"Without belonging to public service": charities, the state, and civil society in Third Republic Bordeaux, 1870-1914

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1998 by Steven M. Beaudoin

Addressing the 1872 annual meeting of the General Council of the Societe pour l'extinction de la mendicite dans Bordeaux, the vicomte Charles de Pelleport-Burete, the association's secretary, proudly characterized the Societe as "part of that ensemble of Bordelais institutions that, without belonging to public service properly speaking . . . has a permanent goal of public utility that recommends it to the protection of the state, whose tasks it seconds and sometimes completes."(1) In these few words, Pelleport-Burete captured the very essence of Bordelais poor relief. Between 1870 and 1914 benevolent associations carved an enduring niche for themselves in Bordeaux's solution to the social question. And few knew this better than Charles de Pelleport-Burete. During his long lifetime, he embodied the traits of an activist elite that devoted much of its time and energy to civic life. In an official capacity, he served the new regime as a monarchist senator for the Gironde, mayor of the city, and administrator of both the municipal hospitals and the city's public relief centers. In addition, he donated hours, money, and effort to numerous charitable organizations, from the Societe above to the (Euvre du refuge des enfants abandonnes ou delaisses de la Gironde, from the Societe de charite maternelle to the Office central de la charite bordelaise. Even his last minutes were spent in service to private charity in Bordeaux: he collapsed and died at the age of 72 while presiding over a meeting of the Societe de Secours aux blesses militaires.(2) Together with colleagues like the Jewish shipping merchant Alexandre Leon, the Protestant negociant Charles Cazalet, and the republican cheese merchant Alfred Daney, Pelleport-Burete helped to create and maintain a strong core of public and private institutions that lay at the heart of poor relief in Bordeaux.

Perhaps because of its local nature, this system of assistance has largely escaped the attention of most historians. As a result, they have failed to analyze the many private charities that dotted the urban landscapes of France, and the benefactors who supported them, as representatives of both a thriving system of relief and a vibrant associational life. While this article offers correctives to interpretations that have underestimated the extent of social welfare in late-nineteenth-century France, its primary focus is on the interaction of these charities and the municipality as an aspect of voluntary organization and a reflection of an active civil society. In Bordeaux and elsewhere, a broad range of societies and leagues flourished throughout the nineteenth century.(3) The 1876 Annuaire general du commerce et de l'industrie de la Gironde, for example, listed for Bordeaux alone over twenty cercles, or clubs, twelve Masonic lodges, and seventeen literary and scientific associations. By 1913, the number of cercles and Masonic lodges had fallen to seventeen and ten respectively, but the number of literary and scientific societies had grown to fifty. Moreover, a host of new associations, including more than forty-five sports clubs and thirty musical societies, now supplemented these lodges and cercles.(4) As early as 1892, a list compiled for the prefect carried the names of over 235 charities, sports clubs, musical societies, cercles, and other associations located in Bordeaux alone, over seventy percent of which had been founded after 1870.(5) Other French cities witnessed a similar growth in this public form of sociability. Between 1870 and 1901, for example, the 13,000 citizens of Annecy created over seventy-five associations, averaging more than two new associations each year.(6)

As part of this lively associational life, charities have a particular relevance to the history of Third Republic France, for voluntary organizations are central to both the prevailing interpretation of the regime's failure and a recent critique of that argument. The belief that French men and women were reluctant to join clubs and societies constitutes an essential aspect of Stanley Hoffmann's "stalemate society," a now paradigmatic description of the republic.(7) For Hoffmann, the associations that could have offered France a means of creating strong links between the citizenry and the state, links that might have engendered loyalty and raised the possibility of change within the existing system, were missing. Without them, the state remained unable to incorporate a growing working class into the union of bourgeois and peasants at the heart of the "Republican synthesis."(8) Instead, the state, the ultimate symbol of public authority, assumed the mantle of sole legitimate mediator among individual citizens.(9) Recently, however, Philip Nord has challenged this view of both associational life and French civil society.(10) Nord posits the centrality of associations in constructing a strong republican political culture in the 1860s and 1870s by stirring the rebirth of civil society during the final years of the empire and the first decade of the new republic. Despite imperial attempts either to destroy or control autonomous public life, Nord argues, associations as diverse as the Protestant Consistory and the Paris Bar nurtured civil society and saved it from state dominance. In the process, they imbued public life with republican sentiments. Far from the weak associational life Hoffmann depicts, Nord's Third Republic was a regime in which the "state pulled back from civil society, [while] citizens pushed into new spaces. . . . The Third Republic was a democratic regime that sprang from and then nurtured a resurrected civil society. It rested on solid institutional and associational foundations."(11)