"If we would know," says M. Michelet, "the inmost thought, the passion of the French Peasant, it is very easy. Walk any Sunday into the country, and follow him. Look! he is yonder before us! It is two o'clock; his wife is at vespers, and he is in his Sunday's clothes. I warrant you he is going to see his mistress!" His mistress! Yes; but tropically. The peasant's mistress is his Land; he loves it with intensest delight, with procreative love. Happy for France that it is so; for let it once cease, and the land is barren from that instant. She brings forth because she is loved. "La terre le veut ainsi, pour produire; autrement, elle ne donnerait rien, cette pauvre terre de France, sans bestiaux presque et sans engrais." By Love, the reader will understand needful care and culture, but he will err in the interpretation. It is something far more poetical and French. The peasant having arrived face to face with his mistress, "folds his arms, stops, looks serious and thoughtful; he looks a long, long time, and seems to forget himself; at last, if he fancies himself overlooked, if he perceives any body passing, he moves slowly away; after a few steps, he stops, turns round, and casts upon his land one last profound and melancholy look: but to the keen-sighted, that look is full of passion, full of heart, full of devotion. If that be not love, (!) by what token shall we know it in this world? It is love—do not laugh." It were indeed very easy to laugh, but, thus intreated, we forbear, and proceed. To love is to covet possession. To have a bit of land, means "you shall not be a mercenary, to be hired to-day and turned off to-morrow. You shall not be a serf for your daily bread. You shall be free!" To acquire that land, the peasant will consent to any thing, even to lose sight of it. To obtain it he will sell his life, and go to meet death in Africa. The peasant is very aspiring; he has been a soldier; he believes in impossibilities. The acquisition of land is for him a combat; "he goes to it as he would to the charge, and will not retreat. It is his battle of Austerlitz; he will win it; it will be a desperate struggle, he knows, but he has seen plenty of these under his old commander;" and accordingly this brave and warlike peasant borrows money of a usurer at seven, eight, or ten per cent, to purchase a piece of earth that shall bring him in two. "Heroic man—are you surprised, if, meeting him on that land which devours him, you find him so gloomy?" Certainly not. "If you meet him," says M. Michelet—heroic and sublime as he is—"do not ask him your road; if he answers, he may perhaps induce you to turn your back on the place you are going to." It is the way with atrabilious heroes. What is to be done? "We must take serious measures for defending the nobility;" that is to say—the peasantry who are in the hands of the usurers. Alter the laws. This "vast and profound," but very much involved "legion of peasant-soldier proprietors," are the People: the people are France. France is a principle, "a great political principle. It must be defended at any cost. As a principle, she must live. Live for the salvation of the world (!!) In the midst of his difficulties, the peasant learns to envy the town workman. He sees him on Sunday walking about like a gentleman, and thinks he is as free as a bird; he believes that a man who carries his trade with him, not caring a straw for the seasons, is a lord of the creation: he remembers his own liabilities to the usurer—and, lo! we have arrived at bondage and hatred, No. 1.
But the Workman, after all, is not so well off as he looks in his Sunday's best. Work fluctuates, and at times there is a want of work altogether: moreover, there are wicked cabarets and cafés, that play havoc with his four or five francs per diem. And, above all, there is that tremendous rival, with lungs of iron that know no rest, and never cease, whom men call Machinery, and who laughs the skill and strength of man to scorn. "It is humiliating," says the historian, "to behold, in presence of machinery, man fallen so low. The head is giddy, and the heart oppressed, when, for the first time, we visit those fairy halls, where iron and copper of a dazzling polish seem moving of themselves, and to have both thought and will, whilst pale and feeble man is the humble servant of those giants of steel." No reverie, no musing is allowed in the temples of Machinery. The Lollards, those mystic weavers of the middle ages, received their name, because, whilst working, they lulled, or hummed in an under tone some nursery rhyme that cheered then in their labour: for it is wisely said by our author, who can speak like a prophet and a sage when he will—shame to him when he speaks otherwise!—that "in the manual labours subject to our impulse, our inmost thought becomes identified with the work, puts it in its proper place; and the inert instrument, to which we impart the movement, far from being an obstacle to the spiritual movement, becomes its aid and companion. The rhythm of the shuttle, pushed forth and pulled back at equal periods, associated itself (in the case of the Lollards) with the rhythm of the heart; in the evening, it often happened, that, together with the cloth, a hymn, a lamentation, was woven to the self-same numbers." No human heart beats harmoniously with the thunder of machinery, whose abode is the real hell of ennui. "It seems, during those long hours, as if another heart, common to all, had taken its place—a metallic, indifferent, pitiless heart." Pitiless, indeed, if it degrade the human creature to the level of the brute. "The manufactory is a world of iron, a kingdom of necessity and fatality. The only living thing there is the severity of the foreman; there they often punish, but never reward. There man feels himself so little man, that as soon as ever he comes out, he must greedily seek the most intense excitement of the human faculties, that which concentrates the sentiment of boundless liberty in the short moment of a delicious dream. This excitement is intoxication, especially the intoxication of love." The workman becomes vicious; but extreme physical dependency, the claims of instinctive life, which once more revert to dependency, moral impotency, and the void of mind, are the causes of his vices. Talk of the bondage of the peasant! What is his slavery to that of the workman! He was at least a happy child. He lived in the air and played. He was at liberty, whilst his body and his strength were forming: the chains did not gall him till his wrist was hard: he was not called upon to suffer, before his spirit was sufficient to cope with life. Yes, there is positive bondage here.
And the Artisan? Is he at liberty? As an apprentice-boy, he is already in bondage. "Whatever annoys or irritates his master or his master's wife, falls very often upon his shoulders. A bankruptcy happens, the apprentice is beaten: the master comes home drunk, the apprentice is beaten: the work is slack or pressing, he is beaten all the same." Apprenticeship over, the artisan marries—has a wife, family; expense, misery! His children grow up, and the mother (we are in France, and M. Michelet speaks) is ambitious. Drawing will be serviceable, says the mother, to her boy in his business. She pinches herself for a few sous for crayons and paper, and a miserable artist is made of one who would have proved a good workman. Or an inspired artist, the child of labour, is left an orphan and a beggar in the midst of his aspirations and struggles towards distinction: to subsist, he must desert art, and become a workman like his father. "All his life he will curse his fate; he will work here, but his soul will be elsewhere." If he weds, and has a family—that family will become less and less loved. "A man embittered in such a struggle, and wholly intent on personal progress, considers every thing else of little value. He weans himself even from his native land imputing to it the injustice of fate." And so there is imprisonment and hatred also here.
Look at the Manufacturer. The manufacturers of France have, generally speaking, all been workmen. Six hundred thousand have become manufacturers or tradesmen since the peace. "Those brave men, who, returning from war, wheeled suddenly to the right-about towards Industry, charged as for an onset, and without difficulty carried every position." But they brought to commerce more of the violence of military life than the sentiment of honour, and treated unmercifully two classes of individuals, viz. the workman and the consumer. Towards the latter they behaved as the female shopkeepers ransomed the Cossacks in 1815. They sold at false weight, false die, false measure. With respect to the former, they applied to industry the great imperial principle—sacrifice men to abridge warfare. Men were pressed in town and country, and the conscripts of labour were placed at the pace of the machine, and required to be, like it—indefatigable. The successors of these men, the present manufacturers, pay the penalty of their fathers' misdeeds. Their reputation is gone in the market—they cannot get on. "Most of them would be heartily glad to retire if they could; but they are engaged, they must go on—march! march!" Such men are not likely to be tender-hearted. They are unfeeling to their workmen, for the money-lender is unfeeling to them. To live, the manufacturer must borrow. To get back his interest he has recourse to the workmen, for the consumer is on his guard. The former present themselves in crowds, and are obtained at any price. But a glut in the market compels the manufacturer to sell at a loss; the lowness of wages, which is death to the workman, is no longer profitable to the master, and the consumer alone gains by it. May not bondage and hatred be discerned in the present condition of the French manufacturer?
We come to the Tradesman. "The tradesman is the tyrant of the manufacturer. He pays him back all the annoyance and vexations of the purchaser." The purchaser of to-day wishes to buy for nothing: he requires two things, a showy article and the lowest price. The tradesman must deceive or perish. His life is made up of two warfares—one of cheating and cunning against the purchaser; the other of vexations and unreasonableness against the manufacturer. We have said that no one can talk more wisely than the author of The People when he is so disposed. The picture of the tradesman is drawn with a masterly hand. The original may be found here as well as in France, and is, in truth, the creation of the unwholesome time in which we live rather than of any particular city or state.
"The repugnance for industry exhibited by the noble republics of antiquity, and the haughty barons in the middle ages, is doubtless unreasonable, if by industry we understand those complicated fabrics which require science and art, or a grand wholesale trade, which requires such a variety of knowledge, information, and combination. But this repugnance is truly reasonable when it relates to the ordinary usages of commerce, the miserable necessity in which the tradesman finds himself of lying, cheating, and adulterating.
"I do not hesitate to affirm, that, for a man of honour, the position of the most dependent working man is free in comparison with this. A serf in body, he is free in soul. To enslave his soul on the contrary and his tongue, to be obliged, from morning till night, to disguise his thoughts, this is the lowest state of slavery.
"It is singular that it is precisely for honour that he lies every day, viz. to honour his affairs. Dishonour for him is not falsehood, but bankruptcy. Rather than fail, commercial honour will urge him on to the point at which fraud is equivalent to robbery, adulteration to poisoning; a gentle poisoning, I know, with small doses, which kill only in the long run.
"The manufacturer, and even the artisan, have two things which, in spite of work, render their lot better than that of the tradesman—
"First.—The tradesman does not create; he has not the important happiness—worthy of a man—to produce something—to see his work growing under his hand, assuming a form, becoming harmonious, responding to its framer by its progress, and thus consoling his ennui and his trouble.