Celestine by Gillian Tindall

Author:Gillian Tindall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466885738
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Chapter 12

In departing for Bourges, Ursin Chaumette was very much a figure of his time, though not necessarily a laudable one. In France as in England, the idea of the village as good and the town as intrinsically evil was appealing to a growing nineteenth-century romanticism.

Once changes were working away elsewhere, a static rural existence without the possibility of improvement or social mobility came to be seen as desirable, healthy and ‘natural’. In contrast, urban life was allegedly ‘sick’ – this vague sickness comprising everything from alcoholism, gambling and loss of religious faith to snobbery, adulterated milk and bad drains. From the Second Empire onwards, life on the land was less apt to be described as a matter of harsh conditions and brutalized feelings: a softer and more positive image took over. It was given wide currency in Millet’s two phenomenally successful pictures, ‘The Gleaners’ (exhibited 1857) and ‘The Angelus’ (1859), which between them conveyed an impression of the thrift, piety and generally unchanging values of an adequately fed and decently clad peasantry. These portrayals, apparently of timelessness, actually of a particular moment in France’s evolution, were distributed in the form of cheap prints (thanks to new processes) to homes all over France. It is significant that they caught the popular imagination so strongly just when the age-old practice of gleaning for grains was declining because of the new and more efficient reaping machinery. In both pictures, and most obviously in ‘The Angelus’, the light is that of the day’s ending which carries its own subliminal message: the paintings, apparently naturalistic, are elegiac in mood. The fictionalizing effect of nostalgia is already evident.

The reality was that both town and country were, in their own ways, part of the same evolving pattern, and the opposition between them was more complex than popular art or laments about the young deserting the land could suggest. Indeed, had rural life continued at the same deprived level, dominated by the need to eat, with all other considerations secondary, arguably more peasants would have been leaving the land, from simple necessity. At the time Célestine was born, Balzac wrote, referring to the Berry: ‘country people have a profound aversion to change, even to changes which they acknowledge might be useful to them’. But this very remark indicates that change in the countryside was stealthily on its way. A generation later the industrial and commercial development that was transforming urban France was introducing new skills, trades and amenities not just in country market towns but in the villages as well.

Land, too, was being regarded as more valuable now that it was being more productively used, and those in possession even of a smallholding found themselves in slightly easier circumstances. Most of the unused heathlands in the Berry disappeared between 1860 and 1880, apparently without the traumas and class conflicts of the British Enclosures of a hundred years earlier. In Chassignolles, grazing held by the Commune was auctioned off in lots in 1870, on the grounds that ‘most of the inhabitants get no benefit from it’.

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