Poor-relief institutions from the Concordat to the Restoration.

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]