinary winter suffices to bring on
distress. On all sides hands are seen outstretched to the king, who is
the universal almoner. The people may be said to resemble a man
attempting to wade through a pool with the water up to his chin, and
who, losing his footing at the slightest depression, sinks down and
drowns. Existent charity and the fresh spirit of humanity vainly
strive to rescue them; the water has risen too high. It must subside
to a lower level, and the pool be drawn off through some adequate
outlet. Thus far the poor man catches breath only at intervals,
running the risk of drowning at every moment.

II. THE PEASANTS.

The condition of the peasant during the last thirty years of the
Ancient Regime. - His precarious subsistence. - State of agriculture.
- Uncultivated farms. - Poor cultivation. - Inadequate wages. - Lack
of comforts.

Between 1750 and 1760,[25] the idlers who eat suppers begin to
regard with compassion and alarm the laborers who go without dinners.
Why are the latter so impoverished; and by what misfortune, on a soil
as rich as that of France, do those lack bread who grow the grain? In
the first place many farms remain uncultivated, and, what is worse,
many are deserted. According to the best observers "one-quarter of the
soil is absolutely lying waste. . . . Hundreds and hundreds of arpents
of heath and moor form extensive deserts."[26] Let a person traverse
Anjou, Maine, Brittany, Poitou, Limousin, la Marche, Berry, Nivernais,
Bourbonnais and Auvergne, and he finds one-half of these provinces in
heaths, forming immense plains, all of which might be cultivated." In
Touraine, in Poitou and in Berry they form solitary expanses of 30,000
arpents. In one canton alone, near Preuilly, 40,000 arpents of good
soil consist of heath. The agricultural society of Rennes declares
that two-thirds of Brittany is lying waste. This is not sterility but
decadence. The régime invented by Louis XIV has produced its effect;
the soil for a century past has been reverting to a wild state.

"We see only abandoned and ruinous chateaux; the principal towns
of the fiefs, in which the nobility formerly lived at their ease, are
all now occupied by poor tenant herdsmen whose scanty labor hardly
suffices for their subsistence, and a remnant of tax ready to
disappear through the ruin of the proprietors and the desertion of the
settlers."

In the election district of Confolens a piece of property rented
for 2,956 livres in 1665, brings in only 900 livres in 1747. On the
confines of la Marche and of Berry a domain which, in 166o, honorably
supported two seigniorial families is now simply a small unproductive
tenant-farm; "the traces of the furrows once made by the plow-iron
being still visible on the surrounding heaths." Sologne, once
flourishing,[27] becomes a marsh and a forest; a hundred years earlier
it produced three times the quantity of grain; two-thirds of its mills
are gone; not a vestige of its vineyards remains; "grapes have given
way to the heath." Thus abandoned by the spade and the plow, a vast
portion of the soil ceases to feed man, while the rest, poorly
cultivated, scarcely provides the simplest necessities[28].

In the first place, on the failure of a crop, this portion remains
untilled; its occupant is too poor to purchase seed; the intendant is
often obliged to distribute seed, without which the disaster of the
current year would be followed by sterility the following year[29].
Every calamity, accordingly, in these days affects the future as well
as the present; during the two years of 1784 and 1785, around
Toulouse, the drought having caused the loss of all draft animals,
many of the cultivators are obliged to let their fields lie fallow. In
the second place, cultivation, when it does take place, is carried on
according to medieval modes. Arthur Young, in 1789, considers that
French agriculture has not progressed beyond that of the tenth
century[30]. Except in Flanders and on the plains of Alsace, the
fields lie fallow one year out of three, and oftentimes one year out
of two. The implements are poor; there are no plows made of iron; in
many places the plow of Virgil's time is still in use. Cart-axles and
wheel-tires are made of wood, while a harrow often consists of the
trestle of a cart. There are few animals and but little manure; the
capital bestowed on cultivation is three times less than that of the
present day. The yield is slight: "our ordinary farms," says a good
observer, "taking one with another return about six times the seed
sown."[31] In 1778, on the rich soil around Toulouse, wheat returns
about five for one, while at the present day it yields eight to one
and more. Arthur Young estimates that, in his day, the English acre
produces twenty-eight bushels of grain, and the French acre eighteen
bushels, and that the value of the total product of the same area for
a given length of time is thirty-six pounds sterling in England and
only twenty-five in France. As the parish roads are frightful, and
transportation often impracticable, it is clear that, in remote
cantons, where poor soil yields scarcely three times the seed sown,
food is not always obtainable. How do they manage to live until the
next crop? This is the question always under consideration previous
to, and during, the Revolution. I find, in manuscript correspondence,
the syndics and mayors of villages estimating the quantities for local
subsistence at so many bushels in the granaries, so many sheaves in
the barns, so many mouths to be filled, so many days to wait until

the August wheat comes in, and concluding on short supplies for
two, three and four months. Such a state of inter-communication and of
agriculture condemns a country to periodical famines, and I venture to
state that, alongside of the small-pox which out of eight deaths
causes one, another endemic disease exists, as prevalent and as
destructive, and this disease is starvation.

We can easily imagine that it is the common people, and especially
the peasants who suffers. An increase of the price of bread prevents
him from getting any, and even without that increase, he obtains it
with difficulty. Wheat bread cost, as today, three sous per pound,[32]
but as the average day's work brought only nineteen sous instead of
forty, the day-laborer, working the same time, could buy only the half
of a loaf instead of a full loaf[33]. Taking everything into account,
and wages being estimated according to the price of grain, we find
that the husbandman's manual labor then procured him 959 litres of
wheat, while nowadays it gives him 1,851 litres; his well-being,
accordingly, has advanced ninety-three per cent., which suffices to
show to what extent his predecessors suffered privations. And these
privations are peculiar to France. Through analogous observations and
estimates Arthur Young shows that in France those who lived on field
labor, and they constituted the great majority, are seventy-six per
cent. less comfortable than the same laborers in England, while they
are seventy-six per cent. less well fed and well clothed, besides
being worse treated in sickness and in health. The result is that in
seven-eighths of the kingdom, there are no farmers, but simply
métayers (a kind of poor tenants)[34]. The peasant is too poor to
undertake cultivation on his own account, possessing no agricultural
capital[35]. "The proprietor, desirous of improving his land, finds no
one to cultivate it but miserable creatures possessing only a pair of
hands; he is obliged to advance everything for its cultivation at his
own expense, animals, implements and seed, and even to advance the
wherewithal to this tenant to feed him until the first crop comes in."
- "At Vatan, for example, in Berry, the tenants, almost every year,
borrow bread of the proprietor in order to await the harvesting." -
"Very rarely is one found who is not indebted to his master at least
one hundred livres a year."

Frequently the latter proposes to abandon the entire crop to them
on condition that they demand nothing of him during the year; "these
miserable creatures" have refused; left to themselves, they would not
be sure of keeping themselves alive. - In Limousin and in Angoumois
their poverty is so great[36] "that, deducting the taxes to which they
are subject, they have no more than from twenty-five to thirty livres
each person per annum to spend; and not in money, it must be stated,
but counting whatever they consume in kind out of the crops they
produce. Frequently they have less, and when they cannot possibly make
a living the master is obliged to support them. . . . The métayer is
always reduced to just what is absolutely necessary to keep him from
starving." As to the small proprietor, the villager who plows his land
himself, his condition is but little better. "Agriculture,[37] as our
peasants practice it, is a veritable drudgery; they die by thousands
in childhood, and in maturity they seek places everywhere but where
they should be."

In 1783, throughout the plain of the Toulousain they eat only
maize, a mixture of flour, common seeds and very little wheat; those
on the mountains feed, a part of the year, on chestnuts; the potato is
hardly known, and, according to Arthur Young, ninety-nine out of a
hundred peasants would refuse to eat it. According to the reports of
intendants, the basis of food, in Normandy, is oats; in the election-
district of Troyes, buck-wheat; in the Marche and in Limousin,
buckwheat with chestnuts and radishes; in Auvergne, buckwheat,
chestnuts, milk-curds and a little salted goat's meat; in Beauce, a
mixture of barley and rye; in Berry, a mixture of barley and oats.
There is no wheat bread; the peasant consumes inferior flour only
because he is unable to pay two sous a pound for his bread. There is
no butcher's meat; at best he kills one pig a year. His dwelling is
built of clay (pise), roofed with thatch, without windows, and the
floor is the beaten ground. Even when the soil furnishes good building
materials, stone, slate and tile, the windows have no sashes. In a
parish in Normandy,[38] in 1789, "most of the dwellings consist of
four posts." They are often mere stables or barns "to which a chimney
has been added made of four poles and some mud." Their clothes are
rags, and often in winter these are muslin rags. In Quercy and
elsewhere, they have no stockings, or wooden shoes. "It is not in the
power of an English imagination," says Arthur Young, "to imagine the
animals that waited on us here at the Chapeau Rouge, - creatures
that were called by courtesy Souillac women, but in reality walking
dung-hills. But a neatly dressed, clean waiting-girl at an inn, will
be looked for in vain in France." On reading descriptions made on the
spot we see in France a similar aspect of country and of peasantry as
in Ireland, at least in its broad outlines.

III. THE COUNTRYSIDE.

Aspects of the country and of the peasantry.

In the most fertile regions, for instance, in Limagne, both
cottages and faces denote "misery and privation."[39] "The peasants
are generally feeble, emaciated and of slight stature." Nearly all
derive wheat and wine from their homesteads, but they are forced to
sell this to pay their rents and taxes; they eat black bread, made of
rye and barley, and their sole beverage is water poured on the lees
and the husks. "An Englishman[40] who has not traveled can not imagine
the figure made by infinitely the greater part of the countrywomen in
France." Arthur Young, who stops to talk with one of these in
Champagne, says that "this woman, at no great distance, might have
been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure was so bent and her face
so hardened and furrowed by labor, - but she said she was only
twenty-eight." This woman, her husband and her household, afford a
sufficiently accurate example of the condition of the small
proprietary husbandmen. Their property consists simply of a patch of
ground, with a cow and a poor little horse; their seven children
consume the whole of the cow's milk. They owe to one seignior a
franchard (forty-two pounds) of flour, and three chickens; to another
three franchards of oats, one chicken and one sou, to which must be
added the taille and other taxes. "God keep us!" she said, "for the
tailles and the dues crush us." - What must it be in districts where
the soil is poor! -

"From Ormes, (near Chatellerault), as far as Poitiers," writes a
lady,[41] "there is a good deal of ground which brings in nothing, and
from Poitiers to my residence (in Limousin) 25,000 arpents of ground
consist wholly of heath and sea-grass. The peasantry live on rye, of
which they do not remove the bran, and which is as black and heavy as
lead. - In Poitou, and here, they plow up only the skin of the
ground with a miserable little plow without wheels. . . . From
Poitiers to Montmorillon it is nine leagues, equal to sixteen of
Paris, and I assure you that I have seen but four men on the road,
and, between Montmorillon and my own house, which is four leagues, but
three; and then only at a distance, not having met one on the road.
You need not be surprised at this in such a country. . . Marriage
takes place as early as with the grand seigniors," doubtless for fear
of the militia. "But the population of the country is no greater
because almost every infant dies. Mothers having scarcely any milk,
their infants eat the bread of which I spoke, the stomach of a girl of
four years being as big as that of a pregnant woman. . . . The rye
crop this year was ruined by the frost on Easter day; flour is scarce;
of the twelve métairies owned by my mother, four of them may, perhaps,
have some on hand. There has been no rain since Easter; no hay, no
pasture, no vegetables, no fruit. You see the lot of the poor peasant.
There is no manure, and there are no cattle. . . . My mother, whose
granaries used to be always full, has not a grain of wheat in them,
because, for two years past, she has fed all her métayers and the
poor."

"The peasant is assisted," says a seignior of the same
province,[42] "protected, and rarely maltreated, but he is looked upon
with disdain. If kindly and pliable he is made subservient, but if
ill-disposed he becomes soured and irritable. . . . He is kept in
misery, in an abject state, by men who are not at all inhuman but
whose prejudices, especially among the nobles, lead them to regard him
as of a different species of being. . . . The proprietor gets all he
can out of him; in any event, looking upon him and his oxen as
domestic animals, he puts them into harness and employs them in all
weathers for every kind of journey, and for every species of carting
and transport. On the other hand, this métayer thinks of living with
as little labor as possible, converting as much ground as he can into
pasturage, for the reason that the product arising from the increase
of stock costs him no labor. The little plowing he does is for the
purpose of raising low-priced provisions suitable for his own
nourishment, such as buckwheat, radishes, etc. His enjoyment consists
only of his own idleness and sluggishness, hoping for a good chestnut
year and doing nothing voluntarily but procreate;" unable to hire
farming hands he begets children. -

The rest, ordinary laborers, have a few savings, "living on the
herbage, and on a few goats which devour everything." Often again,
these, by order of Parliament, are killed by the game-keepers. A
woman, with two children in swaddling clothes, having no milk, "and
without an inch of ground," whose two goats, her sole resource, had
thus been slain, and another, with one goat slain in the same way, and
who begs along with her boy, present themselves at the gate of the
chateau; one receives twelve livres, while the other is admitted as a
domestic, and henceforth, '' this village is all bows and smiling
faces.'' - In short, they are not accustomed to kindness; the lot of
all these poor people is to endure. "As with rain and hail, they
regard as inevitable the necessity of being oppressed by the
strongest, the richest, the most skillful, the most in repute," and
this stamps on them, "if one may be allowed to say so, an air of
painful suffering."

In Auvergne, a feudal country, covered with extensive ecclesiastic
and seigniorial domains, the misery is the same. At Clermont-
Ferrand,[43] "there are many streets that can for blackness, dirt and
scents only be represented by narrow channels cut in a dunghill." In
the inns of the largest bourgs, "closeness, misery, dirtiness and
darkness." That of Pradelles is "one of the worst in France." That of
Aubenas, says Young, "would be a purgatory for one of my pigs." The
senses, in short, are paralyzed. The primitive man is content so long
as he can sleep and get something to eat. He gets something to eat,
but what kind of food? To put up with the indigestible mess a peasant
here requires a still tougher stomach than in Limousin; in certain
villages where, ten years later, every year twenty or twenty-five hogs
are to be slaughtered, they now slaughter but three[44]. - On
contemplating this temperament, rude and intact since Vercingetorix,
and, moreover, rendered more savage by suffering, one cannot avoid
being somewhat alarmed. The Marquis de Mirabeau describes

"the votive festival of Mont-Dore: savages descending from the
mountain in torrents,[45] the curate with stole and surplice, the
justice in his wig, the police corps with sabers drawn, all guarding
the open square before letting the bagpipers play; the dance
interrupted in a quarter of an hour by a fight; the hooting and cries
of children, of the feeble and other spectators, urging them on as the
rabble urge on so many fighting dogs; frightful looking men, or rather
wild beasts covered with coats of coarse wool, wearing wide leather
belts pierced with copper nails, gigantic in stature, which is
increased by high wooden shoes, and making themselves still taller by
standing on tiptoe to see the battle, stamping with their feet as it
progresses and rubbing each other's flanks with their elbows, their
faces haggard and covered with long matted hair, the upper portion
pallid, and the lower distended, indicative of cruel delight and a
sort of ferocious impatience. And these folks pay the taille! And now
they want to take away their salt! And they know nothing of those they
despoil, of those whom they think they govern, believing that, by a
few strokes of a cowardly and careless pen, they may starve them with
impunity up to the final catastrophe! Poor Jean-Jacques, I said to
myself, had any one dispatched you, with your system, to copy music
amongst these folks, he would have had some sharp replies to make to
your discourses!"

Prophetic warning and admirable foresight in one whom an excess of
evil does not blind to the evil of the remedy! Enlightened by his
feudal and rural instincts, the old man at once judges both the
government and the philosophers, the Ancient Regime and the
Revolution.

IV. THE PEASANT BECOMES LANDOWNER.

How the peasant becomes a proprietor. - He is no better off. -
Increase of taxes. - He is the "mule" of the Ancient Regime.

Misery begets bitterness in a man; but ownership coupled with
misery renders him still more bitter. He may have submitted to
indigence but not to spoliation - which is the situation of the
peasant in 1789, for, during the eighteenth century, he had become the
possessor of land. But how could he maintain himself in such
destitution? The fact is almost incredible, but it is nevertheless
true. We can only explain it by the character of the French peasant,
by his sobriety, his tenacity, his rigor with himself, his
dissimulation, his hereditary passion for property and especially for
that of the soil. He had lived on privations, and economized sou after
sou. Every year a few pieces of silver are added to his little store
of crowns buried in the most secret recess of his cellar; Rousseau's
peasant, concealing his wine and bread in a pit, assuredly had a yet
more secret hiding-place; a little money in a woollen stocking or in a
jug escapes, more readily than elsewhere, the search of the clerks.
Dressed in rags, going barefoot, eating nothing but coarse black
bread, but cherishing the little treasure in his breast on which he
builds so many hopes, he watches for the opportunity which never fails
to come. "In spite of privileges," writes a gentleman in 1755,[46]
"the nobles are daily being ruined and reduced, the Third-Estate
making all the fortunes." A number of domains, through forced or
voluntary sales, thus pass into the hands of financiers, of men of the
quill, of merchants, and of the well-to-do bourgeois. Before
undergoing this total dispossession, however, the seignior, involved
in debt, is evidently resigned to partial alienation of his property.
The peasant who has bribed the steward is at hand with his hoard. "It
is poor property, my lord, and it costs you more than you get from
it." This may refer to an isolated patch, one end of a field or
meadow, sometimes a farm whose farmer pays nothing, and generally
worked by a métayer whose wants and indolence make him an annual
expense to his master. The latter may say to himself that the
alienated parcel is not lost, since, some day or other, through his
right of repurchase, he may take it back, while, in the meantime, he
enjoys a cens, drawbacks, and the lord's dues. Moreover, there is on
his domain and around him, extensive open spaces which the decline of
cultivation and depopulation have left a desert. To restore the value
of this he must surrender its proprietorship. There is no other way by
which to attach man permanently to the soil. And the government helps
him along in this matter. Obtaining no revenue from the abandoned
soil, it assents to a provisional withdrawal of its too weighty hand.
By the edict of 1766, a piece of cleared waste land remains free of
the taille for fifteen years, and, thereupon, in twenty-eight
provinces 400,000 arpents are cleared in three years[47].

This is the mode by which the seigniorial domain gradually crumbles
away and decreases. Towards the last, in many places, with the
exception of the chateau and the small adjoining farm which brings in
2 or 3000 francs a year, nothing is left to the seignior but his
feudal dues;[48] the rest of the soil belongs to the peasantry.
Forbonnais already remarks, towards 1750, that many of the nobles and
of the ennobled "reduced to extreme poverty but with titles to immense
possessions," have sold off portions to small cultivators at low
prices, and often for the amount of the taille. Towards 1760, one-
quarter of the soil is said to have already passed into the hands of
farmers. In 1772, in relation to the vingtième, which is levied on the
net revenue of real property, the intendant of Caen, having completed
the statement of his quota, estimates that out of 150,000 "there are
perhaps 50,000 whose liabilities did not exceed five sous, and perhaps
still as many more not exceeding twenty sous."[49] Contemporary
observers authenticate this passion of the peasant for land. "The
savings of the lower classes, which elsewhere are invested with
individuals and in the public funds, are wholly destined in France to
the purchase of land." "Accordingly the number of small rural holdings
is always on the increase. Necker says that there is an immensity of
them." Arthur Young, in 1789, is astonished at their great number and
"inclines to think that they form a third of the kingdom." This
already would be our actual estimate, and we still find,
approximately, the actual figures, on estimating the number of
proprietors in comparison with the number of inhabitants.