Towards a ‘welfare state’, 1789–c. 1795.

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]