Peasant-Savant

Déguignet family, circa 1875

Fewer pleasures are more direct or immediate than the pleasure of good conversation.  We all know what a good book can do.  In Milton’s famous definition it “is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”  Conversation does not aspire to immortality, even the self-conscious immortality of the archive.  It has a spendthrift and wastrel nature, like a libation that leaves only its moist and rapidly drying shadow in the sand, a unique outpouring treasured up for no other time or place or company than those who are creating it in the moment.  Of course, books often lead to conversations, and, as today’s little anecdote will demonstrate, conversations may lead to books.

            Two very old and dear friends from New York recently visited us.  Jerry is an eminent historian, Jayn an eminent flautist; both are wonderful conversationalists.  We touched on various topics, domestic and foreign, drifting for a moment into the literary and artistic life of France in the middle of the nineteenth century.  It was in this context that Jayn mentioned a friend who had translated from the French a book* that had received a good deal of attention upon its publication in 1994 by a provincial editorial house, the memoir of a nineteenth-century French peasant, published from manuscripts that had somehow survived a century of oblivion, neglect, and even conscious disdain. This was all news to me, but within a week a perfect remaindered copy was in my hands at a cost of four dollars, inclusive of postage.

            Jean-Marie Déguignet was born into abject poverty in Brittany in 1834, the sickly son of landless agricultural laborers.  He died in Quimper, a few kilometers from the place of his birth, in 1905.  But quite a bit happened to him in between—in Russia, Africa, and Mexico, among other places.  In his later life Déguignet was a radical anarchist and a priest-hating anticlerical, usually penurious, oppressed on every side, walking that fine line between mumbling, street-person eccentricity and certifiable madness.  His seemingly simple but unattainable dream was to become a hermit-beekeeper. The latter part of his book will have the greatest appeal for most readers, but it was his formative boyhood that I found most arresting.

            Being “born into poverty” was no figure of speech.  There was no money, and very often no opportunity to earn any.  Distressed families lived by begging, and for years it was the children’s taxing occupation to go house by house through the sparsely settled farm country trying to scrounge a few half-rotten potatoes for his penniless family.  I find it most interesting that the embittered free-thinker, looking back on those experiences, turned to no political, let alone Marxist paradigm.  Instead he turned to the Gospels, whose official ecclesiastical interpretation he so despised—and in particular to those passages in which Jesus imposes a life of mendicancy upon his closest followers, adding with terrifying indignation that Judgment Day will be kinder to Sodom and Gomorrah than to those who denied food to his poor.  Any scholar of Franciscanism will recognize in the texts alluded to the very heart of Francis’s vision of religious life.

Jean-François Millet: Man with the Hoe

            Déguignet’s attitude toward peasant Catholicism is remarkable.  He hated it, and regarded it as the great millstone weighing down his countrymen.  One of his longest and most interesting chapters—an account of his visit to Jerusalem in the company of believing Russian peasants—is mainly a catalogue of vituperation and blasphemy.  Yet he never entirely broke free of the despised faith.  His remarkable self-education began with the priests, from whose rustic service books he first deduced written Breton and then Latin—all this before acquiring even the rudiments of standard French.   His mental acuity was of a particular kind occasionally documented in the old medical literature.  Among the early disasters of his life was a terrible skull fracture, the result of having been kicked by a horse.  He was convinced that this accident had “rearranged his brains,” leaving him with a photographic memory and intuitive powers of grammatical analysis and the power to master writing merely through imitation.  He then read widely and indiscriminately, achieving on his own many of the markers of a middle-class education.  At some point he started writing cahiers (notebooks) full of biographical reminiscences and essays on historical, scientific, and mythological topics that interested him.  His book is laced with classical allusions, Latin tags, and snippets from the poets of the Pléiade.  A surprising number of notebooks survived to be sought out and rescued by an indefatigable researcher who recognized their importance.  One of the poems I memorized in school was Edwin Markham’s “Man With the Hoe,” a socialist response to Jean-François Millet’s painting of that title.  Markham’s poem concludes thus:

  How will it be with kingdoms and with kings —
    With those who shaped him to the thing he is —
    When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world.
    After the silence of the centuries?

There is a sense in which this book suggests an answer.  A few months before he died, Déguignet concluded his biography thus:  “I end by wishing mankind the power or rather the will, to become true and good human beings capable of understanding one another and getting on together in a societal life that is noble and happy.  And….Doue bardono d’an nanaon.”   According to the translator, that ritual phrase of Breton means “God forgive in the beyond.”

A good deal of the book is explicitly or implicitly about language, both as an instrument of oral communication and as the nearly magical key to the author’s autodidacticism.  The Déguignets were illiterate monoglot speakers of Breton, an ancient Celtic tongue distributed among several dialects throughout the westward-jutting bump of land between the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel, due south of English Somerset and Cornwall, with Brest at the west and Rennes at the east.  It is usually called Brittany; Chaucer calls it “little Britain”.  One Breton name for the land is Cornwall (Cornouaille)—reminding us of a vanished age in which the coastal refugees of the south of England and those of the west of France had been a conjoined linguistic community.  The last Cornish-speakers in England vanished in the eighteenth century; but in France the language was so deeply entrenched that even until today it has to some extent survived the usual attempts of nationalist idiots to improve the culture of native minorities by obliterating it.  Déguignet did not speak or read French, hardly even heard it spoken, before he entered the army at the age of twenty.  What he heard then was mainly obscenities.  If we are to believe him, his first conversation “in the language of Voltaire” was with a Russian officer after the Battle of Sevastopol in 1855.  Like most French intellectuals of his century, Déguignet had a madcap theory of the origins of human language.  It came to him while boning up on Italian in preparation for a campaign in 1859.  The distinctive beauty of Italian, he claimed, derived from the fact that all its words were “pronounced with the tip of the tongue and the lips, unlike the Anglo-Saxon languages, which are pronounced with the throat; which proved that these languages were transmitted to mankind by wild beasts, whereas the Latin ones came from birds.”

Jean-Marie Déguignet, Memoirs of a Breton Peasant, trans. by Linda Archer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004)