Assistance and repression: rural exodus, vagabondage and social crisis in France, 1880-1914

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1999 by Timothy B. Smith

I.

As a vagabond roaming the Midi during the 1890s, Vacher would have had ample opportunity to team up with the veritable army of vagabonds and beggars that was circulating on French roads at this time. Indeed, at his trial several men who had come to know him on his tour de France vagabond testified against him. Estimates of the number of vagabonds in early and mid-nineteenth century France range from 75,000 to 200,000. There were an average of 2,910 convictions each year for vagrancy and begging in 1826-30 yet 10,429 in 1876-80 and 19,723 (and over 51,000 arrests) in the early 1890s.(11) Estimates for the 1890s reached the figure of 400,000, even 500,000. One third to one half of all arrests in Paris in the 1880s were for vagabondage. Jules de Crisenoy, in his sweeping study based on the records and reports of the nation's 90-plus departmental councils, Questions d'assistance et d'hygiene publiques traites dans les conseils generaux (13 vols., 1885-1900), reported on the problem. Dozens of departments complained throughout the 1880s and 1890s that vagabondage was the most pressing social problem facing rural populations. The problem was so great in the Ardennes that the prefect instructed all the mayors to set aside an abandoned building in their commune where vagabonds and beggars might take shelter. The general council distributed 25,000 francs to help out with the conversion of empty buildings into night shelters.(12) An 1891 report from the department of the Seine-Inferieure noted that "there isn't a single commune in the Seine-Inferieure which is not bitterly complaining about the considerable growth in mendicity in the last few years."(13) In 1890, there were an estimated seven to eight times more beggars in Poitou than fifty years earlier.(14)

The prosperity of the 1860s saw the problem recede into the background of the nation's concerns. In the generation following 1848 there were no serious efforts to tackle the problem, and the vagabond population seems to have stabilized. Few studies of vagabondage appeared between the 1840s and the late 1870s. Yet from the late 1870s right to the outbreak of the First World War, the nation was consumed with fear of the vagabond. The popular press, academic journals, social policy journals and university publications devoted inordinate amounts of space to the topic. Prison societies, agricultural societies, municipal and general councils, charities, social policy forums, and parliament itself were obsessed with the problem of vagabondage. National conferences were held almost every year on the topic during the period 1880-1910 (and international ones, too, for the Italians and Belgians, in particular, were also obsessed with the issue, for they too had to cope with a rapid rural exodus and their social services were also poorly developed). At least three dozen theses were written on the topic in France. Arrests for begging and vagrancy rose sharply; the fear of the vagabond, the beggar, the 'apache,' consumed the nation.