---
title: "Down and Out in Paris and London"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 22 of 38
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/22/
cite: "George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, section 22. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/22/"
---

# Down and Out in Paris and London

*George Orwell*

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> Title: Down and Out in Paris and London
Date of first publication: 1933
Author: George Orwell (1903-1950)
Date first posted: Mar. 14, 2018
Date last updated: Mar. 14, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180314

> This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Howard Ross
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> GEORGE ORWELL

> _Down and Out_
    _in Paris and London_

> O scathful harm, condicion of poverte!
       CHAUCER

> PENGUIN BOOKS

> First published by Victor Gollancz 1933

> Copyright 1933 by Eric Blair

> [The end of _Down and Out in Paris and London_ by George Orwell]

## 22. Chapter XXII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/22/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/22/#p-N

[¶0] For what they are worth I want to give my opinions about the life of a
Paris _plongeur_. When one comes to think of it, it is strange that
thousands of people in a great modern city should spend their waking
hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The question I am raising
is why this life goes on—what purpose it serves, and who wants it to
continue, and why. I am not taking the merely rebellious, _fainéant_
attitude. I am trying to consider the social significance of a
_plongeur_'s life.

[¶1] I think one should start by saying that a _plongeur_ is one of the
slaves of the modern world. Not that there is any need to whine over
him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still, he is no
freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and without
art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the
sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he marries, his wife must work
too. Except by a lucky chance, he has no escape from this life, save
into prison. At this moment there are men with university degrees
scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day. One cannot say
that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a
_plongeur_; they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes
thought impossible. If _plongeurs_ thought at all, they would long ago
have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do
not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made
slaves of them.

[¶2] The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of
taking it for granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They
see somebody else doing a disagreeable job, and think that they have
solved things by saying that the job is necessary. Coal-mining, for
example, is hard work, but it is necessary—we must have coal. Working
in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And
similarly with a _plongeur_'s work. Some people must feed in
restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hours a
week. It is the work of civilization, therefore unquestionable. This
point is worth considering.

[¶3] Is a _plongeur_'s work really necessary to civilization? We have a vague
feeling that it must be 'honest' work, because it is hard and
disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a
man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social
need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he
may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous
statue. I believe it is the same with a _plongeur_. He earns his bread
in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is doing
anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is
not a luxury.

[¶4] As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are not luxuries, take an
extreme case, such as one hardly sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw
puller, or a gharry pony. In any Far Eastern town there are rickshaw
pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighing eight stone, clad in
loincloths. Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years old.
For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging at
the shafts, with the sweat dripping from their grey moustaches. When
they go too slowly the passenger calls them _bahinchut_.[1] They earn
thirty or forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs out after a few
years. The gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been sold
cheap as having a few years' work left in them. Their master looks on
the whip as a substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort
of equation—whip plus food equals energy; generally it is about sixty
per cent whip and forty per cent food. Sometimes their necks are
encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw flesh. It
is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of
thrashing them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front.
After a few years even the whip loses its virtue, and the pony goes to
the knacker. These are instances of unnecessary work, for there is no
real need for gharries and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals
consider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has
ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount of
convenience, which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and
animals.

[¶5] [1] See footnote p. 191.

[¶6] -----

[¶7] Similarly with the _plongeur_. He is a king compared with a rickshaw
puller or a gharry pony, but his case is analogous. He is the slave of a
hotel or a restaurant, and his slavery is more or less useless. For,
after all, where is the _real_ need of big hotels and smart restaurants?
They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a
cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some
restaurants are better than others, but it is impossible to get as good
a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same expense, in a
private house. No doubt hotels and restaurants must exist, but there is
no need that they should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work
in them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to
represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely
that the staff work more and the customers pay more; no one benefits
except the proprietor, who will presently buy himself a striped villa at
Deauville. Essentially, a 'smart' hotel is a place where a hundred
people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the
nose for things they do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of
hotels and restaurants, and the work done with simple efficiency,
_plongeurs_ might work six or eight hours a day instead of ten or
fifteen.

[¶8] Suppose it is granted that a _plongeur_'s work is more or less useless.
Then the question follows, why does anyone want him to go on working? I
am trying to go beyond the immediate economic cause, and to consider
what pleasure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing dishes for
life. For there is no doubt that people—comfortably situated people—do
find a pleasure in such thoughts. A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be
working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is
needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good—for slaves,
at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains
of useless drudgery.

[¶9] I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom,
simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals
that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep
them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually
honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions,
usually says something like this:

[¶10] 'We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we
rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness.
But don't expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower
classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will
fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel
that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits
us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by
an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat
to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.'

[¶11] This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one
can read the substance of it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated
people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally
they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded
to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal
Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep
things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow rich very much,
but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his
pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had
better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that
makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.

[¶12] Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that
there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor,
as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But
in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the
poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the
average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new
suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the
thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this
quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the
very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix
with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about
poverty? In my copy of Villon's poems the editor has actually thought it
necessary to explain the line '_Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres_' by
a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man's experience.
From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite
naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a
day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work
minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks,
'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that
since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is
no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now,
and—in the shape of rich men—is using its power to set up enormous
treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.

[¶13] To sum up. A _plongeur_ is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and
largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a
vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated
people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because
they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him. I say
this of the _plongeur_ because it is his case I have been considering;
it would apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These are
only my own ideas about the basic facts of a _plongeur_'s life, made
without reference to immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely
platitudes. I present them as a sample of the thoughts that are put into
one's head by working in a hotel.