Celestine (34 page)

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In its gradual evolution of a primitive welfare net, France was merely keeping pace with other developed countries – old-age pensions were introduced in England in 1909. But the French legislation of 1913 concerning help for large families had a more specific intent. The tendency, apparent ever since the Napoleonic wars, for the population of France to grow more slowly than that of neighbouring countries, had persisted. In 1871 France had 36 million people and only three and a half million more in 1911. In the same period the British population had grown from just under 32 million to forty-five and a half million, but the most spectacular contrast was with the German Empire: there, 41 million had grown to nearly 65 million.

What was worse, from the point of view of the French government, was that this difference could only increase, for the French birth rate was the lowest in western Europe. Long before August 1914 the Government knew, even if the people of central France did not, that a confrontation with the German Empire was looming, a further round in the hostilities begun in 1870. It is from this period that one can date the governmental obsession with numbers, with ‘missing' young men who should have been born to be cannon-fodder, and the conviction that national strength depends on a steadily increasing population – an idea not extinct in France even today.

It is in this context that the Government decided to give financial help to large families. Needless to say, this had little effect on most of the citizens of villages such as Chassignolles, who saw husbanding the family property as a much greater virtue than procreation. It is clear from the birth rates that most couples did want to limit the number of children born to them and more often than not succeeded. The few large families tended to be born to those with little or nothing to husband, for whom children might be optimistically regarded as a source of pride and an eventual security. To this minority the new law, with its allocation for bread to each new child, must have come as a salvation, and among them was Paul Bernardet,
cultivateur,
father of Georges and eight other children. All of them survived to grow up, which seems some sort of proof of the law's positive effect.

‘Poor man,' said Paul Bernardet's daughter-in-law to me. ‘He did what he could, but that was so little to go round. He'd nothing, and he wasn't even particularly strong. And she was lame. Had been from birth. That didn't help.'

‘Her foot was turned sideways. She walked on her heel. Nothing was done about that in those days.' (Mademoiselle Pagnard speaking) ‘She was a very pretty woman, though. Lovely face.'

In the early years of our relationship with Bernardet I knew only that he himself had been brought up not by his parents but by another couple, a circumstance round which had settled in his mind an aura of romance – of a rescue into love. His godmother was his mother's older sister, another daughter of the renowned grandfather who had built his own house after work. She was married to a plasterer, a man therefore several steps up the village social hierarchy, and they lived in an old, one-storey farmhouse with a yard across the way from what is now our house. The ceilings were embellished by the husband with the plaster roses he had learnt to do when he went to work for a spell on the fine new buildings going up in Paris. He also laid new floor tiles: the couple had a grandfather clock that had been made in La Châtre in the middle of the last century and a carved cupboard or two. But no children had appeared to populate this home, and by the time the First World War came, when the plasterer had turned forty-five and his wife was approaching forty, it seemed clear that they never would. One day when Georges was five, this godmother spoke to his mother. ‘Why don't we take on little Georges and bring him up? That would be one less mouth for you to feed.'

When this offer reached Paul Bernardet, all he said to his son was:
‘Va t'en. C'est une chance pour toi.'
(‘Off with you. You're in luck.') This unpaternal remark was retailed with a hint of bitterness sixty years later, even though Paul Bernardet turned out to be right.

Georges moved in with the middle-aged couple, but at first he missed the comfortless house among the fields, which had been his entire world, and the company of his brothers and sisters. Obstinate by nature, he moped, and would not be seduced by his aunt's anxious affection. Eventually his uncle said to him: ‘If you stay with us, I'll make you a little wheelbarrow, just your size, and then you can give me a hand.'

A little wheelbarrow his own size! To a child who had never known a toy, or indeed one single possession of his own, the idea was irresistible.

‘So I decided to cheer up,' he recounted long afterwards. ‘I said to myself: I'll stay here, at any rate till I get the wheelbarrow. Then I'll wheel it all the way home to show them.'

But by the time the wheelbarrow was made, his uncle and aunt's house had become his home. Fifteen years later, transformed into a young man doing his army service in Versailles, his gratitude to the couple who had reared him found expression in the remarkable feat of saving his pay to buy a small house for his aunt in her widowhood. But his sense of obligation also extended to the general desire to perform well. The idea that he had been specially singled out by fortune and must act accordingly seems to have informed his whole life, giving him an underlying confidence that his brothers, struggling into adulthood in a pack, never attained. He worked and saved and gradually built up his own kingdom. The son of the near-landless Paul became known in the Commune as ‘The Proprietor'. As the child of a too-numerous family he cautiously limited his own offspring to two. To his own son, he was rather a stern father; less so to his daughter, the first-born. She, as things turned out, was the one who left Chassignolles and made her home with her mechanic husband in the suburbs of Paris.

To our son he was always kind, almost proprietary, like his uncle by marriage long ago, as if his instinct was to try to evoke in this alien child a feeling of loyalty to the patch of territory that meant so much to
him.
‘I'll make you a ladder – then you and your friends will be able to climb into the chicken loft … I'll teach you to plant potatoes…'

Later, when we built a room on to our house and our son helped us to dig foundations, lay bricks, and mix and apply rendering, Georges Bernardet strongly approved: clearly we were bringing the boy up the right way. Later again a touch of shyness set in – was the boy now too large and foreign to be addressed as
tu?
– and when he began to go off on holidays of his own, Georges Bernardet asked anxiously: ‘Doesn't he care for Chassignolles any more then?'

Only after Bernardet himself was gone did I read Daniel Halévy on the French peasantry, but when I did I recognized him:

The land, the soil itself … represents something magic. Even the poorest man hopes that one day he will own a piece of it, and that secret hope illuminates his silent spirit, with its passion that lies concealed beneath a coarse exterior … The peasant is proud of his work on the land, and this pride too is a secret treasure …

But always to be reckoned with is that haunting fear that this treasure, this land, this proud labour of feeding France, may be becoming devalued in others' eyes. ‘The children are leaving the land' – the recurrent cry.

Their going is the most painful rejection. Many never return, do not even write home: their forgetting makes the rejection still sharper. Others remember, write and sometimes come home on a visit. They are welcomed, fussed over; it is so keenly desired that they should continue to love this corner of the earth that has nurtured them. But they don't care for it any longer – or care only a little …

The perennial regret, fresh and keen when Halévy was writing but echoing a lament already heard seventy, fifty and thirty years earlier, and one that has been reiterated with a note of increasing distress between 1920 and our own day. What is always perceived as a new phenomenon is in fact a very long-term one, and more complex than just a matter of numbers. What, exactly, is meant by the ‘rural population'? When Halévy was writing
circa
1920, the people of rural areas still easily outnumbered town dwellers, and out of the entire population of France about forty per cent were still directly employed on the land. Today the population considered as rural, many of whom live in country towns such as La Châtre, accounts for something over one third of the total, but the number who actually
work
the land now is very small. It becomes apparent that the whole subject of rural depopulation is more involved than the immediate perception of it.

Bernardet's son continues honourably to work the family farm, but has not married. If Bernardet had any regrets for the principles on which he had reared the boy he never expressed them, though he mourned the absence of children in the house, understanding what this must eventually mean. Once, there were too many children, but now? The two sons of the daughter in Paris are strangers to the countryside and country ways. When the younger one was a sturdy seven-year-old, sent to his grandparents during the long summer holiday, Bernardet had hopes of making a farmer of him, but the boy has grown up to become a chef in a large urban restaurant. The older boy, always more reserved and studious, has a degree in aeronautics.

(‘They do not take pleasure in seeing the countryside again so much as in being seen, in showing the town ways they have acquired, their fine clothes and their hands untouched by manual labour.' Halévy again.)

In the early 1980s Bernardet said to me one day: ‘If this depopulation of the countryside goes on, fields will be left uncultivated and ungrazed.' The phrase he used,
‘des terres en friche',
evokes images of couch grass and yarrow, then thistles, nettles and soon brambles, invading the clean spaces that have been nurtured for generations where crops or grass should grow. There was horror in his eyes as he spoke. To him, the prospect was a kind of sacrilege, an insult to the whole ethic by which he had lived.

‘I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man devoid of understanding: And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns. And nettles had covered the face thereof. And the stone wall thereof was broken down…'

Bernardet did not make the connection between the image of desolation that haunted him and the modern increase in farming productivity from which he, like all his generation, had benefited. Indeed the paradox by which land, when more and more efficiently cultivated, may eventually become not more valuable but less, is far from obvious, since it only operates over a long period of time.

In the second half of the nineteenth century land use had already become noticeably more efficient. Then, in the years leading up to the First World War there was a gradual but steady increase in crop yields, as the early machinery began to replace almost everywhere the immemorial scythe and flail. The trend continued between the wars; indeed the spectre of overproduction and falling prices that is so familiar today first showed signs of appearing in the 1930s. It was met with incomprehension by the peasant population, to whom such a concept was against nature. That you could have
too
good a harvest ran counter to all their instincts and traditions, and also counter to the policy of agricultural encouragement that the Government had pursued for the previous seventy years. They refused to believe in the problem and, sure enough, it disappeared with the Second World War and then seemed to be conveniently forgotten. After 1945 productivity continued to increase and to be praised, and the small farmers of the 1950s, '60s and '70s enjoyed real prosperity for the first time in their history: this period is now known, already nostalgically, as ‘the Thirty Glorious Years'.

But while, between the wars, farms had still continued to occupy large numbers of people, and the loss of men in the Great War helped to disguise the declining need for labour, the far greater mechanization that came in gradually after the Second World War changed the whole nature of farming. A squad of men out in the fields was, simply, no longer needed. The retreat from the land has, in a large part, been rational: not so much a matter of the boys being seduced away by the bright lights as of them being driven away by the sheer lack of jobs at home.

Today, only two French citizens in each hundred are directly employed on the land, not much more than one million in all, yet they produce double the amount that was produced by six million forty years ago. But it is all too much. This excess of wheat, cereals, milk, meat, richness beyond the imagination of those who worked this land in the last century, has also created a crisis beyond their imagining. The efficient and profitable cultivation of all the available land by a small number of people is one thing; the growing suggestion that this enterprise may not be worthwhile anyway is a different kind of message, and one likely to lead to further mass defection from sheer discouragement.

The prospect of that remaining million of land workers being further drastically reduced raises images of land simply abandoned piecemeal, like some great empire being abandoned by a retreating power and returning to a primeval state. Even when Bernardet's spectre of
des terres en friche
is controlled and made official in the form of ‘set-aside' land (dignified in French by the old word for ‘fallow' –
jachère
) this in itself is perceived as an insult and a defeat. It strikes at the very heart of rural pride and morality which are, by tradition, quintessentially French national pride and morality.

I feel glad that Bernardet, though he had his forebodings, died before the full effect of the problem was apparent. I am glad he did not live to experience the pain of those who have found that this land they had spent their lives husbanding and cultivating to pass on to the next generation is explicitly regarded as just so much redundant space, a treasure without worth after all.