The Poor of Paris

Frederick Brown, Zola: A Life (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995), pp.66-67.

In 1862 Baron Haussmann reported that if the municipal government were to feed everyinhabitant who regularly went hungry or who

Working Class Children in the Second Empire

 sacrificed other necessities in order not to starve, 1.07 million out of the 1.7 million Parisians would qualify for help. The average worker spent between 35 and 63 percent of what he earned on bread alone, and inflation, which saw prices rise far more steeply than wages during Louis Napoleon's reign, narrowed his chances of survival. Gendarmes arrested 35,000 vagrants in one year as the population of those reduced to scavenging, begging, and whoring swelled. Without rations from the municipality, they made do on garbage from the imperial feast. "[Our maid] tells me that recently, while passing the Maison d'Or on the morning after a masquerade ball, she saw a nun collecting scraps in a little cart," Jules de Goncourt noted in February 1859.  Every day, long before dawn, chiffoniers – ragpickers equipped with hooks, lanterns, and voluminous bags – fanned out through the city.  A familiar a sight in Second Empire Paris as the child prostitute, the organ grinder, and the ill-clad errand boy posted at street corners, they scurried from rubbish bin to rubbish bin, along with rats crazed by the demolitions that had exposed their nests beneath the former Marche des Innocents. Homeless rats -- they, too, casualties of Napoleon Ill's grand design -- became a veritable scourge.