The fourth characteristic that defines the French, according to Wharton, is "Continuity:"
"Any one who really wants to understand France must bear in mind that French culture is the most homogeneous and uninterrupted culture the world has known..." From the time prehistoric man painted the caves of souther France through waves of invasions--Gaul, Roman, Franks..."The people of France went on living in France, surviving cataclysms, perpetuating traditions, handing down and down and down certain ways of ploughing and sowing and vine-dressing and dyeing and tanning and working and hoarding, in the same valleys and on the same river-banks as their immemorially remote predecessors."
Wharton contrasts the French experience with the American one--"the sudden uprooting of our American ancestors and their violent cutting off from all their past, when they set out to create a new state in a new hemisphere, in a new climate, and out of new materials?...[They] "no doubt carried many things with them, such vital but imponderable things as prejudices, principles, laws and beliefs. but even these were strangely transformed when at length the colonists emerged again from the backwoods and the bloody Indian warfare."
And why, Wharton wonders, do the French cling so tenaciously to France? "...because they loved it...France, as her historians have long delighted to point out, is a country singularly privileged in her formation." Great rivers, sheltering mountains, natural harbors, a mild climate and rich soil..."her cool mild sky shot with veiled sunlight overhung a land of temperate beauty and temperate wealth...France offered the happy mean which the poets are forever celebrating."
Wharton uses "Continuity" to explain such French practices as thrift--"the reluctance to give, the general lack of spontaneous and impulsive generosity" even to relieve suffering during wartime--and good manners which the "French too often economize...as they do francs.") Choosing to stay in France, reasons Wharton, meant that the French renounced Adventure and the kinds of risk-taking that can make men inordinately rich or generous towards strangers. "The Frenchman did not desire inordinate wealth for himself, but he wanted and was bound to have, material security for his children. Therefore the price to be paid for staying at home, and keeping one's children with one (an absolute necessity to the passionately tender French parent), was perpetual, sleepless, relentless thrift." Good manners are not "a spontaneous emission of human kindliness" but rules of social interaction that guarantee no surprises in lives that are "as settled, ruled off and barricaded as their carefully-measured and bounded acres."
But this conservatism, this fear of imprudence, has also led to the French belief in the power of sustained effort: "in the world of ideas, as in the world of art, steady and disinterested effort alone can accomplish great things."
In addition, Wharton advises her readers to observe the French absence of financial ambition--both the best clue to the French character and the most useful lesson for Americans to learn from the French. Wharton observes that the French "are not occupied with money-making in itself, as an end worth living for, but only with the idea of having money enough to be sure of not losing their situation in life, for themselves or their children...they want only enough leisure and freedom from material anxiety to enjoy what life and the arts of life offer....the distinguishing mark of the Frenchman of all classes is the determination to defend his own leisure, the taste for the free play of ideas, and the power to express and exchange views on questions of general interest."
Wharton's observation about the French absence of financial ambition echoes Montaigne--who, writing three hundred and fifty years earlier, explained that he had lived kinds of situations...in the first, he was dependent on the authority of others for his spending money ("My spending was done the more joyously and carelessly for being all at the hazard of fortune.") In the second, he had money and laid it aside for emergencies, but "I never thought I was sufficiently provided. And the bigger my load of money, the bigger my load of fear....we deprive ourselves sordidly of the enjoyment of our own possessions."
In the third stage, however, Montaigne, sounding very much like a Frenchman of 1917, has "overthrown this stupid fancy...I make my expense run abreast with my receipts;...I live from day to day and content myself with having enough to meet my present and ordinary needs....Happy the man who has regulated his needs in such just measure that his wealth can satisfy them without his care and trouble, and without the spending or acquiring of it interrupting his pursuit of other occupations better suited to him, more tranquil and more congenial."
Continuity, indeed.