YOUNG FRANCE.
Ootobsb 29, 1859.]
355
word!” cries Sir William Lucy, in Shakspeare’s
“Henry VI.” And truly so it is, and there lies
perhaps the one great distinction between the
English boy and the French one. The French boy
is the higher prized the more subservient he is;
whereas, put Eton and “subserviency ” together
if you can! Think how * ‘ submission ” and no
“play ” would suit those rollicking youths who are
everywhere destined to be foremost when England
is to be served, and who get their real value per*
haps more even from the “play ” than from the
“work;” fancy an Etonian kept from boating or
cricket by his mother’s sermons!
This may require a few words of explanation: it is supposed — too lightly perhaps — that because France has such a large standing army, and that French soldiers do incontestably fight so well, it is an easy thing to recruit men for the trade of war, and that it suffices to stamp on the ground to make soldiers rise out of it. This is erroneous. The conscription is submitted to, but hated; and with a system of voluntary recruiting, it is much to be doubted whether France could maintain any army at all. But this is not our immediate point: what we say is, that in France no man fights who is not a soldier, and with whom fighting is not a trade. The conscription, which forces men of the lower ranks into the army; their incon- ceivable laziness which accommodates them to garrison life in time of peace; and their natural subserviency, which bends them to the will of their chiefs at all times — -these are some of the causes which help to make good soldiers of the French, but none of these characteristics make good citizens — stout-hearted men. Here is the secret of their submissiveness to tyranny. Have the army for you, and you may govern France. Emerson has said: “Englishmen are manly rather than warlike. ” The saying may be reversed, and it would be true to say of the French that they are “warlike ” rather than “manly.”
And the system works through life. To be the “first boy ” in a school in contemporary France, is to be the most obedient and respectful; and to be a “model young man,” when school is lived through and laid aside, is to be in all things submissive to the elders of the family, and not a little guided by the influence of the family confessor. But this is a state of perfection to which, it must be admitted, few young Frenchmen, however well educated, attain. What remains to them is the capacity for subserviency, but it is not always to what is so worthy of respect as the “heads of a family” that their obedience is tendered.
Now, in the lower ranks what happens? The wretched baby, swathed and sewn up physically during the first two years, emerges from this oppression to find itself as morally mummied up as is its more aristocratical companion of whom we have just spoken. There is no “play,” either, for this poor little atom, whose earliest infliction is not to be clean, but to be useful So soon as the French peasant-boy can walk and talk he becomes the employ^ of his parents, neither more nor less than does the clerk in some government office, furnishing so many hours a day of work. His first lesson is to do something and gain some- thing, and for any display of superfluous energy, implying perchance that he might some day be something, he is sorely taken to task.
The writer of these pages remembers, one fine summer morning, having talked to a farmer’s wife, in the central provinces of France, and questioned her about her children, the youngest of whom held by his mother’s apron, and listened with a fearfully acute ear for a brat of four years old to what was being said. The children of a neighbouring chateau were being led out to walk in a field close by, and were permitted by their guardian bonnes to indulge in the recreation of skipping. Upon the question being (mischiev- ously!) put to the infant peasant of “whether he, too, should not like to be skipping with the rest?” he threw an extraordinary expression of sharpness into his eyes, and replied, “What would you give me for it?” (literally, — “Quy est ce que vous me donnerez pour cela?”)
The notion of enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake — the notion of any act committed otherwise than for the consideration of what was to be gained by it — had not yet taken a definite place in the brains of this baby of four years old.
Well, now, this was not always the condition of French children. On the contrary, French history will furnish you in the century and a-half that precedes the so-called Great Revolution, with countless cases of boys who were as reckless, as irreverent, as gay, as imprudent, as “up to a row,” or to any wickedness in the world, as any Etonian since the time of the foundation of Eton by Henry VI.; real “boys,” who snap their fingers at the experience of others, rush headlong into adventure, and, if they do not bravely die for some noble cause, may battle with circumstances till they become great men.
The aristocracy of France betrayed itself and the country: but into the details of all its back- slidings it is not our purpose to enter; suffice it to say, there was a time when, like England, France had “younger sons” — when men with ancient names were forced to do something for themselves and for the country; when unmarried girls were comparatively free; when colonies were there, asking for colonisers; and when marriage was not, as now, based upon the inevitable sale of the man, in order that the equality of the fortune may be restored. The armies of Cond6 and Turenne were full of boys, lads of fourteen and fifteen, who were neither canting little Jesuits, nor puny would-be exquisites, nor infidels either, like the products of the Revolution — but who fleshed their maiden swords gallantly, died like Christian gentlemen, and would not have told a lie for all the world, but whose chief virtue was far from being their capacity of obedience. Many of them had run away from home to join the standards of the King or of “Monsieur le Prince,” as it might be. The great and undeniable fact is, that there were boys in France before the Revo- lution of ’89, and that it would puzzle any one to discover a genuine boy there now.
We will prove by- and- by that there were girls, too, in France, some hundred and fifty years ago; and that might seem a much more hazardous assertion to persons familiar with the present
immured condition of French young ladies of