Degrees of Privilege

On 12 July 1789, as he toured through the French countryside, the social commentator Arthur Young noted the following encounter. ‘Walking up a long hill, to ease my mare’, he says, ‘I was joined by a poor woman, who complained of the times.’ She and her husband had ‘but a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse’. They had to work hard to maintain their children and pay a crippling burden of taxes. ‘This woman, at no great distance’, Young explains, ‘might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure was so bent, and her face so furrowed and hardened by labour,’ but in fact, ‘she was only twenty-eight’. ‘An Englishman who has not travelled, cannot imagine the figure made by infinitely the greater part of the countrywomen in France’, he continues. ‘It speaks, at the first sight, hard and severe labour … and this, united with the more miserable labour of bringing a new race of slaves into the world, destroys absolutely all symmetry of person and every feminine appearance.’1 Working men in Brittany, for instance, are described as broad, stout, mostly with naked legs and wooden shoes. The women are ‘furrowed without age by labour, to the utter extinction of all softness of sex.’2