Begging could be a profitable profession. A blind old man in Aix who was in the habit of begging from a door to door with a crowd of the poor refused to pray for the restoration of his sight:

Why do I need the vision I lost so long ago? It is worth more to me to be deprived of it than to have it. Blind, I can beg and none will repulse me. Rather, they hasten to attend to my needs. But if I had my sight back, it would seem wrong for me to beg alms even though I am old and weak and cannot work.

The sight of beggars gathered in squares and at crossroads was a cause of anxiety to the public power. In 806, Charlemagne took measures ‘to control the beggars who circulate around the country.’ Under Louis the Pouis a supervisor was appointed to watch the conduct of these wretches at Aix. In effect, all sorts of vagabonds mixed in with these beggars: errant monks, clerks breaking the ban, shady merchants (mangones), pseudo-penitents, half-naked and weighed down with irons ‘pretending that a penance of wandering had been imposed on them.’ Such people could become dangerous and turn to brigandage. ...Carolingian roads were not very safe. Brigandage was rampant everywhere. Outlaws hid in the forests and posted themselves at the entrances of defiles to rob travellers of the few precious objects they might be carrying. They followed the army across the country in the hopes of pillaging the baggage. The difficulties which beset the end of the reign favored brigands. A capitulary of 804 was specifically devoted to the scourge. Counts were ordered to pursue brigands taking refuge in certain privileged domains. (These were known as the lands with immunity.) For a while, brigandage seemed less threatening under Louis the Pious, but by the middle of the century it was more menacing than ever. Bandits could profit from the fraternal dissensions rising out of the partition of the Empire by seeking refuge in another kingdom. Writing to a friend about 856, Lupus of Ferrières asked him to choose a safe road and seek ‘travel companions whose number and courage would facilitate their audience of brigand groups or their repulsion necessary.’ In the same period, Charles addressed the Capitulary of Servais to the repression of banditry. Italy had the same problems. Louis II declared that brigandage flourished everywhere with the complicity of counts and royal officers. Lay and ecclesiastical aristocrats as well as the more wealthy landed proprietors often connived with brigands to divide the loot. The presence of the Normans favored the creation of such bands. Charles the Bald planned the organization of local resistance to outlaws. At the end of the century, Carloman promulgated a law against rapine at Compiègne. But how could anyone struggle when, as Hincmar says, these brigands were not only protected by the great but paid to contract themselves out as assassins?

“It's not Madness, ma'am,” replied Mr. Bumble, after a few moments of deep meditation. “It's Meat.”

“What?” exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.

“Meat, ma'am, meat,” replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. “You've over-fed him, ma'am. You've raised an artificial soul and spirit in him, ma'aim, unbecoming a person of his condition: as the board, Mrs Sowerberry, who are practical philosophers, will tell you. What have paupers to do with soul or spirit? It's quite enough that we let 'em have live bodies. If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma'am, this would never have happened.”

“Dear, dear!” ejaculated Mrs. Sowerberry, piously raising her eyes to the kitchen ceiling: “this comes of being liberal!”

“If self-help became the fundamental principle by which the validity of relief would be measured, this was not only because it constituted the supreme objective of a successful intervention in working-class life, as per the philanthropic doctrine of welfare that had been well understood since the end of the eighteenth century, if not earlier. It is also because this principle came to serve as the main criterion used to distinguish autonomous families, who were entitled to short-term household assistance, from paupers, whose lot was to be confined within the workhouses of the Victorian era. This principle would henceforth serve to distinguish poverty from pauperism, to assign each a territory and a topical remedy. The authorities had swiftly learned to differentiate the two, of course, but they had often drawn the line at the boundary between classes rather than attempting to judge the extent of the pauper’s moral depravity. Pauperism was merely the extreme form of the working classes’ deep-seated inability to either adapt to economic laws, or (as conservatives hoped) to recreate bonds of dependency. In either case, the pauperized urban masses suggested a possible future for societies. Their existence offered evidence of congenital vice among the poor to all those Malthusians searching for it, just as it suggested to liberals the need for organized, large-scaled societal intervention in favour of all the poor, with private initiative and government collaboration on this work of social reconstruction.

But from the moment when personal and civil autonomy became the criterion used to classify poverty - when the urban industrial environment ceased to be a cause of poverty and instead became the dominant context for the manifestation of dependency - it became possible to image society as composed of two separate, coexisting worlds: that of ‘natural poverty’ the structural constraint inflecting the trajectory of all workers and peasants, and that of pauperism, an abject, immoral ghetto inhabited by those members of society who had failed the test of autonomy. Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez explained this separation, in 1853, as follows:

That which makes modern pauperism a blot on society, that which makes it frightening and dangerous, is its ordinary alliance with a state of mindlessness and depravity in the mass of individuals, an all-too natural effect of their agglomeration and their homogeneity. Instead of being disseminated throughout the population of a region, indigents form a separate ‘population unto themselves’; instead of a localized infection found in all station of society, they form a separate class, a whole body infirm...to destroy moral poverty would be the true means of driving physical poverty back within its normal bounds, and this is, in truth, all one may hope to obtain by the most energetic and continuous action of the most enlightened charity. When we have reached that point, we will have beaten pauperism; there will remain only a small sum of accidental misery, which would always be an evil, no doubt but would no longer constitute a scourge. There would still be plenty of individual suffering, many miserable lives; but society’s progress would no longer be halted, its economic development disrupted, its vital principle attacked by the scourge of collective poverty, which, by causing whole categories of workers to fall into savagery, gathers little by little, around the same hearths where civilization is being most actively developed, a people foreign to any civilization.

Two fundamental corollaries flow from this separation:

1. On the one hand, the isolation of pauperism as an easily discernible social ill, as a separate world populated by failed citizens, allows for the ‘rehabilitation’ of ordinary poverty as a normal or even legitimate social phenomenon. Poverty is the habitual condition of the working classes and constitutes a characteristic of their environment. It becomes unacceptable only when it reaches a degree of intensity that threatens the survival of the honest family. Poverty is an essentially human condition that renders human beings more vulnerable to life’s unfortunate circumstances. The discourse of liberalism had a last learned to reconcile progress with poverty. Progress was no longer the emergence of a free people from the Egypt of ancestral poverty and arbitrariness. Instead it had become the sum of small individual victories over adversity: poverty was at once the precondition, the environment, and the fertile soil in which the possibility of a better life for all could take root.

Thus, the kind of poverty literally constituted the condition for the existence of civil society. It was not a political issue, or even really a social problem. Fundamentally, it derived from the inherent dynamics of civil society and was to be confined thereto. This explains why private charity reigned supreme in the economy of welfare. Not only because state charity was clumsy and dangerous, a pretext for demands formulated in terms of rights, but quite simply and more fundamentally because ‘normal’ poverty, as a general rule, demands relief only in its accidental manifestations, on the surface of civil society. Honest workers and toiling peasants were members of the autonomous poor struggling to survive and, if possible, thrive in a hard world. The will was their driving force, the aspiration to a better life their sustenance. If an accident such as illness or temporary unemployment were to befall them, charity was there to fill the gap. However, an accident is but is nature unforeseeable, unique, circumstantial. Poverty, like accidents in general, was thus the concern of those most able to intervene at the right place and time - that is, neighbours, the community, or the local relief organization (itself staffed by neighbours). Private charity, whatever its forms - whether secular or religious, ethnically based or municipal, outdoor or indoor, occasional or long-term, and whether it dispensed goods or services - was the ineluctable horizon of this ‘normal’ poverty.

2. On the other hand, the mass of pauperized individuals was excluded from the ordinary poverty that continued, for the time being, to bedevil the still-imperfect liberal societies. This mass of people was the precise equivalent of the more or less irretrievable criminals found in the liberal prisons. Political economy, so loquacious on the conditions of production and consumption, professed its powerlessness in the face of this marginal population, which had to be recorded as a liability on the balance sheet of progress, as noted by  Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez in 1853:

On the question of pauperism, political economy affords little but negative insights. It rejects state intervention as always impotent and often dangerous; it likewise rejects any system of social organization founded on the negation of property or the family, or on the right to work, as promising nothing but universal misery and societal dissolution. But the full exposition of these economic doctrines, and the refutation of errors and utopias...in no way contain the solution to our problem. They teach us only that it remains unresolved, and prevent us from taking red herrings for solutions.

But if pauperism has no solution, at least in the short term it nonetheless demands a response. If it is not to be cured, it can be perhaps at least contained. As in the case of criminals, confinement begins to take on the hues of a segregation procedure in which the ideal of reform gives way to prophylactic isolation. Here again, the Foucauldian notion of disciplinary treatment is of no use in grasping the meaning of the institutions of confinement in the economy of relief. Workhouses were not instruments of disciplinary knowledge. The new hub and spokes structures were not panopticons and in their regimes disciplinary techniques played a blind, repressive role. Generally, official strategy did not positively aim to reform and remake individual paupers. The aim was negatively to repress pauperism by making indoor relief thoroughly unattractive and making outdoor relief unobtainable for able-bodied men.

Unlike the charitable aid dispensed by the private sector, which was sensitive to the specificities of each case, the confinement of ‘degraded’ elements of the working classes was a systematic procedure based on the notion that anyone who willingly applied for and submitted to it must surely be unable to meet his own needs. This was the primary, fundamental criterion making the workhouse, the house of industry, or the beggar’s prison, more an instrument of discrimination than a place of refuge or assistance. A general distinction among those interned was established on the basis of the treatment accorded them, between the obligate dependency of abandoned children, the infirm, the elderly, or the insane, on the one hand, and the morally condemnable dependency of unemployed but able adults, on the other. But the particular circumstances of dependency were ultimately secondary to the facts of desperation and self-selection that gave rise to the institutionalization of extreme poverty. 

Moreover, despite the extreme discourse of the hard-liners of political economy, the validity of state intervention in this area was seldom challenged. A population without any great hope for reform, dangerous to the mass of honest citizens, and burdensome to administer had to be excluded, and appeals for state intervention to accomplish this were inevitable, if only for lack of something better - as Lambert stated in 1873:

The very existence of a poor law, the very fact that there does exist a provision for all who cannot provide for themselves, is a direct incentive to pauperism, and to the neglect of social ties...Do not think that I wish to say hard things against it. I say that for the time being it is the best, the only method of dealing with a great evil...I look forward to a time when we shall return to the original principle of the poor law, and consider poverty a crime.

Lambert makes it clear that the ‘poverty’ at issue here is that of pauperism, that form of extreme poverty in which so many people perpetually subsist. The poverty of paupers is a social crime of sorts, a violation of the conditions of life in society. It may be largely set down to a lack of foresight an inability to provide for one’s dependents, an unfitness for stable employment. It is a crime by omission, and the elites have learned to distinguish it from ‘true’ crime of the deliberate, or premeditated variety, yet it still dictates confinement for the individuals in question. Whether managed by the public authorities or otherwise, the institutions in which paupers were confined gave them special visibility by virtue of their physical segregation from ordinary poverty. It now became possible, and indeed tempting, to ascribe specific characteristics, or even physical or psychological idiosyncrasies, to this population - to categorize paupers as ‘defective, dependent, and delinquent’ in Wines’ 1888 words. The people living in prisons, houses of industry, asylums, and even hospitals became symptomatic of a sui generis social pathology on the basis of which they could be isolated from all forms of solidarity and marked as counterexamples of social normality. In this way, the problem they represented could be reduced to a localized condition of an otherwise fundamentally healthy social body.” - Jean-Marie Fecteau, The Pauper’s Freedom. Translated by Peter Feldstein. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2017. French edition 2004. pp.176-181 

La bienfaisance publique tourne dans un cercle vicieux dont il lui est impossible de sortir: elle crée une attente qu'elle ne pourra pas satisfaire ; puis elle s'efforce de la rendre illusoire pour di minuer le fardeau dont elle s'est témérairement chargée.”