Abstract
The reconfiguration of charity and social discipline which took place in the 150 years or so following the Reformation has attracted the attention of a distinguished roster of historians. Characteristically, each has focused on the experience of a particular country, even a particular region. Yet they have also shown an interest in comparative issues. Curiosity about the extent and nature of differences between Catholic and Protestant practice has provided an important stimulus to this form of work. Collectively, historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have succeeded in mapping out a fairly coherent picture of commonalities and variations, both in the intentions and in the achievements of governments and the charitable in the face of poverty and distress. Robert Jutte’s recent survey, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe, synthesizes a generation and more of this work.1
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Notes
R. Jutte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994).
For older overviews, see J.-P. Gutton, La société et les pauvres en Europe (XVI-XVIIIès.) (Paris, 1974)
C. Lis and H. Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe, trans. J. Coonan (Hassocks, Sussex, 1979), and for another recent survey, originally a series of lectures
R. Mitchison, Coping with Destitution: Poverty and Relief in Western Europe (Toronto, 1991).
Accounts including some nineteenth-century material include G. V. Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and Industrialisation in Europe, America and Russia (London, 1971), and
P. Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity. Class Bases of the European Welfare State 1875–1975 (Cambridge, 1990).
See also W. J. Mommsen (ed.), The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany 1850–1950 (London, 1981) and
E. P. Hennock, British Social Reforms and German Precedents (Oxford, 1987).
S. Pedersen, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State. Britain and France 1914–45 (Cambridge, 1994), ‘Introduction’ provides a helpful overview of the main varieties of welfare-state historiography.
Recent publications include H. Beck, The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia. Conservatism, Bureaucracy and the Social Question 1815–70 (Michigan, 1993)
C. Duprat, Pour l’amour de l’humanité: le temps des philanthropes (2 vols., vol. 1 Paris, 1993, vol. 2 forthcoming)
M. Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge, 1995)
F. Gouda, Poverty and Political Culture: the Rhetoric of Social Welfare in the Netherlands and France, 1815–1854 (Amsterdam, 1995), and
A. Lindenmeyr, Poverty is not a Vice. Poverty, Charity and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1996).
L. A. Cherubini, Dottrine e metodi assistenziale del 1789 al 1848. Italia, Francia, Inghilterra (Milan, 1958)
D. van Damme, Armenzorg en de Staat (Gent, 1990).
J. Barry and C. Jones (eds.), Medicine and Charity before the Welfare State (London, 1991)
J. Carré (ed.), Pauvreté et assistance en Europe a la fin du XVIIIè s. et au début du XIXè s.’ in Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, no. 311 (Oxford, 1993)
C. Bec (ed.), Philanthropies et politiques sociales en Europe (XVIII-XXè siècles) (Paris, 1994).
For England, see R. Burn, History of the Poor Laws (London, 1764)
T. Ruggles, History of the Poor (2 vols., London, 1794)
F M. Eden, The State of the Poor (3 vols., London, 1797)
J. Duncan, Collections relative to the Systematic Relief of the Poor, at Different Periods and in Different Countries (London, 1815).
The broader European literature was reviewed by J.-M. de Gérando, De la bienfaisance publique (4 vols., Brussels, 1839), vol. 1, pp. i–lxxiv.
Another early survey of German literature was contained in M. Friedlander, Bibliographie méthodique de ouvrages publiés en Allemagne sur les pauvres (Paris, 1822) (compiled to accompany his essay on the poor in Germany in La revue encyclopédique XXII (Dec. 1821) 456–509. The tradition of the Pauperismusliteratur-survey seems to have established itself particularly strongly in Germany: see Beck, Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State, pp. 10–12 for twentieth-century contributions.
I have consulted A. de Villeneuve-Bargement, Economie politique chrétienne, ou recherches sur la nature et les causes de la paupérisme en France et en Europe, et sur les moyens de la soulager et de la prévenir (3 vols., Paris, 1834); C. I. Pettiti di Roreto, Saggio sul buon governo della mendicita, degli istituti della beneficenza, e delle carceri (2 vols., Turin, 1837), F. M. L. Naville, De la charité légale (2 vols., Paris, 1839), Gérando, De la bienfaisance publique, and a somewhat later collection, A. Emminghaus (ed.), Das Armenwesen und die Armengesetzgebung in Europäischen Staaten (Berlin, 1870) (translated in part as Poor Relief in Different Parts of Europe [London, 1873]).
J. B. Post, Food Shortage, Climatic Variability and Epidemic Disease in Pre-industrial Europe. The Mortality Peak of the Early 1740s (Ithaca, 1985); The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in Western Europe (Baltimore, 1977).
See also R. Price, ‘Poor relief and social crisis in mid-nineteenth-century France’, Eur. Stud. Rev., 13 (1983), pp. 423–54.
D. Rohr, The Origins of Social Liberalism in Germany (Chicago, 1963), pp. 92, 117–18.
Useful general surveys include M. Teich and R. Porter (eds.), The Industrial Revolution in National Context (Cambridge, 1996)
P. Hohenberg and L. Lees, The Making of Urban Europe 1000–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), part 3
I. Katznelson and I. R. Zolberg (eds.), Working-Class Formation (Princeton, 1986)
W. Seccombe, Weathering the Storm. Working Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (London, 1993)
J. Blum, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (Princeton, 1978)
J. Kocka and A. Mitchell (eds.), Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1993)
R. Grew, ‘The nineteenth-century European state’, in C. Bright and A. Harding (eds.), Statemaking and Social Movements (Ann Arbor, 1984), pp. 83–113
E. N. and P. R. Anderson, Political Institutions and Social Change in Continental Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1967)
H. McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789–1970 (Oxford, 1981). For association, see n. 77.
Villeneuve-Bargemont, Economie politique chrétienne, vol. 1, pp. 22–4, 40–1, 225 and elsewhere. His outlook is characterized and put into perspective in K. Lynch, Family, Class and Ideology in Early Industrial France (Madison, Wisconsin, 1988), pp. 33–48. PP 1834 (XXXVIII) App. F, p. xi and throughout (the contents of the report are organized around this distinction).
For English remodelling of charity at the Reformation, see G. S. Jones, History of the Law of Charity 1532–1837 (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 11–15, and for subsequent practice
W. K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England 1480–1660 (London, 1959) and
D. Owen, English Philanthropy 1660–1960 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964). The historiography of Protestant welfare policy tends to stress official rather than independent charitable activity — thus Jutte, Poverty and Deviance, ch. 7, pp. 105–12, 120–5.
For Denmark, see M. Jørgensen, ‘L’assistance aux pauvres au Danemark jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIès.’, in T. Riis (ed.), La pauvreté dans les pays nordiques 1500–1800 (Odense, 1990), p. 15, and in the same volume A. Nakken, ‘La pauvreté en Norvège 1500–1800’, p. 86.
Thus Jutte, Poverty and Deviance, pp. 100–5, 112–20. S. Cavallo, Charity and Power in Early Modern Italy. Benefactors and their Motives in Turin, 1541–1789 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 23–9.
Jutte, Poverty and Deviance, pp. 169–77; P. Spierenburg, The Prison Experience. Disciplinary Institutions and their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (New Brunswick, 1991).
The move to confine the French poor in ‘general hospitals’ was most famously described by M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. R. Howard (New York, 1965), ch. 2.
See also J.-P. Gutton, La société et les pauvres. L’example de la generalité de Lyon 1534–1789 (Paris, 1970), pp. 295–349
C. Jones, The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France (London, 1989), esp. ch. 1. Italy had a long tradition of municipal hospital foundations, but for initiatives influenced by French example see L. Cajani, ‘L’assistenza ai poveri nella Toscana settecentesca’, in G. Politi, M. Rosa and F. Della Peruta (eds.), Timore e carita. I poveri nell’ Italia moderna (Annali della Biblioteca statale e libreria civica di Cremona XXVII-XXX, 1982), pp. 145–6. From the sixteenth century on, the general hospital/workhouse ideal was firmly implanted in European consciousness, and subject to periodic reinvigoration in all parts of Europe. G. F. Piccaluga, ‘La riforma dell pubblica assistenza sotto il governo di Maria Teresa’, in Politi et al. (eds.), Timore e carita, pp. 325–34 reports Lombardy’s Austrian rulers pressing for a new ‘Albergo dei poveri’ there in the mid-eighteenth century; hospitals at Genoa and Madrid were taken as architectural models
For Scotland, R. Mitchison, ‘North and South: the development of the gulf in Poor Law practice’, in R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte (eds.), Scottish Society 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 199–255, and
R. A. Cage, The Scottish Poor Law 1745–1845 (Edinburgh, 1981).
For Ireland, David Dickson, ‘In search of the Old Irish Poor Law’, in R. Mitchison and P. Roebuck (eds.), Economy and Society in Scotland and Ireland 1500–1939 (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 149–59, and
H. Burke, The People and the Poor Law in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Littlehampton, W. Sussex, 1987). The question, should the English Poor Law be extended to Ireland, was repeatedly asked after the Union of British and Irish Parliaments in 1801 — but, until after the establishment of the English ‘New Poor Law’, persistently answered in the negative.
For England, P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), p. 170, notes that in 1696, 82 per cent of north Shropshire parishes reported themselves to have raised taxes for the poor. Even these high figures probably understate activity, since some of the non-respondents were ‘peculiars’, to whom the episcopally organized enquiry was probably not directed. Other figures are supplied in Emminghaus (ed.), Poor Relief, pp. 254 (for Belgium in 1856), 208 (for France, various dates from 1833), 147 (for Austria, 1846 and 1866). For Piedmont, PP 1834 (XXXVIII) App. F, p. lxxvii (for the earlier history of these congregations: Cavallo, Charity and Power, pp. 183, 193–4). For the gradual development of initially nominal local provision in eighteenth-century Denmark, see Jørgensen, ‘L’assistance’, pp. 21–9. The establishment of such local bodies was not obligatory in all systems: in France, for example, instructions of the Restoration period made it plain that it was up to local authorities to determine whether the establishment of a bureau de bienfaisance was necessary at all (Price, ‘Poor relief’, 429).
A. Shubert, ‘Charity properly understood. Changing ideas about poor relief in liberal Spain’, Comp. Stud. Soc. and Hist., 33 (1991), pp. 48–50; M. P. Caprioli, ‘Il sistema della beneficenza pubblica nel Piemonte preunitario’, in G. Politi et al. (eds.), Timore e carita, pp. 477–87, and Emminghaus (ed.), Poor Relief, pp. 274–83. The weakness of parochial government structures, or of links between these structures and higher levels of administration, was probably also a problem in other countries, though less self-evidently so. In PP 1834 (XXXVIII) App. F, p. 377, it was observed of Sweden, for example, that provincial administration was weakened by the absence of an effective underlayer: municipal organs and church councils were both said to need strengthening.
Naville, De la charité légale, vol. 1, p. 58. For Prussia, see also G. Steinmetz, Regulating the Social. The Welfare State and Social Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1993), pp. 112–13.
The development of formal district-level responsibilities of this kind often built upon earlier de facto practice of concentrating certain kinds of provision in large towns, which functioned in this as in other respects as regional centres. Penal workhouses or houses of correction were among the earliest to be formally assigned to district-level authorities. In France, the maintenance of ‘dépôts de mendicité’ was made the responsibility of the generalité in the 1770s, of the departement in 1808. French departements became responsible for providing lunatic asylums from 1838. In Prussia, provinces were made responsible for providing poorhouses in 1794; under French rule, the departements of the Rhine Province were to maintain workhouses; in 1811, also to provide foundling hospitals. In Bavaria in 1816 it was made the responsibility of the district to support poorhouses and workhouses, of the ‘circle’ to maintain foundling and maternity hospitals and lunatic asylums. In Spain in 1821 provinces were directed to maintain poorhouses, orphanages, infirmaries and maternity hospitals. In England, counties were empowered to maintain lunatic asylums from 1808, but required to do so only from 1845. A system of district asylums was instituted in Ireland in 1817. In Austria, by contrast, from the time of Joseph II the tendency had been to put such institutions under the direct control of the state; they were devolved to the care of territorial governments only in 1860. (In by no means all, and perhaps few of these cases were such responsibilities comprehensively discharged.) Emminghaus (ed.), Poor Relief, pp. 40, 123, 150–2, 210; R. M Schwartz, Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century France (Chapel Hill, 1988), pp. 158–9
G. Best, Shaftesbury (London, 1964), pp. 42–9; Burke, People and the Poor Law, pp. 2–3; Jones, Charitable Imperative, p. 275.
For the English New Poor Law: S. and B. Webb, English Poor Law Policy. Part 2, The Last Hundred Years (London, 1929)
D. Fraser (ed.), The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1976)
Driver, Power and Pauperism. For workhouses, A. Crowther, The Workhouse System 1834–1929 (London, 1981). The system of poor law ‘unions’ was extended to Ireland in 1838 (Burke, People and the Poor Law, pp. 46–7), but in Scotland, while towns were united for poor law purposes, rural provision remained parish-based (Cage, Scottish Poor Law, ch. 8).
‘Cantons’ comprised a small number of communes. I. Woloch, The New Regime. Transformations of the French Civic Order 1789–1820s (New York, 1994), chs. 8–9 provides a brief overview
J.-P. Gross, Fair Shares for All (Cambridge, 1996) sets relief policy narrowly conceived in the context of Jacobin social policy more broadly
Forrest, French Revolution and the Poor provides more detail on implementation; Duprat, Le temps des philanthropes, part II, is a case study of Paris, C. Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance. The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpellier Region 1740–1815 (Cambridge, 1982), part III, of provincial France. French influence elsewhere in Europe was experienced as statist and centralizing, inasmuch as previously largely autonomous bodies were subjected to government control. By comparison with what was attempted in France in the heyday of the Revolution, these were none the less relatively modest ventures (see Caprioli, ‘Il sistema della beneficenza’ and
S. Eser, Verwaltet und Verwahrt. Armenpolitik und Anne in Augsburg vom Ende der reichsstadischen Zeit bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg [Sigmaringen, 1996], pp. 94–101). When French example was rejected, such systems were often dismantled.
See thus P. Bonenfant, Le problème du paupérisme en Belgique à la fin de l’ancien régime (Brussels, 1934), pp. 138–45, 318, 369–70, 401–4
T. M. Adams, Bureaucrats and Beggars. French Social Policy in the Age of the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1990), pp. 31–2, 53, 58, 64, 102, 141–3.
See n. 15 above; also Innes, ‘The “mixed economy of welfare”’, p. 152, for a failed early eighteenth-century proposal to bring more charities under local government control. For the growth of the workhouse out of the charity-school movement, T. Hitchcock, ‘Paupers and preachers: the SPCK and the parochial workhouse movement’, in L. Davison et al. (eds.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive. The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England 1689–1750 (Stroud, 1992), pp. 145–66.
For the seventeenth century, see n. 18 above; for revolutionary initiatives, n. 39. For a local study of such arrangements, D. Higgs, ‘Politics and charity in Toulouse 1750–1850’, in J. F. Bosher (ed.), French Government and Society 1500–1850. Essays in Memory of Alfred Cobban (London, 1973), pp. 191–207.
J. Leith (ed.), ‘Facets of education in the eighteenth century’, Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, no. 167 (Oxford, 1977).
The remodelling of older charities was not a feature of the Enlightenment and revolutionary years only: see Cajani, ‘L’assistenza’, p. 78. For Enlightened and revolutionary assaults on church and charitable funds: P. G. M. Dickson, ‘Joseph II’s reshaping of the Austrian Church’, Eng. Hist. Rev., 36 (1993), pp. 89–114
J. McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (London, 1969), pp. 26–31
G. Ellis, The Napoleonic Empire (London, 1991), p. 84ff
S. Woolf, A History of Italy 1700–1860 (London, 1979), pp. 203, 212; and
R. Carr, Spain 1808–1975 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 172–6, 252–3. For links with relief policy, see Bernard, ‘Poverty and poor relief’, pp. 245–6; Forrest, French Revolution and the Poor, pp. 38–43; Cajani, ‘L’assistenze’, p. 204; Shubert, ‘Charity properly understood’, p. 39.
For brief observations on German trends, C. Sachsse and F. Tennstedt, Geschichte der Armenfursorge in Deutschland (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1988), p. 227.
I. de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (London, 1981), pp. 113–21, 125–7. Lindenmeyr, Poverty is not a Vice, p. 33.
Dickson, ‘In search’, pp. 154–5; R. Soloway, Prelates and People (London, 1969), pp. 166ff; Burke, People and the Poor Law, pp. 17ff.
Emminghaus (ed.), Poor Relief; Riis (ed.), La pauvreté dans les pays nordiques; P. P. Bernard, ‘Poverty and poor relief in the eighteenth century’, in C. W. Ingrao (ed.), State and Society in Early Modern Austria (West Lafayette, Indiana, 1994) p. 244.
For the role of the clergy in prerevolutionary France, see T. Tackett, Priest and Parish in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton, 1977), pp. 157–9, and index under ‘poor relief’; for their role in the nineteenth century, Price, ‘Poor relief’, p. 438.
Jones, Charitable Imperative, esp. chs. 3, 5; O. Hufton and F. Tallett, ‘Communities of women, the religious life and public service in eighteenth-century France’, in M. J. Boxer and J. H. Quataert (eds.), Connecting Spheres (New York, 1987), pp. 75–85
H. Mills, ‘Negotiating the divide: women, philanthropy and the public sphere in nineteenth-century France’, in F. Tallet and N. Adkin (eds.), Religion, Society and Politics in France since 1789 (London, 1991), pp. 21–54, esp. 43–51; Luddy, Women and Philanthropy, pp. 23–35
S. O’Brien, ‘French nuns in nineteenth-century England’, Past and Present, 154 (1997), pp. 142–80, also essays by Mills and Luddy in this volume. Villeneuve-Bargemont listed charitable congregations of men and women, Economie politique chrétienne, vol. 2, pp. 346–7; Petitti di Roreto did the same for Italy, Saggio sul buon govemo, vol. 1, pp. 291–308.
L. Chatelier, The Europe of the Devout, trans. J. Birrell (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 129–35. A Madrid confraternity was among the forms of philanthropy publicized by [Duquesnoy], Recueil des mémoires (vol. 3 as bound in British Library copy). See also works by Jones, Mills and Luddy listed n. 63, and Mills and Luddy in this volume.
W. O. Shanahan, German Protestants Face the Social Question, vol. 1, 1815–71 (Notre Dame, 1954), pp. 68–9
C. M. Prelinger, Charity, Challenge and Change. Religious Dimensions of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Women’s Movement in Germany (New York, 1987), ch. 1.
W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992) for the first movement.
There is no comparable survey of the second, but see for Britain, W. R. Ward, Religion and Society in England 1790–1850 (London, 1972)
R. H. Martin, Evangelicals United: Ecumenical Stirrings in Pre-Victorian Britain (London, 1983), and
D. M Lewis, Lighten their Darkness. The Evangelical Mission to Working-Class London 1828–60 (New York, 1986); and for Germany and Scandinavia
N. Hope, German and Scandinavian Protestantism 1700–1918 (Oxford, 1995), chs. 15–16; Shanahan, German Protestants.
C. Clark, The Politics of Conversion. Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728–1941 (Oxford, 1995), esp. ch. 3, has interesting material on Anglo-German links in the Awakening; see also Prelinger, Charity, Challenge, p. 33, for such links in a Hamburg context. Lindenmeyr, Poverty is not a Vice, pp. 105–6, 113–14 for the Russian Bible Society.
S. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth (Oxford, 1982).
H. D. Rack, ‘Domestic visitation: a chapter in early nineteenthcentury evangelism’, J. Eccl. Hist., 24 (1973), pp. 357–76, Lewis, Lighten their Darkness; Best, Shaftesbury.
See also Owen, English Philanthropy, ch. 5. M. Roberts, ‘Reshaping the gift relationship. The London Mendicity Society and the suppression of begging in England 1818’1869’, Int. Rev. Soc. Hist., 36 (1991), p. 212 emphasizes that forms of charity attractive to evangelicals were not peculiar to them. For Germany, Shanahan, German Protestants, ch. 2; Prelinger, Charity, Challenge, chs. 1–2. For Holland, Dekker’s chapter in this volume. Note that despite the voluntary organization of much of this charitable activity, those who carried it out might be paid agents.
Shanahan, German Protestants, ch. 2, pp. 70–98 and chs. 3–6. D. E. Barclay, Frederick William IV and the Prussian Monarchy 1840–61 (Oxford, 1995), and Beck, Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State, ch. 7 set the scene, but do not deal with Wichern.
M. Friedlander, ‘Coup d’oeil historique sur les pauvres … en Allemagne’, Revue Encyclopédique, XII (1821), pp. 90–1. For contemporary references to Yverdun, see Bonenfant, Le problème du paupérisme, pp. 308ff
J. McFarlan, Inquiries Concerning the Poor (Edinburgh, 1782), p. 488.
J.-M. de Gérando, The Visitor of the Poor (London, 1833; original French edn. 1820), ch. 11, ‘The Spirit of Association’. Villeneuve-Bargemont, Economie politique chrétienne, vol. 2, pp. 342ff celebrates the associative spirit, but is keen to emphasize the pioneering role played by religious associations: p. 545 he writes that he cannot understand how M. le comte de Laborde, in his work on the spirit of association, failed to identify the contribution made by religious and charitable congregations, and instead praised English societies (the reference is to A. de Laborde, De l’esprit d’association [Paris, 1821]). In the later nineteenth century, it became commonplace to question the effects of the uncoordinated proliferation of charitable societies, but this was not a common theme in the first half of the century. For such later complaints, R. Humphreys, Sin, Organised Charity and the Poor Law in Victorian England (London, 1995), pp. 4–5
J. H. Weiss, ‘Origins of the French welfare state: poor relief in the Third Republic’, Fr. Hist. Stud., 13 (1983), pp. 47–78; F Della Peruta, ‘Conclusioni’, in Politi et al., Timore e carita, pp. 497ff; Lindenmeyr, Poverty is not a Vice, pp. 144ff.
J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, 1989), which has greatly influenced work in this field, and which identifies England as the cradle of a new kind of public life, does not much emphasize the role of associations in forming the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ (see p. 35), but that link is commonly made in the literature: e.g. M. Becker, The Emergence of Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Bloomington, Indiana, 1994), p. 59. For the developing language of sociability in France (within the context of broader European thought)
see D. Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty (Princeton, 1994), esp. ch. 2. For English practice
J. Brewer, ‘Commercialization and politics’ in N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb (eds.), Birth of a Consumer Society (London, 1982), pp. 197–262, and Peter Clark’s forth-coming study of clubs and societies in seventeenth-and eighteenth-entury Britain.
Some information on Dutch associative practice can be found in M. C. Jacob and W. W. Mijnhardt (eds.), The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, 1992), esp. chs. 4, 12 and 15. For associational life as a manifestation of ‘civic virtue’, see e.g. [Duquesnoy], Recueil de mémoires, XVIII, 124 (vol. 1, as bound by the British Library).
D. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police (Princeton, 1989), chs. 5–6.
D. G. C. Allan, William Shipley. Founder of the Royal Society of Arts (London, 1979).
For Holland see also S. Schama, Patriots and Liberators. Revolution in the Netherlands 1780–1813 (London, 1977), pp. 168–9; Gouda, Poverty and Political Culture, p. 233. For Russia, Lindenmeyr, Poverty is not a Vice, pp. 103ff. For similar societies in Spain and Norway, J. Horcade, ‘L’assistance en Espagne selon Los Amigos del Pais’, in Carré (ed.), Pauvreté et assistance’, pp. 233–42
Østerud, Agrarian Structure, p. 184, and B. Hovde, The Scandinavian Countries 1720–1865 (2 vols., Ithaca, 1948), vol. 2, p. 614.
F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1980); Prelinger, Charity, Challenge. Friedlander, ‘Bibliographie méthodique’, p. 38, comments on the existence throughout Germany of associations of women to provide for the care and education of poor girls. See [Duquesnoy], Recueil des mémoires, XVI, pp. 19–20 (vol. 3 as bound in British Library copy) for a charitable society in Berne, apparently established in the 1780s; Gérando, De la bienfaisance publique, vol. 2, p. 33, for a Danish society of benevolent women founded in 1790.
F. K. Prochaska, Royal Bounty. The Making of a Welfare Monarchy (New Haven, 1995) for the English experience.
P. H. J. H. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England 1815–75 (Manchester, 1961) and Self-Help: Voluntary Associations in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1973). Thomas Alcock, mid-eighteenth-century advocate of self-help charities, praised the Dutch for their activities on this front: Alcock, Observations on the Defects of the Poor Laws (London, 1752), pp. 37–8. Villeneuve-Bargemont, Economie politique chrétienne, vol. 3, p. 28, characteristically suggests Catholic primacy, though acknowledging England as the modern leader in the field. For the rise of interest in the ‘provident institutions’ more generally, of which mutual aid societies were only one manifestation, see Gérando, De la bienfaisance publique, vol. 3, pp. 1–221; Cherubini, Dottrine e metodi assistenziale (the main focus of his interest is the reorientation of thought around the concept of’ security’, and the development of new modes of providing for that), and for France, F. Ewald, L’état providence (Paris, 1986), pp. 195–222. Rohr, Origins of Social Liberalism, notes considerable enthusiasm for provident institutions of various kinds among German’ social liberals’.
Gosden, Friendly Societies, pp. 4–5. For a local study, R. P. Hastings, Essays in North Riding History (Northallerton, 1981), ch. 7.
M. Dreyfus, La mutualité. Une histoire maintenant accessible (Paris, 1988), pp. 19, 25; for the early history of French mutualism see also Woloch, New Regime, pp. 290–3; for Italy, Emminghaus (ed.), Poor Relief, p. 295; for Russia, Lindenmeyr, Poverty is not a Vice, p. 115.
One hope was that they might make it easier for workers to weather the boom/slump economic cycle: see Brown, Thomas Chalmers, p. 147 (and see vol. 3 of Chalmers’ Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns [Glasgow, 1826]); Hansard, LI (1840), cols. 1227–8 (as part of a package of proposals for relieving discontent among the working classes);T. B. Smith, ‘Public assistance and labour supply in nineteenth-century Lyon’, Jnl. Mod. Hist., 68 (1996), esp. pp. 12–23.
W. S. Steer, ‘The origins of social insurance’, Trans. Devon Assoc. for Advancement of Sci., Lit. and Art, XCVI (1964), pp. 303–17
J. R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism. English Ideas on Poor Relief 1795–1834 (London, 1969), pp. 35–9; Gosden, Friendly Societies, pp. 63–76 (these policies are placed within a more general survey of relations between the state and the voluntary sector in G. Finlayson, Citizen, State and Social Welfare in Britain 1830–1990 [Oxford, 1994], pp. 80–100). For a similar repudiation of ‘an unnecessary and obnoxious guardianship’ in mid-nineteenth-century Sweden, Hovde, Scandinavian Countries, vol. 2, p. 645.
Poynter, Society and Pauperism; Mitchell Dean, The Constitution of Poverty (London, 1991) both survey English thinking on this theme. See also for charitable practice, Owen, English Philanthropy, ch. 4.
S. Woolf, The Poor in Western Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London and New York, 1986), p. 34 notes a general harshening of attitudes. In relation to the argument developed below, it is however of interest that on p. 33 he notes that the same period saw organized relief becoming ‘more organised and widespread’.
C. Bloch, L’assistance et l’état en France à la veille de la Revolution (Paris, 1908), pp. 341–2, Bernard, ‘Poverty and poor relief’
M. Lindemann, Patriots and Paupers. Hamburg 1712–1830 (Oxford, 1990)
F. Redlich, ‘Count Rumford and his followers’, Int. Rev. of Soc. Hist., 16 (1971), pp. 184–216, and
B. Thompson, Count Rumford, Collected Works, ed. S. C. Brown, vol. 5, Public Institutions (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).
For accounts of local experiments sharing common elements with the showpiece initiatives, see among others Observations on the Present State of the Poor of Sheffield (Sheffield, 1774), also more generally for Britain my forthcoming ‘The state and the poor’; C. Lis, Social Change and the Labouring Poor: Antwerp 1770–1820 (New Haven, 1986), pp. 12–14
C. Ingrao, The Hessian Mercenary State (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 95–9, 110–11; Bernard, ‘Poor relief’; Bonenfant, Le problème du paupérisme, pp. 308ff, 368ff, 455–6; Cajani, ‘L’assistenza’; Nakken, ‘Pauvreté en Norvège’, pp. 98–9; Shubert, ‘Charity properly understood’, pp. 38–9
J. Soubeyroux, Paupérisme et rapports sociaux a Madrid au XVIIIès (2 vols., Lille, 1978); Zurawicka, ‘Charity in Warsaw’, p. 321; Lindenmeyr, Poverty is not a Vice, pp. 100–2. For Denmark, [Duquesnoy], Recueil des mémoires, XVIII, p. 124 (vol. 3 as bound in British Library copy); for Bremen, Emminghaus (ed.), Poor Relief, p. 107. The merits and diffusion of the various relief forms are discussed especially by Villeneuve-Bargemont, Economie politique chrétienne, vols. 2 and 3, and Gérando, De la bienfaisance publique, vol 3.
To this list might be added the employer. The development of both the theory and practice of employer sponsorship of welfare services-an increasingly important theme in the early nineteenth century-deserves more attention than I have given it here. See Villeneuve-Bargemont, Economie politique chrétienne, vol. 3, pp. 163ff; Gérando, De la bienfaisance publique, vol. 3, pp. 289ff; I. Bradley, Enlightened Entrepreneurs (London, 1987)
P. Stearns, Paths to Authority. The Middle Class and the Industrial Labour Force in France 1820–48 (Urbana, 1978); Ewald, L’état providence, pp. 109–40; and Rohr, Origins of Social Liberalism.
M. Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organisation: the Royal Institution 1799–1844 (London, 1978)
for the British Association, I. Inkster and J. Morrell (eds.), Metropolis and Province. Science in British Culture 1780–1850 (London, 1983), esp. essays by MacLeod, Shapin and Neve; Brown, Thomas Chalmers, p. 282. For the Central Verein, Beck, Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State, pp. 181–97 and J. Reulecke, ‘English social policy around the middle of the nineteenth century as seen by German reformers’, in Mommsen (ed.), Emergence of the Welfare State, pp. 37–44. For the Swiss society, Gerando, De la bienfaisance publique, vol. 1, p. xlvi (Naville was a member). For the role of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in stimulating research and wr
see A. Lees, Cities Perceived (Manchester, 1985), pp. 65, 71.
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Innes, J. (1998). State, Church and Voluntarism in European Welfare, 1690–1850. In: Cunningham, H., Innes, J. (eds) Charity, Philanthropy and Reform. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26681-4_2
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