misc '5 ’1 [ER-1 Hittifimmr'filéaulmm“ - «v i ' V y 0.13. -- ‘1'; '9‘ p I'.' "g 3.3. 1' 93 «L543...- .___' a . at, . ’ 3-4, “ ' ‘ ‘ -.g «T; A» a;.-'-._o‘- . . H .4 . ‘- ‘._' '1 a ‘ -‘-’"4'V 1.) Umvezfly This is to certify that the thesis entitled Poverty and the Enlightenment presented by Patricia Elisabeth Smith has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for MoA. Jemein Date March 6, 1979 04639 History Major professor OVERDUE FINES ARE 25¢ PER DAY PER ITEM & . m. is . \ \ Return to book drop to remove this checkout from your record. POVERTY AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT By Patricia Elisabeth Smith A THESIS Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of History 1979 ABSTRACT POVERTY AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT BY Patricia Elisabeth Smith Intermittent or chronic poverty threatened a growing proportion of the working people of eighteenth-century France as population grew faster than agricultural production, and as income inequalities were aggravated by long—term economic trends. The response of the thinkers of the Enlightenment to this growing social problem was closely linked to their novel secular modes of social analysis and to their new conceptions of morality, social justice, and social responsibility. Their conclusion was that poverty was the product of "unnatural", unjust, and inefficient social institutions, and that it was therefore amenable to solution by human action. This represented a radical departure from traditional fatalistic con- ceptions of the causes and cures of poverty. The articulation of these notions formed the analytic and normative basis for the -- much later -- development of modern public welfare systems. This work is dedicated to my grandmother Lisa Rudinger, a faithful and energetic servant of Humanity and Reason ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my mother, Chitra Smith, for moral and intellectual help beyond all measure; Howard M. Solomon, for exciting my interest in historical "nuts and sluts" and for indulgence at a critical time; and Anne Meyering, for stimulation and encouragement. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PART ONE THE PROBLEM OF POVERTY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE . . . 1. THE ECONOMIC CONTEXT OF POVERTY . . . . . . . . . . . 2. POOR PEOPLE: HISTORIANS' DEFINITIONS AND TYPOLOGIES. PART TWO THE ENLIGHTENMENT RESPONSE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . l. SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ANTECEDENTS . . . . 2. THE ENLIGHTENMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A. The philosophes and the People. . . . . . . . . . B. The Economists and Poverty. . . . . . . . . . . C. Prescriptions for the Reform of Poor Relief . . . NOTES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv .14 .31 .31 .41 .41 .49 .57 .68 .77 INTRODUCTION Historical writing on eighteenth-century France abounds with excellent works of scholarship on the social and economic realities of the age on the one hand, and on its great intellectual achieve- ments on the other. This essay is a modest attempt to articulate the two with respect to a single topic: it tries to join together the history of poverty with an account of Enlightenment thinkers' perceptions of it and responses to it. The spread and deepening of poverty was one of the dramatic devdelopments of the age, and it coincided with the no less dramatic intellectual and moral efflorescence of the Enlightenment. The philosophes are best known to posterity for their thought on many other matters, but they were deeply concerned about the poverty of the common people. Their study of the problem led them to radically new understandings of its sources, and thence to policy proposals of exceptional relevance and comprehensiveness. An analysis of their responses to poverty adds a new dimension to our understanding of the practical meaning of "Enlightenment" in the face of an immediate and pressing social problem. PART ONE: THE PROBLEM OF POVERTY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE 1. The Economic Context of Poverty Just as there is no altogether satisfactory and unambiguous definition of poverty existing today, there can be no clear definitions of historical poverty. This is especially true of times and places where the great majority of the population live at or near subsistence level and are subject to unpredictable and uncontrollable fluctuations in resources. A simple monetary definition of a poverty-line would be particularly misleading if applied to an economy like that of eighteenth-century France, in which only a small minority of the population received their entire income in money, and in which the prices of essentials varied regionally, and fluctuated frequently and widely. Definitions based on levels of food consumption are likely to be less misleading. Some eighteenth-century observers distinguished the poor, who managed to feed themselves, from the indigent, who could not -- but attempts to define "feed" are also problematic; even severely malnourished populations —- for example, those that eat virtually nothing but potatoes or chestnuts -— can survive and even increase in size. Historians of the poor, poverty, and poor relief in eighteenth- century France are unanimous in their conclusion that it is impossible to estimate the numbers of the poor with any degree of reliability. "On doit renoncer ... a connaitre 1e nombre des pauvres, la nature et 1e degré de leur indigence." (Camille Bloch, l908)1. "La question la plus urgente, et la plus évidente, qui se présente a l'esprit est celle du nombre des pauvres. C'est aussi, indiquons—le d'emblée, la question pour laqelle aucune réponse satisfaisante ne peut étre donnée." (Jean-Pierre Gutton, l970)2, "...[The] approach to a study of poverty must predominantly be a qualitative not a quantitative one. There is no such thing as a graph of human suffering." (Olwen Hufton, 1974)3. This is so not only because there is no workable and consistent definition of poverty, but also because the necessary eighteenth- century economic and demographic data are spotty and unreliable. Fiscal records do not reveal the number of people who did not have enough to tax, and they are frequently inaccurate records of the resources of those who did. The records of relief institutions, where they exist at all, provide more information about the resources of those institutions than about the extent of poverty -- although they frequently contain invaluable information on the occupations, ages, infirmities, and sex of relief recipients. Police and court records provide statistics and some biographical information on the poor who resorted to illegal expedients such as vagrancy, theft, or smuggling in order to survive; but they give us no idea of the number of poor people who did not break the law, or of those who did but did not get caught. The governmental and ecclesiastical enquiries into the poverty problem conducted under Turgot in 1774 and by the commissions intermédiaires of the provincial assemblies after 1787 yielded substantial data on charitable resources, but the light they shed on the poor themselves illuminates the quality of poverty far more clearly than its extent. The greatest obstacle to counting the poor of eighteenth- century France lies in the fact that the proportion of the total population living in poverty was very unstable and almost infinitely expansible. People or families who were normally self-supporting could be driven rapidly into indigence by a bad harvest or a series of bad harvests, by an increase in the price of bread, by a decrease in the demand for labor, or by illness. Probably the chief defining characteristic of the eighteenth-century French poor was their inability to accumulate reserves for hard times. This resulted in extreme vulnerability to even moderate changes in prices, wages, and employment. By this definition, it seems likely that a very sub- stantial proportion of the population of France in the eighteenth century were poor, in the sense that even temporary and minor adversity could lead to indebtedness in the best case or, at worst, to physical deterioration or actual starvation. Olwen Hufton suggests that more than 30 or 40 percent of the population fit this description by the end of the ancien regime.5 Because the definition of poverty is itself so problematic; because a very substantial proportion of the poor were only destitute some of the time; because the ecclesiastical and governmental authorities generally only felt moved to count them when things were worse than usual; and because methods of counting them were so primitive, it is reckless to estimate their numbers in anything more than very gross figures. There is a good deal of evidence, however, which suggests strongly that the number of poor people -- and quite possibly their proportion in the population -- increased as the century progressed. The eighteenth century produced an apparent paradox: a population growing to unprecedented size while the standard of living of a substantial proportion of its members progressively deteriorated from a level that had been very near to subsistence to begin with. In a sense the population increase was due to a long run of meteorological and epidemiological good luck. The murderous subsistence crises and catastrophic pandemics.which had decimated the undernourished population in the seventeenth century abated after the early decades of the eighteenth. The last demo- graphically disastrous nation-wide crop failure followed.the bitter winter of 1708-1709, and the bubonic plague disappeared from France after a last major outbreak in the south in 1720. Harvest failures and epidemics continued to cause extreme hardship locally, but gradually improving transportation and marketing arrangements probably helped to reduce the severity of regional food shortages.6 People in crisis-stricken areas went hungry and became easy prey for the diseases which attack the undernourished; but they no longer starved to death by the thousands as they had during the worst of the seven- teenth-century crises. In a sense, the shortages were better distributed. ,The local killer-crises of the seventeenth century were replaced gradually by a more generalized chronic, attenuated hardship. Under these circumstances "it was fully possible for relative emancipation from famine and plague to produce a greater number of poor than ever before ... A starving population, generally speaking, cannot reproduce itself; an undernourished one has no difficulty in so doing."7 Small but persistent annual excesses of births over deaths produced a very substantial growth in population during the course of the century, from nineteen or twenty million in 1700 to twenty- five or twenty-seven million in 1790. The increase started slowly in the 1720's, continued until the 1740's (when.the decimated gener- ation of 1710 reached reproductive age just as several poor harvests followed one another), and resumed at an accelerated rate during the 1750's and 1760's.8 Between about 1725 and 1770, Goubert argues, demographic growth and economic expansion more or less supported each other during a more or less benign period of generally good harvests. After 1750 population growth began to snowball as the large cohorts born after 1710 or 1720 reached their peak reproductive years. Economic growth did not accelerate correspondingly. The stranglehold of France's traditional vicious circle of agricultural inefficiency and poverty (low crop yields leading to reluctance to use precious crop-land for pasture, leading to manure shortage, perpetuating low crop yields) was aggravated by increasing population pressure. Goubert believes that developments well documented in Brittany may have been an extreme case of something happening all over France. In Brittany the population expanded to the absolute limit of the economy's carrying capacity. As long as harvests were good and the domestic textile industry prospered, the swollen population managed to stay above the starvation line. When general economic recession set in all over France in the early 1770's (partly as a result of poor harvests) large numbers of people who barely managed to survive in the best of times finally began to starve, or to drop dead in the epidemics that attacked the starving; or they picked up whatever they had left and trudged off to join the growing masses of vagrants who knew they would starve if they stayed at home, and who thought they might avoid or postpone starvation by going somewhere else.10 It remains a matter of debate among economic historians whether aggregate increases in food production kept pace with population growth over the course of the eighteenth century. Goubert seems to doubt it. Labrousse estimates tentatively that agricultural pro- duction may have increased by one-fourth to one-third between 1730-39 and 1780-89 -- a growth rate which would very roughly balance Goubert's estimate of a 20 to 40 percent increase in population between 1700 and 1790.11 In any case, the pauperization of the lower levels of the French peasantry did not begin abruptly in the 1770's when population growth began in many areas to overtake agricultural production. The fruits of the substantial economic growth which had taken place during the four decades before 1770 were unevenly distributed. Population growth may not have produced an absolute decline in per capita product, but the distribution of the aggregate product became increasingly unequal as the eighteenth century progressed. A significant proportion of the population lived better than ever before, but successive generations of the lower ranks of the peasantry edged in the direction of starvation. Labrousse's Esguisse d2 mouvement des prix‘EEDdes revenus describes an important concentration of wealth as land rents increased faster than agricultural prices, and agricultural prices increased faster than wages.12 Large landowners and.the sellers of large quantities of agricultural products profited from these long-term developments, while those who rented the land they farmed and those who bought the food they ate suffered. The eighteenth century witnessed d'une part, une pauperisation radicale mais limitée, d'autre part une pauperisation générale mais attenuée, de la masse de la population. Le travailleur proprement did subit la premIEre, d'autant plus fortement que son niveau de vie est plus bas. Le petit pigpriétaire et le métayer subissent seulement 1a seconde. Peasants who rented some or all of their land found their profits (if they made any) shrinking, or found that what they grew would no longer pay the rent and feed them too. Labrousse estimates that the cost of living increased by about 62 percent between 1734 and 1789, while wages rose by only 26 percent; the drop in real income for those who lived on wages alone was on the order of 25 percent.14 This figure may well overstate the deterioration in living standard resulting from these secular movements of prices and wages, since only a small fraction of all French families derived all of their income from wages, and since many laborers received at least a portion of their wages in kind. But although most French cultivators were not totally landless, only a minority owned or held enough land to support a family or to accumulate reserves for years of deficient harvests.15 At the time of Louis XIV between 50 and 90 percent of all rural households, depending on the region, did not farm enough land to feed themselves and to pay their taxes.16 Most rural families depended on a variety of sources of income to supplement the inadequate product of their land: men hired out as agricultural laborers if work were available near home, or as migrant workers if it were not; their wives spun thread or made lace at home; their sons might ease the pressure on the family holdings by looking for work as valets dg_fe£me_ somewhere in the neighborhood; and their daughters might leave for a nearby town to work as domestic servants for room and board and a small wage. Those with the smallest landholdings, who depended on wages for a relatively large proportion of their livelihood, and who had to buy a relatively large proportion of their food, suffered most from the long-term lag of wages behind prices. Increasing numbers of small landowners and sharecroppers were forced to turn to wage labor precisely during a period when the purchasing power of wages was declining. Labrousse suggests that many peasant families may have avoided pauperization by working more as the value of their wages dropped, and as the product of their landholdings was eaten away by rising rents, taxes, and seigneurial dues.17 But many did not have that option. The increase in pop- ulation far outstripped the increase in land brought under culti- vation, and even the progressively more labor-intensive exploitation of land already under cultivation could not absorb -- or feed -- the millions of additional people.18 By the 1740's and 1750's there was already substantial chronic rural unemployment in the pay§_dg_petite culture, and the problem gradually spread through much of France.1 The rapid growth of domestic textile production provided some addition- al part-time employment for rural families in most regions,20 but rarely enough to take up the slack in employment caused by rural 10 overpopulation: indeed, the growth of the rural textile industry may have encouraged population growth by providing a supplementary means of subsistence to families which could not have survived -- or could not have grown -- without this source of income. "Certes", observes Labrousse, "l'abondance des tisserands n'est pas habituellement signe d'opulence, surtout au niveau paysan."21 The poverty of the agri- cultural population was in turn a serious obStacle to the industrial development which alone could have provided employment for the surplus rural population. The combination of growing population, declining wages, and rising prices and rents accelerated the subdivision of already-small peasant landholdings. More and more small cultivators let their leases expire or sold bits of their holdings. If an extra child survived to adulthood the heirs to what was left of the family property were faced with having to scrape some sort of living out of an even smaller "micropropriété". The number of exploitants-travailleurs (small proprietors who also did wage labor and were therefore affected by.the ' declining purchasing power of money wages) increased, especially during the second half of the century.22 This resulted in a gradual, inexor- able downward movement in the standard of living and security of a substantial proportion of the peasant population. The degree to which a peasant family was pauperized by secular trends in wages, prices, rents, and population growth -- and the rate at which this took place -- depended upon many variables, including among others the proportion of the family landholdings which was rented; the proportion of the family's income which came from its land; the availability of work 11 in the area; the state of the textile industry; the weather; the number of children born and the number who survived. Those who started out the poorest -- those who held the least land or who rented everything they farmed —- suffered the most. Some of those who held just enough land to feed themselves at the beginning of the century managed not to lose ground; they might pay the extra taxes and rents and dues by doing a bit of wage labor on the side; and, if they were lucky, not too many of their children would survive to subdivide the family holdings. They might weather crises by mortgaging some of their land on terms that might enable them event- ually to get it back again. If, on the other hand, a few years of bad harvests followed one another, or if the local sources of employ- ment dried up, or if the head of the family died of smallpox, or if an extra child or two survived infancy, the family economy could easily begin to crumble into pauperism. The barely self-sufficient peasant might sink into intermittent or permanent indigence. The long-term economic trends of the eighteenth-century probably made recovery increasingly difficult for those who went under. As a larger and larger number of people were pushed toward the edge of indigence, the "traditional" cyclical and seasonal periods of economic hardship became an increasingly serious threat to ever more people. In the short term as well as in the long run, the intensity of economic pressures was inversely proportional to wealth, since marginal changes in the cost of living were the most serious for those with the smallest margins. Seasonal and cyclical fluctu- ations in prices affected the poorest the most seriously for a number 12 of reasons. The cost of food, which was the largest single element in the budget of the classes inférieures, increased faster in the eigh- teenth century than most other prices. Further, the amplitude of fluctuations in food prices was generally the greatest for the cheapest foods. In times of shortage the prices of inferior grains increased more than the price of wheat, as people who normally could afford wheat resorted to rye or barley; and the price of legumes —- the staple of the poorest -- rose more than the prices of the cheapest grains.23 Periodic increases in the cost of living were therefore greatest for those people whose standard of living was the lowest to begin with. If high prices were the result of a poor harvest, as they usually were, the pressures on the poor were compounded. Tithes, dues, and rents levied on crops proportionally and in kind became grossly regressive when the harvest was short. Families whose land normally yielded just enough for their support would need to buy food to com- pensate for the deficient harvest, and families which normally had to buy some of their food would need to buy more. More people therefore entered the labor market just when the diminished size of the crop reduced the demand for agricultural labor. Under these circumstances the totally landless suffered first and worst; they could find no work and they had no other income. But the position of the micropro- priétaire who could only extract a few cabbages or a couple of bushels of beans from his little plot was not significantly better. He might be able to forestall starvation for a few weeks longer than the land- less travailleur. Or he could sell his lopin dg_terre, eat for a 13 while on the proceeds, and spend the rest of his uncertain life as a travailleur himself. Through most of the eighteenth century harvest failures were fairly localized and generally not severe. But by the 1760's such a large number of people had moved so close to the border of indigence that they were acutely vulnerable to even very small economic upsets. And the series of widespread harvest failures of the 1770's and the industrial and commercial crises which soon followed were a great deal more than small upsets. The crisis was bad enough to reduce, or to halt, or in some areas even to reverse population growth.24 .QE£§§ and bishops started writing agonized reports to intendants about the masses of people in their parishes or dioceses who were starving to death much faster than usual. Peasants, municipal governments, and the State began to panic about the growing hordes of vagrants and beggars invading the cities and terrorizing the countryside. Theft and organized banditry increased. During the last decade of the ancien regime forty thousand babies were abandoned every year.25 Poverty had suddenly taken on a new and appalling aspect. l4 2. Poor People: Historians' Definitions and Typologies Even the most sophisticated eighteenth-century observers did not have sufficient data to construct the graphs of price and wage move- ments and of demographic evolution which illuminate our understanding of the poverty problem. They based their analyses and judgements of the poor on what they saw -- or thought they saw -- in the streets and the countryside. Recent social historians have learned a great deal about what they saw -- and also about what they failed to see. Their findings about the characteristics of the poor population are indispensable to an informed analysis of eighteenth-century responses to poverty. Camille Bloch was the first historian to do a comprehensive study of the rationales for the development of government assistance to the poor in eighteenth-century France.1 He was more concerned with the nature of institutionalized state assistance and with the evolution of its intellectual justification than with the precise identification and classification of its recipients, and his account centers almost exclusively on those aspects of the poverty problem which provoked concern among the agents of the State. Late in the eighteenth century increasing begging and vagrancy spurred the royal government to assume increasing responsibility for the poor, Bloch argued. He attributed this "mendicité exubérante foisonnante" to general economic pressures (land parcellation and rising taxes, dues, and rents) which weighed ever more heavily upon small cultivators as the century progressed.2 He indicated that these pressures were worst for day-laborers and sharecroppers, but he made no attempt to be more specific about the 15 economic characteristics or the numbers of the poor, about thresholds of poverty, or about the line between struggling self-sufficiency and the resort to begging or vagrancy. Bloch's treatment of the poor as an administrative problem was characteristic of the approach taken by historians of the poverty problem until the last couple of decades, when social historians started to dig more deeply in an effort to identify and analyze the classes inférieures. In 1963 Francois Furet proposed a method for differentiating among the menu peuple who had been lumped together by their grander eighteenth-century contemporaries, and who had remained lumped to- gether in much of the quantitative demographic and social history which was by then being produced.3 Since the birth of the social sciences in the eighteenth century, Furet complained, social scientists and historians had overemphasized the importance of wage levels in their definitions of the classes inférieures and had exaggerated the significance of the economic dividing line between property-owners and wage-earners. He suggested a multivariate analysis of the lower orders which would take into account socio- logical data as well as data on wages and consumption levels. None of these factors, he argued, was by itself adequate to identify the classes inferieures and to differentiate between groups within them. Accurate measurement of wages and consumption is difficult: there are no uninterrupted series of national or regional wage statistics; and even where data are available they may be misleading because workers frequently received a substantial but variable and unknown proportion of their pay in kind. Official occupational designations can also 16 obscure enormous differences in activities and standards of living -- a maitre-menuisier, for example, could be a substantial entrepreneur employing several dozen compagnons, or a lone carpenter with no employees and little to insulate him from fluctuations in food prices or in the demand for cabinets. The former did not belong to the classes inférieures; the latter did. But careful examination of notarial records (marriage contracts and inventaires aprés décés, for example) can illuminate the personal economic realties too often obscured by excessive concentration on wage and price data, or by inflexible adherence to nominal differences in socioprofessional status. A definition which used both economic and socioprofessional criteria and checked them against each other, Furet argued, would show that the urban classes inférieures —- those susceptible to sudden pauperization -- extended above the level of propertyless wage—laborers and domestic workers, well into the ranks of property- owning artisans and shopkeepers.4 Within the classes inférieures, the proportion of classes flottantes (the poor who were so poor that they had no domicile) varied with long-term demographic changes and with short-term conjonctures of prices, employment, and wages. Most recent historians of the pre-industrial French poor have used the variety of sources recommended by Furet, and their studies have confirmed his expectations about the nature of the poor pop— ulation. Unfortunately, Furet's method is more fruitfully applied to the urban poor than to the rural poor —- and more easily to the domiciled urban poor than to the homeless urban underclass or to the hordes of rural immigrants who flocked to towns seeking work or hand— outs. Wage and price statistics are more abundant for urban than for 17 rural areas, and are more likely to reflect accurately the real stand- ard of living of town dwellers, whose incomes generally included a larger proportion of cash wages than did the income of rural workers. Wage data are scarcest forthe least skilled occupations; the occupations, that is, of the poorest, and frequently the occupations of the rural immigrants who did not stay in town long enough to make it into any other historical documents. The countryside was the major source of poor people in the eighteenth century, and because of the relative shortage of economic and sociological data on the rural classes inférieures the major sources and forms of poverty in the ancien regime remain understudied. However, several excellent and detailed monographs illuminate the nature and extent of poverty among the urban working classes. Jean-Pierre Gutton's study of the poor of Lyons and the Lyonnais5 provides a comprehensive analysis of the degree and composition of urban poverty. Gutton argues that the economy of the Lyonnais was sufficiently varied to produce most of the kinds of poverty which existed in eighteenth-century France: it included some isolated and some heavily-travelled rural areas, two major manufacturing cities, (Lyons and Saint-Etienne) and a number of smaller towns. Most of Gutton's data come from Lyons itself, however, which was in a number of ways atypical: it was the second largest city in the kingdom, and it had an unusual single-industry economy (silk manufacturing). It was exceptionally well provided with municipal and ecclesiastical charitable resources, and this probably affected the composition of the city's floating population as well as the fate of the indigenous poor, 18 since the hope of appealing to urban charity was a powerful magnet to the rural destitute. Poverty in Lyons had different sources and took somewhat different forms from poverty in cities which were smaller, less industrialized, and less well—endowed with resources for relief. Nonetheless, Gutton's typologie des pauvres is extremely informative, and describes patterns of poverty which were similar to those in many cities.6 Gutton observes that in the language of the Ancien Regime the word pauvre denoted anyone who had to work for a living. The "poor" had to work to live; the "indigent" were those of the poor who could not live on what they could earn. For les indigents begging was not a measure of "dernfere extrémité", but a normal source of supplementary income; indeed, "mendiant" was often used as a synonym for "indigent". The resort to vagrancy represented a much more serious break from "normal" life, although it was just one short step beyond beggary as an expedient for survival. Vagabonds, unlike pauvres and mendiants, were outside the boundaries of the social order; they had cut their ties to patron and place; they were masterless, rootless individuals below the bottom line of a society based on connections to corporate groups. Going beyond the imprecise terminology of eighteenth-century observers, Gutton distinguishes what he calls "pauvres structurels", who were perpetually indigent because they were unable to work, from "pauvres cgnjoncturels", who were normally self-supporting, but who were liable to slide into indigence as a result of unfavorable long- term economic trends, or with any crisis of the local or the family 19 economy. The pauvres structurels were the traditional impotent poor: those who could not work because they were too young or too old, or too sick, too crippled, or too blind. Victimes d3 l§_solitude were also pauvres structurels -- a large proportion of these were widows, who were frequently unable to support themselves —- much less their children -- on the inferior wages paid to women. These were the classic "deserving poor" -— the people most likely to receive charity when charity was available. The pauvres conjoncturels formed a much larger and more elastic group. Indigence crept gradually up the socio- economic scale when bread prices rose faster than wages -— as they tended to do during much of the eighteenth century. Different groups were swallowed up at different rates: the real wages of unskilled workers shrank faster than those of skilled workers.8 The frequent crises of the Lyonnais silk industry could suddenly drive the majority of the working population -- including unskilled workers, artisans, and small shopkeepers -- from poverty into indigence. The birth of a child or the illness of a wage-earner could act as an unfavorable conjoncture in the family economy. A disabling injury or the death of an income-earning spouse could convert a pauvre conjoncturel —- or a family of pauvres conjoncturels -- into pauvres structurels. Using a variety of sources, Gutton has identified the socio- economic groups most likely to be or to become indigent. For the city of Lyons he started with the lists of "passive citizens" compiled in 1791. Those heads of households who could not afford to pay the equivalent of three days' wages in direct taxes were so classified, and their names, addresses, and occupations were recorded. According to 20 the documents they constituted about 8 percent of the population of Lyons. Gutton warns that these figures are inaccurate and unreliable, and tend to underrepresent the extent of poverty. The guartier of the Hbtel-Dieu, for example, which housed hundreds of ailing indigents, listed only eight passive citizens. The poorest and most unstable members of the population -— beggars and vagrants, among others -- were usually not counted. In the whole city only twenty-six beggars and fifty-seven "pauvres" made it into the registers of passive citizens, although the city fathers were constantly complaining about the presence of beggars in the streets. Of the 2,493 passive citizens who were listed, 733 were journaliers (a term which subsumed a wide variety of unskilled manual occupations); 530 were ouvriers en soie, and 245 more were dévideusesgdg soie (semiskilled women silkworkers). Of the remaining 985, most were artisans (especially chapeliers, tailleurs, and cordonniers), and street vendors. A few bourgeois, marchands, and religieux convers fill out the list. The accuracy of these numbers is suspect, but the occupational composition of this poor population is repeated in lists of the recipients of municipal bread distributions, and in lists of the parents of the beneficiaries of a dowry-fund established by a pious bourgeois for the poorest girls in certain parishes of Lyons. Over half of the recipients of munici- pal bread (in the parishes for which records remain) were ouvriers _de textile; nearly a third of these were dévideuses. Of the rest, over half were artisans g; gens_dg métier (including large numbers of cordonniers and chapeliers) and a somewhat smaller number were domestigues and affaneurs (who, like manoeuvriers, picked up any 21 manual labor they could find). A few miscellaneous transport workers (yoituriers and bateliers), a few cultivators (vignerons and jardiniers) and a few street vendors complete the registers. Of the 478 parents of the dowry recipients, about half were artisans and petits marchands, 192 more were textile workers, and 31 were affaneurs or manoeuvriers. In the city of Lyons the poor were recruited above all among the workers in the dominant industry, among semiskilled and unskilled workers, and among small artisans.9 Some indication of the individual circumstances which could drive people into indigence exists in the registers of passive citizens. Nearly 22 percent of them were widows, and an additional 17 percent were single women or women separated from their husbands. Women were particularly vulnerable "victimes d3 13 solitude", as their wages were substantially lower than those of men. The composition of the population of vieillards admitted to the Charité de Lyon (the municipally operated charity hospital which housed several varieties of impotent poor) illustrates the fineness of the line between pauvreté conjpncturelle and pauvreté structurelle. More than half of them were ouvriers d2 textile -- a category which included substantial maltres-marchands-fabricants as well as maitres-ouvriers and compagnons. (Unfortunately, the information in the registers does not differentiate these different socdo-economic groups clearly.) Chapeliers, cordonniers, and tailleurs were also well represented. Small artisans and shopkeepers appeared regularly on the registers, although in much smaller numbers that textile workers.10 Many of the old people who ended up in the Charité had been self-supporting 22 members of the classes inférieures, but they had not been able to accumulate sufficient reserves to keep them from sinking to the status of pauvres structurels when they became too old to work. Gutton also examined the records of charity hospitals in other towns and villages in the Lyonnais. As in Lyons, the majority of relief recipients were artisans and journaliers. The composition of the poor artisan population usually reflected the dominant artisanal activity of the town; in Saint-Etienne the poor artisans were mostly armuriers, cloutiers, and couteliers. Saint-Symphorien-le-Chéte1 specialized in making shoes for the army, and most of the local poor artisans were cordonniers. The smaller towns generally counted among their poor larger numbers of agricultural laborers (manoeuvriers) than did Lyons, but Gutton refuses to estimate the numbers of the rural poor.11 They left little documentary evidence of a quantifiable sort in the countryside, and it is impossible to know how many of them came to towns seeking alms -- and what proportion of the ones who did come made their way into the records of the local charities. Agricultural laborers -- whether or not they owned a small piece of land -- constituted a very important proportion of the rural poor, but Gutton gives only a brief qualitative description of their precarious hand-to-mouth existence. His typology of the poor casts a great deal of light on the occupations and condition of the urban groups susceptible to rapid pauperization, and on the tenuousness of the distinction between bare Self-sufficiency and destitution, but it does little to illuminate the enormous problem of rural poverty. Cissie Fairchilds adopted Gutton's distinction between pauvreté 23 structurelle and pauvreté conjoncturelle for her analysis of poverty and charity in Aix-en—Provence, and she added the significant ob- servation that these two categories corresponded quite closely to "the poor of the charities" and "the poor outside the charities".12 In the view of the directors of Aix's municipal and ecclesiastical charities, the "structural poor" -- the aged, the ill, and the very young -- were "good" poor and deserved help. The able-bodied poor I” were generally not eligible for assistance. Although the authorities g ‘l" | recognized the problem of seasonal unemployment, especially among agricultural workers, they generally assumed that the able-bodied indigent were poor because they would not work -- or would not work hard enough.13 Aix was a much smaller town than Lyons, with a population of roughly 29,000 (Lyons had about 150,000 inhabitants by the end of the eighteenth century). It was primarily an administrative center for the church and the state, it had no important industry, and it engaged in no important commerce. The working population consisted mostly of the tradesmen and artisans who served the officers of the courts and the church, but it also included a substantial number of agricultural workers -- both small proprietors and wage-laborers. In order to determine which groups were most susceptible to extreme poverty, Fairchilds compared the proportions of different occupational groups among those admitted to Aix's major charity hospital with their proportions among the menu peuple of the city as a whole. (Extreme poverty and some sort of disability were conditions of admission, since these hépitaux corresponded more closely to 24 poorhouses than to hospitals in the modern sense.) Cultivators constituted about one fourth of the menu peuple of Aix, but almost 40 percent of the people entering la Charité. Among cultivators resorting to charity, the proportion of travailleurs (landless day— laborers) was by far the highest. Members of the building trades, and craftsmen dealing in food, lodging, and transportation entered .13 Charité roughly in proportion to their representation in the population; but textile and leather workers, who made up about 13 percent of the menu peuple, accounted for almost 22 percent of the hospital's entrants. Nearly a third of the menu eu le were P 12 domestiques. (This term included both household servants and live- in production workers. Unfortunately the data include no estimates of their respective numbers.) In spite of its prominence among the working people of the city, the servant group supplied only a little over a tenth of the hospital entrants. Apparently most households in Aix managed to care for their employees even during hard times.14 The impotent poor of Aix's charities were not, for the most part, congenitally helpless -- they had not always been disabled and des- titute. Most of them had had an occupation and had been self-support- ing, but had become pauvres structurels as they became too old to work, or they had succumbed to the illnesses that preyed upon the malnour- ished and those who worked in unhealthy conditions, or as their spouses had died or deserted them, or as their children had multiplied beyond their earning power. For her analysis of the pauvres conjoncturels or "the poor outside the charities", Fairchilds had to turn to documents which record the 25 occupations of two groups of poor people who were probably not al- together typical: arrested beggars and convicted thieves. Three- quarters of the beggars arrested between 1724 and 1733 were from out- side Aix.15 The wide-ranging geographical origins of the arrested beggars attest to the high mobility of the poor: they came to -- or through -— Aix from all over France. Of the beggars whose occupations were identified (a third of the total), about 40 percent were urban artisans, and about 35 percent were agricultural workers. Most of the artisans were probably looking for work, Fairchilds argues, and had only begged to tide themselves over until they found it. The rural poor who came to Aix to beg came largely from the countryside around the town or from elsewhere in Provence, victims of land parcellation, underemployment, and the inflation of food prices.16 The people who were convicted of theft in Aix came overwhelmingly from the same occupational groups as the city's charity recipients and the beggars: of 165 sentenced between 1773 and 1790, 92 were agricultural workers (81 of them day-laborers), and 46 were artisans and craftsmen (24 of these were textile workers).17 The poor of Aix who qualified for municipal relief, the poor of Aix who did not qualify, and who eked out a subsistence by begging or by stealing an occasional pigeon or some apricots, and the poor of other areas who had come looking for work or alms and who got them- selves arrested in Aix -- all these came from the same social and occupational groupings as the poor of Gutton's Lyonnais. Small artisans, textile workers, wage laborers, landless rural day-laborers, and the owners of tiny plots of land were liable to find themselves 26 sinking from uncertain self-sufficiency into indigence with any dis- turbance in the regional or family economy. Olwen Hufton's studies of Bayeux and of the French rural poor reveal even more clearly than the works of Gutton and Fairchilds the infinite degrees and varietaries of impoverishment.l8 Hufton estimates that about 1,800 of Bayeux' population of 10,000 were dependent on some form of outside assistance, and that another 3,000 lived on the brink of poverty. As in Aix and in the Lyonnais, the poor were chiefly laborers and small artisans, and a very large proportion of charity recipients and beggars were single, deserted, or widowed women, and their children.19 Hufton's typology of the poor of Bayeux adds a critically impor— tant third category to Gutton's dichotomy between structural and conjunctural poverty. She too describes people who were chronically indigent because they could not work and people who were intermit- tently indigent because they could accumulate no reserves; but, in addition, she focusses attention on those who were always indigent, no matter how hard they worked, even if they had regular employment. Her two main analytical categories are the unemployed and the employed poor. The unemployed included the impotent poor who were unable to work, and also the able—bodied who could not or would not find work. The employed poor included the pauvres conjoncturels, who managed to scrape by most of the time, and also the working poor who simply could not make ends meet even in the best of all possible cggjonctures. Hufton adds to the personal and economic crises which beset Gutton's pauvres conjoncturels the unremitting pressures of chronic 27 underemployment and sub-subsistence wages which prevented a sub- stantial proportion of the working population of Bayeux from ever rising above the ranks of the indigent, even to the level of the tenuously self-sufficient pauvres conjoncturels.20 The different kinds of beggary in Bayeux reflected the different kinds of poverty which afflicted or threatened nearly half of the city's population. Mendiants dg_profession did nothing but beg for a living —- some of them begged because they were unable to work, and some were profes- sional vagabonds. The unemployed, the underemployed, the chronically underpaid, and the pauvres conjoncturels only begged occasionally or part-time to supplement their inadequate earnings. Gutton and Fairchilds confined their discussions of the rural poor mostly to those who ended up in urban jails for begging or vagrancy and those who were lucky enough to receive some urban charit- able support. Hufton has examined systematically the origins and manifestations of poverty in the countryside.21 She does not establish a typology of the rural poor; the lines between self-sufficiency, poverty, and indigence were even more unclear in the country than in the city. The causation of rural poverty was more complex because of the mixed nature of the rural family economy (income in both cash and kind from domestic industrial, artisanal, and agricultural labor, as well as some from the family's own land). A little poaching, access to the village commons, receipt of occasional wages in kind rather than in cash, or the cultivation of a miniscule garden plot might stave off or postpone (or prolong) starvation in hard times. Hufton argues that the slide from poverty into indigence tended to be more 28 gradual for individuals or families in the country than in town -- largely because rural economic crises did not usually bring productive activity to a sudden and complete standstill as urban economic crises were apt to do. Rural families dependent partially on income from spinning thread, for example, might be able to com- pensate for the income lost during a textile slump by working a few more hours for the laboureur down the road or by gathering a few more edible weeds from neighborhood hedges. The urban spinner who was laid off during the same slump had few if any alternatives. In the countryside landless day-laborers were the most susceptible to sudden and absolute pauperization, but Hufton emphasizes that the ownership of a small piece of land was no guarantee of protection from misery as desperate as urban indigence. Because documentary evidence about the urban poor is relatively more abundant, most historical study of the poor has focussed on urban poverty, even though the vast majority of the eighteenth-century French poor were rural. Although the rural poor remain relatively less well-studied, it is clear that the patterns of urban and rural impoverishment were similar. At rock bottom in both town and country were the "impotent poor". Without property, and physically unable to work because of age or infirmity, these people were utterly dependent for survival on alms or institutional charity. One did not have to be born blind or crippled: illness, an accident, or simply advancing age could throw a self-sufficient worker into this category. 29 A step above the impotent poor in economic terms, but still extremely insecure, were propertyless wage-laborers. Unskilled and semiskilled urban workers and rural day-laborers were dependent on others for their income, and were at the mercy of variations in prices, wages, and employment. The long-term economic developments of the eighteenth century pressed hardest on this group, as the real value of their wages declined and competition for scarce jobs increased. .1 Able to accumulate no reserves at all, wage-laborers were reduced almost instantly to beggary when food prices rose suddenly or when P” work was unavailable. By the end of the century, the impotent and the propertyless constituted a small minority of the very poor. Above them was an enormous mass of poor people, able-bodied and owners of property, who often found themselves in rags and without enough food to sustain reasonable health. Eighteenth-century documents from the diocese of Tours refer to "mendiants-propriétaires".22 The line between the poor and the non-poor in the countryside was not the line between the landless and the propertied, but the highly mobile line between those who owned too little land to feed themselves, and who were - therefore vulnerable to fluctuations in food prices and dependent in part on wages, and those who owned enough land to feed themselves even when harvests were short. There was of course an intermediate range of people who were self-sufficient in good years and poverty-stricken in bad years. The urban equivalent of the poor peasant proprietor was the independent artisan operating on too small a scale to ac- cumulate reserves for bad times. A weaver who owned his own loom 30 and worked in his own shop might make ends meet when food prices were stable and the demand for cloth adequate; but if either of these conditions took a turn for the worse (as they both did at once when harvests were bad) he and his family could be reduced to beggary almost as quickly as dependent wage-laborers. The long-term pressures of inflation and population increased the size and vulnerability of this third level of poor people. .1 Many of the vagrants arrested in towns were found to have deserted their poverty-stricken farms and families.23 Many destitute silk- I workers in Lyons dropped their children off on the orphanage steps and disappeared into the countryside.24 By the end of the eighteenth century there was a heavy two-way traffic in indigence between town and country. Many of the poor of both city and country thought that the grass had to be greener -- or at least more abundant -- somewhere else. 31 PART TWO: THE ENLIGHTENMENT RESPONSE l. SiXteenth and Seventeenth Century Antecedants The eighteenth century introduced and developed ideas about the origins of poverty and about appropriate responses to it which were radically different from earlier conceptions, but several important aspects of eighteenth-century thought on these subjects grew directly out of beliefs which originated and matured in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From the end of the Middle Ages the term pauvre had represented two distinct and contrary images.1 Christian theology exalted poverty. Traditionally the poor were membres souffrants gg_Jésus Christ; they had a special kinship to God, whose Son had especially identified with them. Those among the poor who accepted their condition with humility and resignation were holier than the rich, and their very existence provided the spiritually disadvantaged rich with opportunities to perform sanctifying acts of charity. As social and community ties weakened, a very different image of pauvres and mendiants began to emerge. As the numbers of the destitute grew, and especially as they became more mobile, they came increasingly to be regarded as dangerous, and their poverty as a degrading punishment for sin and vice. While the earlier tradition retained some vitality up to and even after the French Revolution, the negative element in the image gradually gained ground from the late twelfth century onward.2 By the sixteenth century, growing numbers of desperate beggars had been driven into 32 cities by the disruptions of prolonged civil war. These poor were strangers, and they carried disease, they stole, and they rioted.3 In the cities, at any rate, poverty came to be perceived and discussed in increasingly secular terms -- not as a condition whose vittims were beloved of God, but as one that posed a social danger and a public policy problem. Traditionally, private alms were the primary source of succor for the poor. In addition, countless tiny hospitals, run by the Church or founded by pious laymen, were scattered across the country- side. These cared primarily for the sick, but they also provided hospitality to the pauvres passants in whom they recognized the holiness of the pilgrim or the sanctity of the itinerant beggar. Changes in attitude toward the poor were accompanied by changes in the organization of charity -- or at least of urban charity. Innovations introduced by municipal authorities throughout France in the sixteenth century generally followed the plan outlined in 1526 by Juan Luis Vives in his influential book 23 Subventione Pauperum. Vives' frame of reference was profoundly religious, but his ideas about the poor and the proper organization of assistance departed radically from the traditional view of the pauvres membres g£_Jésus Christ and from the tradition of individual alms. ,Vives elaborated the distinction between the good poor and the bad poor which was to become ever more complex and ever more important during the next two centuries. The bad poor feigned sickness and disability, they created disturbances in churches during mass, and then they squandered on drink and debauchery the alms which they had extorted 33 by these means. When one reproached them for their evil habits they would respond insolently that they were "the poor of Jesus Christ", although Christ, of course, would never have recognized as his "des pauvres si éloignés de ses moeurs et de la sainteté du'il nous enseigna."4 The pious, humble, and orderly poor were deserving of charity; the rest were not. Charity remained a Christian duty, Vives repeated the classic fl argument: God had entrusted the rich with stewardship of His 6 bounty, and they had an obligation to distribute it to the needy -- P but not, he insisted, in the traditional form of casual alms. Poverty was a matter of public order as well as of morality. The municipal authorities should therefore be charged with responsibility for collecting, recording, and distributing rationally the alms contributed voluntarily by the faithful. The city should conduct a census of the sick, the beggars, and the vagabonds. It should then banish indigent outsiders with a passade (a small gift of bread or cash), distribute alms to the local impotent poor, and provide work for its able-bodied beggars both to reform their morals and to keep them off the streets. During the sixteenth century the municipal governments of most major French cities founded bureaux des pauvres or aum6nes générales organized along the lines of Vives' plan.5 Most of their funds con- tinued to come from charitable donations, and their conceptions of charity remained Christian; but three important new principles guided their operations: the moral legitimacy of differentiation between good and bad poor; the responsibility of secular authority for the 34 rational administration of poor relief (or.charity); and the positive moral value of extracting work from the able-bodied poor in return for the charity they receiVed. Changes in perceptions of the poor were not confined to city fathers concerned with the maintenance of law, order, and public morality. They were reflected also in the development of the picturesque littérature 92 la gueuserie which became popular in the ”1 sixteenth century. In these "documentary" publications the poor -- ‘1 especially beggars -- were depicted as deceitful and dangerous; they cynically feigned illness to win the sympathy of the charitable; they belonged to vast organized networks of professional beggars and cheats with a weird and incomprehensible argot of their own.6 This representation of the poor, whether or not it was accurate, was a far cry from the traditional image of the holy pauper meekly and gratefully accepting the crusts offered by his wealthier Christian brother. Some pictorial representations of the poor (especially in art produced for the lower social levels) continued to show classically deserving beggars receiving alms from classically pious almsgivers; but new artistic representations also appeared which portrayed the poor as ugly, shifty, threatening, and violent.7 Sixteenth-century humanists disparaged the spiritual benefits of poverty, arguing that poverty was a terrible obstacle to the full cultivation of human potential on earth, and that a moderate degree of material comfort made possible a level of spiritual and intellectual development foreclosed to those burdened with poverty. Even.the Church contributed to the ideological desanctification of poverty: 35 the Council of Trent adopted a hard line against mendicant religious orders and itinerant begging priests, and declared work to be a greater act of piety than mendicancy.8 By the seventeenth century the sanctification of work had begun to edge out the sanctity of poverty. Work assumed, in the eyes of the religious authorities, the nature of prayer, in Catholic France as well as in Protestant countries.9 Idleness came to be "mhre‘gg tous les vices". The exact nature of the causal connection between poverty and idleness remained somewhat ambiguous, but idleness certainly resulted in poverty, and the poor who owed their condition to idleness were also likely to succumb to the vices of the idle.10 These notions in turn facilitated the spread of the conviction that the poor were poor because they were idle. Vives had distinguished the good poor from the bad on the basis of their moral qualities. In the seventeenth century the differentiation was based increasingly on their physical condition: the impotent poor retained their spiritual superiority, while the able-bodied poor were increasingly lumped together in the "bad" category.11 Once the urge to make the poor work had gained both secular and religious support, secular and religious impulses combined to produce the "grand renfermement des pauvres." "Renfermer" meant both "to enclose" and "to imprison". Mercantilist theorists argued that France's economy was falling behind England's because of the relative stagnation of French manufactures. Beggars had no right to deprive the State of their work. If they could be institutionalized, trained, and forced to 36 work, they would cease to be a drain on the economy and they could contribute to the expansion of the wealth of the State. They would also be unable to engage in the disruptive vices of the idle. From the second decade of the seventeenth century on, the Crown made repeated (and largely ineffective) efforts to round up beggars and vagrants and set them to work -- generally by encouraging local authorities to do so. The religious concerns of the dévdts of the Catholic counterreformation gave a strong added impetus to the renfermement des pauvres. Their goal was not so much to increase the wealth of the State as to save the idle poor from the sins which lay in wait for them. The method they supported was the same as that favored by the municipal authorities concerned with law and order, and by the Crown with its concerns about law, order, and national productivity: lock up the beggars, keep them occupied with lots of work, and improve their morals with an almost monastic regimen of religious instruction and prayer. Both the deserving and the vicious poor were to be "enclosed" in hdpitaux généraux, which were combination asylum-prisons. Al- though the Crown gave support and encouragement, most of the hdpitaux généraux founded before about 1675 were products of local initiative. They provided work relief for their inmates, and their officials were empowered to arrest and imprison beggars and force them to work. Most municipal hdpitaux généraux had their own police forces which patrolled the streets for beggars. They were financed in large part by private alms and were administered by local lay notables, who were given broad jurisdiction over all beggars in the city except those 37 suspected of serious crimes; they were left to the police. .The goal was to abolish urban beggary by making work available to good paupers, extracting work by force from local beggars, and chasing nonresident beggars out of town. In about 1675 the Crown enlisted the aid of three extremely effective Jesuit missionaries to urge city authorities to found more h8pitauxggénéraux. One of them, Phre.Chaurand, is credited with a personal part in the foundation of 126 h§pitaux généraux and bureaux fig charité throughout France. In a series of sermons in Aix-en-Provence, he summed up current arguments in favor of renfermement as he campaigned (successfully) for the establishment of a municipal hdpital'gEnéral: he invoked "the necessity of enfermement of poor as much for their temporal as their spiritual well-being, and also for the good and holy police of this town."12 These arguments produced results.' Between 1678 and 1686 one hundred four new h6pitaux