Royal Paternalism with a Repressive Face: The Ideology of Poverty in Late Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that great numbers of the laboring poor experienced increasing immiseration throughout France after the 1760s. Less well known perhaps is the corresponding formation of an influential set of cultural constructions that shaped how the poor were understood. This framework, which might be called an “ideology of poverty,” is best seen in the widely diffused discourse on mendicity that appeared after midcentury. At its core stood the notion of the able-bodiedmendiant vagabond, or “beggar/vagrant,” who was characterized as a “professional” deviant with a full-blown menacing and illegalétat. This cultural construction provided the animating principle of the ideology that not only powerfully shaped royal and local strategies in treating the poor but also helped to screen out multicausal explanations of poverty and frustrate the development of a genuinely humane assistance program for all categories of poor.