Esquisse des mœurs de quelques peuples d’Europe. — Parallèle entre les mœurs de ceux qui habitent so

CHAP. 36: > Sketch of the morals of some peoples of Europe. — Parallel between the morals of those who live under a cold climate, and the morals of those who live under a temperate climate or under a hot climate.

When one wishes to compare the morals of nations placed under different latitudes, one encounters difficulties that are almost insurmountable, and the first that presents itself is to determine the epoch at which one must take the facts that are to serve as terms of comparison. There is, in Europe, no people whose morals have not changed in the course of centuries; the inhabitants of Germania, Helvetia, and the Gauls did not have, in the time of Caesar and Tacitus, the morals they had in the fifteenth century, and they do not now have the morals they had at this latter epoch. One finds today, among them, more humanity, more good faith, more regard for weak beings, and especially more respect for properties, without finding less courage. Has the climate changed with the morals? When the Roman legions invaded the Gauls, and carried their domination to the Vistula, had the sun moved away from Italy to draw closer to these lands? Did it advance toward the south when the Barbarians of the north overthrew the Roman empire? And did it move away again, when after centuries of servitude, ignorance, and corruption, civil liberty was established, minds were enlightened, and morals were purified?

But taking the peoples of modern Europe at a given moment, what are the moral differences that we observe between one and another? Is it true that, starting from the northern extremity of our continent, and advancing to Cape St. Vincent, we find peoples who become more and more enslaved and vicious? To answer these questions, it is enough to cast a rapid glance over some of the nations of Europe, and particularly over those who live under the coldest climates.The Lapps, although wandering like all savages, are tributary to the Russians, the Danes, and the Swedes. They are so few in number and so weak that they cannot be malevolent. In their private morals, they resemble most savages. They are of an extreme laziness, giving themselves over to labor only when forced to it by the most rigorous necessity. They bear hunger with ease, and consume a small quantity of food, because they often experience scarcity; but, in moments of abundance, they show the same voracity as beasts of prey: two of them can, in one sitting, eat half of one of the largest deer. Women appear to be for them only a commodity; fathers deliver their daughters to those who offer them the highest price; husbands offer their wives to all those to whom they wish to show politeness. In their huts, they have but a single bed for the whole family, and this bed is formed of the skin of some animals they have killed in the hunt. It is not necessary to expound the morals that result from this mixture; but one can say that the ideas of decency and modesty are as foreign to them as to beasts. We find here morals analogous to those we have observed in the northeast of Asia, in Kamchatka or in the Aleutian Islands [339].

The Lapps are for the most part slaves of the Russians; but the Russians themselves are far from being free. In which part of their population, then, shall we seek pure morals, and all those virtues that have been made the exclusive appanage of cold climates? Is it in the class of masters or in that of slaves? But the masters themselves are slaves, since there is not one of whom the prince cannot dispose as he sees fit. Is it therefore among a people of slaves that one must go to seek generous sentiments, courage, activity, the love of labor, sincerity, frankness? Is it among peoples who enjoy, if not political liberty, at least a great deal of civil liberty, that one must seek laziness, cunning, falsehood, cruelty, vengeance, and finally all imaginable vices? There is something so extraordinary in these propositions, that one would feel inclined to incredulity, even if one had not verified the facts.

There is no people whose history has not recorded its vices and crimes: at the same degree of civilization, they have all shown themselves to be more or less the same. But, if there are in Europe nations that have in this regard surpassed the others, it is those that occupy its most northern part. In the civil or religious wars that have torn apart the other European states, fanaticism has often pushed the victors to excesses of barbarity worthy of savage peoples; but these excesses have been fleeting, and sentiments of humanity have reappeared with the calm of peace. In Russia, from the beginning of the tenth century, that is to say from the epoch when the history of this country is known to us, until near the end of the last century, morals have almost not varied, and these morals equal, in their coarseness and their barbarity, those of the most stupid and ferocious peoples of Asia. The vices of the Russian population, covered today by a veneer of civilization, but presented bare by historians, so far surpass the idea one can form of them, that one cannot attempt to trace their picture without feeling an invincible repugnance, and without fearing that the weakest sketch might be taken for exaggeration.

For a little more than a century, the communications that have taken place between the peoples of the south of Europe and the slave-possessors of Russia have given some of the latter ideas and manners foreign to their homeland. Some rich families of this country have brought in tutors, artists, and works from the temperate climates of Europe, to form their understanding, or to soften their morals, as the great men of Persia had women brought from the Caucasus to reform the ugliness of their physical constitution; the influence they have thus received from the peoples of the south may have extended to a few other individuals. But it is not by a small number of privileged families that one must judge a numerous nation; it is by the men who are most subject to the influence of places and climates, that is to say, by the mass of the population. If one thus judges the Russian nation, not only will one find in it no moral superiority over the peoples placed under a hot climate or under a temperate climate, but one will find that it is greatly inferior to them.

In considering the Russian nation in its relations with foreign nations, one finds that, in victory, it has habitually pushed vengeance and cruelty as far as the most savage peoples; that, in defeat, it has carried submission and servility further than any other people, and that in treaties it has shown only perfidy [340]. From the taking of Constantinople, at the beginning of the tenth century, up to and including the war that resulted in the partition of Poland, the conduct of the Russians toward the vanquished has almost never varied. Preluding, with violence and debauchery, the massacre of women, children, and the elderly; joining irony and insult to cruelty, and carrying refinement to the invention of tortures, they could have given lessons to the cruelest Asiatic despots. The history of tigers, says their historian, would be less revolting than that of men in these centuries of barbarity [341].

In the war that preceded the partition of Poland, the Russian officers and soldiers showed the same perfidy, the same cruelty, and the same vengeance that we have observed among the natives of the north of America.

All the usages by which the most barbarous nations have softened the scourge of war were violated with regard to the vanquished; all capitulations became traps; the faith given to prisoners was always betrayed. Gentlemen who had surrendered as prisoners of war were massacred in cold blood: the chiefs perished in tortures invented for slaves; several were tied to trees, and exposed as a target to the skill of the soldiers; others were chained, so that their heads, skillfully removed at the end of pikes, might represent all the games of a carrousel. One thus saw carnage, which has for its excuse only the necessity of combat, become, by these horrible varieties, the amusement of the victors. Barbarity was pushed even further: entire troops were left to wander in the countryside after having had both their hands cut off; at other times, by an inconceivable ferocity, joining irony and insult to the most unheard-of cruelty, these unfortunates were flayed alive, in such a way that their skin represented the Polish uniform [342].

This picture, traced by the hand of a great historian, is exactly similar to those that other historians have traced of the customs of the Russians in almost all wars. One sees them, in the tenth and sixteenth centuries, giving themselves over to all the pleasures they give themselves at the end of the eighteenth, and which Rulhière has just made known to us.

Cruelty is ordinarily but a consequence of cowardice and fear. Men who tremble ceaselessly, such as tyrants and slaves, show themselves terrible in their victories, whether they wish to avenge themselves for the long torments that fear has made them suffer, or whether they hope to frighten and contain their enemies. Thus, these same Russians, so ferocious in their triumph, showed themselves to be the most submissive slaves, as long as the yoke of the Tatars weighed upon them. Not only did their chiefs, in their quarrels, always submit to the decisions of the khan; but none of them dared to take possession of his appanage before having gone to render homage, as a vassal, to this chief of barbarians. The Russian princes escorted the tax collectors of the Tatars and served them, in a way, as bailiffs [343].

“When the khan’s envoys arrived in Moscow to seek the tribute,” says Rulhière, “the grand duke would go out of his city to meet them, his head bare, holding in his hand a vase filled with mare’s milk, the most agreeable drink to all the Tatar nations; and while the envoy drank, if some drop fell on the horse’s mane, the Russian prince was obliged to wipe it with his tongue [344].”

The Russians, in their mutual relations, have never shown either more humanity or more elevation of character than they have shown, in their victories or in their reverses, with regard to the vanquished or the victors. When we see in our history the chief of the horde of the Franks strike off with his own hand the head of a soldier who has offended him, we imagine a chief of savages to whom all notion of justice is foreign; but, when we see the Russian sovereigns habitually perform the office of executioners until the eighteenth century; when we see them torture, slaughter with their imperial hands, not one victim, but fifty or sixty; when we see their numerous courtiers dispute the honor of sharing their infamous pleasures; when we see the victims themselves carry the instrument of their torture and adore the hand that slaughters them, it is impossible not to recognize in the ones a ferocity, and in the others a servility unknown in all other parts of Europe [345]. This ferocity and this servility are not particular to one class of the population; they are found in all. If the Russian senators whom a prince has just declared free advance immediately to yoke themselves to his carriage, and if they recoil at once, frightened at having shown so much audacity, the peasants show themselves no less servile toward their masters, nor less cruel toward their enemies [346].

In a country where persons are so little respected, properties must be little in safety; thus, the Russian annals, like those of the Roman empire, present to us denunciation, vengeance, cruelty, as consequences of avidity. In Moscow, as in Rome under the emperors, one recently saw slaves denounce their masters, colluding with the great to ruin, by false accusations, the men whose riches they coveted, and princes encouraging them in order to have the best part of the spoils. There is no country in Europe where the Jews have not been persecuted and where they have not been ransomed by the governments; but it is, I believe, only in Russia where almost all of them were made to perish in a general massacre, in order to seize their goods [347].

The Russians, in the relations of the sexes among themselves, have been more corrupt than any other European nation. Until the reign of Peter I, women were secluded among them as they are in most countries of Asia. They were united or rather delivered, without having been consulted, to men they had never seen, and this was called a marriage. Wives and mothers, they were counted for nothing, even in the interior of their family; they had no domestic authority. As the use of eunuchs was not established, there had resulted, says Rulhière, from this captivity of women in the midst of slaves, the total disorder of morals; and when Peter I brought society into being there, he had to reform only an apparent austerity of already dissolute morals [348]. Wherever women are slaves, they are the object of men’s contempt and outrages; those of the Russians were and still are more outraged than those of any other nation; even their murder was not punished [349]; but if they killed their husbands, they were subjected to the most horrible tortures [350]. This contempt for women led men into a vice common among slave peoples, but very rare in almost all other states of Europe [351].

Knowing no other way of rendering justice, in criminal matters, than to subject the accused to the bastinado, until he has confessed his crime, and, if he does not confess it, to subject the accuser to the same ordeal, until he has retracted his accusation [352]; subject, in their civil trials, to magistrates without enlightenment and without conscience, who know no other rules of justice than the credit of the litigants and the money they receive from them [353], it would be foolish to seek among them probity, sincerity, frankness. Let one add to this a profound ignorance and an excessive pride, and one will have a faint idea of their national morals [354].

Voltaire, who judged this country only on the memoirs he received of it, but who was not ignorant of the barbarity and corruption that reigned there before Peter I, claimed that this prince had advanced civilization there by thirty centuries. Rulhière, who saw it more closely, judged it otherwise. What remained of this celebrated reign, he says, was not a policed empire, as the panegyrists of Peter ceaselessly repeated; it was a ferocious people armed with all the arts of war [355].

“Scarcely had I arrived in Russia,” says the same historian elsewhere, “than all that Tacitus painted took on in my eyes a new character of resemblance. The Russians, in the progress of their civilization, gave me a faint idea of what Rome had become in its ruin; this sad conformity struck my eyes on all sides [356].”

The legislative works of Catherine have in no way advanced morals; all this work of pomp and ambition was reduced to preserving despotism in Russia and anarchy in Poland. The czar, says the same writer, is a hundred times more despotic than the Grand Seignior, since he is a despot while living with his subjects, without a mufti, the Koran in hand, having the right to balance his wills, without having to maintain respect for ancient customs, nor to spare the morals of a nation to whom the rod and the axe have taught, for eighty years, that it must change them [357].

I will end these observations with the picture that Rulhière gives of the morals and arts of this country, half a century after the death of Peter the Great.

“Their ancient poverty and Asiatic pomp; Judaic superstitions and the most unbridled license; stupid ignorance and a mania for the arts; unsociability in a gallant court; the pride of a conquering people and the deceit of slaves; academies among an ignorant people; orders of chivalry in a country where the very name of honor is unknown; triumphal arches, trophies, and monuments of wood; the image of everything and nothing in reality; a secret sentiment of their weakness, and the persuasion that they have attained, in all genres, the glory of the most famous peoples; that is what results, after half a century, from these astonishing works of Peter I, because he did not think of giving laws, because he let all vices subsist, and because he hastened to call in all the arts before having reformed morals [358].”

We can leave the vast territory of Russia, and approach the countries of the South, without fear of departing from morality itself. Will we find among the Poles, who do not live under a hot climate either, much purer morals? Many people cannot hear Poland spoken of without ideas of liberty and independence immediately presenting themselves to their minds. They do not consider that, on this territory as on Russian territory, there have existed, since time immemorial, two peoples: one numerous, servile, poor, and mute, like all slave peoples; the other few in number, proud, and noisy, like all dominators. The first works, suffers, and is silent; the second is lazy, oppressive, and warlike. The latter has deafened the world with the noise of its quarrels, until it was enslaved in its turn; the former has never occupied the world with itself. The existence of these two peoples on the same soil is very ancient; and, if they are not both native to the country, or if they did not arrive there at the same time, it is probable that there, as elsewhere, the slaves are the first occupants. The heat or the cold of the climate has therefore acted on them as long and with more force than on their possessors, since they did not have, like the latter, the means to escape it. How then did it happen that, being much more numerous than their masters, they did not make, to shake off their yoke, the efforts that a part of the nobility made to repulse the domination of the Austrians, the Prussians, and the Russians? Were they warmed by a more ardent sun than the one that warmed the gentlemen? Were their fibers relaxed by the heat?The greater part of the Polish population is enslaved like the Russian population that inhabits a colder climate; but there is nevertheless a remarkable difference between the one and the other. The Russian slaves, according to Rulhière, are the strength of that empire’s armies; brutalized and ferocious, they regard their slavery as the natural state of men; they bless God for their condition, and believe they will win heaven by suffering death to obey the czar [359]. The Polish slaves, on the contrary, are impatient of the yoke to which they are subjected; in the wars that the Polish nobility has had to sustain, they have sought to profit from the presence of their masters’ enemies to conquer their individual liberty. It is true that, in the revolts to which Russia called them, they avenged themselves in a cruel manner for the long oppression under which they had groaned; but, in abandoning themselves to the ferocity of their nature, they at least showed that they placed some value on their liberty, a kind of virtue that was still unknown among the Russian slaves. The cruelty and spirit of vengeance of the slaves of Poland have been only too well established; but I have nowhere encountered praise for their sincerity, their frankness, and the other virtues that Montesquieu attributes to the peoples of cold climates [360].

The morals of the Polish nobles cannot be put on the same line as the morals of the Russian nobles; there is, in a great number of the former, a pride and an elevation of character that one would seek in vain among the latter. History is far, however, from giving an honorable testimony of the morals of this part of the Polish population; the brutalization, misery, and hatred of the slaves are, in all countries, irrefutable witnesses to the ignorance, pride, avidity, and cruelty of the masters. When an enslaved population acquires or preserves for centuries the stupidity and ferocity of savages, it is not possible to believe in the gentleness of the domination. The avidity of the greater part of the Polish nobility is not proven only by the misery of its slaves; it is proven above all by the facility with which the kings bought their votes. This facility was such that, in their diets, the most virtuous of the Poles saw no other resource against corruption than the necessity of unanimity in the deliberations: finally, the gold of Russia had a greater part than its arms in the subjugation of Poland [361].

One finds in other parts of the north of Europe two populations on the same soil, as in Russia and in Poland; but, in general, historians observe little the morals of the enslaved peoples; they concern themselves with those of the masters only in what relates to the divisions that arise between them. It is not the history of the species that they describe, it is that of the kings, of their courts, and at most of their armies. The populations that cultivate the soil seem to be a part of it; one concerns oneself with them only to make known the resources they have furnished to their possessors [362]. One sees, however, that as one approaches the temperate climates, men are less enslaved; those who cultivate the land have a more considerable share in the products; their persons and their properties are less subject to the arbitrary; they have consequently gentler morals, and have less need to resort to the cunning and trickery of slaves; there are, in this regard, some exceptions; but these exceptions, as we shall see elsewhere, are not the product of the coolness of the climate.

One finds in some parts of Germany peoples who have better morals and who are more civilized than peoples closer to the south. But the degree of cold or heat of a country is not estimated only by the degree of latitude under which it is placed, it is also evaluated by the degree of elevation of the soil above sea level. A part of the peoples who are placed on the banks of the Rhine, for example, enjoy a much warmer climate than that under which the inhabitants of certain mountains of France, Italy, or Spain live. One can draw from one or the other no conclusion in favor of Montesquieu’s system.

Some of the most southern regions of Europe—Spain, Italy, and Turkey—have less liberty than France and a part of Germany; but the first two countries have more, and the third has no less, than Russia. When the Spaniards have had to fight for interests to which they were truly attached, they have shown neither less activity nor less courage than the other peoples of Europe. If they are slaves, it is by the nature of their ideas and their prejudices or by other circumstances that I do not have to expound in this chapter, and not by the weakness of their physical constitution or by a lack of courage. The Italians, so easily submitted by the armies of Austria, have not shown themselves less courageous than the peoples of the north, as long as they have been commanded by men who inspired them with confidence. One can see, by the accounts of the campaigns of 1812, that an army of eighteen or twenty thousand Italians did not fear the encounter of an army of forty thousand Russians, even under a climate to which they were not accustomed, and in positions that were not favorable to them. Finally, if the peoples situated in the most southern parts of Europe enjoy no political liberty, is it not because the populations of the North are enslaved? Is it not the North that weighs upon the South with all the weight of its ignorance, its barbarism, its slaves, and its vices?