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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– the paradigmatic poor-relief institution since the middle of the seventeenth century – was coming to be seen as outdated.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]

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]