POVERTY

In nineteenth-century Europe, the question of poverty presented itself in a double form. In the first, poverty was part of what various historians have termed a moral economy, that is, a public arena on a local scale, in which the initiative of the state remained in the background and the responsibility for the maintenance of the poor was part of the charitable practices of the aristocracy, following a model of paternalism that in times of crisis might become obligatory even for the ruling classes. Unrest over food supplies was not only a "spasmodic" reflex caused by a sudden surge in food prices, but also a means by which the poor could remind the aristocracy of their need to comply with this unwritten social pact. This moral economy translated a millennial cultural tradition into a civil and secular form. Whereas other religions of the Mediterranean basin (Judaism and Islam) prescribed a codified mandate of institutionalized solidarity with the poor in the form of a regular tax, Christian churches accentuated the spiritual value of poverty and charity, and did not invoke the collective sphere of social justice and responsibility: solidarity was an individual, abstract, and voluntary choice. Social harmony came to depend on this tradition, through practices and rituals involving the exchange of gifts and deference. Alongside free-market forms of exchange and the distributive authority of government, there was a place for relationships based on reciprocity, which built up and preserved symmetries and solidarity in the heart of the social organism.

The other face of poverty, however, belonged entirely to the political sphere. The governing of cities required means to control large numbers of beggars. Beginning in the sixteenth century, legislation began to appear throughout Europe ranging from the prohibition or repression of begging to the physical sequestration of healthy and idle paupers. The technical and legal principles that determined the classification of the poor were based on the ethos of work. Indigents who were elderly, sickly, or otherwise unfit for labor were "deserving poor," worthy of aid inasmuch as they were not culpable for their personal misfortunes. But beggars capable of work were an "undeserving poor" who infringed upon the social pact, contravened the law, and committed a crime. In the enlightened thought and the economic policies of the nineteenth century, these distinctions took their place alongside the negative preoccupation with police control of vagabonds, and the positive and laissez-faire philosophy of work as an instrument of social ascent. Missing from this conceptual framework was the typical ancien régime figure of the shamefaced poor: the disgraced noble who was secretly supported at home because he was still perceived to be the bearer of a social prestige independent of (and indeed contrary to) the obligation to work. While the definition of the poor that resulted from this cultural evolution presented infinite local variations, in all of Europe it did not diverge much from the canonical form elaborated by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham: "poverty is the state of everyone who, in order to obtain subsistence, is forced to have recourse to labour.

Indigence is the state of him who, being destitute of property… is at the same time, either unable to labour, or unable, even for labour, to procure the supply of which he happens thus to be in want" (Writings on the Poor Laws [1796–1797], cited in Poynter, p. 119). On the basis of this generic definition, statistical data on the poor were compiled at more or less regular intervals in all of the greater European cities, in order to monitor a phenomenon that continued to preoccupy the ruling classes. Yet the methods of quantification were heterogeneous (records of poverty released by parishes, home visits by administrative officials, comprehensive censuses of familial economic conditions), and the classifications adopted varied greatly from one place to another and over time, to the point of making comparative studies extremely problematic.

England provides a good example of the evolution from a "moral economy" to the policing of the labor market. The old Poor Law, adopted in 1601 and kept in force until 1834, established a poor tax that was imposed at parish level, to which was added a self-correcting scale of wages (allowance system) linked to grain prices, formalized by the magistrates of Berkshire County assembled in 1795 at the Pelican Inn in Speenhamland. The English experience, therefore, took the form of a tax for the relief of poverty (typical of the non-Christian religions of the Mediterranean basin) distributed through a network of "outdoor relief " that did not restrict the free movement of the poor. In contrast, the new Poor Law, ratified in England in 1834, took up the idea of internment in work-houses, which was closely inspired by the principle of "less eligibility": of the lesser suitability of reclusion with respect to free labor (that is, the highest wage in the workhouse was lower than the lowest wage out-side the workhouse on the free market). "Indoor relief" was substituted for "outdoor relief."

In many European countries, the period of Napoleonic domination had already witnessed the introduction of new institutions (ateliers de charité [charity workshops] and dépôts de mendicité [beggars' centers]) that united vocational training with the repellent physiognomy of the "total institution"—the gloomy image that Charles Dickens immortalized in Oliver Twist (1837–1839), and that the studies of the twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault have shown to be a universal and divisive tendency in modern societies. A closer analysis of these institutions, however, reveals more articulated and complex realities. Superimposed over the initiatives of the authorities were the traditional networks of private beneficence and the improper use that the poor themselves were often able to make of the refuge offered in such institutions, by creating high rates of turnover and devising strategies for the temporary registration of family members too young or old to work. The sporadic data available (for the work-houses of London, Antwerp, and Florence) show that the average duration of reclusion was less than a year and that mortality rates were around 10 percent, with most deaths occurring among the very old. Even in the case of England, historians have questioned the effectiveness of the new Poor Law in practice, and a number of case studies document the continuation of the system of domestic subsidies before and after 1834, and with them the persistence of charitable practices foreign to the principle of internment. According to statistics from the United Kingdom in the second part of the nineteenth century, the proportion of "indoor paupers" remained constantly under ten per thousand, in the face of rates of overall demographic increase of 50 percent (from twenty-five million inhabitants in 1859 to thirty-eight million in 1900). The number of "outdoor paupers" in turn fell, both as a percentage of the total population and in absolute figures, though it always remained nearly triple that of the "indoor paupers."

All the same, the battle fought in England against the right of healthy paupers to receive assistance took on the character of a cultural divide, whose echo reverberated throughout the Continent. The criterion of "less eligibility" aimed at propelling the poor onto the free labor market, by reserving public aid exclusively for invalids. A new initiative for the management of poverty thus made headway by means of the mechanisms of free capitalist competition: social policy entered into the question of poverty. In 1842 Frederick William IV of Prussia approved, not without strong opposition, a law on poor relief—inspired by principles not dissimilar to those of the English reform—aiming at the free circulation of manual labor and at the unification of the labor market.

The revolutions of 1848 dramatically brought to light the other side of the coin. The mob, the "low population" of the principal European cities, gradually broke with the deferential ties of the moral economy and, perceiving the crisis of the old order, adopted new heroes and new banners. On the barricades of 1848 the urban poor again showed that it could be dangerous, but now no longer in the forms defined by the old and subaltern expedient of the grain riot, but rather by an adherence to political and national programs. Intent on defining the new revolutionary matrix by anchoring it firmly to the factory, manual labor, and class conscience, Karl Marx rigidly separated the proletariat from the subproletariat, relegating to the second category the varied world of the impoverished. Yet before Marx, for example in the sixth edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy (1832–1835), the definition of the proletariat closely resembled Bentham's concept of the poor: those who, possessing neither capital nor property, lived from day to day on the fruit of their labors. Salaried work was usually an intermittent and precarious condition, not always sufficient to maintain a stable social position. Much more prevalent in the vocabulary of the democrats was the more generic and all-inclusive concept of the "people." This "people," defined by a sense of social inequality that had a vaguely evangelical tinge, encompassed the shadowy and typically urban world of the poor—a world that in the mid-nineteenth century became the focus of the new genre of "mystery" literature dedicated to the obscure underbelly of the great European metropolises. Small-time criminals, prostitutes, those who performed odd jobs—in a word the misérables of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel of that name—became the bearers of a "culture of poverty" that was radically foreign to prevailing concepts of legality and bourgeois morality; indelibly marked by precariousness, mistrust, and marginalization; and destined to propagate itself from generation to generation. The moral stigma reserved by the authorities for the undeserving poor in the ancien régime returned once more to prominence, and the idea of deviance overtook that of poverty. Early marriage, sexual promiscuity, drunkenness, heedlessness, apathy, blasphemy, and brutality henceforth defined the contours of the condition of poverty, adopting themes still current in modern sociology: absence of privacy, the chronological contraction of childhood, scarce faculties for economic planning, and fatalism.

The laissez-faire approach to employment, introduced by England's new Poor Law of 1834 as an aid in the struggle against poverty, came into collision, however, with the corporate protections that regulated access to skilled occupations and maintained an exclusive monopoly on charitable donations and pensions. Huge numbers of the poor continued to weigh on the cities. And the problem of urban misery was as a result separated from the problem of legislation designed to provide social security, which remained the privilege of recognized occupational groups who were already partially protected. Meanwhile, the task of providing assistance for the poor continued to be met on an emergency and temporary basis by local institutions and private beneficence. In no other century

was "public beneficence" (where public stood for "directed at the public") written and talked about as much as in the nineteenth century: ten thousand volumes were published in the nineteenth century alone on this theme, many of which came to be best-sellers translated into several European languages and reprinted many times. In Italy, the Saggi bibliografici di economia politica (Annotated bibliography of political economy), compiled by Luigi Cossa at the end of the century, lists 151 studies on the theory of charitable donations for the period from 1800 to 1848, compared to 112 on the field of finance, 83 dedicated to problems of food supply, and 188 on money and credit.

The targets of the liberal polemic were twofold. On the one hand, the polemic aimed at all of those proposals—from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen put forth by the French Constituent Assembly in 1789 to the English formula of Speenhamland—that presented assistance as a right and created fiscal levies specifically intended to finance initiatives on behalf of the needy; and on the other, at the typically European tradition of private charity, administered in a piecemeal, casual, disorganized manner and hence incapable of resolving the problem. In the wake of François Naville and Joseph Marie De Gérando, the need to devise forms of scientific and organized charity capable of overcoming the limits of individual generosity gained a growing place in European culture. In 1846 the Society of Charitable Economics was founded in Paris, and various authors lent their pens to the idea of a Christian reconciliation between laissez-faire policy and charity, which was to counter the socialist doctrines and the notion of "legislative charity" (charity made obligatory by law) that underpinned the English reform of 1834. In the course of the 1850s the municipal administration of Elberfeld, in the Rhineland, developed a full-fledged system for the adoption of poor families by richer citizens, who became jointly responsible for charity and social cohesion. This example of "familial morality" that was extended to become a form of governance enjoyed rapid success: it was widely followed in Germany, and served as a model in the following decade for the Charity Organization Society in London. Under the direction of an official in the Belgian government, Edouard Ducpétiaux—whose works were critically analyzed by Marx—the first international congress of these charitable organizations was convened in Brussels in 1856, and thereafter repeated annually in Frankfurt and London. The large majority of those who attended claimed no ideological or religious affiliations, and what brought them together was the growth in professional qualifications in the field of public assistance, and the shared goal of modernizing charitable activities on the principles of science, without jeopardizing the direct and reciprocal ties that existed between social classes. In short, "charitable economics" propagated a philosophy of labor and social mobility; public assistance was to be linked to civil progress and individual enterprise.

In its more radical and secular forms, the issue of poverty offered important benchmarks for new constitutional governments: the opportunity to achieve both a moral reform to restore to the people the right and duty to work, and a religious reform to resuscitate not an ecclesiastical but an interior and personal sense of the divine. In Bavaria in the 1830s and in Denmark in the 1860s, the volume of private donations—centralized and coordinated by this type of nongovernmental charitable association—greatly exceeded the expenditures earmarked for the poor by local administrations. A study on religious charities conducted in January 1863 by the Kingdom of Italy revealed that the influence of the Catholic Church was enormous, but not exclusive and perhaps not even predominant: roughly speaking, charitable enterprises run by the church made up 40 percent of the total. The report presented in parliament in 1887 reduced this figure further: out of 8,127 religious charities, only 2,195, or 27 percent, were under the "direct or indirect control" of the clergy. Even in the country of the Holy See, therefore, the majority of charitable foundations were part of a private and secular tradition of "public beneficence" that—in similar fashion to what occurred in the rest of Europe—contributed in various ways to a common "paternalistic matrix." This matrix did not merely preserve an ancient tradition of charity and private beneficence, but was well adapted to modern times and revealed a surprising capacity to transform itself and evolve over time. Only in part did it recall the traditional philanthropic and paternalistic "ideology of dependence" that was colored by backward-looking rural and anti-industrial traits, and opposed to modernization, whose delays, compromises, and defects it highlighted. As occurred in England—where the local landowning aristocracy adapted to the reforming impulse of the state by adapting its charitable customs—so too in France, Italy, and Germany the paternalistic matrix adapted to progress, reflected on foreign examples, exorcised fears, and began to seek preventive measures against social disorder, in ways that often brought into the public sphere traditional private practices linked to the moral economy. The process of modernization, of state and nation building, did not negate these practices: alongside the centralizing impetus of government and politics, a deeper and more continuous dimension of welfare relations survived in which rich and poor continued to encounter each other and to exchange gifts in return for deference. This network of institutionalized social relations was not merely linked to a shadowy zone set apart from the modernizing initiative of the state but was also a valuable heritage of ancient and hallowed paternalistic initiatives on the part of the local elites that paved the way for successive developments not only by virtue of their simple capillary presence but also because they replicated enduring ways of approaching the social question. Cultural and technical concerns, for example, connected the forms of corporate paternalism that Italian entrepreneurs such as Alessandro Rossi and Paolo Camerini were developing in the Veneto at the turn of the twentieth century with the contemporary English experiences of welfare capitalism on a local level.

Historians writing in the "neo-laissez-faire" mood of the 1980s questioned the links between this tradition of private paternalism and the development of the modern welfare state, emphasizing the public function of the former as opposed to the bureaucratic and parasitic degeneration of the latter. The explicit target of these polemics was the model of modernization formulated in 1950 by the English sociologist Thomas H. Marshall that

involved successive stages beginning with the conquest of civil rights in the great bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; of political rights with the extension of the suffrage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and finally of social rights that came over the course of the twentieth century with the reform of systems for public assistance and pensions. In fact the contrasts are overstated and when analyzed in localized contexts, the political and cultural origins of the welfare state reveal constant interactions between public and private, between paternalistic customs and popular associations, between the survival strategies of the poor and institutional reforms. The social state emerged, in other words, from negotiations conducted among numerous players, while the state initiatives did not exhaust the politics of public assistance. There were also systems of welfare that embraced a wider social ambit, where modernization mixed with the maneuvers of local political elites and the centuries-old traditions of welfare relations inspired by charity and beneficence. These different variables gave rise to legislative processes in different national contexts that addressed the social question by adopting agendas based either on an English or a German model.

The English model embodied opposition to legislated charity, the "religion of freedom": every obligation mandated by law was seen as a threat to the sense of individual responsibility of rich and poor alike. Between 1833 and 1850, in response to pressure from the trade unions, limits were placed on the employment of children and women, an intervention protecting the social groups at greatest risk of poverty. Yet the traditions of local autonomy and the reform of 1834 enabled the English state to avoid direct intervention in the matter of poverty for a long time, with consequences that became public at the end of the century. Charles Booth's monumental study on the poor of London, based on years of house visits and published between 1892 and 1903, revealed that around a third of the urban population (of over four million inhabitants) lived in conditions of "casual labor" and "chronic want." On an inner circle of poor who lived on the margins of society (casual laborers, semicriminals, loafers), and amounted to 9 percent of the total, were super-imposed concentric rings of the "very poor" (7.5 percent) and the poor (22.3 percent), all identified by low and irregular wages: of this million and more people only forty-five thousand were "indoor paupers" permanently supported inside the work-houses of the metropolis. For all the others, poverty was a permanent condition of life, bereft of potential avenues of escape and destined to propagate itself across the generations. Similar results were obtained through a contemporary inquiry conducted by B. Seebohm Rowntree on the smaller city of York (with a population of less than one hundred thousand): 10 percent of the populace lived in conditions of primary poverty (those permanently beneath the poverty line fixed by the minimum salary necessary for food and shelter sufficient to permit mere survival), while another 18 percent lived in secondary poverty (those liable to fall into the first category with any unforeseen or extraordinary expenditure). Poverty became a defining structural trait of the individual and familial cycle of life: the birth of children and their departure from home upon reaching adult age coincided with critical moments of income reduction to levels below the line of primary poverty. These were precisely the critical moments that determined the use made by the poor of the systems of indoor and outdoor relief, either by pressing for temporary aid in cash or by having the youngest and oldest members of the household shut up in workhouses.

During the nineteenth century poverty progressively lost its moralistic connotations and took on new economic overtones. From a vagabond and

marginalized member of society, the pauper became seen as the product of unemployment and under-employment, which were directly linked to the recessive phases of the economic cycle. Further, the connections between poverty and the cycle of life were seen to be related to historical constants that from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century made the links between poverty and specific family circumstances permanent. The poor were composed of the solitary elderly, single women with children, and large families with one income. Even the reasons for decline from secondary to primary poverty described by Rowntree and Booth closely resembled those recorded in the more impressionistic inquiries from the beginning of the century: excessive family size, premature death of the head of family and breadwinner, and illnesses and invalidity among members of the household.

The great investigations-cum-denunciations of urban poverty by Booth and Rowntree set the English political world astir, and in 1897 the first law promoting voluntary accident insurance was passed. Considered over the long term, the English welfare system seems therefore to have followed a sort of pendular pattern: from privatization to state control after 1940 and then back again to privatization in the 1980s. This can be seen as a process of adaptation to the long-term trends of the capitalistic economy: the state retreated in step with expansive cycles and advanced under the threat of depression. It is also important to note that the notion of occupational risk remained outside the original scope of English social legislation: the early concern shown for women and children reflected a prevailing paternalistic and moralistic ethos rather than a general concern to regulate the workplace. By contrast, it was precisely the concept of risk that became the dominant feature in the German model—a concept that by definition reflected the progressive abandonment of a culture of poverty that paid no attention to the future and placed adversity in the magic world of the unforeseeable and uncontrollable calamities. This notion took shape in the wake of railroad accidents and the legal precedent that—beginning in Prussia in 1838—established the principles of the civic responsibility of a business enterprise for damages to personnel. It was from this earlier experience that in Bismarck's Germany the obligation to insure was seen as an economically rational response that was necessary to redistribute and reduce the overall costs of risk. Germany therefore followed a more politicized and rationalizing path: in contrast to England, poverty and social issues parted ways, and while the former remained the responsibility of municipal administrations, responsibility for the latter was forcefully assumed by the central state.

During the course of the nineteenth century, therefore, the problem of poverty shaped different aspects of the process of state building. England's new Poor Law of 1834 represented a model of governmental intervention designed to improve the functioning of the capitalist labor market, a model more or less closely imitated by nearly all the European countries. Yet modernization did not supplant private beneficence, which followed parallel models of rational self-organization that were driven by the activities of charitable institutions and by the survival strategies of the poor. From these different tendencies, various forms of the welfare state would emerge in the following century, from the universalist model based on individual rights that prevailed in southern Europe, to the particularist model financed by the contributions made by different groups of dependent workers that spread through northern Europe. Neither proved capable of providing any effective solutions to the problem of poverty, which continued in more or less severe forms as a result of economic downturns and of specific family situations unsuited to the conditions of the labor market (female heads of family, numerous dependent children, solitary and unproductive elderly), and through cases of social marginalization (depressed rural or mountainous zones, deindustrialized zones).

See alsoClass and Social Relations; Demography; Economists, Classical; Poor Law; Statistics; Welfare.

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Giovanni Gozzini