Pierre Maurin, quoted by Dorothy Day: on Charles Peguy, the French Revolution + homesteading in Canada

CATALAN-FRENCH PEASANT CO-FOUNDED CATHOLIC WORKER

 WITH EX-COMMUNIST AMERICAN PACIFIST SAINT

‘I did not like the French Revolution’

Bastille Day

 

“It was in 1882 when the public-school system started (I was five years old).  It was obligatory in every village.  My mother and father could not speak French, only a dialect like Catalan.  (Joffre was born in French Catalonia and Foch in Basque.  Catalonian is spoken in Barcelona.)  Our home language was more Latin than French.  The name of our town was a Latin one, Oultet.

“The seat of our diocese was twelve miles away, and our parish church two miles.  Oultet had fifteen families and in the parish there were ten villages.  There were two priests who worked very hard.  To help earn their livelihood they worked in the garden.  The villagers provided them with wood, and they got some pay from the state, a compensation which was regulated by the concordat made by Napoleon.

“My family owned eighty sheep and there was one herder for all the village.  He had a helper in summer.  There were probably three thousand sheep in the flock and they grazed off what was still communal land.  It was very cold in winter.  We used branches from the trees for fuel, cutting them every three years.  The leaves were for the sheep and the branches for firewood.  We cooked at an open fireplace.

“My father is dead, and my stepmother must be seventy-five by now.  Her name was Rosalie.  She was nineteen when she married my father.  Last I heard, my brother was still farming and dealing in cattle.

“I lived there in the southern part of France, a peasant, on the soil, until I was fourteen.  After that for a time I was a cocoa salesman traveling around France.  Then while I was teaching at the Christian Brothers’ School I was a member of a study club in Paris.  At the same time Charles Peguy was there, but I did not know him, nor was I influenced by him, though people say I write like him.  Instead I was interested in a group which published a paper twice a week, called Le Sillon.  It had nothing to do with the decentralist movement, no, but it was interested in ethics.  It understood the chaos of the times.  Marc Sangnier was editor and backer of the paper.  Later my friends got out a weekly paper called The Spirit of Democracy.  They were looking for an ideology.  They were preoccupied about the idea of an elite in a democracy.

“I did not like the idea of revolution.  I did not like the French Revolution, nor the English Revolution.  I did not wish to work to perpetuate the proletariat so I never became a member of a union.  Besides I was an unskilled worker.  I was always interested in the land and men’s life on the land.

“That’s why I went homesteading to Canada in 1909, but after two years, when my partner was killed, I moved about the country with work gangs and entered this country in 1911, where I have been ever since.”

Probably it was the sight of the poverty of Paris slums, and the thought of his peasant background, and the reading of Prince Kropotkin, that first led Peter to think of moving to Canada to settle on the land.

 

[Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, 'Peasant of the Pavements,' pages 176 - 178, originally published in 1952 with illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg.  This autobiography of the legendary Catholic social activist Dorothy Day is available at the Oak Bay branch of the Greater Victoria Public Library.]