the considerable *métissage* between charity and solidarism⁷ can only be understood through the lens of mutual acceptance and increasing cooperation between public and private welfare over a period of decades.

It is important to remember that this mutual construction and growth between public and private welfare were not simply a product of the crisis of the 1970s–1980s, but has deeper roots. At first, however, this relationship was not explicitly expressed and was even by nature inadmissible. Indeed, the 1880s–1910s, the first phase, saw the prevailing idea of a conflict between Church and State, religion and secular Republic, charity and solidarism. Yet, it is also during this period that the foundations for this relationship were laid; like in the United Kingdom, the early nineteenth century saw a multiplication of private actions in response to the growing ‘social question’ in a context of industrialisation and urbanisation. The local councils (*municipalités*) born out of the Third Republic then attempted to vie with private aid, in a context of rising secularism and competition with religious structures, by taking back control of the municipal charity offices (*bureaux de bienfaisance*) and by developing a number of social initiatives for the elderly, the disabled, the temporarily unemployed, etc. Finally, similarly to the chronology of the United Kingdom, the State began to intervene in the 1890s: with the 15 July 1893 law guaranteeing free medical assistance for those ‘deprived of resources’, the 26 July 1904 law on children in care, the 14 July 1905 law on ‘obligatory aid for the elderly, disabled and incurable’ and the June and July 1913 law in favour of expecting mothers and large families. Weakened by these new developments and competing on their own terrain, the charities did not however disappear because the legal fabric remained in fact extremely patchy and slow to implement, because the aid allocated was small and poorly adjusted and because there still remained significant need. Thus, private welfare remained active both filling the gaps and as a complement to public measures.

The two world wars are often described as veritable laboratories for the social healthcare sector.⁸ In the case of France however, these two important events seem more to have been a sort of parentheses for the welfare sector. During the First World War, the majority of charity aid was just ticking over, or even ground to a halt, because of the draft and because no important or durable welfare measure ended up being put in place. As for the Second World War, the welfare system implemented by the Vichy regime did not survive. The second important era of mutual growth in France can therefore be more found concentrated between the Liberation of Paris and the late 1950s. Indeed, far from putting an end to social assistance, as one might expect, a social insurance approach (with the social security as its crowning jewel) developed in parallel to a new generation of large-scale (and often Catholic)⁹ charity actions on the one hand and the fresh expansion of measures and aid budgets on the other.¹⁰ After all, the elderly, immigrant workers, successive generations of the ‘fourth-world’ poor and the physically and mentally handicapped in particular still faced challenging living conditions.
However, during this period, the associations fighting poverty and precarity remained poorly subsidised, suggesting that their development was more in parallel to the welfare state than intertwined with it.

The 1970s–2000, which form the heart of this chapter, should thus be read as the *third* great period of expansion of French welfare. A few figures provide us with a telling picture: for a poverty rate of 60% of the median revenue, subject to variation but relatively stable over the long term (14.2% of the population was living under the poverty line in 1979, 14.1% in 2010 and 14.1% in 2017¹¹), the number of welfare beneficiaries and the sums allocated to welfare in proportion to GDP doubled overall: in 2015, there were 4.15 million beneficiaries of various basic allowances compared to 1.9 million in 1975. In other words, 6.2% of the population received some form of welfare aid in 2015, compared to 3.6% in 1975, and 1.3% of GDP was spent on welfare compared to 0.6% in 1975. Alongside this, the growth of associative aid has been just as spectacular: since the 1990s, the budgets of the largest organisations have expanded to tens of thousands of euros and a portfolio of donors in the thousands.

What then is the chronology of this final phase of double inflation in public and private welfare action, how can it be explained and what forms did it take? What kind of relationships did these two actors form? Was this period unprecedented, taken against the ones that came before it? What impacts (or lack thereof) did this have on the redefinition of welfare? Is it possible to speak of a uniquely French model? To answer these questions, this study draws on a number of historical studies of associations – some already published (about *Emmais* and the Secours populaire [French Popular Relief], but also protestant aid), but mostly still being written (about the homeless shelter *Le Foyer Notre-Dame des sans-abri* in Lyon¹² and the association ATD Fourth World¹³) – as well as the analysis of national reports, laws and measures undertaken by the public authorities over a period running between the 1970s and today.

If this period is relatively uniform both in terms of the economic and social hardships that characterise it and the renewed mutual growth between public and private welfare, it can nevertheless be divided up into two principal phases, shaped by two different rationales, and these form the two sections of this chapter. Between the late 1970s and 1988, mutual growth was spurred by the urgent need for new welfare safety nets, roping in public authorities and associations alike – even if, ultimately, such efforts were unable to stem the rising unemployment and job instability that marked this period. Since 1988, however, the need was felt for a more curative system to fill the gaps in welfare aid, based on employment schemes’ [*insertion*] and labour laws – accompanied, paradoxically, by the new (and impressive) growth of emergency aid.

## 1970s–1987: an urgent need for new welfare safety nets

After a quarter of a century of sustained economic growth and low unemployment and the progressive disappearance of the housing crisis and of
poverty amongst the elderly ('les Trente glorieuses'¹⁴ [the Glorious Thirty] was coined to describe this period, although historians have since sought to nuance the term¹⁵), the trend reversed progressively in France from the very end of the 1960s. Ten years later, the social emergency had become strikingly visible, sparking renewed activity from both the public authorities and associations.

*The slow reframing of a 'public issue'¹⁶*

The great historical paradox is that initial reactions to the economic and social crisis that hit the West in the 1970s sought to respond to poverty issues of the 'Golden Thirty', even while the West was slipping – unbeknownst to it – into the 'Pitiful Thirty'.¹⁷

Indeed, in December 1972, the Commission of the European Communities signed a contract with an important French association, ATD Fourth World, to determine 'a methodology for identifying and quantifying Fourth World households' in Europe. Founded in 1956 by a priest, Joseph Wresinski, in the heart of the Noisy-le-Grand slum, and after splitting fromEMAÜS, ATD has since 1964 been chaired by the niece of General de Gaulle, Geneviève Anthonioz de Gaulle, with the Dutch diplomat Alwine de Vos van Steenwijk holding an equally central role – the latter having dedicated much of his time, skills and network to the association since the 1960s. ATD found two invaluable allies at the Commission of the European Communities: Robert Pendville (member of the Directorate-General for Information, which would gradually turn its services into an 'information source on the fourth world') and Léo Crijns (Director of the Directorate-General for Social Affairs, which would later set up the pilot program against poverty).¹⁸ In 1975, still at the initiative of ATD, the study took a new turn, with the launch in Europe of a first program of 20 pilot projects spanning several years and destined to fund and develop innovative action for fighting poverty. If the Commission of the European Communities proved in practice to be far ahead regarding a still barely visible economic and social deterioration – with new swathes of European programs funded from 1980 – it was in fact far behind the United States, which had already begun a 'war against poverty' over ten years previously.¹⁹

Indeed, an increasing number of national alerts were being sounded. In France, the first alarm-bells went off in the mid-1960s, when ATD Fourth World published several studies on the persistence of widespread poverty in the heart of prosperous societies.²⁰ At the same time, Paul-Marie de la Gorce published *La France pauvre* (1965) [France in Poverty]. This was followed by the decision to choose this subject as the theme for the 1970 edition of the yearly very Christian event 'Semaines sociales'²¹ and by René Lenoir's highly commented publications²² (he became State Secretary of Social Affairs that same year) as well as those of Lionel Stoléru²³ (economist and councillor to the President of the Republic Valéry Giscard d'Estaing). Until the late 1970s,
however, in France and in Belgium,²⁴ poverty was still a subject that escaped large-scale statistical studies.²⁵

Aside from the deteriorating economic climate, the evolution of interpretative approaches in sociopolitics contributed to a growing awareness of the issue. Indeed, it was the decline of Marxist analyses (in terms of exploitation, domination and the class struggle) that brought a renewal in social concepts starting in the 1950s–1960s, making way for analyses in terms of ‘marginalism’, ‘asociality’ and ‘social maladjustment’ that called for a ‘readaptive’ approach to social aid. These analyses were in turn rejected by the post-1968 movement and the works of Michel Foucault, which stigmatised the ‘social control’ of the most needy. Finally, in the 1980s, media attention was given to the ‘nouveau poor’, a concept presented less under moral than in strictly economic terms.

It is in this triple context (of a growing awareness in Europe, of evolutions in interpretative approaches and of economic deterioration) that the Economic and Social Council (ESC)²⁶ – a non-decision-making assembly which nevertheless had a political advisory role – was the first public authority in France to sit down and address the question and to attempt a ‘critical review of all measures undertaken or proposed to eradicate manifestations of poverty’.²⁷ Henri Péquignot,²⁸ medical professor and member of the ESC, was entrusted in December 1974 with writing the report, and it was adopted in September 1978. No official statement or program, however, was adopted by the government, due to a lack of consensus within the ESC and the refusal to emit recommendations on a question considered very (too) ‘political’. The absence of charity association representatives in this assembly doubtless also had a negative impact on analysis; and indeed, pushed by ATD Fourth World, President Giscard d’Estaing would remedy this situation the following year, in 1979, by nominating the president and founder of the association, Father Wresinski, into the ESC. Thus, for the first time, an associative actor involved in the fight against poverty joined the assembly.

After the Commission of the European Communities, then the ESC, it was the turn of the French government to rally around with the commissioning of several reports, at the turn of the 1970s–1980s. The first of these, entrusted to Councillor of State Gabriel Oheix, was submitted in March 1981; the report, which identified a number of shortcomings in social protection safety nets, also put forward ‘sixty proposals’.²⁹ The second, requested of France (and of each of the member states) by the Commission of the European Communities, was entrusted to an association, the Fondation pour la recherche sociale [The Social Research Foundation]³⁰, entitled ‘Poverty and the fight against poverty’ [‘La pauvreté et la lutte contre la pauvreté’], it provided a descriptive rather than a prescriptive approach to public and private welfare. The election of the Socialist François Mitterrand as President and the shift of the political majority quickly buried these reports in favour of others of a more targeted nature – notably, from September 1981 that of the continuing/
further education specialist Bertrand Schwartz on youth professional and employment schemes.

## A 'tidal wave of poverty'

The victory of the left coincided with a brutal exacerbation of economic woes, observed by the French charitable associations in the field. In the different Emmaüs communities (financially independent structures centred around employment through recycling activities), which provided lodgings and work for people facing serious social hardship,³¹ this was felt just before the elections, in 1980: for the first time, the journeymen who left for the wine harvest were unable to find employment upon their return. The Catholic Relief, the principal Catholic charity organisation in France, having recorded a rise in numbers at reception centres just after the elections, in 1982, decided to publish an annual statistical report. Its communist homologue the Popular Relief (which since had become depoliticised) was also overwhelmed by a flood of demands:

> I think in some ways we were taken off guard.... The Popular Relief expanded suddenly, but why did it happen? Because people needed the Popular Relief. Not because there was a particular plan for us to expand, but because there was such great need that we had to help. We just had to! A lady walks in and says: 'I don't have nappies for my kid, I don't have anything to feed him'; and so we have to set up something for sourcing nappies and sourcing milk, we had to help. I think there was something pushing us, something that said: 'We can't just send people away with empty hands'. That was the basic idea, really. Impossible? We still had to try.... And then we had to make do; we had to find people, and find the cash.³²

At a more local level, at the Foyer Notre-Dame des Sans-Abri (FNDSA) in Lyon (the principal emergency lodging structure in the county), the change was felt in 1984: some evenings more than 250 people were piled together, on folding beds and mattresses hastily laid in the corridors, and the homeless stayed longer and longer: from 12 nights on average in 1969, their stays increased to 17 in 1981, then 28 in 1987. Like in the Emmaüs communities, for lack of a better solution, people were staying longer and longer, where before there had been a greater turnover.

Under this quantitative increase in demand, a general impression of 'drowning' was felt by the associations: in 1984, the FNDSA described a 'flood of the homeless' of 'upecedented proportions', while the Popular Relief spoke of a 'tidal wave of poverty'. Qualitatively speaking, however, it was also the very nature of poverty that had changed, resuscitating two recurring historic figures: the 'nouveau poor' and the homeless. A re-evaluation of
analyses and field responses was thus felt to be necessary: since this period (and still today), the principal poor are now the unemployed, single-parent families (a large majority of them women), young people excluded from a contracting job market, over-50s made redundant for economic reasons and who feed the expanding figures of long-term unemployment and people of immigrant origin (first and second generations). The poor was no longer made up of the non-working (the elderly, the handicapped, etc.), as in the previous period, but of the active heart of society.

A first decisive contribution by the government did not come until 1983, just before the neoliberal turning-point of 'austerity'. However, it only implied indirect involvement by the public authorities: in reality, plans for the 'fight against poverty and precarity' consisted in allocating large subsidies to the principal charity associations, dedicated to emergency aid (creating emergency centres, assistance for the unemployed without benefits, etc.).³³ This aid would be renewed annually throughout the 1980s. The associations were required to comply to predefined priority actions; however, they remained free to act as they wished on the ground – to the extent that ATD Fourth World, a strong critic of emergency policies that resolved none of the underlying issues, used them for a radically different objective: the local experimentation of a minimum guaranteed revenue.

This decision to delegate the issue to the associations, which seems improbable considering a century of history until then dominated by conflict and then compartmentalisation, was facilitated by the increasing proximity between association 'advocates' defending the 'cause of the poor' and 'elites of the Social State'.³⁴ This kind of multi-positioning was not new: in the nineteenth century, the well-to-do (*notables*) had been, in a secular sense, philanthropists (*hommes d'oeuvres*), through Christian charity, but also through networks of power, coopting and the gated élite.³⁵ However, now it touched the highest echelons of the Social State, with several high-ranking officials passing through a 'revolving door'³⁶ between public and private welfare. Thus, there is the case of François Bloch-Lainé, Treasurer (1947) and then Director of the investment arm of the French State, la Caisse des dépôts et consignations (1952–1967), who upon his retirement became President of the largest federation of health and social associations in France, UNIOPSS.³⁷ Or of René Lenoir, Director-General of Social Action at the Ministry of Public Health and Social Security (1970–1974), Minister of Social Affairs (1974–1978) but also administrator of an independent philanthropic network founded by the state in 1969, la Fondation de France (1971–1974) and a fervent defender of charity and volunteer associations, who on his retirement replaced François Bloch-Lainé as President of UNIOPSS (1992–1998). There is also Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, niece of General de Gaulle (the latter was French President from 1958 to 1969) and daughter of a senior official: from 1959, she left the Ministry of Culture and dedicated herself to ATD Fourth World, which she chaired from 1964 to 1998.
The porosity between the associations and political circles created by the following generation was no longer diachronic, but synchronic. For example, Jean-Michel Belorgey, senior official, Socialist deputy from 1981 to 1993 and one of the most influential figures in the Assembly on the Revenu minimum d'insertion (RMI) law ('minimum income', cf. *infra*), was involved in parallel in a number of associative causes from the cause against homophobic and anti-immigrant discrimination to the fight against poverty; he chaired, in particular, the French National Housing Union for Young Workers [Union nationale des foyers de jeunes travailleurs] (1976-1981) and was member of the Central Committee for the Human Rights League. Belorgey subsequently chaired the French Social Action Fund for Immigrant Workers and their Families [Fonds d'action sociale pour les travailleurs immigrés et leurs familles] (1993-1996), then in the late 2000s joined the board of directors of ATD Fourth World.

***The burgeoning of local emergency aid***

The financial windfall from the 'poverty and precarity plans' that the associations began to receive in 1983-1984, together with a civil desire to respond to the social deprivation and to the significant media coverage of it, led to a triple expansion of the private sector: the growth of the most dynamic associations (Catholic Relief, Popular Relief, Emmaüs, etc.), a new breath of life for declining structures (Protestant Mutual Aid [Entraides protestantes], The Protestant Welfare Centre [Centre d'action sociale protestant], the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Movement, etc.) and the creation of new organisations. In 1984, food banks based on the American model were also founded - by Catholic Relief, Emmaüs, the Federation of Protestant Mutual Aid and the Salvation Army. The following year, the famous comedian Coluche founded another food distribution association, the Restaurants du cœur [Restaurants of the Heart], which grew exponentially and quickly became a leading association, thanks to significant media attention and support from the world of showbiz. There was also a medical response to the emergency: the medical consultations provided at the Jobseeker's Centre in Paris led in 1985 to the birth of the association Remede, and in 1986, the humanitarian organisation Doctors of the World also opened a health centre in France for the most needy, followed by another large emergency humanitarian organisation, Doctors Without Borders, the following year. In terms of housing, a swath of new social rehabilitation and emergency homeless shelters opened in permanent or temporary centres (by re-appropriating abandoned hospital wings, empty offices, etc.).

Local councils also began setting up emergency aid response. In Lyon, for example, a series of initiatives were approved as early as 1981: the creation of a housing benefit fund, the negotiation of a partnership with the French energy company EDF to avoid electricity cuts in case of unpaid bills, the distribution of food vouchers valid in municipal canteens for unemployed under-25s, etc.
Faced with a fresh wave of economic and social deterioration, a second set of measures was implemented in 1986: the creation of a 'subsistence fund' for the most needy, the allocation of meal vouchers for the unemployed without benefits, logistical and financial support for State food distribution, increased aid for rent payment, the financing of transportation tickets for jobseekers, aid to prevent homelessness and for paying heating, gas, water and electricity bills.³⁸

This period thus saw the mobilisation both of the public powers, who demonstrated a new and strong support for associations, and of private initiatives, which caught the public financial windfall while at the same time resorting massively to private donations and volunteering. While, during the two previous phases, these two worlds remained fairly autonomous, as much financially as practically, the increasingly porous nature of their relationships meant that they became more and more interdependent. In this sense, the field of social aid was simply conforming to a pre-existing model that had already been operational for the last few decades in the field of social health-care³⁹: from this point on, the State made associations fighting against poverty, the official operators of its social policies.

**An era of employment schemes and labour laws?
(since 1988)**

The palliative measures introduced in the early 1980s had officially been taken in response to the direness of the situation, but in expectation of more preventative, curative and/or universalising policies. The temporary 'break' in reforms imposed in 1983 and then the change in government majority in 1986 slowed their implementation. However, with the left once again in government, 1988 saw a return to these policies with the adoption of the RMI (or Minimum Income Support).

**'Insertion', the new public policy watchword**

The idea of a minimum revenue was not a new one: it already existed in Denmark (1933), in the United Kingdom (1948), in the Federal Republic of Germany (1961), in Holland (1963), in Belgium (1974) and in Ireland (1977). The measure was for the most part promoted by the Socialist left⁴⁰ and the associations – with once again at its head ATD Fourth World, notably via the Wresinski report for the French ESC ('Chronic Poverty and Lack of Basic Security', February 1987), which had a strong reception in France and abroad. More broadly, critical of a patronising approach to aid, the report called for the development of a true policy on labour law and employment.⁴¹

If, for more than a century, France had refused to lay down a 'general principle for the right to aid for all of those in need',⁴² the RMI can be seen as a definitive turning point. The RMI established a kind of 'right to income',⁴³ non-depreciative and unlimited, intended to cover millions of unemployed
people who without it would have had no benefits at all. Legally abolishing
the secular dichotomy between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ poor, it implicitly
confirmed the democratic acknowledgement, recognised (anew) since the
late nineteenth century,⁴⁴ that modern unemployment is overwhelmingly
not a choice but a condition. Its success was instantaneous: in 1989, almost
400,000 people received the RMI, 600,000 in 1991, 800,000 in 1993, then
almost a million in 1996. In 2008, the RMI was replaced by the Revenu
de solidarité active (RSA), which in 2014 was allocated to 2.3 million ben-
eficiaries. In 2015, a new reform⁴⁵ instated the Prime d’activité (a salary
supplement for low-income workers) which in June 2017 saw 2.57 million
households as beneficiaries.

The RMI also opened the door to a proliferation in basic allowances of laws and measures seeking to achieve universal rights. And the 1990s saw the passing of several major laws: the Besson law on the right to housing (1990), the decriminalisation of vagrancy and begging (1992, effective in the 1994 New Penal Code), the law against social exclusion (1998), the creation of Universal Health Coverage (1999, guaranteeing healthcare and reimbursement for anyone permanently settled in France not covered by an obligatory Health Insurance scheme), then of State Medical Aid (2000, healthcare reimbursement for illegal immigrants on French soil). One could add to this list a multitude of local and employment aid policies.

The 2000s were just as busy, with no less than ten reforms of the different
basic allowances between 2000 and 2015, the 2002-2 law reform on social
and healthcare aid, or the 2007 vote on the enforceable right to housing. The
legislative perimeter was indeed extended considerably in correlation with an
increase in public welfare expenditure. If the growth of this aid was signifi-
cant, however, the percentage dedicated to the fight against social exclusion
in proportion to GDP remained small: between 1981 and 2014, it rose from
0.1% to 0.8%, to which should be added housing benefits (from 0.5 to 0.8%)⁴⁶
and diverse other allocations (linked to health, for the elderly, etc.). If it is true
that France has become, in the words of some critics, ‘European champion’ –
or even world champion – in terms of the percentage of its GDP dedicated to
accumulated social benefits (32.1% in 2016, compared to a EU 28 average of
27.5%), the percentage actually dedicated to the fight against social exclusion
has only ever been between 1.8 and 2.6%, depending on the allocations taken
into account.⁴⁷

A public policy shaped and implemented by the associations

If the associations became massively involved in this new era of employment
schemes, it is because they had in fact been the motors behind it since the
1980s. One could cite two examples of initiatives created in the heart of the
Emmaüs communities. In 1983, Strasbourg city council founded ‘Envie’ (En-
treprises nouvelles vers une insertion économique [New Companies towards
Economic Integration]) with the aim of helping young people into work; the
project helps to place candidates in two-year salaried contracts at minimum wage for recycling companies. Based on a growing number of Scandinavian projects begun in 1979, and which had given encouraging results, it was part of the genesis of the so-called ‘intermediary’⁴⁸ companies, which, in 1983, were awarded a specific status in France. Envie revolves around the collection of electronic devices in Emmaüs communities, but also at rubbish sites and sales points and via agreements with the household appliances retailer giant Darty. Around the same time, after the success of the project of the Belgian-based Emmaüs-Namur, which managed to employ 104 members of staff in the space of four years, Emmaüs-Artois created the ‘Relais’, based on the selective collection and salvage of clothes. The Relais, launched in 1985, is today the largest textile collection and reuse operation in France.

These initiatives, experimental in the 1980s, soon multiplied what with the proliferation of dedicated public policies and funding. This first came in the form of spin-offs; in 1999, there were already 27 Envie associations representing some 400 subsidised jobs and 730 Le Relais jobs. Several Emmaüs communities founded companies specialised in employment through waste sorting, recycling and reuse, and they were not the only ones. Some proved to be highly flexible; the Bocage Workshops (*Ateliers du Bocage*) founded in 1992 as an employment scheme by Emmaüs-Peupins (Deux-Sèvres in central-western France), started out providing assistance to the handicapped. Despite its beginnings with classic pallet reuse, its sorting and recycling activities were quickly reshaped into an innovative new market: ink cartridges (1997), computer hardware and mobile phones (2003), etc. In addition, the Catholic Relief created a network in 2004, ‘Spinning for Solidarity’ (*Tissons la Solidarité*), which has, in recent years, created some 1900 employment contracts, of which 83% were for women.

Indeed, the kind of employment scheme described above is flexible in terms of resources and can be adapted to a diverse population. The Moyembrie Farm, for example – founded in 1990 and since 2009 part of Emmaüs – works towards helping young prisoners ending their sentence enter the job market; an organic vegetable and goat farm, its products are delivered to a local vegetable box association.⁴⁹ Emmaüs-Défi, founded in 2008 following the highly publicised creation of the Parisian homeless camp by the association Enfants de Don Quichotte, aimed to help the homeless and the long-term unemployed; in particular, the association invented ‘per hour’ contracts as an income supplement for homeless people, who often had difficulty finding contracts of more than 15 hours. Even today, employment schemes are often developed on an ad-hoc basis in the vast domain of the social economy.

The schemes set up by the associations were not just oriented towards employment: they also targeted access to rights, sports, culture and recreational activities; health and hygiene; adult literacy and after-school support, etc. From the 1980s, the fight against inadequate housing also saw renewed action, notably with the foundation of Lyon Housing and Humanism in 1985 by Bernard Devert, a housing professional who became a priest, or at the
national level, of the Foundation abbé Pierre for the housing of the Under-
privileged in late 1987. The aim was to act, either independently or together,
on the causes of poverty and precarity and to allow people to enter into an
upwards spiral of occupational and social integration.

‘A social emergency’: the rise of public service delivery

An increase in associative action did not, however, imply a decrease in pal-
liative action. On the contrary, food and clothing distribution, still the most
popular choice at a local level,⁵⁰ saw exponential figures: at the Popular
Relief, 15 million meals were distributed in 1990, 90 million in 1995 and
139 million in 2005; at the Restaurants du cœur, 25 million in 1988–1989,
103 million in 2008–2009 and 136 million in 2016–2017.⁵¹

Aid for the homeless is another example of this consolidation of emer-
gency aid, almost always developed by associations and then commissioned
as a public service. ‘In reality, there was nothing in [this] public policy that
wasn’t initiated, invented or at least approved by associations… Public policy
basically involves translating initiatives put in place by associations into reg-
ulatory measures’.⁵² The (free) ‘hotline’ for the homeless, for example, was
created by a group of Parisian associations, including Emmaüs, who joined
forces in the winter of 1986–1987 to collectively keep tabs at all times on the
number and location of available beds⁵³; extended little by little to the rest
of the region, it was simplified in September 1997 and became the national
emergency number ‘115’.

Another example can be found in the municipal emergency service Paris
Samusocial, founded in 1993 by Doctor Xavier Emmanuelli, and based on his
experience with Doctors Without Borders and with the emergency ambu-
lance services. Based on the double principle of immediate and unconditional
aid for the homeless, the Samusocial was given institutional form in 1998
by the law against social exclusion. In 1993, the Paris Samusocial founded a
parallel service with the very first ‘emergency housing and healthcare centre’,
which became in 2006 the ‘healthcare and nursing beds’ public service. One
could also cite the day shelters for the homeless, developed by a number of
associations in the mid-1980s, which spread considerably in the 1990s and
were institutionalised by the 1998 law: providing necessary services to the
homeless (health and hygiene, help finding work, administrative and housing
assistance, etc.), they were another strong success – the Association Emmaüs,
which managed five centres in 2006 and 11 in 2014, saw 41,000 people walk
through its doors in 1997, 145,000 in 2000 and 300,000 in 2007.

One could cite any number of examples in the field of emergency social
aid that, taken together, demonstrate an impressive inflation in initiatives
mutually constructed by public and private welfare – or to be precise, most
often invented by private welfare, supported and extended by public wel-
fare, to then be run by private welfare. The capacity to adapt to changing
needs has even become a defining criteria for obtaining subsidies; in Lyon,
for example, the FNDSA was asked in 2012 by the President of the Rhône
Regional Council to demonstrate their ‘imaginativeness’ in order to ensure
renewed funding the following year.⁵⁴

*The mutual construction of social rights*

Built out of numerous exchanges, the relationship between associations and
the public authorities has not been without conflict – indeed, the ‘tribunician
role’ of the associations even seems to have intensified since the 1990s. These
were the actions on behalf of undocumented immigrants and the homeless
led by Droit au logement (DAL, Housing Rights) and by abbé Pierre between
1990 and 1994⁵⁵; the gains made for emergency housing rights in 2007 after
actions led by the Enfants de Don Quichotte⁵⁶; the ‘Night of solidarity for
lodging’ in 2008, 2009 and 2015 organised in Paris by a collective of associa-
tions; and actions in response to the inhuman treatment of migrants camping
near Calais in the hopes of reaching England – to cite just a few examples.

These same associations, violent detractors of public policies on radio talk
shows and social networks, orchestrating vast collective actions, attribute just
as much importance to securing their place in the higher reaches of institu-
tional boardrooms, a complementary role that allows them to weigh in on
legislation. The associations have not only become essential operators of so-
cial policy but also mainstay figures through the weight of their reports and
their ability to mobilise media attention. Present in the French Economic,
Social and Environment Council,⁵⁷ they can also be found, since the 1990s,
in the National Council for Policies to Fight Poverty and Social Exclusion,⁵⁸
at the National Observatory of Poverty and Social Exclusion,⁵⁹ the High
Committee on Housing for the Disadvantaged,⁶⁰ the National Consultative
Commission on Human Rights⁶¹ and in ministerial and parliamentary ex-
pert consultation committees. Today, the legitimacy of these associations’
expertise is taken as a given⁶²; indeed, the annual reports of the Catholic
Relief since 1983 or of the Fondation abbé Pierre since 1996 have become
veritable barometers and are based on the work of hired specialists (sociolo-
gists, statisticians, etc.).

Thus, not a single significant law touching on social aid issues has been
voted since the 1990s without consultation from the principal associations
and federations. What is more, these laws are by now often elaborated *at the
instigation* of associations. It is again ATD Fourth World that has marked itself
out with its precocious and efficient political lobbying. Following some more
minor legislative victories in the 1970s, it had a hand in the establishment
of the RMI and became, after a long struggle throughout the 1990s, the
principal instigator of the law determining the fight against social exclusion
(1998).⁶³ ATD Fourth World was also responsible for instigating the law on
the enforceable right to housing (2007), thanks to its President Paul Bouchet
(1998–2002),⁶⁴ a lawyer, Councillor of State and president of the National
Consultative Commission on Human Rights (1989–1996). The association
campaigned for the legal recognition of social vulnerability as the 21st cri-
terion of discrimination (2016) and can also be found at the initiative of the
long-term project ‘County of Zero Long-Term Unemployment’,⁶⁵ which is
currently being piloted (since 2016) in six French local councils of varying
profiles. The latter project involves transferring basic unemployment bene-
fits to an employing company to provide a job and a stable contract for the
unemployed, while at the same time responding to unmet needs in the local
area. Indeed, ATD Fourth World is far from a uniquely national organisa-
tion; the success of the association is also clear at an international level, with
its participation in the founding of the World Day for Overcoming Poverty
with the UN in 1992.

***The rise of the public-private ‘intermediary’***

If the associations succeeded in gaining recognition as legitimate intermediaries and in weighing in on the public debate, it is also thanks to an increasing number of ‘middlemen’ between the associative sector and the higher echelons of political or civil service.

As we saw earlier, for ATD Fourth World, this was the case for the impor-
tant presidencies of Geneviève Anthonioz de Gaulle and then Paul Bouchet.
The current president of the Catholic Relief-Caritas France is Véronique
Fayet: first, a member of ATD Fourth World, she has also built a political
career in parallel working for the City of Bordeaux and the greater region as
well as the Aquitaine Regional Council.⁶⁶ Between 2002 and 2007, the pres-
ident of Emmaüs France was Martin Hirsch, a well-known French political
figure: in between his positions as Councillor of State, Managing Director
of the French Food Health and Safety Agency (1999–2005) and Managing
Director of the French public health institution Assistance publique-Hôpitaux
de Paris (since 2013), he has had various political posts (director in 1997 of
Bernard Kouchner’s cabinet for the State Secretary for Health and Social Ac-
tion, High Commissioner of Active Solidarity against Poverty from 2007 to
2010, president of the National Agency for Civic Service from 2010 to 2013)
and also became the founder, in 2006, of the New Agency of Active Soli-
darity, which helps implement local initiatives to fight poverty in partnership
with local councils and companies. The powerful Federation of Actors of
Solidarity (ex-FNARS) is presided by Louis Gallois: as a senior official, in
the 1980s, he held various ministerial offices, then in the 1990s–2000s was
president of different public enterprises (Aérospatiale, the national SNCF rail
company, EADS, Airbus) and he also became the president of the ‘County of
Zero Long-Term Unemployment’ Experimental Fund in 2016.

Several humanitarian figures have also gone in the opposite direction, holding ministerial offices. This is the case for Claude Malhuret, president of Doctors Without Borders (1978–1986), then Secretary of State for Human Rights (1986–1988). Similarly, Bernard Kouchner, cofounder of Doctors Without Borders (1971) and Doctors of the World (1981), was present in
almost every single Socialist government between 1988 and 2002 (notably
several times Secretary of State for Humanitarian Action, then Minister of
Health in 1992 and in 2001–2002), then Minister of Foreign Affairs between
2007 and 2010. Dr Xavier Emmanuelli, mentioned above, recruited early
to the emergency ambulance service, was cofounder of Doctors Without
Borders and then founded the Samusocial in 1993, followed by Samusocial
International (1998); close to the City of Paris and then to President Jacques
Chirac, he became Secretary of State for Emergency Humanitarian Action
(1995–1997), president of the High Committee on Housing for the Disad-
vantaged (1997–2015) and member of the National Consultative Commis-
sion on Human Rights (since 2015).⁶⁷

If the move to limit the growth of palliative aid was in some ways moti-
vated by good intentions (it does not resolve underlying issues), there were
also bad ones (curb excessive spending on the poor, for political or even
populist reasons). Contrary to expectations, and to what appears to have hap-
pened in other Western countries (such as the United Kingdom or the United
States), budget cuts and the negative press given to ‘handouts’ have not actu-
ally implied a reduction in the perimeter of social aid in France both public
and private. On the contrary, the desire both to provide assistance for those in
need and to improve labour laws has remained strong, and in an increasingly
moribund social and economic context (indeed, severely deteriorated by the
big 2008 financial crisis) public spending and associative reports have seen
new growth as well as curative and palliative aid.

Conclusion

We know that in Germany a complementary relationship between public and private welfare was set up in the interwar period, based on the subsidiarity principle, and that it has since reached a certain level of complexity.⁶⁸ In the United States, ‘mass philanthropy’⁶⁹ has been practiced for the last two centuries. The French case is yet a different model; the centralising State has remained strong; however, in the long term this has not prevented a close-knit relationship from forming with private initiatives nor has it limited their importance.

After a first formative phase (1880s–1910s), a certain complementarity
was achieved, although private welfare still remained weakly connected to
funding and political decision-making (1945–1960s). In contrast, the years of
social and economic hardship that began in the mid-1970s saw the forging
of important subsidisation and contractual relationships and even of public
service delivery by associations, a situation that has turned out to be in the
interests of both parties. For the public authorities, it is a solution that allows
them to keep a hand in and keep tabs on the initiatives they fund, while at the
same time being implemented at little cost by associations familiar with the
terrain. To private initiatives, the solution represents access to subsidies and
the upper political echelons, at the cost of sometimes losing a certain amount of freedom of action and expression.

A different relationship between French public and private welfare can be observed in each of the three phases. In the first phase, spurred by the Great Depression of the 1870s–1890s and the establishment of the Republican State, private action was the driving force behind welfare initiatives, which then found itself competing with local public initiatives, then national ones, without however being completely excluded. In the second, with fresh challenges immediately after the war, and when it was still believed that social security protection would eventually do away with the need for insurance measures, a new generation of associations appeared, filling the numerous gaps in a public aid system under increasing financial pressure. In the final phase, the associations, still innovative and increasingly outspoken, constantly pushed the public authorities into action; the latter responded with an unprecedented increase in measures and basic allowances of different kinds (often instigated by the associations themselves) and by an equally unprecedented degree of subsidisation and contracting.

Thus, in this timeline of a 'mixed economy of welfare', far from being a case of 'communicating vessels' where a loss on one side equals a gain on the other, both parties saw an expansion of their perimeter of action in each phase. For at least the last three decades, however, there has been an increase in *aid* protection, incurring a loss both for social security protection (as studies have shown for France⁷⁰ and Belgium⁷¹) and for the fight against inequality⁷² – and here indeed is where the 'communicating vessels' metaphor seems more appropriate. This is a key factor in understanding why social aid, despite its continuous growth, is not capable alone of ending poverty: if nothing is done to lower job insecurity, unemployment and inequality, social aid will only ever be a quick fix solution.

## Notes

1. J. Juéry, *L'Assistance aux Vieillards, Infirmes et Incurables et la Loi du 14 Juillet 1905* (Paris, 1906).

2. See, among many others, M.B. Katz, *The Undeserving Poor. From the war on poverty to the war on welfare* (New York, 1989); M.B. Katz, *In the Shadow of the Poorhouse. A social history of welfare in America* (New York, 1989); O. Zunz, *Philanthropy in America. A history*, (Princeton, NJ, 2012); A. Kessler-Harris, and M. Vaudagna (eds), *Democracy and the Welfare State: The two wests in the age of Austerity* (New York, 2017).

3. S.B. Kamerman, 'The new mixed economy of welfare: Public and private', *Social Work*, 28, 1 (1983), 5-10; B. Harris, and P. Bridgen, 'The mixed economy of welfare and the historiography of welfare provision', in B. Harris, and P. Bridgen (eds), *Charity and Mutual Aid in Europe and North America since 1800* (New York and London, 2007), 1-18.

4. N. Duvoux, 'Introduction' to the special issue on 'Philanthropies et prestige d'État en France, XIXe-XXe siècle', *Genèses. Sciences Sociales et Histoire*, 109 (2017), 3-8, 4.
5 G. Lavau, *À Quoi Sert le Parti Communiste Français?* (Paris, 1981).

6 A. Brodiez-Dolino, *Emmaüs and the Abbé Pierre. An alternative model of enterprise, charity and society* (Paris, 2013) and ‘1954. Toward a new humanitarism’, in P. Boucheron (ed), *France in the World: A new global history* (New York, 2019).

7 On this point, see A. Brodiez-Dolino, 'La sécularisation des valeurs de l'action sociale: du principe de charité au principe de solidarité', *Informations Sociales*, 196-197 (2018), 28-36. As much in response to liberalism as to socialism, solidarism is a philosophical and political doctrine theorised in 1896 by Léon Bourgeois, which highlights the interdependency between different members of a social body; it is at the heart of early welfare in France (see M.C. Blais, *La Solidarité. Histoire d'une idée* (Paris, 2007)).

8 See, for example, G. Finlayson, 'A moving frontier: Voluntarism and the state in British social welfare, 1911-1949', *Twentieth Century British History*, 2, 1 (1990), 183-206; P. Thane, 'The Ben Pimlott memorial lecture 2011. The “big society” and the “big state”: Creative tension or crowding out?', *Twentieth Century British History*, 23, 3-1 (2012), 408-429; A. Rasmussen, 'Protéger la société de la guerre: De l'assistance aux droits sur la nation', *Revue d'Histoire de la Protection Sociale*, 9 (2016), 9-24; C.-A. Wanecq, 'Sauver, protéger et soigner. Une histoire des se-cours d'urgence en France (années 1920-années 1980)' (D.Phil., Paris, 2018); M. Chauvière, *Enfance Inadaptée. L'héritage de Vichy* (Paris, 2009).

9 Secours catholique (Caritas-France), Petits frères des Pauvres, UNIOPSS, Em-maüs, ATD Quart Monde, etc.

10 Between the 1950s and 1980s, the number of people receiving social security benefits decreased only slowly (medical aid in hospitals and at home) or even con-tinued to increase (aid for the handicapped or the elderly), while in 1953-1954, the role of local councils in social aid reform was strengthened.

11 Most recent available figures. Source: French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE).

12 Study under press, due 2020.

13 Unpublished professorial thesis.

14 J. Fourastié, *Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la Révolution Invisible de 1946 à 1975* (Paris, 1979).

15 R. Pawin, 'Retour sur les “Trente Glorieuses” et la périodisation du second XXᵉ siècle', *Revue d'Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine*, 60, 1 (2013), 155-175.

16 There is an abundant political science literature on this 'public issue'.

17 This expression was coined as a counterpoint by N. Baverez, *Les Trente Piteuses* (Paris, 1998).

18 International Centre Joseph-Wresinski, *ATD fourth world archives*, 1974 National Report, Chapter on 'The Movement's International Activities' ['La dynamique internationale du Mouvement)].

19 D. Zarefsky, *President Johnson's War on Poverty: Rhetoric and history* (Birmingham, 1986); Katz, *The Undeserving Poor, op. cit.*; E. Berkowitz, *America's Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan* (Baltimore, MD, 1991); B. Coll, *Safety Net: Welfare and social security 1929-1979* (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995); R. Huret, *The Experts' War on Poverty. Social research and the welfare agenda in post-war America* (Ithaca, NY, 2018).

20 J. Klanfer, *L'Exclusion Sociale. Étude de la marginalité dans les sociétés occidentales* (Paris, 1965); J. Labbens, op. cit.

21 Semaines sociales de France, *Les Pauvres dans les Sociétés Riches* (1970).

22 R. Lenoir, *Les Exclus. Un Français sur dix* (Paris, 1974).

23 L. Stoléru, *Vaincre la Pauvreté dans les Pays Riches* (Paris, 1974).

24 D. Zamora Vargas, *De l'Égalité à la Pauvreté. Une socio-histoire de l'assistance en Belgique (1895-2015)* (Bruxelles, 2017).

25 The first was published by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), and indeed at the instigation and with the cooperation of ATD Fourth World: M. Debonneuil, 'Les familles pauvres d'une ville moyenne', *Economie et Statistique*, 105 (1978).
26 Founded in 1946, but a successor of the National Economic Council founded in 1925, this constitutional assembly was made up of social representatives: employers, unions, and associations.

27 H. Péquignot, 'La lutte contre la pauvreté', Report by the Social and Economical Council (20 September 1978).

28 Professor of medecine at the Université de Paris, Henri Péquignot is considered to be 'the authority in gerontology' and is the author of a number of works on hospital organisation; particularly interested in medical statistics, he notably contributed to the development of the Credoc medical team (Centre de Recherche pour l'Étude et l'Observation des Conditions de Vie, a prestigious French research and pedagogical institution).

29 G. Oheix, 'Contre la pauvreté et la précarité. 60 propositions', Report by the Ministry of Health and Social Security (1981).

30 Association founded in 1965 by associative figures close to social Catholicism, which carried out studies and provided counselling for State services, local councils, and associative networks (sociological studies, evaluations of public action, etc.). Its principal domains of expertise, since the beginning, have been urban policy, the family, and poverty.

31 Emmaüs, which today is present in 37 countries, has been based in the United Kingdom since the mid-1980s. See https://emmaus.org.uk/, accessed 27 October 2021.

32 Interview with Patricia Le Corvic, Federal Secretary of the Marne SPF Federation, August 2003.

33 N. Mariller, 'Le plan gouvernemental français contre la pauvreté et la précarité', in A. Fracassi, M.F. Marques, and J. Walter (eds), *La Pauvreté. Une approche plurielle* (Paris, 1985), 88–103.

34 F. Viguier, 'La Cause des Pauvres: mobilisations humanitaires et transformations de l'État social en France (1945-2010)' (D.Phil, Paris, 2010).

35 See, for example, M. Brejon de Lavergnée, *La Société Saint-Vincent-de-Paul au XIXe siècle* (Paris, 2008); N. Mitsushima, 'Elites "Reconnues d'Utilité Publique"', Philanthropie réformatrice et revendications capacitaires autour de la réforme pénale (1815-1851), (D.Phil, Paris, 2014) and 'Aménager, subvertir et contester l'ordre électoral. Philanthropie et politique sous la Restauration (1819-1830)', *Genèses. Sciences Sociales et Histoire*, 109, 4 (2017), 32–56.

36 Viguier, *op. cit.*, 204.

37 The National Interfederal Union of Private Health and Social Initiatives [Union nationale interfédérale des œuvres privées sanitaires et sociales], founded in 1947.

38 Lyon City Archives, *Lyon City Council Archives*, 1921 W 003, minutes of the Social Affairs Commission.

39 R. Lafore, 'Le rôle des associations dans la mise en œuvre des politiques d'action sociale', *Informations Sociales*, 162, 6 (2010), 68.

40 J.-M. Belorgey, *La Gauche et les Pauvres* (Paris, 1988).

41 J. Wresinski, 'Grande pauvreté et précarité économique et sociale', Report by the Social and Economical Council (*Journal Officiel de la République Française*, 28 February 1987).

42 Juéry, *op. cit.*, 6–7.

43 B. Fragonard, 'Préface', in M. Lelièvre, and E. Nauze-Fichet (eds), *RMI, l'état des lieux (1988-2008)* (Paris, 2008), 9.

44 C. Topalov, *Naissance du Chômeur, 1880-1910* (Paris, 1994).

45 Fusion between the 'activity' side of the RSA and another, similar measure, the Prime pour l'emploi (employment bonus).

46 Direction de la recherche, des études, de l'évaluation et des statistiques (DREES), 'Les prestations sociales de 1981 à 2014: Trois décennies de maîtrise des dépenses de santé et de vieillesse', *Études et Résultats*, 949 (2016).
47 DREES, *La Protection Sociale en France et en Europe. Les chiffres clés* (Paris, 2016).

48 That is, companies principally involved in employment schemes tied to construction, catering, green area construction, etc.

49 The 'Amap', or community-supported agriculture associations, are groups of farmers who sell their products to consumers through local food networks.

50 See, for example, J.-N. Retière, and J.-P. Le Crom, *Une Solidarité en Miettes. Socio-histoire de l'aide alimentaire des années 1930 à nos jours* (Rennes, 2018).

51 Source: activity reports for the two associations.

52 P. Noblet, *Pourquoi les SDF Restent dans la Rue* (La Tour d'Aigues, 2010), 50.

53 Emmaüs-Solidarité Paris Headquarters, *Emmaüs-Solidarité Archives*, 31/03/1987 board meeting.

54 Foyer Notre-Dame des Sans-Abri Lyon Headquarters, *Foyer Notre-Dame des Sans-Abri Archives*, 4 September 2012 board meeting.

55 C. Péchu, *Droit au Logement. Genèse et sociologie d'une mobilisation* (Paris, 2006).

56 D. Cefaï et É. Gardella, *L'Urgence Sociale en Action. Ethnographie du Samusocial de Paris* (Paris, 2011); É. Gardella, 'L'Urgence Sociale comme Chronopolitique. Temporalités et justice sociale de l'assistance aux personnes sans-abri en France depuis les années 1980' (D.Phil, Cachan, 2014).

57 Former *Conseil économique et social* (Economical and Social Council).

58 The *Conseil national des politiques de lutte contre la pauvreté et l'exclusion sociale*, founded in 1988 in concert with the law establishing the RMI.

59 The *Observatoire national de la pauvreté et de l'exclusion sociale*, founded in 1998 with the law against social exclusion.

60 The *Haut comité pour le logement des défavorisés*, founded at the request of abbé Pierre.

61 The *Commission nationale consultative des droits de l'Homme*, founded in 1984 to consult the government on Human Rights issues in the world and in France.

62 Y. Lochard, and M. Simonet-Cusset (eds), *L'Expert Associatif, le Savant et le Poli-tique* (Paris, 2003).

63 F. Néau-Dufour, *Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz. L'autre de Gaulle* (Paris, 2005).

64 P.-É. Weill, *Sans Toit ni Loi? Genèse et conditions de mise en œuvre de la loi DALO* (Rennes, 2017).

65 Launched in 1995 by Patrick Valentin (an associative figure in the field of handicap and long-term unemployment issues), the first pilot in cooperation with the mayor of the small local council of Seiches-sur-le-Loir (Loire region) demonstrated that 'there are more potential jobs than people in long-term unemployment', and that anyone could be employable 'as long as the work is adapted to the person and the situation is reversed' (Interview with Patrick Valentin, *Revue Quart Monde*, 161 (1997)). In the 1990s, P. Valentin approached ATD Fourth World, which decided to give his project the necessary support to expand it to other local councils and indeed demonstrated in 2013 that the macro-economic cost of long-term unemployment for a single person (around €15,000 per year) was enough to create a full-time job for them at minimum wage.

66 Alongside Jacques Chaban-Delmas and then Alain Juppé (Republican right). She was also part of the national executive bureau of the Modem party (centre-right).

67 Cefaï and Gardella, op. cit.

68 C. Maurer, 'Le "dualisme" de l'assistance en Allemagne. La collaboration de l'Etat et de la bienfaisance privée, de la République de Weimar à nos jours', *Revue d'Allemagne et des Pays de Langue Allemande*, 35, 1 (2003), 139-151; Y. Bizeul, 'Tutelle publique et recomposition du pouvoir au sein du Diakonisches Werk allemand', in G. Vincent (ed), *La Place des Œuvres et des Acteurs Religieux dans les Dispositifs de Protection Sociale. De la charité à la solidarité* (Paris, 1997), 145-157.

69 Zunz, op. cit.

70 Duvoux, op. cit.

71 Zamora Vargas, op. cit.

72 T. Piketty, *Capital in the Twenty-first Century* (Paris, 2014).
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# 4 Social movement and economic statistics in interwar Poland

## Building an alternative expert knowledge on the condition of the working class

### Morgane Labbé

## Introduction

As early as 1918, the new Central European states that emerged at the end of the First World War set up ambitious social protection systems in order to meet the considerable expectations and needs of populations who had been left impoverished by their recent experiences. They also had to provide the Allies and international organizations with evidence that ‘social peace’ in Eastern Europe would stabilize the disputed territories within reach of Soviet Russia. These new states, at the margins of the Western economies and their scientific centres, also intended to demonstrate their ability to develop a statistical information system that would guide the recovery of their devastated economies. As part of this call for modernity, socially committed academics and intellectuals were invited to work in new government institutes, conducting surveys and studies.¹ All of these changes were to be found in Poland, which in 1918 established a Ministry of Social Protection, a Statistical Office, and various research institutes. However, in a context marked by a lack of improvement in living conditions, unstable governments, and repeated currency crises, social protests and demands continued and even became more widespread. Yet, these social movements, which in the early 1920s shook the whole of Central Europe, gave rise in Poland to valuable surveys and social studies, on the initiative of activist associations that were independent of the state.

This chapter focuses on the interactions between the Central Statistical Office of the Polish state (Główny Urząd Statystyczny, GUS) and one of these activist organizations, the Institute of Social Economics (Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego, IGS), which became an important organization with the capacity to cooperate and compete with public actors in statistics (and the Statistical Office in particular). The IGS included members of educated elites – sociologists, economists, and statisticians – of a socialist political leaning, and in some cases even Marxist, all of whom, by the end of the war, had experienced the harshness of political reality under the occupying regimes as well
as the hardships of war, repression, and exile. The activism of the IGS and its founders was deeply rooted in the history of the Polish territories attached to Tsarist Russia. It dated back to the period of liberalization following the 1905 Revolution, which had led to the rise of social-reformist associations, including the Society for the Social Work (Towarzystwo Pracy Społecznej), from which the IGS emerged after the war. Under this Russian regime and then that of the German occupation, the association was consolidated and professionalized with a view to compensating for the absence of a social protection policy, and in this way, it anticipated the institutions of the new state. It then managed to coexist with them and even compete with them.

Within this long historical context, this chapter deals with the relations between the IGS and the GUS, which were marked by both cooperation and competition, and centred around the implementation of social surveys and the calculation of social indices. First, it looks back at the successive transformations of the Society for the Social Work under the different political regimes that existed prior to the creation of an independent Poland, leading up to its re-establishment as the IGS. The strength of the new institute became apparent in the immediate post-war period, when, in the context of the inflationary crisis and a sharp fall in living standards, it pre-empted the GUS in producing studies that quantified this decline, calculated on the basis of wage demands. The chapter goes on to describe how the IGS, building on this earlier success, was recognized by the International Labour Organization (ILO) when it came to address the challenge of measuring wage variation and the cost-of-living index, which had been a cause of unrest in many other countries. The IGS was then invited to cooperate with the GUS on the project of a major national survey of the budgets of workers' families, which would make it possible to calculate the official cost-of-living index. From that survey, however, the two institutions drew different proposals and values with regard to this new index. Nonetheless, at the end of these ten years of close rivalry, they had constructed a specialized field of economic statistics, relating to wages, prices, and living conditions, on which the new economic theories and policies of regulation would be based.²

## Social surveys and associations in Poland in the imperial period

In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the territory of the former Poland divided between the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian states, members of reformist, Catholic, or socialist movements, often drawn from the small pool of local intelligentsia, initiated investigations into the living conditions of workers employed in the factories of the nascent industry or the large agrarian farms. The authors of these studies used the model of Le Play's family monographs or of the surveys conducted by the famous German society, the *Verein für Socialpolitik*, as a basis for their observations.³ In the absence of official Polish institutions, these works, which are often described as
precursors of empirical sociology, were carried out in various settings on the initiative of Catholic circles, philanthropic associations, and learned societies. Some of these associations continued to operate and had a legacy in the public and private institutions of the new Polish state after 1918. This was the case for the Society for the Social Work.

The Society was founded in 1907 in Warsaw, then located in the Kingdom of Poland, a territory annexed by Russia. It benefited from the context of political liberalization ushered in by the 1905 Revolution, with the legalization of associations in 1906. It was in this reforming spirit that the Society's founders set themselves the mission of promoting and supporting 'social work'. In 1910, the new Society established a 'Board of Social Work' (Biuro Pracy Społecznej), which was the active organ of the Society, devoted to conducting studies on social and economic issues. Its activities were still constrained by the legal, administrative, and political framework of imperial Russia. Nevertheless, its projects bore witness to its ambition as an institution, which gave it a pivotal role in lobbying the tsarist administration with ideas of social reform.

The aim of the founders of the Board of Social Work was to provide documentation on social and national causes in the life of the Kingdom, causes that would then be defended by Polish deputies in the new Russian assembly, the Duma. As well as proposals for greater cultural and linguistic autonomy, others concerned working conditions, and thereby echoed the demands made by the demonstrations and strikes of 1905 and 1906, which broke out in Poland as in the rest of Russia.⁴ To this end, the surveys undertaken by the Board of Social Work reported on public health, women's work, accident insurance, and so on. The Bureau had a statistical division, but a lack of resources prevented it from conducting its own surveys, and most of its data came from external sources.

Ten years later, the First World War overturned the political order in which Poles, having been excluded from public spaces, had built their own institutions. However, the war on the Eastern Front was particularly destructive, leaving territories and economies devastated, with poverty and epidemics on the rise.⁵ In the first months, Citizens' Civic Committees were set up in the main towns to manage and coordinate the relief effort. In Russian Poland, in particular, these voluntary institutions continued, on a larger scale, the activities through which charitable and philanthropic organizations had formerly compensated for the imperial government's lack of interest in social policy.⁶

Like other civil society organizations, the Board of Social Work strengthened and expanded its activities during the years of war and occupation. It developed substantially from 1916 onwards under the German administration, adopting an ambitious organizational structure divided into sections devoted to legal questions, economics, education, and so on and then further subdivided into some 30 commissions.⁷ This rapid expansion was due to the deterioration of living standards and working conditions under the occupation regime; workers were badly hit by inflation, falling wages, and rising
unemployment. The Board of Social Work was all the more sensitive to this
situation as many of those who had joined it since that time came from so-
cialist circles. Their investigations then ran in parallel to strikes and demon-
strations. The agenda of the Board of Social Work covered every aspect of
the social question – labour regulations, social insurance, women's work,
and so on – and a 'Commission on workers' questions' was created. The goal
of gathering information remained a priority, and the collection of data of
all kinds – legal, economic, and statistical – fed into studies whose results
were disseminated, for lack of other means, in small brochures. Nonetheless,
these publications did, however, lead to proposals for the reform of public
institutions.

By the end of the war, the activity of the Board of Social Work had reached
its peak, but in 1918 it was weakened by the fact that the Polish state gained its
independence. A Ministry of Social Welfare was established, which offered
official positions to several of the Bureau's members. The same movement
from the private to the public sphere took place in the field of social studies
and statistical expertise following the establishment of the GUS. The open-
ing of positions in the administration of the Kingdom became, for Polish
patriotic elites, an opportunity to enter the workings of a new Polish state,
ready to be built and appropriated from within. They also hoped to establish
a system of social protection, as charities and philanthropic associations were
no longer able to meet the needs of the civilian population.

In this new situation, it seemed likely that public institutions would as-
similate this world of reforming associations. Yet, this turned out not to be
the case. The Board of Social Work was disbanded and reborn under a new
name, but in the new political context it was divided by the simmering ten-
sions between members of the two political currents who claimed to speak
for the cause of the Polish 'people' – socialists and supporters of National
Democracy, respectively. In 1920, the socialist branch joined the Society of
Polish Economists and Statisticians,⁸ where it formed an autonomous section
under the name of the Institute of Social Economics, which became an inde-
pendent institute in 1926. The new institute continued to pursue the social
and political project of the Board of Social Work, with the involvement of
several of its former members. It also fulfilled one of the Bureau's wishes:
to conduct its own social and statistical surveys. However, this new mission
could not be taken for granted, since in the new Polish state, the IGS found
itself in competition with public institutions and especially the GUS.

The rivalry between the Central Statistical Office and
the Institute of Social Economics in measuring workers’
cost of living

The mission of the IGS was to ‘to develop activities to support the social
economy in Poland on a scientific basis’.⁹ In this vast field of economic and
social issues, the condition of workers remained the central theme of the IGS’s
investigations, as shown by the publication of a collection entitled 'Workers' Issues'. This commitment to the cause of workers is at first sight surprising in a country where the peasantry was more abundant. It was, however, characteristic of the socialist, and in some cases Marxist, intellectuals and activists attached to the IGS, who prioritized workers and the urban working classes when addressing the 'modernization' of Poland, which Polish elites saw as the major challenge facing the new state.

The major theme that preoccupied the IGS in the early 1920s was the continuing decline in workers' living standards as a result of the inflationary pressures caused by the world economic crisis of 1920–1921, which was exacerbated in Poland by the expense of the war with Soviet Russia.¹⁰ Not only was the new Polish state faced with the challenge of rebuilding a devastated country and a ruined economy, but, as in most Eastern European countries, its own currency crisis was more severe and more lasting than in Western Europe. This crisis was followed by a phase of hyperinflation, which led to a further drastic and tragic fall in living standards.¹¹ It was only in 1924 that Poland emerged from these crises with a thorough reform of its monetary and fiscal system. This reform immediately brought about wage stabilization.¹²

The IGS's earliest studies were carried out in this economic and social context. Throughout the world, the monetary crises of the immediate post-war period took a large, direct toll on the growth and generalization of wage-labour that had been under way in the capitalist economies, as part of a transformation of the world of work.¹³ Inflation lowered the monetary value of wages and tragically reduced the lowest incomes, those of manual workers. Since the end of the nineteenth century, this extremely close dependence of the standard of living of families on the vicissitudes of currency values had been the source of conflicts which alarmed both industrialists and rulers. From the end of the war, in all countries, the effect of price rises in addition to the existing deprivation fuelled discontent and demonstrations, which threatened to destabilise a fragile domestic political situation.

In Eastern Europe, the leaders of the new Polish state were also worried because, in the newly united territories, echoes of the Bolshevik movements and promises of national prosperity were spreading among impoverished populations eager for a better world. As early as 1916, under the German occupation, demonstrations and strikes demanding wage increases had begun in Warsaw and Łódź, the two main cities and centres of Polish industry, as well as in the coal-mining areas of Silesia. The end of the war and of the German occupation brought about a short period of respite. In 1919, owing to the rise in inflation, workers resumed their strikes in pursuit of wage increases, this time directing their demands to the new Polish government. The government gave in to some of their demands, but not all, owing to the high level of inflation and the reluctance of industrialists. The same pattern repeated over the following years, with high inflation continuing to worsen employees' living conditions, and strikes, which were now coordinated by
the unions, became more frequent. The government's compensatory measures were insufficient to dispel from public opinion the impression that the government was incapable of containing inflation, and was guilty of passing fiscal measures deemed to be unfair, on the grounds that they only served the interests of industrialists.

While the protests continued and spread in reaction to the Polish government's erratic response to inflation, a new economic and statistical expertise was developed that transformed the terms of the demands and negotiations. It provided both a scientific framework for economic policy and a language that codified inflation as a global monetary phenomenon. On this basis, it was possible to derive standards that could regulate wage policy. No official institution held a monopoly over this expertise, as it was practised by public and private institutes alike: the GUS, municipal statistical offices, and once again, the IGS. The ILO was also closely involved in this work. In view of the political importance of the monetary crisis and its social consequences for the economic recovery of Europe, the ILO had a decisive influence on the standardization of economic and statistical data.

At different times, these organizations acted either in parallel, in cooperation or in opposition; their relations gave rise to a particular dynamic between the public and private sectors, which can be reconstructed by observing the role of the IGS in this context. The creation of joint study commissions also favoured this dynamic.

### The construction of an official cost-of-living index

In the long history of surveys and calculations of prices and wages, the immediate post-war period can be seen as a brief moment that, owing its political urgency, saw the emergence of a new way of empirically describing the economic instability caused by currency fluctuations. It was a matter of concern for old and new states alike, and one particular step indicated their recognition of the social and political impact of the inflationary crisis: the creation of commissions to study the cost of living. In Poland, in 1920, a 'Commission on the Cost of Living of family workers in industry and commerce' was set up by government decree.¹⁴ Like the commissions in other countries,¹⁵ the Polish commission, attached to the GUS, was official, but it was composed of stakeholders from different domains: in addition to the director of the statistical administration, it included representatives of several ministries, employers, and trade unions; outside experts were also sometimes involved in its work. Its mission was to calculate the cost-of-living index, which, when combined with the level of net wages, could be used to estimate their 'real' value or in other words 'purchasing power'. The validity of this new index would depend on its being regularly updated, so it was calculated every month and published together with reports on prices and wages by the GUS in the *Monthly Statistics Review*.
The Cost of Living Commission also had to specify the method used for calculating the index, a method which was supposedly simple and well known, but which, as will be seen, was actually widely debated, both in its principles and its implementation. The method adopted by the Commission consisted of finding the average of price increases in a series of items deemed to be representative of the ‘budget’ – that is, the needs – of a typical worker’s family, consisting of four people: two adults and two children. The Commission established a list of some 30 items, of specified quantities, which was supposed to correspond to the family’s daily consumption. The list began with food: 1.23 kg of rye bread per day, 1.15 kg of potatoes, then barley gruel, dried beans, meat, bacon, sugar, salt, and so on. In addition, the list included other items such as housing and fuel costs, water consumption and finally some minor expenses on leisure activities: one newspaper per day and two theatre tickets per month. The daily quantities of food were set according to the calories deemed necessary for subsistence, a physiological standard set by the biological and nutritional sciences. The use of these pre-established standards of workers’ needs meant that this method was based on a so-called ‘theoretical’ budget. This was distinguished from a method of calculation based on real consumption, which would be supported by critics of the official index, notably by the IGS, as will be explained below.

Its data on prices, however, were gathered in situ, as municipal authorities were required to transmit these data to the GUS within a narrow time frame. Unlike its figures for consumption, which were based on physiological needs, the collection of retail prices confronted the Commission and the GUS with the real world and minute detail of shops and markets. Prices were firmly rooted in local practices, and so the newly created commissions in major cities took on direct responsibility for recording and calculating the indices. In this way, the authorities could demonstrate their traditional competence in municipal price policy. The Central Commission provided a framework for these practices. The government Ordinance had stipulated that ‘with the permission of the Central Statistical Office’s Committee, local committees can be established in certain larger cities, operating on the basis of an agreed-upon settlement’.¹⁶ This provision was further elaborated by an ordinance in January 1921 requiring the mayors of major cities to follow the instructions of the GUS in producing their monthly price statements and to complete a pre-determined table.¹⁷ The ordinance also required the municipal administration to set up its own commission by gathering representatives of trade unions, workers, industry, trade, and agriculture.

In the barely unified country of Poland in 1920, which was plagued by social unrest that threatened its internal and external political stability, the government therefore attempted to centralize and control information on prices and to promote joint resolutions through the use of commissions. In this, it followed practices in other states and, above all, the recommendations of the ILO.
## From data to strikes

The GUS centralized municipal data, calculated indices, and published them monthly. However, the municipal scale remained the dominant one: the tables listed the indices of price increases for individual Polish cities, but did not give any index for Poland as a whole. Had the state failed in attaining a 'common language of prices'? The cost-of-living index had local or regional validity, but at the level of the whole Polish state it had less significance. In its commentary, the GUS acknowledged that the municipal commissions had used different methods of calculation and that, as a result, the raw figures for price increases were not comparable, only the relative changes. The price index was, as elsewhere, a black box maintained by delicate compromises.

It is also the practical usefulness of the index that explains why it remained a local index, for two reasons. On the one hand, the index was used to adjust wages in line with the rate of inflation, which still varied significantly by location. On the other hand, in Poland, as in other countries, workers demanded that this adjustment should be automatic. The principle of indexing wages to inflation had to be enshrined in collective agreements signed at the level of individual businesses, that is, as close as possible to actual working conditions. This was one of the major demands put forward by trade unions on behalf of workers throughout Europe. In Poland, it became a frequent reason for strikes in industries that were reluctant to adopt this automatic adjustment. Strikes were also called when collective agreements set the index too low or provided for only partial wage increases. The question of measuring the cost of living was therefore central to power and class relations, became highly politicized, and manifested itself in successive conflicts.

Although the language of indices is often seen as the expression of a tendency towards objectivization that triumphed in the nation states of the twentieth century, during this interwar period, consensus regarding the price index always remained fragile. Two institutions, independent of public authorities, tried to give it a solid basis, one favouring a social foundation and the other a statistical one: whereas the IGS calculated an alternative index to the official one, with the aim of benefiting workers, the ILO claimed to be improving the method and accuracy of measurement. The two modes of calculation used by the IGS and ILO involved different epistemologies, but as we shall show, the exchanges between their respective exponents led to a better measurement of the real living standards of workers.

## The IGS: wage statistics in the service of the class struggle

The IGS, which focused its studies on workers' issues, naturally devoted its earliest works to the defence of their wages and working conditions. In the political context of the 1920s, it presented itself as the mouthpiece of workers, alongside the trade unions, who also happened to be among the institute's members. Independently of the GUS, the IGS developed its own expertise
on the measurement of the cost of living and the change in wages and pub-
lished several studies on the subject.¹⁸ Its aim was not only to contribute to
the debate but also to provide technical arguments in support of the demands
of employees seeking to maintain their standard of living. It also documented
the mobilization of workers by producing statistics on strikes, even before of-
ficial data on this subject existed, through the collection of information from
various ‘field’ sources to which it had access: strike committees, the workers’
press, notes from journalists, information from factories, and so on.

As early as 1922, one of the founding economists of the IGS, Tadeusz
Szturm de Sztrem, published a book entitled *The Struggle for Wages*, in which
he provided a statistical analysis of the impact of inflation on wages. The
study was limited to Warsaw owing to the lack of complete data at that time,
but the author nonetheless managed to reconstruct statistical series on the
prices of basic foodstuffs and workers’ wages since 1914, which indicates that
he had access to unofficial sources, notably through trade unions. His ambi-
tion was to grasp, in the chronic fluctuations of currency, what he believed
was a new structural trend in the capitalist economy leading inevitably to a
decrease in the value of wages. The six-month percentage changes in food
prices, when compared to real wages, revealed a remarkable increase in the
divergence between these data series under the effect of inflation.

The salient point of his analysis was to compare these two statistical series
with data on strikes, in order to show that wage increases, even if they were
insufficient to compensate for their erosion by inflation, were the result of
workers' mobilizations. Although strikes had occurred only sporadically un-
der the German occupation, they subsequently increased substantially – in
Warsaw, there were 42 in 1918, rising to 67 in 1919, and 72 in 1920. The
author emphasized that the creation of the Polish state in 1918 had not put an
end to this movement, and that, on the contrary, the number of strikes had
increased. He pointed out that strikes were increasingly coordinated by trade
unions, stressing in particular the major role of the Trade Union Associations
(Związek Stowarzyszeń Zawodowych), which was closely connected with so-
cialistic circles and which, since 1920, had brought together several federa-
tions. He also credited unions with signing collective agreements, creating a
wage scale, and demanding other social benefits (paid leave, social insurance,
medical assistance, and so on). The conclusion of the study, supported by
voluminous statistical annexes worthy of a yearbook, was explicitly political
since it considered that the injustice created by inflation, which was 'a factor
conducive to the strengthening of Polish industry', was also 'a source of ex-
perience for the working class, and a source of necessity that constitute[d] the
basis for the maturing of contemporary forms of class struggle in Poland'.¹⁹ In
this respect, the study corresponded to the mission of the IGS, which aimed
its work and publications at a broad public, including trade unionists.

This short text, with a limited scope, situated the recent gains of the work-
ers' movement in a longer history, which was objectivized by the figures and
their trends. The author's intention was also to demonstrate the ability
to carry out an ambitious study independently of the new Polish state, which was then setting up its own institutions of expertise. He thereby showed that he was surpassing the GUS not only in the analysis of data series but also in the collection of data since he combined the official figures with his own sources of data.

The IGS also knew how to coordinate its work with the international references that were authoritative in this field. One organization that wielded this international authority was the ILO, whose recommendations extended beyond labour legislation to the methods for transcribing information on working conditions, covering processes such as maintaining reports, conducting surveys or calculating indices. However, the ILO also appeared as a unique forum on the international stage, owing to its tripartite structure involving governments, employers' representatives, and trade unions.²⁰ It was therefore a source of legitimacy for private work and expertise on social issues, particularly in the countries of Central Europe.²¹

**The ILO and the politics of indices: international recognition of the IGS's expertise**

The early and rapid mobilization of the IGS in the field of wage statistics and price indices was a successful strategy, if not for the workers' cause, then at least for the international recognition of its expertise. Indeed, two years after the publication of his book, Sztrum de Sztrem published an article on 'Wage problems in Poland during and after the War' in the ILO's journal, *International Labour Review*.²² This article, written in English, took up the theme of the earlier book, written in Polish, and adapted it to an international context, which required toning down provocative political positions in order to achieve the neutral tone of technical analysis. It gave a prominent role to the work of the IGS in its presentation of an increasingly established division of statistical labour: on the one hand, the GUS and the Warsaw Statistical Service carried out price surveys and the calculation of the cost-of-living index, and on the other hand, the IGS gathered together data – which were still scattered and not yet unified in an official framework – on the wages of workers in a few industrial establishments. Although official statistical work gradually extended and encroached on the IGS's specialist field of social economy, the IGS maintained its dominance in the analysis of wage trends in this turbulent period. It again linked this development to the abundance of strikes, which had increased in Warsaw from 59 in 1921, to 115 in 1922, and 131 in 1923, the year of the inflationary crisis. Stressing again the importance of these mobilizations for wage increases, the author states that 'It was only as the result of fairly numerous strikes that the workers first secured increases in wages... to meet the rise in the cost of living'.²³ The author emphasized the importance of introducing into collective agreements the principle of the automatic adjustment of wages to the cost of living, also known as the sliding scale principle, which was in line with the ILO's recommendations. As requested
by the review, he reported on the growth of this practice in each industrial
sector, which was slow in the first year and more sustained and promising
from 1921.²⁴ In the following years, in 1921 and 1922, the principle be-
came widely established, with about 20 new conventions appearing every six
months. Szturm de Sztrem also reported the resistance of some companies
to these measures, and the dissatisfaction of workers with a process of wage
increases that could no longer keep pace with inflation. In this editorial space
provided by the ILO, Szturm de Sztrem nonetheless had to depart from his
role as the mouthpiece of the workers and respond in a different way to the
objections raised by workers with regard to the supposed errors in calculating
the index: 'the reason for the depreciation of real wages should be sought in
certain defects in the methods used for adjusting wages to the cost of liv-
ing'.²⁵ His numerical arguments, which, in Poland, provided a justification
for workers' demands, were transformed for the ILO into economic variables
in statistical equations relating to the comparative effects of increases in wages
and supplementary payments on the costs of production. He entered into the
discussions of economists, particularly those in neighbouring Germany and
Austria, who were facing a similar situation and who feared that an inflation-
ary spiral could be triggered by the automatic indexing of wages demanded
by workers.

How did Sztrum de Sztrem, an economist and statistician from the pri-
vate activist organization IGS, gain access to the ILO's journal, which was
intended to disseminate notes and articles on the social situations in different
countries to an international audience? An exchange of letters between the
ILO and its Polish correspondent in Warsaw, Adam Rose, sheds a partial but
nevertheless revealing light on the path that led to this event.

In September 1922, Rose had proposed an article on 'the automatic adjust-
ment of workers' wages in Poland according to changes in the cost of living
by a commission attached to the Central Statistical Office'.²⁶ It had attracted
the attention of the ILO Research Division which, in December of the same
year, specified that the article should address

the conditions that led to the establishment of a cost-of-living commis-
sion, as well as the methods that were adopted for arriving at the cost-
of-living index number and for deciding on the adjustment to workers'
wages on the basis of fluctuations in the cost-of-living index. It would
also be desirable to give a full presentation of the results of this procedure,
as well as any objections that may have been raised to its application.²⁷

However, the article was not signed by Rose, but by Szturm de Sztrem, to
whom the former seems to have entrusted the task of writing it, presumably
because he had published a book for the IGS on precisely this subject. The
article on Poland appeared after others on the same subject, with a focus on
Austria and Germany respectively, but these other articles had been written
by members of ministerial administrations. The IGS, as a private institute,
therefore had access to the ILO's editorial space on an equal footing with the official institutions of other European countries.

The publications of the ILO were closely connected to the agitated social situation of the first half of the 1920s in Eastern Europe, where the continuous decrease in workers' purchasing power in a context of constant inflation was the source of demonstrations which hampered the recovery of an already badly damaged industrial fabric, and created, at the gates of Bolshevik Russia, a political instability feared by governments, even in their social-reformist ranks. It was in this context that the ILO devoted one of its first special issues to the question of real wage and inflation, so that it could be examined by its experts from a statistical point of view.

## The ILO and the authority of its method

In the ILO's centralized documentation, statistics played a key role in describing social conditions in different states, synthesizing the information, and then producing a ranking on the scale of social progress. This ranking was intended to encourage those states deemed to be lagging behind to catch up. The ILO, however, had no more power to decree how statistics should be collected than it did to affect national social legislation. It did not produce statistics itself but collected those of the member states. As a result, it was faced with the problem of the comparability of data and indices, which depended upstream on the variable conditions of their production, according to rules and recording practices that remained diverse. In the nineteenth century, under the impetus of the earliest International Statistical Congress, and supported by the rise of the first statistical offices, the process of standardization had advanced, but some economic elements, including wages and prices, remained difficult to standardize. Progress was often made in response to crises and their social consequences, notably poverty and unemployment; the First World War and its impact on the disorganization of societies and economies was one such moment.

The ILO had created its own statistics section, whose members were renowned statisticians from official institutes in their countries. The question of measuring real wages and the cost-of-living index was on their agenda as early as 1923 and was the main theme of the Second International Conference of Labour Statisticians held in 1925. Wage statistics would be addressed there from a methodological point of view only. To this end, in preparation for the conference, the ILO published a voluminous report, *Methods of Compiling Cost of Living Index Numbers*.²⁸ As noted in the title, the issue of wages and prices was now subsumed under the issue of calculating the index, which, in the terminology of statistical economists, fell into the category of index numbers. But however technical this question it might be, the cost-of-living index had already been politicized by workers' demands and government commissions, so the question of method was inextricably linked to this burning political issue. The report did not hide this, stressing that 'The
necessity for the adoption of satisfactory methods is manifest if the object of
securing wage agreements with the minimum of friction is to be attained'.<sup>29</sup>
The statisticians attached to the ILO believed that the objectivizing power
of statistics was capable of reducing social protests as long as it could establish
sufficient confidence in the method of calculating the index.<sup>30</sup> This was the
task to which they devoted their conference as well as the 'Resolutions' that
emerged from it.<sup>31</sup>

The ‘ILO method’ for statistics, in principle, was based on that of the
international congresses of the nineteenth century, which consisted, on the
one hand, of issuing recommendations for producing figures and indices,
and, on the other hand, of gathering information on the actual practices
followed by the various states.<sup>32</sup> These practices provided the ILO with ex-
amples to be encouraged or, on the contrary, to be avoided. This centraliza-
tion of information resulted in the voluminous annexes to the documentary
collections, which catalogued in detail the survey and calculation practices in
different countries around the world from South Africa to Czechoslovakia,
Great Britain, and Lithuania. In these pages, the ILO listed the diversity of
national practices, but also documented their dynamism at local and private
levels, adding that ‘Mention is, however, also made of other costs of living
statistics, including those published by certain municipal authorities, or by
private organisations or individuals’.<sup>33</sup> Although the ILO addressed its rec-
ommendations to public statistical administrations and only thought of in-
citing centralized states to standardize their statistical practices, it recognized
the plurality of private initiatives and their capacity to provide impetus to
statistical work. This concerned in particular municipal authorities, such as
those in Germany, where a dozen or so cities were assessed with their own
cost-of-living indices, but also trade unions, and even individuals, notably
economists. While the ILO implemented its founding principle of tripartism
in conducting its deliberations on policies and legislation, as far as technical
knowledge in economics and statistics was concerned, it defended a unitary
and centralized view.

With regard to index numbers, the discussions were not only of a technical
nature. Beyond the scope of the ILO, they involved an epistemology on how
to summarize the change in figures, the meaning attributed to the average
that is supposed to summarize that change, and as always in statistics, the
question of the representativeness of the results. Statisticians initially pro-
vided strict definitions to replace what they considered to be a mess of terms
and figures: ‘an index number of the prices of a number of commodities is an
average of their price relatives’, wrote the American economist Irving Fisher
in his seminal book, *The Making of Index Numbers*.<sup>34</sup> The index was there-
fore relative, it did not measure the cost of living itself, but rather changes in
the cost of living, and the cost of living was not equivalent to the standard
of living. It was necessary, then, to ensure that changes in the cost of living
resulted only from currency fluctuations, or in other words, that they re-
lated to fixed quantities and qualities of items. However, the epistemological
standards expounded by these statisticians – established figures with university chairs or administrative directorates, such as Irving Fisher, Lucien March or Karl Pribam, all proponents of empiricism against probabilistic conjecture – remained far removed from local realities.

Municipal authorities also compared the prices of items, but their temporality was that of the daily life of families. For example, in the first half of the 1920s, the municipality of the industrial town of Łódź in Poland monitored between 50 and 60 prices, including nine types of flour and semolina, and different types of bread, which varied according to the percentage of wheat flour.³⁵ One of the ILO's recommendations for maintaining the principle of goods being comparable in time and space was to calculate the cost-of-living index based on a selection of items considered representative of a family's basic needs. It refrained from specifying this list of basic necessities, however, as it varied across countries, regions, and time periods. It is therefore clear that the projects of international standardization and comparability undertaken by the ILO and statistical offices had to adapt to an irreducibly heterogeneous local world, that of markets and family consumption, and therefore had to work with local representatives. In 1928, the same city of Łódź filled out a monthly questionnaire, sent by the GUS, on the prices of everyday consumer items. At first glance, the use of this form suggests that the municipal authority of Łódź had adopted the official terminology, but a detailed reading of the list makes it clear that the GUS had taken into account the diversity of consumption: the list was still as long as that of 1920, with about 40 items, and mentioned five types of bread and seven types of flour and semolina.³⁶ National administrations did not wish to restrict local rules and habits any more than this and would proceed, on the model of a census, to code items into certain categories. In doing so, they would produce price indices that were 'black boxes', and which trade unions would challenge in periods of inflation on the grounds that the items selected were not representative of employees' consumption.

Challenges to the indices also related to another component of their calculation, that of the varying importance attributed to different items, or categories of items, within family consumption. Their relative importance certainly reflected personal preferences, but was above all a function of income. In order to take this into account in the calculation of the index, different weights were assigned to the prices of the selected items. Experts at the ILO had considered how to determine these relative weights. Two methods in particular attracted their attention: first, the 'Theoretical Budget Method', which determined the proportions of such consumption according to the nutritional and physiological needs of a typical family. It was recommended and applied in the absence of other reliable sources. This, it will be recalled, was the principle applied by the Polish Cost of Living Commission in its early days. The other method, known as the 'Standard Budget Method', was based on the results of budget surveys, a type of survey examining family spending and consumption patterns, which had been in existence for a long time. It
proved to be a unique source of information for estimating the proportion of
items in the index, as ILO statisticians recognized:

in a large number of countries the weights used in the compilation of
the cost of living index numbers are based on budget enquiries into the
consumption of working class families as a whole, or of those living in
industrial areas³⁷

The advantage of this method was the possibility of extracting information
relating to representative families, particularly from an occupational group,
if, for example, it was a question of indexing miners' wages or of distinguishing
between categories according to income or qualification.

Statisticians pointed out that it was not necessary to conduct large surveys –
which would then have been unnecessarily costly – to estimate the weights
of a selection of consumer items. The reality already exceeded the ILO rec-
ommendations, as most budget surveys were conducted at the level of a city
(e.g., Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, all of which served as models for this sort of
work) or a category of workers, and they were already a valuable source for
calculating cost-of-living indices. It was this method of direct family surveys,
sanctioned by actual practice, that was endorsed by the ILO's statistics sec-
tion, although the approach based on biological and physiological needs still
had its supporters.³⁸

Although the ILO explicitly considered the role only of public admin-
istrations for the production of statistics, its resolutions brought an unex-
pected legitimization to all the private surveys that had been conducted
until then. It even gave them a new impetus, since, in the mid-1920s,
most countries continued to rely on pre-war budget surveys to estimate the
weights needed to calculate the cost-of-living index. In this case, the cal-
culation was made based on data from 1914. The ILO recommended that
new surveys be conducted to update these weights and that data should be
gathered from the shared date of 1928 in order to establish 1930 as the new
baseline for the index.³⁹ To hasten these resolutions, the topic of family
budget surveys was put on the agenda of the next Conference of Labour
Statisticians in 1926.⁴⁰

In Poland, the IGS had not waited for these international recommenda-
tions to envisage, as early as 1922, and before the GUS, a survey of the budg-
ets of workers' families. For both representatives of workers' interests and
supporters of social reform, this type of survey was one of the tools available
for investigating the condition of workers. For the economists and sociolo-
gists of the IGS, the major survey of the German metalworkers' union carried
out in 1907 already occupied an important place in the annals of workers'
surveys, as did the 1912 survey carried out by the Vienna Labour Office.⁴¹
The establishment of the Cost of Living Commission in Warsaw in 1920
provided the IGS with a major incentive to collect data on the consumption
of workers' families.
**The budgets of workers' families in Poland: three institutes and one survey**

From its inception, the IGS aimed to carry out a survey of the budgets of workers' families and, using the results, to challenge the wage statistics and the official cost-of-living index calculated by the GUS since 1920. In order to calculate this index according to the guidelines of the new Commission, the GUS used the principle of standard nutritional norms for family consumption. However, despite the ILO's recognition of this so-called theoretical method, the IGS considered the process to be far removed from the actual consumption of households and argued that it underestimated the real fall in incomes.⁴² This was the reason for the survey on the budgets of workers' families, which it launched in 1922. The aim was both to offer workers a tool for their wage demands and to demonstrate the competence of the IGS on this statistical question.

***Budget surveys in the long history of workers' surveys in Europe***

This statistical project did not emerge from a vacuum. Questions related to measuring the cost of living were debated in the international framework of the ILO, and surveys on workers' budgets inherited a long tradition of social surveys. These had been undertaken from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, starting in Western Europe in the wake of industrialization, and subsequently became more frequent and widespread in other countries. Budget surveys were initially conceived as a means of maintaining knowledge and control of workers, but they later became a tool supporting the demands made by the workers' movement and social reformers, for whom it provided factual and quantified arguments.⁴³

In the second half of the nineteenth century, surveys of family budgets attracted the attention of economists, who were then taking a new interest in consumption. This was the case of Ernst Engel at the head of the Statistical Office of the Kingdom of Saxony. He found himself in one of the most industrialized regions of Europe, witnessing the poverty of workers, the earliest revolts, and the hopes raised by the Revolutions of 1848. He joined the ranks of the reformers and did not see solutions to the 'social question' in the work of philanthropists and the writings of social observers, but instead believed in the potential for solutions drawn from the empirical equations of statistics and economics. His work was part of both theoretical and practical reflections on the setting of a minimum wage based on an evaluation of 'The Cost of Man'.⁴⁴ He gave his name to the famous 'Engel's Law' on the structure of consumption, which describes how the proportion of expenditure devoted to food varies inversely with income, and he created rules on data collection and the classification of items and family types. Through his roles at the head of the Statistical Office of Saxony, and later that of Prussia, he helped to establish family budget surveys as part of the collection of official statistics.
The importance of these surveys and their use continued to grow from that point on.⁴⁵

The members of the IGS were familiar with these early surveys and the theoretical and methodological debates they had generated, as well as with recent surveys, including the English survey conducted by the Board of Trade and those of German and Austrian cities. There were favourable conditions for the circulation of knowledge of these surveys, owing to the wide dissemination of these works in European reformist and socialist circles and also as a result of the movement of Polish political activists between the territories of the former kingdom of Poland or of those going into exile. The ILO then accelerated this circulation through its intensive programme of publishing inventories.

The process of the budget survey seemed relatively simple: it consisted of recording the expenditure and income of families over a certain period of time. Among the various methods experimented with, that of distributing account books to families was recommended and adopted in the majority of cases. These regular records, which at first glance seemed to be straightforward, actually raised many problems, starting with the misunderstandings and omissions on the part of workers' families. These difficulties, despite the use of repeated instructions and checks, often led families to abandon their participation in the survey. This reduced the number of usable questionnaires and compromised the representativeness of the results, thereby increasing the cost of the survey. This was the impasse that the IGS reached with the survey it launched in 1923 in Warsaw, which collected an insufficient number of completed booklets. Owing to the crisis at that time, it lacked the necessary funds for extending the scope of the survey and had no choice but to suspend it. The survey was finally successfully accomplished in 1926, but in the context of a new collaboration with public bodies.

## *The Polish survey of workers' budgets and cooperation between private and public institutes*

The IGS sought additional funding to carry out the survey of workers' budgets that it had begun earlier on and secured help from several public bodies. Three of these bodies gave rise to new collaborations: the Health Insurance Fund, the Statistical Department of the Warsaw City Council, and the GUS. The GUS, which found itself caught between its mission for the Cost of Living Commission, the instructions of the ILO, and this approach from the IGS, was also planning a survey of the budgets of workers' families. According to the report of the IGS, the decision of the GUS to participate in the collaboration was taken under pressure from the trade union organizations whose delegations were involved in the Cost of Living Commission.⁴⁶ The GUS was planning a large-scale survey, covering the main urban and industrial centres in Poland – that is, the two main cities, Warsaw and Łódź – as well as two coalfields in Silesia. Again, according to the IGS, it appears that
this project was undertaken at the insistence of the trade unions, who 'from
that moment on, in the Committee on the Cost of Living, started to system-
atically demand that surveys be conducted on household budgets'.⁴⁷

The survey would collect the data needed to calculate the cost-of-living index but would also provide more information on the living conditions of workers. The GUS created a commission to coordinate the survey, and from 1926 onwards, a series of preparatory meetings brought together the three organising institutes. The collaboration with these new partners brought about a change in the IGS's way of working, as it now had to consult with them on the organization and methodology of the survey. The management of the survey and its use were overseen by the GUS, which had the most appropriate logistics for this process, and also conferred official legitimacy. The IGS was recognized for its close relationship with workers' circles and trade unions, and it was therefore given responsibility for implementing the survey in the field.

Conducting a survey on domestic budgets on this new national scale was a methodological challenge. The process began by constituting of a sample of typical families, that is, families that were representative of different occupations, income categories, and industries. The organizers relied on the trade unions to select the families. Once this phase was completed, the distribution of the notebooks could begin, involving a network of trained and paid instructors, and here again, the mediation of trade unions proved indispensable. The survey was entrusted to the municipalities of the different areas in question. The municipalities of Warsaw and Łódź, both major urban centres, carried this out without difficulty, but in the small mining and steelmaking towns of Silesia, there was some reluctance to cooperate. It was decided to send a delegation from the GUS and the IGS to travel from town to town, to present the survey and convince the authorities to provide the necessary material and personnel support. These efforts were not always successful, as the IGS reports:

> The work was not too promising in Upper Silesia. The Central Statistical Office decided to entrust the survey to the provincial administrative unit. Silesia's Vice-Voivode in turn entrusted the task to the head of the Province's Department of Industry and Work without providing him any assistance. The attempts to base the surveys on the cooperation of the workers' representation did not bear any fruit, even though there was a representative of metal workers on the committee, who before the War had conducted similar surveys on behalf of the Central Association of Metalworkers in Stuttgart.⁴⁸

It is quite remarkable to discover, in this paragraph on the local organization
of the survey, a reference to the major survey carried out in 1907 by the
German trade union IG Metall⁴⁹ and to the contacts maintained between the
German and Polish organizations.
The survey itself was supposed to document the expenses of 1250 families over 12 months in 1926 and 1927, but, owing to the number of participating families dropping out, it was extended in 1928 and 1929 with new families. In the end, the number of filled and usable notebooks was low, barely 220 across the whole of Poland. This low level of participation was observed in all countries, as these surveys required regular participation and constant attention on the part of the families. The continued presence of instructors to guide and correct the surveys and the commitment of trade unions to convincing the families of the usefulness of the survey for the improvement of their condition were therefore indispensable.

The GUS reported to the Interior Ministry and its activity was scrutinized by the government, but scientifically, the authority of international organizations such as the ILO took precedence. The two international conferences on indices and budget surveys of 1925 and 1926 created volumes of recommendations, addressing the smallest details, which had become the main guides for the profession from which statistical offices drew instructions and recognition. For example, in its first article on the budget survey, which was devoted to methodological issues alone, the GUS made numerous references to ILO recommendations.⁵⁰ The ILO itself had gradually reduced the scope of its inventory of surveys to include only those conducted by public bodies: ‘the notes are further limited generally to investigations undertaken by a department of the central Government or a local administrative authority. Thus no account is given of…the considerable number of enquiries conducted by private individuals or organisations’.⁵¹

The autonomy of the IGS with respect to the GUS and the latter’s management of the survey was manifested in the IGS’s initiative to carry out an additional survey in order to deepen its knowledge of workers’ living conditions. This survey was conducted among the same families and was based on a new questionnaire, which added more qualitative questions in addition to the earlier questions on material resources: questions regarding associative, cultural, and religious practices, the use of their time, meals, clothing, and also questions of a psychological nature and regarding their views on job satisfaction and their future projects. Through this qualitative component, the IGS aimed to distinguish its approach and to connect it to the monographic and statistical type of surveys. It was inspired by the survey of the Austrian economist and statistician Walter Schiff, which was carried out for the Labour Statistics Office of the City of Vienna, and whose questionnaire served as a model for the IGS.⁵² The IGS highlighted the innovative and unique nature of its study, ‘This work is the first detailed monograph on workers’ life conditions, based on extensive data’, and contrasted it with previous surveys which ‘concerned a small number of families and were based on very limited data’.⁵³

The three institutions involved in conducting the survey – the GUS, the Warsaw Statistical Department, and the IGS – disseminated the results in separate publications. The IGS published a work in 1929 under the title *The Working Class's Living Conditions in Warsaw, Łódź and the Dąbrowa Basin Based*
*on the 1927 Surveys.*<sup>54</sup> The following year, the GUS published the results of the general survey that it had coordinated, with a slightly different title: *Workers' Family Budgets. Results of Surveys Conducted in Warsaw, Łódź, the Dąbrowa Basin, and Upper Silesia.*<sup>55</sup> In 1932, the Warsaw Statistical Department published another volume with detailed results for the city.<sup>56</sup> The GUS emphasized the new significance of large-scale surveys, 'statistical surveys carried out by the statistical authorities mainly with public funds'.<sup>57</sup>

The publications of the three institutions included numerous tables, which presented the data according to the standard statistical form of a budget survey: types of families, units of consumption, detailed list of items, income. Faced with this mass of figures that had been collected, checked, and corrected, the statisticians were able to calculate a single index of the standard of living, the Engel coefficient, which measures the proportion of expenditure on food within the overall budget. The advantage of this index was that it was recognized and calculated in all countries, thereby allowing easy comparisons to be made and commented on. With this figure, Polish statisticians had a tool to objectivize the poverty of Polish workers' families on a European scale and even beyond. In their publications, the IGS and the Warsaw Statistical Service produced tables comparing the distributions of spending by Polish families with the results of surveys conducted in other cities or countries, in Vienna, Hamburg, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and even Russia. They unanimously concluded that 'Polish working-class families' low standard of living, compared to those of European families, [was] evident in the high percentage of expenses allocated to food'.<sup>58</sup> In fact, the results showed that expenditure on food represented about 61% of the workers' budget in Poland compared with 55% in Vienna, 44% in Russia, and 41% in Germany. They added that 'Engel's Law appears everywhere with perfect regularity'.<sup>59</sup> They even estimated and compared the nutritional value of this food, and the differences confirmed the disadvantaged living conditions of Polish workers' families:

> The disadvantageous chemical composition and low caloric value of food in the surveyed workers' families in Warsaw is striking in comparison with the food of German and Austrian workers. It is not difficult to imagine what might have appeared in a comparison with an English, Dutch or American worker.<sup>60</sup>

All these measures were evidence of their extreme poverty. The IGS, adopting a more militant approach, estimated that workers' living standards had improved in most of these countries, but not in Poland: 'Poland is first in terms of indicators related to food expenses. The working class' standard of living and salaries in Poland are among the lowest in Europe'.<sup>61</sup>

Unlike the GUS and the municipality of Warsaw, the IGS was free to develop a militant discourse on the basis of the survey results. It had acted
early on to bring about a budget survey in order to review the way in which
the price index was calculated. Its later participation in a nationwide survey
provided it with further opportunities to criticize official indices and statis-
tics. This was the case with respect to wage statistics, and here again the IGS's
argument was based on the reality of workers' working conditions:

Labour statistics are usually based on wage rate data, not on overall in-
come... However, the remuneration of the workers depends not only
on the wage rate but also on the number of working days or the work
performed. This is subject to large fluctuations, as shown in our study
on family budgets... Part-time work or total unemployment are the rule,
not the exception in the lives of workers.⁶²

The IGS's criticism was directed at both the GUS and the ILO, which made wage comparison one of the axes of their labour statistics. However, the IGS argued that 'the Family Budget statistics provide a much better measure for comparing the standard of living of workers in different countries than the wage statistics'.⁶³

The three institutions acted in collaboration in organizing the survey, but
they once again became independent and separate in their use and publica-
tion of the data. However, their positions converged once again with regard
to the interpretation of the results, and the need to use them to calculate a
new cost-of-living index that would more accurately reflect workers' living
conditions. Nonetheless, the GUS and the IGS embarked on their own cal-
culation of this index.

Public and private calculations of a new cost-of-living index

The first reason for the survey was related to the activities of the Cost of
Living Commission and the insistent demand by trade unions, supported by
the IGS, to the GUS to change the way the index was calculated. As soon as
the first results were available, statisticians at the GUS produced simulations
of the cost-of-living index and published the results.⁶⁴ The approach for this
simulation was experimental because it was based on a small number of budg-
ets, barely 40, which described the consumption of workers' families in War-
saw between 1927 and 1929. From the total amount of expenditure recorded
each month, a group of minimum and maximum budgets was formed respec-
tively. In each of these, the records of daily expenditure and the quantities of
items purchased made it possible to estimate norms of consumption, taking
into account the composition of the families. The three monthly data series,
relating to prices, quantities, and expenditure, were sufficient to estimate
the weights needed for calculating the new cost-of-living index. The values
were then reconciled with the Commission's index in order to identify any
discrepancies. The article published by the GUS emphasized the limitations
of the results obtained because of the small number of observations and concluded that the rationale for the demonstration was as follows:

> Only with sufficiently abundant materials...will we be able to discover the threshold at which the basic needs of this group are met. All other means, such as using standards set by physiologists or hygienists, can only give suppositions that may be more or less close to the truth – they do not, however, answer the questions that statisticians deal with.⁶⁵

With this article, the GUS therefore rejected the Commission's method without, however, providing concrete solutions.

The IGS, again through the voice of Szturm de Sztrem, proposed an alternative method for calculating the cost-of-living index, which Szturm de Sztrem set out the following year in the GUS's journal *Statystyka Cen* (*Statistics of Prices*).⁶⁶ The GUS and the IGS agreed on the need for a new method of calculation based on observed, rather than theoretical, data; Szturm de Sztrem therefore proposed an alternative index, while asserting, in this way, the technical expertise that he and his institute possessed on this subject.

His approach arose from the same desire to distinguish between workers according to their income, which could vary according to qualifications and sectors of activity. However, his method was different in that the IGS used a source external to the budget survey, that of the 'Commission for Investigations in the Conditions and Costs of Production and Exchange'.⁶⁷ In 1927-1928, this official and joint commission had coordinated an important survey of production, following the model of foreign surveys.⁶⁸ Within this framework, at the request of the trade unions, precise data had also been collected on the working conditions and remuneration of workers in industry according to sector of activity, qualifications, and working hours. Szturm de Sztrem had been invited, together with another member of the IGS, to take part in the survey as an economic expert, and through this involvement he had access to the information that was collected.⁶⁹

From the data on workers' pay, he determined their distribution among four income groups and then identified which families in the budget survey these levels corresponded to, and from this, which norms of consumption they corresponded to. By linking the two sources, he intended to weigh the different structures of consumption observed according to income levels, more than 60% of which were found to be at the lowest levels. In this way, he made the cost-of-living index more representative of the living conditions of workers than the budget survey was.

A graph represented the monthly change in index values between 1927 and 1931 according to both methods. Szturm de Sztrem pointed out that 'the most important change consists in the increase of the amount spent on food at the expense of other kinds of spending'.⁷⁰ Based on the new method of calculation, this figure rose from 51% to 68.4% over the period, which reflected the large proportion of budgets with low incomes. Similarly, the nutritional
value of consumption decreased in the new index, which was a consequence of taking into account the lower proportion of well-off workers' families. Finally, he pointed out that the new index was more sensitive to changes in market prices due to the high proportion of food items, thereby revealing the vulnerability of the poorest families in the face of these price fluctuations. Szturm de Sztrem concluded in these objective and factual terms, but it must have been evident that the new method was fairer and justified workers' criticisms of the index that had been used until then.

## Conclusion

In Poland, as in other countries, social studies and surveys had their roots in the social movements of the nineteenth century. Until 1918, under the imperial regimes governing these Polish territories, there were no state institutions supporting such studies and organizing large-scale surveys. In their place, associations provided the framework for this process of professionalization and made a strong connection between that research and their demands relating to social and national questions. These surveys were therefore carried out with a view to both gaining knowledge and making social demands. In the new Polish state, this close and lasting link between surveys and social activism continued throughout the interwar period. It characterized the work of the IGS, one of the most active and productive independent organizations in the field of studies and surveys of workers' living conditions.

This chapter focused on a field of study that was then undergoing major expansion, that of social and economic statistics. This field accompanied the transformation of economies and the resolution of their crises, but it was also a language that objectivized workers' working conditions in order to condemn those conditions. However, the production of numerical data and the implementation of statistical surveys – activities normally undertaken by the administration of the state – occurred relatively late in Poland, owing to its role in the history of European empires. As a result, the GUS, created at the same time as the Polish state, had to cooperate and compete with private institutions, including the IGS. The chapter focused on the relations between these institutions in the context of a social matter which had become a political issue for most governments at the head of capitalist economies: the question raised in the interwar period by the impact of the inflationary crises on the wages and living standards of workers and the need to create a price index capable of automatically determining the size of wage increases.

The interaction between the two institutions – one public and one private – gave impetus to the implementation of statistical studies and surveys and particularly the large-scale survey of the budgets of workers' families, which was unprecedented in Poland. By examining the organization of the survey in this chapter, it has been possible to specify the form of this cooperation. In line with the ILO's recommendations, which conferred international recognition on the project, the practical implementation of the survey involved
the coordination of a complex network that actually included many private and public partners ranging from the level of national government to that of municipalities and trade unions. The conduct of the survey also highlighted the fragility of an asymmetrical relationship of cooperation, due to the institutions' unequal access to financial and symbolic resources, which developed into a hierarchical division of labour. Although the IGS found itself reduced to the task of mediating between the GUS and trade unions, it ultimately undertook its own survey, from which it derived indices that competed with the official ones. The two indices published in a GUS journal endorsed the validity of the IGS's work. Although it was a private institute, it was a recognized actor in social policy. Subsequently, wage and price statistics became a regular feature of the work of the GUS, and the IGS no longer acted in this area. At the beginning of the 1930s, the IGS was confronted with the need to study another problem arising from economic crises, that of mass unemployment, and launched a new type of survey.

## Notes

1. M. Kohlrausch, K. Steffen, and S. Wiederkehr, *Expert Cultures in Central Eastern Europe. The internationalization of knowledge and the transformation of nation states since World War I* (Osnabrück, 2010). K. Lebow, M. Mazurek, and J. Wawrzyniak, ‘Making modern social science: The global imagination in East Central and Southeastern Europe after Versailles’, *Contemporary European History*, 28 (2019), 137–142. M. Górny, *Science Embattled. Eastern European intellectuals and the Great War* (Paderborn, 2019).

2. M.S. Morgan, and J.L. Klein (eds), ‘The age of economic measurement’, *History of Political Economy*, 33, 5 (2001).

3. W. Winclawski, ‘Leplayowskie inspiracje w socjologii polskiej’, *Rocznik Lubuski*, 34, 2 (2008), 87–110.

4. R. Blobaum, *Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904–1907* (Ithaca, NY, 1995).

5. W. Borodziej, and M. Górny, *Der vergessene Weltkrieg Europas Osten 1912–1923* (Darmstadt, 2018).

6. A. Lindermeyer, *Poverty Is not a Vice. Charity, society and the state in imperial Russia* (Princeton, NJ, 1996).

7. S. Hłasko, *Sprawozdanie z działalności Biura Pracy Społecznej za okres od 1 grudnia 1915 r. do 1 kwietnia 1918 r.* (Warsaw, 1918).

8. The Society of Polish Economists and Statisticians was founded in 1917, and several members of the Board of Social Work were members of it.

9. As the archives of the IGS were destroyed during the Second World War, documents relating to the creation of the institute are rare, with the exception of two publications: T. Szturm de Sztrem, *Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego 1920–1944* (Warsaw, 1959); the annual activity reports printed between 1920 and 1938, in particular, *Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego 1920–1930*. *Sprawozdanie z działalności dziesięcioletniej*, (Warsaw, 1930). For the recent period, see B. Łazowska, ‘Współpraca Głównego Urzędu Statystycznego z Instytutem Gospodarstwa Społecznego w zakresie badań społecznych w latach 1920–1939’, *Wiadomości Statystyczne*, 65, 7 (2020), 47–64.

10. The war with Soviet Russia continued until the Treaty of Riga in March 1921.
11 I. Mrzygłód, ‘Harsh reality: Living in Warsaw under hyperinflation in 1923’, *Remembrance and Solidarity. Studies in 20th Century European History*, 4 (2015), 27–46.

12 W. Morawski, *Od marki do złego: historia finansów Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej (Warsaw, 2008)*.

13 G.D. Feldman, *The Great Disorder: Politics, economics, and society in the German inflation, 1914–1924* (Oxford and New York, 1997).

14 Order of the 27 May 1920. *Monitor Polski*, 149 (6 July 1920).

15 In France, for example, a 'Central Commission for Studies on the Cost of Living' was set up in February 1920. See A. Lhuissier, 'Les enquêtes officielles sur le coût de la vie et l'alimentation ouvrière (1910-1921)', in É. Geerkens, N. Hatzfeld, I. Lespinet-Moret, and X. Vigna (eds), *Les Enquêtes Ouvrières dans l'Europe Contemporaine* (Paris, 2019).

16 Order of the 27 May 1920, *op. cit.*

17 Order of the 17 January 1921. *Monitor Polski*, 34 (12 February 1921).

18 T. Szturm de Sztrem, *Walka o place zarobkowe* (Warsaw, 1922). See also *Place zarobkowe w okresie dewaluacji pieniężnej* (Warsaw, 1923), *Żywiołowość Opodatkowani: podatek inflacyjnie* (Warsaw, 1924).

19 *Ibid.*, 20.

20 D. Maul, *The International Labour Organization. 100 years of global social policy* (Oldenbourg, 2019). S. Kott, 'From transnational reformist network to international organization', in D. Rodogno, B. Struck, and J. Vogel (eds), *Shaping the Transnational Sphere. Experts, networks and issues from the 1840s to the 1930s* (New York, 2015).

21 N. Stegmann, 'The ILO and East Central Europe: Insights into the early Polish and Czechoslovak interwar years', *AUC Studia Territorialia*, 17, 1 (2017), 11–34.

22 T. Sztrum de Sztrem, 'Wage problems in Poland during and after the War', *International Labour Review*, X, 3 (1924), 389–410.

23 *Ibid.*, 399.

24 *Ibid.*, 400.

25 *Ibid.*, 401.

26 Archiwum Akt Nowych, *Międzynarodowe Biuro Pracy, Oddział korespondencyjny w Warszawie*, 3, 1922–23, 510, Letter of the 25 September 1922 (in French).

27 *Ibid.*, 499, Letter of the 6 December 1922.

28 ILO, *Methods of Compiling Cost of Living Index Numbers. Report prepared for the second international conference of labour statisticians (April 1925)*, Studies and reports. Series N (Statistics); 6 (Geneva, 1925).

29 *Ibid.*, 9.

30 T.M. Porter, *Trust in Numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life* (Princeton, NJ, 1996).

31 ILO, *Second International Conference of Labour Statisticians. Held at Geneva, 20 to 25 April 1925*, Studies and reports. Series N (Statistics); 8 (Geneva, 1925), 69–70.

32 É. Brian, 'Transactions statistiques au XIXe siècle. Mouvements internationaux de capitaux symboliques', *Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales*, 145 (2002), 34–46.

33 ILO, *Methods of Compiling Cost of Living Index Numbers, op. cit.*, 48.

34 I. Fisher, *The Making of Index Numbers. A study of their varieties, tests, and reliability* (Boston, MA and New York, 1922), 3.

35 Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi, *Akta miasta Łodzi: "Ceny i koszty utrzymania 1921...1926"*, 24379.

36 Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi, *Akta miasta Łodzi: "Sprawozdania miesięczne do G.U.S."*

37 ILO, *Methods of Compiling Cost of Living Index Numbers, op. cit.*, 17.

38 ILO, *Second International Conference of Labour Statisticians, op. cit.*, 12–13.

39 *Ibid.*, 70.
40 ILO, *Third International Conference of Labour Statisticians*. held at Geneva, 18 to 23 October 1926 (Geneva, 1926).

41 320 Haushaltungsrechnungen von Metallarbeitern, Vorstand des Deutschen Metallarbeiter-Verbandes, (Stuttgart, 1909). *Wirtschaftsrechnungen und Lebensverhältnisse von Wiener Arbeiterfamilien in den Jahren 1912 bis 1914*. Erhebung des k. k. Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes im Handelsministerium (Vienna, 1916).

42 Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego 1920–1930, op. cit., 17.

43 Geerkens, Hatzfeld, Lespinet-Moret, and Vigna (eds), *op. cit.* A. Oberschall, *Empirical Social Research in Germany: 1848–1914* (Paris and La Haye, 1965). M. Bulmer, K. Bales, and K.K. Sklar (eds), *The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–1940* (Cambridge, 1991).

44 C. Berthomieu, ‘La loi et les travaux d’Engel’, *Consommation*, 4 (1966), 59–89. G. Stigler, ‘The early history of empirical studies of consumer behavior’, *Journal of Political Economy*, 62, 2 (1954), 95–113.

45 A. Desrosières, ‘Du travail à la consommation: L’évolution des usages des enquêtes sur le budget des familles’, *L’argument Statistique. II*, Gouverner par les noms-bres (Paris, 2008), 8, 177–215.

46 Warunki Życia Robotniczego w Warszawie, Łodzi i Zagłębiu Dąbrowskim w świetle Ankiet 1927 Roku (Warsaw, 1929), VII.

47 Ibid., 3.

48 Ibid., 7.

49 320 Haushaltungsrechnungen von Metallarbeitern, op. cit.

50 B. Balukiewicz, ‘Ankieta o budżetach domowych’, *Statystyka Pracy*, 3–4 (1927), 321–343.

51 ILO, *Methods of Conducting Family Budget Enquiries*, Studies and reports. Series N (Statistics); 9 (Geneva, 1926), 57.

52 Warunki życia robotniczego w Warszawie, Łodzi i Zagłębiu, op. cit., 17. W. Schiff, ‘Die österreichische Erhebung über Wirtschaftsrechnungen und Lebensverhältnisse von Wiener Arbeiterfamilien, Methode und Ergebnisse’, *Allgemeines Statistisches Archiv*, 10 (1916/17), 509–594.

53 Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego 1920–1930, op. cit., 20–21.

54 Warunki życia robotniczego w Warszawie, Łodzi i Zagłębiu, op. cit.

55 Budżety Rodzin Robotniczych. Wyniki ankiety przeprowadzone w Warszawie, Łodzi, Zagłębiu Dąbrowskiemu i na Górnym Sasku, 1927, 1928, 1929, (Warsaw, 1930).

56 Budżety Rodzin Robotniczych w Warszawie w latach 1927–1929, 5 (Warsaw, 1932).

57 B. Balukiewicz, op. cit., 325.

58 Budżety Rodzin Robotniczych w Warszawie, op. cit., 15.

59 Warunki życia robotniczego w Warszawie, Łodzi i Zagłębiu, op. cit., 95.

60 Budżety Rodzin Robotniczych w Warszawie, op. cit., 15.

61 Warunki życia robotniczego w Warszawie, Łodzi i Zagłębiu, op. cit., 109.

62 Ibid., 111.

63 Ibid., 107.

64 E. Estreicher, ‘W sprawie metody badan kosztów utrzymania rodzin robotniczych’, *Statystyka Pracy*, IX, 2 (1930), 194–209.

65 Ibid., 208.

66 T. Szturm de Sztrem, ‘Nowy wskaźnik kosztów utrzymania’, *Statystyka Cen*, 4 (1931), 1–23.

67 B. Rzepecki, *Komisja Ankietowa. Badania warunków i kosztów produkcji oraz wymiany* (Warsaw, 1927).

68 M. Dhermy-Mairal, ‘Du danger des enquêtes savantes. Faire œuvre de science dans l’entre-deux-guerres au Bureau international du travail’, *Revue d’Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine*, 62, 4 (2015), 7–32.

69 Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego 1920–1930, op. cit., 15–16.

70 T. Szturm de Sztrem, ‘Nowy wskaźnik kosztów utrzymania’, op. cit., 13.
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Hłasko, S., *Sprawozdanie z działalności Biura Pracy Społecznej za okres od 1 grudnia 1915 r. do 1 kwietnia 1918 r.* (Warsaw, 1918).

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# 5 Performing the state?

Public and private actors in
the field of social provision in
twentieth-century Greece

Efi Avdela

**Introduction**

Recent historical research referring to various European countries has pro-
posed new insights in respect to the relation between voluntary associations
and the state. Many studies have repeatedly shown that these relations have
been steady and polymorphous, if not mutually co-constitutive, and contin-
ually reconfigured not only for the twentieth but also for a large part of the
nineteenth century. Thus, the old assumption about a gradual substitution
of charitable organizations by state institutions has been undermined. In her
2012 article on ‘The “Big Society” and the “Big State”’, Pat Thane has ar-
gued that ‘throughout the history of the British welfare state, institutions of
civil society worked closely with the state, that they reinforced and com-
plemented each other, if sometimes in tension and with continually shifting
boundaries’.¹ Many studies have corroborated this thesis for Britain as well as
for many other European countries.² It is maintained that instead of a welfare
state, it is more appropriate to talk about a ‘mixed economy of welfare’ in-
volving public and private action.³ However, all national historical cases are
not identical. I argue that it is not enough to acknowledge the complementa-
rity of the two sectors. It is equally important to assess the specific forms that
this complementarity took in particular historical circumstances, the types of
relationships developed and – last but not the least – the part that individual
or collective initiatives took.⁴ In other words, it is necessary to understand the
relations between voluntary associations and the state as historic, contextual
and specific. If the British state appeared as a strong and reliable, even if not
always accommodating, partner of the voluntary sector, this was not neces-
sarily the case elsewhere.

Greece has been mostly absent from the international historiography re-
garding twentieth-century social provision. Most research has focused on the
state, while the role of the voluntary sector in the field of social provision
during this period has only recently started to be studied.⁵ It has often been
argued, mainly by political scientists, that social provision in Greece has been
systematically inadequate due to the persistence of a weak civil society, a
poor state and ‘clientelist’ relations.⁶ However, I follow here recent research
‘challenging the idea of a singularity of associational culture that emerged in Western Europe and the Atlantic World and then spread to the rest of the globe, and against which all other social contexts are measured’.⁷ In order to explore the specific forms that the interaction between private and public actors in the field of social protection took in Greece, I will turn my attention from the state to voluntary associations, focusing on those directly dedicated to offering social provision to various vulnerable groups; that is associations working ‘for the good of others’.⁸

My contention is that in the period from the 1920s to the 1970s, voluntary associations dedicated to the good of others became the locus for the interaction between public and private, individual and collective actors in the field of social provision, while their form and content changed considerably. Focusing on Athens and Thessaloniki, the two biggest urban centres of the country, I will examine cases where public agents – meaning various types of public employees and civil servants – acting in a private capacity in the above-mentioned field, were able to instigate the creation of, participate in or create for themselves voluntary associations that extended the field of social protection in various ways. This was possible because during the period under investigation, membership in voluntary associations was limited only formally by age and nationality: anyone, private citizen or public employee, man or woman, provided that she was adult and a Greek national, could become a member of a voluntary association. Thus, these public agents, together with a multitude of volunteers of various sorts created networks⁹ that undertook through voluntary associations, the social protection of vulnerable groups. However, the character of these networks changed over time in accordance to the social and political circumstances of each historical period: from multiple and extending, placed at the social and political centre of power during the interwar years, they became more locally circumscribed at the level of city districts during the 1940s, and much more fragmented, diversified professionally bounded and politically peripheral in the post-war period. Their ideological transformations were also considerable. The desire for modernization and reform that private volunteers and active state officials evoked for their initiatives in assisting vulnerable others in the 1920s turned into religious humanitarianism and fierce social and political conservatism in the 1950s–1970s. I argue that the close interaction of public and private agents in the above-mentioned networks covered important needs in social provision, accentuated by the repeated extraordinary socio-economic conditions that the country faced throughout the twentieth century as a result of political and military upheavals – the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), the Greco-Turkish War and the ensuing Asia Minor Catastrophe (1919–1922), the Second World War and the ensuing tripartite Occupation (1940–1944), Civil War (1946–1949) and also two dictatorships, Metaxas 1936–1940 and the military Junta of 1967–1974.¹⁰

In what follows, I will sketch first how during the interwar years social protection became a central political issue, attracting around a host of
voluntary associations a large network of individual and collective public and private agents and how this network broke up and diversified in the following decades. Then I will present three cases, from the interwar, the war and the post-war years, of initiatives undertaken by state agents acting as private members of associations dedicated to the field of social provision: (a) when in the interwar years public officials used their social networks in order to induce private collective actors to undertake the social protection of vulnerable groups; (b) when during the German, Italian and Bulgarian Occupation (1941–1944), public and private agents collaborated in founding voluntary associations that substituted for the state, which was unable to meet urgent social needs; (c) when in the post-war years state officials performed the role of private actors organizing voluntary associations for themselves in order to better provide social protection to vulnerable individuals in their care.

I argue that these examples allow us to attest to the importance of individual action in fostering social provision initiatives and consequently to follow the transformations in the meaning of ‘social protection’ from a reformist plan of state building to the struggle for conserving social and political power. The initiatives, in which the state is ‘substituted’ and ‘performed’ by public employees and civil servants acting as private actors together with volunteers, constitute the particularly idiosyncratic version of the Greek social and political space of social provision throughout the century, which has still not been systematically recorded. This is a first attempt.

## Volunteering and networking

Throughout the nineteenth century after the formation of the Greek state in the 1830s, philanthropic and self-help associations abounded, while state intervention in the field of social provision remained rudimentary. As historical research has shown, the state assigned to municipalities and varied charities the provision for specific groups – for instance, destitute families and beggars. The main goal of philanthropic intervention was the moralizing of the poor. Through countless associations, Greek philanthropists undertook action against poverty, creating institutions such as hospitals, orphanages, Sunday or technical schools. While they regularly received state funding, they repeatedly criticized the state for indifference. In fact, their own concern was to prevent state intervention that would burden middle-class incomes. Historians consider the virulent irredentism characterizing the last decades of the nineteenth century – known as *Megali Idea* (Μεγάλη Ιδέα – the Great Idea) – the continuous economic difficulties and the widespread clientelism as the main reasons for restricted state social provision.¹¹

The legal status of voluntary associations changed with law 281 of 1914 on associations.¹² The law stipulated the voluntary participation of their members, the distinction between members and non-members, formal self-government, independence from the state and explicitly non-profit character. The existing associations had to adapt to the new legal framework that
fostered the rapid expansion of associations in numbers as well as in aims and scope, especially in respect to workers' and professional unions. As elsewhere, collective voluntarism remained an important part of the associational sector throughout the twentieth century, although in Greece, most of the relevant collectivities were small in membership and finances and either were short-lived or often changed their names.

Be that as it may, the rise in power of Liberal Eleftherios Venizelos and the Liberal party (1910–1920, 1928–1932), the decade of war (1912–1922) and the advent of almost a million and a half refugees after the defeat of Greece in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, changed things dramatically. Social provision became one of the main targets of state reform, while new social concerns emerged.¹³ Scientists and scholars criticizing philanthropy and promoting social work played an important role during the interwar period in developing the field of collective voluntarism.¹⁴ So did a growing number of men and also women, of varied professional and social backgrounds, who became active in associational activities and volunteer work as well as numerous state officials – most with legal or medical formation, favourable to the modernizing efforts of the Liberal Party (Κόμμα Φιλελευθέρων – Komma Fileleftheron) – who, anxious to promote reform plans in the field of social provision, operated as mediators between private and public actors. They all encountered each other in numerous voluntary associations and in social networking, enhanced by political affinities, social sensitivities and the increasing, even if uneven, institutionalization of social provision. The constantly acute social problems, exacerbated by recurrent political and national tragedies, made the necessity of reform more pressing. The relevant activity created a social and political space of public sociality that allowed educated individuals to develop initiatives, acquire social capital and build careers moving between voluntary associations and public institutions in the name of easing social needs.¹⁵ Private citizens interacted actively – most often as members of the same association – with public employees, civil servants and state officials anxious to extend the field of social provision but unable to do so through formal procedures. However, as we shall see, the character of these collective interventions changed dramatically over the years in tune with the general political climate.

Educated women became significantly more visible in the associational field of social provision: the care of others was considered by all, themselves included, as compatible with their 'feminine nature'. As the century progressed, there were fewer and fewer charitable individuals or family members of politicians; those who were professionals of various specializations – social workers, probation officers, teachers, nurses, jurists – though often without a stable job and coming from the lower middle classes, increased with time. Timidly in the interwar years, more explicitly after the war, they became an important component of the associative action related to social provision, where they could demonstrate their skills, gain social recognition and even aspire to paid work. Although a small number reached executive positions
in the boards of mixed associations, some had succeeded in asserting their
influence through their long active presence in this field. By their constant
presence, their networks and their interactions with state officials, some ac-
quired considerable power and became public figures.

The case of Evanthia Guinopoulou is revealing and also characteristic of
its time. Coming from a family of provincial politicians, married and wid-
owed young, without much education, E. Guinopoulou became an early
and active member of the League for Women's Rights (Σύνδεσμος για τα
Δικαιώματα της Γυναίκας – Syndesmos gia ta Dikaiomata tis Gynaikas) dur-
ing the interwar years – the most important feminist organization of its
time – developed intense associational work for the provision of various
vulnerable others and dedicated her life to the protection of poor and de-
linquent children and adolescents. A leading figure in the campaign for the
establishment of Juvenile Courts, she became the President of the Society
for the Protection of Minors (Εταιρεία Προστασίας Ανηλίκων – Etaireia Pros-
tasias Anilikon, henceforth SPM) from its inception in 1924 until 1957, long
after SPM ceased to be a voluntary association and became a public entity,
administered and operated by volunteers and supervised by the Ministry of
Justice. She remained its honorary president until her death in 1959. Her
continuous presence and persistent activities in this field brought her the
social and symbolic capital that allowed her to go through the upheavals
of Greek political life of the period while remaining at the centre of the
associational action regarding juvenile delinquency: a feminist close to the
liberal reformers in the 1920s and the early 1930s, she rallied to the dicta-
torial regime of Metaxas from 1936, collaborated closely with state officials
during the Occupation and integrated into the conservatives after the war to
become one of the pillars of the moralizing and anti-communist campaigns
of the 1950s. Thus, she remained for more than 30 years at the head of most
associations and services dedicated to the social protection of juvenile de-
linquents, those convicted, gone astray, destitute or in 'moral danger' and
acquired considerable power in this area. She lived to see her work rewarded
first by the Academy of Athens and then by the King himself. E. Guinop-
oulou remained a 'professional volunteer' at a time when those who volun-
teered in social work, mainly women but also men, systematically tried to
make it a professional and paid activity.¹⁶

Many other women throughout the period demonstrated outstanding
skills for fundraising, administration and organization of collective actions
through associational work in the field of social provision. Together with a
growing number of public agents – judges, state officials, academics, physi-
cians or lower civil servants – and ‘professional’ philanthropists – politicians,
businessmen, jurists or clergymen – they embodied the shifting but constant,
even if complex and contradictory, continuum between the voluntary sec-
tor and the state in the extensive field of social provision. The considerable
transformations of this continuous space in form, content and ideology will
be illustrated by the three cases presented below.
Instigating

The first example of interaction between public and private agents in the field of social provision concerns state officials instigating the foundation of voluntary associations in order to extend social protection to vulnerable groups that were recently becoming visible.

The end of the First World War and Greece's defeat in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922 produced a wave of a million and 300 thousand Greek Orthodox refugees from Eastern Thrace and Asia Minor into a country of 5 million inhabitants at the time and gave rise to important economic and social problems.¹⁷ Among them, a new public anxiety emerged concerning destitute children and delinquent youth. Many reformers followed attentively the methods, practices and policies applied in respect to the 'new' social issue in other European countries, such as France and Germany but also the USA, and especially those regarding the establishment of juvenile justice. They aspired to see them applied in Greece. In order to promote this goal, a network of jurists, physicians, public administrators, reformers and feminists in favour of the above reforms founded voluntary associations, joined with pressure groups and developed various forms of collective action. Their aim was threefold: to press politicians to establish juvenile courts, to sensitize public opinion to the necessity for them and to provide for the urgent needs of imprisoned minors.¹⁸

A common trait of these efforts concerned the close collaboration between private collectivities and state structures through individuals participating in the above-mentioned network. In the following years, the members of this network crossed each other in a multitude of associations, which constantly changed names and statutes in order to adapt to the successive regulations in respect of the penal and social provision management of minors. Most importantly, a number of public administrators proved very imaginative and active in their efforts to expand the field of social protection.

The case of Panagiotis Skouriotis is telling. Serving as prefect – regional governor – of Herakleio in Crete since 1915, P. Skouriotis was a high-ranking state official under the successive Liberal governments throughout the interwar years. Director of the Correctional Department in the Ministry of Justice and representative of Greece on the Commission Internationale Pénale et Pénitentiaire in the 1920s and early 1930s, member of the Committee of Savings (Επιτροπή Οικονομιών – Epitropi Oikonomion, a parliamentary group assigned by the government of the Liberal Alexandros Papanastasiou to the sanitation of national finances) in 1924, he founded the Prison of Tyrintha – the first agricultural prison in the country – in 1925. His traces disappear after the Metaxas dictatorship on 1936.

Amidst the complex political context and the encumbered state apparatus following the 'refugee crisis' of 1922, in June 1924 Skouriotis appealed to the 'ladies' of the two main feminist organizations of the interwar years, the League for Women's Rights and the National Council
of Greek Women (Εθνικό Συμβούλιο Ελληνίδων – Ethniko Symvoulio El-linidon), prompting them to contribute to creating an association for the protection of imprisoned women and minors. The timing was not accidental. For the two previous years, several members of the two feminist organizations had participated actively in the public debate regarding the prospect of founding courts for minors in Greece – or ‘children’s courts’ as they were called.¹⁹

In fact, interwar feminists were especially interested in this prospect for various reasons. On the one hand, they perceived juvenile justice as a new domain of potential paid activities for educated women. On the other hand, this issue opened up a new field for these women’s public interventions and one where their organizing and administrative skills as well as their experience in working collectively could be acknowledged. So they accepted willingly Skouriotis’s call to create promptly an association aiming at the ‘moral and economic assistance of women and minors, however imprisoned, irrespective of religion or nationality’.²⁰ As the first administrative board of the new association shows, they were joined by jurists and other civil servants such as the Public Prosecutor of the Appeal Court Judges, A. Riganakos, very active in the associational and reforming activities of these years.²¹ The first goal of the Association for the Protection of Imprisoned Women and Minors (Σύλλογος προς προστασίαν κρατονμένων γυναικών και ανηλίκων – Syllogos pros prostasian kratoumenon gynaikon kai anilikon) was to offer free juridical assistance to women and minors in trouble with the law.²²

There are indications that Skouriotis sought to see similar associations founded in urban centres other than Athens. For example, an association with the same name – Association for the Protection of Imprisoned Women and Minors (Σύλλογος προς προστασίαν κρατονμένων γυναικών και ανηλίκων – Syllogos pros prostasian kratoumenon gynaikon kai anilikon) – was created in 1925 in Hermoupolis, the urban centre of the island of Syros.²³ Presumably, it was part of a more or less orchestrated effort. It is my contention that the case of Panagiotis Skouriotis shows that in those years, personalities enjoying authority and crucial positions in the state institutions seemed to take initiatives supported by a double aspiration: to follow the new international trends in social protection in an organized, thematic and scientific way and to extend the field of social provision to new areas. In order to recruit those interested to participate in and to finance these projects, they often leaned on private collectivities.

For example, it seems that the protection of imprisoned women and children was not Skouriotis’s only project. It is said that he was also the instigator of the creation of the General Society for the Protection of Childhood and Adolescence (Γενική Εταιρεία προς Προστασίαν της Παιδικής και Εφηβικής Ηλικίας – Geniki Etaireia pros Prostasian tis Paidikis kai Efivikis Ilikias), founded in 1924 with the aim of promoting all issues regarding social provision for children. A member of the International Save the Children Union (Union Internationale de secours aux enfants – UISE), founded in 1920
and based in Geneva, the association would later change its name to SPM.²⁴
Many state officials can be traced among its members, while Evanthia Guinopoulou was one of its founding members.

In other words, a new common space of collective action and public sociality was formed during the interwar years, where various intersecting networks – liberal, professional and philanthropic – of private individuals, voluntary associations and civil servants were able, in the name of novel scientific knowledge and innovative reform, to extend the field of social provision to wayward and destitute minors or to children and minors in general. The same individuals participated in more than one association dedicated to the good of others.²⁵ These initiatives bore the marks of the 1920s, namely the desire to reform the state, the persistent invocation of scientific methodologies and the reality of the acute social problems. In the following years, the networks in question broke up and many of their members made considerable political and ideological shifts according to the ups and downs of the country's political life. Several disappeared from the public domain, such as Panagiotis Skouriotis. Others, who were initially mobilized in the midst of the reforming movement of the Liberal Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, were not embarrassed to become engaged with the dictatorial regime of Ioannis Metaxas from 1936 on, or to rally to the conservative anti-communist state in the post-war years, as was the case for Evanthia Guinopoulou and many others. What remained stable were the close interconnections between volunteers and public employees and the constant movement of the latter from one position to the other.

## Substituting

The second example concerns the concerted actions of apparently both public and private actors through the creation of voluntary associations aiming to confront the famine inflicted on Athens by the Axis Occupation and provides for the most vulnerable groups of the population.

Greece was under the tripartite occupation of German, Italian and Bulgarian armed forces from April 1941 to October 1944, following a year of fierce war. The German army invaded Athens on 27 April 1941. Soon, and especially during the winter of 1941–1942, the capital endured a severe famine, with large numbers of inhabitants dying from starvation or illnesses related to insufficient nutrition, especially from the lower social strata as well as ex-soldiers unable to reach their native region. While data on the deaths due to the famine in the area of Athens and Piraeus in 1941–1942 are very dubious and estimates are risky, most studies concur that they consist of several tens of thousands, probably up to 100,000 deaths, both declared and non-declared.²⁶ The famine was the result of multiple causes, but mainly the pillage of the country's resources by the German army, the decrease of agricultural production, the disintegration of the state public assistance services and the blockade applied by the British navy. As insufficient food came into the capital, large
parts of the population struggled against starvation or succumbed to it, espe-
cially children. After an international outcry, the belligerents concluded an
agreement in spring 1942 that allowed for international food aid, managed
by the Swiss and the Swedish on behalf of the International Red Cross. The
mechanism for its distribution was put in place during the summer of 1942.²⁷

During the famine and in the months following it, from the beginning of
1942 and throughout 1943, at least 27 voluntary associations were founded
in Athens, each one corresponding to a district of the capital, mostly the
working-class ones.²⁸ All associations aimed at providing assistance to those
inhabitants of the districts that had been affected by the special circumstances
of the Occupation. The founding members signing the respective statutes
were all men, apparently residents of the same neighbourhood.

These associations can be divided into two groups. The first group com-
prises eight associations, most of which were founded in the midst of the
famine, in the early months of 1942, but some also in the first months of the
following year. Their titles present some variations, but all refer to the Police
Department covering the specific neighbourhood. For example: Treasury
of Social Provision of the District of the 5th Police Department of Ath-
ens (founded 8.1.1942), Association of Social Welfare and Provision of the
District of the 14th Police Department of Athens Amperokipon (18.2.1942),
Brotherhood of Social Welfare and Provision of the District of the 7th Police
Department of Athens (Quarter of Kypseli, Agias Zonis) (1.3.1942) or Social
Provision of the District of the 8th Police Department of Athens (19.3.1942)
and others.²⁹ Their statutes were also more or less identical. Their com-
mon objective stated in their statutes was to provide relief to ‘those living
in the district whom the exceptional circumstances make unable to provide
themselves with the essential needs of life’ or to ‘provid[e] any possible kind
of mental, spiritual and material assistance to those who need it and espe-
cially to those stricken by the extraordinary circumstances under which the
Greek fatherland finds itself’. The means stipulated were also almost iden-
tical: the support could derive from the association’s own resources, from
services provided by individuals ‘appropriate and willing’, by cooperation
with compatible state agencies, bodies and organizations.³⁰ All the statutes
stipulated that the acting Director of the relevant Police Department was an
ex officio member of each association’s administrative council. It was also
stipulated that in case of dissolution, their property was to be handed over to
the Greek Red Cross or the National Organization of Christian Solidarity
(Εθνικός Οργανισμός Χριστιανικής Αλληλεγγύης – Ethnikos Organismos Chris-
tianikis Allileggyis, henceforth NOCS), created by the Archdiocese of Athens
in December 1941.³¹

It should be noted that most of these associations were established be-
fore the setting up of the international humanitarian intervention to save the
population of Athens from the famine, deployed in August 1942. The slight
variations of their titles as well as their more or less identical statutes testify
that they represented some kind of concerted action, most probably uniting
both public and private actors in order to face extraordinary circumstances and facilitate the distribution at the local level of whatever humanitarian aid was being secured – soup kitchens especially for destitute children, medical care and other.

Another 19 voluntary associations, all named Care Fund (Ταμείον Περιτθάλψεως – Tameion Perithalpseos) in different districts of Athens, were created in the course of 1943, one or two in almost every month of that year. For example: Care Fund of Kallithea (14.1.1943); Care Fund for those Destitute of Aigaleo (31.1.1943); Care Fund of Social Provision of Chalandri (11.2.1943); Care Fund of Vyronas (12.5.1943) and others.³² In large part, their statutes duplicate those of the first group, especially in respect to their aim: to ‘provid[e] aid in kind or money to those whom the exceptional circumstances make unable to provide themselves with the essential needs of life’. However, there are also notable differences. For instance, while the means by which the objectives were to be achieved remained the same as for the first group, there is no mention of the police, the Greek Red Cross or the NOCS. This time it is stipulated that the local Station for Social Provision (Σταθμός Κοινωνικής Αντιλήψεως – Stathmos Koinonikis Antilipseos) would indicate those eligible to receive aid and that the collaboration between the local Station and the respective association should be close. In all statutes of this group of associations, it was stipulated that the local General Provider (referred to in the female grammatical gender) was to attend the meetings of the administrative council, but without the right to vote. Nothing is known up to now about these Stations for Social Provision or the female General Provider. The term social provision (κοινωνική αντίληψις – koinoniki antilipsis) was often used by different actors that offered help to individuals in need.

Everything indicates that these associations were the revised model of the first group, conceived and set up before and after the mechanisms of international aid were put in place. However, this is the limit of our current knowledge about these associations. With no mention of them in the existing historiography of the period, but with concrete evidence that some of them at least were active, I will limit myself here to working hypotheses only.³³

Based on their identical character and their references to public authorities, it is my contention that the associations in both groups were the product of concerted initiatives deriving from an extended network of public and private actors placed in crucial posts. We do not know whether and how these voluntary associations were related to the soup kitchens that the government, the Orthodox Church, the Red Cross and other institutions organized during the same period in order to feed the starving population. The references to the female General Provider might indicate a connection with the Greek Red Cross, but it is impossible for the moment to confirm this hypothesis. Also, it is not possible to know whether the otherwise unknown individuals signing the statutes as founding members had any prior involvement in the field of social provision.
Be that as it may, many studies have shown that from the first months of
the Occupation, a strong collective action took place in the form of associ-
ations (σύλλογοι – syllogoi) and cooperatives (συνεταιρισμοί – synaiterismoi).
Cooperatives have attracted the attention of historians more fully. They were
established early on by various professional groups and trade unions in order
to secure funds for common meals or food rationing at the place of work. We
also know that the Police of Athens were involved in the dispensing of soup
kitchens. However, in fact, little is known about similar efforts – or other
aspects of everyday life, for that matter – in the capital’s neighbourhoods or
the multiple actors who undertook action during this first non-heroic year,
that is before the resistance movement made its public appearance.³⁴ We only
have fragmented information especially from written and oral testimonies.

For instance, we know that in many districts of the capital, the famine
of winter 1941–1942 mobilized a multitude of forces in formal and in-
formal initiatives. Members of various charities, public employees, local
dignitaries – municipal officials, representatives of the Church and the local
Police Department as well as ‘reputable citizens’ – representatives of national
and international philanthropic organizations, middle-class volunteers and
increasingly members of the left-wing National Liberation Front (Εθνικό
Απελευθερωτικό Μέτωπο – Ethniko Apeleftehrotiko Metopo) and National Sol-
idarity (Εθνική Αλληλεγγύη – Ethniki Allileggyi), both founded in the second
half of 1941, collaborated closely during this first year.³⁵ At first, in the in-
formal Popular Committees that were established in various districts of the
capital in order to facilitate the distribution of food and other essentials in
place of the paralysed state mechanism, and later probably in local associations
such as those presented above.³⁶ We do not know much about where the
central planning regarding the creation of these committees and associations
came from. At any rate, everything indicates that the close collaboration be-
tween local agents, state officials and the Church increased their credibility
and their effectiveness in their efforts in claiming goods and securing services
such as food supplies for the soup kitchens, feeding bulletins, accommoda-
tion, medical care, etc. Members of the Popular Committees undertook to
make representations to ministries and state services, organized collective
trips to the countryside in order to locate food supplies and gathered clothes
and medicines. Various foreign charities also financed programmes providing
soup kitchens in the districts of Athens, until the supply of food and its distri-
bution to the capital’s districts were undertaken by foreign humanitarian aid.

We still know little about the exact connections between all these actors,
private and public as well as with the voluntary associations presented here,
but the above material gives us some indications that have to be pursued.
I contend that the associations presented here were part and parcel of the
general collective action characterizing this period. They represented an or-
ganized joint intervention of public and private actors in order to face dire
circumstances. In other words, once the collaborationist state proved to be
incapable of safeguarding the lives of its citizens, in circumstances of violence
and destitution, but also of looming social mobilization – the year 1943 was marked by massive demonstrations in the streets of Athens and violent confrontations between the growing resistance and the occupying forces all over the country³⁷ – the coordinated collective action of public employees, private citizens and various collectivities substituted for the absent state – absent in this field, but otherwise oppressive and brutal.

## Performing

The last example concerns public employees acting like volunteers; and specifically, the employees of the Juvenile Probation Office and the judiciary of the Court of Minors of Thessaloniki, the co-capital of Greece, who during the 1960s created a voluntary association in order to cover urgent needs for social protection arising in their everyday work but impossible to meet in their work context. Here is the story.

In 1966, the voluntary association Care for Minors in Moral Danger the Good Samaritan (Μέριμνα των εις ηθικόν κίνδυνον ευρισκομένων ανηλίκων ο Καλός Σαμαρείτης – Merimna ton eis ithikon kindynon evriskomenon anilikon o Kalos Samareitis, henceforth The Good Samaritan) was founded in Thessaloniki. A few years later, in 1969, the association, with the same founding members and statute, was renamed Care for Minors in Moral Danger: The Good Shepherd (Μέριμνα των εις ηθικόν κίνδυνον ευρισκομένων ανηλίκων ο Καλός Ποινήν – Merimna ton is ithikon kindynon evriskomenon anilikon o Kalos Poinin, henceforth The Good Shepherd).³⁸ Its 21 founding members, all residents of Thessaloniki, were men and some women, mostly lawyers, but also doctors and retired civil servants. According to its status, its objective was 'the provision of shelter, sustenance, care and protection in general to minors in danger of moral corruption' because they were orphans or had an unsuitable family environment and because they had been recently released from penitentiaries or were on their way to one.³⁹ The statute, apart from the usual stipulations regarding the activities and the membership of the association, also described in detail the operation of the future shelter: the conditions of admission, the obligations and rights of the inmates, its administration and personnel and its structure.⁴⁰

What was peculiar about this association was the fact that the initiative for its creation came from the Juvenile Judge of Thessaloniki and chief of the Juvenile Probation Officers' Service, Dimitrios Karymbalis, in cooperation with employees of this service – probation officers.⁴¹ Its administrative council comprised lawyers and other respectable citizens of the city, men and women, while the probation officers were members of the association and the Juvenile Judge supervised its activities.

Juvenile courts began operating in Greece in 1940. At first, juvenile probation was assigned to the semi-official SPM – legal entities governed by public law that received a restricted state subsidiary and operated gathering private funds and recruiting volunteers – and their volunteers.⁴² The Juvenile
Probation Officers' Service (Υπηρεσία Επιμελητών Ανηλίκων – Ipiresia Epimeliton Anilikon, henceforth JPOS) was only established in 1954, with the aim of rendering juvenile probation rational, organized and professional. A state service attached to the juvenile court and supervised by the Ministry of Justice, its staff comprised university graduates who at first offered voluntary unpaid work and from 1958 undertook paid work. They were recruited following a special examination and short-term training. An important number of volunteers continued to participate in the operation of the JPOS. Those employed were not proper civil servants until 1976; their salaries were paid by the Royal Welfare Foundation (Βασιλικό Ιδρυμα Πρόνοιας – Vassiliko Idryma Pronoias) – a controversial semi-private institution created by the Queen during the Civil War and funded by donations and (unofficially) the state. JPOS had branches in the main cities of the country. That in Thessaloniki was one of the most active.⁴³

The lack of provisional shelters for wayward or released minors was a constant concern for all probation officers throughout the country. The Ministry of Justice declared repeatedly that it was unable to establish them due to resource shortages. In Athens and Piraeus, they were created during the 1960s – after laborious efforts of many years – by the local SPMs. It is probable that the SPM of Thessaloniki, extremely active during the previous period, had other priorities, especially after the establishment of the JPOS.⁴⁴

However, it seems that some provisional solutions were devised early on. According to an oral testimony by a former juvenile probation officer, a so-called first shelter for adolescent girls operated in Thessaloniki for a short period at the beginning of the 1960s. It was an apartment in the basement of a central residential building, bestowed by an affluent local lady, member of the SPM of Thessaloniki, to a poor family from the working-class district of Toumba. In exchange, they had to clean the stairs of the apartment building and host wayward or released girls for short periods of time. The family received money for feeding the girls – one to five at a time – and covering their own expenses. The apartment was constantly locked, and the mother had the key around her neck. The family consisted of the parents and three siblings – girls of 7, 16 and 19. The elder, later a juvenile probation officer herself, remembered this period as the worst in her life. The family lived in one room and the inmates – usually charged with ‘moral misconduct’ – in the others.⁴⁵

It was in this context that in 1966, the Juvenile Judge and the probation officers, together with other volunteers, took the matter into their own hands and founded the association Care for Minors in Moral Danger the Good Samaritan, renamed Good Shepherd in 1969. The reason for this change of name was apparently related to the foundation of the Shelter for the Day-time Residence of Female Minors, the Good Shepherd (Στέγη ημιελευθέρας διαβιώσεως θηλέων ανηλίκων ο Καλός Ποιμήν – Stegi imieleftheras diavioseos thileon anilikon o Kalos Pimin, henceforth Shelter), in 1970. It seems that its founding members had realized that the Ministry of Justice was not ready to attend to their constant request for funding. The Residence had 20 inmates,
mainly from Northern Greece, orphans or from destitute or 'unsuitable' fam-
ilies, awaiting trial, on their way to the juvenile reform school or recently
released from it. They were provided with shelter and nutrition, footwear
and clothing, medical care and education, while attempts were made to se-
cure them paid work. The Shelter was directed by an administrative council,
headed by the Director of the JPOS of the city and supervised by the Juvenile
Judge.⁴⁶ From the beginning, the members of the Good Shepherd started
to campaign in order to gather funds that would secure the operation of the
Shelter.⁴⁷

Everything indicates that the heart and soul of the whole enterprise was
Mitsa Nikolaou. An active lawyer – at the time, it was not incompatible to be
an active lawyer and at the same time a paid probation officer –, she passed
the first examination for recruiting probation officers held in 1958 in Thessa-
loniki. Soon she became the head of the local JPOS and retained her position
until her retirement in 1979. She also became treasurer of the local SPM. At
the same time, she handled all the legal matters of the Good Shepherd as well
as its correspondence.⁴⁸ Once the Residence was created, she also chaired its
administrative council. Working in a public service under the supervision of
the judicial system, but employed as a private employee, bestowed with state
authority over troublesome juveniles while working as a lawyer on her own
account, Nikolaou exemplifies the constant movement between the public
and private that characterized social provision in post-war Greece.

There is no indication that the dictatorial regime of the time (the military
Junta was imposed in 1967 and abolished in 1974) showed any inclination
to support the initiative financially. The resources for the Residence came
from fees and various contributions. The volunteers of the Good Shepherd –
mostly women, private citizens together with probation officers and the
Judge – organized banquets, musical events and other gatherings to raise
funds. Perennially lacking financial resources, they conducted a systematic
correspondence with various public bodies asking for their aid in kind, ser-
vices or money, but to no great effect.⁴⁹ Finally, its directors, unable to sus-
tain the operation of the Residence further, started negotiations with the
local SPM and its president, Konstandinos Vougioukas. Vougioukas had a
long history of working with juvenile delinquency: he was for many years
the close assistant of the controversial first head of the SPM of Thessaloniki,
Dimitrios Karanikas, whom he succeeded there and also at the chair of Penal
Law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Thessaloniki. Finally, four
years later, in 1975, the SPM agreed to host the Residence using its state sub-
sidy.⁵⁰ The Shelter closed down in the 1980s, following a law that abolished
all similar private or semi-private institutions – without, however, creating
public ones in their place. This was the only grievance that M. Nikolaou,
devoted to her work with the juvenile delinquents, had in her old age.

In fact, in creating the Residence the members of the Good Shepherd per-
formed as if they were the state, the same way that the probation officers op-
erated as if they were civil servants. Although this is the only known example