This article discusses the critical role that social provisioning played in forming and maintaining communities across the longue durée of European history. Based on evidence from urban Europe in particular, the study suggests the importance of the early creation of a sphere of civil society here. Civil society was marked by the presence of both voluntary and civic associations, many of them designed for the care of the “honorable” or “house” poor. Although filled with the activities of “private” citizens, civil society was an eminently public sphere. It provided men and, more importantly, women with opportunities to extend their lives beyond the domestic to participate in organized associational life. Two types of community, based on confessional and civic affiliation, were especially important in shaping early modern societies and the poor relief organizations that helped to bind them together.The study argues that these types of community persisted well beyond the early modern period, leaving a legacy of community-building patterns and practices of social provisioning that helped to define the “imagined communities” of modern nations and their welfare states.
Katherine A. Lynch, Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, 1200-1800: The Urban Foundations of Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
2.
Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (Hassocks : Harvester Press, 1979); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan ( New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1994 ).
3.
The classic text remains Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation, ed. and trans. H. C. Erik Middlefort and Mark U. Edwards, Jr. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972). On confraternities’ relation to civic religion, see Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and the same author’s Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
4.
For discussions of the poor’s multiple "strategies" for survival see Martin Dinges, "Self-Help and Reciprocity in Parish Assistance: Bordeaux in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in Peregrine Horden and Richard Smith, eds., The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions, and the Provision of Welfare since Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 111-25; Jütte, Poverty and Deviance, 83-99; and the citations in Marco H. D. van Leeuwen, "Logic of Charity: Poor Relief in Preindustrial Europe," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24, 4 (1994): 589-613.
5.
Abram de Swaan, In Care of the State: Health Care, Education and Welfare in Europe and the USA in the Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), especially 1-51.
6.
See, for example, Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (London, 1768).
7.
Lynch, Individuals, 18-19; Marx’s critique is developed in "On the Jewish Question," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1972), 33-36.
8.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA.: Polity Press, 1989).
9.
Habermas uses the term "town" in a metaphorical as well as a literal sense, but he identifies the bourgeois public sphere’s development as occurring in cities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the role of urban culture in the development of the bourgeois public sphere, see also Geoff Eley, "Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century," in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1992), 291.
10.
For a discussion of how Habermas’s notion of private individuals differed from classical models, see Keith Michael Baker, "Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France," in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 182, 187.
11.
Dena Goodman , "Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime,"History and Theory31 (1992): 6-7, notes the fact that Habermas considers civil society as "the public face of the private realm." Many of the activities that helped constitute Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere occurred in quite public places such as cafés or theaters. See Margaret C. Jacob, "The Enlightenment Redefined: The Formation of Modern Civil Society," Social Research 58 (Summer, 1991): 478.
12.
Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 83-156.
13.
Lynch, Individuals, 68-102.
14.
Michael Anderson , Family Life in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 136-61.
15.
Peter Laslett , "Family, Kinship and Collectivity as Systems of Support in Pre-Industrial Europe: A Consideration of the ‘Nuclear-Hardship’ Hypothesis," Continuity and Change 3 (1988): 153-75.
16.
On women’s employment in public services, see in this issue Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, "Professionalization of Public Service: Civil Servants in Dordrecht, 1550-1795," Journal of Urban History (2010), and Manon van der Heijden and Ariadne Schmidt, "For the Benefit of All? Women’s Work in Public Services in Early Modern Dutch Towns," Journal of Urban History (2010).
17.
Anne E. McCants, Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 147-50.
18.
McCants, Civic Charity, 33. The author suggests that in earlier times, extended families may have been more willing to take in dependent children.
19.
McCants, Civic Charity, 19.
20.
McCants, Civic Charity, 25-26, notes also that by 1634, these fees totaled approximately 10 guilders for the Burgerweeshuis. Later in the century, the growth of a dependent population of children required the establishment of another less restrictive institution for the poor. New citizens routinely paid 22 guilders to it.
21.
John Henderson , Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1994), 257-71.
22.
Lynch, Individuals, 123-31.
23.
Sandra Cavallo, Charity and Power in Early Modern Italy: Benefactors and Their Motives in Turin, 1541-1789 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
24.
Cavallo, Charity, 85.
25.
Cavallo, Charity, 221, notes: "Now . . . richer relations, or those without direct descendants increasingly felt the need to provide for the poorer branches of their families, creating permanent trusts for a whole variety of purposes."
26.
Cavallo, Charity, 223-4.
27.
Cavallo, Charity, 241, shows how well the architecture and placement of the eighteenth-century workhouse signaled the poor’s isolation from the urban community. Whereas recipients of indoor relief for the shamefaced poor were lodged in Baroque palazzi, newer institutions for the vagrant poor, consisting of drab workhouses, were now located outside the city’s walls.
28.
On the important historical interdependence of urban governance and poor relief administration, see in this issue Mary Lindemann, "Poor Relief, Medical Care, and Voluntarism in Eighteenth-Century Hamburg," Journal of Urban History (2010).
29.
On the question of social capital, including the work of Robert Putnam, see Lynch, Individuals, 219-20.
30.
Jason Kaufman, For the Common Good? American Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), passim.
31.
For a synthesis of the main elements of the "social control" approach, see Van Leeuwen, "Logic."
32.
Marx’s famous comments on this are to be found in "The German Ideology" and those of Marx and Engels in "Manifesto of the Communist Party," in The Marx-Engels Reader, 161, 475.
33.
Susan Gal , "A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction ," in Joan W. Scott and Debra Kates, eds., Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 261-77. The problem of the inequities built into current French welfare state entitlements is explored in Timothy B. Smith, France in Crisis: Welfare, Inequality, and Globalization since 1980 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2004 ), especially chaps. 5-7. See also Katherine A. Lynch, "The Family and the History of Public Life," Journal of Interdisciplinary History24 (Spring 1994): 665-84.
34.
Lynch, Individuals, 181-82.
35.
See, most recently, Christine Adams, "Constructing Mothers and Families: The Society for Maternal Charity of Bordeaux, 1805-1860," French Historical Studies 22 (1999): 65-86.
36.
Catherine Duprat, "Pour l’Amour de l’Humanité"; Le temps des philanthropes: La philanthropie parisienne des Lumières à la monarchie de Juillet (Paris: C.T.H.S, 1993), 127, 145.
37.
The classic work is Alan Forrest, The French Revolution and the Poor ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981).
38.
On this issue, see most recently, Kimberly Morgan, Working Mothers and the Welfare State: Religion and the Politics of Work-Family Policies in Western Europe and the United States (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
39.
The bibliography here is immense. Some titles of note include: Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel , eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993); Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1814-1945 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1993 ); George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Yannick Marec, Bienfaisance communale et protection sociale à Rouen, 1796-1927: Expériences locales et liaisons nationales, 2 vols. (Paris: La Documentation Française/Association pour l’étude de l’histoire de la Sécurite sociale, 2002).
