Serfdom in England.
Peers the only Landowners.
“Which is the country in Europe where the blood-horse plays the most brilliant part? It is England. Why? The horse continues to reign and govern in England because England is the country of all the world where oppression is most odious and most revolting. There we find a thousand Norman families which possess, by themselves, all the soil, which occupy all posts, and make all the laws, exactly as on the day after the Battle of Hastings. In England the conquering race is everything, the rest of the nation nothing. The English lord esteems his horse in proportion to the contempt he has for the Irishman, for the Saxon, inferior races that he has vanquished by his alliance with his horse. Take good heed, then, that you offend not one hair of the tail of a noble courser of Albion, you who care for your money and your liberty; for the horse is the appanage of the House of Lords, and these Lords have caused the law to declare their horse inviolable and sacred. You may knock down a man with your fist, you may take your wife to market with a halter round her neck, you may trail the wretched prostitute in the mud of the gutter, the daughter of the poverty-stricken artisan whom misery has condemned to infamy. The law of Great Britain tolerates these peccadilloes. For the Norman race of Albion, the English people has never formed part of humanity.”
What strikes us at once in writing of this kind is the astonishing confidence of the author in the profound ignorance of his readers. The confidence was fully justified. There are few Frenchmen even at the present day to whom anything in this passage would seem inaccurate or exaggerated. The statement that only the Norman families can be lords and landowners is quite one that the French mind would be prepared to accept, because it implies that England is in a more backward condition than France. I have met with an intelligent Frenchman who maintained that serfdom still exists in England—the serfdom of the Saxon, the serfdom of Gurth and Wamba; and when I happened to mention an English estate as belonging to a certain commoner, another Frenchman, a man of superior culture and gentle breeding, first looked politely sceptical, and then raised the unanswerable objection that in England, as everybody knew, land could only be held by peers. Others will repeat Toussenel’s statement that all the public posts (what we call places) are held by the nobility.
Toussenel’s Kind of Falsehood.
The kind of falsehood of which Toussenel’s statements are an example arises from complete indifference to truth. He pays no attention to it whatever, has no notion that a writer who fails to inform himself neglects a sacred duty, but sets down in malice any outrageous idea that comes uppermost, and then affirms it to be fact.
The English Family Bath.
My next example is of less importance, because it is not spread abroad in a famous and permanent book; still, it shows a kind of falsehood that may be dictated by French malevolence. A Frenchman had been staying in England, and on his return to France he told any one who would listen to him that the English have a strange custom—the family bath. All the members of an English family, without regard to sex or age, bathe together every morning in a state of perfect nudity.
Cause of the Lie.
This, I think, is rather a representative specimen of a French lie. It is a pure invention, suggested by anger at the superior cleanliness of the English upper classes, and by a desire to make them pay for their cleanliness by a loss of reputation for decency.