WHO does not know of these old paintings, or even of these humble lithographs with which our ancestors loved to cover the walls, where we see, flail in hand, peasants threshing the sheaves of the last harvest on the threshing floor? With "the august gesture of the sower" and the harvest, threshing is one of the three main moments of the privileged cycle to which all humans owe their eating of bread. It is therefore understandable that apart from the picturesque nature of moving artists, they saw, in the threshing of grain, a symbolic act worthy of testing their pencils or their brushes.

But, thanks to the progress of modern machinery, the ancient scourge has disappeared from our countryside. It had remained the same as in the most distant times of history. The peasant of France, fifty years ago, still made the same gesture, used the same rough and breaking instrument as the fellahs of ancient Egypt, the slaves of Rome or the colonists of the Middle Ages. Let us not regret its death! In addition to causing disproportionate fatigue, the flail produced only a mediocre, incomplete yield. This one, like all the other primitive instruments used by the farmers of yesteryear, was one of the causes, with a few others, of the misery suffered by the countryside of France under the old regime.

Should we recall in this regard what Taine said about it in his history of the Origins of Contemporary France?
"In the most fertile regions, cottages and faces, everything announces misery and pain. Most of the peasants are weak, exhausted, small... They eat only black bread made of rye and barley and drink only water thrown on the remaining grounds... And, recalling a phrase from Mirabeau in his Treatise on Population, he adds: "Agriculture, as practiced by our peasants, is a real galley; they perish by the thousands in childhood and, in adolescence, they seek to place themselves everywhere other than where they should be".

This last phrase proves that people were already complaining, before the Revolution, about the desertion of the countryside. But this Revolution came, freeing the farmer, giving him back the right to work without being crushed by taxes and duties, giving him back the taste for life and the legitimate joy of increasing his wealth, of saving.

More than a century has passed since then. Certainly, the cultivation of the land did not become idyllic overnight. It has undergone, until this century, severe tests. However, as the situation of the farmer, the sharecropper as well as that of the owner, became more established, the working instruments made available to him improved. Among these advances, the mechanical thresher is one of the most important.

The first created in France is due to two inventors, Messrs. Bordier and Delacombe. It dates from 1855. It consisted of a cylinder bristling with mobile flails that the centrifugal force stretched and each of which came to beat the ears of corn presented to it. It was activated by the movement of a horse turning an endless belt. It was, as we see, still a very primitive machine. But the impetus was given. Its successive improvements added, on the one hand, to mechanics, the substitution, on the other hand, of steam for animal power, did not take long to make the first invention practical, manageable, easy, to spread it almost everywhere in the countryside.

Now, as soon as the harvest is done, the dull rumble of the thresher and the shrill whistle of the locomotive that drives it animate the silence of the farmyards and fields. These are, for the peasants, hard days that begin at dawn and end barely with dusk, days of incessant labor among the gold dust that escapes from the machine. But it is also the last stage, the happiest, in this life of work and worry that the farmers lead.

If our ancestors, who knew only the ancient flail, could see today how wheat is threshed, their astonishment would be great. But this astonishment would not be less for the French of today if they could see with what speed the harvest and the threshing are done in America. There, on the immense fields of cultivation stretching as far as the eye can see, enormous road locomobiles, the same ones that were used to plow the plain in all directions, advance through the ears of corn. The wheat cut by the harvester falls on an endless canvas that dumps it onto a cart. This leads the sheaves to the steam thresher that immediately threshes the wheat, winnows it, and bags it. Straw and grain, everything is carried away immediately, by a train. And, so that this gigantic work is completed without delay, electric light replaces sunlight during the night.

Claude FRANCUEIL.