Andrew R. Aisenberg, Contagion: Disease, Government, and the “Social Question” in Nineteenth-Century France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. vii + 238 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Abstract

The dramatic transformations wrought by industrialization and the accompanying demographic shifts made nineteenth-century European cities veritable factories of contagion and disease. Contaminated water supplies, inadequate sewer systems, overcrowded housing, and poorly ventilated workplaces ensured the spread of typhoid fever, diptheria, tuberculosis, and cholera. Like their counterparts in other industrializing countries, French government officials recognized that the “social question,” common parlance for the political and social problems caused by poverty and general working-class discontent, constituted their most formidable domestic political challenge. But according to Andrew R. Aisenberg, the French state, unlike its European counterparts, was faced with a unique predicament: How could a government rooted in a political tradition that established the family as the “inviolable site” of individualism and liberty, justify intervention in the home in the name of the public welfare? In other words, how could the state address the “social question” if the home—especially the working-class home, the very locus of poverty and its attendant problems—was politically off-limits?