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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2011
It is widely acknowledged that great numbers of the laboring poor experienced increasing immiseration throughout France after the 1760s. Less well known perhaps is the corresponding formation of an influential set of cultural constructions that shaped how the poor were understood. This framework, which might be called an “ideology of poverty,” is best seen in the widely diffused discourse on mendicity that appeared after midcentury. At its core stood the notion of the able-bodied mendiant vagabond, or “beggar/vagrant,” who was characterized as a “professional” deviant with a full-blown menacing and illegal état. This cultural construction provided the animating principle of the ideology that not only powerfully shaped royal and local strategies in treating the poor but also helped to screen out multicausal explanations of poverty and frustrate the development of a genuinely humane assistance program for all categories of poor.
1. See, especially, Schwartz, Robert, Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century France (Chapel Hill, 1987)Google Scholar, chap. 5; Lefebvre, Georges, La Grande Peur de 1789, p. 1 (Paris, 1932)Google Scholar; Braudel, F. and Labrousse, E., eds., Histoire economique et sociale de France. Tome II; De derniers temps de 1'dâge seigneurial aux préludes de I'âge industriel (1660–1789) (Paris, 1970)Google Scholar; Hufton, Olwen, The Poor in Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar; Forrest, Alan, The French Revolution and the Poor (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Jones, Colin, Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpellier Region, 1740–1815 (Cambridge, 1982)Google Scholar, chap. 2, and Cissie Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity in Aix-en-Provence, 1640–1789. For a welldocumented case study of a town, see Engrand, Charles, “Paupérisme et Condition Ouvriere dans la Seconde Moitié du XVIIIe Siècle: L'Exemple Amiénois,” Revue D'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 3 (July-August 1982): 376–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2. Much of what follows is based on a reading of the printed and manuscript pamphlet literature on mendicity and dictionaries and encyclopedias. For an extensive discussion of this literature, see Olejniczak, William, “The Royal Campaign in France against Beggary and Vagrancy during the Eighteenth Century as Implemented in the Généralité of Champagne” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1983)Google Scholar, chaps. 1 and 3. See also Paultre, Christian, De la répression de la mendicité et du vagabondage en France sous I'ancien régime (Paris, 1906)Google Scholar, and Bloch, Camille, L'Assistance et l'Etat en France à la veille de la Revolution (Paris, 1908).Google Scholar
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10. This is not to say that masters and laboreurs did not experience indigence, but that most elite writers expressed greater worry over the strata below this group.
11. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers par une societé des gens de lettres, ed. Diderot and d'Alembert (Paris, 28 vols., 1751–72) (henceforth Encyclopédie) and Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières par une societé des gens de lettres, de savans et d'artisans (Paris, 1786)Google Scholar arts. “Gueux,” “Infortuné,” “Indigent,” “Malheureux,” “Mendiant,” “Mendicite,” “Misère,” “Peuple,” “Pauvres,” “Pauvrete,” “Vagabond,” “Besoin,” “Necessité,” “Subsistence.”
12. Encyclopédie, art. “Pauvreté,” “Besoin”; Plan de Travail du Comité pour L'Extinction de la Mendicité: Présenté a l'Assemblé Nationale, en conformité de son Décret du 21 ]anvier, 11–12. The Encyclopédie méthodique, art. “Pauvre”; Abbé Malvaux agreed: “Poverty is undoubtedly inevitable; but we believe we have sufficiently proved that mendicity can be destroyed.” in Abbé Malvaux, ed., Les Moyens de détruire la mendicité en France, en rendant les mendians utiles a l'État sans les rendre malheureux: Tirés des memoires qui ont concouru pour le prix accordé en l'annee 1777, par l'Académie des Sciences, Arts et Belles Lettres de ChâlonS-Sur-Mame (Châlons-sur-Marne, 1780), 321.
13. Encyclopédie, arts. “Besoin,” “Subsistance,” “Indigence;” Also Encyclopédie méthodique, art. “Pauvre”; Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, ed. Kaplow, Jeffry (Paris, 1985)Google Scholar, art. “Mendiants”; Coyer quoted in Chisick, Harvey, The Limits of Reform in the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1981), 254Google Scholar; Turgot quoted in Behrens, C. B. A., Society, Government, and the Enlightenment (New York, 1985), 131Google Scholar; A.-J.-M. Servan saw misery as leading to crime: “the most frightening assassin is simply an unfortunate that misery and hunger have driven out on the great highways in order to wrench away by violence the bread that men have refused to give him through charity.” See his Discours sur l'administration de la justice criminelle (Paris, 1767), 119–20.Google Scholar
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15. Encyclopédie Méthodique, art. “Pauvre”; Linguet and Necker quoted in Catherine Lis and Soly, Hugo, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1979), 172–73Google Scholar; Condorcet quoted in Hufton, The Poor, 19; Turgot quoted in John A. Garraty, Unemployment in History (New York), p. 64; Montlinot quoted in Delasselle, Claude, “Abandoned Children in Eighteenth-Century Paris” in Forster, Robert and Ranum, Orest, eds. Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 73–4Google Scholar; Montlinot also asserted that “the wage is the single inheritance of the unknown and propertyless man” in his État Actuel du Dépôt de Mendicité ou le Maison de Travail de la généralité de Soissons, 1782 (Soissons, 1782)Google Scholar; for the Committee on Mendicity, see Premier Rapport. Exposé des principes généraux qui ont dirigé son travail, p. 13.
16. See Fox-Genovese, Origins, 98–107, 133–34; Behrens, Society, 133–35; Spengler, French Predecessors, 136–204; McLain, James J., The Economic Writings of DuPont de Nemours (Dover, 1977)Google Scholar, and Weulersse, Georges, Le Mouvement physiocratique en France (de 1756–1770), 2 vols. (Paris, 1910).Google Scholar
17. Simon Cliquot de Blervache, Mémoire sur les Moyens d'Ameliorer en France la condition des Laboureurs, des Journaliers, des Hommes de peine dans les campagnes et celle de leurs Femmes et de leurs Enfants (1783, 1789), 18–19, 26, 28, 45, 51, 55, 135–37, 185–89; Committee on Mendicity, Plan de Travail, 11–12; Spengler, French Predecessors, 307–10.
18. For the most recent treatment, see Schwartz, Policing, 158–59, 176, 241.
19. Schwartz, Policing, 154–62; Olejniczak, “The Royal Campaign,” chap. 4.
20. On fifteenth and sixteenth-century “vagrancy,” see especially Bronislaw Geremek, “Criminalité, vagabondage, pauperisme: La marginalité à l'Aube des temps modernes,” Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (July-September 1974): 337–75. On the seventeenth-century shift, see Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity, 29–37. The key royal statutes were passed in 1680, 1685, and 1686; see Jacques DePaux, “Pauvres, pauvres mendiants, mendiants valids, ou vagabonds? Les hésitations de la legislation royale,” Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (July-September 1974): 404–11; For elite fascinations and fears, see Chartier, Roger, “La ‘Monarchie D'Argot’ Entre Le Mythe et L'Histoire,” in Les Marginaux et Les Exclus dans l'histoire (Paris, 1979), 275–311Google Scholar, and B. Geremek, “Figures de la gueuserie: Picaresque et burlesque dans la Bibliothèque bleue,” in Chartier, Roger, Figures de la Gueuserie (Paris, 1982), 11–106.Google Scholar
21. Emanuel Chill, “Religion and Mendicity in Seventeenth-Century France,” Internationa! Review of Social History 7 (1962): 400–425CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chartier, “La ‘Monarchic D'Argot,’” 300–302; Gutton, La Société, 343–34; Hufton, The Poor, 163–66. Louis Perouas, Le Diocèse de la Rochelle de 1648 à 1724 (Paris, 1964), 182–85.Google Scholar
22. Mohammed Grissa, Pouvoirs et Marginaux à Paris sous le Regne de Louis XIV (1661- 1715) (Tunis, 1980), 304–6; Depaux, “Pauvre,” 402–6; Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity, 35–37; Chill, “Religion and Mendicity,” 410–25; Olejniczak, “The Royal Campaign,” 29–38.
23. Schwartz, 154, 281–82; Archives departementales de la Marne (henceforth ADM) 1] 195, Necker to Sabbathier, secretaire perpetuel of the Academy of Châlons, 17 September 1777; Abbe Malvaux, ed., Les Moyens de détruire la mendicité en France, en rendant les meridians utiles a l'Etat sans les rendre malheureux: Tirés des memoires qux ont concouru pour le prix accordé, en l'annee 1777, par l'Académie des Sciences, Arts et Belles Lettres de Châlons-Sur-Mame (Châlons-sur-Marne, 1780).
24. ADM 1J 35–1J 42.
25. Malvaux, Les Moyens, iii-v, 11–18, 71–80; ADM 1J 35 “Projet à Amiens de rendre les mendians utiles a l'Etat sans les rendre malheureux, 1783”; Montlinot quoted in Kaplow, The Names of Kings, 129.
26. Chartier, “Les Elites et Les Gueux,” 377–78; ADM 1J 40, Anonymous, “Discours sur les moyens de dimineur les nombres des mendians”; 1J 38, essay of Abbé Blanchard; Turmeau de la Morandière, Police sur les Mendians (Paris, 1764), 34Google Scholar, 120–21, 198; Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, in Oeuvres complètes III (Paris, 1879), 322–34Google Scholar, and “Fragment des Instructions pour Le Prince Royal de ****”; Encyclopédie, art. “Mendiant”; ADM 1J 40, Le Tonnelier, curé de la paroisse d'Autrèches, diocèse de Soissons; G. F. LeTrosne, Mémoire sur les vagabonds et sur les mendiants (Soissons, 1764), 4, 8–9; Montlinot, État Actuel du Dépôt de Mendicité … de Soissons (1783).
27. ADM 1J 38, Duverger de Bezinghen de Bourbonnois; Anonymous, Discours; 1J 40, Cure de Saint Jean de Chalons essay; Encyclopédie, art. “Oisiveté comme une terme medicale.” Abbe Reymond in his Le Droit des Pauvres (1771) argued that beggars had “a pernicious penchant for idleness which ennervates and corrupts.” Quoted in Norberg, Kathryn, Rich and Poor in Grenoble, 1600–1814 (Berkeley, 1985), 258.Google Scholar
28. ADM 1J 35, Abbe Villin; 1J 40, Le Tonnelier; Terray quoted in Hufton, The Poor, 111. Montlinot worried that a new “type,” the mendiant de race, was forming, see Etat Actuel du Dépôt de Soissons precedé d'un essai sur la mendicité. 1786.
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30. Boisgelin and Trudaine quoted in Paultre, Repression, 557–58. Mirabeau believed that misery caused poverty; see Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity, 154. Montlinot argued that misfortune and poverty caused beggary, but he sympathized chiefly with the disabled and aged country laborers and farmers. See Etat Actuel du Dépôt de Mendicité de la Généralité de Soissons IV. Années 1784 et 1785, 1, 4–5.
31. J. J. Rousseau, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, fifth part, II. The passage, in part, reads: “Do you believe that you can degrade a poor person in his quality as a man by giving him the despised name of gueux? … Renounce this word, my friend, so that it may never leave your lips. … I agree that the poor must not be encouraged to become beggars, but once they are it is necessary to feed them.”
32. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, bk. 23, chap. 29; on mercantilist views, see Furniss, E., The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism (New York, 1965), 117–56Google Scholar; on physiocratic wage theory, see Fox-Genovese, E., The Origins of Physiocracy (Ithaca, NY, 1976), 133–34Google Scholar; for the philosophes, see Payne, Philosophes and the People, 35, 143. On incentives, see Adams, “Mendicity and Moral Alchemy.”
33. Among the scores of contemporary attacks on unconditional almsgiving, see Vasco, J. B., Memoire sur les causes de la mendicité et sur les moyens de le supprimer (Paris, 1788), 313–16Google Scholar; Encyclopédie, art. “Fondation”; Achard de Germane, director of the Hopital-General de Grenoble, cited in Norberg, Rich and Poor, 262; ADM 1J 40, Montlinot essay submission; ADM 1] 42, Clouet de Verdun essay submission; and Malvaux, Les Moyens, 69. On the decline of traditional charity, the hospital crisis, and the critique of hospitals and Hôtels-dieu, see Encyclopédie, art. “Hopital”; Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity, 133–46; Forrest, French Revolution and the Poor, 8–10; Hufton, The Poor, 131–216; Norberg, Rich and Poor, 300–301; Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance, chap. 2, and Vovelle, Michel, Piété baroque et déchristianization en Provence au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1978), 229–64.Google Scholar
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35. Hufton, The Poor, 163–64; ADM C.2005, Circular from Necker to Champagne intendant, 4 December 1777.
36. ADM C. 2005. On 30 March 1778 the intendant sent out instructions to start thirty-three new municipal bureaus. Macquart's bureau is described in his “Plan d'admtnistration pour la distribution des aumônes dans la paroisse de Sainte Marie Magdeleine de Reims, 1778.” He sent the intendant annual reports throughout the 1780s; see ADM C.2006, C.I726, and Municipal Bibliothèque de Reims, G 253 Paroisse de Sainte Marie Magdeleine de Reims. A similar project was implemented in sixteenth-century Lyon from the 1530s through the 1560s; see Davis, Natalie Z., “Poor Relief, Humanism, and Heresy: The Case of Lyon,” Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), 39–40Google Scholar. For other essay submissions on bureaus, see ADM 1J 36. For similar schemes, see Malvaux, Les Moyens, 209–13.
37. Hufton, The Poor, 116, 166–67, 171; Kaplow, The Names of Kings, 96; Norberg, Rich and Poor, 183.
38. Engrand, “Pauperisme et Condition Ouvrière,” 381, 398; Norberg, Rich and Poor, 183; ADM 1J 40 “Projet pour le bureau de charité de Chateauroux”; ADM 1J 36 Montlinot submission. Malvaux suggested that all “Rôles des Pauvres” list house numbers, total number of inhabitants in the dwelling, and each inhabitant's surname, sex, age, place of origin, length of time at current residence, occupation, state of health, name of master, and daily income. Physical disabilities should be verified by a doctor. His “misery scale” followed the calculations of Macquart; see Résumé, 211–17.
39. Rudé, George, Ideology and Popular Protest (New York, 1980), 54Google Scholar, 61–66; Schwartz, Policing the Poor, 51.
40. Hufton, The Poor, 47, 60; Engrand, “Pauperisme et Condition Ouvrière,” 398–402. Schwartz finds a perceptive cure from Athis in the 1770s; see Policing the Poor, 132–34.
41. Evidence from hundreds of interrogations and verifications reveals scores of cases where Champagne curés worked closely with judges and police officers to prosecute “beggar/ vagrants” in the 1760s through the 1780s. See AD Marne C. 1995–98 and Archives de la Haute Marne B 478, 480, 486 for the Langres police. At least nine curés can be identified who responded to the Châlons essay contest. All of them railed against “professionals” and favored reformed bureaus along the lines of Macquart, AD Marne 1 J 38–42. Goubert attaches significance to the rise of seminary-trained priests, especially after 1700, which transformed them into quasi-state officials both culturally and economically removed from the majority of the parishioners. See Goubert, The French Peasantry, 158–65. T. Tackett also notes the gap in income between the priest and the day-laborer, often two to five times greater, and sometimes more, in the late eighteenth-century. See Tackett, , Priest and Parish in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton, 1977), 133–47Google Scholar. For the condescension and power of curés, see Ian Cameron, Crime and Repression in the Auvergne and the Guyenne, 1720–1790(New York, 1982), 167, 171. For the curé as state functionary, see J. P. Gutton, “Confraternities, Curés, and Communities in Rural Areas of the Diocese of Lyons under the Ancien Régime,” trans. John Burke, in Greyerz, Kaspar Von, ed., Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe (London, 1985): 202–11Google Scholar. See also Castan, Nicole, Les Criminels de Languedoc: Les exigences d'ordre et les voies de ressentiment dans une société pre-revolutionnaire (1750–90) (Toulouse, 1980), 127–28.Google Scholar
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43. Schwartz, Policing the Poor, 215–16, 223; Archives departementales de la Haute Marne (henceforth ADHM), B. 362, 478, 480, 486, 492; ADHM 13 B31, where there are numerous examples of the Langres police responding to “rural inhabitants”; ADM C. 1995–98.
44. Gamier, A., “Histoire de la Maréchaussée de Langres de 1720 a 1790,” Memoires de la société pour l'histoire du droit et des institutions des anciens pays bourguignons, contois, et romands I (1950–1951): 211–75Google Scholar, and Gamier, A., “Histoire de la Maréchaussée de Langres: La Répression des emeutes,” Memoires de la societe II (1952): 35–129Google Scholar; for interrogations, see, for example, ADHM B. 362, interrogation of Paul Pillot, 26 September 1773, and ADHM B. 480, interrogation of Charles Souchard, July 1774; Schwartz, Policing the Poor, 223–29; Olejniczak, “The Royal Campaign,” chaps. 5 and 6; and Cameron, Ian, Crime and Repression in the Auvergne and the Guyenne, 1720–1790 (Cambridge, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
45. This figure, which seems to derive from the total number who were detained in dépôts, undoubtedly significantly underestimates the number arrested. It comes from the Committee on Mendicity, Sixième Rapport. Sur la Répression de la Mendicité. The Turgot Commission in 1774 compiled national statistics which stated that approximately 72,000 arrests were made from 1764 to 1773; see Hufton, The Poor, 390. Necker thought that 50,000 “beggar/vagrants” were arrested in 1768 alone. For Turgot's policies on arrests and detention, see ADM C. 2000. Turgot to intendant of Champagne, Paris, 19 November 1774; ADM C. 2026 Turgot circulars and correspondence 21, 22, 27 November 1775 and the circulars of Clugny, 29 May and 27 June 1776; Gutton, La Société et les Pauvres, 117— 19; and Schwartz, Policing the Poor, 176–78. For inmate information, see Olejniczak, “The Royal Campaign,” chap. 6; Schwartz Policing the Poor, 229–42; and Montlinot's annual reports for 1782, 1784–86. On restructuring, see Olejniczak, “Recasting the Disordered Poor: The Dépôt de Mendicité in Châlons-sur-Marne during the Decade before the Revolution,” The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe: Proceedings 1984 (Athens, GA, 1986): 16–25; Schwartz, Policing the Poor, 196–97; and Montlinot's reports. To gain some perspective, it is estimated that approximately 110,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft throughout Europe from 1450 to 1750; see Levack, Brian P., The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London, 1987), 21.Google Scholar In France during the height of the use of the galleys from 1680 to 1715, approximately 38,000 were sentenced to galley terms. Most of these were not convicted of “vagrancy” but of violent crimes, theft, desertion, and protestantism. See Zysberg, A., “Les Galères de France 1660–1748: Une institution penitentiare sous l'Ancien Régime,” in Petit, Jacques G., La Prison, La Bagne et L'Histoire (Geneva, 1984): 69–76Google Scholar, and his “Galères et galériens en France à la fin du XVIIe siècle: Une image du pouvoir royal a l'âge classique,” Criminal Justice History 1 (1980): 51–115.
46. For an elaboration of these ideas, see my “Working the Body of the Poor: The Ateliers de Charité in Late Eighteenth-Century France,” forthcoming in Journal of Social History.
47. Schwartz, Policing the Poor, 95–99; Vovelle, Piété baroque, 232–43; Olejniczak, “The Royal Campaign,” chap. 2; For examples of early eighteenth-century popular resistance to police arrests of “beggars,” see Gutton, J. P., “Les Mendiants dans la Société Parisienne au debut du dix-huitieme siècle,” Cahiers d'Histoire 12:21 (1968): 131–41Google Scholar; A. Farge, “Le Mendiant, Un Marginal? (Les Resistances aux Archers de L'Hôpital dans le Paris du XVIIIe siècle),” in Les Marginaux, 312–29; Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity, 109–12;]. P. Gutton, L'Etat et la Mendicité dans la Première Moitié du XVIIIe Siècle: Auvergne, Beaujolais, Forez, Lyonnais (Sainte Etienne, 1973), 101Google Scholar, 105–12, 220–24; Norberg, Rich and Poor, 5–6, 297; Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance, 62; Jacques Maillard, Le Pouvoir Municipal à Angers de 1657 à 1789 (Angers, 1984), 122–25. For evidence of remnants of Counter-Reformation thinking into the eighteenth century, see Groethuysen, Bernard, The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France, trans. Mary Ilford (London, 1968), 140–54.Google Scholar
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