Then as now the main preoccupation of the lawmakers was that any form of charity, state or otherwise, might be a disincentive to trying to find work. It was widely agreed that the so-called ‘impotent’ poor (i.e. the disabled or the elderly) should be provided for. The vagrant would be sent to a kind of prison. But what about the able-bodied poor? One must not protect the lazy. The solution was to make the conditions of recipients worse than those they would have encountered had they been working.52
In the course of the nineteenth century poor relief decreased rapidly everywhere in Europe.53 While Britain had, at the end of the eighteenth century, the most wide-reaching poor laws, it was revolutionary France that first established the principle that society owes some form of subsistence to citizens in misfortune, either by providing work or the means of existence to those unable to work. The Convention nationale (i.e. the Constituent Assembly) had even tried in 1793 to abolish private philanthropy (in 1789 there were 27,000 charitable institutions; by 1848 the number was down to 1,800).54 The reason given was that the relief of indigence should be the business of the state and not of private citizens: a citizen in a state of poverty should not be further humiliated by receiving charity from another citizen. To be helped was a right, explained Pierre-Roger Ducos, a member of the Convention nationale.55 Article 21 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen promulgated (but not adopted) in 1793 (not to be confused with the more important but less ‘Jacobin’ Declaration of August 1789) states that ‘public relief is a sacred obligation. Society owes subsistence to citizens in misfortune, by providing work, or, for those unable to work, the means of existence.’
In 1791, Tom Paine in The Rights of Man had developed the idea of allocating public grants to families with children under the age of fourteen (a form of family allowance not introduced anywhere in the world before the twentieth century) and a pension to all those over fifty.56 Two years later, the Marquis de Condorcet, Paine’s fellow member of the Convention, devoted the last chapter of his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (published posthumously in 1795) to what a social insurance system might look like; how it could reduce inequality, insecurity, and poverty; and how it would be financed partly by ‘people’s own savings and partly by the saving of others’.57
This concern did not last. Already in Thermidor (July–August 1794), when reaction set in, another conventionnel, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delecroy, complained there were not enough public funds: ‘It is time to get out of that rut where we have been confined by too generous a philanthropic attitude in the days of the Constituent Assembly.’58 At the time liberals had a position on welfare that today would be associated with right-wing neo-conservatives. The great liberal economist Jean-Baptiste Say, in his Cours complet d’économie politique practique (1829), declared that society does not owe any help or subsistence to any of its members.59 Alexis de Tocqueville in his Mémoire sur le paupérisme (1835) maintained that any regular system of help towards the poor will cause their number to grow, will increase misery, and bring about the deterioration of trade and industry. He contrasted public charity (of which he disapproved) to private philanthropy (of which he approved). Having examined England’s poor laws, ‘the only country in Europe which has systematized and massively applied the theories on public charity on a grand scale’, the great liberal concluded that though rights are all very well, the right to public charity humiliated those who received it, unlike charity privately received.60
Forty years and four political regimes later (the Orléans monarchy, Second Republic, Second Empire, Third Republic), French liberals were still upset about public assistance. In 1872, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, the editor of L’Économiste français, contrasted Britain unfavourably to France, arguing that in Britain public charity (unlike private charity) diminished human dignity, was costly and counter-productive, and that all leading British economists agreed with him – or so he said.61 He accepted that the workhouse regime was very harsh.62 Matters were far better in France where there is no public charity, where the poor are (rightly) left to look after themselves, and where, should a local authority want to help them, it would do so out of charity and not to repay a ‘social debt’, since the poor have no rights.63 British workers, he explained (with little empirical evidence), just spend everything they earn knowing that they will be looked after when they are old.64 British welfare legislation had gone too far. Working only ten hours a day and resting on Sundays and on holidays such as Christmas was not such a bad life, he opined; it left workers with plenty of leisure time, if only they knew what to do with it.65
As a consequence of this liberal anti-welfare attitude, France, though politically more radical than England or Germany, lagged behind in terms of social policies.66 Even when the Republicans gained control of the Republic in 1879, no drastic move was made to increase poor relief.67 Not until the late 1880s were some timid steps taken towards welfare.
The Third Republic was ‘radical’ only in intention or only in its anticlericalism. Not for nothing did Madeleine Rebérioux doubt its radicalism with a question mark in La République radicale?68 The radicals had been mocked as radishes: ‘rouges à l’extérieur, blancs à l’intérieur, et toujours près de l’assiette au beurre’ (‘red on the outside, white on the inside, and always near the butter dish’).69 Yet the radicals hardly ever had a majority and, in the years leading up to the First World War, depended on the Alliance républicaine démocratique (ARD), a party founded in 1901 by followers of Léon Gambetta, who was tied to the business world.70 The ARD too, however, claimed to be ‘radical’ and ‘democratic’.
The main radical-republican leaders of the Third Republic, Jules Ferry and Léon Gambetta, cared little for social reforms. Gambetta was a typical nineteenth-century traditional liberal who did not believe there was something called the social question and was wary of state intervention. Competition was the solution to everything. Gambetta’s salient trait as a radical consisted in being anticlerical.71 He, like Georges Clemenceau later, started his career on the ‘far’ left, scaring the establishment, and then, as happens only too often, was regarded as an opportunist, as indeed the Républicains modérés came to be known. Even under the Second Empire, in 1868, Gambetta had been convinced that the solution to the ‘social question’ could only be found in liberal capitalism; the problem with Louis-Napoléon’s empire was that it was not sufficiently pro-capitalist.72 In 1872 (the empire had collapsed in 1870) when he toured some of the cities in western France, such as Le Havre and Rouen, Gambetta hinted that there might be a ‘social question’ by saying ‘there is no social solution because there is not a real social question: one must solve problems one at a time, with patience.’73 And when he considered new social groups entering politics – what he called les nouvelles couches sociales – he meant, above all, shopkeepers, artisans, employees, teachers, and doctors, as distinct from the notables.74 Gambetta was far more concerned with not losing the support of the rural world than in gaining that of the working class.
Jules Ferry, the other great protagonist of republican France, held a similar view in the 1860s when Louis-Napoléon was still on the throne. The prosperity of the masses depended on capitalism and not on state intervention. Free enterprise will lower the cost of foodstuffs and increase wages. The elimination of poverty is not the business of the state; the state should not bother with stuff like compulsory insurance but should encourage savings.75
This explains at least in part why France, having taken a somewhat timid step earlier than other countries, with a national pension fund in 1850 and an accident insurance fund in 1868, was overtaken by all comparable countries in welfare benefits and especially in pensions.76 The opposition to state-funded poor relief united both French Catholics (i.e. the conservatives) and liberals – the former because state charity would undermine clerical charity, the latter because it would undermine individualism.77 Even a relatively reformist Prime Minister such as Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau thought tha
t pensions should be left to associations of workers who ought to join forces to pay a subscription for their old age.78
The French paradox is that everyone, or, at least, all socialists, radical-socialists, and socially minded Catholics claimed to be in favour of social policy, yet those in power remained firmly attached to generic liberal principles, though there were some telling exceptions: wine growers whose vines had been affected by phylloxera received public help.79 The rural votes mattered too much to stand in the way of liberal principles. Deputies and ministers were particularly susceptible to lobbying and to pressures partly because, as in Italy, there was no strong party system (as there was in Great Britain), and partly because even though there was remarkable homogeneity among the members of the republican majority, governments were exceedingly unstable. The Third Republic may have lasted seventy years (1870–1940) but each government did not last long; there were around 120 of them and the record-holder, the 1899 Waldeck-Rousseau government ‘de défense Républicaine’, lasted only three years.
What moved many French republicans towards welfare was not so much the plight of the poor as the realization that if the state did not intervene it would leave ‘charity’ to the good works of the Roman Catholic Church, strengthening its prestige. Thus the social question became part of the anticlerical battle and France turned more decisively in favour of public welfare. In 1893 medical cover for the poorest was established by law.80 In 1905, as the battle against clericalism had been won with the law separating Church and State, public assistance was introduced for the over-seventies and the disabled.81
The main opposition to public assistance was now confined to Catholics of various hues and the odd ultra-liberal. During the 1903 parliamentary debate on national insurance a leading monarchist, the Comte Paul-Henri Lanjuinais, declared that in a really free country the state should limit itself to maintaining law and order and national defence. Everything concerning public welfare should be left to private initiative and, failing this, to local authorities. Pro-republican Catholics around the newly formed party Action libérale populaire were just as opposed to public welfare. One of their deputies, Pierre-Marc Arnal, used the slippery-slope argument: if you grant ‘them’ the right to welfare, next they will ask for the right to work and before you know it the budget of the state will be spent on such ‘adventures’, to the delight of the socialists.82 In fact the right to work, the droit au travail, had already been accepted in the Second Republic (1848) and would become an international right enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Socialists, as was to be expected, were all in favour of state welfare. Léon Mirman, an independent, wanted welfare to be a right and not part of state philanthropy:
It would be a new world. Imagine! An old man … will no longer feel humiliated, shameful as those who are today on public assistance, but will hold his head high, no longer a prayer on his lips, but the law in his hand; he will … be able to claim his rights … not requiring any recommendation, protection or patronage, neither from the clergy nor from a masonic lodge to obtain a pension …83
Thanks to Mirman the text of the law was systematically modified: expressions such as ‘indigent’ became ayant-droit (having the right) and recevoir l’assistance (to be in receipt of assistance) was turned into droit à l’assistance (right to assistance).84
When, towards the end of the century, the radical-republican government led by Léon Bourgeois tried to introduce a progressive income tax to pay for compensation for industrial accidents, medical cover, and pensions, many liberals denounced it as a frontal attack on private property.85 Bourgeois had to explain that his proposal was aimed at defusing the socialist threat. The ‘Red Peril’, whether real or imaginary, is often a useful argument for reforms; after all, the point of reforms was to make revolutions impossible. In his book Solidarité (1896), Bourgeois explained that it was necessary to distance oneself from both economic liberalism and socialism in favour of a ‘superior goal’ – that of solidarity – and that this required state intervention. He was thus aligning himself with mainstream liberal interventionists in Germany, Italy, and Great Britain.86 By 1912, however, the average amount received per assisted person in France was still only one-fifth of the British level and French housing conditions were among the worst in western Europe.87
Impenitent as ever, the ultra-liberal Leroy-Beaulieu remained firm in his denunciation of what later would be known in Britain and the United States as ‘the nanny state’ but was already known, according to him, as ‘great motherly legislation’ (in English in the text):
Western civilization owes its growth to individual vigour, to individual initiative, courage, foresight … qualities which separate Europeans and Americans … from other races … the whole system of paternalistic legislation, as the English say, great motherly legislation, tends to suppress and eliminate such qualities … We think this to be a detestable system which transforms members of civilized nations into perpetual children, spineless and sleepy.88
The term ‘grandmotherly legislation’, and not ‘great motherly legislation’ as Leroy-Beaulieu would have it, had been used by liberals such as Jevons in his last work, The State in Relation to Labour (1882), but, by the time Leroy-Beaulieu was deriding it, it was no longer used even in Britain.89 British liberals had moved decisively towards defending the principle of state welfare. Thus the utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick, writing in 1891 in the footsteps of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, used the term ‘paternal’, aware that it was ‘used with more or less sarcasm’, to describe the circumstances in which individuals were helped by the state.90
Although backward on many welfare issues, the French, however, were ahead of most other countries in assisting mothers and their children. They helped large families and funded maternity crèches. By 1904 even the organized working class, though still giving priority to improving wages and working conditions, established associations such as the Alliance d’hygiène sociale (1904–11), which encouraged physical education for workers and their children, provided hot lunches in schools for poor children, tried to enforce hygiene in working-class homes, instructed women on the benefits of breastfeeding, and looked after unwed mothers. It was one of the rare forays of the labour movement onto a terrain so far occupied by philanthropists, liberal activists, and intellectuals.91
Public assistance was doled out by local, not central government, and much of this went to hospitals for abandoned children. There was an anticlerical element behind this since local authorities were afraid that abandoned children would be rescued by parishes and fall prey to the ideological zeal of priests. No doubt such pro-natalist policies were also largely due to the rapid drop in French fertility rates. In 1800, France had been the most populous country in non-Russian Europe. By 1850 it had been overtaken by Germany (i.e. the territories that eventually formed the united Germany of 1870).92 Immigration into France, largely from Belgium and Italy, as well as from eastern Europe, alleviated the situation only a little.93 Encouraging large families was something that united republican nationalists as well as Catholics. After France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, anxieties about depopulation (dénatalité) grew. These increased pressure for the establishment of a less perfunctory welfare state. It became a ‘family welfare state’ or even a ‘maternalist’ welfare state, one in which the state’s solicitude was directed not so much towards women per se but rather towards women as mothers and wives.94 Prominent social theorists and politicians ‘ceased to castigate the unwed mother for her immorality’.95
Around 1910 anxieties about a drop in the birth rate also plagued some northern European countries, leading to demands for maternity reforms. In Norway the feminist Katti Anker Møller proposed a state salary for mothers (she was also a leader in the campaign for the rights of children born out of wedlock and for the decriminalization of abortion).96 Similar demands were put forward by Swedish social democrats in early 1900s.97 Increasingly, women e
ntered the official labour market. By 1891 the percentage of women in the economically active population was around 30 percent in France and Britain, and a little less in Germany.98 This was the beginning of an unresolved controversy: would a state salary for mothers condemn women to domestic labour and discourage them from entering the labour market? Would the lack of support to mothers discourage them from having children?
Some Christian feminists defended private charity. Conceptión Arenal, the leading Spanish feminist of her time and the first woman to attend university in Spain, thought that social problems would be solved, she declared in 1875, only if the rich accepted their Christian obligation to provide charity and build an ‘International of Love’ (Internacional del Amor) against the ‘International of Hate’ (Internacional del Odio, i.e. Karl Marx’s First International).99
In the years between 1880 and 1914, at least in Europe or in countries settled by Europeans, such as Australia and New Zealand (but not in the USA), modern welfare took off, along with the globalization of industrialization. In its initial stages, as we mentioned, such welfare developments owed little to social unrest. The growing power of socialism might have played an important role in welfare legislation but only after the establishment of universal male suffrage in 1909.
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