If we assume the local finances of the rest of France to have been handled during the last decade on the same lines, there is nothing extravagant in the estimate made by a friend of mine, who formerly held a very high post in the Treasury, and who puts the accumulation of local deficits and the local indebtedness in France, independently of the national deficits and the national loans, since 1880, at two milliards of francs, or eighty millions of pounds sterling. For, although Amiens is an important city, it represents only about one four-hundred-and-fiftieth part of the population of France.
While I was at Amiens in June M. Goblet came there and made a rather remarkable speech. It was in the main aimed at a society called the 'Association of the Conservative Young Men of Amiens,' all of whom, I am told, except the president, are young working men—mechanics, clerks, or the sons of clerks, mechanics, and working men—in short, a kind of French 'Tory democracy.' They are not Boulangists at all, but outspoken royalists. They support Boulanger simply and avowedly in order to get at a revision of the Constitution and make an end of the Republic. 'This association,' said M. Goblet, 'is making a tremendous stir. I admit its right to do this. It holds meetings and conferences; it listens to speeches in the city and the suburbs; it attacks both democracy and the Republic in no measured terms; it does not hesitate to denounce its enemies personally and by name, and neglects no means of acting on public opinion. These conservative young men speak and act energetically. They believe in the re-establishment of the monarchy; they desire it; they preach a reaction against all that we have done for twenty years past!'
There could hardly be a more signal proof given of the reality and vitality of the anti-Republican movement in this part of France than these words of a Republican leader who began his political career, as I have shown, twenty years ago in a hopeless minority of Republicans under the Empire, who has since worked his way up the municipal ladder at Amiens and up the legislative ladder in Paris; and who, after reaching the top of the tree, now finds himself in imminent peril of slipping down again to the point from which he started. The force of the testimony is certainly not weakened by the fact that at the legislative elections in September, M. Goblet, standing as a candidate for the Chamber, was completely beaten.
I have shown what a large part the octroi plays in the revenue of a city like Amiens. Nothing resembling it, I believe, exists in England since the abolition, two or three years ago, of the coal dues in London; and, though I suppose it would be within the power of any American State to establish a tax of this sort within its own boundaries, it would be practically impossible to enforce it without coming into collision with the commercial rights of other States under the Federal Constitution. I once had to pay the octroi tax on two brace of Maryland canvas-back ducks, which I was taking over from London to a Christmas dinner in Paris. But Maryland would not submit to an octroi upon her birds entering New York.
The importance of the octroi at this time in the financial system of France is one of the most conclusive and most amusing proofs of the essentially superficial and ephemeral character of the alleged 'Great Revolution' of 1789. The octroi was a revival in mediæval France of the Roman portorium which survives in the Italian offices of the dazio consume and in the garitas of Spain and Spanish America. It was originally imposed as a local tax by a city, under the sanction of a royal charter. To get such a charter from a sovereign strong enough to enforce respect for it was essential to the citizens who bound themselves to one another to maintain their local independence against the barons in their neighbourhood; and when such a charter was granted by a sovereign it was said to be octroyée by him. The tax therefore is rooted in a privilege. Amiens obtained the right to impose it in the fourteenth century. Of course the 'Great Revolution of 1789' swept this right away, one of the most obvious 'rights of man' being to pluck an apple in an orchard, take it into a town in his pocket, and eat it there. But equally, of course, the Republic in the year VII. on the 29th Vendémiaire re-established it; and in the next year, VIII., provided that the privilege should be exercised as under the sanction of the National Government, the National Government reserving the right to revise the tariffs fixed by the municipal councils, and thereby making the restored privilege of the octrois another string whereby to fetter and control the local action of the people on their own affairs. The octroi of Amiens was re-established on the 3rd of Brumaire next following. Under the Empire, the Restoration, and the Monarchy of July, the Council of State granted the octrois. Under the Republic of 1848 this power naturally went to the National Assembly as a means of legislative pressure and corruption. The Second Empire restored it to the Council of State; and it has now, naturally, gone back to the Chambers. Neither the people of the cities nor the rural populations like the octroi, but, in the immortal words of the late Mr. Tweed of New York, 'What can they do about it?' It is a ready-money tax, from which the taxpayer receives no visible equivalent, as he does when he pays a penny for a postage stamp. When he has paid it, he is simply allowed to take his own property where he wishes to take it, and do with it what he wishes to do. It is quite likely that this octroi may have something to do with the disinclination of the common people in France to part with small change as readily as do the Americans, and even the English. They must always have 'money in the pocket' if they want to bring a sausage and a bottle of beer through a 'barrier,' whereas an American is never called upon to pay cash down to his Government except at a custom-house when he returns to his country from a foreign trip, or in exchange for a licence or a document of some sort which represents value received in one or another form.
The time wasted over this tax in a city like Amiens is an extraordinary burden on the patience of the people, trained as the French people are to submit to a torment of eternal red tape, a week of which would drive an American or English town into open revolt. At Amiens, for example, there is a central bureau of the octroi, where the tax is received from the great breweries and warehouses after the amounts have been fixed by the officers on duty at those establishments. Then there are ten bureaux or 'barriers' at the railway stations, the slaughter-houses, and the fish-markets; and then again eight secondary bureaux, where the people must go and pay amounts of less than one franc. There are, and I am told have long been, loud complaints as to the inconvenient location of the bureaux; but nothing comes of these outcries as yet, and I presume nothing ever will come of them until something like an independent local administrative life exists in the provinces of France.
The elements of such a life ought surely to be found, if anywhere, in this ancient province of Picardy. You cannot traverse it in any direction without being struck by the evident prosperity of the people. Arthur Young, a hundred years ago, travelling from Boulogne to Amiens, found only 'misery and miserable harvests.' He would find now only comfort and excellent crops. Possibly he would think of the country what he then thought of the region about Clermont and Liancourt, where, under the fostering care of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, the farmers had developed a highly-diversified cultivation; 'here a field of wheat; there one of luzerne; clover in one direction, vetches in another; vines, cherry and other fruit trees making up a charming picture, which must, however, yield poor results.'
But he would be wrong. This diversified culture of modern Picardy has been highly remunerative, and the extensive kitchen-gardening of the province is so still. The 'agricultural crisis' has doubtless hit the large farmers rather hard, but I am told they are standing up well under it—thanks to their past savings, and to French protection—better, indeed, than the large farmers in England; while the peasants proper are actually profiting by it. They not only get as much for their labour as when the large farmers were making money, but they are buying up land at lower rates. This may very possibly help the Republicans in the coming elections, for the peasants always give the credit of a state of things which is satisfactory to them to the Government of the day—be that Government what it may—so that while the larger farmers tend to Conservatism, the peasants will probably lean the other way. It is next to impossible to get a political opinion out of a Picard peasant, but I have more than once heard a peasant speak of the farmers in his neighbourhood as 'aristocrats,' which I took to be as precise a formula of political opinion as one was likely to get from him. It seemed to me to represent, among the peasants of to-day, the enlightened 'principles of 1889,' very much as the same formula, applied to the noblesse of a century ago, represented, among the large farmers of that day, the 'principles of 1789.'
Both then and now the formula simply means 'the man who has what I want to have is an aristocrat.' I think I have observed something like this in other countries—as, for example, in Ireland—where the guilty possessor of acres, however, is not only an 'aristocrat' but an 'alien,' as appears from a song popular in Kerry:—
The alien landlords have no right
To the land God made for you;
So we'll blow them up with dynamite,
The thieving, hellish crew!