France and the Ruhr: The Peasant-Proprietor Speaks

I

IN the course of my career I was for four years in charge at the Quai d’Orsay of the questions affecting the relations of France with the two Americas. But I do not feel myself either obliged or inclined to repeat for my American readers the official arguments of France against Germany on the Reparations question and on the affair of the Ruhr. These have been admirably and finally set out by M. Poincaré. Nor shall I try to refute German propaganda in the United States. All propaganda is a kind of boomerang. The only useful propaganda is that based on facts. A lie uncovered cuts off the retreat of him who first set it going.

Let me then set aside the paraphernalia of modern propaganda, and give you not my opinion, but my experience, of the French attitude. It is a long experience, for I belong to a generation which came of age shortly after the war of 1870. It is an experience wide enough and varied enough to free me from any suspicion of preconceived ideas. I am a countryman by birth, a small artisan by education, and the vicissitudes of life have brought me, heaven knows why, into contact with every class of society in my own country, and in many others where I have represented France as Consul and as Minister. During all this time I necessarily remained a middle-class Parisian whilst I lived in France. My tastes and my habits have now led me to become a small rural proprietor. To be quite frank, I am the Mayor, by election, of a tiny village of vinegrowers in the district of Vouvray, in Touraine, the heart of France.

Though for twenty years it has often been my duty to set forth the official point of view in public, my best claim to represent the attitude of France towards Germany is, perhaps, that I live, in Paris and in the country, in close contact with those small artisans, those small proprietors, those small tradespeople, all extremely individualistic, who are the dominant force in my country.

In Paris I have lived for twenty-two years (except during my absences abroad) in one of the large southern quarters where there is no big business. The economic activity of this quarter is seen in the small workshops, and the small shops, carried on entirely by the family, or a very small number of employees. It is the life of the provinces transplanted to Paris. It is the missing link, that foreigners are all looking for and that so few know how to find, between the capital and the rest of the country. The only point of complete resemblance between Paris and France is in this very great number of practically independent workers. In the world of thought and in the world of work they were the soldiers of all our revolutions in the nineteenth century. They resisted every effort to centralize political authority or economic power. In France, the large stores have not yet killed the small shopkeepers. The large manufacturers have not yet crushed the small employer. Jointstock companies have multiplied and have successively taken charge of all branches of production and commerce. But for all that they have not yet got the upper hand of private enterprise in France. Private enterprise, aware that it is threatened, nevertheless rubs along. One might have thought that soon, in France as in other countrics, there would not be a single individual left who was not the agent or the employee of a big company. Not at all. Shopkeepers and artisans have survived. Their trade associations resist, the domination of the wholesalers, and the competition of their gigantic rivals. Politically they withstand the workers and even the intellectuals. Since the war they have held their heads higher than ever. Even at Paris they have increased rather than diminished in numbers compared with 1913. The war seems to have left many ex-soldiers sick of authority in any shape or form. They prefer the risks of a small business of their own to the higher wages which they could earn in the service of a trust. There are three million men of this type in France, making eight or nine million persons when you count their families. At Paris and in several of the large cities such as Bordeaux, Nantes, or Rouen, they outnumber the workmen employed in the large factories, and they effectively dominate the municipal councils and business.

My village is in Touraine, not the well-fed and scented Touraine of the châteaux, valleys, and villas, the only one known to the tourist. It is a little commune in Upper Touraine between Châteaurenault and Vouvray, on the river la Brenne, which descends from Vendôme to the Loire. Of two hundred and thirty voters there are only three or four who are not proprietors. Except for the châtelain none of these proprietors possesses more than twenty acres, — I am one of them, — and the majority of them have only from two to four acres. This condition obtains in nearly all France. In the middle of this solid mass of peasant owners, the nobles and bourgeois are more or less isolated, without influence on local affairs. These peasants govern themselves. They are not organized into political parties, and, although agricultural interests dominate France, there is as yet no agrarian party in Parliament. But Parliament does not dominate local life. Nine tenths of the municipal assemblies and of the departmental councils are in the hands of the stnall rural owner.

But let us return to my village. All the inhabitants of my village are both farmers and vine-growers. Even the smith and the grocer, the butcher and the baker, possess a small strip of vineyard or of arable land. None of them is really rich, none of them employs other hands than the members of his family, and occasionally one or two day-laborers. But none of them is poor. There are only five or six families with more than four children. The majority, alas, have only two — three at the utmost. About a fifth had bought Russian bonds before 1914. Three quarters have bought French bonds before, during, and since the war.

There has been an enormous intellectual change among them during the last, twenty or thirty years, thanks to the great development of elementary education which is the principal achievement of the Third Republic. Their ways of living are still mean, but they are no longer the ignorant masses described by J. C. Bodley twenty years ago, or the ‘swarming millions embruted by toil, avarice, and superstition,’ whom J. B, Crozier considered thirty years ago as the great obstacle to the political evolution of France. They read much and they think much more. I have lived among the peasants of Norway and I know those of England. I can assure my readers that the peasants of France are to-day, taken as a whole, in process of becoming just as cultivated intellectually, though they live less comfortable lives.

There are about thirty-three thousand little communes of this sort in France. They are inhabited by four million small peasant-proprietors. These, added to the three million artisans and shopkeepers of whom I have already spoken, make about seven million Frenchmen living a life as independent as can be imagined in a world where all men depend on one another. These individualists do not constitute the whole of France, but they are the dominant majority. Nothing can be done without their consent, and nothing can be done against their wishes. They are irresistible because they are indefatigable. They don’t write and they don’t speak in public. They are not organized as a class. The day is coming when they will be welded more firmly together, but they have an instinctive distrust of collective tyrannies, even the tyranny which might result from their own unions. Passive resistance and slow pressure are their weapons. They do not know themselves.

No one has yet really translated the aspirations of this mass of men, for they have not yet emerged into self-consciousness. A hundred years ago they thought only of keeping their land, of acquiring a little more, and of freeing themselves from clerical and military domination. Since then the political and religious tyranny that the average Frenchman feared has receded before his patient resistance. It is he who has made impossible the domination of the three great moral forces which contend for the control of contemporary France — Catholic Clericalism, Internal Militarism, and International Socialism. Each of these forces has contributed more or less usefully, more or less legitimately, to the shaping and to the misshaping of public opinion in France. Each has left its impress on the average Frenchman, but he has gradually eaten into them and slowly transformed them, because they all threatened his independence. If to-morrow he became a socialist in name, it would not mean that socialism had conquered him, but that he had conquered socialism by diluting and dissolving the residue of collectivism in socialism. His destiny is to maintain not so much his political liberty (which after all is only a means), but his economic independence, and his personal liberty, which he silently considers as the best things that life can give. He is not ‘merry and bright.’ Nothing could be duller for the average American than his existence; but he is happy in so far as man can be happy — that is, in proportion to his capacity for realizing his own potentialities.

II

This is the man who is at once the real master and the best servant of France. Twenty times in two thousand years, thrice in a century, German invasions have brought out the most characteristic of his natural instincts. He and his like know German civilization by tradition, and by their own experience. They respect it for its power and for its organizing capacity, but they feel that it is entirely opposed to their own conception of life. I dare not say their ideal, for they make it a point to see things as they are. The average German is quite satisfied to be a part in a whole, to be a serviceable cog in a piece of first-class machinery. The average Frenchman loathes the ‘mécanisation de la vie.’ Between the two there is an abyss.

Ten years ago, the Germans had made such marvelous progress that the wisest prophets predicted the total disappearance of the type of existence and civilization that France represents. A miracle of energy and the help of her allies enabled France not only to resist but to conquer. But the French were decimated and their country was devastated. They thought that the Peace Treaty would give them reparation at once and security for the future. They realize that they were either mistaken or misled. During these four years they have agreed to successive reductions in the payments promised by Germany, and the guaranties of security given by their allies have been whittled away. Out of their own pockets they had undertaken the reconstruction of the regions that Germany had devastated, and not only did they not know whether they would be repaid, but they had a new war in prospect. They faced their ruins and their danger alone.

So they decided last January that they would also act alone. A means of pressure, possibly a means of payment, possibly a guaranty of security, was within their reach — the Ruhr. They seized it. It was a leap in the dark, it is true. No one could say last January whether the occupation of the Ruhr would give France either the security or the reparation which she must have, or die. The very existence of France and of French civilization was as much threatened in January 1923 as in July 1914. We had to act then or never. We had to make a choice — even a blind choice. The choice has been made in face of the opposition of the world.

The question now is what we want to get out of our choice, and what we can get out of it. At the moment when I write it looks as if negotiations might very shortly begin. I am not going to give here a list of the demands of France, but I want to try to explain them.

If the word philosophy were not too grandiloquent when applied to a class which is inscrutable, prosaic, unimaginative and inarticulate, I should say that the key to the French attitude can be found only in the philosophy of those middle classes which I have just described.

Is it necessary for me to say here and now that they are neither militarists nor imperialists? The very notion of all that these two words imply is contrary to their way of looking at life. The greatest misery for a man who is passionately devoted to liberty is not to be a convict but to be a jailer. If France became the jailer of Germany she would be Germany’s prisoner as certainly as if she had been conquered.

When my country folk in Touraine and my neighbors in Montrouge talk about this question with one another, they often make use of such phrases as, ‘Il faut nous protéger sans nous enfoncer.’ ‘ Il faut dévider sans emmêler.’ (‘We must be protected without being paralyzed.’ ‘We must roll the skein of wool into a ball without getting it tangled.’) In other words, they were not altogether comfortable about the occupation of the Ruhr with all its possibilities of entanglement. Their native shrewdness warned them that the operation was not only dangerous but of doubtful profit . But they did not hesitate. A sure instinct told them that it was better to make a blunder than to do nothing at all. Now they are reassured. The Ruhr perhaps won’t give them what they are expecting, but it will give them something which is better than anything else and which they had not ventured to hope for. Germany will make up her mind to pay because France has made up her mind to be paid. The Germans will at last learn that desire for security which we ourselves have felt for so long.

It is true that in itself the Ruhr is an insufficient guaranty either of reparation or security. It is to our advantage to allow the big German industrials to go on working, for otherwise we shall have the population to feed. Yet if we do allow them to go on working we shall not be exercising an irresistible pressure on the magnates who are the real masters of Germany. Hence it would seem that we must exploit the Ruhr on our own account. But the Ruhr can give us only coal and its by-products. Now coal alone even with its by-products is not a paying commodity. The direct financial profits of the occupation are in any case small in comparison with its expenses. It would have been no consolation for the small owners, the small tradespeople, the small artisans of France, even if the occupation of the Ruhr had renewed the prosperity of our large metal industry. They have no more liking for the industrial trusts and the financiers than they have for the priest or for G.H.Q. If they had been asked to risk the lives of their sons in the Ruhr to enrich the Schneiders, the Wendels, and other steel kings, they would have been furious.

But in this respect they were only too soon enlightened. During the first three months of the occupation the French metal industry had to close down 40 of the 116 blast furnaces which were in full swing on the first of January. There are 219 blast furnaces in France, and only 76 were in action at the beginning of April. And so the bonds of ‘La Grosse Métallurgie,’secured on Reparations, fell thirty points. Most of these bonds were held by the class of people of whom I am now speaking. If the French and German metallurgical interests reach an agreement for the exchange of Ruhr coke against Lorraine ore, nobody in France will be slow to approve. Nor can anyone in England or America object: a two-party agreement of this sort cannot involve as dangerous a competition to Anglo-Saxon industry as Germany’s undivided control of both the coke and the ore up to 1918.

Whatever happens, the occupation of the Ruhr is not considered by the average Frenchman as a financial panacea. Nor is it a military and territorial panacea. It was not necessary for us to go to Essen to threaten Essen. Our real line of defense would be this side of the Rhine, if worse came to worst.

III

I say nothing here of the dismemberment of Germany. The average Frenchman does not even think of it. A certain school of specialists and a certain school of publicists may perhaps dream of it and make speeches about it, but dismemberment is a thing which never comes from without. The disruption of the German Empire would certainly be a move toward universal peace, and the historian would see nothing surprising in it. But no Frenchman, town-bred or country-bred, dares to hope that the military spirit of Germany, and with it her moral unity, will disappear. If ever German unity were threatened, for example by a quarrel between the Communists of Saxony and the Royalists of Bavaria, we should take no part for or against. It would be quite enough for us if the administrative and military hegemony of Prussia wore weakened. We know that unfortunately it is East Prussia, Slav in origin, which has stamped its military character on the whole of Germany, and we should be delighted if the Rhenish Provinces rid themselves of this domination ; but that is their own affair.

We have gone into the Ruhr, not to secure any immediate and definite result, but in order to obtain reparation and security. What the middle classes in France repudiate most warmly is the charge that we are in process of realizing an historical dream — the military domination of Europe. We desire no annexation, and it would be madness if we did. We do not even desire the disguised annexation of a Rhineland state, subject to the exclusive influence of France and Belgium. A Rhineland Republic, thus created, would inevitably gravitate back to Germany.

It is not a question of France’s choosing between reparation and security — she wants both. She wants to be paid; because if Germany does not repay the enormous sums which we have had to spend, we are doomed to internal bankruptcy and the destruction of the class which, at the present moment, is the most numerous and the most happy within our borders. Germany has already turned itself into an immense factory; France would be condemned to do the like. Our social organization would have to be transformed into an intolerable sweatingsystem. The average Frenchman is perhaps mistaken; he believes that his social system is the nearest approach to the ideal of every Government — the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Does the economic and intellectual civilization for which France stands deserve to disappear? Is it not on the contrary for the good of the world that it should continue?

Make no mistake. If we do not recover at any rate our war damages, it is the social economy of us French which will collapse. We have no means of recovery. It would be the collapse of all that is most characteristic and most precious in our civilization.

If we are paid without being effectively and finally protected against a future war, in ten or twenty years America and the world will have to recommence the same struggle as in 1914-18. Their efforts will then be in vain. Germany is in no need of recovery; her industry is intact; the collapse of the mark does not mean the collapse of German production. There is suffering among the poor in Germany; but there are no ruins. The collapse of the mark has increased the industrial power of Germany, that is to say the power of the German nation for war. Signs are not lacking to show that in 1919 industrial Germany tried to take her revenge in the sphere of industry for the military and political defeat of 1918. Thanks to the fall of the mark, and at the expense of her own working-classes, Germany reckoned on being able to sell her products throughout the world at prices defying any possible competition, and thus on letting loose everywhere unemployment and revolution. The reason that she did not succeed is that the greed of her business-men surpassed the calculations of her manufacturers. They wanted to profiteer, and as a result — Germany was beaten in the second war she let loose.

But let us look further ahead. Between the years 1935 and 1940, France, already behindhand in population, will be short of all the children who ought to have been born between 1915 and 1920. She will have only half the young soldiers which she had in 1914. This half will not be equal to one fifth of the generation which Germany can then put in the field. The people of forty to fifty years of age in France will be a weakened generation, for lack of all the men who disappeared at twenty years of age on the battlefields, between 1914 and 1918. There again, we have no power of recovery and resistance. But look at the case of Germany; even after the loss of the territory which the Treaty of Versailles has taken from her, she will not only have made up her population but will have very substantially increased it. Against our weakened resistance, her power of offense will be more than doubled. We shall be at her mercy if we have not taken precautions beforehand. If America does not wish to aid us, can she blame us?

IV

I know the objection which you make to this. You say, ‘If you will not have more children, you cannot escape your fate.’ You are right. But what is true is not always just. I regret our low birthrate. It is the result of looking too far ahead, of a rather mean economy, of a false idea of family wellbeing, and, finally, of the right to make testamentary dispositions. On the other hand, the comparative sterility of France results from a social system which is based upon independent small ownerships. It has saved us from one form of social misery. It has preserved us from the scourge and the haunting fear of unemployment which besets all industrialized nations. Ask us to abandon our system if you like; if you don’t, you cannot, on that ground, refuse to share our mortal uneasiness before the future.

One word more. Is it rash to claim that the high birthrate of a people depends largely on freedom from anxiety, confidence in the future, and territorial security; In this respect, France is in a tragic dilemma. Prolific families would be necessary to defend her and to exploit her resources; but three invasions in a hundred years have made every generation of Frenchmen afraid of massacre, ruin, and tyranny; and this is not favorable to the begetting of children. For the first time for a hundred years, France has had a reasonable chance of escaping from this nightmare, and that without transferring the nightmare to another nation. But her chance will be irrevocably lost if she does not obtain the territorial and financial security which is the sole object of our occupation of the Rhine and of the Ruhr. You cannot haggle with us about our security against Germany and, at the same time, blame us for our sterility. These are a few of the many unspoken reflections which come to millions of French fathers and mothers as they toil in the fields or the workshops.

When they compare the attitude of France in 1870 with the mixture of arrogance and whining which the Germans have offered to us for the last five years, they wonder with a smile which of the two nations is virile and which is hysterical.

When they examine the degree of intelligent foresight and reckless gambling shown by the two countries, they say that, after all, political courage and wisdom are not the monopoly of any one people. And then they return to the immediate problem of reparation and the Ruhr.

My compatriots — the small proprietors, the small artisans, and the small tradespeople—have neither the time nor the means to read everything that has been published on this question. Besides I do not know any class of people that is more mistrustful of printed ‘Revelation.’ It is true that nearly the whole Press tells them every morning pretty much the same thing; but their decisive impression, I mean the impression which governs their vote, their choice, and their action, does not come from any book or paper. It comes from reality, from life, from the family, from conversation, and from men. It must be remembered that for three generations they have been living with their eyes fixed on Germany, and three of every four of them have seen the Germans at work in France during war. The average Frenchman knows what he is talking about when he talks about reparation.

He knows that, in spite of her lamentations, Germany can pay and pay a great deal. The London Reparations Programme fixed at 150 million sterling the annual sum to be paid by Germany. Everybody, even the English professors, recognizes now that ‘for a country that spends on armaments only a fraction of the sums spent by countries with a smaller population and which is paying practically nothing on its home debt, the provision of 150 million sterling in the form of export surplus to be obtained by means of taxation, seems by no means impossible. ... It would not even be difficult were only the present automatic dwindling of Germany’s liquid resources stopped by means of currency stabilization.’ ¹ This stabilization is partly accomplished as I write. Nothing will get it out of the heads of the French electorate that Germany, if she wishes, can meet the infinitely reduced financial obligations with which the London Agreement left her. It is the will-to-pay which the occupation of the Ruhr must sooner or later bring out in unoccupied Germany. Whatever be the majority in the next French Parliament, whether it be moderate, radical, or even socialist, that Parliament will take exactly the same view on this point as the present Parliament.

If England should ask us to repay her only what she herself repays to the United States, the German annuity of 150 million sterling (3,000,000,000 gold marks) for 30 to 35 years could secure a world loan, pay the German debt to France, and finally enable France to wipe out her own debt to America. Whatever happens it is impossible to conceive that we should give up our claim to get the whole of what we have spent and have still to spend on reparation. The occupation of the Ruhr is not popular, but now that it is a fait accompli, evacuation without payment would be so unpopular that no Government will risk it. So far as the financial aspect of the question is concerned, this is the line which the public opinion of France will insist on her spokesmen taking.

As regards our future security I have heard vine-growers in the valley of the Loire say, ‘ They can do what they like in the rest of the world (by ‘they,’ they mean the French Government and the allies of France), but if they do not let down a steel fire-proof curtain on the Rhineland between Germany and us we are done for in ten years; only, the whole world will blow up after us.’ They have a vague idea that the Rhineland railways might be internationalized, that an international commission of control might ensure the delimitation of the Rhineland, that an international police force might be put at the disposal of this commission and that perhaps the whole of the organization might be entrusted to the League of Nations. But they have no very great faith in this fragile and complicated mechanism. They have the same respect and admiration for the League of Nations as for an expensive orchestra. They do not yet appreciate or understand its practical possibilities.

In any case they will leave the Ruhr only if they are paid. They will leave the Rhine only if they are paid and made secure — or driven out. At this thought they bow their heads and set their teeth as they did before Verdun. But if the Germans themselves offered the money and security that France desires, France would be only too happy to come to a lasting and final agreement with them.

V

I have tried to explain from the point of view of the average citizen the essence of the French attitude on reparation and I have outlined certain of its applications. Historians and politicians have a way of creating phantoms, and perhaps I have fallen into this error myself. We hear of democracy, imperialism, and socialism, as if they were real living beings. We talk of France, Germany, America, as if their millions of citizens had all a single thought and a single will. You can no more reduce ‘middle-class France’ to a unit than you can ‘the French nation.’ You may then answer all my arguments by saying that class and country are mere generalizations and a fiction of thought.

I agree. But there is an error still more common than this confusion between reality and the verbal expression of reality — it is the confusion between the two sorts of reality which exist side by side in every country and in every class. The word reality is often used to describe the indescribable quality, the inimitable and incommunicable something which makes the existence of one community totally different from the existence of another. It is just this which cannot be analyzed. I have made no attempt to conceal the fact that I cannot translate exactly the ‘aspect’ of Europe and the ‘form’ of the reparation question as they appear to the most numerous class in France. For this class there is no aspect and there is no form in this matter. It is a matter which they are living. They see it from within, with the invisible and piercing eyes of their innermost being. For them there is a ‘consciousness’ of reparation, a ‘consciousness’ of security; there is no problem. The French middle class have had enough of suffering and of fears for their own existence. Not so long ago their despair was deep enough, and in recent days their hopes were high enough, to justify them in thinking that on a question of this sort they have the right even to make mistakes. From the point of view of reason they may be wrong; from the point of view of life they know that they are absolutely right. Anglo-Saxons sometimes make it a reproach against French mentality that it works only by deduction. Here is a case where we are trusting simply to instinct.

These people are at the present moment the protestants of the economic world, the rebels of individual life against universal mechanization — the true and perhaps the only guardians of the principles of the English Revolution, of the American Revolution, of the French Revolution, against the modern tyranny of super-organization from above, or from below, which Germany represents. If they do not succeed in getting paid and in getting protected within ten years from now, their civilization is doomed. The world will sink one step lower toward slavery under the industrial, political, and military, machine which Germany adores. In a large measure America can help us to dispel this nightmare. If she will not help us, at any rate let her not stab us in the back.