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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 problem of poverty was perhaps the most serious social question which faced Enlightenment France. The countless mémoires, treatises and projects, the debates and polemics, the pamphlets and brochures, the occasional writings and reflections of social critics and the opponents of the established church, the moralising sermons and homilies of anxious ecclesiastics, the piecemeal reforms sometimes adopted by municipal and provincial authorities, the plans dabbled with and increasingly espoused by the central government, all in their different ways bore witness to an underlying conviction that poverty was a distemper which led on ineluctably to begging, vice and crime and which no society which was humane, economically sound or socially cohesive could tolerate. This epiphenomenon in the history of mentalités may be largely ascribed to the course of French social development in the eighteenth century. Up to the seventeenth century, mortality crises, normally associated with any one or a combination of the three ‘Malthusian’ checks on population growth – war, famine, disease – had decimated the population frequently enough to keep its size in proportion to the available economic resources: roughly speaking, at around 18 to 20 millions from the late medieval period. In the eighteenth century, however, as war was ‘tamed’ and was increasingly conducted away from French territory, as plague died out and as famine receded, these crises became fewer and further apart, bit less deeply – and thereby lost their pristine role as demographic regulator. Hunger and epidemic disease were still prevalent, of course; but they now despatched people to their beds rather than to the tomb. [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]