France and the Republic / A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889

by William Henry Hurlbert

It says but little for what Texans call the 'sabe' of the municipal authorities of Valenciennes that this, which ought to be one of the most picturesque and attractive, is really one of the shabbiest historic towns of North-eastern France. The streets are ill-paved and ill-kept, the public buildings are untidy, and the whole place contrasts most unfavourably, from this point of view, with the rich and beautifully cultivated region through which you reach it by the railway from Douai. This is the finest agricultural region in France—the old French Flanders, a 'fat' country as well as a flat. You hardly see a weed between Douai and Valenciennes. Great fields of beetroot are cultivated like flower-gardens, and the green and growing crops are as daintily ordered as the coils and plateaux of flowers with which it is the fashion to adorn dinner-tables à la Russe. It is not pleasant to be assured that the industrious dwellers in this land of Goshen are as fond of cock-fighting as the Spaniards, who probably enough introduced the amusement here during their long domination over what is now known as French Flanders, and that they are addicted also in a systematic way to the abominable practice of blinding bullfinches to make them better singers. I am told that in many communes the authorities actually give prizes for the best singing birds thus produced, and that 'blind bullfinch societies' are among the many associations regularly established and nourishing among the fields and villages. The old Flemish love of strong drink also survives here, as is shown by the number and the prosperous appearance of the cabarets.

These average, for the whole Department of the Nord, no fewer than one to every sixty-six inhabitants, and around Valenciennes, the proportion rises as high as one to every forty-four. There is much subdivision of property, but it has not been pushed so far around Valenciennes as in some other portions of the department, a majority of the small properties extending to twenty-five hectares, and properties of from one hundred to three hundred hectares being considered large estates.

Thanks to the energy and intelligence of many considerable landholders, a great improvement has taken place of late years in the agricultural methods and instruments in use throughout this department: the open drains have practically disappeared, the country has become more wholesome, as well as more fertile, and the farmers in general are admittedly much better off, despite the crisis. This increasing prosperity is given as an explanation of the decreasing average number of children.

But French Flanders is nevertheless one of the densely populated parts of France, showing a population of 267 to the square league. It is proper to say, however, that this is chiefly due to the growth of certain great manufacturing centres. In the rural regions the population is much less dense, and the population of Valenciennes is actually declining. It fell from 23,291 in 1881 to 22,919 in 1886. The explanation is that people are moving out from Valenciennes into the new suburbs. Anzin, Thiers, Denain, and St.-Amand are increasing with the development of the manufactories which are growing up here around the great coal-fields.

While I was at Valenciennes, there was a terrible commotion in the Paris newspapers over a certain colonel in the army, who, being in the service of a well-known arms factory, loudly protested against the alleged sale of that factory to the Germans, and the threatened consequent closing of its works near Paris.

After much journalistic and parliamentary gunpowder had been burned, it came to light that the proprietors were simply making up their minds to transfer their works to the vicinity of Valenciennes as a necessary measure of economy.

Notwithstanding the slovenly 'edility' of Valenciennes, I found it a very interesting place. The Hôtel du Commerce there is a very well-kept old-fashioned hostelry, installed in a stately and spacious house, long the residence of a considerable family. Indeed, one of my friends in Valenciennes was quite severe in his comments upon the indifference of the head of this family, still a man of large property, to this conversion of the ancestral mansion into an inn. With its fine gateway, its porter's lodge on either hand, its large courtyard shaded with well-grown old trees, and its well-proportioned apartments, it is certainly a specimen worth preserving of such a house as King Louis need not have disdained to enter, when he made Valenciennes and French Flanders definitely French in 1677.

'We have a noisy, ignorant set of people in power here now,' said my friend, 'who pulled down, not long ago, the finest of the only three good gates we had left, out of sheer stupidity; and you can see how they let things go at sixes and sevens all over the city. But the old-established citizens of Valenciennes are to blame also, not for the decline of our population perhaps, but for the gradual disappearance of all the features of the city worth preserving. Like the head of this family, they care nothing about the past.'

In the course of a walk about the city, he showed me, in the Rue Nôtre-Dame, an edifice, the condition of which certainly excused his criticism of his fellow-citizens.

It is an ancient dwelling-house of the fifteenth century, standing at the corner of two streets. A most graceful tourelle markes the façade, and strikingly resembles that which decorates still the house at Paris near the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, in the vaulted doorway of which Louis, Duc d'Orléans, was murdered, a crime avenged by the death, on the bridge of Montereau, of its real author, Jean Sans-Peur, Duc de Bourgogne. The exterior ornamentation of this house is admirable, nor is it too far gone in dilapidation to be successfully restored. The door was locked, boardings were fixed in some of the beautiful windows, and advertisements of Amer-Picon and auctions and political meetings defaced the front. Obviously the house belonged originally to some personage of importance at a time when Valenciennes, the city of the Emperor Valentinian, was still one of the great marts of Western Europe and a capital of the civilisation of the West. Its population was then much larger than it now is. By the Scheldt, it communicated with the sea, and in the thirteenth century it was a member of the famous Hanse of London, which included also, Reims, St.-Quentin, Douai, Arras, St.-Omer, Abbeville, Amiens, Bruges, Ypres, and Ghent. This league dominated over the Channel. Its chief, the Count of the Hanse, who seems to have been in a manner a successor of the Roman Counts of the Saxon Shore, was chosen by the leagued cities from among the great burghers of Bruges. The privileges its representatives enjoyed in London were balanced by sundry rather monastic restrictions; but it was a great commercial corporation, and it played a great part in the social and economical history of mediæval Europe. As early as the ninth century Valenciennes and Mons had been so rich and influential, that they were regarded as the pillars of the 'noble Comté de Hainault, tenu de Dieu et du Soleil.' With the crusades, the importance of Valenciennes notably increased, and with its importance the independence of its burghers. The leading part taken by Godfrey de Bouillon in the early crusades is a proof of the power of these Flemish towns. When Baldwin of Flanders assumed the imperial purple at Constantinople, he did it expressly to benefit the commerce of the Flemish cities. At this day it is believed that there exist, in some palace of the sultan at Constantinople, tapestries of Oudenarde taken to the East by Baldwin, who was born at Valenciennes in 1171. At Valenciennes, too, were born his sister, Isabelle of Hainault, the first wife of Philip Augustus of France, his brother Henry, Emperor of the East, and his two daughters. One of these daughters, Marguerite, grown to woman's estate, besieged Valenciennes because the burghers refused to recognise her as the born Countess of Hainault. Gilles Miniave, provost of the city, plainly said to her when he refused to surrender: 'We have taken and we intend to kill your soldiers, madame, as abettors of tyranny.' This was as much to the purpose in its way as the firing on the royal troops by the farmers of Lexington in America in 1775.