Elite Attitudes Towards the "Dangerous Classes"

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

What Made the Poor so Dangerous?

   There can be little doubt that during this era, from the perspective of the ruling classes, the working class poor of Paris were correctly identified as being the “dangerous" poor. The question however must be asked; what was it exactly that made the Parisian poor so dangerous? For the ruling classes the measure of their own keenly felt sense of the dangers posed to them and their comfortable world by the poor, was exactly the measure of the personal dangers that were keenly felt by the poor themselves as they lived in the midst of their uncomfortable world, a world that was created by the exigencies of the iron grip of the status-quo of a highly stratified French society. It was in this widening, seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the classes, that the class warfare which came to be one of the characteristics of the nineteenth century was born. . . .

The Attitude of the French Government.

  Throughout this era successive French governments denied any necessity for increasing public spending on behalf of the relief of the poor, whose very numbers and existence they consistently underestimated, discounted, or denied. As far as the government was concerned, true, unblameworthy poverty affected only a relatively small number of what were, in fact, an increasingly mythical class of those who had been described traditionally as being "a comfortable clientele of honest artisans, old folk, widows, and nursing babes." These groups alone were considered to be the "industrious and deserving poor" who represented a population which it was assumed could be supported, easily and minimally, without any further bothersome increases in government expenditures or attention. For the government and its ruling classes, "the problem of poverty came to be related only to an infinitesimal number of persons and was thus stripped of all its gravity and horror."

  As far as the French government and ruling classes were concerned, then, what was considered to be the problem? This key question can be answered by paraphrasing the above quotation in the following way: "the problem of crime came to be related to an almost infinite number of persons and was thus invested with a tremendous sense of gravity and horror." The ever-increasing crime, violence, social problems, civil unrest, and strident socialist rhetoric which naturally accompanied la misere were not connected in the mind of the government or the ruling classes to any of the direct consequences of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution but rather with what they saw as the moral and criminal failings of the poor themselves whom they largely judged to be the "agents of their own misfortunes." (Paul Christophe, Les pauvres et la pauvrete du XVI siecle ii nos jours: Ileme partie, (Paris: 1987), 113.

 As the contemporary social analyst Eugene Buret commented:

The almost sole focus of governmental activities in this era, with respect to the poor, was therefore not to control or regulate industry, or physically to improve the living conditions in the working class sections of Paris, or even to minimize the wide ranging negative social effects of the  Industrial  Revolution  on  the  working  classes;  rather  it  was  to control, morally correct, and if necessary punish what were seen as the criminal, asocial, irreligious, and immoral lives of les classes dangereuses.