French & English

One of the most prevalent popular errors, for it is prevalent both in France and England, is the belief that the French are the more sociable people of the two. The truth is quite the contrary; the English are much more sociable than the French; the English associate together much more readily for purposes of business, of culture, and of pleasure; the force of fellowship is greater in England, and so is the feeling of subordination towards leaders.

The error seems to have taken its origin in the outwardly repellent manners of the English towards persons whom they do not know. They look with suspicion on new or accidental acquaintances; they hate to be intruded upon, and they have an undefined dread of having acquaintances forced upon them who may be a little inferior in rank. But towards all whom they consider safe, that is, well bred and unobtrusive, and belonging to their own class, they exhibit a degree of sociability which far exceeds the sociability of the French.

The English very rarely have the temper that can amuse itself with a little unrestrained intercourse of an accidental kind. Novelists and philosophers have that kind of openness of interest, but they are a small minority. It is much more common amongst the French. The ordinary Frenchman amuses himself with studying human nature, and likes a conversation with a temporary acquaintance. It serves to pass the time better, he thinks, than “putting his nose into a book.” Most of what the French know they have got by conversation, and so far as readiness to talk is concerned they are sociable. But with all his apparent openness and frankness the Frenchman has his own reserve too, and fences his life round in his own way. People say that “the Englishman’s house is his castle;” if so, the Frenchman’s house may be described as his armoured turret. “On ne donne pas la clef de sa maison” is not an English expression, and it means more than the material key.

A Parisian invites you to dinner, and will probably take you to an expensive restaurant; a Londoner will offer his roast-beef in his own house. The separation of the sexes is much greater in France than in England. You may know a great number of married Frenchmen and have a very slight acquaintance with their wives, perhaps not enough to recognise them in the street. Nay, you may even habitually visit Frenchmen in their own private apartments without ever seeing their wives and daughters at all. Frenchwomen (I do not mean in Paris, but in the provinces) often live in something like oriental seclusion, but beyond this there is in the feminine mind an extreme tenacity about real or imaginary rank. The husband may have intimate friends, whom he respects for their character or admires for their talents, whilst his wife rejects them because they have not the particule, or because their grandfathers have been in trade. We know that character, talent, culture, count for nothing whatever in the aristocratic estimate,[84] and we must remember that in France the spirit of aristocracy, where it exists, is extremely pure, and does not allow itself to be seduced from its own principles either by merit or wealth, nor even by such offices and honours as a republic can confer. It is not exactly convenient for me to give special instances, because these pages may be translated and the cases recognised, but I will say, speaking generally and without special application, that if M. de B. is the intimate friend of M. C., and if the two call each other Jules and Jacques, it does not at all follow that Madame de B. will recognise Madame C., or allow their children to associate.

There is really very little necessity for this kind of morgue in France, as the French are not pushing, and care very little about distinguishing themselves by having fine acquaintances. It might be more necessary in England, where people are proud to know a lord, yet in England I have not observed that extreme difference between the sexes which certainly exists in France. I should say that in England, as a rule, a man and his wife, in whatever rank, will either repel you or accept you together. You would hardly, in England, be on terms of affectionate friendship with a man, and on terms of the most formal and distant acquaintanceship with his wife—acquaintanceship remaining equally formal, equally distant, for an unlimited number of years.

This distance between the sexes does not diminish in provincial France. I am not speaking of the great cities like Lyons and Marseilles, which may have something of Parisian openness and ease, but of the country and especially of the aristocratic parts of it. I should say that if there is any perceptible change it is rather towards a still wider separation of the sexes. The French have a very keen sense, perhaps an exaggerated sense, of what is feminine and what is unfeminine. Englishmen of the last generation were French in their feelings about this; they would have considered it unfeminine for a woman to make political speeches, to deliver sermons, to be a leader in the Salvation Army, and to press for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. They would even have thought it unfeminine to want a grand classical and mathematical education. All that feeling of objection to the “unfeminine” is essentially French, and it remains in France whilst in England it is passing away. I remember talking to some French people about George Eliot’s extensive education. It did not exalt her in their eyes, but the contrary; they thought it unfeminine. There is a partial reaction against this opinion in France, of which one symptom is the establishment of lycées for girls; but it is only one party, and but a section of that party, which advocates this, and the real object is not so much to educate girls as to deliver them from clerical domination. All the tendencies of modern amusements and occupations separate men and women in France. As examples I may mention the increase of smoking and gambling, and the decline of conversation and dancing. The increase of smoking has the effect of leaving men together after dinner “to smoke a cigarette.” In former times they went to the drawing-room with the ladies, and looked upon the English as boors for doing otherwise. Now, under pretext of a cigarette, Frenchmen will remain away from ladies almost the whole evening. The increase of gambling makes the card-table more interesting than feminine small talk. Young Frenchmen are now becoming too old, too blasés, to enjoy dancing, which is one of the pleasures of healthy and natural youth. As to conversation, it is difficult to maintain it with ladies in a country where they have such a small share in the political and religious opinions of men, and where literature has little interest for either. In Paris there are the theatres, and the Salon whilst it is open. Perhaps the best subject in common between men and women in modern France is business, for which the women often have a natural aptitude.

The great want in French provincial life is amusement of a cheap and innocent kind, that might bring people together. The men have their cafés, but they are only frequented by one sex, and not universally by that. The clergy, of course, avoid them, and so do the gentry who pretend to some degree of rank. They are frequented by the middle, including the professional, classes; and the very existence of cafés is evidence of the small amount of intercourse going on in private houses. They are at the same time an effect and a cause of the separation of the sexes. So far as I know, the upper classes are more sociable in the sense of having more intercourse amongst themselves than the middle, but they are exclusive, and even amongst the richer nobles I doubt if there is as much hospitality as in England.

An idea is prevalent in England that Frenchwomen are constantly going to balls and theatres. In Paris, no doubt, rich women have these amusements, but in the provinces, where most French people live, there is very little of them. The provincial town that is best known to me is situated in an aristocratic neighbourhood, and although the theatre is very pretty and very well kept, the gentry will not patronise it at all, and are never to be seen there. Even the middle classes are by no means regular in their attendance, for the actors often play to empty benches. There are never any public balls, and those in private houses are very rare. The only public entertainments patronised in any way by the upper classes are the charity concerts, which occur perhaps twice in three years.

The English institution of lunch, to which any friend may come uninvited, is a great practical help to social intercourse in the country. It is pleasant from the absence of state and pretension, both in host and guest, and it gives a convenient excuse for paying a long call in the middle of the day. There is nothing answering to it in France. You must be very intimate indeed with a French family before you could venture to “demander à déjeuner;” in fact, that is hardly possible without relationship. It is astonishing, to an Englishman, how very much of French social intercourse is absolutely limited to the formal call between three and six in the afternoon. People go on calling upon each other in that way for all their lives without an invitation on either side.

Another great difference between France and England concerns invitations to sleep. In England, all your friends’ houses are open to you. It would not occur to an Englishman to go to the hotel in a town where he had intimate friends. In France the narrowness of town lodgings acts as an effectual preventive to this kind of hospitality, except amongst the very rich, and so the habit of it is lost. This is one of those small matters which have great consequences. The most unrestrained social intercourse in England takes place when guests are staying in a house, and the most valuable moments for the interchange of masculine confidences occur very late at night.

I have said elsewhere that the increase of luxury in France acts as a restraint upon hospitality. People shrink from the disturbance, the trouble, and the expense of the state dinner, and so they end by giving no dinners at all. In former times hospitality was more a thing of the heart than of the purse, more of gaiety than ceremony, and was so common as to be a weekly, and in some houses almost a daily habit. Now it is a solemn function occurring at rare intervals.

My attention has been drawn by the French themselves to the decline of hospitality amongst the peasantry. I believe that this varies greatly in different parts of France. So far as I have been able to observe, the peasants never invite each other except to marriage-feasts, and then their hospitality is excessive and extravagant. In my neighbourhood, not only do the peasants abstain from invitations, they do not even meet for an evening’s chat in each other’s houses. The farm-houses may be a mile from each other by measurement; socially, they are a hundred miles apart.

The club is, in a certain sense, a more sociable institution in France than in England. It exists in France for conversation and gambling, in England for the individual convenience of the members who may want a rest in an easy-chair with a newspaper or a review, or who desire a convenient place for dining in a kind of semi-privacy. The purpose of the English club is answered in some degree by the cafés and restaurants in France. They have no privacy, but they are to be found everywhere. The difference of title between “club” and “cercle” is an indication in itself. “Club” implies an association to meet common expenses for individual convenience, cercle is a circle of talkers.

The effects of religious and political bigotry in restricting social intercourse are lamentable enough in both countries, and especially because the more intercourse is needed the less it is likely to take place. Real toleration of differences in opinion is possible only for a few. It comes from largeness of mind, but there are few large minds. It is dictated by the highest reason, but few people are reasonable. The ordinary and practical social solution of the difficulty is to break off intercourse when differences of opinion manifest themselves. In this way it comes to pass, almost involuntarily, and as if by the operation of a natural law, that people who visit together have usually the same political and religious opinions, or, at least, profess them, which is equally conducive to harmony. And the few who have true liberality of sentiment, and could bear with the gentle and considerate expression of a different opinion, are often compelled to adopt the usual custom that they may not have to resent rudeness. So it happens that people in the same nation are divided even more trenchantly than if they belonged to different nations, and you find English people who will receive Catholic foreigners but not an English dissenter, or French people who will receive Americans but not a French republican. The evil resulting from this increases with the smallness of the place. In London and Paris it condemns nobody to solitude, because every one may find others who agree with him, but in provincial towns where petty class distinctions restrict people already to a very limited circle they may find themselves entirely shut out from social intercourse if they are even suspected of holding opinions not tolerated there. A want of delicacy and of hospitable feeling may even permit people to attack the known opinions of a guest at their own table, a proceeding not unexampled in civilised countries, though it would be thought barbarous in the tent of a nomadic Arab. Or, without going so far as that, a host, in mere weakness, may fail to defend his guest because it would be impossible to do that without establishing the forbidden principle that every one has a right to his own views.