The galleys were worse than the prisons. The Company urged that sick forçats should be released from their chains and provided with food, with remedies and a hospital. This last the galley-slaves seem to have regarded as a paradise after the hell (cet enfer) in which they had suffered. Even Turks, we are told, were converted by the loving-kindness of their attendants. Illegal detention long after the term of the sentence had expired was common-the rule rather than the exception. We read, for instance, of the Company intervening on behalf of a pauvre forçat dans vos galères whose sentence was for three years, who had been compelled to toil at the oar for eight years, and whose father was poor, old and failing. The Company effected a reform under which every criminal was to be furnished with a document showing when his sentence expired. Girls, whether seeking domestic service or flying from the soldiery, were met on arrival in Paris, placed in homes for training, and protected from the harpies who preyed on them. Seed, furniture, utensils and surgeons were sent to the provinces that had been devastated by war, plague, famine and taxation. Roman Catholic fugitives from Ireland were hospitably entertained. For all these purposes the members of the Company gave with the most praiseworthy generosity out of their own pockets; and in a multitude of ways (we have given only a few examples) the Company was faithful to its purpose de donner à tout le monde, à toutes les conditions, parmi toutes les misères du monde. How far it was successful is another question. Probably it touched little more than the fringe of the chronic misery of France. In this respect Claude Joly is a very competent witness and his *Claude Joly (1607-1700) must be distinguished from his contemporary namesake, the Bishop of Agen. A worthy precursor of Boisguilbert and Vauban, he may be described as a French Whig of the school of Hampden, Pym and Selden. He was a lawyer as well as a priest, and his Institution du Roy (education of King Louis XIV, then -1653-in his early teens) was a plea for constitutional as against arbitrary government. His Traité des Restitutions des Grands " (1665) deals with the wrongs of the poor, and urges confessors to refuse absolution to the rich until they have made all possible restitution or reparation." Justice, not charity seems to have been his motto. He wished that some one would compile a volume on the legal rights of the poor and was inclined to do so himself. About 1697, Fénélon wrote, but did not publish, his celebrated evidence cannot be disregarded. He maintained that politics and piety, the laws of the State and the precepts of the Gospel are not irreconcilable and boldly condemned the queen-mother for spending in cloisters time that ought to have been devoted to her duties as regent. Clearly this sturdy canon of Notre Dame had but little sympathy with the hot-house religiosity of the Company and, unlike it, he enquired into causes. Among the multitude of evils (les iliades des maux), which afflicted his fellow countrymen and fired his indignation, was the collection of taxes by the army, which lived at discretion in the villages as if in an enemy's country. It may be suggested that knowledge of this use of a standing army in France may have intensified the English hatred of standing armies under the Stuarts. However this may have been, Claude Joly was one of the first to prophesy the Revolution of 1789. In a noteworthy passage he wrote: Mais il faut que ces Lyons ravissans et les Princes mesmes qui les souffrent soient advertis que cette affliction des peuples doibt tomber enfin sur eux mesmes ... pour ce qu'il est impossible qu'il n'arrive à la longue de tous ces mauvais traitemens et de tant d'injustices un bouleversement général de l'estat et une cheute de l'édifice entier sous lequel les grands et les petits se trouvent accablez tous ensemble. This was published in 1653 and republished in 1665, when the Company was dying; and, like some of Bossuet's sermons, proves that much of the Company's philanthropic labour (laudable as most of it was) had ended in comparative failure. The French Roman Catholic Puritans who formed the Company attempted, like their Protestant contemporaries across sentence: La France entière n'est plus qu'un grand hôpital désolé et sans provision. Joly had anticipated him. In 1665 he dared to publish his vigorous protest against toutes les maltostes horribles qui ont fait de la France depuis plusieurs années un hospital de gueux et de misérables. The Canon of Notre Dame was a near neighbour of the Hôtel Dieu and, if Petty was right, his use of the word "hospital" intensifies his description of the misery of France. Judging by quotations given by M. Brémond in his "Histoire Littéraire du Sentiment Religieux en France" (Paris, 1916, I. 469 ff.) the famous Capuchin, Yves de Paris (1591-1679) deserves honorable mention. Like Joly, he began life as a lawyer. He asked what we are to think when we see équiper les carrosses et les laquais du et de la sueur des pauvres, and advocated un coffre commun pour tous les artisans syndiques. He wrote a veiled condemnation of the Company, which, M. Brémond implies, was transforming les confréries de prière ou de charité en cabales politiques. sang the Channel, to enforce the precepts of morality by rigour of law. In England we have been taught to regard the legislation of our Long Parliament as the peculiar outcome of our insular Puritanism. This was not the case, or not the whole of the case. Zeal for the suppression of the vices of the seventeenth century was first kindled in Spain, and affected France before it touched England. It was a widespread phenomenon and belonged to Western Europe as a whole, and the question which presents itself to the historian of morals is why were three countries, so different in traditions, religion and government as Spain under Philip IV, France under Richelieu, and England under the Long Parliament, moved almost in the same decade to take drastic action against immorality? In Spain new edicts were promulgated. In England new laws were passed. In France, the Company had to rest content with the laws as they stood. But in all three countries penal action by the civil magistrate was regarded as the mainspring of moral reform. The spirit of coercion seems to have been in the air, and in France the attitude of the Company towards the theatre, towards gambling, duelling, immodest raiment and behaviour, improper books, almanacks, pictures and statues, and towards prostitution and the like, was severe and implacable. Like its English contemporaries the Company was strictly Sabbatarian; and, again, like the English, it appointed "Triers " for the pulpit who were to deal with illiterate and scandalous. priests. Gossiping, gallantry and indecorous behaviour in the churches were denounced, as was also the sending of lackeys to retain chairs under fashionable preachers.* In short it was, as M. Allier says, an essential article of the Company's programme to set in motion all the powers of police and justice for the suppression of everything that was against " the honour of God. On the other hand, the Company was imbued with a genuine missionary spirit and fostered preaching to the people and the army. Foreign missions were liberally supported (one of them was sent to the Hebrides), and through them the Company touched what is now the British Empire. One of its missionary expeditions was to Canada where some forty priests, nuns and soldiers landed on a desert island" in the St. Lawrence and *Some two generations later the wealthy were willing to pay twelve or fifteen sols for a chair under Massillon, while those who in the same Lent were content to sit under Maure could do so for four sols. dedicated their new habitation to the Virgin under the name of Ville-Marie-de-Montreal. The Company came into conflict with Labour, but the main interest of this minor episode in its history is in the sidelight it casts on the relation of the Church to Labour at the middle of the seventeenth century. In certain trades, the journeymen had spontaneously and sporadically formed secret combinations which were at once Friendly Societies and Trade Unions. These combinations were known as Compagnonnages* and, as a matter of course, had their legends and traditions, their peculiar rituals and their secret pass-words. They claimed to have been founded by King Solomon and his architect, Hiram of Tyre. As a matter of fact they must have crept into being as the old craft gilds died out and employers and employed began to drift apart. When the Company was founded in 1630, Compagnonnages had already, in spite of their illegality and the ill-will of all in authority, been in existence for a century or two. They survived the Revolution of 1789 and lingered on until that of 1848 and, indeed, it is not impossible that even now they are not wholly extinct. Their members were necessarily unlettered-bakers, tailors, shoemakers and the like-and could not have been other than coarse and ignorant. They have been accused of immorality. Their initiatory rites were probably grotesque and vulgar. The Company thought them blasphemous. Moreover the Compagnons de devoir as the members called themselves were apt to be violent and prompt to "down tools" and to fight "blacklegs"; and thus ran counter to all the ideas of reverence, law and order that were cherished by the deeply religious and highly aristocratic members of the Company. One of these latter was a certain Baron de Renty, who is said to have been, in his time, the soul of the Cabale des Dévots-a noble, devout, and probably a somewhat ecclesiastical layman. Working at his trade as a shoemaker was a certain Henry Buche who, like Carey and many others who have toiled at the cobbler's bench, was devoted to the saving of souls. Like St. Paul he had travelled from city to city, maintaining himself by the labour of his hands, and always bent on winning men for God. In Paris this artisan *See " Le Compagnonnage," by E. Martin Saint-Léon, Paris, 1901; also M. Raoul Allier's "Une Société Secrète à Toulouse," Paris, chrétien, le bon Henry, as he was commonly called, sought out the journeymen of his craft (les pauvres garçons cordonniers), taught them, consoled them, found work for them and won their confidence. From them he learnt that in Paris there were syndicats ouvriers and syndicats patronaux, that the syndicats ouvriers had mysterious ceremonies at their secret meetings, were violent in their dealings with their masters and with the garçons who refused to join their combinations, that there were frequent and sometimes fatal battles and that, in short, masters, unionists and non-unionists, behaved in much the same way as they have always behaved where oppressive laws have driven workers to combine in secret. Le bon Henry and the Baron de Renty met. The cobbler and the baron joined hands in their hostility to these mysterious and blasphemous societies. Le bon Henry—l'artisan chrétien-turned detective and found information while the baron found funds. The Company allied itself with the masters for the suppression ofese wicked Compagnonnages, stirred up popular indignation against them and persuaded the learned doctors of the Sorbonne to denounce them as irreligious. The Company went further. It organized celibate fraternities of working men who were to have all things in common, to admit no heretic, to be content with food and raiment, to live in an atmosphere of piety, and to devote all their superfluous earnings to the relief of the poor, including any of their masters who should be so unfortunate as to be reduced to poverty. One of their rules is not unworthy of imitation in the spirit, if not in the letter. They were to lay by systematically during the week, that they might have the more to give on Sundays. Above everything else, they were to renounce all fellowship with the Compagnonnages and their deeds of darkness. Members of these exotic fraternities were to declare : - Nous détestons et renonçons de tout nostre cœur à cette malheureuze pratique et superstition des prétendus Compagnons de devoir comme estant une pratique du tout diabolique, contraire à la relligion chrestienne, aux bonnes mœurs et au salut des âmes.* As was to be expected these fraternities did not enjoy a long life, but one of them (at Toulouse) seems not to have been quite dead in the middle of the eighteenth century. *M. Allier's "Compagnie à Toulouse," p. 130. |