Poor Relief and Medical Assistance in 18th and 19th Century Paris

In the period before 1945, the state is better characterised as strong in the abstract but in practice only cautiously interventionist in the social and economic realms. Certain government services, including public health, poor relief and the provision of health care, were not only less well-developed than in several neighbouring European countries, but surprisingly decentralised. The city of Paris will be the principal, but not the exclusive, concern; it is not possible to write about Paris without writing to some extent about France. Paris was also the seat of the most important of the parlements, so-called sovereign courts with important administrative and political, as well as judicial, powers. In ancien regime France, as elsewhere in early modern Europe, poor relief and medical assistance were conflated, and the hospital had an ambiguous role – primarily as a shelter for the needy, but with some limited therapeutic functions.