Bureaucrats And Beggars

In the mid-eighteenth century in France, the royal authorities launched a new campaign to sweep beggars from the streets, pinning their hopes on the creation of a uniform royal network of lock-ups in which anyone found begging might be detained. In this study, Adams probes the accomplishments and the failings of these so-called dépôts de mendicité, as seen by critics of the experiment (including learned judges and influential spokesmen of the provincial Estates) and as seen by those responsible for its success: the provincial intendants, the royal engineers, the doctors, the inspectors, the contractors, and various givers of advice. He shows how the debate--both internal and external--over the operation of the dépôts contributed to the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. The resulting web of reasoning and empirical data gave support to Montesquieu's principle that the state owes every one of its citizens "a secure subsistence, suitable food and clothing, and a manner of life that is not contrary to good health."

Public academic prize contests—the concours académique—played a significant role in the intellectual life of Enlightenment France, with aspirants formulating positions on such matters as slavery, poverty, the education of women, tax reform, and urban renewal and submitting the resulting essays for scrutiny by panels of judges. In The Enlightenment in Practice, Jeremy L. Caradonna draws on archives both in Paris and the provinces to show that thousands of individuals—ranging from elite men and women of letters artisans, and peasants—participated in these intellectual competitions, a far broader range of people than has been previously assumed. Caradonna contends that the Enlightenment in France can no longer be seen as a cultural movement restricted to a small coterie of philosophers or a limited number of printed texts. Moreover, Caradonna demonstrates that the French monarchy took academic competitions quite seriously, sponsoring numerous contests on such practical matters as deforestation, the quality of drinking water, and the nighttime illumination of cities. In some cases, the contests served as an early mechanism for technology transfer: the state used submissions to identify technical experts to whom it could turn for advice. Finally, the author shows how this unique intellectual exercise declined during the upheavals of the French Revolution, when voicing moderate public criticism became a rather dangerous act.

Tracing the interwoven traditions of modern welfare states in Europe over five centuries, Thomas McStay Adams explores social welfare from Portugal, France, and Italy to Britain, Belgium and Germany. He shows that the provision of assistance to those in need has faced recognizably similar challenges from the 16th century through to the present: how to allocate aid equitably (and with dignity); how to give support without undermining autonomy (and motivation); and how to balance private and public spheres of action and responsibility. Across two authoritative volumes, Adams reveals how social welfare administrators, critics, and improvers have engaged in a constant exchange of models and experience locally and across Europe. The narrative begins with the founding of the Casa da Misericordia of Lisbon in 1498, a model replicated throughout Portugal and its empire, and ends with the relaunch of a social agenda for the European Union at the meeting of the Council of Europe in Lisbon in 2000. Volume 1, which focuses on the period from 1500 to 1700, discusses the concepts of 'welfare' and 'tradition'. It looks at how 16th-century humanists joined with merchants and lawyers to renew traditional charity in distinctly modern forms, and how the discipline of religious reform affected the exercise of political authority and the promotion of economic productivity. Volume 2 examines 18th-century bienfaisance which secularized a Christian humanist notion of beneficence, producing new and sharply contested assertions of social citizenship. It goes on to consider how national struggles to establish comprehensive welfare states since the second half of the 19th century built on the power of the vote as politicians, pushed by activists and advised by experts, appealed to a growing class of industrial workers. Lastly, it looks at how 20th-century welfare states addressed aspirations for social citizenship while the institutional framework for European economic cooperation came to fruition

This clearly written and deeply informed book explores the nature and meaning of work in early modern France. Distinguished historian James R. Farr considers the relationship between material life—specifically the work activities of both men and women—and the culture in which these activities were embedded. This culture, he argues, helped shape the nature of work, invested it with meaning, and fashioned the identities of people across the social spectrum. Farr vividly traces the daily lives of peasants, common laborers, domestic servants, prostitutes, street vendors, craftsmen and -women, merchants, men of the law, medical practitioners, and government officials. Work was recognized and valued as a means to earn a living, but it held a greater significance as a cultural marker of honor, identity, and status. Constants and continuities in work activities and their cultural aspects shared space with changes that were so profound and sweeping that France would be forever transformed. The author focuses on three salient, interconnected, and at times conflicting developments: the extension and integration of the market economy, the growth of the state's functions and governing apparatus, and the intensification of social hierarchy. Presenting a unified and compelling argument about the role of labor in society, Farr addresses a complex set of questions and succeeds masterfully at answering them. With its stylish writing and clear themes, this book will find a broad audience among students and scholars of early modern Europe, French history, economics, gender studies, anthropology, and labor studies.

A wide-ranging history tracing the birth of biopolitics in Enlightenment thought and its aftermath. In Enlightenment Biopolitics, historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals. In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and "organize" the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed "improvement of the human species" and practices of dehumanization.

How, in the years before the advent of urban maps, did city residents conceptualize and navigate their communities? In his strikingly original book, Daniel Lord Smail develops a new method and a new vocabulary for understanding how urban men and women thought about their personal geography. His thorough research of property records of late medieval Marseille leads him to conclude that its inhabitants charted their city, its social structure, and their own identities within that structure through a set of cartographic grammars which powerfully shaped their lives.Prior to the fourteenth century, different interest groups—notaries, royal officials, church officials, artisans—developed their own cartographies in accordance with their own social, political, or administrative agendas. These competing templates were created around units ranging from streets and islands to vicinities and landmarks. Smail shows how the notarial template, which privileged the street as the most basic marker of address, gradually emerged as the cartographic norm. This transformation, he argues, led to the rise of modern urban maps and helped to inaugurate the process whereby street addresses were attached to citizen identities, a crucial development in the larger enterprise of nation building.Imaginary Cartographies opens up powerful new means for exploring late medieval and Renaissance urban society while advancing understanding of the role of social perceptions in history.

This is a rich and comprehensive study of beggars’ culture and the institution of mendicancy in China from late imperial times to the mid-twentieth century, with a glance at the resurgence of beggars in China today. Generously illustrated, the book brings to life the concepts and practices of mendicancy including organized begging, state and society relations as reflected in the issues of poverty, public opinions of beggars and various factors that contribute to almsgiving, the role of gender in begging, and street people and Communist politics. Panoramically, the reader will see that the culture and institution of Chinese mendicancy, which had its origins in earlier centuries, remained remarkably consistent through time and space and that there were perennial and lively interactions between the world of beggars and mainstream society.

Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur, as described in his 1863 essay "The Painter of Modern Life," remains central to understandings of gender, space, and the gaze in late nineteenth-century Paris, despite misgivings by some scholars. Baudelaire’s privileged and leisurely figure, at home on the boulevards, underlies theorizations of bourgeois masculinity and, by implication, bourgeois femininity, whereby men gaze and roam urban spaces unreservedly while women, lacking the freedom to either gaze or roam, are wedded to domesticity. In challenging this tired paradigm and offering fresh ways to consider how gender, space, and the gaze were constructed, this book attends to several neglected elements of visual and written culture: the ubiquitous male beggar as the true denizen of the boulevard, the abundant depictions of well-to-do women looking (sometimes at men), the popularity of windows and balconies as viewing perches, and the overwhelming emphasis given by both male and female artists to domestic scenes. The book’s premise that gender, space, and the gaze have been too narrowly conceived by a scholarly embrace of Baudelaire’s flâneur is supported across the cultural spectrum by period sources that include art criticism, high and low visual culture, newspapers, novels, prescriptive and travel literature, architectural practices, interior design trends, and fashion journals.