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CHAPTER XII.
THE FRENCH LABORERS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Each of the many French revolutions was occasioned by destitution almost amounting to famine among the laboring classes. Each was the insurrection of labor against capital. But until the revolution of 1848, the revolutionists were unconscious alike of their motives and their objects. They believed, till then, that political changes would remedy the evils which oppressed them. After the revolution of 1830, philosophers and statesmen, seeing the inadequacy of change of dynasty or of political policy, to alleviate the distresses of the great working classes, began to search deeper for the causes of social embarrassment. Suddenly the discovery was made, not only in France, but throughout Western Europe, that the disease was social, not political. That it was owing to the too unequal distribution of capital, and to its exploitation of labor. The ablest minds saw, as well in England as in France, that in transferring the reins of government from the hands of hereditary royalty and nobility, to those of the capitalist class, that the people had exchanged a few masters for thousands of extortioners. Never did so vast a moral, intellectual and social movement arise so suddenly, and spread so rapidly. The thing became the rage and fashion. Even in America, our Northern folks affected a disease, which they did not feel, just as Alexander's courtiers aped his wry neck; and anti-rentism and land monopoly became the constant theme of conversation, lectures, speeches, books and essays. In France and in England, prior to 1830, there had been a few Socialists, such as Fourier and St. Simon, Owen and Fanny Wright – but they were little heeded, and generally considered about half crazy. Immediately thereafter, by far the greater portion of the literary mind of Europe imbibed, in whole or in part, the doctrines of these early Socialists. The infection soon reached the lower classes, and occasioned revolution, intended to be social as well as political, throughout Western Europe. The Provisional Government in France, which immediately succeeded to the expulsion of Louis Philippe, was composed entirely of Socialists, and its programme and attempted measures were thoroughly socialistic.

The subject of the condition of the laboring classes in Europe, and especially in France, was handled with an accuracy of detail and a breadth of scientific expression in a review of our own work in the Literary Messenger of March, 1855, of which we are incapable. The author, Professor H. of Virginia, is our corresponding acquaintance only. Informed by letter that he would review us, and that he concurred in the general truth of our theory, we suggested to him in reply, that he should, from his vast stores of learning, strengthen our main positions. He thought the suggestion a good one, and fulfilled our request, with an ability and learning, that no other man, on so short a notice, could have done. As we have prompted, if not caused his toil, we make no apology for appropriating so much of his review as seems to be a reply to our suggestion:

From the principles as laid down in theory and exemplified in practice, we proceed to the effects. That religion has been undermined, morals contaminated, crime increased, misery extended, deepened and multiplied, want and starvation augmented, society agitated, and orderly government endangered by the progress of the so-called prosperity of the free labor system, is evident, without further proof, to any one who reads contemporary literature, who pays attention to the statements of newspapers, and of Poor Law Reports, who notes the cases brought before the police or criminal courts, or is cognizant from any source of information, of the actual condition of the multitude and of the poor in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Prussia, and parts of Switzerland, and in New England and the Northern States. The connection of the results with the causes, is ably traced by Mr. Fitzhugh, but not with sufficient care, minuteness and precision; and the actual character and enormity of the results is exhibited by him, and by an indefinite array of the most various and unexceptionable testimony. The History of the Working Classes, by Robert du Var, which we have joined with the Sociology for the South, as the text for the present observations, is full of evidence to this effect with regard to France; and for the other countries specified, ample testimony may be easily obtained. The Boston papers will suffice to illustrate the wretchedness of the laboring classes in New England: the New York Herald and Tribune, the works of Stephen Pearl Andrews, and of Greeley himself, will render the same service for the other Northern States: Alton Locke, Mary Barton, Mayhew's London Labor and the London Poor, the debates in Parliament, the Reports of the Poor Law Commissioners, and the English Reviews, will amply illustrate the condition of Great Britain and Ireland; and for Germany, reference may be made to Hacklander's Europarsches Sclavenleben, a work which has followed the example of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and portrayed the condition of the inferior classes in Europe, as a much more legitimate object of European sympathy and consideration than American Slavery. Where the evidence is so abundant and voluminous, selection would be as unnecessary as it would be tedious. It is within the reach of every one who desires to consult it; and we need not load our pages with extracts to prove what has been frequently and sufficiently proved before, and what is so notoriously true as to be undeniable. A few quotations to illustrate the condition of free labor societies we may indeed quote at a later period, in connection with a different division of the argument; but they are wholly unnecessary to confirm the allegation of the wretchedness and depravity which are consuming the vitals of the principal free societies of the Nineteenth Century. They are rendered still more unnecessary by the fact that the acceptability of Socialism in all of those communities, betrays the extent of both the misery and the social disease to be cured; and the confession of the multitude of recent writers on social topics, admits not merely the evils which we have specified, and their dependence on the theory and practice of free societies, but acknowledges also the truth of the general conclusion, that the free societies enumerated have unquestionably failed, they have not produced the permanent or general blessings anticipated from them, they have produced overwhelming social disaster, multiplied indefinitely the woes and the vices of the poor, threatened all society and government and national existence in those communities, and announced a future so dark that little more than its gloom and spectral shapes can be distinctly recognized.

We regard Mr. Fitzhugh's employment of these admissions by European writers and Northern reformers, as constituting the most important position of his argument, and the most characteristic novelty in his defence of the South. The testimonies which he adduces are very strong and pointed, but they may be easily multiplied, and will gain an accession of strength from such multiplications. For years we have carefully collected similar acknowledgments from foreign writers, and cheerfully contribute them to the cause of the South, and the fortification of Mr. Fitzhugh's position. And let it be remembered, that neither in the Sociology for the South, nor in the quotations which will be shortly introduced here, is the sole or principal obligation due to Chartists, Socialists, Communists, or Agrarians of any sort. From such authors some admissions have been received, but the chief contributions are derived from those who have been the most strenuous supporters of past social arrangements, and who, notwithstanding a great diversity of views, abilities, studies, and opportunities of knowledge, still represent the sober conservative sense of their respective communities. We regret that Mr. Fitzhugh should have extended so much countenance to the Socialists, and should have partially identified Socialism and Slavery, but the strongest part of his testimonies to the failure of free societies, is derived from other declarations than theirs, and we shall imitate his example.

We begin, however, with a Socialist, but almost the only one whom we shall summon to the stand:

"The French Revolution was an abortion. The trading classes (la bourgeoisie) organized themselves in the name of capital, and, instead of becoming a man, the serf became a prolétaire. What then was his situation? The most painful of all, the most intolerable which can be conceived. Like all the prolétaires, the trading classes had shouted: 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' The result has been that every thing which was prolétaire – that is to say, all those who have no capital, groan under the most cruel usage (exploitation.) They cannot be freemen, nor brothers, nor equals. Not free, because their daily bread depends on a thousand accidents produced and engendered by the competition of capitalists among themselves; not brothers, because, with hearts crushed and lacerated by the evils which overwhelm them, they cannot love those whose creed is so fatal to them; not equals, because capital being the supreme law, it is only through it that any participation or concurrence in social power is possible."⁹

An apology is due for not attempting to translate the term prolétaires in the above passage, but every one familiar with the condition of modern free societies, is aware that it is absolutely untranslateable. It is an indispensable word in modern times, and the impossibility of avoiding its use is a stronger proof of the failure of free societies, than the invention of the phrase Sociology, which Mr. Fitzhugh regards in this light. It ought to be unhesitatingly introduced into the English language; it can boast of a very respectable Latin descent; it occurs in the XII Tables, and originally signified a person of the lowest class, too poor to pay taxes, and unable to serve the State otherwise than by raising children and thus increasing the population¹⁰– a very doubtful service in modern Europe.

We return to Mr. Robert du Var:

"It must be remarked, that what is called pauperism, this sore, this ulcer, which infests, and more and more consumes the body social, could not exist in the same degree amongst the nations of antiquity. It is a phenomenon which could only arise as the consequence of the transformation of slavery into serfdom, and of serfdom into free labor (prolétariat.) * * * In antiquity, every one, whether free or not, citizen or slave, was always connected with some centre which ensured at least his material support."¹¹

"As a result of the individual liberty, independent of any central power, proclaimed by Christianity, favored and developed by the instincts of the Northern barbarians, legitimated and transformed into a social doctrine by the institution of Communes, was formed and agglomerated throughout Europe an innumerable population, having no material connection with the regular society, and having for itself nothing but the most naked liberty, that is to say, misery, poverty, isolation. Thence issued the poor, the beggars, the thieves – in one word, parias of every description, with whom society was compelled to compound, willingly or reluctantly, by the foundation of establishments intended to palliate the bleeding wound of the pauperism which had been engendered by liberty."¹²

"From whatever point the modern system is regarded, it seems impossible not to recognize that the Politico-economical rule of free competition is the negation, as its name indicates, of all ties and communion of interests between the members of society. Free competition is a free field open to every individual, provided or not with the elements necessary and indispensable to its manifestations; free competition, in a word, is liberty, but liberty without other rule than the material and moral force, of which each one may be able to dispose in the presence of the thousand causes which produce a difference in the position of individuals."¹³

"But, we say that a system which thus arms, morally, the poor against each other, is a barbarous system, and contrary to civilization: it is barbarous, inasmuch as it developes all the bad tendencies of the human heart: it is contrary to civilization, because, instead of facilitating harmonious relations among men, it inclines them to mutual repulsion and hostility."¹⁴

This is a sufficient sample of M. Robert du Var's testimony. The greater part of his work is to the same effect: and there is a singular accordance between his censures of Political Economy,¹⁵ and those uttered by Mr. Fitzhugh. They merit especial attention.

We will cite another Socialist, M. Vidal:

"The ox, the horse, the hog eat according to their hunger: their desires are even anticipated: they have their subsistence assured. It is the same thing in the case of the slave. For the ox, the horse, the hog, the slave, belong to a master, and their loss is the loss of the owner: res perit domino, says the Digest. But with the hired laborer it is different! He belongs to himself.

His death is the loss of his family whom he maintained, and who will no longer find the means of living. What matter to an employer is the death of a hired laborer? Are there not every where millions of arms always ready to offer themselves at reduced wages?"¹⁶

Let us turn to evidence of a different character. Here is Sir Robert Peel's testimony to the condition of Ireland before 1844, previous to the potato-rot and the famine:

"It may be assured that the fourth class of houses, (according to the census,) are generally unfit for human habitation; and yet it would appear that in the best circumstanced county, in this respect, the county of Down, 24.7 per cent., or one-fourth of the population, live in houses of this class: while in Kerry, the population is 66.7 per cent., or about two-thirds of the whole; and, taking the average of the whole population of Ireland, as given by the census commissioner, we find that in the rural districts about 43 per cent. of the families, and in the civic districts, about 36 per cent. inhabit houses of the fourth class. * * *

"The lowest, or fourth class, remember, comprises all mud cabins, having but one room."¹⁷

Mr. Kay, from whom the foregoing remarks of Sir Robert Peel are quoted, thus comments upon a murder committed in open day in Ireland. The two murderers had escaped:

"Why," he asks, "were not these men apprehended? Because of the rottenness that there is in the state of society in these districts; because of the sympathy which there is on the part of the great bulk of the population with those who, by these dreadful acts of vengeance, are supposed to be the conservators of the rights of the tenant, and supposed to give him that protection which imperial legislation has denied. The first thing that ever called my attention to the condition of Ireland, was the reading an account of one of these outrages. I thought of it for a moment, but the truth struck me at once: and all I have seen since confirms it. When law refuses its duty – when government denies the right of a people – when competition is so fierce for the little land, which the monopolists grant to cultivation in Ireland – when, in fact, for a bare potato, millions are scrambling, these people are driven back from law and from the usages of civilization to that which is termed the law of nature, and, if not of the strongest, the law of the vindictive; and in this case the people of Ireland believe, to my certain knowledge, that it is only by these acts of vengeance, periodically committed, that they can hold in suspense the arm of the proprietor and the agent, who, in too many cases, if he dared, would exterminate them."¹⁸

A pretty result, this, for free labor and free competition, and abolitionism, to have arrived at. But Ireland was always esteemed un mauvais sujet. Let us cross St. George's Channel:

"The English peasant is thus deprived of almost every motive to practice economy, and self-denial, beyond what suffices to provide his family with food and clothing. Once a peasant in England, and a man cannot hope that he himself, or his children, will ever be anything better, than a mere laborer for weekly hire.

"This unhappy feature of an English peasant's life was most powerfully, and only too justly depicted in those articles of 'The Times,' to which I have referred above. It was there shown that during the last half century, every thing has been done to deprive the peasant of any interest in the preservation of public order; of any wish to maintain the existing constitution of society; of all hope of raising himself in the world, or of improving his condition of life; of all attachment to his country; of all feelings of there really existing any community of interest between himself and the higher ranks of society; and of all consciousness that he has anything to lose by political changes; and that every thing has been done to render him dissatisfied with his condition, envious of the richer classes, and discontented with the existing order of things."¹⁹

This, too, is a pretty picture, which is not relieved by the further information that,

"In the year 1770, there were, it is said, in England alone, 250,000 freehold estates in the hands of 250,000 different families. In the year 1815, at the close of the revolutionary war, the whole of the lands of England were concentrated in the hands of only 32,000 proprietors."²⁰

"What is the result? The labor market in the manufacturing towns is constantly overstocked; the laborers and shopkeepers find new and eager competitors constantly added to the list; competition in the towns is rendered unnaturally intense; profits and wages are both unnaturally reduced; the town work-houses and the town gaols are crowded with inmates; the inhabitants are overburthened with rates; and the towns swarm with paupers and misery.

"I know not what others may think, but to me it is a sad and grievous spectacle, to see the enormous amount of vice and degraded misery which our towns exhibit, and then to think, that we are doing all we can to foster and stimulate the growth and extension of this state of things, by that system of laws, which drives so many of the peasants of both England and Ireland to the towns, and increases the already vast mass of misery by so doing.

"I speak with deliberation, when I say, that I know of no spectacle so degraded, and if I may be allowed to use a strong word, so horrible, as the back streets and suburbs of English and Irish towns, with their filthy inhabitants; with their crowds of half-clad, filthy, and degraded children, playing in the dirty kennels; with their numerous gin-palaces, filled with people, whose hands and faces show how their flesh is, so to speak, impregnated with spirituous liquors – the only solaces, poor creatures, that they have! – and with poor young girls, whom a want of religious training in their infancy, and misery, has driven to the most degraded and pitiful of all pursuits."²¹

"Of 1600, [pauper children in London,] who were examined, 162 confessed that they had been in prison, not merely once, nor even twice, but some of them several times; 116 had run away from their homes; 170 slept in the "lodging-houses;" 253 had lived altogether by beggary; 216 had neither shoes nor stockings; 280 had no hat or cap, or covering for the head; 101 had no linen; 349 had never slept in a bed; many had no recollection of ever having been in a bed; 68 were the children of convicts."²²

"The further we examine, the more painful, disgusting and incredible does the tale become.

"We see on every hand stately palaces, to which no country in the world offers any parallel. The houses of our rich are more gorgeous and more luxurious than those of any other land. Every clime is ransacked to adorn or furnish them. The soft carpets, the heavy rich curtains, the luxuriously easy couches, the beds of down, the services of plate, the numerous servants, the splendid equipages, and all the expensive objects of literature, science, and the arts, which crowd the palaces of England, form but items in an ensemble of refinement and magnificence, which was never imagined or approached, in all the splendor of the ancient empires.

"But look beneath all this display and luxury, and what do we see there? A pauperized and suffering people.

"To maintain a show, we have degraded the masses, until we have created an evil so vast, that we now despair of ever finding a remedy."²³

We may now dismiss Mr. Kay – this testimony is sufficiently direct and sufficiently ample: and yet it would have been easy to have introduced many more and stronger statements made by him, which have been omitted because they were loo long to be quoted. Mr. Kay is neither Chartist nor Socialist. He is a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, a Barrister-at-law, and has traveled over Europe for eight years, under an appointment from the Senate of the University of Cambridge, as Traveling Bachelor of the University, commissioned "to travel through Western Europe in order to examine the social condition of the poorer classes of the different countries."²⁴ The evidence of such a man should be authoritative, but we will continue our quotations:

"It is undeniable that morality has declined in our days with the progress of knowledge."²⁵

"One word more, and we have done. On many questions of practical duty, men are now affecting to be wiser and better than the Bible. Plans of social progress and improvement are rife, that have an air of transcendental refinement about them, unknown to the homely morality of the Word of God. We are becoming too sentimental to endure that even the murderer shall be put to death. And now we are for bettering God's ordinance of marriage itself; and we see a fine, romantic, tender charm in an alliance of brothers and sisters, on which God has stamped his curse. What may such things betoken? Are they ominous of such unbridled lawlessness and lust as marked the days before the Flood? Are they signs of the days not unlike these that are to precede the coming of the Son of Man?"²⁶

"The task of restoring health and soundness to a society so fearfully diseased as ours unquestionably is, is on all hands acknowledged to be at once the noblest and the most imperative to which citizens or statesmen can now direct their energies."²⁷

"Society, such as it now is in England, will not continue to endure, &c."²⁸

"The last battle of civilization is the severest: the last problem the knottiest to solve. Out of all the multitudinous ingredients and influences of the past; out of the conquest of nature, and the victory of freedom; out of the blending and intermixture of all previous forms of polity and modifications of humanity, has arisen a complex order of society, of which the disorders and anomalies are as complex as its own structure. We are now summoned to the combat, not with material difficulties, nor yet with oppressors nor with priests, but with an imperfect and diseased condition of that social world of which we form a part; with pains and evils appalling in their magnitude, baffling in their subtlety, perplexing in their complication, and demanding far more clear insight and unerring judgment, than even purity of purpose, or commanding energy of will. This conflict may be said to date from the first French Revolution; and it has been increasing in intensity ever since, till it has reached to a vividness and solemnity of interest, which surpasses and overshadows the attractions of all other topics, &c. &c."²⁹

"England's rapidly accelerating decline is a very remarkable and mournful phenomenon; it is a mortal sickness for which there is no remedy. I liken the English of the present day to the Romans of the third century after Christ."³⁰

The analogy might be extended to nearly all of modern civilization.

"Tremendous catastrophes have come to pass, and there is no resistance; not a semblance of great men, no joy or enthusiasm, no hopes for the future, except that the time will one day come, when by means of mutual instruction every peasant boy shall be able to read. The truth of the thing is the unveiled destitution of the populace, who are resolved to bear it no longer, and this again paves the way for a revision of property; which is not, indeed, something new under the sun, but has been unheard of for centuries past, and even now seems quite inconceivable to our politicians, who have set property, in the place of God, in the Holiest of Holies, &c., &c."³¹

We cannot venture to extend our extracts, though we have the materials before us to increase them ten – nay, twenty-fold. We contribute these merely as a confirmation of Mr. Fitzhugh's position, that, really and confessedly, Free Society has proved a calamitous and irremediable failure in the principal communities of Christendom.