Chapter 17

THE COUNTRY.

There is perhaps no great country inhabited by civilized man more favored by nature than France. Possessing every variety of surface from the sublime mountain to the shifting sand-dune, from the loamy plain to the precipitous rock, the land is smiled upon by a climate in which the extremes of heat and cold are of rare occurrence. The grape will ripen over the greater part of the country, the orange and the olive in its southeastern corner. The deep soil of many provinces gives ample return to the labor of the husbandman. If the inhabitants of such a country are not prosperous, surely the fault lies rather with man than with nature.

It has been the fashion to represent the French peasant before the Revolution as a miserable and starving creature. "One sees certain wild animals, male and female, scattered about the country; black, livid and all burnt by the sun; attached to the earth in which they dig with invincible obstinacy. They have something like an articulate voice, and when they rise on their feet they show a human face; and in fact they are men. They retire at night into dens, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the trouble of sowing, digging and harvesting to live, and thus deserve not to lack that bread which they have sown." This description, eloquently written by La Bruyere, has been quoted by a hundred authors. Some have used it to embellish their books with a sensational paragraph; others, and they are many, to show from what wretchedness the French nation has been delivered by its Revolution.

The advances of the last hundred years are many and great, but it is not necessary therefore to believe that in three generations a great nation has emerged from savagery. Let us see what part of La Bruyere's description may be set down to rhetoric, and to the astonishment of the scholar who looks hard at a countryman for the first time. Undoubtedly the peasant is sunburnt; unquestionably he is dirty. His speech falls roughly on a town-bred ear; his features have been made coarse by exposure. His hut is far less comfortable than a city house. His food is coarse, and not always plentiful. All these things may be true, and yet the peasant may be intelligent and civilized. He may be as happy as most of the toilers upon earth. He may have his days of comfort, his hours of enjoyment.

While the French writers of the eighteenth century find fault with many things in the condition of the peasant, their general opinion of his lot is not unfavorable. Voltaire thinks him well off on the whole. Rousseau is constantly vaunting not only the morality but the happiness of rural life. Mirabeau the elder says that gayety is disappearing, perhaps because the people are too rich, and argues that France is not decrepit but vigorous.[Footnote: La Bruyere, _Caractères_, ii. 61 (_de l'homme_). Voltaire, _passim_, xxxi. 481, _Dict. philos. (Population)_. Mirabeau, _L'ami des hommes_, 316, 325, 328.]

"The general appearance of the people is different to what I expected," writes an English traveler, to his family, in 1789; "they are strong and well made. We saw many most agreeable scenes as we passed along in the evening before we came to Lisle: little parties sitting at their doors; some of the men smoking, some playing at cards in the open air, and others spinning cotton. Everything we see bears the mark of industry, and all the people look happy. We have indeed seen few signs of opulence in individuals, for we do not see so many gentlemen's seats as in England, but we have seen few of the lower classes in rags, idleness, and misery. What strange prejudices we are apt to take concerning foreigners! I will own that I used to think that the French were a trifling, insignificant people, that they were meagre in their appearance, and lived in a state of wretchedness from being oppressed by their superiors. What we have already seen contradicts this;[Footnote: Observe that this was written in French Flanders. Note by Dr. Rigby.] the men are strong and athletic, and the face of the country shows that industry is not discouraged. The women, too,--I speak of the lower class, which in all countries is the largest and the most useful,--are strong and well made, and seem to do a great deal of labor, especially in the country. They carry great loads and seem to be employed to go to market with the produce of the fields and gardens on their backs. An Englishwoman would, perhaps, think this hard, but the cottagers in England are certainly not so well off; I am sure they do not look so happy. These women with large and heavy baskets on their backs have all very good caps on, their hair powdered, earrings, necklaces, and crosses. We have not yet seen one with a hat on. What strikes me most in what I have seen is the wonderful difference between this country and England. I don't know what we may think by and by, but at present the difference seems to be in favor of the former; if they are not happy they look at least very like it."

"We have now traveled between four and five hundred miles in France," says the same traveler in another place, "and have hardly seen an acre uncultivated, except two forests and parks, the one belonging to the Prince of Conde, as I mentioned in a former letter, the other to the king of France at Fontainebleau, and these are covered with woods. In every place almost every inch has been ploughed or dug, and at this time appears to be pressed with the weight of the incumbent crop. On the roads, to the very edge where the travelers' wheels pass, and on the hills to the very summit, may be seen the effects of human industry. Since we left Paris we have come through a country where the vine is cultivated. This grows on the sides and even on the tops of the highest hills. It will also flourish where the soil is too poor to bear corn, and on the sides of precipices where no animal could draw the plough." [Footnote: Dr. Rigby, 11, 96. See also Sir George Collier, 21.]

Let us now turn to the other end of France, and hear another traveler, one generally less enthusiastic than the last. "The vintage itself," says Arthur Young, "can hardly be such a scene of activity and animation, as this universal one of treading out the corn, with which all the towns and villages in Languedoc are now alive. The corn is all roughly stacked around a dry, firm spot, where great numbers of mules and horses are driven on a trot round a centre, a woman holding the reins, and another, or a girl or two, with whips drive; the men supply and clear the floor; other parties are dressing, by throwing the corn into the air for the wind to blow away the chaff. Every soul is employed, and with such an air of cheerfulness, that the people seem as well pleased with their labor, as the farmer himself with his great heaps of wheat. The scene is uncommonly animated and joyous. I stopped and alighted often to see their method; I was always very civilly treated, and my wishes for a good price for the farmer, and not too good a one for the poor, well received."[Footnote: Arthur Young, i. 45 (July 24, 1787).]

These descriptions would give too favorable an idea if they were taken for the whole of France. All peasant women did not powder their hair and wear earrings. Those of France did much more field-work than those of England. Their figures became bent, their general appearance worn; an English observer, accustomed to the more ruddy faces of his countrywomen, might set them down for twice their age. They often went barefoot, and on their way to market carried their shoes on a stick until they drew near the town. They had to be thrifty, and might be seen picking weeds on the wayside into their aprons, to feed their cows. All provinces were not so rich as Flanders. There were vast stretches of waste land in France, given up to broom and heath. Wolves and bears were still a terror to remote farms. There were, moreover, times of famine, which the foolish regulations of the government aggravated, by preventing the free movement of provisions within the country. In some provinces these seasons of famine were often repeated. Then the wretched inhabitants sank into despair. Young people would refuse to marry, saying that it was not worth while to bring unfortunate children into the world. But in general the country people were laborious and happy, with enough for their daily needs, and often merry,--resembling in that respect the English before the Puritan revival rather than the Anglo-Saxons of more modern times.[Footnote: A. Young, i. 6 (May 22, 1787). Ibid., i. 45 (July 24, 1787), i. 18, (June 10, 1787), i. 28 (June 28, 1787). D'Argenson, vi. 49 (Oct. 4, 1749), vi. 322 (Dec. 28, 1850), vii. 55 (Dec. 22, 1751), viii. 8, 35, 233, ix. 160. Turgot (iv. 274) reckons that in Limonsin, 1766, the laborers' families did not have more than 25 to 30 livres per person per annum for their support, counting all they got. This is but 1 64/100 sou a day, and bread cost 2 1/2 sous per lb. A. Young, i. 439. This does not seem possible. The people lived partly on chestnuts.]

In the country, as in the towns, prosperity and material well-being were slowly increasing. The latter years of King Louis XIV. had been years of depression and misery. External wars, and the persecution of the Protestants at home, heavy taxation and bad government, had reduced the numbers and the wealth of the French nation. But with the accession of Louis XV. in 1715, a time of recuperation had begun. During the seventy years that followed, the population increased from about sixteen to about twenty-six millions. The rent of land rose also. The natural excellence of the soil, the natural intelligence of the people, were bringing about a slow and uneven improvement.[Footnote: Clamageran, iii. 464. Bois-Guillebert, 179, and _passim_. Horn, 1. The improvement was not universal. Lorraine is said to have lost prosperity from the time of its union with France in 1737. Mathieu, 316.]

One third of the soil was covered with small farms, which at the death of every proprietor were subdivided among his children. By a curious custom (arising in I know not what form of jealousy or caprice), the subdivision was wantonly made more disastrous. It was usual to divide not only the whole estate, but every part of it among the heirs. Thus, if a peasant died possessed of six fields and left three children, it was not the custom that each child should take two fields, and that he who got the best should make up the difference in money to his brethren. Perhaps cash was too scarce for that. But every one of the six fields would be divided into three parts, one of which was given to each child, so that instead of six separate plots of ground, there were now eighteen. This process had been repeated until a farm might almost be shaded by a single cherry-tree.[Footnote: Sybel, i. 22. Chérest, ii. 532. Turgot, iv. 260. English writers, from Arthur Young to Lady Verney, wax eloquent over the evils of small holdings.]

The class of middling proprietors was very small. The incidents to the holding of land by all who were not noble drove rising families to the towns. The great change that has come over the French country during the last hundred years consists, in a measure, in the formation of a class of men owning farms of moderate size.

A large part of the soil belonged to the nobles and the clergy. The exact proportion cannot be ascertained. It has been stated as high as two thirds; but this is probably an exaggeration. These proprietors of the privileged classes seldom cultivated any very large part of their land themselves, by hired workmen, although certain privileges and exemptions were allowed to such as chose to keep their farms in their own hands. A few of them let their lands for a fixed rent in money. But the greater part of the cultivated soil which was owned by the nobility and clergy was in the hands of _metayers_, lessees who paid their rent in the shape of a proportionate part of the crops. Sometimes the landlord made himself responsible for a portion of the taxes; sometimes he furnished cattle or farming implements. His share of the gross crop was usually one half. The system, which is still common in some parts of France, is considered a good one neither for the landlord nor for the tenant, but is devised principally to meet the want of capital on the part of the latter.[Footnote: Young reckons that the price of arable land and its rent are about the same in France as in England. The net revenue is larger in France, because there are no poor-rates and the tithe is more moderate in that country. The price of arable land he calculates to be on an average 20 Pounds per acre; rent 15 shillings 7d. per acre = 3 9/10 per cent. of the salable value. From this deduct the two vingtièmes and 4 sous per livre (taxes paid by the landlord) and other expenses, and the net revenue remains between 3 and 3 1/4 per cent. The product of wheat in France is, however, much worse than in England, so that the proportion obtained by the landlord is greater and that of the tenant less. In France the landlord gets one half of the crop; in England, one fourth to one sixth, sometimes only one tenth. A. Young, i. 353.]

We may imagine the country-houses of the nobles scattered over the face of the country so that the traveler would come upon one of them once in two or three miles. Sometimes the seat of the lord was an ancient castle, with walls eight feet thick, rising above the surrounding forest from the top of a steep hill, dark and threatening, but no longer formidable. Within, the great hall was stone-paved. Its walls were hung with dusky portraits and rusty armor. From the hall would open a spacious bedroom, with tapestried walls and a monumental bedstead. Curtains and coverlets showed the delicate embroidery of some ancestress, long since laid to rest in the family chapel. The very sheets had perhaps been woven by her shuttle. This bedroom, according to old custom, was still the living-room of the family. Sometimes the lord's house was modern, elegant, and symmetrical; it was flanked with pavilions and in front of it was a stone terrace, with a balustrade, on which stood vases for growing plants. Inside the house were high-studded rooms with white walls and gilded mouldings. High-backed, crooked-legged chairs, in the style of the last reign, were ranged against the walls; and near the middle of the dark, slippery, well-waxed floor, were lighter seats and stools. The grandmother's armchair with its footstool stood at the chimney corner, where the fire was religiously lighted on All Saints and put out at Easter, regardless of weather. Through the tall windows that opened down to the ground might be seen the long straight garden-walks, none too well kept, and clipped shrubs, with here and them a marble nymph, moss-grown and broken, or a fountain out of repair. The family did not spend much money in the place. There was little to do except in the season for shooting.[Footnote: Taine, _L'ancien régime_, 17. Mme. de Montagu, 59.]

In order that this last occupation may be left to the lord and his friends, game is strictly preserved, to the great detriment of the crops. Poachers are sharply dealt with, and the peasant may not have a gun to protect him from wolves. There are laws enough against the wrongs wrought by landlords and gamekeepers, against the trampling down of young wheat, against vexatious complaints and fines, but the country people say that such laws are not fairly enforced. Especially is the case hard of those who live near the _capitaineries_ or royal hunting-grounds. Here rural proprietors may not raise a new wall without permission, lest the hares be restrained of their liberty of eating cabbages. No crops can be cut until the appointed day, that the young partridges be not disturbed. Deer and rabbits live at free quarters in the cultivated fields. They are the peasants' personal enemies, and among the first unlawful acts of the Revolution will be their wholesale destruction.[Footnote: Olivier, 78, mentions the laws protecting the crops. The universal complaint of the _cahiers_ proves the grievance. See the chapter on the _cahiers_. The _capitainerie_ of Chantilly was said to be over 100 miles in circumference. A. Young, i. 8 (May 25, 1787).]

In every village there is a church, sometimes even in small places a beautiful gothic building, oftener modest in size and of plain architecture. Once or twice in a day's ride the red roofs and high walls of a convent come in sight, not very different in appearance from a group of farm buildings,--were it not for the chapel and its belfry;--for here in France the farms are surrounded by high walls. The interminable straight roads, fine pieces of engineering, but little traveled, stretch out between the ploughed fields, with rows of Lombardy poplars on either hand, that tantalize the sun-baked traveler with a suggestion of shade.

The peasants live in villages oftener than in detached farms, and the village itself is apt to have a rudely fortified appearance. The fields that stretch about it belong to the peasants, but with a modified ownership. Over them the lords exercise their feudal rights. There is the _cens_, a fixed rent, annual, perpetual, inseparably attached to the soil. It is paid sometimes in money, sometimes in grain, fruits, or chickens, according to deed, or to long established custom. There is the _champart_, a rent proportional to the crop, also payable to the lord; and there is the tithe which must be given to the clergy. Should the peasant wish to sell his holding, a fine called _lods et ventes_, amounting in some cases to one sixth of the price, must be paid to the lord by the purchaser, and on some estates the lord has also the right to refuse to accept the new tenant, and to take the bargain on his own account.[Footnote: Prudhomme, 37, 137, 515.]

These are the common incidents of feudal tenure. Rights analogous to them may be found in England or in Germany, wherever that system has existed. And the vestiges of a state of things far older than feudalism have not entirely disappeared. The commons of wood and of pasturage yet recall the time when agricultural lands were held by a common tenure. Even that tenure itself, with its annual redistribution of the fields, may be found in Lorraine.[Footnote: Mathieu, 322.]

There were, moreover, many irksome restrictions on the peasant. In the lord's mill he must grind his corn; in the lord's oven he must bake his bread; to the lord's bull his cow must be taken. Days of labor on the lord's land might be demanded of him. Ridiculous customs, offensive to his dignity or his vanity, might be enforced. Newly married couples were in some parishes made to jump over the churchyard wall. In other places, on certain nights in the year, the peasants were obliged to beat the water in the castle ditch to keep the frogs quiet. These customs have been considered very grievous by democratic writers, nor were they so indifferent to the peasants themselves as the lovers of the good old times would have us believe.[Footnote: See the rural _cahiers, passim_. Mathieu gives the text of a customary right of _banalité_. The fee of the _four banal_ was 1/24 of the bread by weight; the _moulin banal_, 1/12 of the flour; the _pressoir banal_, 1/10 to 1/12 of the wine; but the fees varied in different places even in one province. It was complained that presses enough for the work were not furnished, and that grapes spoiled in consequence. Mathieu, 285.]

It was not always the lord of the soil who enjoyed and exercised the feudal rights. He had sometimes sold them to strangers, in whose hands they were merely revenue, and who demanded them harshly.

The origin of these customs lay in a form of civilization that had long passed away. To understand the conditions on which the French peasants held their lands little more than a hundred years ago, we must glance back over many centuries. Feudalism began in military conquest. When the barbarians overran the Roman Empire, the victorious chiefs divided the land among their principal followers; and the titles thus conferred, although personal at first, soon became hereditary. The man who received or inherited land was expected to appear in the field with his followers at the call of his chief. The tenant, in his turn, distributed the land among his friends on conditions similar to those on which he had himself received it; and the process might be indefinitely repeated. Thus there came to be a hierarchy in the state, in which every member was responsible to his immediate superiors and obliged within certain limits to obey the man next above him, rather than the king who was supposed to rule them all. The obligations were various, according to the conditions on which the lands had been granted, but they always involved military service on the part of the grantee, and protection on the part of the grantor. The services being mutual, and the tenure the usual, or fashionable one, most persons who held land in any other way saw fit to conform to the feudal method; and absolute, or allodial owners, where the tide of conquest had left any, generally, in the course of time, surrendered their lands to some neighboring lord, and received them back again on feudal conditions.

But the tenure here described existed only among the comparatively rich and great. When the last feudal division had been accomplished, when the chief had made his last grant to his captains and the soil was divided among them, there still remained by far the larger part of the population which owed no feudal duty and held no feudal estate. The common soldiers of the invading army, the native people of the conquered country and their descendants, inextricably mixed together, remained upon the soil and cultivated it as free tenants, or as serfs. They paid for the use of the land on which they lived in money or in a share of the crops, or in services. They acknowledged the title of the feudal lords over them, and while struggling to make good bargains with their masters, they seldom set up a claim to equality, or to independence. The peasants came to think it the natural and divinely appointed order of things that they should obey and serve their lords, with a partial obedience and a limited service. To ask why they were content so to serve, would be to open one of the greatest problems of history. Whatever the reason, over a large part of the world, and through the greater part of historical time, men have consented to obey other men whom they have not selected, and have generally preferred the hereditary principle to any other in determining to whom they would look up as their rulers.

So the French peasants and their lords went on for centuries, living side by side, rendering each other mutual services, sometimes quarreling and sometimes making bargains. The peasants were called on for military service, but they and their families took refuge in the lord's castle when the frequent wars swept over the land. The mill, whose rough machinery was still an improvement on the rude hand-mill, or on the yet more primitive mortar and pestle; the oven where the peasant could bake his bread without lighting a fire on his own hearth, after the toil of the long summer's day; the bull of famous breed in all the country-side, were the lord's, and all his tenants must use them and pay for them, at rates fixed by immemorial custom, or perhaps by some long forgotten bargain, made when these conveniences were first furnished to the dwellers in the land. The lord led his peasants to battle, he protected them from the inhabitants of the next valley, he decided their differences in his court, where the more considerable of his tenants sat beside him; he governed his people, well or ill, according to his character, but on the whole to their reasonable satisfaction. His government, such as it might be, was their only refuge from anarchy. The lord was governed, not very strictly, by a greater lord, who in his turn owed duty to a greater than he; until, after one or more steps, came the king, or overlord of the land.

The long struggle by which the kings of France had transformed this loose chain of allegiance into the tightened band of almost absolute monarchy, is not to be told here. From the tenth century to the seventeenth the combat was waged with varied success. The feudal lords lost much of their power, but kept much of their wealth and many of their privileges. The dukes and counts, whose fathers, in their own domains, had been as powerful as the king himself, retained their titles, and drew their incomes, but they spent their time in attendance on their sovereign. The petty lord still held his court of justice, over which his bailiff usually presided, but its functions had been gradually usurped by the royal judges. The castle, no longer needed for protection, was transformed into a country house. But many old customs and old rights were maintained, although their origin was forgotten. The peasants still worked for several days in the year on the lands of their lord, or paid a part of their crops in rent for their farms, although these had been in the possession of their forefathers for a thousand years.

This rent, or some rent, the peasants under Louis XVI. believed to be just, for they did not claim absolute ownership, but they considered the services onerous and degrading. Their ideas on these subjects were not very definite, but of late years a general sense of wrong had been growing in their minds. The long-lived quarrels which ever exist in the country-side were envenomed by stronger suspicions of injustice. It was a common complaint that the last survey and apportionment of rent had been unfair. The lords were no longer so far removed from their poorer neighbors as to be above envy. They were no longer so useful as to be considered necessary evils, as a large part of the community everywhere is prone to think of its governors.

Let us look at the life of the peasant. His cottage is not attractive; a low thatched building, perhaps without a floor. The barn is close against it, and the family is not averse to seeking the warmth of the cattle and of the dunghill. The windows are without glass, and pigs and chickens wander in and out at the open door. But the house belongs to the peasant, and is his home. He dares not improve it for fear of increased taxes. He cares not much to do so. It keeps him warm at night and dry when it rains; daylight and fine weather will find him out of doors. If he can hide away a few pieces of silver in an old stocking, he will more readily bring them out to buy another bit of ground, than waste them in useless comforts and luxuries of building.

The furniture was generally better than the house. A great bedstead, with curtains of green serge, was the principal piece, the centre of family life, the birthplace of the children, the death-bed of the parents. It was made as high as possible, to lift the sleepers above the damp ground. A feather-bed helped to keep them warm. A few cupboards and chests stood about the walls of the room, dark with age and grime. They were made of oak, or pear wood, and sometimes rudely carved. In the eighteenth century comfort had much increased in the towns, but the country had seen little change.

The dress, again, was generally better than the furniture. The costumes of the provinces are often the copy of some long-forgotten fashion of the court, simplified or changed to adapt it to rural skill and country needs. To be well dressed is a sign of respectability; to be modestly housed may pass for a sign of thrift. On Sundays, bright coats, blue, gray, or olive, made their appearance. The women came out in good gowns and clean caps. There were flowered damask waists, sleeves of white serge, wine-colored petticoats. A gold cross was a sign of comparative wealth, but silver jewelry was common. Leather shoes were worn by both sexes. On week days there were wooden shoes, or bare feet in the southern provinces, and overalls of gray linen. Under Louis XVI., cotton began to drive out the linen and woolen cloths of former years. Being cheaper and less strong, clothes were oftener renewed. The change was contrary to beauty, but favorable to cleanliness.

The food of the peasant depended much on his harvest. In good years and on good soils he was well fed; in bad years and in poor districts, ill. Bread, the chief article of his diet, was cheaper and less good than in England, the wheat flour being mixed with rye, barley, oats, chestnuts or pease. The women made a soup, or porridge, by boiling this bread in water, adding milk perhaps, or a little bit of pork for a relish. Cheese and butter were fairly plenty, for common lands were extensive. Beef and mutton would be eaten at Easter-tide or at the festival of the patron saint, and most at wedding-feasts. Wine appears to have been considered a luxury, but a common one. It would seem that a peasant who did not taste it several times a week was accounted poor; one who drank it freely but temperately twice a day would have been called rich. Tobacco, the comforter of the poor, was in common use. This description of the food of the country people applies rather to the poorer peasants, or to those whose condition was not above the average, than to those who were best off. In Normandy, good bread, meat, eggs, vegetables, and fruit, with plenty of cider, formed the daily fare in prosperous farm-houses. [Footnote: This description of the condition of the peasants is taken chiefly from Babeau, _La vie rurale._]

The peasants were not cut off from all social and political activity. Every rural parish formed a separate little community, very restricted in its rights and functions, yet not without valuable corporate powers. [Footnote: The parish and the community were generally coterminous, but were not always so. Ibid., _Le Village_, 97.] It could hold property, both real and personal; it could sue and be sued; it could elect its own officers and manage its own affairs. In the eighteenth century it became the fashion in France, as in many other countries, to divide the common lands, but many parishes still held large tracts in the reign of Louis XVI. The sale of their woods, the letting of their pastures, of fishing rights, or of the office of wine-taster in grape-growing districts, formed the revenues of the rural community. Its expenses were many and various. It repaired the nave of the church, the choir being kept in order at the cost of the priest. The parsonage and the wall round the churchyard were maintained by the parish. The drawing for the militia was at the expense of the community. So were some of the roads. It paid the schoolmaster and the syndic. Then there were incidental expenses, such as the annual mass, the carriage of letters, the keeping in order of the church clock. Sometimes the accounts of a community show a charge for a present to some influential person, capable of helping in a lawsuit, or of effecting a reduction of the taxes assessed on the parish. It was a notable feature of the communal expenses, that the lord of the village shared them with his poorer neighbors. Into these rural matters privilege did not extend.[Footnote: But this was not always the case. See the _cahier_ of the Artignose in Provence, _Archives parlementaires_, vi. 249. "Clochers et autres bâtiments généraux. (Les seigneurs n'en payent rien, même pour leurs biens roturiers, pour les différentes charges des communautés)."]

The public meetings of these little communities were held on certain Sundays of the year after mass, or after vespers. Sometimes the meeting took place in the church itself, oftener in front of it, on the green. There the men of the village, streaming from the porch, stood or sat in groups on the grass, under the trees. Their own elected syndic presided. Ten was a quorum for ordinary business, but two thirds of the whole number was necessary to confirm a loan. A fine could be imposed for absence, or for leaving the assembly before adjournment.

In these town meetings the affairs of the community were discussed and decided. Sales were made, land was let, repairs of public buildings or of roads were voted. The syndic was elected. A record of the proceedings was kept, and was afterwards submitted to the royal intendant for his approval, without which no action was valid. This system lasted to the eve of the Revolution, but was at that time giving way to another. Under pretense that the public meetings were disorderly, they were gradually obliged to surrender their functions to boards partly or wholly elected. But certain important matters, such as the election of a schoolmaster, were still left to the general assembly. At the same time the right of suffrage was somewhat curtailed. Voters were required to be twenty-five years old and to pay certain taxes.

The village had its elected head, the syndic,[Footnote: So called in the north of France. In the south, _consul_. Babeau, _Le Village_, 45.] whose functions were not unlike those of an American selectman.

He was the executive officer of the community, who conducted its business and had charge of its papers. The central government of the country also laid tasks upon him. He had to attend to the drawing of the militia, to report epidemics among the cattle, to enforce the laws for the destruction of caterpillars. Beside him were other officers, also elected by the inhabitants, but more directly the servants of the central power than he. These were the collectors of taxes. The syndics and collectors had much work and responsibility, with little pay and no chance of promotion. Honest and capable men were much averse to taking such places and often tried to escape it. The dishonest acquired illicit gain in them, at the expense of their fellow-subjects. Serving the community was considered less an honor than a duty, and service could be forced on the unwilling citizen; but the inhabitants in easy circumstances often found means to avoid the task, and the syndics and collectors were then chosen from among the poorer and less educated peasants. Some of them could neither read nor write.[Footnote: The above description of the political life of the village is taken chiefly from Babeau, _Le Village_. See also the _cahier_ of the village of Pin (_Paris extra muros, Archives parlementaires_, v. 22, Section 1).] A public body that wishes to be well-served must not make public service too disagreeable. France suffered at once from overpaid courtiers, and from ill-treated syndics and collectors.

The chief layman of the village was the lord's steward (_bailli_), who exercised the judicial functions of his master. He held himself above the common peasants and his wife was called "Madame." Her kitchen showed a greater array of pots and pans than that of her neighbors; her linen and her jewelry were more abundant than theirs. The steward and the parish priest were the most important persons in the hamlet. [Footnote: Babeau, _La vie rurale_, 156.]

The schoolmaster came far below the priest, who had over him a right of supervision. The main control of the schools, however, was in the hands of the communities, which elected the masters from candidates approved by the clergy. The latter insisted more strongly on orthodoxy than on competence. The position of the village schoolmaster was not brilliant. His house usually consisted of two rooms, one for the school and one for the family; his books were few, his clothes shabby. He was paid in part by the scholars, at the rate of three or five sous a month for reading, higher for writing and arithmetic. In some cases a tax of a hundred and fifty livres was laid on the parish for his benefit. But school was not held during the whole year; the scholars would desert in a body early in Lent, and be kept busy in the fields until November. The master might act as surgeon, or attorney, or surveyor; he might cultivate a plot of ground. He was expected to assist the priest at divine service, to lead the choir, or even to ring the bells. Simple primary schools were abundant in the country, especially in some of the northern provinces. In some villages the boys and girls went together, but the higher civil and ecclesiastical authorities, the king and the bishops, more familiar with the manners of the court than with those of the village, looked on these mixed schools with disfavor. In general it was harder for girls to get an education than for boys.[Footnote: Babeau, _La vie rurale_, 143. Ibid., _Le Village_, 277. Ibid., _L'Ecole de village_, 17, 18. Mathieu, 262. _Cahier_ of the "_Instituteurs des petites villes, bourgs, et villages de Bourgogne," Rev. des deux Mondes_, April 15, 1881, 874. Statistics are imperfect, but from an examination of marriage registers, Babeau gathers that the proportion of persons married who could sign their names varied from nearly 89 per cent. of the men and nearly 65 per cent. of the women in Lorraine, to 13 per cent. of the men and nearly 6 per cent. of the women in the Nivernois. The central provinces and Brittany were the most illiterate parts of the country. _L'Ecole_, 3 _n_. 187. _Le Village_, 282 _n_. 3.]

The ambitious lad found means by which to rise. In spite of the heavy and badly levied taxes, he might grow rich, add new fields to his father's farm, attain in some degree to comfort and to that consideration in his neighborhood which is perhaps the most legitimately dear to the heart of all the worldly consequences of success. Nor was it necessary to confine himself entirely to agriculture. The lower walks of the law and of medicine might be attained by the son of a peasant, and if one generation of labor were hardly long enough to reach the higher, no career, except the few reserved for the upper nobility, was beyond the aspiration of the rising man for his children or his children's children. There was more modest promotion nearer at hand. The blacksmith and the innkeeper stood in the eyes of their poorer neighbors as instances of prosperity. The studious boy, with good luck, might become a schoolmaster, even a parish priest. The active and pushing might, with favor, aspire to some petty place under the central government; or to stewardship for the lord. To what eminence of fortune might not these prove the paths.[Footnote: Babeau, La vie rurale, 128, etc.]

Meanwhile for the unambitious, for the mass of rural mankind, there were simpler pleasures, the dance on the green of a Sunday afternoon, the weddings with their feasts and merry-makings, the fairs and the festival of the patron saint of the village. There were games, ploughing matches, grinning matches. Holidays were frequent,--too frequent, said the learned; but probably they did not often come amiss to the peasants. On those days they could throw off their cares and play as heartily as they had worked. It is generally believed that the Frenchman, and especially the French peasant, was livelier before the Revolution than he has ever been since.[Footnote: Ibid, 187. See Goldsmith's Traveller, the lines beginning:--

"To kinder skies, where gentler manners reign, I turn; and France displays her bright domain."]

There was much that was hard in the condition of the rural classes, but it was better than that of the greater part of mankind. On the continent of Europe only the inhabitants of some small states equaled in prosperity those of the more fortunate of the French provinces. [Footnote: Holland and Lombardy were the richest countries in Europe. Tuscany was especially well governed just then. A. Young, i. 480. Serfdom still existed in some remote French provinces, especially in the Jura mountains. Its principal characteristic was the escheating to the lord of the property of all serfs dying childless.] And in France prosperity was growing. The peasant's taxes were constantly getting heavier, but his means of bearing them increased faster yet. The rising tide of material prosperity, the great change of modern times, could be felt, though feebly as yet, in the provinces of France.