France and the Republic Part 34

He is an earnest and devoted Catholic, and he has encouraged the foundation of a Christian Corporation among the people employed in his works. These works were founded half a century ago, in 1840, for the purpose of turning to practical results the interesting discoveries then made by M. Chevreuil, the famous centenarian dean of French science, as to the nature and properties of fatty substances. At the outset these works were taken up with the manufacture of stearine candles; but as in the case of the gla.s.s works of St.-Gobain, the chemical processes employed in creating one particular product were soon found to yield other very different and not less valuable results. I shall not attempt to enter into the mysteries of saponification and distillation, which cease to be mysteries when they are followed up from point to point through the extensive and orderly organisation of the Fournier Works; suffice it that at these works 600 men and 400 women are busily employed in turning every year 13,000 tons of African palm-oil, and of Australian, Russian, French, and American tallow into stearine candles, oleine, and glycerine. The output is enormous, amounting annually to 20,000,000 packets of candles of an average weight of 400 grammes a packet, to 3,300,000 kilogrammes of oleine, and to 1,200,000 kilogrammes of glycerine. How much of this latter product goes to the pharmacies and how much to the powder magazines of the world it is not easy to say. But it is easy to see that if the Bouches-du-Rhone get the better of the Calvados in the politics of France, there will be a serious falling off in the demand for altar lights and chamber candles, and a still more serious increase in the demand for nitro-glycerine!

The output of the Fournier Works represents about one-fourth of the whole stearine and glycerine production of France, and as paraffin has of late years largely taken the place of stearine in the famous Price Works in England, the Fournier Works are now doubtless the most important of their kind in the world. Thirty years ago the candles produced here were almost all exported; now the home consumption just about equals the exportation, a fact as to which the truly paternal Government of France takes pains to leave no doubt in the minds of the producers by taxing candles heavily as an 'article of luxury.' They are subjected to a regie like cigars, and to the octroi, and these imposts, M. Fournier tells me, now amount to about fifty per cent, of their value. A knowledge of this circ.u.mstance may, perhaps, divert the wrath of travellers in France from the hotel-keeper, who claps a couple of francs for bougies into your bill if you pa.s.s half a summer's day in his house, to the Government which concerns itself much more actively with squeezing percentages out of the industries than with balancing the national budgets of France. Must not all taxes be paid by the ultimate consumer? What with these taxes and with the higher wage of labour in France, the stearine works of Ma.r.s.eilles find themselves taken at advantage by the energetic manufacturers of Holland. In the Fournier Works the average workman earns a daily wage of from 3 frs. 25 c. to 3 frs. 50 c.; the average workwomen, who do chiefly the clean and even pretty work of moulding the candles, making them up into packets, in large, very well ventilated and well ordered rooms, earn an average daily wage of 2 frs. 50 c. Both men and women work about ten hours a day. The 'eight-hours' doctrine of the political Socialists finds no more favour here with the real working people apparently than elsewhere in France. In Holland and Belgium and at Roubaix the average wage is about one franc less for both s.e.xes.

The Christian Corporation of the Fournier Works is organised upon the principles, but not exactly upon the lines, of the Harmel system. It is formed by a union of five religious a.s.sociations among the workpeople, made up of the men, the married women, the young men, the young girls, and the children. Character and conduct are the conditions of membership, and under the direction of a General Council in which the employers take an active part, the Corporation has founded and administers for the common benefit a Consumers' Society which maintains an economical kitchen with refectories, a recreation hall with a bar, (not limited to soda water, lemonade, and tea), and a circulating library. The statutes of this Society leave the members a wide range of liberty, and the managers are chosen by the members. Of the profits five per cent first go to the reserve fund; dividends may then be declared of not more than ten per cent, on the capital stock of 10,000 francs, and the surplus, if any, forms a supplementary reserve. The economical kitchen is so well managed that it gives a customer (who must be employed in the works, but need not be a member of the a.s.sociation) for 55 centimes, or a little more than fivepence, a bowl of soup, a large helping of meat and vegetables, half a pound of bread, and a third of a bottle of wine. A cafe-cognac (and the cognac good) may be had for 25 centimes more.

In August of last year, with the help of the owners of the works, a Musical Society was established, and the workpeople are furnished gratuitously with medical advice and medicines. To these, in the case of invalid workmen who have been for two years employed in the works, is added a weekly allowance of six francs during illness. The owners have also founded a savings bank which pays six per cent. on sums below 3,000 francs, and four per cent. on sums above that amount. These are open to all the workpeople employed in the works, whether members or not of the Christian Corporation.

In this fashion M. Fournier, and other devout and practical Catholics of the Bouches-du-Rhone are fighting the Republic by fighting the Socialistic Radicalism of which their department is the true headquarters, and to which the Republic has substantially surrendered.

It is visibly an uphill fight in the Bouches-du-Rhone, and in South-Eastern France generally. But there is life in the convictions which nerve men to fight an uphill fight, and there is something in the fire and spirit of these militant Catholics of France which reminds one of Prudentius, the Pindar of Christian Spain, celebrating fifteen centuries ago the believers who upheld so manfully the rights of conscience against praetors and prefects bent on converting them to the beauty of 'moral unity'--_quod princeps colit ut colamus omnes_!

When two men ride on a horse the man who holds the bridle is the master, and the Radicals hold the bridle of the French Government. The Radical Department of the Bouches-du-Rhone represents the Republic. The Monarchist Department of the Calvados represents France. If the Republic wins, the history of France before 1789 will be wiped out as with a sponge, and with it all the great qualities of the French people must disappear. Without an Executive, without a Past, and without a Religion, France would become the ideal nation of the Nihilists.

If France wins, if she recovers the Executive unity and stability essential to her life as a nation, recovers the historic sense of her national growth into greatness, recovers for every man, woman, and child in France the simple human right to believe and to hope, then the Republic must inevitably vanish, for with all these things the Republic has made itself incompatible.

If these were only my own conclusions, drawn from all that I saw and heard and learned in France during the year 1889, I might hesitate to adopt them as adequate and final.

But how can I hesitate, when I find these conclusions of mine not obscurely foreshadowed as impending in 1872 by Ernest Renan, and re-affirmed as imminent in 1882 by Jules Simon?

'The edifice of our chimaeras,' cried Ernest Renan in 1872,[9] 'has melted away like fairy castles in a dream.

[9] _La Reforme intellectuelle et morale._ Ernest Renan. Paris, 1872.

Presumption, puerile vanity, insubordination, feather-headedness, inability to grasp many different ideas at a glance, want of scientific sense, simple and stupid ignorance, here is the summary of our history for a year!... The Opposition, which pretended to have revolutionary remedies for all possible ills, has found itself at the end of a few days as unpopular as the fallen dynasty. The Republican Party, puffed up with the fatal errors which for half a century have been current as to the history of the Revolution, and which imagined itself able to play over again a game won eighty years ago only through circ.u.mstances utterly unlike those of to-day, has learned that it was a lunatic taking visions for realities. The legend of the Empire has been slain by Napoleon III. The legend of 1792 has been done to death by M. Gambetta.

The legend of the Terror (for even the Terror had its legend among us!) has been hideously parodied by the Commune.'

So cried M. Renan in 1872.

'Our worst disasters,' said M. Jules Simon in 1882,[10] 'have so far broken out only where great numbers of men are crowded together. Men begin with scepticism, from scepticism they go on rapidly to Nihilism, and from Nihilism to Social War. The labourer in the fields still has his faith; he still has his hope of another life; he has not yet unlearned the name of G.o.d. When he becomes a Nihilist we shall have the Commune in our cities, and beyond them the Jacqueries! It is impossible that the authorities should not see this. But the authorities obey the deputy, the deputy obeys the elector, and the elector obeys the agitator.'

[10] _Dieu, Patrie, Liberte._ Par Jules Simon. Paris, 1882.

'There will soon be only two parties left in France; the party of the dynamiters, and the party of the do-nothings. Whatever moderate Republicans are left must go over either to violence or to indifference. Is it France alone which is thus threatened? It is the world. The Communists and the Fenians were not produced in France. But France attracts them.

'The liberty you pretend to be establishing is oppression. The neutral education you propose is the suppression of the human heart, of the human conscience.

'This "clericalism" which you declare to be the enemy, and which, when you are pushed to the wall, turns out to be Christianity--this "clericalism" which you attack and mean to exterminate, tell me, is this the power which lays your Ministers prostrate before your Deputies, and your Deputies prostrate before their electors? Is it "clericalism" which is stirring up Labour against Capital? Is it "clericalism" which preaches and supports "strikes"? Is it "clericalism" which manufactures dynamite and blows up houses? Is it "clericalism" which is transforming your literature into ribaldry and your theatres into brothels? Is it "clericalism" which shuts up your schools? Is it "clericalism" which transforms all the actions and relations of life into matters of contract and of calculation? Do you imagine that Christianity, if it be your enemy, is an enemy as terrible as Nihilism? And what other end but Nihilism can there be of your "neutral" obligatory schools and your atheistic laws? Already you go in fear of the very phrase which recognises the duties of man to G.o.d! You think it dangerous, you think it equivocal! You do not know that when you recoil before the name of G.o.d you abandon the traditions of France!

'Nay, you will not even hear now of man's duties to his country! This is another "dangerous," another "equivocal" phrase! You talk now in your programmes about the "civic duties" of man, for when these are taught there will be no danger of confounding the Monarchical France before 1789, which we must learn to hate, with the Republican France which we must love and admire!'

Thus spoke Jules Simon in 1882.

The 'civic duties' of man brought France in 1792 to the 'Law of Suspects,' to the headlong and brutal demolition of the whole social edifice, to confiscation, and to the guillotine.

To what will the 'civic duties' of man bring France, and, with France, the civilization of Christendom, in 1892?

[Ill.u.s.tration: France]

EPOCHS OF ANCIENT HISTORY.

_THE GRACCHI, MARIUS, AND SULLA._ By A. H. BEESLY, M.A. With 2 Maps.

_THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE._ From the a.s.sa.s.sination of Julius Caesar to the a.s.sa.s.sination of Domitian. By the Rev. W. WOLFE CAPES, M.A. With 2 Maps.

_THE ROMAN EMPIRE OF THE SECOND CENTURY, or the Age of the Antonines._ By the Rev. W. WOLFE CAPES, M.A. With 2 Maps.

_THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE FROM THE FLIGHT of Xerxes to the Fall of Athens._ By the Rev. Sir G. W. c.o.x, Bart. M.A. With 5 Maps.

_THE RISE OF THE MACEDONIAN EMPIRE._ By ARTHUR M.

CURTEIS, M.A. With 8 Maps.

_THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS._ By the Rev. Sir G. W.

c.o.x, Bart. M.A. With 4 Maps.

_ROME TO ITS CAPTURE BY THE GAULS._ By WILHELM IHNE.

With a Map.

_THE ROMAN TRIUMVIRATES._ By the Very Rev. CHARLES MERIVALE, D.D. Dean of Ely. With a Map.

_THE SPARTAN AND THEBAN SUPREMACIES._ By CHARLES SANKEY, M.A. With 5 Maps.

_ROME AND CARTHAGE, THE PUNIC WARS._ By R. BOSWORTH SMITH, M.A. With 9 Maps and Plans.

EPOCHS OF MODERN HISTORY.

_THE BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES._ By the Very Rev.

RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH, M.A. &c. Dean of St. Paul's. With 3 Maps.

_THE NORMANS IN EUROPE._ By Rev. A. H. JOHNSON, M.A.

With 3 Maps.

_THE CRUSADES._ By the Rev. Sir G. W. c.o.x, Bart. M.A.

With a Map.

_THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS._ By the Right Rev. W. STUBBS, D.D. Bishop of Oxford. With 2 Maps.

_EDWARD THE THIRD._ By the Rev. W. WARBURTON, M.A.

With 3 Maps.

_THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK; with the Conquest and Loss of France._ By JAMES GAIRDNER. With 5 Maps.

_THE EARLY TUDORS._ By the Rev. C. E. MOBERLY, M.A.