Paris
I
MY first impression of Paris was one of desolation. I stood in the midst of that vast waste of pavement bordered by trees clipped to perverted straight lines, the Place de la Concorde. The wide and stately avenues that merge here in a common centre, lent their vistas to the feeling of gloom and sadness; because each perspective ended in a monument, the souvenir of a dead glory: the Church of the Madeleine, severe and formal, cold witness to the failure of the surrender of the heart to the head, the Gothic to the Doric; the Chamber of Deputies, remnant of a Palace of Power; the Louvre, unwieldy reminder of the over-reaching Bourbons; the Arch of Triumph, taller than Trajan’s arch and more pretentious, the monument of one, who, greater than all the Louis, wielded his genius to his own undoing and the mortification of his capital. Desolation of pavement, acres of cobble and gravel; desolation of vista, a forsaken palace, a forgotten religion, a mock triumph.
The mutilated trees were touched with the first green of April, and the mesmerism of Tolstoï’s sentence came over me: ‘Though hundreds of thousands had done their very best to disfigure the small piece of land on which they were crowded together, by paving the ground with stones, scraping away every vestige of vegetation, cut ting the trees, turning away birds and beasts, and filling the air with the smoke of naphtha and coal, still spring was spring, even in the town.’
Spring was spring even in Paris.
Hypnotized by Tolstoï in Paris! A frisson that I hasten to shed in the fashionable throngs of the boulevards. But I cannot, lose it. These Parisians, these rest less particles of a restless race, with their nervous, everlasting gesture, are not convincing in their café gayety; they are a nation to whom nature and history have denied repose. Every circumstance, whether of catastrophe or prosperity, they meet with national nonchalance, filling the stage of their terrible national tragedies with a frivolous flowing of fashion.
After a long time, and repeated visits, you get acquainted with the French. I do not say with Parisians, — they are easy of access, — but with the French. Then you realize that this, their capital, is a national manifestation of restiveness; but that behind its commotion, concealed from view, — like the wonderful old gardens in the Faubourg St. Germain hidden from the vulgar gaze by ancient walls, — is a seriousness of purpose, a sort of pat riotic sadness, that is regenerating the Land of Foibles.
The French nation is a mass of individual particles, scintillating, assertive, — strangers to all the ethics of cohesion. They are incapable of team work. You never read of French football or baseball or organized sports. They are a nation of individualists, brilliant individualists. Their philosophy, poetry, art, music, science, literature, all bear the imprint of a superindividualism that has filled the world with its radiance.
They defy every known law of human gravitation and fly off in a million fragments, careless of results. In truth, they never think of results. They have the child’s love for the doing, and the child’s scorn for the thing done. They begin more processes, inventions, contrivances, experiments, and end fewer, than all the rest of Europe put together. The French propose, the Germans and the English dispose.
This is the reason why you find the nation split up into factions, instead of divided into two or three large parties. There can be no universal sects among a people where each individual is his own party and writes his own creed. There are a hundred ‘schools’ of thought, of art, of politics and sentiment, engaged in the endless finesse of French disputation.
Their capital is the great human kaleidoscope in which these scintillating particles are momentarily arranging and rearranging themselves into new and fantastic forms. In no other capital do event s shift as they do here. There is always an excitement, a universal topic of conversation and exclamation. Some years ago I thought I had analyzed a political situation, a ‘climax,’ and I left for Aix-le-Bains. The next paper brought me word of a complete overthrow of the government and the utter reversal of my conclusions. It is so with every session of the Chamber of Deputies. It is so in art, in literature; from one faith to another, from fad to fad, like a child tiring of its toys, these brilliant people glide. They never settle a question, never reach a resting place in their subtle speculations. They are constantly moving.
And the axis of their shifting is always a personality: a Dreyfus, a Mme. Steinheil, a Briand, a Rodin, a Bonaparte, a bandit, an actress, or a Mona Lisa. There must be a new personality every week, a new shift of colors, a new pattern of brilliant nothings on the sombre background of daily routine, for these children of the hour weaving myths and legends around contemporary characters.
When the great floods were filling the wine-cellars with silt some years ago, and the sewers and subways were choked, and the streets were flooded and buildings slipping from their foundations, the boulevard throng was gay with its new pleasure. It immediaately invested the rising Seine with the personality of the granite soldier who braces the buttresses of one of the bridges. He was the hero of theturbulent floods. Crowds gathered to wager that the rising current would reach his thighs, his waist, his epaulets, his chin, his nose, his eyes, heedless of the fact that when the water touched his cap, bridges and quays would melt away.
The whole history of this race has been commotion and turmoil and overturning, one constant procession of dramatic events, from the days of the Great Martel to the latest ministry of the newest republic. Wherever you wander in their ancient capital, you encounter gruesome reminders of revolution and tyranny, old street names, squares, monuments, inscriptions, eloquent with t he emotions of tumult and courage. Neither Saxon nor Teuton could have survived such centuries of dramatic torsion. Other nations have been forced into war; Prance has time and again compelled Europe to meet her in combat. Other peoples have been despoiled; France has robbed herself, three times in as many centuries, to the verge of ruin. Other countries have feared rebellions and trembled at the thought of uprisings; France is the mother of Revolution.
Other people find solace in philosophy, respite in religion, and tranquillity in literature and art. To the French, philosophy is an adventure, religion a speculation, literature an excitement, art a stimulant. The Parisian must have the absinthe of variety to dispel the dread of ennui. He acknowledges only one purgatory, the inanity of an existence without excitement.
But I have lost myself in the throng of the boulevard, where I sought consolation from the gloom of Tolstoï.
II
The Paris of to-day is a faithful reflection of the old France of yesterday, and a prophecy of the new France of to-morrow. For there is a new France in the making. I say this in the face of the lachrymose orators who find France the horrible example of‘degeneracy,’ ‘race decadence,’ and ‘banal debauchery.’ In a few years the moral reformer will have to fall back on ancient Rome, like the perennial sophomore, for his morbid figures of speech. I say ancient Rome, because modern Italy, too, is responding to the spirit of awakening that hovers over Europe and China.
Paris is a faithful exposition of France, old and new. But always with this exception—the tourist. When a new Dante arises out of the ashes of modern poetry, he will fill a vast corner of hell with tourists, and the majority of them will have the image of Paris, the ‘modern Babylon,’ imprinted on their memory. Everybody goes to Paris. That has been the fair capital’s misfortune. Everybody has gone to Paris for three hundred years, to taste the forbidden fruit. And Paris, with dainty conceit, has prepared elaborately and artistically the suggestive degeneracy which most of these t ourists go to Paris particularly to see. Paris gives any one a boost toward the abyss, if he seeks it — and if he can pay for it.
But as for Paris going over the precipice, it is a neck-and-neck race between all the metropolises and capitals on earth, with the odds for staying qualities in favor of the city that can be the financial mistress of Russia, Germany, and Austria, while wearing the smile of frivolity and the robe of fashion.
Aside from the tourist and touristbaiting, Paris is the capital of France. Here the ebullient government simmers. Occasionally it bubbles over and puts out the fire under the cauldron.
‘We are always over a volcano, and never know what will happen before morning,’ the oldest American resident once told me, as he related his experiences during the Commune. The bullet holes in the trees of the Tuileries, made in that last uprising of the proletariat, are warnings of the tantalizing temper of these people; and the ugly scars on the burned palaces are not yet healed over.
What of it? In London a commune would be a catastrophe; in Paris it is only an event.
Destiny, that potent ogre, prepared the way through a century of Bourbon degeneracy for the greatest, the ghastliest of French Revolutions; an overturning of evcryt hing cherished by the older civilizations. It was terrible, not because of its political acts, or its economic consequences, but because it revealed the uniformity of human nature. When the fanged and clawed harpy of the sewers lifted himself into power, he was as heartless and reckless and murderous as the politest Bourbon and the most accomplished courtier. When the Revolution was at its awful climax, when bourgeois had succeeded Bourbon, and the proletarian had risen over the middle class, Edmund Burke said, ‘I scanned the map of Europe for France, and she was not.’ A decade later, Paris was the capital of the Continent. The kaleidoscope had turned.
It is still turning. I. never tired visiting the Chamber of Deputies, where the Republic is governed. No; let me modify my statement; it is not literally true that the Republic is governed by the Chamber of Deputies. The Republic is governed by the Bureaucracy, the wonderfully centralized system of administration designed by Napoleon and perpetuated by every empire and republic, as they have succeeded one another through the century, with Cal lie precision. But the Chamber of Deputies is supposed to dominate the administrative system. It dictates to the premier, and when its sanction is withheld the government falls.
In this beautiful and ancient hemicyele with its subdued coloring and chaste classic details, there is enacted yearly the amusing farce, ‘Gallic selfgovernment by Deputies.' It will take three or four visits to overcome the feeling that, these men are not boys and are not really angry and are not a mob. Every one talks at once, the President rings a huge bell and shouts ‘Silence—but there is no silence. The member who wishes to address the Chamber mounts the tribune, high up, out of reach. It is well that he is out of reach. No sooner has he uttered a sentiment than the crowd swoops down the aisles and is upon him; that is, they surround the tribune and shout and gesticulate up at him. They all ask questions in chorus. Nobody seems to mind anybody. When a favorite orator or a prominent politician speaks, he commands a hearing by paragraphs; the ordinary member is allowed to proceed a phrase at a time.
After a particularly turbulent meeting, when desk-lids were slammed and the Chamber was in an uproar, I remarked to a member — a well-known avocat — that t here had been some confusion. ‘Ah,’he said, ‘do you not in America exhibit so fine a spirit, of earnestness in your Congress?’ And when, a few weeks later, I related this experience to a leading professor of law in the University of Paris, he smiled and said that was their way of doing; that political revolution was not abhorrent, but natural, to their national spirit. I do not know how many ministries they have had since 1873. But the average is about one a year. ‘We dearly love triumphant insurrection,’answered the editor of a Parisian daily to my question as to why they did not seek greater stability in their government.
After all, this turmoil is only on the surface. The great freemasonry of government employees goes on, no matter what faction claims the premier or the president. These clever people play the game of governing, with wonderful adroitness. They love the spectacular show of shifting ministries, dramatic debates, sudden overt urnings of majorities that thought themselves secure; but behind the scenes is a more or less efficient and orderly administration of affairs.
Underneath this interesting duality of humdrum and excitement, is a constant plotting and counter-plotting. The underground city of Victor Hugo still exists. I visited, one Sunday, a little meeting of anarchists and syndicalists in a basement in one of the out-of-the-way streets of the ancient Town. I looked into faces such as inspired Marat, — veterans of the Commune who helped tear down the walls of empire. There was one old woman whose face, covered with wrinkles, wore a hard and scornful glee. She had one tooth left, which showed like a yellow fang when her lips parted in a heartless smile. She was constantly mumbling to herself. What revenges was she hiding in her ancient soul? In her trembling fingers was some needlework. She might have stepped out of Dickens’s Tale, fresh from the counting of falling heads. I can understand the Revolutions.
On a A fay day, I went about the haunts of the syndicalists. Their similes and metaphors were of violence and eruption. ’Rip up the bourgeois’; ‘Nail the moneyed hides to the wall’; ‘Not liberty, equality, fraternity, but powder, dynamite, and sabres, our potent trinity,’ etcetera. Squadrons of cavalry in the avenues, brigades of infantry in the open places kept them in the alleys for the day. One of their leaders boasted to me that some members of his union had put coal into cases that were supposed to contain guns, subjecting their employers to heavy damages.
The next revolution is to be economic as well as political. These proletarians have generations of poverty behind them; they are the aristocracy of the poor. They have their theories written for them, and their pamphlets edited, by men of learning and culture who sit in easy chairs, in well-stocked libraries, in bourgeois residences on ' respectable’ streets. It does not shock the French that Georges Sorel, clever and learned, writes readable books inciting the mobs to violence, or that Professor Lagardelle advocates strikes, boycotts, sabotage, destruction. Sorel is read and answered, and the Professor is received as a scholar. That is the Parisians’ Way, — condemn no man for opinion’s sake. To-day he is a Syndicalist, to-morrow he may be a Royalist; Georges Sorel, I am told, has actually made this astounding shift. Paris only smiles and shrugs her shoulders.
I can lead you to another meeting, but I cannot take you in. I can only point out the mansion, or rather the château — for it is out in the country. Here, through an informant, you will hear the language of royal courts. The dukes and counts of the ancient régime revive their illusions of glory with the tides of a vanished splendor. They call each other Count and Baron and Countess.
The blue-bloods plot for regaining power, in the aristocratic faubourgs, just as the no-bloods plot for plunder in the cellars and half-lit chambers of the choked and crooked alleys of the ancient cité. The under-world and the super-world are plotting. It makes no difference to the outer world, the Republic goes merrily on. It is the French Republic.
I met these extremes one day in a most unexpected manner. It was in the Prison Santé, where I contrived to see Gustave Hervé, the noted antimilitarist and antipatriot, who was serving a four years’ sentence for his inflammatory editorials in his daily paper La Guerre Sociale. While I was talking to him of his theories and his practice of his theories — these French antipatriots have a habit of practicing their theories — I observed a group of fashionably dressed ladies in another part of the prison yard. ‘Who are these?’ I asked. ‘Oh, they are of the old aristocracy and are calling on those young men, who are Bonapartists, and are here for starting a royalist riot on the boulevards the other evening.’
Where else in all the world could such a meeting of the ultra and the nether theories of government have occurred? The Teutons would fail to see the philosophy of it, the British the humor of it.
This shows that inconsistency is an unknown word in the vocabulary of the Frenchman. There is not hing under the sun that is out of place, and nothing ever will appear in human society that will seem out of place, in Paris. You need not be startled, shocked, or surprised at anything in the way of dress, demeanor, or display, which you may see on the streets or in the public places; or at anything you hear pertaining to philosophy, politics, art, and religion. The great salon this year included the work of the cubists and the classicists. The University lures orthodox Romanism, rampant or quiescent skepticism, the mysticism of Bergson, and the materialism of Renan.
No one is debased, in France, because of his opinions. From the shining white basilica that surmounts the heights of Montmartre, you look down upon the city of the Pantheon; from the dizzy summit of the Eiffel Tower you look down upon the Sacré Cœur; and from the aeroplanes that buzz like giant locusts in the clouds you look down upon the Tower. It is a matter of absolute indifference to the everyday Parisian, whether you prefer the Pantheon, the Church, the Tower, or the airship. His curiosity as to these things was satisfied long ago. But if you can invent a new way of achieving heights heretofore unreached, then you will have Paris at your feet — for a day.
There is in Paris a genuine democracy of mind. Nowhere else in the world is thinking so untrammeled, philosophy so unshackled, science so ardently followed for its own sake and not for gain. Nowhere else is mere opinion so unguided, so free. And nowhere else does it matter so little what you believe or think or do or possess, so long as you are a personality. The bonhomie of intellect is achieved. It is as if the realm of thought and speculation were one joyous Latin Quarter where the soul of fellowship reigns. Cliques and claques change and shift, they never deny to one another the independence of research, conviction, and criticism which each asserts for itself. At least so much of democracy is here — whatever the Prison Santé may teach — a democracy of art, philosophy and letters. And where this is attained, what matters the outward form of mere government?
By the side of this democracy of culture, there is developing a new democracy of politics and industry. A new power is arising behind the dual forces that hitherto have made the government of the Republic. It is the old, old power in an entirely new guise; the power of landed property. But it is the power of decentralized, not of centralized property; not of trusts and feudal baronies, but of peasants and artisan owners of garden plots. There are more small holdings of land in France than in Germany, England, and Austria together. Such great estates as survived the revolutions and the vicissitudes of royalty are rapidly breaking into fragments and the particles are greedily snatched by the peasant farmer.
You smile? Let me tell you, here is the mightiest class in the world. Anchored to the soil, therefore as independent as the lark; living humbly and out of doors, therefore as strong as the ox; owning his acre, therefore as cautious as a banker; owning only an acre, and therefore as radical as a labor-unionist; thrifty, honest, and frugal, hoarding his earnings, therefore a lender of money and capable of commandi ng. There are, I know not how many millions of these peasants. Estimates vary. Their aggregate savings, herded and controlled hy three or four great banking syndicates, are invested in Russian and Austrian bonds and German securities; and to such an extent that the French peasant and his city cousin, the artisan, can tumble the Dual Monarchy into the Danube, can shake the Czar’s throne as by a revolution, and can put the new industrial Prussia into the hands of a receiver. Only this last May (1913), the city of Paris offered for sale $41,000,000 of bonds for t he extension of the municipal gas-plant, and the amount was oversubscribed eighty times and by the humbler classes; proof that French frugality had stowed away $3,280,000,000. And as a deposit of ten francs was required for each bond subscribed for, there had been actually paid into the city treasury $11,5,000,000 for the privilege of subscribing for $41,000,000.
Last summer, when the Morocco scare was at its height, the French called in a few German loans, and the Berlin Bourse, in one day’s panic, lost the price of several battleships and sent in haste a committee of bankers to wait on the Kaiser, to protest against the delay in the negotiations for settling the dispute.
This French peasant is also the gardener for England. The cabbages and potatoes of the French market-gardens form an entente cordiale between the hungry Briton and the thrifty Breton that is more enduring than the bland barter of diplomats.
Now this peasantry is finding its own. Heretofore the bankers led the peasants’ political opinions as well as invested their funds. But they are forsaking these masters and flocking by the thousands into the Radical and Socialist, camps. They have a new leader. I point him out to you as we sit in the balcony of the Chamber of Deputies, — Compere Morrell. He is a gardener, also a politician, an economist, a socialist and, like all Frenchmen, an orator. Socialism, to this group, does not mean destruction of smalt properties. It means democracy, selfassertion, power. The peasant is becoming politically self-conscious.
The twentieth century is beholding the apotheosis of the Great Revolution. Bourbon oppression and Bourbon opulence, Versailles and the Louvre, drove the peasant to frugality with the lash of hunger and the scorpions of terrible taxes. Royal cruelty called forth the habit of frugality and thrift; two centuries of experience have fixed it; and now these peasants are realizing their independence. To-day the Revolution is accomplished.
In France, household industries still thrive. Paris and the greater towns are filled with hand-industries. The peasant and artisan of the land and the craftsman of the towns, these are joining hands in the shaping of the new France. They have enlisted in their cause scholars, writers, and scientists; the aristocracy of intellect, of whom Anatole France is the supreme type, delights in coöperating with the democracy of labor.
There are other evidences of the new order, such as an awakening in education that is seen everywhere, from the University, through the lycées, to the common schools. Practical vocational training is receiving greater emphasis. A national society for the education of apprentices is growing rapidly, and technical and trade schools are increasing in favor. And the idealism of Bergson is permeating the neo-patriotism.
France is on the verge of an awakening that bodes no ill for the world. Unlike the prosperity of some other European lands, familiar to the reader, the prosperity of France will not be built on the ruins of a competitive trade. It will be the triumph of her national trinity: thrift, art, and idealism.
The beautiful capital on the Seine is witnessing these significant events with the apparent indifference that it has manifested toward all changes, serene or violent, during the stirring and eventful epochs of its history. The dead and the living are scarcely separated in the metropolitan thought—the great dead are standing everywhere, under the spreading trees of its squares and streets, in bronze and marble, reminders of the brief immortality of fame. The living surge everywhere, in search of gain and pleasure, unmindful of the fleetness of Time.
But underneath this frivolous unmindfulness is an eternal vigilance. The heart of Paris feels every true emotion of its people; the mind of the capital is conscious of every passing thought. Paris has witnessed so much history, such violent history, that it can never again be deluded. The capital knows that there are two Frenchmen in every jacket, one serious, the other frivolous. It knows that there is only one thing under heaven about which the Frenchman can be serious: that is property. Everything else is pleasure, speculation, vanity. But property, — that, is serious. This explains France and the Frenchman — the boulevard, the cafe, the home. The Frenchman that, you see is the Frenchman of the café. The Frenchman who has made history, and will make much more history, is the Frenchman of the home.
In the light of this duality, the Frenchman is the most consistent of mortals, and in the appreciation of his skill in separating his ego from his possessions, who shall say that he is not the wisest? And that. Paris is not the capital of Sanity?