144 FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



small peasant, compelled most of them to give up the 

 struggle, and to seek employment in the factories, while 

 part of them have, by this time, again returned to 

 agriculture or taken to market-gardening. 



Another important centre for rural industries was 

 in the neighbourhood of Rouen, where no less than 

 110,000 persons were employed, in 1863, in weaving 

 cottons for the finishing factories of that city. In the 

 valley of the Andelle, in the department of Eure, each 

 village was at that time an industrial bee-hive; each 

 streamlet was utilised for setting into work a small 

 factory. Reybaud described the condition of the 

 peasants who combined agriculture with work at the 

 rural factory as most satisfactory, especially in com- 

 parison with the condition of the slum-dwellers at 

 Rouen, and he even mentioned a case or two in which 

 the village factories belonged to the village communities. 



Seventeen years later, Baudrillart * depicted the same 

 region in very much the same words ; and although the 

 rural factories had had to yield to a great extent before 

 the big factories, the rural industry was still valued as 

 showing a yearly production of 85,000,000 francs 

 (2,400,000). 



At the present time, the factories must have made 

 further progress ; but we still see from the excellent 

 descriptions of M. Ardouin Dumazet, whose work will 

 have in the future almost the same value as Arthur 

 Young's Travels,^ that a considerable portion of the 

 rural weavers has still survived ; while at the same time 

 one invariably meets, even nowadays, with the remark 

 that relative well-being is prominent in the villages 

 in which weaving is connected with agriculture. All 

 taken, we must, however, say that in northern France, 

 where cottons are fabricated on a large scale in factory 



* Les Populations agricales de la France : Normandie. 

 t Voyage en France. Paris, 1893-7 (Berget-Levreau, publishers), 

 10 vuU. 



