The government and poor relief in the early nineteenth century.

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]