Women of France in 1901
"The two features that most strike the foreigner in French home-life are the careful economy practised everywhere, in city and country, among the poor and the rich, and the pretty…
From: 1901 C.E. To: 1901 C.E.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“Home Life in France,” part one, from French Life in Town and Country by Hannah Lynch, 1901.
There is no race on the face of the earth whose home-life is so enviable as that of the French. Both men and women bring the best of their qualities to the making and maintaining of this admirable domestic institution. It is, perhaps, too perfect, too wadded, for any people which may hold the theory that domestic happiness is an inferior ideal. It explains to us why the French are bad colonists, why initiative and enterprise are less developed here than in the regions of rougher interiors. The atmosphere of a French home is the most delightful I know. I cannot see why men and women should be expected willingly to tear themselves away from it in search of dubious prosperity and happiness among barbarians.
After all, it seems to me that human happiness is as high an ideal as any of us can justly lay claim to; and if we want our own happiness we are pretty certain to want that of others, for the few who find their happiness in the misery of those around them are lower than the brutes. In England and in Ireland I have seen men and women of this sort, persons of diseased selfishness, who, in their homes, surrounded by others, live only for themselves, and whose sole mission in life apparently is to render those same victims of their proximity as wretched as possible.
Frenchwomen are not perfect, we know, since they are human. They have their meannesses, their spites, their pettinesses, and jealousies, like others; they are largely tainted with the vice of avarice, and it cannot be said that they are, in general, capable of climbing the heights of disinterestedness. They love money, and they save it. But, whatever their faults, I dare to say that no race of women can show a smaller percentage of shrews and reckless mischief-makers. Their discretion is extraordinary, and no less extraordinary is the equable, dignified nature of their domestic rule. They have their tantrums like other women, but they are surprisingly free from the vice of scolding. The word "termagant" was never invented for the pleasing and tactful Frenchwoman. She will blight your life by other means should she have that fancy.
Economy is her great and unlovable virtue. If she clips the wings of romance so ruthlessly, it is always in the interests of economy. I do not give her ideal as the highest or the noblest; it is even lower, perhaps, than that of many other classes of women, since it is exclusively occupied with the state of her own and her progeny's purse.
But the process by which she attains this ideal is charming in itself. She cheerfully makes every personal sacrifice needful, and counts herself blest when she places the hand of a son or daughter in that of a suitable match, with fortune proportionate and prospects of equal promise. She lives for her husband and children; and if, as the fashionable novelists assure us, she often deviates from the path of virtue,—makes, as the boulevardiers say, a rent in the marriage contract,—not even those romancers dare affirm that she neglects, for such caprices, the interests of either.
She is in all things literally the better half of her people. Observe her in all classes, and you will have no further need of explanation of the striking prosperity, strength, and self-sufficiency of France itself. Cheerful, competent, thrifty creature, how could the land that owns her go to the dogs, whatever the decadents and politicians may do? She is the force of the country, its stable influence and salvation.
The home rests upon her, and she makes of it a delicious nest for her children, who may exaggerate the outward form of their love for her, but who can never exaggerate the inward devotion they owe her. She has taught them, it is true, to think too much about money, to be too ready to dispute the wills of recalcitrant relatives who wish to leave their fortunes to others than themselves; she has left them too little liberty, and trained them in ignorance of such a virtue as disinterestedness; she is too apt to encourage her son in the theory of the wild oats-sowing, without even the saving grace of limiting that period to pre-nuptial days, being trained herself in the fixed conviction of her land, that man is a tameless beast who cannot exist without fugitive loves throughout his chequered career.
Indeed, I have heard a very pious old French lady assert that a married man may have a hundred mistresses and be a perfectly honest man whom nobody should criticise. When I made respectful mention of the wife's injuries, she shrugged, called me an unsophisticated fool, and said that every sensible girl, on her wedding-morn, understood what she was facing, and, if she were well-bred, she was wise enough to keep her eyes shut. No wife, she maintained, could expect to learn anything to her advantage by prying into her husband's habits and distractions outside the portals of home, and so her wisdom lay in studied ignorance.
The thing to prevent in a husband or son was extravagance. So long as the purse-strings remained unloosened, and the health was uninjured, a judicious woman should ask for nothing more from the men around her. For this reason, the novelists show us the French mother as charmed to discover that her son has started romantic relations with the wife of a wealthy friend. She is convinced that he must have a mistress, and her only hope is that he shall choose one who will not ruin him in purse or in health.
Of his heart and happiness in these matters she seems to care not a pin, possibly because of the talent for cynicism possessed by the French, which declines to recognise heart outside the family. If every poison has its antidote, so has every quality its drawback. This beautiful maternal devotion we so admire is practised to the detriment of all outsiders. The French mother would make a holocaust of all humanity on the altar of her offspring's advancement and interest. She will gladly toil for him or for her, save francs and pence for either, deprive herself of what she most loves, accomplish for her child every virtue in the world but that of justice or generosity toward outsiders.
For the French menagere, the outsider is the enemy. Indeed, for all the French family the outsider is a reptile to be crushed. Let a wealthy Frenchwoman take a strong fancy to an outsider, and the hostility awakened in the breast of every member against this inoffensive outsider will be found to be a sentiment to which only Balzac could do justice. Sons and daughters, cousins, nephews, and nieces, will combine to slight or insult the reprobate.
In the case of a widower, or an unmarried uncle, marriage is the terror; in the case of the wealthy woman I suspect the last will and testament arouses the scare. Anyway, whatever the unexpressed sentiment may be, the French family of all classes joins in this unreasonable hatred, suspicion, and jealousy of the outsider.
I remember when I first came to Paris many years ago, having a letter of introduction to Madame Blaze de Bury, a very singular and clever old lady, who said to me: ''You will find the French as hard as a granite wall when you come to knock against them. To the superficial glance they are so easy, so accessible, so pleasant. Well, I have lived long enough among them to discover that they are just like the Chinese. They hate foreigners, even when they are delightful to them. And this hatred of the foreigner is shown in family life, where the foreigner is everyone who is not a direct relation."
Subsequent experience did not prove Madame Blaze de Bury altogether right as regards the foreigner, for I, a foreigner, have found in France kindness, sympathy, generosity, and affection, and all from the French of the very French. In criticising Frenchwomen, I am criticising the part of humanity I like best, appreciate and admire most on earth. Give Frenchwomen the freedom, the liberal education of England, a dash of Protestantism—that is, mental and moral independence — and you will have womanhood in its perfection. They have little of the snob, they are naturally simple and unpretentious, and they are competent, intelligent, and discreet.
The two features that most strike the foreigner in French home-life are the careful economy practised everywhere, in city and country, among the poor and the rich, and the pretty courtesies and tendernesses which help to keep the wheels of domestic machinery so admirably oiled. The notion that relationship is merely the privilege of making one's self as disagreeable as possible, and indulging in cruelties of speech and action, does not exist in France, or exists in a very diminished degree.
Lynch, Hannah. French Life in Town and Country. Putnam, 1901.
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