The City and its Poor

Edward R. Udovic, (1993) ""What About the Poor?" Nineteenth-Century Paris and the Revival of Vincentian Charity," Vincentian Heritage Journal: Vol. 14 : Iss. 1 , Article 5.
Available at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/vhj/vol14/iss1/5

   The Paris of Victor Hugo's lifetime (1802-85), was the Paris of Napoleon I, the Paris of the Bourbon Restoration of Louis XVIII, and of Charles X, the Paris of the bourgeois July Monarchy of Louis Philippe, the Paris of the short-lived Second Republic, the Paris of the Second Empire of Napoleon III and of Baron Hausmann, the Paris of the Revolutions of 1830, of 1848, of the Prussian siege of 1870, of the bloody Commune of 1871. It was also the burgeoning, impoverished, often violent Paris of the Industrial Revolution.

   During these years and in this Paris, Les miserables were by definition the great masses of the urban poor who between 1801 and 1850 doubled the population of a city which was totally unprepared, unwilling, and unable, to provide for them. La misere, by the same contemporary understanding, was the word which came to express their collective experiences of marginalization, oppression, poverty, and suffering. ('Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of  the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York: 1973), 181-84.)

   This same Paris by the consensus of all contemporary statistical measures, and by the consensus of all contemporary reports and accounts, was acknowledged to be a city that had fallen dangerously ill. The pathologies which afflicted the city of Paris were the pathologies which afflicted its poor. Although there was disagreement as to the diagnosis of the exact nature of this illness everyone recognized its symptoms and their fatal consequences.

   To be born, to live, and to die among those who were considered by French society, and who indeed considered themselves as being les miserable, meant synonymously not only that you were poor, not only that you were suffering, not only that you were an exploited member of the working classes, but also that it was assumed you were a member, either potentially or in actuality, of what were then commonly referred to as the "criminal" classes. This meant that you were considered to be a member, potentially or actually, of what was described with a palpable sense of dread and fear by "polite" bourgeois society as, the "barbarians and savages" of les classes dangereuses, the dangerous classes. . . .

The Costs to the Poor.

   The poor of Paris -- its men and women, its elderly, its adolescents, its children, and its infants -- all paid the comprehensive human costs of this industrialized and capitalistic "urban pathology." They paid this cost in the following measurable and measured ways: in hunger, in sickness, in malnutrition, in the lack of education, in begging, in homelessness, in unemployment, in the exploited employment of women, in abusive child labor, in the general mortality of the great cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849, in infant mortality, in infanticide, in infant abandonment, in orphans, in suicide, in prostitution, in insanity, in violence, in endemic crime, in class warfare, in riots, civil unrest, and in revolution. In short, the poor paid fully in every conceivable way.

It has been estimated that in this era Les miserables always comprised at least one quarter of the constantly increasing population of Paris, and that in times of economic crisis the number increased bringing "hunger, sickness and death to nearly one half of the Paris population."  As Louis Chevalier has pointed out, these statistics "project a vast structural poverty, a fundamental poverty ... a monstrous and permanent poverty ... onto the background of the history of Paris."