CHAPTER IX
THE PRESS AND THE PEOPLE’S COLLEGES
The French bring an artistic instinct into the manufacturing of all things, and so it follows that they could not be content to compose newspapers on the lines of British journalism, which accepts the propagation of mere news as the aim and object for which journalism was instituted. It is not necessarily what is true, but what will amuse and please his subscribers that the editor thinks of. If these want fiction, then give them fiction, by all means, but mix it up in a literary ragout. And so, when you have turned from the political article of your paper, which is frequently written in questionable taste, you will find little paragraphs, half-columns about the nothings of the hour, written with a delicate wit, an infinite grace and humour. Most of the contributors to the Figaro are remarkable writers. Of M. Anatole France there is nothing to be said here, once we salute him as the living master of French literature. Every Wednesday he offers the fortunate readers of the Figaro a scene of contemporary history which constitutes a morning delight. This front column is reserved for the elect. Since the split in the French nation over an unhappy Jewish officer, many of the old contributors have been replaced by writers more in accord with the present line of the Figaro in politics. M. Cornély, the practical editor to-day, used to be a frantic Monarchist, the pillar of the Gaulois. Now the Government has no more firm upholder than this Conservative Catholic. His brilliant leaderettes each morning in the Figaro are a daily joy, so full of sense, of logic, of humour, and of wit are they.
Then the brief and delicious dialogues of M. Capus, who would miss them? To see the name of Capus to a half-column of dialogue on a topic of the hour is to be glad you have lived another day. It was by sheer imperturbable good-humour that the Figaro so splendidly fought the governmental campaign during the severe crisis it passed through after the verdict of Rennes, and out of which it came so triumphantly. Since the Revolution no French Government has had such an hour of triumph as that which the brave and excellent old man, M. Emile Loubet, and his brave and able Minister, M. Waldeck-Rousseau, enjoyed on the 22nd of September, 1899, at the unforgetable banquet of twenty-two thousand mayors of France, come from all parts of the country to gather enthusiastically round the head of the State in a loyal protest against all the base and scandalous machinations of his enemies. It is not often one can congratulate a French editor on the political conduct of his paper, and M. Cornély deserves hearty congratulations for his skilful management of the governmental campaign in the columns of the Figaro. It is true he was magnificently supported by M. France, a host in himself, whose witching satires on Nationalism will remain among the most delicate and dainty of contributions to political literature of this or any country. It was a battle worthily won, the weapons, used with a surprising dexterity, being wit, charm, grace, and humour. The Figaro has also an old contributor, Le Passant, who out of nothing will fabricate you a half-hour of delicious hilarity, and for articles of a more serious and intellectual quality, the distinguished woman of letters who writes under the pseudonym of Arvède Barine.
Add to these intellectual features the bright interspersion of graceful little Parisian notes on anything, from a cabmen’s or washerwomen’s strike to the fraternity of European soldiers in China, from the weather to the circulation of false silver, the literary and theatrical chronicle at the end of such papers as the Temps and the Débats, always intrusted to writers of wide renown. For the criticism of books in Paris is done by competent critics, who sign their articles, or is not done at all. Unsigned reviews in Paris are regarded merely as publishers’ advertisements; and as well-known and responsible critics are few, it wisely follows that few books are ever seriously noticed. This is as it should be. If the London Press would adopt this manner, and suppress the daily trivial reviews of trivial books, less time would be wasted on mediocrities, and more time devoted to the few makers of literature. It is, thanks to this indifference to the large majority of incompetent and unoriginal scribblers in France, that here there are far less spurious reputations than across the Channel, where popularity and frantic eulogies in the columns of the newspapers seem to be based on the possession of no conceivable literary quality.
“We publish more than our own share of worthless trash,” once said a French writer to me, “but it is always better written than your trash, for our bad writers must have some knowledge of grammar, which it appears yours lack, and they must write with what looks like a certain measure of style, whereas your bad writers shine by absence of the smallest pretension to style of any kind”; which means, of course, that illiterate French men and women know their language better than illiterate English men and women know theirs. They have been better trained and disciplined in the maintenance of grammatical laws. And while English journalism would, I am confident, never descend into the gross personalities and insults of the low French Press,—that kind of journalism presided over by MM. Drumont of La Libre Parole, Millevoye of La Patrie, Judet of Le Petit Journal, and Rochefort of L’Intransigeant, the unspeakable Intransigeant,—more intellect, education, and style are expended in the columns of an ordinary French paper than would be needed to carry on a dozen successful London papers. No London journalist would think it worth his while to spend an entire morning over the “confection” of a bright leaderette, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, or be content to cast real brilliance on the ambient air in the reckless fashion of the polished French journalist. The thousand exquisite things Daudet in this fashion flung into the bottomless abyss of journalism without a thought—Provençal spendthrift that he was!—that he was wasting his intellectual capital!
The Temps, a Protestant organ, is the most serious, the best informed, and the most respectable of Parisian newspapers. It has not the dash, the astonishing verve, the invincible courage of the Figaro, but it is always well written, moderate, and interesting. The dramatic and literary columns are special features. The day of the Débats is over. It once held the first place as an intellectual and political paper, but it has lost all vitality, and it has become that unacceptable thing in such an atmosphere as Paris, démodé. Few of its subscribers have remained faithful to it, and only one or two of its distinguished contributors.
The Débats, like the Temps, is eminently respectable, and never uses that recognised weapon of French journalism, calumny, which makes the loss of its prestige on political grounds to be deplored. For, in its method of fighting its political campaigns, the French Press to-day has descended to strange depths of dishevelled freedom. Under the Second Empire the Press had hardly more liberty than that which it enjoyed under the iron heel of Napoleon, and the supervision exercised by the censor in songs, plays, pamphlets, and literature was assuredly of greater benefit to the nation, even when making allowances for errors of judgment, than the coarse and outrageous licence permitted under the Third Republic. It was nothing but an act of stupid prudery to have taken proceedings against a grave masterpiece like Madame Bovary, but the Public Prosecutor, M. Bulot, should certainly have taken measures to summon before a court of justice M. Octave Mirbeau for writing such an irredeemable study as Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre. The working-man, the artisan, those whom the conditions of existence have excluded from the privileges of education, who can pay only a sou for their daily supply of political information, cannot be too deeply pitied for having to rely upon such sources of news as La Patrie and L’Intransigeant. They go into the wine-shop then, primed with the awful lesson in civilisation they daily receive, their minds poisoned against all those in public office by the ferocious hate, the slander, the ignoble lies they have read and discussed in their newspaper. How are these to distinguish between truth and falsehood? No critical faculties in them have been cultivated by training or education. They accept as educated the men who write these pernicious articles, and if the writers solemnly assure their readers that every public man in France is a thief and traitor, the latter suppose these men must know, and, being by nature suspicious of those who rule and tax them, they are only too ready to believe all they read. And so they credit M. Loubet with a capacity for every dark crime.
The unpretentious dignity and courage, above all, the bourgeois simplicity of M. Loubet’s presidentship of the Republic should bid us hope for France in our worst hour of despondency. There is a fine sense of duty in the race, for which this simple civilian stands without brag, assumption, or a trace of French panache. Honour came to seek him uncourted, and he has not wavered or been bullied into resignation by the most appalling insults, outrages, calumnies, and actual assaults that have ever been showered on one mortal man. As a figure of civic integrity and of unassuming merit, I know none worthier of admiration in France to-day. For the terrible price paid in Paris for public office is not only abuse of person and principles, but the digging into every private corner of family history with a deliberate intent to injure and wound by attacks upon the dead. It is this extraordinary Nationalist Press that has so brutalised the imagination of the great reading public, that its readers do not even exact logic or a shadow of consistency from those who cater their politics for them. A little while ago two French officers killed their superior officer sent to arrest them on their way into the heart of Africa. Those two officers were then despatched by their own men, and the Patrie Française made a great splash in the way of a patriotic funeral for the assassinated colonel. Had the colonel been murdered by two civilians all would have been well. But the assassins were officers, and officers, when they are not Jews, must always be respected, admired, and adored. So when the patriots had done weeping over Colonel Klobb, since he had been interred with national and military honours, MM. Coppée and Lemaître, in the name of the nation, acting as chief mourners, they decided to forget him and wax exceedingly and patriotically wroth over the fate of his glorious assassins. Why were Voulet and Chanoine killed? Who had dared to kill so sacred a thing as a French officer? It must be the Government, the wicked, infamous, Jew-paid Government. M. Loubet, of course, gave the order, and M. Waldeck-Rousseau transmitted it, and then, lest anyone should live to tell the tale, Waldeck-Rousseau wired instructions to kill off anyone else belonging to the mission. My Catholic friends are ever lamenting the lack of freedom under the Third Republic. I wonder if any Catholic Government has ever tolerated its enemies in the very heart of its rule writing daily in a hostile Press that it traffics in assassination. And nobody seems to find the charge in this case laughable. Nationalism is certainly in direct hostility to all sense of humour.
But France is too sound and honest and sober a race to live contented with no other public influence than that of her untrustworthy Press. The Catholics have always understood that religious ideas are most happily and lastingly spread by direct personal influences, hence the prestige of their clergy. Catholic clubs and societies abound, but the want of liberal education in the working-man was deeply felt in the revelations of the Affaire. To write of France to-day is to hark back perpetually to the Dreyfus Affair. Everything seems to date from it, everything to touch it, everything to be explained by it. The misfortunes of no single man in all history have ever left such abiding and momentous consequences as those of the Alsatian Jewish officer, whose return to his native land all Europe stood still to watch with thrilled pulses. And so it was felt, as infamy after infamy practised against him was discovered, that the people should be educated to think for themselves, to know and understand what is being done in their name. It was felt, too, that they should have their share of the intellectual ideas, the moral and mental beauty that brightens life and gives it zest, hitherto appropriated by the rich and leisured classes. What M. Deherme calls the co-operation in idea, the basis of the people’s colleges of Paris, is really the popularisation of culture. Anything is good that will help to keep the workmen out of the wineshops, where they are poisoned with inferior and inflammable alcohol, and guard them from the political garbage of their inferior and inflammable newspapers. If you cannot give the workman space, privacy, wealth, and luxurious home-life, at least make him free in his heritage of the thoughts that move the ages, put him in contact with the current of ideas in the ambient air. And so M. Deherme’s notion “caught on,” and from it sprang the “Universités Populaires” opened in several of the populous working-quarters of the capital, where every evening, during certain periods, every different kind of distinguished citizen gives some of his leisure and some of his brains to the poor.
A subscription of fivepence a week, afterwards reduced to sevenpence halfpenny a month, from the numerous members was thought sufficient to pay for rent and light, while the rich should lend their pictures, give their books, and under the form of lectures impart their knowledge—this was the practical form of co-operation of ideas. Then it was decided that a doctor should have his free consultation-room, and working-men’s families be able to come on Sundays and enjoy reading and plays or amusements of divers kinds. In winter, as well as books and papers, light was at their service, which was a small economy that balanced the small charge for these privileges. At its worst, it was always better and cheaper than the wineshop. M. Deherme hired a small lecture-room in the Rue Paul Bert, and for two years, even in the summer months of holiday, arranged for commercial lectures, debates, entertainments provided by the disinterested professional class—always the readiest to assist the poor. The wealthy sometimes give of their superfluous income—and how little! Contrast with it the much that doctors, lawyers, professors, men of science, give of their less as regards actual income! When men like Zola and Léon Daudet sneer at surgeons and fashionable doctors, I ask myself if, for a moment, they realise all that these surgeons and doctors do for the needy for nothing. You give a subscription for some charitable object duly recorded in the newspapers. You have the benefit of your charitable reputation, and your self-advertisement; you have earned both without any actual sacrifice.
How many doctors and surgeons have their hours set aside regularly for free consultations, and add to these gifts of money for medicine and wine! If I were to try to enumerate all the kindnesses and liberal charities done by big doctors and surgeons, and by small doctors, and never a word of it recorded, I should have to embark in several volumes. I know no class of men so disinterested and generous, except perhaps, barristers and professors. In France we need seek no more splendid examples in this class of men than the present French Prime Minister, M. Waldeck-Rousseau, who gave up a lucrative profession, being the most brilliant and best paid advocate of France, to become an ill-paid Minister, sacrificing in the hour of a great national crisis something like fifteen thousand a year; and Maître Labori, who, in order to defend an unpopular cause, not only risked his life but fell from the height of professional wealth to something nearly approaching professional poverty. The Université Populaire, a liberal institution, with, in consequence, Church, Army, aristocracy and snobbish upper-middle class against it, was supported by such professors and writers, the glory of hard-working, thoughtful and intelligent France: M. Gabriel Séailles, philosopher; M. Ferdinand Buisson, educationalist; M. Emile Duclaux, director of the Pasteur Institute; the Pasteur Wagner, M. Paul Desjardins; M. Daniel Halévy, the brilliant young son of the illustrious writer, Ludovic Halévy, one of the simplest and most charming of Frenchmen it is my privilege to know; M. Anatole France, whom I do not hesitate to call the greatest of living French writers; M. Paul Hervieu, a kind of French George Meredith, with all the qualities and defects, the generosity and passion for justice of his great English brother, and others less known across the Channel.
Now the mother-house of the Université Populaire is in the Faubourg St. Antoine, the big nerve of labouring Paris. Here, in the heart of the Socialist movement, serious and honourable men strive nobly to combat the current of anarchy by fraternity in ideas and intellect with those who work by their hands and the sweat of their brow to keep France where she is, and where she will ever remain as long as her children so strive, the centre of civilisation. The new building has a spacious lecture-hall, a museum, billiard-room, theatre, and library. The fame of its brilliant lectures has drawn such a large gathering from the centres of fashion and idleness that many a time the workman, the real “lord of the soil,” has been turned away from his own door, having arrived late, when all the places were taken by the well-dressed usurpers from the boulevards and wealthy avenues.
Branch colleges have happily been established on the same lines at Montmartre, Grenelle, Belleville, the Boulevard Barbés, the Barrière d’Italie, the Rue Mouffetard, and, without the city wall, where the idea first started under the personal superintendence of its noble founder, M. Deherme, at Montreuil sous Bois. Alas, it cannot be said that the impetus that formed these admirable institutions has continued with the same force. Some of the people’s colleges are temporarily closed, because the workmen have not shown ardour of late in attending them. It may only mean the defection that accompanies all strong reactions. Nobody but Don Quixote could for ever live and die at the fever-point of chivalry. Humanity traverses passionate crises, which reveal in a transient flash all that is best and worst in it, and then calms down to the ordinary level of contentment, which has neither best nor worst, but which denotes merely the humdrum desire to live as easily as possible. The historical social crisis France has gone through has done this good, that a freer current was established between the intellectual and the manual workers of France, the guiding soul and hand of the race; and though for the moment the great emotions which served as intermediary between them are forgotten, something of their union will remain. Neither the Church nor militarism, neither the worst influences of caste nor of the clerical party, can undo the good done by this late union. Let us hope the Université Populaire will pull up in the coming crisis of the Liberal Government, against which every base engine and infamy will be used, and that such an excellent institution as one which provides the teaching of the best intellects of France for the working-classes, libraries (from which are excluded any novels that respectable women and girls could not read), concerts, public reading-rooms well lighted and heated in winter, free consultations of brilliant lawyers and doctors on stated days, for the modest subscription of sevenpence halfpenny a month for an entire family, will not perish for want of general encouragement.
The French Liberals are making giant efforts to spread enlightenment, comfort, and fraternity among their poorer brethren, and under the name of solidarity, are founding cheap restaurants, bath-houses, workmen’s dwellings, and a nursing institute. Their efforts have inspired a Conservative rivalry, most excellent for the good of the country, as all rivalries are which strive for the improvement of the condition of the artisan class and the poor. The difference between them lies in the fact that the Catholic party is opposed to education. They wish to give as charity the Republic’s offer as a right earned by labour.
There are two other influences at work upon the artisans of France; one exclusively masculine, and the other an influence equally strong with each sex—the wineshop and the public ball. Statistics assure us that France leads the list for the consumption of alcohol—and statistics are weighty and respectable matter. But can it be true? one asks one’s self in amazement, remembering the evil sights of London and the astonishing absence here of drunken men in the streets. Now and then you will meet such a thing as a drunken man, but the sight is unusual enough to attract notice. Tippling is the general form of drinking to excess here. The men go into the wineshop to have a drink, and to talk things over. There is always something to be talked about, and the public bar is the best place to have it out with your neighbour, and the marchand de vin, sly rogue, is accused of supplying queer, unwholesome drinks that provoke thirst, so that one drink follows another.
The marchand de vin sells more than liquors. He is the local post-office keeper, sells stamps, postcards, tobacco, and usually has a rude little dining-saloon where workmen and coachmen gather. So it stands to reason that there is a great deal of coming and going, of movement and life; there is always something to be learnt in the way of rumour, and someone to listen to you in the hour of revolt. Thus many private and personal revolutions are planned here and it is decided here whether, on the occasion of public functions, the cry shall be, Vive l’Armée or Vive la République. As a different decision will probably be taken at the next wineshop, when these valiant heroes meet in the streets we are threatened with a renewal of the barricades. After the first or second shudder at these menaces, the citizens come to take them very quietly. I remember the afternoon the Chamber of Deputies met under the protection of the troops, when the whole large Place de la Concorde was laid out in bivouacs, mounted police and cavalry gathered in knots around groups of resting horses, both sides of the bridges guarded by lines of sergeants de ville through which a needle could not pass, except by wily and clever entreaties; egress to the avenues, Rue de Rivoli, Rue Royale, all severely barred. You rubbed your eyes, and wondered if the city were besieged. Well, not a soul sought to cross the Place de la Concorde, except some curious, inoffensive spectator like myself. So quiet, so still and silent, was everything that it was impossible to account for all these regiments and this look of a besieged city. Visiting a friend who lives near the Pont des Invalides, she informed me that two young English girls had just left her in a state of acute disappointment. “We came to Paris to see the great French Revolution, and there was nothing.” That has been the true state of affairs in Paris for the past two or three years. We were constantly sallying forth into the streets, and there never was anything much to be seen. What little there was in the way of civic uproar was centred round the reactionary and anti-semitic beershop Maxeville on the Boulevard. It rarely led to anything but a few arrests of a few hours’ duration, and then we quieted down to await with fortitude and patience the next explosion.
The public ball is, if less revolutionary in its consequences, more morally disastrous. The French love dancing; when they dance together in the open or in big kitchens, as the peasants dance, there is nothing for us to do but cheer and envy them. Here we recognise in the dancing of tired workers a legitimate outlet for compressed activities, the eternal measure of joy which children of nature must ever tread. If it lead to love and marriage, or, maybe, only through the dalliance of flirtation, that, too, is in the fitness of things, since men and women must flirt, make love, marry or jilt; and the only thing we have to ask of humanity is that it shall do these things with decorum and taste. It is just this sense of decorum, of taste, which is so conspicuous in the French of all classes, and so absent in the British Isles. And the only place where this decorum and taste fail them is at the public ball. Here they literally go off their heads, and become vulgar, gross, and indecent. Modest little grisettes come to these vile rendezvous for the first time, well-mannered, timid, perhaps with some of the bloom of youth about them still, a reserve which might be interpreted as a kind of virtue,—such a pretty, engaging dignity does it give them,—and this they leave behind in the empty bowl of hot blue wine, with the slices of lemon or orange floating in it. They breathe the air of obscenity, and grow vain and audacious, believing this is life, and that they have learnt it. Inept and stupid rascals think it a grand thing to dye their souls in purple-black, and make a foolish mockery of all things sacred. Tenth-rate, vulgar-minded scribblers haunt these halls of horror, and pretend to prefer the popularity earned by their brutish impurities, couched in coarse verse, in such abodes of vice to that of the reading public. And when, by chance, you see printed, or hear one of those hymns of Montmartre of the glories of Bullier or the Moulin Rouge, it seems to you a proof of infallible justice on the part of contemporary judgment that these mediocre scoundrels should have failed.
Yet the Parisian grisette, even when she is far from being a model of virtue, if she has not been vitiated by the bal public is a very well-behaved and gracious little creature. Her standard of life is not high, but such as it is, it is attained with surprising dignity, and it is thanks to the lover who leads her to the public ball, that she becomes acquainted with the ignoble, the profane, and the outrageous. Left to herself, she would ask for nothing better than a quiet and refined interior, a little money to spend capriciously, as many pretty, inoffensive fineries to wear as are necessary to make her always pleasant to be looked at, an occasional cheerful outing, with a picnic at Robinson or in the woods of Vincennes, or safe water-excursions at Bougival, with the certainty of replacing the present lover on the same discreet and advantageous lines. She takes no heed of the morrow, and it is this improvidence and the public ball that inevitably accomplish her ruin when she does not find—and it must be admitted she more frequently than not does find—an honest workman willing to overlook her past and to start married life with her. Made for the stability of home, neat and competent, she soon settles down, and proves herself a good housewife.
