French Rural Civility.
In France I am known by sight to many hundreds of people in the poorer classes, perhaps I may say to thousands, and they believe me (erroneously) to be what they call rich, because I live in the manner of a very small country gentleman. More than that, they all know that I am an Englishman, a difference of nationality that would not generally tend to repress any tendency to popular satire. The simple truth, however, is that I have never once been insulted, never once even jeered at, by these poor French people, because I had a good coat on my back. On the contrary, numbers of people, whose names I do not know, are in the habit of lifting their hats to me; and if I drive along the road on a market day, when the peasants are returning to their homes, I have to keep my right hand free to answer their salutations by lifting my own hat, according to the courteous French custom. One of my friends, a Frenchman, is really a rich man, and when we walk out together in the town where he is best known, he is constantly raising his hat. I find this practice to be much the same in other towns with well-to-do men who are local notables, and I know an important village where any one who looks like a gentleman will be saluted by every inhabitant he meets.
In the French rural districts the aristocracy are very well known individually, and esteemed or not according to their personal qualities. When they are just to their tenants and kind to the poor, these merits are fully acknowledged, and the great folks are regarded with respect and even affection. “C’est un bon Monsieur” the peasants will say of the squire, or, if they include his family, “Ce sont de braves gens, c’est du bon monde.” I know an honest French gentleman and his wife who are always ready with kindness and money when there is any case of real distress, and I do not believe that there is any country in the world where they would be more esteemed than they are in their own neighbourhood.
Absence of Familiarity in France.
I have never known, in France, anything like the Lancashire familiarity in speaking of the rich. The greatest landowner is always either called by his title or at least gets the usual “Monsieur.” He is “Monsieur le Marquis” or “Monsieur de ——,” and often, with a mixture of local feeling and respect, he is “Notre Monsieur,” to distinguish him from other people’s Messieurs. I never in my life heard a French peasant call a country gentleman by his bare name, or by his Christian name only. I know all the tenants on an estate where the rents were raised in a manner that created the greatest dissatisfaction, but, whilst expressing this dissatisfaction in just and straightforward language, the tenants never infused any hatred into their talk, nor did they abandon the usual respectful form in speaking of the landlord. They said that he was hard with them, and that he was acting against his own interest, which he did not seem to understand, as it was impossible for a tenant to work the farms permanently on the new terms. This is the whole substance of what they said, the complete expression of their “savage enmity.”
Wealth not an Objection in Parliamentary Candidates.
At election times I never found that it was a ground of objection to a republican candidate that he was a rich man. There has been a sort of understanding amongst many reactionary rich people in France, of late years, to give as little employment as possible to the wage-earning classes, in order to punish them for voting in favour of republican candidates. The poor resent this attempt to starve them into political subservience, a feeling which is entirely distinct from hatred to the rich as a class. Rich men who continue to give employment are, from contrast, better liked than ever.
Wealth and National Defence.
Unorganised Wealth Valueless in War.
I cannot close this chapter without some reference to the wealth of the two nations from the military point of view, that we are all compelled to consider. To be rich is of no use in actual warfare unless we are also ready. The French had plenty of money in 1870, as they proved shortly afterwards by paying two hundred millions sterling to Germany, yet that money could not win the battles of Gravelotte and Sedan. At the same time the luxurious establishments of rich French people, the wines in their cellars, their collections of pictures, their beautiful books, their pretty carriages, all the pleasant things that are commonly associated with the idea of wealth, were of no more practical value than the embroidery on the mocassins of a Red Indian. The truth is unpleasant, but we have to face it, that wealth itself is valueless for warlike purposes unless it has been employed in time, and that it is not the richest nation, but the most prepared nation, that lives best through the day of trial.[80]