FROM MENIAL SERVITUDE TO HONOURABLE POVERTY

Attitudes to poverty during the French Revolution were largely fashioned by perceptions of inequality. In advocating progressive taxation or the extension of property rights, the Jacobins assumed that transfers from the rich to the poor would make a substantial dent in poverty and narrow the distance between the two. In pooling and rationing scarce commodities, they were hoping that a different distribution system might rectify unequal consumption even without an expansion of the country's productive capacity. The ‘myth’ of the ‘artificial dearth’ (la disette factice), which was denounced by Gironde, Montagne and sansculotte militants alike, was proof that this was a land of plenty, with shares for everyone, and reflected a strong sense of what is fair and who has the right to enjoy what in a free and equal market economy.

The ancien régime differentiated between the acceptable and unacceptable faces of poverty. Pauvreté, on the one hand, encompassed a vast segment of the working population, those who lived on the brink of deprivation and whose main feature, as Olwen Hufton has shown, was vulnerability. Christian tradition had surrounded this category of long-suffering labouring poor with an aura of moral rectitude.