Assistance and repression: rural exodus, vagabondage and social crisis in France, 1880-1914.
Smith, Timothy B.
Vous croyez expier les fautes de la France en me faisant mourir;
cela ne suffira pas; vous commettrez un crime de plus; je suis la grande
victime fin de siecle.
Joseph Vacher, Bourg, France, 31 December 1897, on his way to the
guillotine.(1)
In 1894-97, a series of brutal murders (and several more rapes and
attempted murders) was committed in various parts of rural France, in a
bloody arc stretching from the Ain to the Haute-Loire to the Var. The
eleven killed were, for the most part, shepherds and farm hands, both
male and female, in their teens. They were invariably strangled,
mutilated, their lifeless bodies sometimes defiled. The killer may have
murdered up to twenty more people going back to 1888. Had he not been
captured, he would be as notorious as Jack The Ripper is today. When the
author of these crimes, Joseph Vacher, a 28 year-old vagabond born in
the Isere, was apprehended in Tournon (Ardeche) in August 1897, it
seemed to confirm the fear that had been widespread in France since the
early 1880s: that the nation was suffering from an alarming social
crisis, widespread vagabondage. Accordingly, French criminologists,
eager to prove the relevance and legitimacy of their new profession,
descended on Bourg, where Vacher had been transferred, to study the man
and his crimes (and eventually, his severed head). Several of the people
involved in the case, such as the chief medical experts, Drs. Alexandre
Berard and Alexandre Lacassagne as well as the investigating judge,
Emile Fourquet, wrote widely read books (the originals have virtually
disintegrated at the Bibliotheque Nationale and in provincial libraries)
and articles in the influential Revue des deux mondes shortly after the
trial in which they warned of the lessons to be learned from the
case.(2) Vacher's heinous crimes impressed themselves into the
popular imagination, becoming the subject of children's rhymes.
The Vacher Affair was a cause celebre in fin-de-siecle France, but
one long forgotten.(3) The public's interest in the case was of
course rooted in the sensationalistic way in which the media - yellow
newspapers and respectable ones alike - reported the crimes, but the
Vacher affair also symbolizes the fear of and fascination with vagabonds
and marginals in general that was so common in France before the war. As
I argue in this article, this fear was, for the most part, grounded in
reality, and was not primarily, as some have claimed, the product of
some sort of national hysteria, fuelled by an irresponsible press.
Indeed, here was one of France's most serious social problems.
Scarcely one decade before the outbreak of the First World War, the
problem of vagabondage and mendicity was so widespread in many parts of
rural France that social commentators often likened the situation to the
explosive one of the 1780s.
Vacher had twice been committed to an asylum a few years before his
arrest and he was clearly suffering from paranoia, a persecution
complex, and delusional episodes. He left his mark on those he met, and
there were several witnesses at his trial who attested to his mad rages.
He was clearly insane. This had been the verdict passed by the doctor
who had evaluated him at the Dole asylum, and by several others,
including his superiors in the military. At his trial it was revealed
that as a child, Vacher had mutilated animals and had once fired a shot
in the direction of some peers. He was sent to the freres maristes at
Saint-Genis-Laval as a postulant, but was thrown out after it was
discovered that "il avait masturbe ses camarades.(4) During his
military service, he was feared as a loner with a volcanic temper.
During the investigation and trial, he suffered frequent delusional
episodes, but he was nevertheless declared responsible.
The problem, if not from the perspective of his victims'
relatives then at least from that of Vacher, who wished to remain
living, was that he was an incorrigible vagabond: this sealed his fate.
Led by Dr. Lacassagne, the medical experts at his trial observed:
Vacher is not an epileptic nor is he an impulsif. He is a violent,
immoral man who was temporarily overcome by delirious melancoly with his
ideas of persecution and suicide. . . . Vacher, cured, was responsible
when he left the Saint-Robert asylum. His crimes are those of an
anti-social, a bloody sadist, who believed in his invincibility. . . .
At the present time, Vacher is not insane: he fakes madness. Vacher is
therefore a criminal and he should be considered responsible, this
responsibility being scarcely attenuated by his previous psychological
problems.(5)
Vacher was executed for his crimes, eerily, on New Year's eve
1898 to the cheers of would-be spectators gathered outside the prison
walls. In a sense Vacher was partially right when, as he was being led
to the guillotine, he shouted, "Look, the victim of the
asylums" (Ah voila! La victime des fautes des asiles). Partially
right, since he had escaped from an asylum and had taken to the road,
and, it could be argued, since his doctors failed to appreciate his
danger to society. But now France had an opportunity to strike out in
the most visible way against an alarming social problem which had long
terrified the nation: vagabondage, and Vacher was presented by the media
as the living embodiment of all that was wrong with this social scourge.
As a semi-educated lunatic, Vacher was by no means representative
of the hundreds of thousands of vagabonds who still roamed French roads
at the turn of the century, but this did not stop the press from
exaggerating the general relevance of this one very sick individual. As
we shall see, elite opinion of the day generally presented vagabondage
as a problem of poor behavior or eugenics, not as the result of a
socio-economic crisis. In fact, the persistence of ancien regime-like
socio-economic conditions in much of rural France, well documented by
Eugen Weber, coupled with the rural exodus and the lack of public
assistance resources to assist people in distress, conspired to create
an alarming social crisis.(6) This, in turn, proved to be immeasurably embarrassing to French republicans, embarked as they were on an
ambitious program of modernization and cultural assimilation, symbolized
by educational reform, the economic and linguistic integration of the
country, social reform legislation for the 'worthy poor,'
anticlerical measures, and efforts to trumpet the virtues of science and
technology (at Parisian world fairs, for instance). How, then, did the
French come to terms with the crisis of vagabondage and rural misery?
For the most part, by simply blaming the victim and engaging, as we
shall see, in remarkably repressive measures to wipe the problem out.
A little-discussed but important counter-current to republican
solidarisme flourished in the three decades before the First World War:
it cannot be overlooked in any analysis of the social question, for it
too would set the parameters of the debate, limiting those reforms which
did emerge to the 'worthy poor' - that is, to almost every
group except the able-bodied adult. Indeed, the harsh intellectual
current discussed below should be considered as a serious counterweight to the social reform movement of the time. If, during the period
1880-1914 the nation increasingly devoted its energies toward assisting
more women, children and elderly persons, it also engaged in a ruthless
crackdown on beggars and vagabonds, sometimes confusing them with the
floating unemployed urban population and with rural migrants to large
cities. For every step forward the French took at this time, they took
one step back, perhaps in order to justify the reforms they were seeking
to put in place for the 'worthy poor.' In an 1888 report to
the Minister of the Interior on the nation's depots de mendicite
(prisons for beggars and vagabonds), the deputy from the Haute-Loire
department (and two-time prime minister) Charles Dupuy argued that the
Revolution had got it right: "The more generous assistance became,
the more rigorous were the laws of repression."(7) Dupuy noted in a
parliamentary report on vagabondage ten years later: "The
Constituent Assembly understood the necessity of 'balancing
assistance with repression.' The more real needs were addressed,
the more proper it was to demask and to punish idleness, vice, and fake
misery."(8) And as Camille Ferdinand-Dreyfus addressed the Congres
de patronage des liberes in 1894 on the topic of vagabondage, he cited
La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt's famous dictum: "If man has the
right to ask of society: 'Help me to live,' society in turn
has the right to ask of him: 'Give us your labor.'"(9)
This type of language was commonplace, even among the most
'solidaristic' of radical republicans, and it constitutes a
strong counter-current to republican 'solidarite.' The concern
over balancing the new laws of assistance that were being introduced at
this time (free medical assistance for indigents in 1893, accident
insurance in 1898, pensions for the elderly indigent in 1905, maternity
benefits in 1913, etc.), with repressive means appears with remarkable
frequency in the nation's social policy forums and in
parliament,(10) Newspaper articles, journal articles and books
containing the phrase "assistance and repression" appeared in
the dozens during this period.
I.
As a vagabond roaming the Midi during the 1890s, Vacher would have
had ample opportunity to team up with the veritable army of vagabonds
and beggars that was circulating on French roads at this time. Indeed,
at his trial several men who had come to know him on his tour de France vagabond testified against him. Estimates of the number of vagabonds in
early and mid-nineteenth century France range from 75,000 to 200,000.
There were an average of 2,910 convictions each year for vagrancy and
begging in 1826-30 yet 10,429 in 1876-80 and 19,723 (and over 51,000
arrests) in the early 1890s.(11) Estimates for the 1890s reached the
figure of 400,000, even 500,000. One third to one half of all arrests in
Paris in the 1880s were for vagabondage. Jules de Crisenoy, in his
sweeping study based on the records and reports of the nation's
90-plus departmental councils, Questions d'assistance et
d'hygiene publiques traites dans les conseils generaux (13 vols.,
1885-1900), reported on the problem. Dozens of departments complained
throughout the 1880s and 1890s that vagabondage was the most pressing
social problem facing rural populations. The problem was so great in the
Ardennes that the prefect instructed all the mayors to set aside an
abandoned building in their commune where vagabonds and beggars might
take shelter. The general council distributed 25,000 francs to help out
with the conversion of empty buildings into night shelters.(12) An 1891
report from the department of the Seine-Inferieure noted that
"there isn't a single commune in the Seine-Inferieure which is
not bitterly complaining about the considerable growth in mendicity in
the last few years."(13) In 1890, there were an estimated seven to
eight times more beggars in Poitou than fifty years earlier.(14)
The prosperity of the 1860s saw the problem recede into the
background of the nation's concerns. In the generation following
1848 there were no serious efforts to tackle the problem, and the
vagabond population seems to have stabilized. Few studies of vagabondage
appeared between the 1840s and the late 1870s. Yet from the late 1870s
right to the outbreak of the First World War, the nation was consumed
with fear of the vagabond. The popular press, academic journals, social
policy journals and university publications devoted inordinate amounts
of space to the topic. Prison societies, agricultural societies,
municipal and general councils, charities, social policy forums, and
parliament itself were obsessed with the problem of vagabondage.
National conferences were held almost every year on the topic during the
period 1880-1910 (and international ones, too, for the Italians and
Belgians, in particular, were also obsessed with the issue, for they too
had to cope with a rapid rural exodus and their social services were
also poorly developed). At least three dozen theses were written on the
topic in France. Arrests for begging and vagrancy rose sharply; the fear
of the vagabond, the beggar, the 'apache,' consumed the
nation.
The French, Gordon Wright reminds us in his important study of
crime in France, were deeply concerned with crime throughout the
nineteenth century, but from the 1880s to the Great War, the concern
over vagrancy was, he concludes, particularly "obsessive." In
this atmosphere, vagrants and beggars were usually lumped together
"as a single locution."(15) Wright attributes this rise in
repression and in popular concern to a periodic wave of irrational fear,
which, he argues, is characteristic of the way French society has
perceived crime during the last two centuries: "there are times
when popular beliefs outrun facts, and this was probably the case with
respect to the vagrancy panic of the 1880s."(16) To be sure, the
obsession with vagrancy was to an extent a figment of the
population's imagination and was fuelled by a lurid press - Le
Petit parisien, Le Petit journal and even the Revue des deux mondes, for
example, regularly contained sensationalistic illustrations and stories
of marauding tribes of vagabonds and "apaches," to the
fascination of Parisian readers.(17) Others, such as Guy de Maupassant
in his Le horla. Le vagabond (1887), provided a more sympathetic (and
fictional) account of the problem.(18) The obsession with vagrancy, as
well as the tendency to medicalize the problem, was rooted, to an
extent, in a pervasive and profound sense of national demographic and
military decline, born of the defeat to the Prussians. But the obsession
with degenerate beggars and vagrants was also an indication that
vagrancy and mendicity were actually on the rise since mid-century.(19)
The decline in French agriculture over the course of the second
half of the nineteenth century lay at the root of the problem: the value
of agricultural properties, for instance, declined by one-third between
1881 and 1913 and grain prices fell from 38 francs per quintal in 1855
to 20 in the early 1890s.(20) As prices fell, many smallholders could no
longer support their families. Whole families took to the road in search
of work in the cities; conscripts turned to the road (an oft-cited cause
of vagabondage); youth struck out in search of greater opportunity than
their villages offered, leaving behind their parents and grandparents,
who sometimes fell into destitution as a result. In the Midi, the
phylloxera epidemic hit the vineyards "like an economic bubonic
plague," reaching catastrophic proportions by the 1880s, pushing
waves of impoverished families into the cities, which could not absorb
them.(21) As rural migrants were shunted from town to town, they
frequently were forced to beg or steal. Jules Meline estimated in his
widely read book of 1905, Le Retour a la terre (The Return to the Land)
that France's rural roads and farmland was being prowled by an army
of 400,000 vagabonds - more than 1% of the population.(22) This was a
figure which was commonly tossed about in the contemporary press and in
parliament during the 1880s, 1890s and 1900s, even if there was no
reliable basis to it. Some observers suggested that 200,000 or 300,000
was a more accurate figure. Whatever the exact figure, here was a social
problem of the first magnitude. An 1895 inquiry found that 466,000
people had been sheltered by night shelters during the previous
year.(23) Over 168,000 people stayed in the night shelters of Paris
alone in 1894 (to be sure, many were repeat guests).(24)
France was on the move as never before in the nineteenth century,
and here was part of the problem, for many arrested
'vagabonds' were in fact destitute rural migrants. The Conseil
superieur de l'assistance publique (the Superior Council of Public
Assistance, a government-named council of social policy experts - and
amateurs - founded in 1888) noted in 1899 that the "involuntarily
unemployed" who took to the road in search of work were too often
arrested for vagabondage.(25) Between 1872 and 1911, the population of
the department of the Rhone increased by 246,000, almost entirely due to
migration from the Massif Central, the Savoie and other poor regions.
During the period 18721896, roughly six to eight thousand people arrived
in the Rhone each year; between 1906 and 1911, 14,000 arrived each
year.(26) Most of these people settled in the Lyon area. Nationwide,
over three million people left agriculture between 1876 and 1911 (in
contrast, only 790,000 had left the countryside between 1831 and 1851
and 1,715,000 had left during the thirty year period 1851-1881).(27)
Between 1881 and 1891, 55 departments suffered from net population
losses due to migration; 58 suffered the same fate during the next
decade, and 62 in the first decade of the twentieth century. French
towns, but especially villages (those with a population of less than
2,000), were emptying at an alarming rate. Above all it was the rural
marginals who left during the crisis of the 1880s. Those who stayed were
the lucky ones still capable of eking out an existence, and many who
stayed behind in fact saw their fortunes rise.(28)
In the short five year period 1906-1911, the rural population of
France decreased by 618,000 and the urban population increased by
866,000 people. Some 70,000 people arrived in the Rhone (mostly in
Lyon), and some 303,000 arrived in the Seine in this five year period.
The poorest parts of France were throwing forth their most impoverished
inhabitants: 22,400 left the western department of the Finistere, many
arriving at the Gare Montparnasse in search of work, only to fall into
deeper misery than that they had fled. Over 18,700 people left the
Cotes-du-Nord, 17,000 departed the Morbihan, 14,500 left the Vendee,
13,000 moved from the Correze (Massif Central) and 14,200 fled the
Ardeche.(29) In 1903, 62 departments (two-thirds the total) were losing
population due to the rural exodus and the low birth rate. The people
fleeing the countryside invariably set out for a few large and
medium-sized cities, like Paris, Lyon, Rouen, Le Havre and Grenoble.(30)
As they made their way to the cities, many were confused with vagabonds
and arrested. Many no doubt fell into vagabondage. Of course widespread
begging was nothing new to Paris and other cities - in the 1866 census,
37,854 Parisians admitted to being full-time beggars - but what was new
was the scale on which it now occurred and authorities' increasing
lack of tolerance for it.(31) Although many towns and villages increased
their commitment to public relief to help the victims of the rural
crisis - during the 1880s, for instance, a village of 700 in the
Indre-et-Loire gave nightime refuge and public assistance to over 1,400
vagabonds in a six month period - most of France's largest cities
did not.(32)
II.
Vagabondage was an offence (Articles 269-273 of the Penal Code)
punishable by three to six months imprisonment and, in certain cases,
five to ten years of police surveillance. Children under 16 could not be
sent to prison for vagabondage. Mendicity was punishable under Articles
274-282 of the Penal Code. All those found to be begging in areas where
"there exists a public establishment organized to obviate begging" (a depot de mendicite) could be punished by prison terms
of three to six months. The penalties increased with threat of violence,
violence, the use of arms, the use of false passports and certificates
of indigence, recidivism, the feigning of injury, and trespassing. The
principal institutions used to combat begging and vagrancy were the
prison-like depots de mendicite. They were first introduced in 1612 and
later expanded early in the eighteenth-century and again in the 1760s.
Resurrected by Napoleon in 1808, there were 96 by the end of the Empire.
By 1850 there were about 20, by 1870, about 40. By 1900, there were
around 50.(33) By 1930, however, there were only a dozen in operation.
The depots, of course, treated the symptoms, not the roots of the
problem. France was iii prepared for the social by-products associated
with the rural exodus.
The remarkable backwardness, inadequacy and inaccessibility of
French hospitals as well as the general lack of public assistance
institutions served to exacerbate the problems of begging and vagrancy
and to speed up the rural exodus. The elderly, epileptics and those
suffering from incurable skin diseases, in particular, often took to the
road when they could find neither family nor neighborhood support, or a
bed in a hospice. In 1886, 43 departments still had no medical service
in their rural areas.(34) Only 193 hospitals were located in rural
communes - France had 36,000 communes. In 1870, 15 million people (40%
of the population), lived in communes without a local welfare bureau (no
commune was required by law to establish them).(35) By 1900, the
situation was only marginally better: now only around 10 million people
had no access to a bureau, but most bureaus were in any case
ineffective, starved of monies. Most of them received no public
subventions. In 1903, of France's 36,000 communes, 29,000 (81%)
still had no public officier de sante or doctor.(36) Resources were
spread unevenly around the nation, concentrated to the north and east of
the notorious Saint Malo-Geneva line.
Tables 1 and 2 help in part to explain the geography of
vagabondage. Many vagabonds, like Vacher, suffered from mental illness
and others often had serious medical problems such as epilepsy. A
disproportionate number came from the poorer departments which had few
relief facilities and they most often headed towards those departments
which, by virtue of their wealth, were better equipped with relief
networks and night shelters. Throughout the nineteenth century, city
officials in Paris and Lyon complained that the mayors of poor rural
communes regularly gave marginals and people with medical problems
travel money (secours de route) to facilitate their passage to large
cities, to shovel the problem to another jurisdiction. Access to
hospital care varied enormously, even at the turn of the century.
Indeed, by the late 1890s, many cities provided even fewer beds as a
percent of the population than they had in the 1820s. Table 3
illustrates this trend.
Table 1
No. of Hospitals/
Hospices (1886) Department
80 Nord
60 Vaucluse
40 Var
9 Haute-Vienne
9 Aude
9 Creuse
8 Tarn
3 Haute-Alpes
3 Corse
Table 2
No. of Bureaux de
Bienfaisance (1886) Department
640 Nord
407 Calvados
406 Aisne
42 Allier
38 Finistere
32 Creuse
32 Haute-Vienne
15 Pyrenees-Orientales
6 Corse
Due to rapid urban growth, many urban hospitals, like those of
Reims, could no longer take in the wayfarers (passants) and provide them
with sustenance. The city had grown from 69,000 in 1870, at which point
there were 1,430 hospital beds, to 94,000 in 1880, when there were 1,700
beds. Whereas population grew by 36%, hospital capacity grew by only
19%, but this, as Table 3 illustrates, was a rather positive situation
in light of other cities' problems. Many elderly men and women in
Reims now were forced to seek charity, and, failing that, to beg. As Dr.
Henri Henrot noted, it was well known that it was common for rural
migrants who had been refused care at the Reims hospital to turn to
begging?
A particularly worrisome problem was that of the elderly indigent.
According to the Minister of the Interior in his 1 August 1888 circular,
19,111 of France's 36,000 communes had no facilities to care for
the elderly. Here was another 'push' factor which added the
elderly to the floating population. Most of the communes lacking support
systems for the elderly were rural, and most of these were located in
the West and the Center. Typically, rural departments' public
relief bureaus (bureaux de bienfaisance) only assisted less than 1% of
their population aged 60 and over.(38) Due to the deficiencies of the
public sector, it was largely to private hands that the elderly turned
for relief when their families could not or would not support them. As
Francis Sabran noted at the Conseil superieur de l'assistance
publique, "in many places the elderly and the incurables would be
left without care and food if they were not assisted by private
charities like the Petites-Soeurs des pauvres, who now assist more than
18,000 elderly indigents."(40) Of course in many places, like the
poorer departments of the Center, the elderly were "left without
care."
Table 3
The Decline in Hospital Beds in Major Cities(39)
City Year, Hospital Bed/Resident ratio
Angers 1825: 1/32 1894: 1/50
Bordeaux 1825: 1/65 1894: 1/148
Dijon 1825: 1/77 1894: 1/128
Grenoble 1850: 1/38 1894: 1/82
Le Havre 1828: 1/55 1894: 1/73
Lille 1825: 1/34 1894: 1/79
Lyon 1825: 1/70 1894: 1/98
Marseille 1835: 1/77 1894: 1/220
St.-Etienne 1860: 1/94 1894: 1/109
The general council of the department of the Puy-de-Dome, in the
Center, noted in 1894 that "the majority of invalids are
beggars." A disproportionate number of the nation's beggars
and vagrants were elderly epileptics and sufferers of incurable skin
diseases. For example, of the 21 beggars arrested in Nice in 1861, seven
were aged 50-60 and seven were over 80 years old. Six were blind, eleven
were invalid, one was mute, and only two were able-bodied.(41) One-half
of the 1,748 men sheltered by the night shelter of Le Havre in 1895-96
were over 50 years old, and one-third were casual farm hands
(journaliers).(42) In Marseille, the mean age of convicted beggars
"was much higher than that of other criminals: 41.3." Whereas
most crimes were committed by the young, begging was a crime of the old,
and of men.(43) (Young vagabonds were not, however, unheard of: one of
Vacher's victims was a fourteen year-old vagabond.) Typically,
elderly vagrants and beggars in the Paris basin hailed from the poorest
departments in the Center and West, where nineteen departments had fewer
than 5 beds per 10,000 people earmarked for the incurable.(44) In 1886,
the depot de mendicite of the Aisne contained 200 elderly indigent or
infirm, 102 idiots, 33 epileptics, 23 blind, and 43 children under the
age of 16.(45) The problem of old age poverty was not helped by the fact
that no hospital or hospice was required by law to admit anyone. It was
to private authorities that the elderly poor had to turn, in the event
that there was an institution to which they could apply, and of course
this meant that some were luckier than others, for there were many holes
in the nation's charitable net, especially in the poorer parts of
the Massif Central.
Far too often, the author of a 1905 study of old age poverty
concluded, it was to begging that the elderly indigent turned to
survive? Vagabondage and mendicity were, if not male practices, male
crimes. The vast majority of those arrested and convicted of vagabondage
and mendicity were men - 14,972 of the 16,773 people arrested for
vagrancy and 2,076 of the 2,853 people arrested for mendicity in Paris
in 1882, for instance.(47) In Paris in 1886, there were 5,995 arrests
for mendicity. Of these, 4,660 were men and 1,295 were women. The number
of people imprisoned in the depots de mendicite increased from 3,654 in
1892 to 4,865 in 1902. The vast majority were men. Convictions
nationwide for vagabondage totalled 14,685, of which 13,579 were men and
only 1,106 were women. In any given year during this period, one-third
to one-half of all arrests in Paris were for vagabondage or
mendicity.(48)
It is no exaggeration, then, to say that vagabondage was a far more
serious problem during the late nineteenth century than it was in
mid-century or even during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unlike
traditional seasonal migrants - for example, the male migrants who
annually left Alpine villages during the winter months to work in cities
- most of the migrants during the late nineteenth century had no firm
contacts waiting for them in a regional center. They left with no money
in their pockets, and many ended up in cities which were themselves in
the grips of economic stagnation. "Unfortunately for those victims
of agricultural stagnation," writes Robert Nye, "their plight
coincided with a highly publicized increase in the rates of criminal
recidivism."(49) It was in this context that the Vacher affair
exploded onto the front pages of French newspapers and journals.
III.
The Vacher case seemed to highlight the urgency of the problem of
vagabondage, but it was also seized upon by some of the critics of
public assistance for the able-bodied adult, such as Marcel Lecoq, who
had been arguing since the 1880s that the bureaux de bienfaisance (local
poor relief committees or welfare bureaus) and other forms of public
relief and charity were only serving to exacerbate the problems of
vagabondage and mendicity. As Lecoq warned in his diatribe against
public assistance (and argument in favor of work-relief),
L'Assistance par le travail en France (Work Relief in France),
public assistance was dangerous because it consisted of something for
nothing, as did the fruits of begging. Assisting the poor in this
fashion was also dangerous since "the needy class and the criminal
class are but a step apart; the slope is slippery and it is easy to fall
to the other side. Most of the great criminals have been habituated [to
their lives of crime] at an early age through begging or through
vagrancy. . . . Vacher, whose series of atrocious crimes everyone knows,
was a vagabond who, unable to settle down anywhere, obtained the large
part of his resources from begging."(50) The Vacher case inspired
several Ministry of Interior reports on the problem of vagabondage in
the three years following his arrest, and of course articles abounded on
the larger lessons to be drawn from Vacher's acts.(51) Even before
Vacher's arrest and trial, many agreed with Camille
Ferdinand-Dreyfus' statement that "the reform of our
legislation governing vagabondage and mendicity is the most urgent of
the social questions."(52)
As begging and vagrancy increased, so too did criticisms of the
principal public institution that was designed to deal with people with
inadequate resources, the local bureaux de bienfaisance. Indeed, during
the 1890s, for the first time in several decades, criticisms of the
bureaux were legion. Books were published calling for the complete
abolition of all the bureaux, since, it was believed, they only
encouraged idleness among the able-bodied and fuelled the problem of
vagabondage, as beggars and vagabonds roamed the country, stopping
periodically in cities to steal, to beg and to request public
charity.(53) Employing a questionable but all-too-common logic, Charles
Dupuy argued in an 1888 report he presented to both the Conseil
superieur de l'assistance publique and to parliament, that there
was a direct link between the expansion of the welfare bureaus
throughout the century and the rise in vagabondage and mendicity.
Whereas in 1833 there were only 6,275 bureaus (which assisted 695,932
people), fifty years later there were 14,500 bureaus and 1.4 million
people were assisted. If, Dupuy argued, increased access to assistance
did indeed reduce vagabondage and mendicity, then there should be no
good reason for there to be more vagabonds and beggars in the late 1880s
than earlier in the century, since, after all, assistance was now more
widely available.(54) The answer to the riddle, in his mind and in the
mind of many others at the time, was that assistance provided by the
welfare bureaus was itself to blame for the rise in vagabondage and
mendicity. Across urban France, in Paris, Nancy, Le Havre, Lille, Lyon,
Marseille, Nice, and Montpellier, city officials reduced 300,000 people
from the public assistance rolls during the 1890s and 1900s in an effort
to weed out the professional cheats who were apparently abusing the
system and in an effort to refocus resources on the elderly, mothers and
children.(55)
Able-bodied adults were effectively shut off from receiving public
assistance in several cities, including those listed above. The
principles of 'scientific charity' were embraced as the French
reformed their urban outdoor relief systems. Paris eliminated over
60,000 people from the relief rolls in the 1890s-1900s; Lyon removed
over 16,000 in one year alone, 1891; Nancy removed 4,000 people from the
rolls in the 1890s; Nice assisted 7,000 fewer people in the late 1880s
than at the start of the decade, and so on. The pattern was repeated in
at least a dozen of France's largest cities.(56) These efforts
cannot be understood without reference to the widespread fear that
public assistance and indiscriminate almsgiving was helping to fuel the
problem of begging and vagrancy. By eliminating or drastically
curtailing relief for the able-bodied adult, French cities hoped to send
a message to marginal elements: they would not be welcome in town. As
the director of Nice's new work-relief center (assistance par le
travail) declared: "It is not an oeuvre d'assistance which
will clear a city [of vagabonds and beggars], it is the creation of a
depot de mendicite, the necessary corollary of work-relief."(57) As
urban France curtailed its outdoor relief systems, it introduced
work-relief services (which usually put the assisted to work breaking
stones, and the like) and depots.
The rich had, of course, always blamed the poor for their poverty,
and Europe had a long history of adopting cruel measures toward the poor
(consider the branding of vagrants and 'rogues' in the
sixteenth century, for instance). But as Barrows and others have shown,
the link between poverty and individual failings (in particular, alcohol
consumption) gained new currency in the aftermath of the bloody,
alarming Commune, and this current of thought gained momentum right into
the 1900s.(58) In a lengthy and influential 1874 report to the Minister
of the Interior on the situation of the nation's bureaux de
bienfaisance, the Inspector General of Public Assistance Paul Bucquet
concluded that "moral and individual causes are far more
common" than economic causes of poverty. "Drunkenness and the
frequenting of cabarets and cafes ruin [workers'] health and cause
them to lose the love for work: the enquiry reveals that these are the
principal, the essential, causes of pauperism."(59) Here was an
accurate encapsulation of elite opinion of the day. It was easier to
explain poverty and vagrancy with such devices than it was to ponder
their socio-economic roots. The pauper was increasingly portrayed as a
sub-human in the popular press. Books like J. Lefort's Intemperance et misere (1875), which equated poverty with alcoholism, were crowned
with France's most prestigious writing awards, such as the Academie
des sciences morales et politique's annual Felix de Beaujour
prize.(60) The Academy had devoted its 1874 prize to a book on the
topic: what role does alcohol play in causing misery? As the rural
exodus was getting underway, many Frenchmen were increasingly turning to
pseudo-scientific explanations for deviancy, criminality, and adult
poverty.
The very titles of many of the books which addressed the social
question speak volumes. They continue to refer to the "dangerous
classes", the "inferior classes", and the "social
garbage" right to the end of the century. In 1910, Dr. Armand
Pagnier published a widely read book with the title Le dechet social, Le
vagabond. Arguably the most influential treatise on poverty during the
nineteenth century was Duchatel's De la charite dans ses rapports
avec l'etat moral et le bien-etre des classes inferieures de la
societe (On Charity and its Relationship to the Moral State and
Well-Being of the Inferior Classes of Society) (1836).(61) A nation with
a long history of denying the socio-economic roots of poverty could
always resort to these timeworn explanations of misery whenever the need
arose. But there was a new, disturbing twist to the elite view of the
social question at the end of the nineteenth century, as the problem was
increasingly cast in medical and/or eugenic terms.
From the 1880s to the 1910s, the study of vagabondage was a
veritable industry in France and in other European nations. A cousin of
the huge literature on 'degeneration' which Daniel Pick has
studied, hundreds and hundreds of articles, books, treatises and theses
appeared in several languages, chiefly French, German and Italian, on
the medical roots of vagabondage and mendicity.(62) As Nye argues,
"the continued and intensified application of medical ideas to new
areas of deviance in the decade or so prior to 1905 helped to . . .
promote suspicion of marginal elements in French society. During this
period vagrancy was thoroughly medicalized."(63) Whereas the
increasing medicalization of childbirth and care would spell more
concern (and money) for pregnant women and children, the increasing
medicalization of begging and vagrancy spelled a harsher attitude
towards these groups.(64) Although there were some critics who advocated
the rehabilitation of vagabonds, the general climate of opinion tended
towards stern repression.
Consider the case of Drs. Armand Marie and Raymond Meunier, an
influential team of French 'experts' on the vagabondage
problem. In their numerous newspaper and journal articles of the 1890s
and 1900s as well as in their widely respected and cited book, Les
vagabonds (1908), they argued that "purely economic causes are only
of minor importance, whereas the true causes must be sought in the
mental state of the vagabond himself." Marie and Meunier, like many
before and after them, constructed an elaborate taxonomy of vagabondage,
which included the following causes and types of the
'disease:' "temporaires, neurastheniques, hysteriques,
epileptiques, degeneres originaux et excentriques, excites, deprimes,
mystiques, intoxiques, dements, d'origine ethnique"(65) (Marie
and Meunier argued that Vacher was indeed insane, but to no avail.) The
medical literature was complemented by the more influential popular
novels and yellow journalism of the time. The seamy underworld of Paris
spawned a literary industry to chronicle it. Typical were the series of
articles published on child vagrants in the Revue des deux mondes in
1876-78, and Felix Platel's Paris-Secret (3rd ed. 1889), which
spoke to the fascination with marginals and vagabonds and portrayed
Paris as a city overtaken by outcasts and orphans.(66) Louis
Paulian's study of begging in Paris, Paris qui mendie: Mal et
remade (1st ed. 1893), went into its tenth edition in 1899.
Paulian's book was replete with life histories of Parisian beggars,
like one Hubert Nicolourdat, a 68 year-old who had been arrested 56
times for begging. Another "aristocrate de la mendicite" was
Louis-Rene Pasquer, a 60 year-old with 54 arrests to his credit.(67) The
Parisian press, especially the Petit journal, was replete with images of
these archetypal figures. The Parisian imagination was further inspired
by Maxime Du Camp's portrait of vagabonds and beggars in his Paris,
ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie (7th ed., vol. 4, 1884) and by
Georges Berry's popular La Mendicite (1897). Berry, a deputy from
the ninth arrondissement, provided Parisians with a sordid list of
vagabonds' tricks, a map of their favorite gathering spots and a
list of their preferred types of victims. The Linnaeus of vagabonds,
Berry claimed that he approached his studies of Parisian vagabonds with
a scientist's empirical vigor (for instance, he dressed up his
colleague Louis Paulian as a beggar to get to know their habits).
Laziness, he argued, was the cause of mendicity. Severe repression, in
the form of mandatory agricultural and industrial work-camps, punitive
work-relief institutions in every city, forced emigration to colonial
prisons (which was done), and the abolition of alms-giving (and even the
bureaux de bienfaisance), was the solution for Berry and for many other
authors.(68) In Parliament Berry tried to put his schemes into practice,
but failed after a commission he led failed to issue a successful
report. Although they did not succeed in realizing most of these goals
(apart from deportation for recidivist vagabonds), Berry and the medical
'experts' on vagabondage helped to create an atmosphere which
was hostile to relief seekers, for in their work the line between the
destitute rural migrant and the professional vagrant was blurred beyond
recogni on.ogniti So hostile was public opinion towards vagabonds that
even the more levelheaded social critics of the day, like Othenin
d'Haussonville, could write in his five-part series of articles on
child poverty in Paris appearing in the Revue des deux mondes that:
"among the principal causes of vagabondage, perhaps one should
place instinct in the first rank. 'Vagabondage is in the
blood,' a prison warden told me, and this axiom is no less true for
children than it is for adults."(69) Marie and Meunier's work
was unabashedly eugenic: vagabondage, they argued, was rooted primarily
in one's inherited "psychology."(70) As late as 1910,
Deputy Marc Reville, the head of the Chamber of Deputies'
commission on vagabondage could write in a committee report on the
problem: "I insist on these words: conditions of morality.
Experience demonstrates that whether it take place in the country or the
city, mendicity practiced by the elderly or the infirm is a racket which
does not even aid the wretched poor themselves." Regarding
able-bodied adult beggars and vagabonds (whom were often confused),
Reville was no more charitable: "experience demonstrates that of
the one hundred men to whom one offers work, ninety-seven will refuse
it.
So host Despite the fact that the upsurge in vagabondage was
generally attributed to personal failings and/or medical and eugenic
roots, there were those who saw the real roots of the problem. The
Minister of the Interior hit the nail on the head in an 1884 report:
"It is the obvious consequence of the agricultural and industrial
crisis which has been with us for several years." His successor
noted in 1887: "The increase in the number of cases of vagabondage
and mendicity, which has taken place in particular since 1883, coincides
with the economic crisis from which the continent had suffered since
then."(72) This was a view against which Marie, Meunier and many
others combatted with great passion, and in the end their view ended up
prevai
Despite Indeed, the general court of public opinion was becoming
less sympathetic to vagabonds and the marginalized poor (even as it was
becoming generally more sympathetic towards women, children and the
elderly). Typical of the harsh tone of critics was Theodore
Homberg's analysis of the growing problem of vagabondage:
"vagabonds are the most dangerous enemies of society."(73) He
recommended that they be punished with the utmost severity, and that
they be transported to colonial prisons, since they threatened the
social fabric, living outside society and its key institution, the
family. Homberg's influential Etudes sur le vagabondage (1st ed.,
1880), first read to the Academie des sciences morales et politiques,
went into several editions before the First World War and served as a
sort of bible to the country's growing pool of experts on the
problem, like Louis Riviere and Jules de Crisenoy, who cited it ad
nauseam. Homberg was influential in having Rouen scale its relief system
back in order to discourage Breton migrants from settling there. In the
writings of Homberg and other 'experts' on the problem, the
line between the professional vagabond and the unemployed migrant was
usually blurred beyond recognition. He and his associates spoke
of"this leper which threatens the very social order," of a
"race of beggars and vagabonds," of "this plague,"
with its own "rules, bosses and unions."(74) In a widely cited
article published in the Revue philanthropique shortly before his
influential book Mendiants et vagabonds (1902) was published, Louis
Riviere noted that due to scientific advances, "parasites and
microbes harboring morbid germs have been expelled" from many
French homes. Leprosy, the plague, and even cholera, he noted, had seen
their day come and go; yet one social parasite which the French had
still not eradicated was the vagabond/beggar.(75) Marius Berge
complained in the Revue philanthropique of urban
"degeneration" caused by the rural exodus.(76) During the
period 1890-1910, the medicine and law faculties of Paris and Lyon
produced several dozen theses written from the same viewpoint on the
medical/eugenic roots of vagabondage and begging.(77) Throughout the
period 1880-1914, the following journals regularly contained articles on
vagabondage and mendicity written in the same spirit: the Revue
philanthropique, Revue des etablissements de bienfaisance, La reforme
sociale, Journal des economistes, Le Temps, Revue d' economie
politique, Revue politique et parlementaire, Revue penitentiaire, Revue
des prisons, and the Archives de l' Anthropologie criminelle, to
name but a
Indeed,
IV.eed, These ideas translated into politics. If the carrot was
taken away by several cities, the stick was brought back. The three
decades before the First World War witnessed a vigorous campaign to
stamp out the problem of vagabondage with repressive means. As during
the Revolution, the state's concern with specific, targeted groups
deemed worthy of assistance (the elderly, the ill indigent, pregnant
women, children) was matched by a cruel and unsympathetic attitude
towards the floating unemployed, beggars and vagrants - the
"undeserving poor," the "professional poor," the
"social garbage." Just as the Jacobins had drawn a sharp
distinction between "the reprehensible miserable and the blessed
poor," so too did late-nineteenth century republicans.(78) Faithful
to their Revolutionary heritage, which, it needs emphasizing, also
contained a repressive strain, French republicans took the hard line
against the loafer, the beggar and the vagabond. As Georges Berry stood
before the Chamber of Deputies in 1899 to introduce a bill which would
have sent beggars and vagabonds to work colonies for five years, he
stated, referring to Vacher, "in effect, does not the beggar become
a thief and a killer ...?
These i In general, larger French cities now went out of their way
to make migrants feel unwelcome, they encouraged migrants to return to
their home towns, or they simply expelled them. During the last three
decades of the century, several French cities, including Paris, Lyon,
Bordeaux, Le Havre, Nancy, Nice and Marseille increased and/or strictly
enforced their residency requirements for all forms of public assistance
(from one year to three in Paris, for example) and engaged in elaborate
expulsion schemes to clear the streets of beggars and the casual
laboring population. As Louis Riviere, President of the Societe
d'economie charitable, and leader of the (punitive) work-relief and
scientific charity movement noted, "We achieve our best results by
sending provincials, attracted to Paris and to other large cities by the
prospect of earning high salaries but who fail and end up in night
shelters after having depleted their small savings, back to their pays.
In these cases, the railroad companies issue half-fare tickets upon
presentation of a certificate of indigence."(80) The Office central
des institutions de bienfaisance helped coordinate these deals with
railway companies in several cities in order to effect the
"repatriation" of the nation's floating urban population.
In 1889, for instance Marseille "repatriated" 243 persons, of
both French and Italian origin. Bordeaux and Versailles were the two
cities most committed to repatriating French provincials, usually
males.(81) In its first decade of operation, the Paris Office central
repatriated 13,644 persons; Marseille's repatriated 1,272.(82) The
Office provided this rationale for repatriation: "Returning these
poor people back to their home towns ... this is one of the most
important concerns of the Office central, which will thereby clear the
pavements of Paris of beggars and quite possibly of some
criminals." The Office purchased rail tickets for provincials and
saw them off at the train station, fearful that they would hawk their
ticket and remain in the city. The Refuge-ouvroir Pauline Roland of
Paris, an assistance par le travail institution for women, repatriated 9
provincials in 1897 against their will and helped 127 leave Paris
voluntarily.(83) The municipal council enthusiastically supported the
repatriation of provincials, and even supported an organization which
sent the unemployed able-bodied to the colonies.(84) In Lille, the
municipal council gave similar support to the Office central lillois des
Institutions sociales et charitables, which was actively involved in
repatriating migrants
In gen
V. gene That shameful French institution, the depot de mendicite,
got a second life in the 1890s. The decade witnessed yet another round
in France's long history of construction of depots, such as the one
built in the Eure-et-Loir. Night shelters (asiles de nuit) also sprung
up in the 1890s as a means to cope with the problem of vagabondage.(86)
In the Seine, the Maison de travail was built at Nanterre, a harsh new
institution inspired by the ruthless Belgian national prison-labor camp
for vagabonds, Merxplas. Merxplas became a model for France's
social policy elite, one which was held in high esteem by many writers
on the social question. But the French had an even more repressive
solution to the problem
That sh A law passed in 1885 had been designed to purge
metropolitan France of vagrants. This "relegation" law
provided for the transportation to colonial bagnes (squalid prisons,
such as the one on Devil's Island) of all those convicted of
"aggravated vagrancy," that is to say, involving physical
threat or disguise. During the 1890s, general councils issued several
resolutions calling for the strict enforcement and even the extension of
the law to include all vagabonds, even children. If some councils still
could not countenance a larger state role in the battle against poverty,
few had reservations about using the state's powers to expel vagabonds from the country. During the 1890s, no fewer than 5,000 were
deported each year, and in 1902 alone, 9,978 vagabonds and beggars were
deported to colonial prisons.(88) In 1900, there were over 50,000
arrests and 11,560 convictions for vagabondage. Without doubt, here was
one of the nation's most serious social prob
A law p During the 1880s and 1890s, over one-half of the
nation's departmental general councils had sent petitions to Paris
demanding a draconian law to suppress mendicity and for effective
machinery to enforce it. The problem was that most departments could not
afford to do this themselves; the state would have to step in. The other
problem was that several departments were firmly opposed to this idea
for this very reason, as were many advocates of a private solution to
the problem, so the issue became deadlocked. Opponents also delayed
bills by availing themselves of the almost endless opportunities
provided to them by the byzantine labyrinth that was the French parlia
During An 1896 report from the Dordogne, a department regularly
invaded by beggars, called for immediate, drastic, national solutions:
"the departments, isolated from one another, with no common
activity and with no overall supervision ..." are powerless. Only
the state had the power to launch a concerted national campaign of
repression.(89) The government stood firm with its harsh approach to the
problem. In 1894, the Minister of Justice announced that it was official
government policy to crack down on mendicity and vagabondage. After news
spread that vagabonds had brought typhus to Lille (an unsubstantiated
claim), the Ministry of the Interior issued a circular to the
nation's night shelters requiring them to hose down and disinfect vagabonds and beggars.(90) That same year, the Ministry of the Interior
instructed prefects to encourage departments to set up harsh work-relief
programs in order to combat vagabondage and mendicity.(91) The Ministry
concluded that there were 400,000 vagabonds circulating on the
nation's roads. In a dozen departments within 200 km of Paris, over
400,000 nomads (again, many repeat guests, no doubt) stayed in night
shelters that year. That there were many unemployed workers on the road
is beyond doubt: the Somme, for instance, sheltered 38,000 people, of
which 14,300 were classified as vagabonds, 13,400 as unemployed workers,
and 10,200 as infirm or elderly.(92) The inquest concluded that
vagabondage should be attacked by spreading work-relief programs,
eliminating rural shelters, making better use of police forces,
eliminating public assistance fraud, and through the abolition of wine
and tobacco. Part of the problem in resolving the situation, the inquest
revealed, was that departments were divided, with some in favor and
others opposed to shelters, and with some in favor and others opposed to
the implementation of national measures and programs
An 1896 The Ministry of the Interior conducted another
wide-ranging national survery of vagabondage, mendicity and unemployment
in 1895, which was followed up with an 1897 circular recommending (but
not requiring), a l'ancien regime, that prefects and mayors put the
nation's vagabonds to work reconstructing roads, reforesting
denuded areas, and restoring canals.(94) Some cities, like Rouen,
briefly took the advice to heart. Most did not. In 1898, inspired by the
Vacher affair, the Ministry conducted another wide-ranging survey of the
problem of vagabondage, presided by M. de Marcere. The commission
adopted the recommendations of the farmers' association, the
Societe des agriculteurs de France: assist the infirm, "rigorously
suppress" professional vagabonds and mendicants, and reform the
nation's welfare bureaus.(95) These instructions were passed along
to prefects, who in turn passed them along to the nation's police
forces. To be sure, the rise in convictions for vagabondage and
mendicity was due in part to this greater emphasis being placed on
repression, but it is impossible to determine to what degree this was
the
The Min Significantly, later that year, the general councils of
several departments, including the Vosges and the Haute-Garonne, issued
resolutions calling for a halt to the creation of new assistance
institutions, such as the welfare bureaus, and instead the creation, in
each department, of work-relief programs in order to wipe out
vagabondage and mendicity.(96) Again, we see the tendency to confuse
vagabondage with both assistance and repression.(97) In 1899, the
Societe nationale d'encouragement a l'agriculture voted to
recommend that Parliament draft legislation to combat vagabondage and at
the same time recommended that work-relief programs be set up across the
nation, which would eventually replace the faulty bureaux de
bienfaisance. The bureaus, it was argued, did nothing but dispense alms,
and public alms were no better than private.(98) The Societe strongly
supported a draconian bill by Deputy Jean Cruppi to punish vagabonds. It
was joined by the Societe des agriculteurs de France, a leading advocate
of harsh legislation to combat vagabondage which regularly sent the
Ministry of the Interior letters requesting swift action
Signifi At the turn of the century, bills calling for the
establishment of work-relief institutions in each and every department
were frequently brought before parliament.(100) The Conseil superieur de
l' assistance publique (CSAP) devoted several sessions to the topic
and came up with its own bill to stamp out vagabondage in 1889 and again
in 1896.(101) In 1899 Deputy Jean Cruppi introduced his bill to repress vagabondage and mendicity, which basically called for a return to the
Napoleonic system of depots de mendicite in each and every department.
Cruppi attempted for many years thereafter to have his bill passed,
without success.(102) Many general councils vigorously opposed it due to
the enormous costs it would have entailed. Next, Etienne Flandin
deposited a bill in 1908 which would have introduced harsh measures
against vagabonds and which would have organized work-relief services on
a national basis, transforming the welfare bureaus into work-relief
centers (about 100 work-relief centers existed at this time, but they
had combined revenues of slightly more than one million francs - a
negligible sum).(103) Most of the half-dozen bills deposited would have
increased the prison sentences for first-time offenders and some would
have sent children to prison for beg
At the No one symbolized the harsh attitude of the era and the
obsession with vagabondage more than the Radical republican Deputy Marc
Reville. On 13 June 1910,(104) Reville issued a 90 page report on the
various bills floating around the Chamber over the years (those
sponsored by Cruppi, Flandin, Berry, Lebrun, and de Pomereu). The
Chamber of Deputies had also instructed a commission, headed by Reville,
to study the various legislative proposals that were brought to it by
provincial agricultural societies, general councils, and prison
societies. In his report, Reville called for a hard line to be taken
against vagabondage, but leftist deputies stalled his proposals. In
Reville's widely cited report there is no evidence of the slightest
socio-economic conception of the problem of vagabondage and mendicity;
it was presented as the product of 400,000 "social parasites/"
No one Ultimately it was the Left which prevented the dozen or so
extremely repressive bills to combat vagabondage and mendicity in the
1890s and 1900s from becoming law. Indeed, in 1900 the socialist
Alexandre Millerand deposited a bill which would have legalized the
theft of food by the hungry.(106) Jean Jaures, commenting on a
weavers' strike in the Nord in 1903, remarked: "Begging is the
natural complement of the (low) wage."(107) These debates,
parliamentary inquiries, resolutions and bills calling for a crackdown
on the nation's vagabonds and beggars (and, often in the same
breath, a reduction of public assistance for the able-bodied) are still
very important in that they capture the general political climate of the
time in much of rural and urban France. Taken together, they constitute
a significant counter-current to solidarism, but one which was
eventually overcome in small steps. Still, one wonders what might have
been achieved if the energies channelled into repressive measures had
been directed in a different ma
Ultimat
VI.imat This article has only provided a glimpse of the other half
of the era's intellectual climate, one side to the
assistance/repression coin. This subject calls out for more research.
But it is clear that the French public and political class alike
continued to be preoccuppied with the problem of vagabondage right up to
the First World War. This concern, even if it manifested itself in
sensationalistic ways in the media, was for the most part firmly rooted
in reality. In the end, all of the major repressive bills to combat
vagabondage and mendicity failed because of quarreling between
departments and the state over who would foot the bill, and because the
debate got caught up, as did so many other debates over social policy,
on the issue of obligation. There were, however, various minor changes
to the penalties against vagabondage (as well as changes in the
definition of who was a "gens sans aveu" in 1885, 1903 and
1912).
This ar In July 1914, another high profile commission was struck
to "study measures for the repression of begging and
vagrancy."(109) Before the commission could get down to business,
the war broke out and eventually the commission was suspended.(110)
During and after the war, the problem subsided considerably, for reasons
which have not yet been adequately explored. In all likelihood, many
vagabonds were drafted into the war effort, and vagabondage was simply
no longer acceptable in light of the nation's wartime suffering.
There does indeed seem to have been, to use Gordon Wright's term,
an "ebb tide" in public fear of crime and vagabondage between
the wars, but this may have been due to the actual decrease in crime,
and particularly the sharp drop in the incidence of vagabondage, rather
than the result of a "change in mood" independent of
socioeconomic conditions.(111) Very few of the renowned criminals,
vagabonds and bandits who fill the annals of French criminal history,
like Cartouche and Vacher, belong to the post-World War One era. The
press mill ceased to grind out the usual stories and images of begging
and vagrancy after the war, and the theses stopped rolling off the
university presses too. Indeed, a quick perusal of several major French
library catalogues reveals that the topic ceased to be of concern to
authors during the Interwar years. Symbolically, perhaps, the Revue
penitentiaire ceased publishing in 1933, and French criminology as a
whole fell into a slumber between the wars, overtaken by the American
school. Widespread vagabondage, it could be argued, is a social problem
born of ancien regime-like socio-economic conditions. These conditions,
as Eugen Weber argues, did not disappear in several parts of France
until after the First World War. When they did, the public fear over the
problem subsided. By the mid 1920s, the crime rate reached its low point
in the Third Republic's history. And as Wright concludes, "it
was clear that the old obsession with the 'plague' of vagrancy
no longer possessed French minds."
In July After the war, assistance and repression no longer were
confused.(113) During the hostilities the state mandated that the
departments set up job placement centers and it also took a few small
steps towards encouraging the communes and departments to provide
unemployment relief to the needy. Something approaching a socio-economic
understanding of unemployment was generally visible across the political
spectrum after the war, even if a national unemployment system did not
follow from it. The war's impact - the blow it dealt to traditional
attitudes towards rural migrants and towards marginals in general -
cannot be overemphasized. The "social parasites" of the
1880s-1900s gave way to the "unemployed" of the 1920s and
1930s. As in so many other realms of life, the war, it would seem, dealt
a death blow to both the attitudes surrounding vagabondage and the
practice it
After t Department of History Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7
Departm END
ENDNOTE I thank David Parker of Queen's University for his
helpful comments on this paper. Any remaining shortcomings are of course
my own. Queen's University provided financial support, for which I
am grat
I thank 1. Quoted in Dr. Armand Marie and Raymond Meunier, Les
vagabonds (Paris, 1908), p. 246 and in Jean-Pierre Deloux, Vacher
l'assassin: Un 'serial killer' francais au XIXeme siecle
(Paris, 1995). The key texts for this story are by Alexandre Berard,
Vacher l'Eventreur ou la passion sadique (Paris, 1899) and Vacher
l'Eventreur et les crimes sadiques (Paris, 1
1. Quot 2. Emile Fourquet, "Les vagabonds criminels,"
Revue des deux mondes 152 (15 March 1899): 399
2. Emil 3. The 1976 film of Bertrand Tavernier, Le juge et
l'assassin, starring Philippe Noiret as the judge and Michel
Galabru as the murderer, was loosely based upon the Vacher affair. In
1995, a French journalist, Jean-Pierre Deloux, produced a short popular
history (without adequate footnote documentation) of the topic (cited
above) and recently Matt Matsuda devoted a chapter to him in his book,
The Memory of the Modern (New York, 1996); otherwise, Vacher has
received little attention from historians. It would seem that this story
cries out for a micro-his
3. The 4. Quoted in Marie and Meunier, Les vagabonds, p.
4. Quot 5. Quoted in Marie and Meunier, Les vagabonds, pp. 2
5. Quot 6. On the persistence of begging and on the problem of
vagabondage, see Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization
of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, 1976), pp. 62-66. Earlier periods
have been covered by Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century
France, 1750-1789 (Oxford, 1974), ch. 8; Robert M. Schwartz, Policing
the Poor of Eighteenth-Century France (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988); Thomas
McStay Adams, Beggars and Bureaucrats: French Social Policy in the Age
of Enlightenment (New York, 1990); and Isser Woloch, The New Regime:
Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s (New York, 1
6. On t 7. Conseil superieur de l'assistance publique (CSAP)
19 (1888), "Depots de mendicite. Rapport au Conseil superieur de
l'Assistance publique ..., " Charles Dupuy, p
7. Cons 8. Archives Nationales, Paris (AN) C 5622, No. 651,
Chambre des Deputes, Annexe au proces-verbal de la seance du 25 janvier
1899, Jean Cruppi, "Proposition de loi relative aux moyens
d'assistance et de coercion propres a prevenir ou a reprimer le
vagabondage et la mendicite," no. 691, 25 janvier (Paris, 1899),
8. Arch 9. "Si celui qui existe ale droit de dire a la
societe: 'Fais-moi vivre,' la societe a egalement le droit de
lui dire: 'Donne-moi ton travail.'" Quoted in Jules de
Crisenoy, Questions d'assistance et d'hygiene publiques
traites dans les conseils generaux, 13 vols., (Paris, 1885-1900)
(hereafter de Crisenoy, vol. no.), vol. 8 (1894), pp. 1
9. "Si 10. Further explored in my forthcoming article,
"The Plight of the Able-Bodied Poor and the Unemployed in France,
1880-1
10. Fur 11. Gordon Wright. Between the Guillotine and Liberty: Two
Centuries of the Crime Problem in France (New York, 1983), p. 158;
Ministere de la Justice, Compte general de l'administration de la
justice criminelle en France (Paris, 1882), pp. 142-3; Bulletin de la
Societe des prisons, 1893, p.
11. Gor 12. de Crisenoy, vol. 6 (1892), pp. 1
12. de 13. de Crisenoy, vol. 5 (1891), p.
13. de 14. Pierre Masse, "Disette et mendicite en Poitou
(XVIIIe-XIXe siecle)," L'Actualite de l'histoire 27
(1959):
14. Pie 15. Wright, Between the Guillotine and Liberty, p.
15. Wri 16. Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern
France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, 1984), pp.
171-226; Wright, Between the Guillotine and Liberty, p.
16. Rob 17. For example, see Le Petit parisien, October and
November 1905, for several sensationalistic illustrations depicting
marauding "apaches" and "bohemiens." Dominique
Kalifa discusses the yellow journalism of the time (and, briefly, the
Vacher affair) in L'Encre et le sang (Paris, 1995). My thanks to
Jeremy Popkin for this refer
17. For 18. Guy de Maupassant, Le horla. Le vagabond, in Oeuvres
completes IX (Paris, 1
18. Guy 19. On the problem of vagrancy in Paris, see Othenin
d'Haussonville, "La misere a Paris (II)," Revue des deux
mondes 47 (1881): 611-51. On crime in general see Benjamin E Martin,
Crime and Justice under the Third Republic: The Shame of Marianne (Baton
Rouge, 1
19. On 20. Pierre Sorlin, La societe francaise, 1840-1914 (Paris,
1969), p
20. Pie 21. Leo A. Loubere, Radicalism in Mediterranean France:
Its Rise and Decline, 1848-1914 (Albany, N.Y., 1974), p
21. Leo 22. Jules Meline, Le retour a la terre et la surproduction
industrielle (Paris, 1905), p
22. Jul 23. Cited in AN C 5622, No. 651, Chambre des Deputes,
Annexe au proces-verbal de la seance du 25 janvier 1899, Jean Cruppi,
"Proposition de loi relative aux moyens d'assistance et de
coercition propres a prevenir ou a reprimer le vagabondage et la
mendicite,"
23. Cit 24. "Les asiles de nuit de Paris," Bulletin de
l'Office du travail 7 (July 1897):
24. "Le 25. CSAP 73 (1899), "Les depots de
mendicite," p
25. CSA 26. Joseph Arminjon, La Population du departement du
Rhone: Son evolution depuis le debut du XIXe siecle (Lyon, 1940), p
26. Jos 27. Georges Duby, ed. Histoire de la France rurale, v. 3,
De 1789 a 1914 (Paris, 1976), pp. 68,
27. Geo 28. Duby, Histoire de la France rurale, p.
28. Dub 29. Michel Huber, La population de la France pendant la
guerre (New Haven, 1931), p
29. Mic 30. Emile Vandervelde, L'Exode rural et le retour aux
champs (Paris, 1903), pp. 22, 121; Journal officiel 8 Jan. 1902, p
30. Emi 31. Paul Cere, Les populations dangereuses et les miseres
sociales (Paris, 1872), p.
31. Pau 32. P. Hubert-Valleroux, La Charite avant et depuis 1789
dans les campagnes de France (Paris, 1890), p.
32. P. 33. Fernand Charoy, L'Assistance aux vieillards,
infirmes et incurables en France de 1789 a 1905 (Paris, 1905), pp.
55-56. Adams, Bureaucrats and Beggars, and Schwartz, Policing the Poor
in Eighteenth-Century France, are the two key sources on the t
33. Fer 34. Jules de Crisenoy, Les etablissements hospitaliers
dans les campagnes (Paris, 1886),
34. Jul 35. John Weiss, "Origins of the French Welfare State:
Poor Relief in the Third Republic, 1871-1914," French Historical
Studies XlII (Spring 1983): 73; Timothy B. Smith, "Public
Assistance and Labor Supply in Nineteenth-Century Lyon," Journal of
Modern History 68 (March 1996):
35. Joh 36. Martha L. Hildreth, Doctors, Bureaucrats and Public
Health in France, 1888-1902 (New York, 1987), p
36. Mar 37. Dr. Henri Henrot. Rapport sur l'assistance
publique a Reims (Reims, 1883), pp.
37. Dr. 38. Peter Steams, Old Age in European Society: The Case of
France (London, 1977), pp.
38. Pet 39. Henri Napias, Budgets municipaux et budgets
hospitaliers (Paris, 1
39. Hen 40. CSAP 37 (1892), "Projet de loi sur
l'assistance aux vieillards,"
40. CSA 41. Archives de l'Assistance Publique, Paris (AAP),
C-1300, Marie-Dominique Augey, "L'Aide sociale a Nice:
Assistance et bienfaisance de 1860 a 1914," Memoire de maitrise,
Universite de Nice, 1969, p
41. Arc 42. Bibliotheque Nationale (BN) 8.R.14593, Dr. Lausies,
Societe centrale havraise de secours, Histoire de l'assistance par
le travail au Havre (Le Havre, 1897), p
42. Bib 43. William H. Sewell, Structure and Mobility: The Men and
Women of Marseille, 18201870 (Cambridge, 1985), p.
43. Wil 44. de Crisenoy, Les etablissements hospitaliers,
44. de 45. Joseph Viple, La repression penale de la mendicite
(Paris, 1905), p. 74. On the mixed populations of the depots, see J.
Vallee, Les depots de mendicite: Leur utilisation comme moyen
d'assistance (Paris, 1908). In order to provide impoverished
elderly with shelter, communities often threw them into the depots,
where they were forced to mingle with beggars, vagabonds and hardened
crimi
45. Jos 46. An 1892 enquiry by Paul Strauss, presented to the
Senate, found that private establishments cared for at least 93,400
individuals, of which 40,000 were elderly and incurable. Of these
40,000, at least 33,000 were assisted by confessional charities; only
7,000 were assisted by ray ones. Usually, the minimum admission age was
60, Charoy, L'Assistance aux vieillards, p
46. An 47. Charles Le Roux, Le vagabondage et la mendicite a
Paris et dans le departement de la Seine: Assistance et repression
(Paris, 1907), pp.
47. Cha 48. Othenin d'Haussonville, "Le combat contre le
vice (I): La repression," Revue des deux mondes 84 (15 Dec. 1887):
48. Oth 49. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics, p
49. Nye 50. Marcel Lecoq, L'Assistance par le travail en
France (Paris, 1900), p
50. Mar 51. For example, Dr. Paul Brousse,
"L'organisation des asiles a propos de l'affaire
Vacher," Revue de psychiatrie (1899): 30
51. For 52. Quoted in de Crisenoy, vol. 8 (1894), p.
52. Quo 53. Typical was Albert Marechaux, L'assistance
publique. Sa suppression (Paris, 1893
53. Typ 54. Othenin d'Haussonville discussed this phenomenon
in "L'assistance par le travail: Faut-il faire la
charite?," Revue des deux mondes 122 (1894): 4
54. Oth 54. CSAP 19 (1888), p
54. CSA 55. Ministire du travail et de la prevoyance sociale,
Statistique generale de la France, Statistique annuelle des institutions
d' assistance. Annie 1910. (Paris, 1912), p. 39. This theme is
further explored in my forthcoming article, "The Plight of the
Able-Bodied P
55. Min 56. Statistique generale de la France, Statistique
annuelle des institutions d'assistance. Annie 1910, p. 7. On Lyon,
Smith, "Public Assistance and Labor Supply." On Nancy, Edouard
Cormouls-Houleis, L'assistance par le travail (Paris, 1910), p.
56. Sta 57. Quoted in Cormouls-Houles, L'assistance par le
travail, p.
57. Quo 58. Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the
Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, 1981); Patricia E.
Prestwich, Drink and the Politics of Social Reform: Antialcoholism in
France since 1870 (Palo Alto, Calif., 1
58. Sus 59. AAPC-368, Ministere de l'Interieur, Enquire sur
les bureaux de bienfaisance, by Paul Bucquet (Paris, 1874), p.
59. AAP 60. J. Lefort, Intemperance et misere (Paris, 1
60. J. 61. See Timothy B. Smith, "The Ideology of Charity,
the Image of the English Poor Law, and Debates over the Right to
Assistance in France, The Historical Journal 40 (Dec. 1997): 997-
61. See 62. For a glimpse of the vastness of the literature, see
the bibliography in Dr. Armand Pagnier, Du vagabondage et des vagabonds:
Etude psychologique, sociologique et medico-legale (Lyon, 1906), and
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848c.1918
(Cambridge, 1989). See also Jean-Claude Beaune, Le vagabond et la
machine: Essai sur l'automatisme ambulatoire, medecine, technique
et societe, 1880-1910 (Seyssel, 1
62. For 63. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics, p.
63. Nye 64. For example, Alexandre Berard, "Le vagabondage en
France," Archives de l'Anthropologie criminelle XlII (1898):
60
64. For 65. Marie and Meunier, Les Vagabonds, pp. 32
65. Mar 66. For a critique of some of the more sensationalist literature, see Othenin d'Hausson-linebreak ville,
"L'Enfance a Paris (V): La Mendicite, les asiles, les
refuges," Revue des deux mondes 27 (15 June 1878):
66. For 67. Louis Paulian, Paris qui mendie: Mal et remade (Paris,
1899), pp. 12,
67. Lou 68. Georges Berry, La Mendicite (Paris, 1897), pp. 178,
200. His dramatic portraits can also be found in AN C 5622, No. 660,
Chambre des Deputes, Annexe au proces-verbal de la seance du 25 janvier
1899, Georges Berry, "Proposition de loi tendant a la suppression
de la mendic
68. Geo 69. Othenin d'Haussonville, "L'Enfance a
Paris (IV): Les vagabonds et les mendians," Revue des deux mondes
27 (1 June 1878): 613. Even the judge who presided in the Vacher case
wrote on the topic in the same spirit, Fourquet, "Les vagabonds
criminels." Another judge, L. Albanel, wrote "L'Enfance
criminelle a Paris," Revue philanthropique IV (189899): 385-99 and
513-42. See also Dr. Victor Parant, "Vagabondage des mineurs,"
Vile Congres national de Toulouse du patronage des liberis (Toulouse, 1
69. Oth 70. Marie and Meunier, Lex vagabonds,
70. Mar 71. AN C 7487, p
71. AN 72. Quoted in Marie and Meunier, Les vagabonds, p
72. Quo 73. Theodore Homberg, Etudes sur le vagabondage (Paris,
1880),
73. The 74. AAP B-3343, Cour d'Appel de Bordeaux.
"Considerations sur les delits de vagabondage et de
mendicite." Discours de Paul Pasteau, 16 octobre 1899 (Bordeaux,
1899), pp.
74. AAP 75. Louis Riviere, "Mendiants et vagabonds,"
Revue philanthropique 11 (1902)
75. Lou 76. Marius Berge, "Hygiene et charite sociale,"
Revue philanthropique 11 (1902): 69
76. Mar 77. See the bibliography in Pagnier, Du vagabon
77. See 78. Quoted in Woloch, The New Regime, p.
78. Quo 79. AN C 5622, No. 660, Chambre des Deputes, Annexe au
proces-verbal de la stance du 25 janvier 1899, Georges Berry,
"Proposition de loi tendant a la suppression de la mendicite"
pp. 3
79. AN 80. Riviere, "Oeuvres de la bienfaisance
privee," p.
80. Riv 81. Congres international d'assistance publique et de
bienfaisance privee, Administration et gestion des oeuvres
d'assistance par le travail dans les departements, Rapport presente
par M. le pasteur Aeschimann (Melun, 1900), p
81. Con 82. AAP B-284/18, Leon Lefebure, L'Organisation de la
charite privee en France. Rapport decennal sur les travaux de
l'Office central des oeuvres de bienfaisance depuis sa fondation
(Paris, 1900), pp. 13
82. AAP 83. BN 8.R.17372, Maurice Jourdan, De l'intervention
des pouvoirs publics en matiere d'assistance par le travail (Paris,
1901), p.
83. BN 84. Jourdan, De l'intervention, p.
84. Jou 85. Musee Social, Paris (CEDIAS), Office central lillois
des Institutions sociales et charitables, Rapport et Compte-rendu.
Octobre 1895 a decembre 1896 (Lille, 1
85. Mus 86. "L'Hospitalite du nuit en France,"
Revue philanthropique 5 (1899): 6
86. "L' 87. For example, Louis Riviere, La repression du
vagabondage et de la mendicite en Belgique et en Allemagne. Rapport a la
Societe des agriculteurs de France, 30 avril 1900 (Paris, 1900) and La
reforme de la bienfaisance en Belgique (Paris, 1901); G. Batardy,
"De la repression du vagabondage et de la mendicite en
Belgique," Bulletin de la Societe generale des prisons (1893):
768-69. See also Henri Gaillac, Les maisons de correction, 1830-1945
(Paris, 1
87. For 88. Pagnier, Du vagabondage et des vagabonds, pp. 6, 182;
Francois Martineau, Fripons, gueux et loubards: Une histoire de la
delinquance de 1750 a nos jours (Paris, 1986), p. 262. A disappointing
book. More useful is Joseph Viple, La repression penale de la mendicite
(Paris, 1905), pp. 99-100. On relegation, see Wright, Between the
Guillotine and Liberty; Patricia O'Brien, The Promise of
Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France (Princeton, 1982), pp.
258-68; Michel Pierre, "La Transportation (1848-1938)," in
Jean-Guy Petit, et. al., ed., Histoire des galeres, bagnes et prisons
(Toulouse, 1
88. Pag 89. de Crisenoy, vol. 10 (1896), p.
89. de 90. G. Drouineau, "Les enquetes sur le
vagabondage," Revue philanthropique (1897), p.
90. G. 91. de Crisenoy, vol. 9 (1895), pp. 140-41; "Les
enquetes sur le vagabondage," Revue philanthropique (1897): 32
91. de 92. Ibid., p.
92. Ibi 93. Ibid., p. 330; de Crisenoy, pa
93. Ibi 94. Bulletin du Ministere de l'Interieur (1897): 67;
Jourdan, De l'intervention, pp. 7
94. Bul 95. Quoted in Cormouls-Houles, L'assistance par le
travail, p.
95. Quo 96. Cormouls-Houles, L'assistance par le travail, p.
96. Cor 97. This is a theme briefly mentioned in Christophe
Guitton, "Le chomage entre question sociale et question penale en
France au tournant du siecle," in M. Mansfield, et. al., eds., Aux
sources du chomage, 1880-1914 (Paris, 1
97. Thi 98. Louis Riviere, "Le Delit du mendicite,"
Revue philanthropique 4 (1898-99): 6
98. Lou 99. For example, "Repression du vagabondage,"
Bulletin de la Societe des agriculteurs de France (1 June 1898): 202
99. For 100. Jourdan, De l'intervention, pp. 14
100. Jo 101. CSAP 73 (1899), "Rapport sur les depots de
mendicite ... par M. Jean Cru
101. CS 102. Jean Cruppi, "Proposition de
102. Je 103. For an excellent discussion of the various bills, see
Cormouls-Houlis, L'Assistance par le travail, pp. 629-46. Also
useful is F. Dubief, La Question du vagabondage (Paris, 1
103. Fo 104. AN C 7487, No. 87, Chambre des Deputes, Annexe au
proces-verbal de la seance du 13 juin 1910, Rapports faits au nom de la
commission relative a la repression du vagabondage et de la mendicite
..., by Marc Reville (hereafter AN C 7
104. AN 105. AN C 7487,
105. AN 106. Robert Doucet, "La repression des delits causes
par la misere," Revue politique et parlementaire 73 (July 1900): 8
106. Ro 107. Quoted in Cormouls-Houles, L'assistance par le
travail, p
107. Qu 108. AN C 7487, p
108. AN 109. Wright, Between the Guillotine and Liberty, p. 161;
Allan Mitchell, The Divided Path: The German Influence on Social Reform
in France after 1870 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), pp. 28
109. Wr 110. AN C 7775, Chambre des Deputes, Commission chargee
d'etudier les mesures relatives a la repression de la mendicite et
du vagabon
110. AN 111. Wright, Between the Guillotine and Liberty, p.
111. Wr 112. Wright, Between the Guillotine and Liberty, pp.
178-79,
112. Wr 113. Guitton, "Le chomage."