"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

While Nord's insightful analysis brings new vigor to the study of public life and civic culture in nineteenth-century France, he leaves much of associational life during the Third Republic unexamined. His study ends as the fledgling regime achieved more secure footing. Moreover, his argument overemphasizes the state's retreat from civil society; freedom of association became law only in 1901. A significant aspect of the history of associational life, the state, and civil society in Third Republic France thus remains unclear: the interaction of associations and the state. This essay explores the world of Bordelais charities between 1870 and 1914 as a means of assessing that relationship. Charities in particular, although not organized interest groups, reveal much about civil society and the state. They unite people for a very public common purpose and frequently place them into direct contact with public authority. As the first section demonstrates, this was especially true in Third Republic Bordeaux and throughout urban France, where charities represented one half of a partnership with public assistance. This alliance arose from an interdependent relationship between public officials, who relied upon charities for public services, and charities, which depended upon the state for authorization and the financial rewards it offered. The basis and operation of this interdependence is the object of the analysis that follows, an examination that separates the interaction of public officials and benefactors into three categories: state authorization and legal status, which highlight the legal context of cooperation; the functions charities performed, which reveal the very real sense of public obligation that motivated charitable activity; and the financial ties between charities and the state, which emphasize the public recognition of the vital part private charities played in Bordelais social welfare. The partnership of public assistance and private charity evident in this discussion depicts a system of poor relief peopled with an activist elite who welcomed cooperation with the state, a portrait that defies traditional characterizations of French social welfare, the state, and civil society. The final section applies these lessons to broader interpretations of Third Republic France, demonstrating the limitations of those that over-emphasize the Jacobin state as the overlord of a weak civil society while tempering those that underestimate the role of the state in shaping civic activity and culture.

Poor Relief in Urban France

For the most part, scholars of French social welfare have overlooked the dynamic nature of urban charity during the late nineteenth century because their studies have been rooted in the search for the legislative and institutional trappings of the modern welfare state.(12) The history of poor relief, those programs devised to aid all needy French men and women, has fallen by the wayside - the programs judged inefficient and anachronistic remnants of the early modern period.(13) Instead, historians have focused primarily on only two issues: the failure of social insurance schemes and, more recently, French innovation in maternal and pronatal welfare.(14) Consequently, they have perpetuated the general perception that the French did little to assist their less fortunate compatriots. Even the maternal and pronatal programs of recent attention appear as exceptions in a persistently backward French nation.