France and the Republic Part 22

In process of time Carpeaux found it necessary to part with a great many of his drawings, and Prince George Stirbey, who had bought most of them, after the death of the artist, divided them into three lots, one of which he gave to the Louvre, another to the School of Fine Arts at Paris, and the third and richest to Valenciennes. To this princely liberality, Valenciennes is indebted for the singular fulness and value of the Carpeaux collection which it now possesses.

Among the portraits in the Museum proper, is one which ought to be sent to the Musee de la Revolution in Paris. It is a pastel of a typical Revolutionary personage, who bore the not very attractive name of Charles Cochon. He was one of the 'patriots' of 1792, and having vowed irreconcilable hatred to all kings and emperors, he was selected to go as a Commissary to the Army of the North after Dumouriez had delivered up Camus and his companions with Beurnonville to the Austrians. After the advent of Napoleon, this incorruptible Republican became one of the most serviceable servants of the new master of France, and ended his career as an Imperial senator, with the queer t.i.tle of Comte de Lapparent!

I wisely availed myself of my first morning in Valenciennes to visit these collections in the Hotel de Ville, for in the afternoon M. Guary, the son of the distinguished director of the great coal mines of Anzin, which I especially desired to see, kindly drove into my comfortable old hotel and most hospitably insisted on carrying me off to the mines.

At the beginning of the last century there was but a single house in all the territory now known as the Commune of Anzin. It is now the seat of a busy and growing town, a suburb, or--to speak more exactly--an extension beyond the walls of the city of Valenciennes. This town has been called into existence during the last century and a quarter by the operations of the Anzin Company, the largest coal-mining company in France. The concessions held and worked by this company cover an area of 28,054 hectares.

Six years ago, when what is known as the great strike at Anzin attracted to this important region the attention of all persons interested in that question of labour, which the excellent M. Doumer tells us the 'true Republic' has been 'studying' in vain for ten years, the Anzin Company employed 14,035 workmen, of whom 2,180 were at work on the surface and 11,855 were employed on the subterranean work of the mines. The coal extracted, which had reached 1,677,366 tons in 1862, amounted in 1883 to 2,210,702 tons, being one-tenth part of all the coal-production of France. The coal-mining of Anzin is carried on now in the face of a great and increasing compet.i.tion almost at its very doors. To the north and east lie the great coal-fields of Belgium, which in 1882 sent into France 4,064,625 tons of coal, and in 1883, 4,217,933 tons. On the north and west lie the great French coal-fields of the Pas-de-Calais, where, at Lens and other points, great discontent has shown itself during the current year among the miners, but which increased their output from 5,724,624 tons in 1882 to 6,148,249 tons in 1883. Then, beyond the Channel, England, which had sent into France, in 1882, 3,560,149 tons of coal, in 1883 sent in 3,818,205 tons; and, finally, from Germany in 1883 France took 1,186,769 tons against 1,035,418 tons. These figures will suffice to show the importance of Anzin as a coal-field. It draws its prosperity from roots struck deep into the soil nearly a century and a half ago, and long before the traditional inst.i.tutions of France were thrown into the melting-pot, amid the cheers of a mob in the streets, by another mob which called itself a National a.s.sembly.

At the beginning of the last century, when, as I have said, there was but a single house in all the present territory of Anzin, coal was not known to exist in this part of France. In the Low Countries, then Austrian, and just beyond the French frontier, coal was mined, and it came into the head of an energetic dweller in the little town of Conde that what was found in Hainault might be found also in French Flanders.

His name was Desambois, and he was not a rich man. But he succeeded in getting from Louis XV. a concession in 1717 authorising him to seek for coal within a considerable range of territory till 1740. The Crown even gave him a small subsidy. But the Mississippi bubble burst while he was struggling with the difficulties which surrounded him when he first struck certain imperfect veins of coal; and in the stress of that great crash he found himself obliged to part with his rights for the sum of 2,400 florins to two gentlemen of the _n.o.blesse_, though not of the great _n.o.blesse_, the Vicomte Desandrouin de Noelles, and M. Taffin.

There is a portrait in the Musee at Valenciennes of M. Desandrouin which shows the qualities one would expect to find in a man who so long ago and in such circ.u.mstances undertook such an enterprise with a limit of no more than eighteen years before him. These two connected with themselves a brother of Desandrouin, a 'gentleman gla.s.sworker' at Fresnes, and two brothers named Pierre and Christophe Mathieu. They worked on, undiscouraged but unsuccessful, for twelve years, until, finally, on June 24, 1734, Pierre Mathieu, who was a trained engineer, found at Anzin the long-sought vein of bituminous coal.

This auspicious day is commemorated on the simple slab which marks the burial-place of Mathieu in the communal church of Anzin. When one considers what the discovery meant, and what its results now mean, to the welfare and the prosperity of France, one is tempted to regard the 24th of June as a date almost as well worth celebrating by Frenchmen as the 14th of July.

Marshal Villars is celebrated by a very uncomely obelisk on his battle-field of Denain near by, and General de Dampierre by a column in the public square of Anzin itself. Why should not Anzin set up a statue of Pierre Mathieu?

A comparatively short time sufficed to convince the adventurous a.s.sociates that they had indeed found the great veins they had sought.

Pierre Taffin went to Paris and got a considerable extension from the Crown of their concession. Money was raised and the work went on, bringing labourers and settlers to Anzin and founding the new industry.

Then came a new danger, which might have been foreseen. The lords of the soil at Anzin had been quite left out of the calculation, but the lords of the soil at Anzin in 1734 were quite as well awake to their legal rights, and to the advantages to be derived from a judicious use of these rights, as were the small farmers of Pennsylvania long afterwards, when prospecting engineers began to sink shafts and to pump up oil along the slopes of the Appalachians. The Prince de Croy-Solre and the Marquis de Cernay brought forward their t.i.tle to share in the riches found beneath their acres. Desandrouin and his a.s.sociates contested these claims as long as they could. But the contests ended, as the lawyers had seen from the first that it must, in a compromise. The Prince and the Marquis on the one hand with their t.i.tles to the land, and the Vicomte and his a.s.sociates on the other with their royal concessions, came together, and in 1757 founded the Anzin Company.

As in the case of St.-Gobain, the capital of the company was divided into sols and deniers. There were twenty-four deniers, of which the Prince de Croy-Solre received four for himself and two a.s.sociates, the Vicomte Desandrouin five sols and four deniers, the heirs of M. Taffin three sols nine deniers, the Marquis de Cernay and his six a.s.sociates eight sols, and the engineer Mathieu six deniers. The phraseology of the articles of a.s.sociation is somewhat quaint and ancient, but the spirit of them is essentially fair and equitable. The recital of the objects for which the company was formed is a model in its way, and shows that the authors of these articles--n.o.bles, roturiers, engineers, and notaries of the _ancien regime_ in 1757--had nothing to learn from Jean-Jacques Rousseau or the Abbe Sieyes as to the essential rights and duties of men in a civilised community. Thus it runs:--

'To bring about a general union of the coal-pits in the territory of Fresnes, Anzin, Old Conde, Raismes, and St.-Vaast, put an end to all the differences and proceedings brought before the Council and as yet unsettled, make it possible to live in good union and a good understanding, and secure the interests of the State and of the public by forming solid establishments, there are adopted by this present act, which shall be duly ratified before a notary, the following articles.'

These articles are nineteen in number, and, as in the case of St.-Gobain, one article binds the a.s.sociates always to furnish, in proportion to their shares, whatever funds may be required for the enterprise.

The hereditary principle is distinctly recognised in these articles not only as to the ownership of the shares, but as to the management, and the Prince de Croy-Solre and the Marquis de Cernay, with their successors, are accorded certain rights as arbitrators, and in the election of directors, a circ.u.mstance worth noting because I find that, notwithstanding the supposed abolition by the revolutionists of 1789 of the hereditary principle, and of t.i.tles of n.o.bility and of privileges, these articles of a.s.sociation, just as they stood when they were signed and subscribed on November 27, 1757, were quietly recognised and registered, and a good fee taken for the recognition and the registration by the proper republican functionary at Paris, on the '11 Pluviose, An XIII' of the Republic one and indivisible.

The main street of Anzin, through which M. Guary drove me to the offices of the company, is a broad and well-paved highway, with many shade-trees, and the houses, for the main part, well built, though not particularly picturesque. M. Guary tells me there are a good many small _rentiers_ living here, which seems to show that the place must be orderly and quiet. Many of the houses are brightly painted, in blue, green, pink, and other colours not to be expected, and of cabarets the name is legion. M. Baudrillart p.r.o.nounces intemperance to be a characteristic foible of the Flemish French, or French Flemings; but in these cabarets--which were, so far as I saw, rather exceptionally neat and even handsome--the customers seemed to be taking light beer and certain sweet beverages, rather than spirits.

At the main office I found M. de Forcade, a son of the celebrated minister of Napoleon III., to whom when he retired, on the accession to power of M. Emile Ollivier, the Emperor addressed a remarkable letter, recognising, in the strongest terms that could be used, his abilities, his integrity, and his patriotism. M. de Forcade had just received a telegram from the father of M. Guary, at Paris, announcing his arrival at Anzin for the next day, and asking me to prolong my visit, which I was very glad to do.

There are many factories at work in and around Anzin, but there is nothing Plutonian in the aspect of the place or of the neighbourhood, and the grimy side of coal-mining nowhere obtrudes itself. On the contrary the green fields, under a very high cultivation, everywhere encroach agreeably upon the town. The residence of M. Guary, the Director, stands in an exceedingly pretty park, and the mansion, a handsome modern chateau, is surrounded with fine and well-grown trees.

You approach the mansion from the busy main streets of Anzin, traversed by a tramway leading to Denain, but from its windows and balconies which overlook the park, you gaze out upon the verdure and the s.p.a.cious peace of a wide rural landscape.

A certain proportion of the workmen employed in the mines prefer to live in the town; but it is the policy of the company to encourage the development of cottage life, and wherever I went throughout its extensive domain I found families of the workmen installed in comfortable homes, surrounded by gardens and by what are called in England 'allotments.' Of these the company now owns no fewer than 2,628.

Originally these houses were built in the form of _cites ouvrieres_; but it has been found by experience that these blocks of contiguous houses are open to certain objections from the point of view of health, as well as from the point of view of morals, and the more recent constructions are detached cottages. A model of one of these cottages was exhibited in the social economy section of the Exposition at Paris this year, But it was more satisfactory to see them actually inhabited and on the spot.

Each cottage is built in a field of land of two acres in extent, and the rent varies from three francs and a half to six francs a month. For the lesser sum, or for forty-two francs a year, a workman at Anzin earning an average wage of three francs a day, or in round numbers a thousand francs a year, may thus secure a well-built house--most of those I saw were of brick--with proper drainage and cellarage, containing two good rooms on each of three floors, with closets, and standing in its own grounds.

Compare this, not with the squalid and noisome single rooms for which in the worst parts of Spitalfields a rent of tenpence a day, or five shillings a week (Sunday being thrown in free when the weekly rent is duly paid), or thirteen pounds sterling a year is exacted--but with the average rental of lodgings in the manufacturing towns of Ma.s.sachusetts!

But this is not all. Whatever repairs are needed in these houses are made, not by the tenants, but by the company, and the company further leases to its workmen, who choose to avail themselves of them, at very low rates garden sites within each commune, for cultivation as kitchen-gardens. No fewer than 2,500 families now have such holdings under cultivation, making a total of 205 hectares thus put to profit by the workmen, who take a lively pleasure in cultivating them during their leisure hours.

Every workman is allowed furthermore by the company seven hectolitres of ordinary coal per month for his own use. In cases of illness, or where a workman has a family of more than six persons, this allowance is increased. In 1888 the coal thus given by the company amounted to 598,550 quintals, representing a money value of 359,150 francs. This is not only a practical application of the Scriptural injunction 'not to muzzle the ox which treadeth out the grain;' it is a practical contribution to the solution of the great 'question' which M. Doumer in his Report tells us the 'true Republic' has been for ten years making believe to study--of the partic.i.p.ation of the workman in the profits of the work. It is, indeed, from this economical and practical point of view, and not from the philanthropic point of view, it seems to me, that all these advantages conceded by the Anzin Company to its workmen should be considered.

No man of common sense needs to be told that to deal successfully with industrial enterprises which require the investment of a large capital for the production of commodities liable to great fluctuations in price, the managers of such enterprises must be executive men employing executive methods. If all the workmen employed in such enterprises are to be admitted in the ordinary way to a partic.i.p.ation in the profits, they must obviously be admitted to a partic.i.p.ation in the councils, and in the direction of the policy of the managers. How is that to be brought about without endangering the success of the enterprises? To consult the workmen of the company on technical questions within the range of their regular employment is one thing; to consider the commercial and fiscal policy of the company in its relation with competing companies, and with the consuming public, in a general conclave of all the establishment, would be quite another thing. It is a curious fact that in the original statutes of 1757 the founders of Anzin expressly provided that the six directors of the company should, when necessary, consult not only the employes, but the workmen of the company--the '_ouvriers_;' and this provision was insisted on at a time when, as the doctrinaires of the nineteenth century would have us believe, 'labour' was not recognised in France as a social force to be considered.

Under its existing system of management the Anzin Company makes its workmen real partic.i.p.ants in the profits of its operations, without at the same time exposing them to partic.i.p.ate in the losses.

This is done not only through the singularly low rates at which the workmen are enabled to house themselves and their families, through the coal allowance, through the provision of cheap kitchen-gardens, and particularly through the establishment of a pension fund and of a savings-bank, but in many other forms.

Advances repayable without interest, for example, are made to workmen who wish to buy or to build houses for themselves. These advances in 1888 stood in the books of the company at a total of 1,446,604 francs, of which 1,345,463 fr. 91 c. had been repaid, leaving a balance due to the company then of 101,140 fr. 9 c. With these funds workmen of the company had bought or built for themselves 741 houses, being thus visibly, and unanswerably to the extent of the value of these houses, partic.i.p.ants in the profits of Anzin.

Not less real is the partic.i.p.ation of the workmen in the profits through the various beneficial and educational inst.i.tutions which I visited with M. Guary, or with his son, and of which I shall presently speak.

The concessions now possessed by the Anzin Company are eight in number: those of Vieux-Conde, Fresnes, Raismes, Anzin, Saint-Saulve, Denain, Odomez, and Hasnon. These concessions cover, in the form of an irregular polygon, about thirty continuous kilometres of territory, stretching from Somain to the Belgian frontier, with a breadth varying from seven to twelve kilometres. The total area amounts to 2,805,450 hectares.

Of these concessions the four first-named were the original basis of the organisation of the company under the controlling influence of the Prince de Croy-Solre at the Chateau of l'Hermitage which still belongs to his family near Conde.

The others have been acquired since 1807; Hasnon, the latest, which covers about 1,500 hectares, in 1843.

But--and this is a notable fact--the Anzin Company from the beginning to this day has been organised and managed under the original statutes of 1757. Under these statutes, devised and drawn up absolutely under the _ancien regime_, and by an a.s.sociation of practical engineers and enterprising adventurers with feudal seigneurs, this great company has, for more than a century and a quarter, administered with signal success, and still administers, what may be fairly called an industrial republic, carrying on its affairs and developing its resources in the face of the enormous changes of modern life, and maintaining here, under what are thought to be the most trying conditions of labour, a most remarkable measure of harmony between an ever-increasing nation of labourers and a strictly limited administration, composed not only of capitalists, but of hereditary capitalists. What becomes of the rights of man and of the Abbe Sieyes, and of the Tiers-Etat, which 'ought to be everything,' and of the 'immortal principles of 1789,' in the face of all this?

To the wisdom of the National a.s.sembly the workmen and the Company of Anzin owe considerably less than nothing. The National a.s.sembly, of course, meddled with the mines of France, as it meddled with everything else. It did endless debating over the subject, in the course of which Mirabeau declaimed eloquently against the doctrine of Turgot, that the mines belong to the men who find them, a doctrine which, after all, is much more rational than the more recent contention of sundry modern Orators of the Human Race that 'the mines belong to the miners'! But after it had talked itself hoa.r.s.e, the a.s.sembly had to descend to the prosaic business of legislation, and in dealing with the mines, as in dealing with other matters, it made a muddle of the laws which existed before it met, and left this muddle to be resolved into a new order of things legal, under the presiding genius of Napoleon.

Under the _ancien regime_ the rights of the feudal lords of the land over the mines beneath the soil had been contested by the steadily increasing power of the sovereign. In the case of the Anzin Company, and of the articles of a.s.sociation adopted in 1757, we see the practical good sense of the practical men who adopted those articles bringing about a good working arrangement between the concessions granted by the Crown and the claims advanced by the lords of the land. The republican legislators in 1791 concocted a mining law, under which the dominion of the sovereign, taken over by the State, was brought into perpetual conflict with the recognised, but undefined, rights of the lords of the soil. Such was the mischief caused by this ill-digested law that, in 1810, Napoleon made an end of it, and subst.i.tuted for it an imperial law, under which the absolute ownership of mines in France might be conferred by a concession of the Government. 'The act of concession,'

says the seventh article of the law, 'gives a perpetual ownership of the mine, which from that moment may be disposed of and transmitted like any other kind of property, and no holder of it can be expropriated, except in the cases and under the forms prescribed with, regard to all other properties.' This law of course made an end both of the royalties of the old French system, and of the English and American doctrine that he who owns the land owns up to the sky and down to the centre of the earth. For while the State recognises under this law the owner of the surface, and provides that the State shall give him what may be called a kind of 'compensation for disturbance' though on a scale to be fixed by itself, it recognises in him no ownership whatever of the mine beneath his soil.

Nor does it recognise under this law any right in the discoverer of a mine to a proprietary interest in a property which but for him might never have existed as an available property at all, either for the owner of the surface, or for the State, or for the concessionary of the State.

The founders of the Anzin Company in 1757, it will be seen, recognised the right of Pierre Mathieu, the discoverer of bituminous coal at Anzin, to such a proprietary interest in the mine he had discovered; but they recognised it with a practical and sensible reference to the concurrent rights also of other people, and to the general utility. So much more deftly, it would appear, were practical questions, involving the interests of labour and of capital, handled under the _ancien regime_ by practical persons, whether n.o.bles, engineers, or adventurers, who had a practical interest in settling them wisely, than by theoretical persons, 'philosophers and patriots,' whose only practical interest lay in 'unsettling' them, during the long legislative riot which began in 1789.

The influence of this period upon labour and capital in France is well ill.u.s.trated in the records of this company at Anzin.

In 1720, when poor coal, _charbon maigre_, was first found by the Vicomte Desandrouin and his friends at Fresnes, fifty-five tons of the mineral were extracted. In 1734, Pierre Mathieu 'struck it rich' at Anzin, and work began in earnest. By 1744 the yearly output reached 39,685 tons. In 1757, when the Company of Anzin was finally formed, and the articles of a.s.sociation were signed, the output of the concessions worked by the company amounted to 102,000 tons. From that time it increased, not 'by leaps and bounds,' but steadily, till in 1789 it had reached 290,000 tons. In 1790 it increased again to 310,000 tons. Then came a decline--gradual at first, but as things grew worse at Paris, sharp and sudden. The output fell to 291,000 tons in 1791--fell again to 275,500 tons in 1792. With the murder of the king, and the final crash of law and order throughout France, in 1793 the output dropped suddenly to 80,000 tons, or less by 20 per cent. than it had been in 1756, the year before the company was finally formed. In the next year, 1794, it dropped again to 65,000 tons, a point below that of the production in 1752, four years before the formation of the company, when the lords of the land were in the thick of their legal battle with the Vicomte Desandrouin and the concessionnaires.

Things began gradually to look better as it became more and more clear that the Republic could not last, and with the establishment of the Consulate and the Empire they grew better still. But it was not till 1813 that the output approached the figure reached in the last year of the monarchy, 1790.

With the disasters of 1814 and 1815, of course, it fell again; but within two years after the restoration of the monarchy, in 1818, the output reached and pa.s.sed the highest point attained before the Revolution, and stood at 334,482 tons. In 1830 the output had reached 508,708 tons, but the revolution of that year threw it back again, in 1831, to 460,864 tons. Under the monarchy of July, the production gradually, though not regularly, increased again, until in 1847 it had reached 774,896 tons, only to be struck down by the senseless Revolution of 1848 to 614,900 tons in 1849. It went up with the establishment of the second Empire in 1852 to 803,812 tons in 1853, and by 1870 had reached 1,633,818 tons.

Under the governments of M. Thiers and of the Marshal-Duke of Magenta, during which, according to M. Doumer, the Republic existed 'only in name,' the output went up till, in 1877, it pa.s.sed the two million limit, only to recede again with the advent to power of M. Gambetta and his friends, with their 'true Republic,' under which it fell in 1884 to 1,720,306 tons. The elections of 1885, marking the rise of a great conservative and monarchical reaction, were followed, in 1886, by an increase in the output of the Anzin mines to 2,337,439 tons; and in 1888, when from one end of France to the other, the Republic was officially and almost hysterically declared by the authorities to be in deadly peril, and men were speculating as to whether President Carnot, or General Boulanger, would open the Exposition in 1889, the Anzin output reached 2,595,581 tons.

Of course, account must be taken of other than political considerations in estimating the significance of this record, nor do I wish unduly to dwell upon what may be called its barometrical value in the study of contemporaneous French history.

But when we consider the relations of coal to all the great industries of our time, it is certainly noteworthy that for more than a century every development in Paris of a tendency favourable to republicanism in France, should appear to have been followed by an unfavourable effect, and every development unfavourable to republicanism in France by a favourable effect upon the production, at Anzin, of a mineral which has come to be the 'staff of life' of all modern industry and commerce.

For during the whole of this period Anzin has been what it still is, the coal-capital, as St.-Gobain is the gla.s.s-capital, and Creuzot the iron-capital of France. Its mines produce about one-tenth of the total output of French coal. A falling off, therefore, in the output of the Anzin mines may be fairly enough taken as an indication of disease in the body politic of France. The most considerable falling off in this output of late years was in 1884, when the production fell to 1,720,306, from 2,210,702 in the preceding year, 1883. Two of the great French industries, the iron industry and the sugar industry, both of them most important consumers of coal, were then pa.s.sing through a period of depression, the over-production of sugar in Germany having seriously damaged the French sugar-producers in particular. To meet the pressure put upon them by the decline in the demand for coal, the directors of the Anzin Company found it necessary to carry out certain economies, either through a reduction of wages or through some modification in their methods of production.

If they had been allowed to do this through an undisturbed arrangement with their workmen, there is no reason to doubt that it would have been done with little friction, and with no injustice to anyone. Wages at Anzin had steadily risen from a daily average, for the surface workmen, of 3 fr. 67 c. to 4 fr. 52 c. in 1883, concurrently with the development at Anzin of that system of practical partic.i.p.ation in the profits to which I have already alluded. For the subterranean workmen, the advance had been from 3 fr. 38 c. in 1879 to 3 fr. 72 c. in 1883.

The spirit in which the Anzin Company has been administered from the beginning is strikingly ill.u.s.trated by the steady advance in the wage of the workmen. In Belgium, one of the chief seats of the compet.i.tion with Anzin for the coal-market of France, on the contrary, the wages of the workmen are subject to the fluctuations of the general market. In 1873, for example, the average wage of the workmen in the mines of Hainault, as given to me by M. Guary, was 4 fr. 69 c., or about 25 per cent. above the average wage of 1883 at Anzin. But 1873 was the year of the great advance in coal. In 1876 the average Hainault wage fell to 3 fr. 45 c.; in 1879 it fell to 2 fr. 68 c., and in 1880 it stood at 3 fr. 6 c. By 1880 the average wage at Anzin had risen (and steadily risen) to 4 fr.

23 c.

During the year 1883 the expenditure of the Company upon the a.s.sistance fund, the pension fund, the medical services, the gratuitous supply of fuel, the cottages, in addition to, and not at the expense of, the wages paid, reached a total of 1,224,730 francs. During this same year the profits of the company, as stated after an inquiry by the French Minister of Public Works, amounted to 1,200,000 francs. This really seems to warrant the a.s.sertion that at Anzin in 1883 the profits of the mines were virtually divided into two equal portions, one of which went to Capital and the other to Labour. a.s.suming this a.s.sertion to be, even roughly speaking, accurate, why should there have been any serious collision between Capital and Labour, in such an organisation, over a question of practical economies necessarily advantageous to both?

Yet there was such a collision. In February 1884, what is known as the great strike at Anzin broke out over a proposed improvement in the methods of working, the demonstrable effect of which must be to improve the position of the best workmen employed by the company, without doing real injustice to others. A similar strike had occurred a quarter of a century before, when the company insisted on introducing from England and Belgium the use of ponies in the subterranean galleries. But in 1884 the conservative instinct of the workmen, which predisposes them in all callings against innovations of any kind, was adroitly worked upon and influenced by the direct influence of the politicians of the 'true Republic' at Paris. A workman of the company named Basly, who had taken an active part in organising a syndicate of mining workmen under a law pa.s.sed in 1881 to favour such syndications, put himself into communication with the advanced Radicals at Paris, const.i.tuted himself the champion of the syndicates of workmen, and, according to the testimony given before a parliamentary committee, fomented a formidable exterior pressure upon the workmen at Anzin, to bring about the strike which eventually took place, and in connection with which M. Basly became a conspicuous figure in French Republican politics, receiving a much larger wage as a deputy than he had ever earned in the mines at Anzin, where, as the books of the company show, though by no means an exceptionally good workman, he earned, in 1881, 4 fr. 93 c., and in 1882 4 fr. 71 c. a day.

One obvious object of the syndicates of workmen being to establish a kind of despotic control over all the workmen of any calling, the syndicate of mining workmen at Anzin set itself, a year before the strike, in 1883, to break down what is known at Anzin (and elsewhere in France also, M. Guary tells me) as the system of 'marchandages.'