French & English

France, being a more advanced democracy than England, has made greater efforts to bring secondary education within the reach of many, and the consequence is that such education, in that country, having ceased to be a mark of class, confers very little social position. The majority of French boys who learn Latin do it simply as a matter of business, the bachelor’s degree being necessary to every physician and surgeon, to every barrister and notary, and even to every teacher of modern languages in the public schools. There are also examinations to be passed before practising pharmacy as a trade, and for that the examinations are not confined to the special science itself. In England the University degree is not absolutely required for the professions of law and medicine, and therefore it retains more of an ornamental character. It is more of an intellectual distinction and less of a matter of business than in France.

To understand France in this and many other matters we must bear in mind that the whole tendency of modern French institutions is to produce, not what the English call the gentleman, but the middle-class man, or bourgeois, in enormous numbers. He is comfortably clothed, badly lodged, far too well fed, and educated in many studies, but not quite up to the point at which they would begin to be available for the intellectual life. The public schools where he gets this education are both too numerous in themselves and too numerously attended, besides being too cheap, for purposes of social distinction. All that education can do for a lad in France, at any school or college, is to place him in the bourgeoisie, that is to say, in the middle class. It does not, in the least, give him an approach to social equality with the aristocracy. Sons of peasants frequently rise in the bourgeoisie by means of University degrees; but that is not much, and there they stop. There is not any University degree, however elevated, not even the double doctorate, which is recognised by what is called “Society” as conferring any claim whatever to come within its pale.[13]

In England the choice of school and University has an immense influence on a boy’s future social position. Educate him at a grammar school or send him to Eton and Oxford, the difference to his future rank will be enormous. If an English mother has a son at Eton she is sure to let you know. All English people associate the idea of class distinctions with the different English schools, and they have an almost insuperable difficulty in realising the condition of things in France, where there is neither an Eton nor an Oxford, nor anything in the least degree resembling them from the social point of view. In this way the English are always wrong about the French lycées, because they begin by imagining the English class distinctions. The prevalent English idea about them is that they are low and cheap places. One English writer accepted it as evidence of the very humble origin of a distinguished Frenchman that he had been educated in a lycée. He could not realise the simple fact that the lycées have nothing to do with social rank either one way or the other. My brother-in-law was educated at a lycée, and one of his ordinary class-fellows was a prince who is now actually reigning; other class-fellows may have been sons of small shopkeepers or poor clerks. Older Frenchmen are still living who were class-fellows of the Orleans princes at the lycée Henri IV. The princes worked like the others, and it was only thought a proof of their father’s good sense that he sent his boys to one of the best schools in the town where he lived, though he happened to be King of the French. It was good for them, but it made no difference to the others, nor to the school. King Milan of Servia was afterwards educated at the same lycée.

A boy gains no rank, and loses none, by being at a French lycée. It is true that the reactionary aristocracy looks upon the lycées with disfavour, but that is not because they are cheap,[14] or because some of the pupils are poor, for the aristocracy is willing to send its children to priestly seminaries, which are still cheaper, and where most of the pupils are poorer. The reasons are not social, but religious and political. The lycées have lay masters, the seminaries have priests; the lycées are animated with a republican spirit, the seminaries are royalist. Everything has a political colour in France. When a young noble has not been to a seminary he is educated on its principles by a clerical tutor at home, or else in some Jesuit school abroad.

Not only does the place of education give no social position to a Frenchman, but education itself now gives him very little, because it has been made accessible to poor men. Eton and Oxford are respected because they are expensive;—if the same education, or a better, were given in cheap schools, it would lose its social significance. France seems to have reached, or almost reached, that point towards which the whole world is tending, when education will be too common to confer rank, and it is even possible we may get back to the middle-age idea that it is lordly to be illiterate. Even now, something of this sentiment is distinctly perceptible in France. Clever young men in the middle class are considered to be working creditably for persons in their line of life, but the nobility do not meet them on that ground; they outshine them, not in learning, but in field-sports and equipages.

A refined way of speaking the native language does something for social position in England. English people say of a man, “He has a good accent, he speaks like a gentleman;” in France so many middle-class people speak well habitually that pure speech has almost ceased to be a distinction. Even if the men had not broken down that barrier, clever Frenchwomen would have removed it. How many of them have I met with, in the middle classes, who, for enunciation, articulation, readiness and accuracy of expression, and precision of accent, spoke quite as well as ladies of rank! This, too, in a country where clear, and prompt, and accurate speaking is valued and appreciated to a degree unknown in England. It is only the most cultivated English people who dare to employ, in conversation, the full powers of their noble tongue; the others shrink from the best use of it, and accustom themselves to forms of speech that constitute, in reality, a far inferior language, in which it is so difficult to express thought and sentiment that they are commonly left unexpressed.[15]

Passing from ordinary education to that higher culture which can only be attained by a sedulous attachment to intellectual pursuits in mature life, I should say that here, again, mental elevation has nothing to do with social rank. In France the time is at hand, if it has not already arrived, when high culture may be taken as evidence that its possessor does not belong to the aristocracy. Speaking for the present of France only, I may offer two or three reasons in explanation of this curious anomaly. The French aristocracy, disdaining all work that is remunerative, does not enter the professions, and so misses the culture that the professions give. But, beyond this, the French aristocracy is unaccustomed to work of any kind, and as culture is usually unattainable without work, and as there is not even a high standard of early education in that aristocracy, it passes its time in ways that do not tend to culture except so far as polite and graceful social intercourse favours it. If the reader wishes to be just he will not think of the minor French rural aristocracy as “a class of rakes,” but as a very numerous class of more or less wealthy idlers, living half the year on their estates, four months in some country town, and a month or two at Paris or the sea-side. Their life is healthy and natural for the most part, and they often attain a great age; but they are, as a class, much more addicted to rural sports than to intellectual or artistic pursuits of any kind. There are exceptions, of course, yet even the exceptions suffer from the benumbing influence of their surroundings, and usually stop short of any noteworthy attainment. I may repeat in this place a remark made to me by an observant Frenchman. He said, “In our country the men who cultivate themselves with effect are more frequently retired tradesmen than men born to independence. The retired tradesman has habits of industry which he applies to any pursuit that he takes up, and the want of these habits is fatal to the aristocrat.” Another Frenchman, himself a man of culture, coincided, quite independently, with Matthew Arnold’s well-known description of another aristocracy. “It is a strange result of the wealth and intelligence of the modern world,” he said, “to give the upper classes the pursuits of the savage without the necessity which is his excuse for them. Our country gentlemen are not our intellectual leaders, they live a sort of perfected barbaric life. They are barbarians armed with the complicated appliances of civilisation. Their greatest glory is to have killed a large number of big wild boars, and they exhibit the heads as trophies. Another savage characteristic is that they despise trade and commerce, and consider all professions beneath them except that of the warrior. Their ideas of government by the simple authority of a despotic chief are also those of primitive man; they have not patience to endure the delays and the complicated action of parliamentary institutions. In a word, the liberty that wealth gives in the modern world means for them the liberty of the primæval instincts.”