Identifier: fieldsoffrancewi00ducl (find matches)
Title: The fields of France / with twenty illustrations in color
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors: Duclaux, Agnes Mary Frances (Robinson), 1857-1944 Macdougall, William Brown
Subjects: Peasantry
Publisher: London : Chapman and Hall
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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ialist siren sang, Come here, come here, and I will give you prosperityand peace. And to the towns went the village youth.Wages were higher there ; the standard of comfort suitedbetter with a newly acquired ideal of refinement; aboveall, the smoky air was full of ideas. Ideas are a passionwith the French, but with no class so absolutely as withthe humbler ranks of Socialism. There reigned in thoseregions an instant hope in the approaching advent of abetter world—a millennium, in fact, as living, as real asthat which animated the first era of the Christian Church.The Socialist working man was somewhat in the positionof the Christian convert of one of those great towns ofancient Asia Minor or Italy—a man with the secret ofa New Hope—while the villages. Pagan now as then,slumbered in their contented ignorance. To go back wouldhave been to apostatize, to renounce, not only the life-in-life 126 ks LUYNES IhC and pc.Wagfes wer a sib g3^lYUJ ^^® village. And ire was something of which
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THE FRENCH PEASANT of an ideal, but also the means of education, the schools,the newspapers, the working-mans club informally unitedround the zinc counter of the Marchand-de-vin, the Boule-vards, the museums, the fetes, the sense of beauty, thesense of politics, of science, of social solidarity. And ifthese parvenus in the moral and intellectual sphere wereoften crude, fanatical, harsh, intolerant, at least they were(what their rural fathers had not been) the heirs of all theages. Every year the schools sent more and more youngrustics to V3ixh,frottetirs and sellers of wood and coal fromAuvergne, masons from the Creuse, old clo men from theLozere, chimney-sweepers from Savoy. In Paris they founda clan of compatriots ready to welcome them, to show themhow to earn their bread, and how, according to the newestgospel, to save their souls alive. And still the drain continues. But trade of late yearshas not been so good in Paris. In many branches of industrythere has been overproduction—m

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