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The Plight of the Able-bodied Poor and the Unemployed in Urban France, 1880–1914

During the last ten years, several historians of French social policy have taken issue with the old view that France lagged behind other European nations in social-welfare provision. Clearly, during the two decades before the First World War, the Third Republic made substantial progress in the area of maternal and infant welfare and medical care. France also made progress in assisting the elderly. Between the 1890s and 1914, the ill indigent were given access at the local level to medical assistance (provision varied a great deal from region to region). The elderly indigent were given the same sort of access to a modest monthly assistance programme and injured workers benefited from an 1898 law providing for accident insurance. In addition, protective labour legislation for women was passed (this could be seen as a negative development, inimical to equal rights); working women gained access to optional maternity leave of up to four weeks, and programmes for pregnant women and large families were introduced at the national level. The departments and several major cities, Paris in particular, went beyond this, funding municipal crèches and successful maternal-welfare programmes and centres. Paris’s social service agency, for example, assisted almost half of all women who gave birth in the city in the 1890s. In this regard, certainly Paris and possibly urban France as a whole was a pioneer in Europe. In light of this, the traditional view of France as a social-policy laggard has, with good reason, been revised. The success of French social reformers in the realm of infant and maternal welfare and in the provision of relief for the elderly and ill indigent is a key component of the history of French social policy in the early Third Republic. In this article I will discuss Timothy B. Smith