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HARVESTING 1827 The final years of the Restoration saw Liberals confront two royalist governments. The first was largely Centre-Right in political orientation and was led by Viscount Jean-Baptiste Martignac, a former Bordelais lawyer who had been elected Deputy in 1825 and thereafter had staunchly supported Villèle. Martignac had not to that point established himself as a major political figure and he was not officially appointed as premier ministre, but his oratorical skills in parliament soon established him as the leader of the cabinet. The second royalist government, appointed in August 1829, was very much ultraroyalist in character and was led by Jules de Polignac. During both ministries Liberalstr ength grew, registered in by-elections under Martignac and in the general election of July 1830 under Polignac, and thus there was a consistent underlining theme to these years. Faced by the possibility of a Liberal majority in 1820, royalists had passed the Law of the Double Vote, and this alteration of the electoral regime had helped secure domination for the next seven years. The Law of 2 May 1827 had then reduced administrative fraud, thereby contributing to Liberal recovery and again raising the spectre of an Opposition majority. Latent in this scenario was the potential conflict that had always lurked in the Charter. Accommodating the representative element of the constitution posed little concern as long as parliament was suitably royalist, but what would happen if voters chose to elect an Opposition majority? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUMULTUOUS POLITICS AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL Uncertainty shrouded the First Restoration. Most historians have concluded that the First Treaty of Paris, signed on 30 May 1814, was relatively lenient: France was reduced to her 1792 frontiers and lost colonies in the West Indies and the Indian Ocean, but would not have to pay reparations. The French, however, had grown accustomed to victory under Napoleon and what was lost was at least as apparent to them as what had been salvaged. Talleyrand would represent France at the Vienna Congress, but it was by no means clear that la grande nation would have much say in the post-war settlement. Wounded patriotism, thus, posed unsettling questions for a regime installed by the Allied powers. Perhaps the prospect of peace might have enabled the Bourbon monarchy to entrench itself, had the government not exacerbated tensions by committing a series of errors. There was little immediate administrative purge at the start of the First Restoration; 76 per cent of the Imperial corps was maintained. By February 1815, however, the Minister of the Interior, the abbé François-Xavier de Montesquiou, was asking prefects for lists with comments on the worthiness of fonctionnaires, and change was accelerating. More potentially explosive were alterations in the army. Reduction by about three-fifths was perhaps not a great danger where common soldiers were concerned; many of the latter had simply melted away in the face of defeat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Revolution only municipal personnel and justices of the peace were directly elected to their posts. National deputies, like departmental officials and district administrators (until their suppression in 1795), were chosen at electoral colleges by second-degree electors who emanated from primary assemblies in the cantons. This indirect route to high office was a procedure retained from the ancien régime, exemplified by the successive stages of election to the Estates General in 1789. It was, above all, a means of vesting real power in the hands of a political elite which, even in the absence of a fiscal threshold in 1792, was drawn predominantly from wealthier elements of the broad electorate. The relatively small secondary assemblies in the departments were clearly the fulcrum of electoral authority in revolutionary France. Government officials and contenders for higher office alike were especially concerned to secure a favourable outcome at this level. Yet, despite the existence of a good deal of accessible documentation, these all-important departmental colleges have received surprisingly little attention from historians; much remains to be done, as this exploratory survey will suggest. Departmental assemblies were created on seven occasions during the revolutionary decade, in 1790, 1791, 1792, 1795, 1797, 1798 and 1799. They ranged in size from less than 200 to almost 1,000 members, reflecting the total of enfranchised citizens in each department: the Pyrénées-Orientales hosted the smallest, while the Seine (usually referred to as Paris) housed the largest assembly. In 1790 and 1791 one second-degree elector was awarded for every 100 ayant droit de voter residing in the canton, regardless of actual turnout. In 1792 the total of electors remained static, notwithstanding an extension of the franchise, because there was no time to compile new voter lists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first and last legislative elections to be held under the Constitutional Monarchy, during the summer of 1791, produced a poor turnout; thereafter abstention became endemic. It is tempting to blame the electoral system for this disappointing trend. Yet the local elections of 1790 had often attracted a majority of the electorate, especially in rural areas. In 1791, by contrast, the context of disaffection and discontent in which citizens were asked to vote clearly began to take a toll on the level of attendance. Frustrated in their expectations of change and dismayed by the emergence of religious divisions, voters began to desert the polls en masse. Abstention was a product of more than just ignorance or indifference but, before any serious attempt is made to explain why turnout plummeted after 1790, an effort must be made to determine more precisely the degree of participation. This is far easier said than done, for the historical psephology of the revolutionary period cannot pretend to be an exact science in the same way as contemporary electoral studies. In one respect there are too few statistics: with the exception of the two constitutional referenda (or plebiscites) of 1793 and 1795, no endeavour was made to collect returns at the national level. This is indicative of governmental indifference and ineptitude where the electoral process was concerned, but above all it reflects the practice of indirect elections in which the primary stage was considered a purely local matter. Yet the conservation of relevant procesverbaux in municipal and departmental archives leaves a great deal to be desired. Though fuller documentation is usually available for larger towns, few rural communes have preserved a set of records for the whole decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wretchedness attending our species subordinates a man to another man: it is not inequality which is a real misfortune, but dependence. FROM MENIAL SERVITUDE TO HONOURABLE POVERTY Attitudes to poverty during the French Revolution were largely fashioned by perceptions of inequality. In advocating progressive taxation or the extension of property rights, the Jacobins assumed that transfers from the rich to the poor would make a substantial dent in poverty and narrow the distance between the two. In pooling and rationing scarce commodities, they were hoping that a different distribution system might rectify unequal consumption even without an expansion of the country's productive capacity. The ‘myth’ of the ‘artificial dearth’ (la disette factice), which was denounced by Gironde, Montagne and sansculotte militants alike, was proof that this was a land of plenty, with shares for everyone, and reflected a strong sense of what is fair and who has the right to enjoy what in a free and equal market economy. The ancien régime differentiated between the acceptable and unacceptable faces of poverty. Pauvreté, on the one hand, encompassed a vast segment of the working population, those who lived on the brink of deprivation and whose main feature, as Olwen Hufton has shown, was vulnerability. Christian tradition had surrounded this category of long-suffering labouring poor with an aura of moral rectitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is up to specific laws to equalise, so to speak, the inequalities, by the charges they impose on the rich and the relief they grant the poor. THE FISCAL CONSENSUS BETWEEN GIRONDINS AND MONTAGNARDS One of the very first acts of the Constituent Assembly in 1789 was to enshrine in the Declaration of Rights the cardinal principle of fiscal justice, namely that, while all citizens were deemed equally liable to taxation, its burden should be spread between them ‘in proportion to their faculties’. In giving prominence to the canon of fair proportion rather than equal sacrifice, and thus opening wide the door to progressive taxation, the Constituents were simply echoing the conclusions of the leading tax reformers of their age. The economist Boisguilbert and the abbé de Saint-Pierre, intent on putting an end to ‘arbitrary taxation’ (la taille arbitraire), were among the first at the beginning of the century to have highlighted the merits of graduation; Montesquieu and Rousseau, having meditated on the sumptuary prescriptions of antiquity, considered it to be the only reliable foil against the impropriety of excessive wealth; and the chevalier de Jaucourt and Jean-Louis Graslin had persuasively argued in its favour in their bitter polemic with the physiocrats. ‘The burden of taxation’, Jaucourt had written, ‘must be assessed in accordance with the principles of distributive justice.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The turn of the nineteenth century witnessed the beginnings of the recovery of the network of poor-relief institutions following the crisis-racked years of the 1790s. This recovery owed much to the rehabilitation of the Catholic church by the Concordat between Bonaparte and the Pope in Messidor Year IX (15 July 1801) and the general strengthening of civilian authority under the Consular and Imperial régimes. The Concordat was of far more than religious significance: in the Hérault as in many other departments of the Midi it also contributed forcefully towards the return to a more pacific and routine public life following the lawlessness, the dissensions and the witch-hunts of the Directorial régime. Despite the rough ride which the department gave its first post-Concordat bishop, the irascible and intolerant Rollet, the local church was to be thoroughly overhauled during the long episcopacy of the popular Bishop Fournier (1806–34) and the way paved for the ‘Catholic restoration’ which marked the first half of the nineteenth century in the department. The religious revival had a profound influence on poor-relief institutions which even under the Directory had begun to feel the effects of the religious thaw in the wake of the dechristianising episodes of first Year II and then Year VI. The structure and context of poor relief were effectively ‘rechristianised’ in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Confraternities of dames de la Miséricorde came to recharge the energies of many bureaux de bienfaisance and, although the government insisted that every pauper was openly to justify his state of need, the old concern for secrecy and discretion and the old favouritism towards the pauvre honteux soon crept back into the administration of home relief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jamais l'assistance ne fut … plus nécessaire que de 1789 à l'Empire. Whoever won the Revolution [the poor] lost. The Enlightenment and Revolutionary critique of the charitable institutions of the Ancien Régime had been fired by a genuine concern for the fate of the poorer classes and had assumed a greater measure of state involvement in the remedying of abuses. The nature of the state's contribution to hospitals and bureaux de bienfaisance in the Consular and Imperial periods showed how much lower sights had now been set following the fiasco of poor-law reform in the 1790s. So too did the set of initiatives introduced by the central government outside the surviving framework of poor-relief institutions. Tangled, discrete and unambitiously pragmatic, they recalled the limited reform endeavours of the Ancien Régime monarchy. Indeed in several cases, pre-Revolutionary relief measures which had fallen into abeyance were revived in almost exactly their pristine form. This was the case, for example, with the practice of sending chests of medicines into outlying rural areas which was re-established after Year XIII. Rather than remedying geographical imbalances in the supply of medical care, as had been one of the aims of social policy in the early 1790s, the furthest extent of the government's intentions was to offer partial compensation to such areas for their lack of trained medical personnel. The emphasis was once again, therefore, on drugs which could be easily administered by the lay person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The voluminous reports of the Comité de Mendicité which the Constituent Assembly established in January 1790 to investigate the provision of poor relief were based on the most thorough national enquiry into poverty and assistance in the eighteenth century. The Comité drew most of its members from the ranks of professional philanthropists and Ancien Régime bureaucrats. Its views, which were more or less reducible to those of its foremost member, the egregious and indefatigable Duc de Larochefoucauld-Liancourt, constituted in breadth of outlook and sympathies a sort of intellectual testament to the social thinking of the Enlightenment. They also provided the framework for government action for most of the Revolutionary decade. Empirical investigations confirmed members of the Comité in their view that, by permitting charity to remain the foundation of the body of poor-relief institutions and by failing thereby to give aid where and when it was needed, the Ancien Régime and above all the church had tacitly acknowledged the insuperability of the problems of poverty and distress. Even the plans for a parish poor-rate on English lines, such as the ill-fated Bureau de Mendicité had endeavoured to introduce in 1764 and 1765, would have failed to remedy that misery which resulted from flagrant disparities of wealth between regions. The Comité was convinced that only the state, by centralising all relief funds in its own hands and by distributing assistance rationally according to criteria such as surface area, population and tax burden, could possibly hope to eradicate obdurate pockets of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relative lack of concern which the Revolutionary Government had shown towards hospitals had sprung from, and was compensated by, a strong and positive commitment to alternative forms of relief. Its immediate successors in the Thermidorean period and then under the Directory (4 Brumaire Year IV to 19 Brumaire Year VIII, 26 October 1795 to 10 November 1799) not only dispelled any lingering ambitions concerning the introduction of a ‘welfare state’ but also displayed an insouciance towards hospitals which bordered on wilful and cruel neglect. The strain which this placed on surviving poor-relief institutions – in the Montpellier region as in most other parts of France – was intensified by the general deterioration in social and economic conditions in the mid and late 1790s. The trade slump caused by the war, the crisis in most local branches of manufacturing, monetary depreciation, high prices and bread shortages, combined with a chronic lack of political stability and administrative authority, produced a rise in the levels of demand for assistance with which crisis-racked poor-relief institutions could hardly hope to cope. The de-nationalisation of hospital property by the law of 4 Brumaire Year IV (26 October 1795) – in essence the revocation of the notorious law of 23 Messidor Year II – was the most important single measure concerning poor relief in this period and showed clearly – and ominously – the general attitude of the government to the provision of relief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As we have seen, the diminishing capicity of charity and its works to cope with the burgeoning problem of poverty was far from a purely local phenomenon. From about the middle of the eighteenth century, the question of how best to organise the relief of poverty on the ruins of existing forms of charity had become a matter of public remark and open polemic. The case of the Montpellier region suggests that, far from being confined to the utopian lucubrations of a handful of out-of-touch Parisian intellectuals, this crisis was rooted in the everyday experience of those individuals who came into contact with the institutions. The dilemmas of hospital administrators, the selective dispositions of charitable donors and the muted pathos of popular attitudes all, in their different ways, underpinned the debate and ran in counterpoint to the arguments of philosophes and social thinkers. The arguments of the latter were thus not merely a product of their rational preferences, but also a telling and informed reflection of the actual performance of charity and its works. The primacy which the hospitals enjoyed at the centre of poor-relief provision was a major bone of contention. The hôpital général – the paradigmatic poor-relief institution since the middle of the seventeenth century – was coming to be seen as outdated. It no longer seemed to make economic sense to pour scanty charitable resources into these cumbersome and top-heavy institutions. The experiences of hospital administrators in the Montpellier region highlighted the extent to which high costs, in an age of inflation and population expansion, had made the care and supervision of hospital inmates progressively uneconomic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anciennement, il n'y avait presque point de petit lieu qui n'eut son hospice. Thus Saint-Priest, the Intendant of Languedoc, in 1753 drew the attention of the central government to the unevenness of the map of institutions of formal relief in Bas Languedoc. What had formerly been a dense network of hospitals had been eroded in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries by a variety of factors: civil dissension, the closure of leper-houses, the expropriation of Protestant charities, eventually aborted government plans to divert the resources of many small country hospitals to the military orders of Mont-Carmel and Saint-Lazare, and the pooling of the funds of many scattered charities so as to allow the creation of multi-purpose hôpitaux généraux in the major cities. The social and economic upheavals of the early modern period had also taken their toll. Furthermore, as a consequence of France's failure to develop anything like the compulsory poor-rate at parish level which characterised relief provision in England, religious almsgiving continued to be the major financial prop of all the local establishments. Inevitably, therefore, social structure and the distribution of wealth remained powerful influences on the availability of hospital care. The widespread presence of the bourgeoisie in the towns and ‘urbanised villages’ of the littoral meant that, in the normal course of events, charity there was more plentiful than in most upland communes, where the population was less socially differentiated and less prosperous. On the plain, a village with a population of 1,100 or 1,200 inhabitants might well have a hospital, and possibly other charitable institutions to boot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entering eighteenth-century Montpellier was an education in the social, economic and cultural contrasts of Bas Languedoc and in the city's pre-eminence in the region. If, like most travellers, one approached the city along the post-roads of the coastal plain it was easy to be impressed by the appearances of prosperity. Most communities observed the time-honoured precepts of Mediterranean mixed farming: the lion's share of cultivable land was devoted to cereals with vines, olives, fruit trees, vegetables and mulberries as secondary crops; while arable farming was complemented by the upkeep of flocks of sheep and goats which were to be found in particularly large numbers in those communities which spread into the garrigues, the low and scrub-covered limestone hills bordering the alluvial deposits of the littoral. The landscape in places formed, in the words of Arthur Young, the celebrated English agronomist who visited the region in the ‘animated and joyous’ harvest-time atmosphere of the summer of 1787, ‘a beautiful mixture’ of its different elements. Young was also struck by the high quality of the network of communications: the much praised Canal du Midi which linked the Atlantic with the Mediterranean at Agde, and the fine roads – ‘stupendous works’ – constructed on the orders of the provincial Estates. There were numerous villas and country houses to admire too, ‘well-built, clean and comfortable … spread thickly through the countryside’, testimony to the wealth of regional elites and the importance of urban capital in the transformation of the countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bienfaisance (Morale), C'est une vertu qui nous porte à faire du bien à notre prochain. Elle est la fille de la bienveillance et de l'amour de l'humanité. Over the past few decades, studies by both French and Anglo-Saxon scholars have completely revised our understanding of the nature of Ancien Régime society. One of the products of this historiographical overhaul has been to uncover a serious and endemic problem of poverty in late eighteenth-century France. The roots of this problem lay in the gap between population growth and economic expansion, the former consistently and even increasingly outpacing the latter in a pattern familiar to many developing economies. Contemporaries seem to have been only dimly aware of many of the changes through which they were living, but all deplored the consequences: social disharmony, nascent political unrest and, especially in comparison with neighbouring England, economic backwardness. There was general agreement too that existing levels of poor relief were insufficient to cope with the scale of the problem. Many Catholic luminaries saw the answer to this in the more thorough-going application of the time-tested virtue of almsgiving which, in the absence of a compulsory poor-rate such as was levied in England, for example, at parishional level, still comprised the basis of all assistance. Enlightenment thinkers, however, reflecting the period's modish anti-clericalism, criticised such ready-made answers to a problem which seemed to be getting increasingly out of hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]