The Teaching Class in France.
Severance between Fashionable and Educated Classes.
The teaching classes are in some respects a lower caste in France than in England. This difference may be in part due to the clerical character of English education, which gave a dignity and almost a sacred character to schoolmasters. In France the numerous professors in the University are not well paid, and often eke out a slender income by private lessons. Many of them are cultivated gentlemen, others are much less refined, as may be expected in a very mixed class, and an old principal tells me that the body as a whole has less tenue and self-respect than it had formerly. “In my time,” he said, “you might always recognise an universitaire by the correctness of his appearance and bearing, but to-day he is not distinguishable from anybody else.” In England university degrees confer some social position, especially if they have been gained at Oxford or Cambridge; in France they confer little or none, certainly they do not make the recipient du monde. The consequence is more and more a severance between the fashionable and the educated classes, and it may even come, in course of time, to this, that a high degree of education may be taken as evidence that a man does not belong to “good society.”
Peasant Life in France.
There is a difference between England and France in the strictness of rural caste. Amongst the French peasants we find a set of rigid caste-customs separating the class completely from the bourgeois and the ouvrier. There is nothing answering to this with the same universality and rigour in English rural life. The English farmer answers more to the French rural bourgeois of different grades; his life is more the general life of the nation, it is not peculiar and behind the time. There are signs that the true peasant life, with its austerity, its self-denial, its patriarchal rules and traditions, will not, in France itself, very long survive the influences of the town, the railway, and the newspaper. It will be a severe loss to the country when it passes away. The peasants do not themselves know how superior they are to the classes they are beginning to imitate.
The strength of caste may be measured by the degradation of the Pariah. As the caste-principle declines he rises, and when it dies he is no longer distinguishable by his vileness, but is lost in the general equality.
The Pariah in England.
The Pariah in France.
English intolerance having been chiefly religious, its Pariah has been the Infidel. France is the country of political intolerance, and there the Pariah is the Republican. “What!” I may be asked, “you speak of the Republicans as Pariahs at a time when they hold all the ministries and receive all the ambassadors?” The answer to this objection is that they have never been more under the ban of high society than since they won political power. In England the Infidel is not quite the Pariah that he used to be when Deists were “pestiferous vermin.” To-day, under his new name of “Agnostic,” he is beginning to be tolerated. On the contrary, the French intolerance of the Republican is more intense than ever. Canaille is the mildest term that the charity of the bien pensant would apply to him—
“E cortesia fu lui esser villano.”