The American in Paris; vol. 1 of 2

by John Sanderson

This common world is more social, and in appearance more joyous, than with us. It huddles together in public places, with wonderful conversation and merriment, till a late hour of the night; and what a quantity of green old age! grandmothers of sixty with their hair en papillote, are playing hide and go-seek with twenty-five. After all, what signifies the degree of poverty or age, if one is happy? Another remarkable thing is, the respect paid to property. Benches on the public squares are handed down to posterity with no other marks than the natural wear and tear of sitting on them; vegetables grow by the way-side untrodden, and gardens and fields offer their fruits without hedge or fence, or any visible protection. I have talked these matters over with a Frenchman, who says, that it is the last generation only that lives at this rate, and that the present one dies off at a very reasonable age. The truth I believe is, that we, in our country, keep old persons inside the house; we wrap them up and lay them on the shelf, and ennui and neglect, no doubt, abridge a little their duration.

As for the security of property, he ascribes it entirely to a certain shepherdly swain, very common here, who wears red breeches, and is coiffed in a cocked hat, with one of the cocks exactly over his nose, called a Garde Champêtre, who watches day and night over the safety of the fields. A curiosity of the place is the peasant women, whom you will see mixed fantastically with the citizens in the market, and flocking in and out in great numbers at the town gate. Labour and the sun have worn all the feminine charms out of their faces, and they have mounted up over these ugly faces starched and white caps two stories high, in which they encounter all sorts of weather; they are seated on little asses, a large basket at each side, in which they carry vegetables to market, and carry back manure for the crops of the next year. The American intercourse is so quickened by railroads and steamboats, that the characteristics of town and country are almost effaced; here they wear yet their distinct liveries.

And now the antiquities. I visited, this morning, a trumpery old palace of Charles V.; also a round tower, built, they say, by that great tower builder, Julius Cæsar; and returning through a solitary alley, I stumbled accidentally upon a monument of more precious memory, the birthplace of the author of Paul and Virginia. It is a scrubby old hut, with a bit of marble in front containing his name and day of nativity. Genius seems to have but mean notions of the dignity of birth; Pindar was born in the slough and vapours of Bœotia, and St. Pierre in this filthy alley of the Havre.

And now the politics. The children here are apportioned equally, and cannot be disinherited. All the father can dispose of by will, is a half, third, or fourth, of the estate, according as he has one, two, or more heirs. This kind of succession cuts up the land into small patches, and thus brings poverty on both town and country. Families being without capital to improve their agricultural resources, have but little to spare to the town, and can, therefore, buy but little of its stores and manufactures; and, from inability to supply the raw materials and provisions cheap, buy this little at an enhanced price. In this way the two parties mutually beggar each other. Besides, under this system of minute divisions, the farming population increases enormously, poverty increasing in the same ratio.

Two-thirds of the French are already farmers; and in England, where farming is in so much greater perfection, the ratio is one-third. This law, too, in rendering the children independent of the father, destroys his authority and his check upon their conduct; it weakens the motives to exertion, which arise from fear of want or prospects of future good, and is consequently unfavourable to intellect and morals. The English system makes one son only a fool, the French besots the whole family. A redundant population is the great curse of all these old countries, and under this system of subdivision, a nation, unless the blessings of war or the plague intervene, becomes as multitudinous as the Chinese, eating dogs, and cats, and potatoes, and hutting with cows and pigs; a plough, as in Ireland, becoming a joint stock possession, and a horse belonging to a whole neighbourhood.

The French, in spite of the Moscows and Waterloos, have added between five and six millions to their population of 1789. Agriculture, to be sure, was improved by the Revolution, by the divisions amongst the peasantry of the national domains and confiscated property of the nobles, by the abolition of tithes and game laws, and by bringing the waste lands into cultivation; but this condition is, or must soon be, on the reverse. In America, the abundance of idle and cheap land prevents this calamity for the present. I have travelled a few miles in the country, and have squeezed what sense I could out of the peasants. I find that, in all branches of husbandry, a labourer here performs a fourth less work daily than in America; and in ploughing and reaping, nearly a third. The French implements, too, are clumsy and bungling; oxen are yoked by the horns, harrows have wooden teeth, and the plough, mostly of wood, scratches up the earth instead of turning a furrow.

Another great evil in French politics is, the centralization of every thing in the metropolis. In our country, each borough or township is an independent community, and manages its concerns with scarce a sense of any foreign superintendence. An individual recommends himself to favour first in his village, then in his county, next in his state, and finally in the United States; and none glimmer in the last sphere who have not shone in the first. Here this condition is reversed—there is a converging of all the rays into one general focus. Paris is the centre, and there is none but delegated authority any where else. So the French provinces are out at the heels and elbows, and Paris wears its elegant and fashionable wardrobe. Your Pottsville has a hundred miles of railroad, whilst the Havre transports the whole trade of the capital by a two-wheeled operation she calls the “roulage,” and her boats upon the channel carrying on the intercourse between the two greatest cities of the world, are about equal to yours, in which you cross over into Jersey to eat creams with mother Heyle.

A third reason of village and country poverty is, the neglect of machinery, by which production may be increased with a diminution of labour. Not a railroad has yet shewn its nose in this place, though it is the outlet to the foreign trade of one third of the French territory, including the capital, with its almost a million of inhabitants. They are cleaning their great dock to-day with a hundred or two of men armed with spades, whilst a machine is doing the same work upon the Delaware with three or four negroes. The economists of the French school reason thus: If this clumsy apparatus is superseded, our workmen will be out of employ; besides, it is known that the increase of consumers always keeps pace with the increase of production, and you end where you began.—But you increase also your strength. Yes, and the difficulties of government.—You give life to a greater number of human beings. And little obligations have they for the gift, if they are to run the risk of being corrupted in this world and punished in the next; and the means of corruption are greater in a crowded than a thin population; greater amongst an idle and luxurious, than a simple and laborious people.

The American public was more happy and virtuous with its three millions than with its ten millions and its railroads. If this is all true, then the country which has least fertility of soil, and least skill in the arts of agriculture, is the most favoured by Providence; and the best system of economy is that which teaches us to procure the least possible produce with the greatest possible labour. The best employment, too, for the labourers, would be to plant cucumbers in summer, and extract the sunbeams out of them, to keep themselves warm in winter. I like the system which teaches us to increase the sum of human comforts. I think it is better to live in an improved country, with clean streets and neat dwellings, than to have the same means of living with a destitution of such conveniences. I like even to starve with decent accommodations.

A fourth great cause of poverty is, the restriction which these nations have imposed upon their mutual intercourse, and the produce of each other’s industry. There is a total disagreement between natural reason and the custom of all countries on this subject. Nature, by giving us a diversity of soils, climates, and products, has pointed out the right objects of industry, and laid all nations under obligations of dependence and intimacy upon each other; and there is a general struggle amongst all to counteract this benevolent design. France, for example, has a natural fitness for wines, and the land producing this wine is unsuited to any other culture; yet she has so managed as to keep her wine trade stationary for the last fifty years. England buys her wine, of inferior quality, from Portugal and Spain, and carries on a greater trade with the Chinese, her Antipodes, than with France, her next-door neighbour. All proclaim the benefits of foreign trade, and all legislate directly to get rid of their foreign customers. In what more direct way could France prevent the sale of her wines to Russia, Sweden, and England, than by refusing their coal, iron, woollen manufactures, and other products, for which they have a natural advantage in return?