Boutmy also fully recognises the important difference between the innate qualities of the French and English; and he also would explain it as the effect of political institutions since the middle ages, but on lines somewhat different from Buckle’s—namely, that England was early ruled by a king invested with great power, and inclined to all the excesses of arbitrary rule. Hence the first need of the people was to fortify themselves against his power. All the law of England carries the imprint of this fear and this defiance. The parliament has been set up against the crown, the judges against parliament, and the jury against the power of the judges; and so, ever since the conquest, individuals have been accustomed to think, and to assert, that their persons, their purse, and their homes are inviolable; and that the State is an enemy whose encroachments must be resisted. This way of thinking has by long usage become instinctive, increasing from generation to generation; until the horror of servitude has become rooted in the Englishman’s temperament, and the desire of independence has become a native and primary passion.
Both Buckle and Boutmy agree, then, that the English love of liberty is due to England having been conquered and ruled by a powerful king, and that in France the opposite effect is to be attributed to the same cause—namely, the influence of despotic rulers. Surely this is to reverse cause and effect. If the English people had not already possessed the sturdy spirit of independence when they were conquered by the Norman, his strong centralised rule would only have rendered them still less independent and would have fostered the spirit of protection, as Buckle calls it. If the national characters had been reversed in this respect, how easy it would have been to show that the dependence of the English character was due to the strong rule of a foreign despot, William of Normandy, while the French independence was due to the existence in feudal times of many centres of independent power, the nobles, each capable of resisting the central authority! It was just because this spirit was theirs already that the English people resisted their kings and were able to secure their liberties by setting up institutions congenial to their nature, institutions and customs which have fostered in each individual and each generation the spirit of independence inherited as a racial quality, and which possibly, though by no means certainly, have further intensified the racial peculiarity.
Another cause for the difference of institutions is assigned by Sir Henry Maine. He pointed to the great influence of Roman law upon French institutions; he showed how the French lawyers, brought up in the school of Roman law and holding the Roman Empire as the ideal of a political organisation, threw all their weight upon the side of the monarchy, and in favour of centralised administration. More, perhaps, is due to this influence than to the causes assigned by Buckle and Boutmy; but no one of these alleged causes, nor all of them combined, can be accepted as adequate to explain the origin of the difference of national characters. These authors fail also to make clear how the political institutions can have modified character. Boutmy frankly assumes use-inheritance, which, as I have said, is, in the present state of science, an unwarrantable assumption.
That these qualities of the French and English peoples are innate racial qualities, evolved during the race-making or prehistoric period, is proved not only by the inadequacy of any assignable causes operating during the historic period, but also by the fact that similar qualities are described by the earliest historians as characterising the ancestors, or the principal ancestral stocks, of the two peoples, when they first appear in history. It is proved also by the fact that other branches of the Nordic race have displayed similar qualities, more especially the Dutch, and also the Normans, who, though they have long formed part of the French State in the political sense, and have suffered most of the political influences assigned as causes of the spirit of protection, not only displayed the spirit of independence in the highest degree ten centuries ago, but are admitted to be still distinguished from the bulk of the French people by the greater individualism of their character, just as they are still markedly different in physical traits. They offer one of the best examples of fixity of the physical characters of a race. No one can travel in Normandy without being struck by the very marked and distinctive physical type, which, according to all accounts, is that of the Norman who came over to England with the Conqueror; and there is every reason to believe that the mental qualities of the race have been equally fixed and enduring.
Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and other early historians have described for us the leading qualities of the Gauls on the one hand and of the Teutons on the other. Fouillée in his Psychology of the French People has brought together the evidence of these early historians on the point; it shows that the Gauls and the Teutons were distinguished very strongly by the same differences which obtain between the French and English peoples at the present time, especially the difference in respect of independence and initiative, the origin of which we are seeking to explain. The Gauls were eminently sociable people, sympathetic, emotional, demonstrative, vivacious, very given to oratory and discussion, vain and moved by the desire of glory, capable of great gallantry, but not of persevering effort in face of difficulties, easily elated, easily cast down. And, what from our point of view is especially important, they were readily led by the chiefs, to whom they were attached by the bonds of personal loyalty; and they were constantly banding themselves together in large groups, under such leaders as attained popularity by their superior qualities; and, again, they were dominated by the priestly caste, the Druids. The Gauls even had those family institutions which characterise the modern French and which have been held to be the expression of their recently acquired qualities and traditions; namely, the family had the character of a community in which the wife had equal rights with the husband, and the children were regarded also as members of the community having their equal claims upon the family property. And society was bound together by a system of patrons and clients, a system of personal dependence.
On the other hand, the Teutonic people, as described by the same ancient authorities, displayed a decided individualism in virtue of which their social organisation was more rudimentary. The father was supreme in the family, and his power and property descended to his eldest son. They were a more phlegmatic people, but of great energy and persistence. Unlike the Gauls, they were dominated by no priestly caste. The religious rites were conducted by the elder men.
The Gauls were a mixed people of whom the minority, constituting the nobility, were of the tall, fair, long-headed Nordic race, while the majority, the mass of the common people, were of the short, dark, round-headed race. And these, as the numerous observations of the anthropologists show, constitute to-day the bulk of the population, except in Normandy and the extreme north-east of France.
The Teutons or Germans of Caesar and Tacitus, on the other hand, were of the fair Nordic race; and the Anglo-Saxons who overran Britain, together with the Danes and Normans, who, with the Saxons, formed the principal ancestral stock of the English, were of this same Nordic race, or Northmen, as we may call them.
Now, it might seem useless to attempt to arrive at any conclusions as to the influences that shaped these races in prehistoric times. But an attempt has been made by one of the schools of French sociologists, which, in spite of its speculative character, seems to be worthy of attention. This is the school of ‘La Science Sociale,’ founded seventy years ago by Fredericq le Play and more recently led by Ed. Demolins and H. de Tourville. Aided by a number of ardent disciples, they have made a special study of the influence of physical environment in determining occupations and social organisation, and in moulding indirectly through these the mental qualities of peoples. That is their great principle. They rightly, I think, insist upon the relatively small importance of political institutions in moulding a people, regarding them as secondary results of the factors which, determining the private activities of men and women at every moment of their lives from the cradle to the grave, exert a far greater and more intimate influence upon their minds. In two fascinating volumes[117] Demolins has summed up the principal results of this school and attempted to trace the conditions that have determined the differentiation of all the principal races of the earth; and de Tourville has applied the same principles and traced their effects in European history[118].
It is a curious fact that the work of the Le Play school is almost entirely ignored by the other French sociologists and anthropologists. It is seldom referred to by them, and outside France also it has not received the attention it deserves. Much of it is of the nature of brilliant speculation, and is regarded no doubt as unsound by many more sober minds. Yet, when we attempt to understand the evolution of man in the prehistoric period, brilliant speculation becomes a necessary supplement to the work of measuring skulls and digging up ruins, to which some less ingenious workers confine themselves. And, of all the conclusions of the Le Play school, their account of the origin of the distinctive characters of the Northmen is one of the most striking and satisfactory; while their account of the origins of the Gauls and of their peculiar social organisation and well marked mental traits is also among their best work.