ABSTRACT
The ancien régime deployed active public interventions in the social realm: these included policies that struggled against begging and vagabondage, royal supports for the traditional organization of work, initiatives led by royal power to create asylums, public hospitals, “charity workshops,” poorhouses, and so on. In England, these public initiatives allowed the construction of a virtual system of relief sustained by a mandatory tax. Even in England, the political scene during the first third of the nineteenth century is animated by a great debate for or against the abolition of the “poor laws,” that is to say, “legal charity,” which in principle guarantees a minimum income to all indigents. And just when, motivated by the critique of the economists, Malthus first and foremost, those parties in favor of abolishing these laws appeared poised to win out, it was in fact a new public system of relief that was put in place by the reformist legislation of 1834. This enacted a very strong system, centered on the workhouse—that is to say, on the forced work by the poor under what were often inhumane conditions. But it was a national, centralized system, which appeared homogenous, and which was to be financed by public funds. 1
