The Political and Professional Life of a French "Maçon"

IN a former paper I have related the rough up-bringing of a French building operative, who yet was heir to an ancestral property of which the acquisition dated back for centuries. Nothing, I think, came out more vividly in the picture than the strength of the family feeling. Atseventeen the lad takes upon himself part of the burden of the family debt, and his main concern in after-life is to pay it off. We left that debt reduced in 1842 to one thousand francs. He tells us it was not entirely paid off till 1848.

Other sides of the writer’s career have now to be shown. It will be remembered that his father was a strong Bonapartist. It was the Emperor’s son whom he would have wished to see proclaimed in 1830. By 1834 the younger Nadaud was already a republican, and, being a better scholar than his fellow-workmen, used every morning to be asked to read aloud in the wineshop the Populaire, a communistic paper edited by Cabet. A young medical student noticed one morning that he read with energy, and complimented him. “ It was the first time that a bourgeois shook me by the hand, and I own that I felt much flattered.” The student asked him if he would join the then wellknown Soeidtd des Droits de I’Homme, a secret political society, and he was enthusiastically admitted a member in one of its sections, together with two workingmen friends. He found himself here in company with educated and well-mannered men, and this stimulated his desire to learn. When he opened his classes, as described in the previous paper, the book which he first selected for classreading was Lamennais’s Paroles d un Croyant, a work nearly forgotten now, but which exercised an immense influence at the time. From 1838 to 1848 he bought “ the most revolutionary ” papers and pamphlets to read to his pupils. “ I taught them to love the republic, and to look upon that form of government as being alone capable of gradually lifting the people to the level of the other classes of society, from the moral point of view and from that of political and social rights.” He made parade of his republicanism, wearing the obnoxious Phrygian cap, proclaiming his views at the wineshop where he took his meals. Already in 1842, as he discovered more than thirty years later, his movements were reported to the police as those of a “ dangerous man,” and the record was consigned to a dossier (register of documents relating to a suspicious person), which was from thenceforth regularly continued. He had the honor, as he also discovered on another occasion, of a similar dossier in his department. Still, he was getting on, earning one hundred and fifty francs a month for an eighteen months’ engagement, which was almost the maximum pay of a maître compagnon, and he was able eventually to send for his wife. Meanwhile he was becoming acquainted with the leading Socialists and Communists of the day, Cabet in particular, on whose behalf he, with some other workmen, went on deputation to Louis Blanc, Proudhon, Pierre Leroux, to obtain support for the Populaire.¹

All this time Louis Philippe’s government was carrying on its insane policy of repression, gagging the press, suppressing public meetings, at last forbidding political dinners. One day when Nadaud was working on the mairie of the Pantheon, he saw the troops of the line occupy the place on one side, the national guard on the other. Some political movement was evidently going on, and work was at once suspended. At two P. M. the colonel of the national guard received tidings of the king’s abdication. The revolution of 1848 had taken place.

After the republic had been proclaimed, Nadaud was surprised to find that those workmen who had till then been most indifferent to their rights and liberties had become suddenly so exacting that no measure taken by the provisional government could satisfy them. Instead of spending their evenings in the clubs, many took to meeting in the open air, and there, before long, the malcontents began to put forward Louis Napoleon as their chief. Nadaud now began to feel himself at issue with the mere revolutionists by whom he was surrounded. They had the republic, they had universal suffrage; he would have been satisfied with consolidating these two great conquests, and would fain have concentrated his whole energies on questions of association. Meanwhile a national assembly had to be elected, and a meeting of Creusois was to be held at the Sorbonne for the choice of departmental candidates to the “ Constituent Assembly.” He went straight from work, in his working dress. A crowd of young men, “ skipping about like grasshoppers,” had come up from the Creuse to offer themselves as candidates. He listened to them, and they seemed to him “ as parrots trying to amuse the gallery.” By a sudden impulse — never having spoken in public before — he rose from one of the back benches of the amphitheatre and asked to speak. His voice was strong, and when he had to repeat the request it was in a louder tone yet. “Turn him out! ” cried some. “ To the tribune ! ” called others ; and the tribune he reached at last. He spoke at once against the last representative (Émile de Girardin), and against all the young candidates, so prodigal of promises, who had just been heard. At the conclusion of his speech, which was frequently applauded, a welldressed young man, whom he had never seen (a working tailor), proposed him for a candidate, and he was accepted. He failed, however, at the election, and, after speaking at two meetings, returned to Paris, where he found his place taken, but had it restored to him a month later.

A terrible commercial stagnation had soon followed on the revolution, and Bonapartists found easy recruits amongst famished men ; nay, the crowds of miscellaneous workers or idlers which poured forth daily from the national workshops, Nadaud declares, would have torn in pieces any one who should have uttered any other cry than that of “Vive Napoléon !" He was himself named a delegate to the Labor Commission for the study of industrial questions, presided over by Louis Blanc, but, owing to his occupations, does not appear to have attended as delegate any meeting after the first. He took part in the founding of a coöperative association in his own trade, which for years stood at the head of the French productive associations. But the year had been an expensive one. His wife had had a severe illness which was to cost her her life. He had intended to start for America, to join Cabet’s colony, with the second band of Icarians. On the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, however, he was pressed by his workingmen friends to stand for its successor, the Legislative Assembly, and, notwithstanding a trick sought to be played off upon him by the reactionists, of setting up as a dummy candidate another Nadaud (not Martin), he received, one morning, while at work, a letter directed “ Citoyen Nadaud, Représentant du Peuple.”

He sat in the Assembly from 1849 to the coup d’etat, spoke frequently, sometimes for hours at a time, and was complimented by men like Jules Favre and Michel de Bourges. He took part in an abortive protest (meant to be something more) against French intervention in Italy. At the prorogation of 1851, the air being full already of rumors as to an impending coup d’état, he went to his department, and, in spite of the enmity of the prefect, was received everywhere with cries of “ Vive Nadaud, notre macon ! ” More than this, Émile de Girardin, the most influential of French journalists, had put forward the idea of a workingman as President of the republic for the elections of 1852, and Nadaud’s name was foremost among those of the workingmen representatives; so that as early as September, 1850, a squib was published on the subject in a reactionary journal. On the other hand, the President, in his struggle against the Assembly, had struck a shrewd blow in his own favor through the reëstablishment of universal suffrage. From this time forth many workingmen among Nadaud’s friends began to say that the President was better than the Assembly, and many who had been in the habit of coming to him kept away. Shortly after midnight, on the morning of the 2d of December, when he had scarcely dropped asleep, his concierge woke him up, and he found in his room a commissaire de police and four strapping sergents de ville. He was told at first that he was only to be taken to the house of the police officer; but this was a trick. As soon as he had stepped into the cab that stood in waiting, he found that he was being taken to the prison of Mazas. The yard of the prison was already filled with hackney coaches which had brought other prisoners. Thiers and the ultra-republican Greppo were brought in while Nadaud was waiting in the office. For nineteen days he remained at Mazas in solitary confinement, but after three days obtained books, and made acquaintance with Guizot’s two works on the History of Civilization in Europe and in France, the perusal of which was of advantage to him years after, during his career as a teacher. Better days came when he was transferred to Sainte-Pélagie. All the representatives who had been arrested were placed in the left wing of the prison, groups of several in a large room. The room he occupied contained, besides friends of his own, political opponents, such as Duvergier de Hauranne and General Leydet. Their days were quiet, and "as agreeable as possible.” Friends were allowed to come to see them, and supply them with provisions, even beyond their wants. Relations of brotherly esteem grew up between monarchists and republicans. Nadaud was even offered by General Leydet a sum of one thousand francs, subscribed for him by the latter’s friends, which he refused, saying that he could always earn his living by his trade. One morning the prisoners received a copy of the official paper, which informed Nadaud that he and sixty-five other republican representatives were exiles for life. Nadaud took a passport for Belgium, and the clerk who handed it over to him offered him a letter to a Brussels architect.

At Brussels he seemed to himself to be in the corridors of the Palais Bourbon, where the Assembly had sat, so many former colleagues and friends did he find there. He went into lodgings with one who was both a colleague and a friend, Agricol Perdiguier, nicknamed “ Avignonnais-la-Vertu,” a joiner, and one of the chief writers in the workingman’s paper, L’Atelier, whose Livre du Compagnonnage is often spoken of by George Sand, and had more effect, according to Nadaud, in moralizing French workmen than all the laws and penalties of the Louis Philippe régime. Perdiguier was the cook, and so economical was he that their expenses rarely exceeded a franc a day each. On the other hand, Nadaud found that wages in his trade were very low in Brussels, not exceeding two and a quarter or two and a half francs a day, and a great public meeting, organized by the Brussels workmen in honor of the exiles, at which he was chosen to return thanks in their names, soon led to his being driven away. On the morrow of the meeting he was ordered to present himself to the burgomaster, who made him understand that he must leave Brussels. Victor Schœlcher and another received the same notice, and all three were sent to Antwerp, where for the first time Nadaud saw the sea. But here also, on inquiry, he found wages in the building trade very low, though somewhat higher than at Brussels, — three francs a day. On learning (January, 1852) from Louis Blanc, then in England, and to whom he had written, that he could earn more than double this amount (five shillings) in London, and that Louis Blanc had already spoken about him to Mr. Pickard,² manager of a then existing North London Working Builders’ Association (founded in connection with the Christian Socialist movement of the time), he crossed the Channel (at the cost of dreadful seasickness) to the country which was to be his home for eighteen years.

The day after his arrival his future employer (who, alas, went to the bad eventually, both morally and pecuniarily) called upon him, and it was settled that he should begin work three days later. He did not yet speak a word of English, and Louis Blanc not only got him an interpreter, in the person of a boy of thirteen or fourteen, but himself took him, the first day, to the building yard at Islington where he was to work. The rain was pouring down in torrents ; the roads in the neighborhood of the yard were almost impracticable for foot-passengers, and poor little Louis Blanc sank so deep in the mud, tearing himself out of one rut only to tumble into another, that his sturdy companion hardly knew whether to laugh or to urge him to go no farther. Nadaud soon made friends, particularly with two worthy Irishmen, who came every day to fetch him from his lodgings, and bought and cooked his dinner for him. He did not find the English plasterer’s work as fatiguing as that of the Parisian, and, as the result of four years’ experience, considers that English workmen in the trade do not work as hard as those of Paris. But it may be questioned whether this impression was not in consequence of the far better nourishment and generally healthier conditions of life of the worker in England.

Finding thus work at once, Nadaud escaped the “ great miseries ” that for some time crushed the greater part of the refugees. More than this, indeed: the London building operatives having subscribed to a fund for his support, he declined it, and handed over the amount collected to a general fund established by his countrymen, out of which twelve francs a week were paid for more than three years to every poor French refugee, and he was able to continue subscribing to this fund without ever drawing upon its resources. But the old divisions subsisted, and the refugees split into three groups, one headed by Ledru Rollin, another by Félix Pyat, the third (to which Nadaud himself belonged) by Louis Blanc. Years after, when he had the opportunity of looking over his police dossier, he found reports sent in by false brethren of most of the meetings of refugees which he had attended in London. Of course, the letters which the refugees wrote to their friends in France were opened, and their contents noted.

It was at this time that I first knew Nadaud, a short, sturdy man, with an open countenance and a pleasant smile, who looked you straight in the face, and could evidently hold his own whenever it was needful. I was struck by the enormous size and strength of his wrists, not knowing then that he had broken them both, as related in my previous paper ; the result being to increase the power of his grip, though at the cost of its suppleness.

After working in London or its neighborhood, — at one time on two houses built for my friend Tom Hughes and myself at Wimbledon by the North London Builders’ Association, — and afterwards in Kent, the building trade becoming very slack in the south at the beginning of the Crimean war, he went to Manchester, where there was more work going on, and where he obtained employment through an Alsatian friend, though he was somewhat coolly received by the men. Here he found himself for the first time in the midst of a dense manufacturing population, and was a witness of a great strike at Preston. Never, he says, can he forget the sight of men coming in for four consecutive hours, laden with long sacks filled with copper money, which they emptied on the floor, when the contents were distributed among the destined recipients, most of whom, though famished, received their portion with a laugh. He was also invited (with Louis Blanc) to a meeting of a so-called Labor Parliament in Manchester, and was introduced by the Chartist leader, Ernest Jones (whom he miscalls "Ernest John ”). He now became anxious to see more of industrial England: visited Sheffield, Leeds, the Wigan collieries, Liverpool; crossed over to Dublin; went to Greenock and Glasgow, where he was amazed at the sight of the “ vast lighted furnaces streaming forth true flames of hell,”whilst “ men, bare to the waist, struck blow after blow on the anvil.” He pushed on as far as Loch Lomond, then visited Edinburgh, and returned to London by boat ; having spent his last copper, but feeling himself “ another man ” after his four months’ tour.

He had, however, a bad time to pass after his return, work being very slack ; he took a contract to build two small houses, and found at the end that he had earned less money than his workmen. Some of his friends urged him to become a French teacher, and one of them — a pleasant and able man named Barrère, whom I have known personally—gave him two months’ training, and at the close of this time found for him a place at a small private school at Brighton. The pay was very poor, — sixteen pounds a year, with board and lodging, — but the treatment he received was friendly ; the sea air restored his health, which had been failing ; he had leisure for self-improvement. At the end of nine months a better place was found for him at Putney, near London, at forty-eight pounds a year ; and though the school was given up after a few months, he simply passed from it, on the same terms, to another at Ealing, kept by a brother-in-law of his late chief. The work was harder, but he still found leisure for study in the evenings, and gained sufficient proficiency in English to give a lecture in the local institute. He was here eighteen months, and left only to take the place of a refugee friend and former colleague at a great school at Wimbledon, chiefly preparatory for the services, where he remained (1858-70) till his return to France, receiving at first eighty pounds a year. I myself was living at Wimbledon, and it was then that I was able really to appreciate the simplicity and sincerity as well as the strength of Nadaud’s character. He was a very successful teacher, owing to the unstinted pains he took with his pupils, and, what is most rare for a French master in an English school, he was popular, being often chosen as umpire at cricket or football. So well were his services appreciated that when his name was included in the imperial amnesty, in 1859, and he informed his employers that he wished to go to France for some weeks and to leave the question of his return an open one, they offered to raise his salary to one hundred and sixty pounds a year if he returned.

He did return. His idea had been to join the Association des Maçons, now in full prosperity. But there was no inclination to receive him. The association was patronized by the Emperor’s ministers, by imperial princes. The spirit of 1848 had avowedly altogether died out. Years were still to elapse before the fall of the empire. In the mean while (this detail is not to be found in the book) he began after some years to be pressed with invitations to stand again for the Creuse, where his election, he was told, would be a dead certainty. Only an oath to take, as a necessary condition. The temptation was great ; not a few republicans succumbed to it. But he resisted, and has told me since how glad he was to have done so. He began now a history of the working classes in England, spending all available leisure at the British Museum Library. The book was published in 1872.

At last the downfall of the empire came. Then Nadaud threw up his professor’s place and returned to France. Friends took him to Gambetta, who at once handed him his nomination as prefect of the Creuse. Here his one preoccupation was to save all unnecessary expenditure, and to send as many men as possible to the war. He has told me how, when he took possession of the préfecture, and a tall liveried major-domo came to take his orders for dinner and ask how many covers were to be laid, he replied that he did not want any dinner cooked for him, and meant to have all his meals from the restaurant, and proceeded to get rid of cook, major-domo, and every servant that could be dispensed with, whilst his meals were supplied to him at the rate of one franc seventy-five centimes each. His secretary was a now well-known French diplomat, Camille Barrère, son of his old friend. Nadaud resigned his place on Gambetta’s retirement, and returned to Paris on the outbreak of the Commune, believing that the Versailles Assembly intended to restore the monarchy. After the Commune, he became member of the Paris Municipal Council, and carried several important proposals ; held (1872—73) a series of “conferences.” on historical and industrial subjects, to a public which sometimes numbered two thousand persons, more than twenty deputies often attending ; and in 1876 he was elected member for Bourganeuf, though by a small majority. In his first speech (May 16) he asked for a credit of 100,000 francs (which was granted) for sending workingmen delegates to the Philadelphia Exposition. He took part chiefly in the promotion of measures of social importance, such as the extension of railways, the improvement of prison discipline, industrial education, the reduction of the hours of labor, old-age pensions, sanitary improvements, compensation to workmen for accidents, the relief of the poor, public works, the water supply of Paris. He avowed himself a free-trader, in opposition to the dominant protectionism. Although it is to be observed that his name was never mentioned for the presidency of the republic, as it had been in 1849, however better fitted he might be for the office through the ripening of experience and self-improvement, he received a testimony of the esteem of his colleagues by being elected, without any solicitation, one of the questeurs of the Chamber, and retained the post for eight years.³ As such, he occupied at the Palais Bourbon the apartments formerly assigned to Prince Napoleon. He was very happy here, working in the library of the Chamber, and scarcely ever leaving the precincts of the palace, although on one occasion he recrossed the Channel with a deputation, and found himself, with his colleagues, invited to a dinner at the Mansion House. At the elections of 1889, however, he failed to be reëlected, obtaining only 3908 votes as against 4120 given to the successful candidate. Accusations were brought against him that he was receiving a pension of 1080 francs a year as a victim of the coup d’état, that he had voted for the increase of taxation, for the Tonquin war, etc. The report made to the Chamber on the election completely exonerated him as to the first accusation, showing that he had never touched his pension for himself, but had always shared it amongst twenty old men of his neighborhood in the Crease. That he had been a partisan of colonial expansion was not to be denied. Since then he has lived in his own country and his own house, troubled only with deafness and failing sight. He was operated on some years ago for cataract in one eye ; but the other is also affected, and a journey which he took to Paris in his eightieth year to have it operated on was in vain, the surgeons refusing to make the attempt, on account of his age. He might probably have been reëlected in 1893, but declined to stand.

There remains to be said that, besides the Mémoires de Léonard and the Histoire des Classes Ouvrières en Angleterre, a work containing mistakes in detail, but bearing witness of a remarkable insight into the general development of events, Nadaud has published a volume of speeches and Six Mois de Préfecture, an account of his experiences as prefect.

I have not dwelt upon the passages in the Mémoires which here and there are repugnant to me, as the glorification of Robespierre, or the unmeasured enmity toward the Church, — personified, of course, for Nadaud, in that of Rome,— an enmity which sometimes reaches a distinctly anti-religious tone. But if I have failed to convey to the reader the idea of a strong, fearless, upright, kindly, and so far as his lights go entirely just man, the fault is my own.

Let me conclude with a few words taken from the last page of the Mémoires, which apply as fully to the working classes of England or of America as to those of Continental Europe : —

“ The most imperative of all duties for the people is less to occupy itself in pulling to pieces the faults of its adversaries than to seek to correct its own.”

J. M. Ludlow.