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

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

The French, Gordon Wright reminds us in his important study of crime in France, were deeply concerned with crime throughout the nineteenth century, but from the 1880s to the Great War, the concern over vagrancy was, he concludes, particularly "obsessive." In this atmosphere, vagrants and beggars were usually lumped together "as a single locution."(15) Wright attributes this rise in repression and in popular concern to a periodic wave of irrational fear, which, he argues, is characteristic of the way French society has perceived crime during the last two centuries: "there are times when popular beliefs outrun facts, and this was probably the case with respect to the vagrancy panic of the 1880s."(16) To be sure, the obsession with vagrancy was to an extent a figment of the population's imagination and was fuelled by a lurid press - Le Petit parisien, Le Petit journal and even the Revue des deux mondes, for example, regularly contained sensationalistic illustrations and stories of marauding tribes of vagabonds and "apaches," to the fascination of Parisian readers.(17) Others, such as Guy de Maupassant in his Le horla. Le vagabond (1887), provided a more sympathetic (and fictional) account of the problem.(18) The obsession with vagrancy, as well as the tendency to medicalize the problem, was rooted, to an extent, in a pervasive and profound sense of national demographic and military decline, born of the defeat to the Prussians. But the obsession with degenerate beggars and vagrants was also an indication that vagrancy and mendicity were actually on the rise since mid-century.(19)

The decline in French agriculture over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century lay at the root of the problem: the value of agricultural properties, for instance, declined by one-third between 1881 and 1913 and grain prices fell from 38 francs per quintal in 1855 to 20 in the early 1890s.(20) As prices fell, many smallholders could no longer support their families. Whole families took to the road in search of work in the cities; conscripts turned to the road (an oft-cited cause of vagabondage); youth struck out in search of greater opportunity than their villages offered, leaving behind their parents and grandparents, who sometimes fell into destitution as a result. In the Midi, the phylloxera epidemic hit the vineyards "like an economic bubonic plague," reaching catastrophic proportions by the 1880s, pushing waves of impoverished families into the cities, which could not absorb them.(21) As rural migrants were shunted from town to town, they frequently were forced to beg or steal. Jules Meline estimated in his widely read book of 1905, Le Retour a la terre (The Return to the Land) that France's rural roads and farmland was being prowled by an army of 400,000 vagabonds - more than 1% of the population.(22) This was a figure which was commonly tossed about in the contemporary press and in parliament during the 1880s, 1890s and 1900s, even if there was no reliable basis to it. Some observers suggested that 200,000 or 300,000 was a more accurate figure. Whatever the exact figure, here was a social problem of the first magnitude. An 1895 inquiry found that 466,000 people had been sheltered by night shelters during the previous year.(23) Over 168,000 people stayed in the night shelters of Paris alone in 1894 (to be sure, many were repeat guests).(24)