The Rue de Rivoli, the Champs Elysées, and the Boulevard des Italiens are familiar to the travelling English, but they know little of provincial France, and they reciprocate, in a great degree, the French indifference about provincial England. Both nations prefer travelling in Switzerland and Italy to visiting each other. This encourages the notion of uniformity which would be greatly modified by a more detailed acquaintance with the provinces.

The variety in the physical geography of France, and in the climate, would be enough already to lead one to expect a corresponding variety in human characteristics. We find in the British Islands that the mountaineers are unlike the inhabitants of the plains, that the people of the north, whose climate is severe, are in some respects unlike those of the south, whose climate is milder, that the maritime population differs from the inland population and the manufacturing from the agricultural. The Englishman is familiar with these contrasts in his own country, yet instead of expecting them in France he supposes French people to be all alike.

The mere size of France might lead one to expect diversity. It is about three times the size of Great Britain, so that the distances in France are greater and the parts of the population more separated. It is not the custom in England to think of France as a mountainous country, because English impressions of it are chiefly derived from railway journeys across the French Lowlands. I may therefore remind the reader that the French Highlands cover an area equal to the whole of Great Britain, that they include fifty peaks above eleven thousand feet, and a much greater number higher than Ben Nevis, a dozen of them in the department of the Ardèche alone. On the other hand, the French plains are so vast that they include the area of three Irelands. Here is evidently one great cause of variety in the conditions of human life, but France has also nearly two thousand miles of sea-coast, with two very distinct maritime populations, one brought up on the shore of the Channel and the Atlantic Ocean, subject to the same influences as those on the English and Irish coasts, the other by the tideless Mediterranean, under the same influences as the sailors and fishermen of Genoa. Now, with regard to climates, French meteorologists tell us that there are seven distinct climates in France. The most northerly differs little from that of the south of England, whilst the most southerly is Spanish towards the west and, to the east, Italian. You may write a list of French towns, Paris, Tours, Lorient, Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux, each of which has a climate perfectly distinct from every one of the others. I believe it is not an exaggeration to say that all these towns differ from each other as much as Amiens does from London, for example, and in some cases the difference is much greater. The difference between Marseilles and Lorient is greater than that between London and Inverness.

It would be difficult to imagine two modern nations more different from each other, both in country and people, than are Brittany and Provence. Brittany has a rainy, temperate climate with sea-breezes; Provence, a fierce dry heat, with almost perpetual sunshine and very strong and lasting continental winds. Brittany is the land of the apple-tree, Provence the land of the olive. The shores of Brittany are washed by the tides of the Atlantic, those of Provence by the waves of the tideless Mediterranean. It is like comparing Wales with Italy and the Welsh with the Italians. The Bretons have their ancient language still, the Provençaux retain their beautiful soft modulated Latin, one of the most exquisitely perfect instruments for poetry in the world. The Bretons preserve their costumes; their ways of living, their temper, their ideas, are all different from those of Provence.

The great distance between north-western and south-eastern France may lead us to expect wide differences. The variety that exists in great nations is still more striking when we observe the trenchant differences that often divide populations which, geographically, are near neighbours. The Morvan is a district about fifty miles from north to south by thirty from east to west. It is not marked on the maps of France, but the reader will understand its situation when I tell him that it embraces portions of four departments: the Yonne to the north, the Côte d’Or to the east, the Nièvre to the west, and Saône-et-Loire to the south. In shape it resembles the Isle of Man, but it includes about five times as much territory. Autun is just outside of it to the south-east, and Avallon just inside it to the north. This district, or region, is marked by a peculiar physical character. It is a land of hills (not mountains), woods, and running streams, and the inhabitants, until their country was opened by good roads, were scarcely less a people apart than the Bretons. They have a language of their own, which, though akin to French, is not French, and the people are now for the most part able to speak French or Morvandeau at will (just as in the Highlands of Scotland they speak English or Gaelic), and their French is remarkably pure.

Now, if you compare the people of the Morvan with those of the plain of Burgundy and the Saône, which is quite near, you find the most striking differences. First there is a difference of race and of physical constitution, the Morvan race being the smaller of the two, the women more frequently pretty and well made on their small scale, with a predominance of dark hair and eyes, and a rich rather than a fair complexion. Besides this, there is a great disparity in material civilisation. The art of cookery has been accounted one of the most effectual tests of human advancement; when the people are clever cooks they are usually, it is said, clever in other arts besides, and they set a value on civilised life generally, and will be at great pains to maintain it. Such an art as cookery may have nothing to do with the intellectual side of life, and the Muse may exist on a little oatmeal, though she generally does her work better on a more varied and more interesting diet; but cookery is of great economic importance, because a cooking people will appreciate all the alimentary gifts of Nature and master the arts that procure them, whilst the non-cooking races are negligent and careless providers. The French are reputed to be a cooking race, but the Morvan people scarcely understand cookery better than the Scottish Highlanders. Servants from the Morvan are often sharp and active, honest, willing, laborious, cheerful, contented, amiable, yet with all these fine qualities invariably unable to cook a dinner. In the Burgundy wine district and the plain of the Saône a talent for cookery is very common in both sexes, and there are plain unpretending wives of small inn-keepers or wine-growers who would be perfectly capable of serving a royal feast, and not in the least disconcerted by the undertaking. All the Saône bargemen are said to be clever cooks, and they live extremely well. In the Morvan the peasants live with severe self-denial, chiefly on potatoes and thin soup flavoured with a morsel of bacon. Their drink is often a poor kind of perry or cider; they indulge in wine on market-days and sometimes sparingly at home, but then it is of a meagre quality. Near the Saône the people are a gardening as well as a cooking race; the Morvan people are not gardeners; a rich man may have a garden as a matter of luxury, but the peasants do not cultivate vegetables or fruit-trees. In some parts of the Morvan the spring comes six weeks later than at Chalon on the Saône.

Lastly, in the Morvan there are no fine arts. There may be occasional artistic genius, like that of Gautherin, the sculptor, who began life as a poor Morvandeau shepherd boy, but such gifts find no natural development in the district. The Burgundy wine country, on the other hand, has always been favourable to art of all kinds, and to learning. Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and all kinds of scholarship have flourished at Dijon in an association (perhaps not altogether accidental) with good cookery and the richest of all French vintages.

I have dwelt somewhat disproportionately on this contrast, because I know the country well. It is offered to the reader merely as one example out of many. I am told by those who know other parts of France familiarly that contrasts equivalent to this are to be found in various other regions and districts of that extensive country. There are three ways of dividing France, into departments, provinces, and districts. The departments, although taking their names from physical geography, as a help to the memory for locality, are in reality nothing more than artificial divisions for administrative convenience. The provinces (Burgundy, Normandy, Guienne, etc.) are convenient in another way, because of their connection with history, and also because it is believed still that the population of each province has a character of its own. Districts, though without any definite political or historical character, and often with rather vaguely defined limits, are useful in fixing local characteristics in the mind. Only local antiquaries could enlighten us about their obscure history; but one thing is always noticeable about them which is that the characteristics of each district are of a special nature. For example, the Morvan is a land of hills, woods, and streams; the Sologne is a woody plain, perfectly flat and interspersed with sandy pools and marshes; Les Dombes are an insalubrious region, full of fish-ponds; and Rouergue (in Guienne) is a land of hills and streams, like the Morvan, but with greater altitudes and wilder scenery. The population of each of these districts takes a certain character from the nature of its surroundings and from the local climate, which in one place may be dry, in another rainy, in one very equable and mild, in another extreme in heat and cold. Even within a distance of fifteen or twenty miles you discover, from the meteorological registers kept by the road surveyors, that twice as much rain falls in one village as in another. You have the wet and woody regions, the arid, hot, rocky regions, the lands of pasture and meadow, the vine lands, the country of extinct volcanoes, the peat morasses, the unprofitable sand countries by the sea where only the maritime pine can resist the invasion of sterility.

Then there is the spirit of towns; each town has a certain individuality, each has a spirit of its own derived from its historic past, and from its occupations in the present. One town may be a clerical and aristocratic little centre, where a republican (even under the Republic) has not the faintest chance of getting into society; a place where all public functionaries under the Government are socially boycotted; a place where all modern ideas are quietly ignored or despised, where reputations have no currency, and nothing is valued but conformity to a narrow local standard of the comme il faut. Thirty miles away, there is, perhaps, a busy commercial town, where all ideas are centred upon a pecuniary success, and people are esteemed exactly in proportion to their capital without regard to other considerations,—a town where all the fortunes are recent, and all have been acquired in trade.

Another variety, very little understood out of France, is that of extremes meeting in the same town. This is sometimes especially striking in the southern towns, and it may be of very long standing, like the conflict between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism at Nîmes, a city that cannot be correctly described as either Protestant or Catholic; and yet there is more of each religion in it than there would be if the rival faith were extirpated. But the best example in France of a city combining the most opposite characteristics is Lyons. It is at the same time most republican and most clerical. “There is one town above all,” wrote Michelet, “where the antagonism of two ages, of the spirit of old times and the new spirit, strikes even the eyes in all its grandeur—that town is Lyons.... I leaned on the parapet on the steep of Fourvières, and said to myself, as I looked upon the opposite hill, gloomy, black below, under the cypresses of the Jardin des Plantes, colossal above in its piles of work-people’s houses, ten or fifteen storeys high,—I said, These are not two hills; they are two religions. The two towns of Lyons, that of the convents and that of the workshops, are the goals of pilgrimage for the poor. Some of them come to the Lyons of miracles and seek charity; these come to Fourvières.[91] But thou, good workman, wilt come to the hill of labour, the serious Croix Rousse. The part in the banquet which thou desirest is bread won by thine own hands.” I was reminded of these words of Michelet when, at Lyons, I said to a mechanic who was working on Sunday, “This task prevents you from going to mass.” The man paused an instant in his labour, looked up at me seriously, and answered, “It is not my custom to go to mass. He who works prays.” He then resumed his prayer with hearty strokes of a hammer.

As in England, London is a kind of nation in itself, so in France we have the nation of Paris. The word is so little of an exaggeration that Paris has often, on the most momentous occasions, acted quite independently of the country, and did actually proclaim its right to autonomy under the Commune, whilst the constant effort of the municipal council ever since has been to erect itself into a parliament at the Hôtel de Ville, and have its own way in spite of the assemblies at the Palais Bourbon or the Luxembourg.

The Parisian nation has not the same characteristics as the nation of Londoners. The distinguishing character of London is to be, not local, but world-wide; the character of Paris is to be as local as ancient Athens, and as contemptuous of all that lies outside. It is commonly believed that Paris is France, but how can it be France when it is so utterly unlike the provinces? This error comes from the foreigners’ habit of staying in Paris only, so that Paris is very really and truly all France to them, being the only France they know. Yet the character of the French capital, so far from being representative, is all its own.

France is not, generally speaking, an artistic country. In the provinces few care for art or know anything about it, whereas Paris is the most artistic city in Europe; and that not simply as the place where pictures and statues are produced in the greatest numbers, and architects find most employment, but as the place where art sentiment is most generally developed, so that it runs over into a thousand minor channels, till the life of the capital is saturated with it.

France is not, generally speaking, an intellectual country. The people are quick in small things, and they are very intelligent up to a certain point, but life in the French provinces is far less intellectual than in England or America. Parisians say that provincial French life is absolutely and hopelessly stupid. They may think that sincerely, for such an opinion would only, in their case, be a natural effect of contrast, but it is an exaggeration. Provincial life is not exactly stupid, French people can hardly be that under any circumstances, but it is mentally very small and narrow, owing to the extreme isolation of the few superior intelligences, and the prodigious ignorance by which they are surrounded. Unless tied down to provincial life by property, professions, or kindred, an intellectual Frenchman gravitates naturally to the capital, which in this manner drains the provinces of the best men. It is an exaggeration of French vanity to believe that Paris is the light of the world, but it is really the light of France. The provincials believe themselves to be more moral and more serious than the Parisians, but they admit that provincial life is dull without making any effort to enliven it, and the clever provincial speaks of Paris as that paradise from which he is an exile. Notwithstanding their apparent levity, I am told by all who are competent to form an opinion, that the Parisians study better than the provincials. The ordinary level attained in all studies is much higher in Paris than in the provincial cities. The Parisians are the most laborious and best disciplined art students in Europe. In the French University the best professors are reserved for Paris, or promoted to the capital in course of time, and they all say that the boys work better there than in the provinces.

The difference between the Parisian and the provincial mind is shown in nothing more conspicuously than in its different estimates of human superiority. In Paris the question is what you are, in the provinces what your family is, or what you possess. Reputation in literature, art, or science, is relatively more valuable in Paris than it is even in London, though it is very valuable there; in the French provinces it counts for nothing, or next to nothing. Many Parisian reputations never reach the provinces. The provincial habit of respecting the idlest people most, is in itself antagonistic to fame, which is usually the consequence of hard work. Then there is the indifference, or semi-contempt, towards the pursuits that lead to fame, towards literature, science, and the fine arts. The fame of political celebrities penetrates everywhere like an unpleasant noise—unpleasant, at least, to all but their own following.

The French temper is not generally very sociable, yet in Paris there is great openness of manner, and a charming readiness to enter into that kind of intercourse which is lightly agreeable without involving much beyond the passing hour. For the free play of the mind, without any pretension to make it more than play, there is no place in the world like Paris. It is a great art or a great gift to make social intercourse bright and truly a relaxation equally removed from pedantry on one side and the dulness of indifference on the other. There is an ease, an apparent simplicity, and a clearness of expression in Parisian talkers that we rarely meet with in provincials, yet these same provincials acquire the Parisian polish after a few years’ frottement in the capital.

I have said elsewhere that there is a contrast in the moral code between Paris and the provinces. Paris now resembles, at least in some degree, the Italy of Byron’s day, where illicit liaisons were tolerated if there was a certain deference to appearances; provincial France, as a rule, resembles provincial England in the severity of public opinion.

Aristocracy is of immense weight in the French provinces, even when accompanied by very little wealth; in Paris it counts for nothing unless accompanied by great wealth. Like London, Paris is democratic, and takes each man for what he is (famous, rich, talented, witty), without inquiring what his ancestors were.

Besides these local differences there remain in France as in England all the contrasts and varieties of individual character. Some of these varieties are known in England through the historians and novelists, but many more are totally unknown there. It is useless for me to refer to them in an English book without elaborate descriptions for which there is no space in this volume. I need only say that as the Frenchman’s Englishman is not an exact representative of all Englishmen taken individually, so it is with that curious ideal type that may be called the Englishman’s Frenchman. In my own limited experience I have known a certain number of French people of whom English writers would say, if I described them accurately and elaborately in a work of fiction, that they had not a single French characteristic, and the less the English critics knew of France the more positive they would be. So, if you were to describe a talkative and genial Englishman, such as G. H. Lewes, for example, French readers who had never been in England would tell you that he was not English, that they knew better, that the real Englishman is stiff, grave, proud, awkward, and reserved, so that he can never have the flexibility of mind that Lewes possessed, nor be, like him, an amiable and delightful causeur.

Notwithstanding the great variety that still exists in France, certain modern tendencies are steadily diminishing it. The army is silently making the peasantry more national, less local. Railways take people from one province to another, and from all provinces to Paris. Public education is the same for all France. The University is not a local institution, like Oxford or Cambridge, but ubiquitous in the nation, like the Anglican Church in England. Cheap postage and telegrams make the nation itself seem smaller, and Parisian newspapers penetrate everywhere. External habits are now almost the same in all French towns; the hotel system is the same everywhere, the cafés are all alike. Besides this, the French nature is not very tolerant of individuality in character, but tends to reduce it to one dead level of uniformity. “Être comme tout le monde” has long been the rule of French civilisation, and there is nothing more contrary to its spirit than to be “singular” or “original.”