CHAPTER IV
IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS—continued
Aire-sur-la-Lys.
My host at St.-Quentin being a councillor-general, his term of office expires with the elections fixed to take place on July 28. There is no reason in the nature of things why councillors-general should be elected on the same lines with deputies and senators. On the contrary, it would seem to be very desirable that local rather than national considerations should govern the election of such functionaries. But it has been found difficult, even in England and Wales, to keep national party politics out of the election of the new county councillors, whose duties are modelled in some important respects upon those assigned to the councillors-general in France; and it is evident that the French local elections in July will be largely determined by considerations affecting the national elections which must take place in September and October. M. Labitte, who was elected a councillor-general by the Conservatives in this department six years ago, was defeated in 1886, as I have already said, in a by-election, held to fill a vacancy in the Chamber of Deputies. It is the wish of his party friends that he should offer himself as a candidate for re-election as a councillor-general on July 28; but he does not seem disposed to do this, preferring, I think, to keep himself quite free to do his very best to bring about a Conservative victory in the national elections in September, with the importance of which to the future of France he is deeply impressed. Meanwhile, he is giving a personal account of his stewardship as a councillor-general to his constituents in a series of 'conferences.' One of these conferences he was good enough to invite me to attend.
It was held in a commune, distant some ten or twelve miles from St.-Quentin-par-Aire, and, as the custom of France is, it was held on a Sunday afternoon. M. Labitte's son-in-law drove out from Aire with his wife to dine and spend the evening with us. And about three o'clock M. Labitte, his son-in-law, and myself set out for the conference. Our road lay through a level but richly cultivated and, in its way, very beautiful region. In the last century, Artois seems to have been a kind of Ireland. The climate was excessively damp, the lack of forests and the undeveloped coal-mines left the peasantry dependent upon turf and peat for fuel; the roads were few and bad. There were good crops of grain; but the Intendant Bignon, drawing up a report on the province at the close of the seventeenth century, for the Duke of Burgundy, tells us the wars had made an end of all the manufactures, including the long-famous tapestry-works of Arras. 'There were few fruit-trees, little hay, and little manure.' Here and there some linen was made; but the trade of the province was carried on almost exclusively in grain, hops, flax, and wool. Iron and copper utensils, and coal and slates came to Artois from Flanders, cod-fish and cheese from the Low Countries, butter and all kinds of manufactured goods from England. Yet the population steadily increased all through the eighteenth century, while it was falling off in the neighbouring provinces of France. The worthy intendant thought the people sadly wanting in 'intelligence, activity, and practical sense,' and seems indeed, like a Malthusian before Malthus, half-inclined to attribute the phenomena of increase and multiplication in Artois to these defects. It would surprise him, I fancy, to look on the people and the land of Artois to-day. The land has become one of the most fertile and prosperous regions of France; the people, unaffected to any appreciable extent by immigration, and unchanged alike in race and in religion, increase and multiply as of old. The well-tilled fields, the well-kept and beautiful roads, the neat, green hedgerows, the orchards bear witness on every side to the intelligence, the activity, the practical sense of the inhabitants.
M. Baudrillart in one of his invaluable treatises on the condition of France before the Revolution of 1789, gives us the main key of this great difference between the condition of agricultural Artois in the eighteenth century and its condition to-day. He cites a most curious appeal to the estates of Artois in behalf of the rural populations, from which it appears that the citizens of the chief towns had combined with the noblesse and the higher clergy to keep the village curates and the farmers out of the provincial assemblies, and to throw the whole burden of taxation upon the agriculturists. 'The soil of Artois,' say the authors of this appeal, 'is quite as good as the soil of England; and yet the Artesian farmers can only get out of their labour on it one quarter as much as the English do.' It was the fiscal maladministration, they maintain, which checked the progress of agriculture and depressed the condition of the farmers; and it is interesting to observe that these rural reformers proposed to remedy the evils of which they complained, not by abolishing all the privileges of the privileged classes in a night, as did the headlong mob of the States-General at Paris in 1789, but by securing a fairer representation of the rural regions in the Provincial Estates, limiting the duration of the Provincial Parliaments to three years, and deciding that one-third of the seats should be vacated and refilled every year. This does not look as if the Artesians of the last century were particularly deficient either in intelligence or in practical sense.
On our way to the conference we saw several sugar factories, most of them now abandoned, though the beet crops of Artois are still very important; and my companions told me that the people here, with all their traditional conservatism, are very quick to abandon any industry which ceases to promise good returns, and to change their crops as the conditions of the market change. We saw but few châteaux. One of the most considerable, standing well in view from the road in the midst of an extensive park, and approached by a long avenue of well-grown trees, seemed to be shut up. The proprietor, the Count de——, I was told had not visited it for two years past, one of his gamekeepers having been murdered in a conflict with some poachers.
Under the existing laws in France, political conferences must be held within four walls. Trafalgar Square meetings would be as impossible in republican France as in monarchical Germany. As the commune in which M. Labitte was to meet his constituents possesses no convenient hall, and the local authorities were not particularly eager to facilitate the conference, one of the local Conservatives, a well-to-do farmer, had taken it upon himself to provide, at his own expense, a proper place of meeting, by fitting up a fine large barn with seats, and putting up a simple rustic platform in one corner of it for the speaker. It struck me that this was a symptom of genuine interest in the politics of his region not likely to be shown in similar circumstances by many English or American farmers. He was a man of middle age, with the quiet, self-possessed carriage, general among his class in all parts of France, and received us, in the large and neatly-furnished best room of his old-fashioned and very comfortable house, with frank and simple courtesy. On the walls hung a number of engravings and two or three small paintings. One of these represented the Duc d'Orléans, the father of the Comte de Paris, in the uniform of the celebrated corps of Chasseurs which he organised and to which he gave his name. 'That picture,' said the farmer, 'was given to my father by the prince. He used to stop here often while he was at the camp of the Chasseurs, and take his breakfast. I remember him perfectly, for I was then a well-grown lad, and he was always full of kindness and good spirits. Ah! if he had lived! We should not be where we are to-day in France, with all these debts and all these dangers!'
The constituents of my host, all of them specially invited by letter to attend the conference, had already begun to assemble when we arrived, but some of them had two or three miles to walk after service in their respective churches, and it was nearly six o'clock when the conference began. By that time the large farmyard and the rooms of the house were filled with a company of perhaps a hundred and fifty men, almost all of them farmers. Among them was only one landowner of the aristocratic class, the Comte de ——, who had walked over from his château about three miles off. He was a type of the old-fashioned French country gentleman, tall and sinewy, with finely cut features, simply, not to say carelessly, dressed, but with an unmistakable air of distinction, and a certain peremptory courtesy of manner which would infallibly have got him into trouble in the days when, near Baume-les-Dames, Arthur Young had to clear himself of the suspicion that he was a gentleman on pain of being promptly hanged from a lantern hook.
The seats in the barn once filled, some fifty auditors grouped themselves in the farmyard about the wide-open doors of the barn, and M. Labitte mounted the extemporised platform. The proceedings had to be suspended for a few moments as the attention of the audience was suddenly drawn to the high road by the galloping past of two generals in full uniform, with their staff officers, from St.-Omer. There was no nomination of a chairman or a secretary, none of the inevitable formalities of an English or American political gathering. M. Labitte called the meeting to order by the simple process of beginning to address it. Nothing could be more direct and business-like than his speech. It was exactly what he told his hearers he meant it to be, an account of his stewardship as their councillor-general. He said not a word about the personal aspects of the party conflicts raging in France, and very little about the national aspects of that conflict. Speaking in a frank conversational way, and referring to his notes only for figures and dates, he gave his constituents a succinct picture of the effect upon their own local interests of the policy pursued by the Government of the Republic. He told them how much of their money had been spent under the action of the Council-General during the six years of his term, and on what it had been spent, and with what results. If they liked the picture, well and good; if not, the remedy was in their own hands at the next election. He had forewarned me to expect nothing demonstrative in the attitude of his audience. 'They listen most attentively,' he said, 'but they give you no sign either of agreement or disagreement, of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. At night, after the meeting is over, they will break up into little knots and coteries, and talk it all over among themselves. If they are pleased on the whole, one of the group finally will say: "Well, Labitte told us the truth," and that being admitted by the rest, the conference will be a success!'