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Aire-sur-la-Lys

It is a local tradition at Aire-sur-la-Lys that, about half a century ago, the good people of this ancient and picturesque town (which, like St.-Omer, remained a part of the Spanish dominions when all the rest of the Artois became French by the treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659) turned out with flags and music to welcome their mayor back from Paris, bringing the good news that the projected Northern railway should not pass through their territory, to disturb their settled trade.

This unique incident is often cited to show the tenacious conservatism of the Artesians. I believe, however, it only proves that the people of Aire, dwelling in a region which has been fought over from time immemorial, had a well-grounded objection to the exclusively military views with which Marshal Soult then desired that the Government of Louis Philippe should take up and carry out the projected enterprise.

At all events, Aire-sur-la-Lys now rejoices in a comfortable little railway station, which makes it an important point in the system of the Northern Railway of France.

There, on a lovely evening in June, I found the carriage of M. Labitte, one of the Councillors-General of the department, waiting to take me to his charming and hospitable home in the richly-cultivated agricultural commune of St.-Quentin.

It was on the eve of Pentecost when, as the German poet tells us, 'the woods and fields put off all sadness,' and a lovelier summer evening it would be hard to find even in England.

M. Labitte is a Conservative and a devout Catholic. As I have already mentioned, he was a candidate in the Pas-de-Calais in 1886 for the seat in the Chamber now held by M. Camescasse, and received 74,554 votes against 86,356 for his opponent. In Aire he was beaten by only 22 votes out of a total of 3,536. His influence in the country here is, in a certain sense, hereditary, for he came of a family which in the last century gave many excellent ecclesiastics to the service of the Church, among a population then, as now, remarkable for its strong religious feeling. When the States-General were convened by Louis XVI. a century ago, the first date fixed for the elections in Artois had to be postponed, at the request of the Duc de Guines, because it interfered with Easter. The Artesians cared more for the Church than for the State. Yet, in no part of France was the calling of the States-General more popular, and nowhere were more efforts made before 1789 than in Artois to improve the condition of the people and to secure a more just and liberal fiscal administration. The clergy were extraordinarily powerful in Artois, alike by reason of their property and of the religious disposition of the people; and it is a curious and interesting fact that under the constitution of the Estates of Artois it was established (thanks to the union of the clergy with the Third Estate) that, while no votes of the nobility and the clergy united should bind the Third Estate, any joint vote of the Third Estate with either of the other two orders should bind them all. Here, long before the much-bewritten date of 1789, we have the Church in Artois arraying itself on the side of the tax-paying people against the privileged classes. Modern inquiries show, indeed, that this was the attitude of the great body of the French clergy long before what is called the 'Revolution.' The majority of the representatives of the clergy in the States-General of 1789 did not wait for the theatrical demonstrations in the Tennis Court of Versailles, about which so much nonsense has been talked and written, to join the Third Estate in insisting upon a real reform of the public service. No French historian has ventured to make such a picture of the Catholic clergy of France under the Bourbons as Lord Macaulay thought himself authorised to paint of the Protestant clergy of England under the Stuarts. There were flagrant scandals among the higher orders of the Church in France, no doubt, as there were in England. The names of Dubois, of Loménie de Brienne, of De Rohan are not associated with the cardinal virtues. De Jarente, Bishop of Orleans, driving Mdlle. Guimard to the opera in his coronetted and mitred coach, is not an edifying figure, nor is Louis de Grimaldi, Bishop of Mans, saying Mass in his red hunting-coat and breeches. But the Protestant Dean of St. Patrick's thought the execution for felony of another Protestant dean a capital theme for a merry ballad; and at the end of the eighteenth century Arthur Young painted the English rural clergy in very dark colours. The curates, the rectors, the monks of France as a body, showed under the old régime the same qualities of devout faith and Christian sympathy with the people with which they met and baffled their persecutors after the crash of the monarchy. The three representatives of the clergy who first struck hands with the Third Estate on June 13, 1789, were curates sent to Paris by a province more intensely Catholic than Artois. They were Poitevin priests from the region which we now know as La Vendée, and which only four years afterwards rose in arms to defend its altars and its homes against the intolerable despotism of the 'patriots' of Paris.

When Turgot was put in charge of that work of fiscal reform which might have spared France the horrors and the disasters of the Revolution, had Louis XVI. been capable of standing even by Turgot to the end, he carried on an extensive correspondence with curates in Artois as well as in the other provinces of France, as the best means of educating the people to an intelligent appreciation of his purposes and of his plans. Condorcet, who treated the brutal murderers of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld with a complaisance which entitles him to the confidence of the most advanced anti-clerical philosophers of our own day, bears witness to the good intentions of Turgot's correspondents. He says, in his memoir of Turgot, printed at Philadelphia seven years before the Revolution of '89, that 'the curates, accustomed to preach sound morals, to appease the quarrels of the people, and to encourage peace and concord, were in a better position than any other men in France to prepare the minds of the people for the good work it was the intents of the ministers to do.'

What was true of the French curates a hundred years ago is true of them to-day, the duties prescribed to them by the Church being still precisely what they were when Condorcet bore this testimony to the good dispositions of men much more conscientious than himself. Then, too, as now, the curates were required to look carefully after the education of the children in their parishes. France is indebted, not to the Revolution, but to a great Protestant historian and statesman, Guizot, and to King Louis Philippe for the foundation of her system of public education. The revolutionists of 1789 left the country worse off in this matter than they found it. The royal ordinance of Louis XIV. in 1698, which required the establishment of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses in every parish in which they were not then to be found, and fixed the salaries to be paid these masters and mistresses out of a public tax in every parish in which no foundations for their support existed, was distinctly a public-school law. This ordinance made it incumbent upon all parents and other persons who had charge of children to send them to the schools until they were fourteen years of age, and it also enjoined upon the curates the duty of 'watching with particular attention over the education of the children in their respective parishes.' The spirit in which the clergy of Artois, at least, discharged this duty appears in an ordinance of the Bishop of Arras issued in 1740, half a century before the Revolution of 1789, in which the bishop lays it down as a maxim that 'the greatest charity which can be shown the poor is to ensure them the means of obtaining an education.'

This, down to thirty years ago, was the principle of legislation in Virginia upon the public school question, the State not attempting to interfere with the authority of parents over their children in the matter of education, but making an appropriation for the instruction of the children of the poor. That mischievous wind-bag Lakanal lived in Mississippi and Louisiana during his exile in America, and it is possible that his influence may have had something to do with the early adoption by another southern State, Louisiana, of the general public school system. However that may be, Louisiana in 1850 spent upon her public schools three times as much money annually as any of the New England States, with the result that, out of a native white population of 186,577, she had in her prisons 240 native white criminals, or 1 in 777 of the whole number, being 'the largest proportion of criminals to population at that time to be found in America, if not in the world.' Virginia, out of a native white population of 1,070,395 in 1860, had no more than 163 native white criminals in her prisons, or 1 in 6,566 of her native white population.

It is a curious fact, by the way, that but for the fidelity of the French clergy before 1789, in carrying out the work imposed upon them by the ordinance of Louis XIV., and commended in the ordinance of the Bishop of Arras in 1740, two of the most conspicuous actors in the grotesquely horrible drama of the French Revolution would have starved to death in the streets of Arras, or grown up there in vagabondage. The clergy of St.-Vaast in the diocese of Arras found, in 1768, two wretched urchins thrown upon the world by an unnatural father. One of these, Maximilian Isidore de Robespierre, was born in 1758; the other, Augustus Bai Joseph de Robespierre, in 1764. The good priests picked them up, cared for them, and put them in the way of getting a good education, which they turned to such purpose that both of them eventually came to the guillotine in the flower of their years, and amid the cordially contemptuous execrations of decent people all over the world. One of the most accomplished public men in Massachusetts told me years ago, that he was stopped on his way to school one morning in 1794, by a friend of the family, who bade him run back at once and tell his father the news had come from Europe that 'the head of Robert Spear had been cut off.' 'Make haste,' said this gentleman, 'and your papa will give you a silver dollar, he will be so glad to hear it!'

It was rather instructive to think of the 'sea-green incorruptible' and his idiotic 'Feast of the Supreme Being' on that beautiful clay of Pentecost, in the charming rural commune of St.-Quentin, the peace and happiness of which was for a time so cruelly broken up by his atrocities and follies a hundred years ago. The fine old church, near by my host's residence, has been restored with great taste and good sense. It was crowded at early mass with the farmers and their families, many of the men wearing their blouses, but all well-to-do, for this region is one of the richest and best cultivated districts of Northern France. The service was celebrated with much simplicity, but with no lack of due ceremony; the singing was excellent; and the priest's homily, a brief and very good discourse on the spirit of Christian charity, was listened to with great attention.

The pretty custom prevails here, as in Normandy, of handing about in the congregation, at a certain point in the service, a basket of bread. Two gravely courteous old peasants presented the baskets in turn to all the people. The service over, the farmers stood and chatted together in groups in the churchyard and about the porch, and I heard much talk of the outlook for the crops, of the price of cattle, and of certain properties which had recently changed hands. Of politics next to nothing.

My host was for many years a notary at Aire. He has transferred this position now to the husband of his only daughter, and occupies himself mainly with his agricultural interests. The notary, who is a personage everywhere in France, is especially a personage in Artois. This has come about in part through the great changes which have taken place in the proprietorship of land in this province during the last three centuries. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, after the province was substantially united with France by Louis XIV., great numbers of small proprietors, who had done well enough under the Spanish rule, found themselves forced, by the pressure of taxation, to part with their land, and there was a marked increase in the great estates, not only of the clergy but of the laity. After the First Consul took the country in hand, and began to reorganise it socially, on the principle laid down by him so often and so energetically, in his dealings with his councillors, that 'true civil liberty in a State depends upon the absolute safety of property,' there began to grow up in Artois a great middle class of landholders, corresponding in many conditions to the 'strong farmers' of Ireland. With the increase of this class came a natural increase in the importance and influence of the notaries, already and through the Spanish traditions very considerable in this region. In many parts of the province the notary is recognised as an unofficial, but authoritative, social arbiter, to whom may be safely referred for settlement all sorts of disputes, including very often questions of property which would elsewhere be taken before the courts of law. It was pleasant to see that the relation thus established between M. Labitte and the people generally had not been affected by the political agitation of the last ten years. When I drove about the country with him, I observed that he was saluted everywhere in the friendliest fashion, and that, as he more than once told me, by persons politically quite hostile to his re-election as councillor-general.

After luncheon on Pentecost, a most interesting ceremony took place at St.-Quentin. A long procession made up of the inhabitants of the commune, the men wearing their best clothes, the young girls garlanded and dressed in white, set forth from the porch of the church, after a brief service there, and marched around the commune. It was the English beating of the bounds without the beating, and with the old religious rites. In the midst of the procession, which extended perhaps a quarter of a mile, the parish priest walked alone under an embroidered canopy borne up by young villagers. Acolytes, with lighted candles, moved on either side of the canopy. Before it was borne a white silk banner of the Virgin, and behind it a banner embroidered in gold. All the park and grounds of M. Labitte lying within the commune, and being thrown open to the people, a very beautiful altar of verdure and roses had been set up under a bower in the great garden behind the house, by the daughter of M. Labitte. Before this altar the procession paused, a brief service was performed there, and then the long line resumed its march, a chorus of some twenty male voices chanting, as it went, the Magnificat. Nothing could exceed the unaffected simplicity and seriousness of the people of both sexes and of all ages. The day was one of those perfect days, which, as Mr. Lowell says, come to the world in June, if ever they come at all; and as the long line wound its way around the fields, green with the prospering crops, beneath the orchards and the groves, and between the fragrant hedgerows, the silvery chiming of the bells in the old church alternated with the far-off chanting of the choristers, and the fitful breeze brought us, from time to time, the grave deep voice of the priest reciting, as he moved, the ancient prayers of hope and of thanksgiving.

It was interesting to remember that under the first French attempt at a republic, this lovely rural spectacle would have been as impossible as it would be to-day under the rule of the Mahdi in the Soudan; and also, to reflect that France is governed to-day by men who dream of making it thus impossible once more.