Placidity [douceur] is the distinctive characteristic of the inhabitants of this Department. They appreciate it when good is done to them; they complain little when ills are caused but support them calmly and resignedly … The Berrichon respects and looks up to the Government not because he finds it so admirable but because the Government leaves him in peace, and peace is for him the most natural and best of states.
Or, as Émile Guillaumin put it in La Vie d’un Simple, which is set in the next Department, towards the Loire: ‘In the country, we trouble our heads very little about what Government get up to. Come Peter, come Paul, it isn’t our affair. What is, is the routine drudgery of work, and that does not change.’
Guillaumin’s writing has become something of an early socialist text, with its insistent theme of the harshness of the more fortunate towards the less. Other people’s reminiscences strike a less brooding note, but there is no doubt that Guillaumin does capture the obsessive hopes and anxieties of those working on the land. The French peasant with his few hectares might seem to have been more independent than the farm labourer across the Channel working for a large landowner, but in practice he was perpetually in thrall to the vagaries of the seasons and to events in the world beyond his horizon. The egalitarian principles of citizenhood – free and fraternal – were imposed on top of older and tougher imperatives, and do not quite sit easily there to this day.
During the more violent political spasm of 1870–71 it was remarked by another observer that the Berrichon peasant showed a new tendency to keep his hat on and offer his hand to a social superior as to an equal, but that, come King, Emperor or Republic, he would still vote for the person who simply seemed likely to procure him the best deal.
True to form, the Minute books of Chassignolles entirely ignore the events that had brought about the fall of the Second Empire by September 1870. No hint of the drama going on elsewhere surfaces till two months later. Then, Paris was entering its long winter under siege by the Prussians. Since a detachment of Prussians was also much nearer at hand, on the Cher at Vierzon, one might think that the inhabitants of the Lower Berry would have had qualms about their own safety and the need for military protection. Certainly in La Châtre, where troops of newly conscripted soldiers passed through singing songs to the local bagpipes, people were conscious of being in a country at war. There were rumours of cannon fire being heard; men ostentatiously carried around with them the old-fashioned carbines they used to shoot game, and women started knitting woollen waistcoats for nos p’tits gars in a way that prefigured the great, sad working parties during the next round of hostilities in 1914–18. However, a testy entry in the Chassignolles Minutes for November merely notes that the governmental demand for 3238 francs to be voted from Communal funds for the National Guard was ‘quite impossible’. All that was in the Commune kitty at that moment was 989 francs, 29 centimes. The Government could have that, if it wanted. The lively topic of debate that autumn was not the invasion and social unrest in the north, but the construction of the first properly made road between Chassignolles and La Châtre.
With the hindsight of history, one might argue that this road was a more truly significant and representative event than the replacement of the Second Empire by the Third Republic. Whether the other changes at village level that the 1870s and ’80s were to bring would have come in any case, even without a Republic to orchestrate them, remains a matter of debate. The democratic spirit of Republicanism did, however, lay an obligation on all its male citizens that, under older regimes, had been largely avoided: in the last quarter of the century the Minutes of Municipal meetings in Chassignolles fill up with requests – to be forwarded to the military authorities – that this or that young man should be excused from military service since he was needed down on the farm. So the most obvious sign of the distant events that were shaping France’s history was the desire on the part of the village to keep their boys away from them.
* * *
In the local newspapers, revolutions in Paris surface a little more, since they were written for and by townspeople. Their circulations were counted in hundreds only, and till near the end of the century they hardly penetrated the villages. So, for instance, L’Écho de l’Indre (later L’Écho du Berry), which was published in La Châtre, represented exclusively the preoccupations of the bonne société of that small town or, if we are to believe George Sand, the six or seven sociétés that did not necessarily consort with each other, let alone vote the same way. These social divisions, in practice, operated more along political lines than along lines of class. In essential terms the small towns in the first half of the nineteenth century seem to have been as close-knit as the present villages. In addition, whatever urban airs they might have given themselves, the townspeople lived so close to the countryside that their interests were more or less identified with it. The figures usually given for percentages of urban as opposed to rural populations in France are therefore misleading. For the entire nineteenth century, the ‘urban’ population of the Indre hovered around twenty-eight per cent as opposed to seventy-two per cent ‘rural’, but the urban were hardly so in the way we would use the word today. Most La Châtre families owned fields or orchards or a vineyard outside the city; many of them supplied some of the made goods or skills that country people were now beginning to purchase.
The cultural gulf between town and country in France, which existed then and still exists to a large extent today, has more to do with social manner and self-image than with any deep-seated material differences. French class fantasies are not the same as those that are current across the Channel. The better-off inhabitants of English country towns have for a long time cultivated that peculiarly British rural inverted snobbery, innocent yet tenacious, which expresses itself in old trousers, darned sweaters, dogs, guns and Country Life. In contrast, the inhabitants of provincial French towns like La Châtre and Châteauroux have traditionally turned their eyes towards Paris. They adopt a tenue de ville, all neat suits and shoes, carefully styled hair and ceremonial greetings. But in reality Paris is far away from La Châtre even today, and was a great deal farther for much of the nineteenth century, when it took from nine to twelve hours in a coach before you got even as far as Châteauroux.
The name of the main street in La Châtre was obediently changed over the years from Rue Nationale to Rue Royale, then Rue Égalité, then Rue Impériale and then back again to Nationale, as great events demanded. There were occasional eruptions of patriotic fervour over such manufactured ‘events’ as the Emperor’s birthday – and, indeed, the occasional demonstration, from one of the sociétés, of anti-Royalist emotion. But the real concerns of La Châtre were much the same as those of the surrounding villages: the state of the roads, visionary schemes for railway lines which more often than not failed to materialize, the weather, the harvest, the floods, the drought, the insatiable needs of the poor and the disgraceful misbehaviour of young males – and occasionally young females too, how shocking – after the local fairs.
* * *
Because of the extensive and unique record available to me in the cupboard of our own Mairie, it was some time before I sought out the official Archives in Châteauroux. With a car, forty kilometres is nothing. Without one, however, as I have often been in France, the journey abruptly expands to the dimensions it must have had at the turn of the century. It begins with seven kilometres into La Châtre on foot or by bicycle to catch one of the infrequent buses that run to Châteauroux today from the moribund railway station. The bus does not take the direct route but, impersonating the branch-line train that it has replaced, it makes its way circuitously for an hour or so through half a dozen villages in the valley of the Indre before finally surfacing on to the modernity of the main road into Châteauroux. There it gets up a sudden speed, past the new sheet-metal hangars called Mammouth and Bricomarché and Jardiland, graceless as pink elephants, before its triumphant arrival at the station with minutes to spare to catch a train to Paris or Toulouse.
The same gathering crescendo has to be executed in reverse for the return journey, driving back into the past with diminuendo effects as the sun goes down over the pastures of the Black Valley and the mist begins to rise.
But even in Châteauroux, when I finally began to go there to absorb the census records, the Écho de l’Indre and other sources of urgent news from another time, I found that no modern techniques stood between me and this material. The grandly named Salle des Archives behind the enormous, classical Prefecture turned out to be domestic in scale: it must have been the dining-room of a middle-class family house of the last century. I would sit there in company with a maximum of a dozen other readers, most of whom seemed to be rustling the papers of the Services de Cadastres (land registry), no doubt checking up as ever on Great Aunt Marthe’s legacy. Huge, battered volumes of bound broadsheets or census returns were brought to me after only a brief wait. Obsolete dust escaped in little puffs as I opened them.
The sheer wealth of cumulative minor facts available in these pages seemed immeasurable, vertiginous. The nineteenth century was the first period in history when, all over Europe, the lives of all individuals began to be recorded in a systematic way at regular intervals: thus the potential of the census returns is almost limitless, or limited only by the time and intentions of the researcher. An entire present existence could be spent summoning people from the lists and tracing their interlocking destinies. But this vast information bank remains schematic and confined to certain circumstances: only by interpretation, conjecture and additional knowledge is life breathed into it. Whereas the pages of old newspapers, some of them yellowed and flaking, others as white as if they had hardly been glanced at since the day they were printed, rich in discursive detail, sometimes maddeningly inconsequential, always full of more submerged content than could ever be systematically tabulated – these are the very breath of vanished lives.
The Salle des Archives seems in itself to belong with those lives. The pattern of the floor tiles evokes all the large, traditionally patterned meals that must once have been consumed there, with vegetables following the meat rather than accompanying it and table-napkins the size of sheets. The façade of the building is in neat grey stucco with Second Empire ironwork on the door and windows like hundreds of other unremarkable houses that arrived in Châteauroux along with the railway after the middle of the last century. But the street where it stands is the Rue Vieille du Prison, the Old Street of the Prison, and runs down to a tower and portcullis and the huddle of narrow lanes that once made up the entire town. Châteauroux, which today numbers some twenty thousand people, is, like La Châtre, a medieval walled city; it has merely been more drastically transformed.
From the front windows of the Salle des Archives, across the street, is visible a house with a sun dial on its pointed gable bearing the words Il est toujours temps de bien faire – ‘It is always time to do good.’ That cannot have been much consolation to the prisoner brought in chains that way towards the tower. The back windows of the Salle, however, offer a gentler view. Grass and municipal dahlias disguise a one-time farmyard, but behind them is an unmistakable barn. The house’s urban façade and nineteenth-century interior are camouflaging a building that is actually far older and originally sheltered a very different way of life. Even here in Châteauroux France’s essential rurality is not far below the skin.
Chapter 6
But what of Célestine and her family?
I am particularly fond of the early Registers of Birth in Chassignolles. Well thumbed over the years to provide evidence for all the other documents French citizens have traditionally been required to carry, some of the pages are edged with real thumb-marks, the insignia of people whose hands were permanently impregnated with wood ash and cow dung because opportunities for effective washing were so few. In these pages the birth of Célestine Chaumette was listed in 1844. But there were a great many other Chaumettes born at that period. In the same decade came a Silvain Chaumette, an Ursin, a Félix, a Françoise, a Marie, a Maurice and an Auguste. In 1850 came a Solange, while in the 1830s there had been a Gilbert, a Louis and another Félix, this one with ‘nt’ noted after his name – ‘naturel’, illegitimate.
When I checked this list against their full birth entries, they did seem to be all the same family: the same paternal Christian name kept reappearing. By and by, however, I established that there was a Silvain-Germain and a Silvain-Bazille, classic Berrichon names, and that each of these men sometimes dropped the second part of their name in statutory declarations, which made them indistinguishable. Célestine was the daughter of Silvain-Germain, born in 1816 (or 1817, if you prefer the mention of him on his daughter’s grave). But most of the others of her generation were the progeny of one or other of Silvain-Germain’s first cousins: Silvain-Bazille (born 1811), his younger brothers Maurice and Louis and his sister Marie, who was the person unlucky enough to produce the natural-born Félix twenty years later.
Silvain-Germain was the son of a François Chaumette. Silvain-Bazille and the others were the children of a Pierre Chaumette. François and Pierre were brothers. They were born in the years immediately after the Revolution, when time ran differently. François’ birth was declared on the twenty-first day of Germinal in Year III of the French Republic (early April 1794) before Aussourd, who described himself in the new politically correct style simply as ‘citizen of Chassignolles’ – ‘élu le trente Floréal l’an Second aussi de la république françoise pour dresser les actes de naissance, Mariage et décès des citoyins’. The declaration was made at the maison commune, which till four years earlier had been known as the church, by the father of the baby, a male friend and the baby’s maternal grandmother, Jeanne Merlin. The baby, who had been born at five o’clock the previous afternoon, was produced in person, as was the custom at that time, but no one but Aussourd was able to sign the entry in the register.
It was this François Chaumette, Célestine’s grandfather, who signed his name in the early Minute books forty years later in a toppling, painstaking hand. As a young man he usually styled himself journalier – day-labourer – but by the 1840s he and his son Silvain-Germain had together opened the inn at the village; like his aspirations to literacy, this suggests a degree of enterprise. He lived on till 1861, when he would have been sixty-six or sixty-seven, a fair age for that period, but his own father had done better. Célestine’s great-grandfather, yet another Silvain, was born long before the obligatory keeping of records; his brief baptismal mention might still be quarried out of the parish register. He was stated to be eighty-eight years old when he died in July 1844 two months after Célestine was born. All the large mid-nineteenth-century Chaumette clan are therefore descended from this Ancien Régime figure. Late in life, according to mentions of him on various birth and marriage registers, he was sacristan to the church, which had by then been rescued from its temporary secular disguise. Sacristan was a position usually reserved for someone of standing in the community who was felt to need a respectable job to bring in a salary, however tiny, but by the standards of his time Silvain Chaumette was not poverty-stricken. He owned a well-built house and a garden in the centre of the village – a property that was to become highly significant to the family fortunes when it was inherited, in the fullness of time, by François.
In earlier days, Silvain the sacristan styled himself tisserand – weaver. His sons François and Pierre sometimes did also, though later François called himself a day-labourer and then, having inherited a piece of land, a ‘smallholder’, before finally becoming an innkeeper. These shifts in occupation and status tell their own tale. For centuries, the area had been one in which handloom weaving was done in the cottages. (Tisserand and Tissand are common local surnames, along with variants such as Tissier and Tixier.) Hemp and flax were grown and harvested as a family enterprise – an important one, in which rituals and dances were employed to make the stuff flourish. Once it was safely harvested, it was left to soak in the Black Valley’s numerous streams, sp
read out to dry again in the sun and then cooked slowly in the big bread ovens that were a regular feature of most dwellings built before the mid-nineteenth century. After that, though the stuff could be trodden underfoot like grapes, it was usually a local specialist, the chanvreur, with his own particular implement, who was called in to mash the baked fibres expertly so that they did not break up.
The chanvreur had a certain mystique attached to him, like a miller or a farrier: a man who was local but who went about the countryside and got to hear things. Sometimes special knowledge of herbs and healing was attributed to him (as it was to George Eliot’s Silas Marner) and he might be feared. Elsewhere, and particularly in the Lower Berry, he was seen as a jolly, benign fellow, a teller of yarns, and it is in this role that he presides over George Sand’s pastoral stories.
Celestine Page 6