# Public and Private Welfare in Modern Europe

Fabio Giomi, Célia Keren, Morgane Labbé

► To cite this version:

Fabio Giomi, Célia Keren, Morgane Labbé. Public and Private Welfare in Modern Europe. Routledge, 1, 2022, 9781032232324. 10.4324/9781003275459. hal-04102505

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Routledge Open History

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
WELFARE IN MODERN
EUROPE

PRODUCTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS

Edited by

Fabio Giomi, Célia Keren, and Morgane Labbé

cost
EUROPEAN COOPERATION
IN SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

ROUTLEDGE
# Public and Private Welfare in Modern Europe

Since the 1980s, neoliberals have openly contested the idea that the state should protect the socio-economic well-being of its citizens, making ‘privatization’ their mantra. Yet, as historians and social scientists have shown, welfare has always been a ‘mixed economy’, wherein private and public actors dynamically interacted, collaborating or competing with each other in the provision of welfare services. This book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of welfare by developing three innovative approaches. Firstly, it illuminates the productive nature of public/private entanglements. Far from amounting to a zero-sum game, the interactions between the two sectors have changed over time what welfare encompasses, its contents and targets, often engendering the creation of new fields of intervention. Secondly, this book departs from a well-established tradition of comparison between Western nation-states by using and mixing various scales of analysis (local, national, international and global) and by covering case studies from Spain to Poland and France to Greece in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thirdly, this book goes beyond state centrism in welfare studies by bringing back a host of public and private actors, from municipalities to international organizations, from older charities to modern NGOs.

**Fabio Giomi** is Research Fellow at CETOBaC in Paris. His research interests include voluntary associations and social movements, women and gender, Islam, and transnational studies in contemporary Southeastern Europe. His recent publications include *Making Muslim women European. Voluntary associations, gender and Islam in post-Ottoman Bosnia and Yugoslavia* (CEU Press, 2021) and *Kemalism. Transnational Politics in the Post-Ottoman World* (I.B. Tauris, 2019).

**Célia Keren** is Associate Professor of Modern History at Sciences Po Toulouse in France. Her research interests are the transnational history of political mobilizations and humanitarian aid, especially child aid in twentieth-century Western Europe. Among others, she is the author of “When the CGT did humanitarian work: Spanish children evacuated to France (1936–1939)”, *Le Mouvement Social*, 264, 3 (2018), 15–39.

**Morgane Labbé** is Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her research interests are in the history of welfare, population policies, and nationalism in Eastern Europe. She published *La Nationnalité, une Histoire de Chiffres. Politique et statistiques en Europe centrale (1848–1919)* (Presses de Sciences Po, 2019) and edited a special issue of the *Revue d'Histoire de la Protection Sociale* (2018).
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### Islam and the Trajectory of Globalization

Rational Idealism and the Structure of World History

Louay M. Safi

### Public and Private Welfare in Modern Europe

Productive Entanglements

Edited by Fabio Giomi, Célia Keren, and Morgane Labbé
Public and Private Welfare
in Modern Europe

Productive Entanglements

Edited by

Fabio Giomi, Célia Keren, and
Morgane Labbé

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First published 2022

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Names: Giomi, Fabio, editor. | Keren, Célia, editor. | Labbé, Morgane, editor.

Title: Public and private welfare in modern Europe : productive entanglements / edited by Fabio Giomi, Célia Keren, and Morgane Labbé.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. |

Series: Routledge open history | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021058364 (print) | LCCN 2021058365 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032232324 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032232331 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003275459 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Public welfare—Europe. | Charities—Europe. | Social service—Europe.

Classification: LCC HV238 .P827 2022 (print) | LCC HV238 (ebook) | DDC 361.94—dc23/eng/20220304

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058364

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003275459

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# Contents

Acknowledgements vii

List of contributors ix

## Productive entanglements: the dynamics of public-private interactions in the history of social protection 1

FABIO GIOMI, CÉLIA KEREN AND MORGANE LABBÉ

1 A quintessential mixed economy?: the issue of illegitimacy as a testing ground for creative collaboration between public and private actors in French-speaking Switzerland, 1890–1960 16

JOËLLE DROUX

2 The co-constitution of public and private actors: building the field of social protection in German and French cities at the end of the nineteenth century 43

CATHERINE MAURER

3 A “mixed economy of welfare” model: the complementary and mutual growth of public and private welfare in France (1970s–2000s) 58

AXELLE BRODIEZ-DOLINO

4 Social movement and economic statistics in interwar Poland: building an alternative expert knowledge on the condition of the working class 79

MORGANE LABBÉ
5 Performing the state?: public and private actors in the field of social provision in twentieth-century Greece 107

EFI AVDELA

6 From international aid to state policy: the cross-border trajectory of the Spanish child evacuation scheme, 1936–1939 132

CÉLIA KEREN

7 Dividing international work on social protection of migrants: the International Labour Office and private organizations (1921–1935) 159

LINDA GUERRY

8 Big Pharma, the World Health Organization, and the co-constitution of international policies against river blindness 182

AURIANE GUILBAUD

*Index*

211
Acknowledgements

This publication is based upon work from COST action 18119 'Who Cares in Europe?' (2019-2023), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

COST is a funding agency for research and innovation networks. Our Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. This boosts their research, career and innovation.

www cost eu

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cost
EUROPEAN COOPERATION
IN SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

Funded by the
European Union
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Taylor & Francis

Taylor & Francis Group

http://taylorandfrancis.com
Contributors

**Efi Avdela** is Professor Emerita on Contemporary History of the University of Crete. Her research interests concern the social and cultural history of the twentieth century, with emphasis on gender, feminism, crime, violence and criminal justice, youth, sexuality and voluntary associations. She has coordinated several collective research projects and has published extensively in various languages. Among her latest publications are, “The quest for (a utopian?) European history” in S. Levsen and J. Requate (eds), “Why Europe, Which Europe? A Debate on Contemporary European History as a Field of Research”, November 2, 2020, https://europedebate.hypotheses.org/301; “Racialism and eugenics in Greek criminology. The case of Konstantinos Gardikas (1896–1984), *Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/ Crime, History & Societies*, 24, 1 (2020), 115–139; with K. Gotsinas, D. Kritsotaki and D. Vassiliadou, “From Virginity to Orgasm: Marriage and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Greek”, *Journal of Family History*, 45, 3 (2020), 1–19.

**Axelle Brodiez-Dolino** is CNRS Researcher, specialised in the history of poverty and precarity and co-director of the Norbert Elias Centre in Marseille. She has published *Le Secours Populaire Français, du communisme à l'humanitaire* (Presses de Sciences Po, 2006); *Emmaüs and the Abbé Pierre. An Alternative Model of Enterprise, Charity and Society* (Presses de Sciences Po, 2013) (originally published in French as *Emmaüs et l'abbé Pierre*, Presses de Sciences Po, 2009); *Combattre la Pauvreté* (CNRS Editions, 2013); *Des Sans-logis aux Sans-domicile* (Presses universitaires de Saint-Etienne, 2020) and has written numerous articles (see https://sites.google.com/site/axellebrodiezdolino/).

**Joëlle Droux** is Senior Lecturer and co-leader of the Social History of Education Research Group at the University of Geneva/Faculty of psychology and educational sciences. She has published articles and books on the long-term evolution of Swiss policies for child and youth welfare. She co-edited with A.-F. Praz, *Placés, Déplacés, Protégés? L'histoire du placement d'enfants en Suisse, XIXe-XXe siècles* (Alphil, 2021). She also studies the history of international child welfare movements and the contemporary
evolution of social and humanitarian networks from a transnational perspective and co-edited with R. Hofstetter, *Internationalismes Éducatifs entre Débats et Combats* (fin du 19e – premier 20e siècle (P. Lang, 2020).

**Fabio Giomi** is CNRS Researcher at the Centre for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan and Central-Asian Studies (CETOBaC) in Paris. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of Southeastern Europe between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, with a special focus on the Yugoslav region. Among his current research topics are voluntary associations and social movements, women and gender history, Balkan Muslims, archives and transnational studies. His recent publications include *Making Muslim Women European. Voluntary Associations, Gender and Islam in Post-Ottoman Bosnia and Yugoslavia* (Central European University Press, 2021), “Gendering the (post-) Ottoman world”, special issue of *Clio. Women, Gender, History*, 48 (2019) (with E. Zerman) and *Kemalism. Transnational Politics in the Post-Ottoman World* (I.B. Tauris, 2019, with N. Clayer and E. Szurek).

**Linda Guerry** holds a PhD in history and is an associate fellow at the LARHRA (Rhone-Alps Historical Research Laboratory) in Lyon and at the Institute Convergences Migrations in Paris (France). She has published a monograph (*Le genre de l'Immigration et de la Naturalisation (1918-1940)*) (Éditions de l'École normale supérieure de Lyon, 2013) and several articles in *Hommes & Migrations, Clio, Monde(s), The Canadian Historical Review, Mondi Migranti, Studies in Religion*, etc. She has co-edited with Françoise Thébaud "Women, gender and Migration", special issue of *Clio. Women, Gender, History*, 51, 1, 2020. Her work focuses on gender in migration policies and access to citizenship during the twentieth century. She is currently working on migrant-protection policies focusing on the transnational circulation of expertise and norms from a gender perspective (1920s–1930s).

**Auriane Guilbaud**, PhD, is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University Paris 8 and a member of the research centre CRESPPA (Paris Centre for Sociological and Political Research, CNRS UMR 7217). Her research interests include global health governance, the role of non-state actors in International Relations and a sociological approach to the study of International Organizations. Among others, she is the author of *Business Partners. Firmes privées et gouvernance mondiale de la santé* (Presses de Sciences Po, 2015), “Generous Corporations? A Maussian Analysis of International Drug Donations”, *Journal of International Political Theory*, 2 (2018); “L'Organisation mondiale de la santé et la Covid-19”, *Études*, 4273 (2020), 7–20.

**Célia Keren** is Associate Professor of Modern History at Sciences Po Toulouse in France and a member of the Institut universitaire de France. Her research interests are the transnational history of political mobilizations and humanitarian aid, especially child aid in twentieth-century
Western Europe. Among others, she is the author of “When the CGT did humanitarian work: Spanish children evacuated to France (1936–1939)”, *Le Mouvement Social*, 264, 3 (2018), 15–39, and ‘Autobiographies of Spanish Refugee Children at the Quaker Home in La Rouvière (France, 1940): Humanitarian Communication and Children’s Writings’, *Les Cahiers de Framespa*, 5 (2010).

**Morgane Labbé** is Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her research interests are in population sciences and policies, statistical expertise and maps in nation-building and nationalism in the history of Eastern Europe. This is the topic of her recent book, *La Nationalité, une Histoire de Chiffres. Politique et statistiques en Europe centrale (1848–1919)* (Presses de Sciences Po, 2019); she published essays in journals as *Centaurus*, *Imago Mundi*, *Genèses, Histoire & Mesure*. Her current research deals with the history of welfare associations and social philanthropies in Eastern Europe from empire to nation-state. She edited a special issue on this topic for the French journal *Revue d'Histoire de la Protection Sociale*, 11, 1 (2018).

**Catherine Maurer** is Professor of Contemporary History of Germany and France at the University of Strasbourg (France). Her research concerns the social and cultural history of religion in Germany and France. She has published *Le Modèle Allemand de la Charité. La Caritas de Guillaume II à Hitler* (Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 1999), *Religion et Culture dans les Sociétés et dans les États Européens de 1800 à 1914* (Éditions Bréal, 2001), *Les Espaces de l'Allemagne au XIXe siècle. Frontières, centre et question nationale* (Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2010), *La Ville Charitable. Les œuvres sociales catholiques en France et en Allemagne* (Éditions du Cerf, 2012) and *L'Espace Rhénan, pôle de savoirs* (Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2013).
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# Productive entanglements

## The dynamics of public-private interactions in the history of social protection¹

Fabio Giomi, Célia Keren and Morgane Labbé

### Thinking productiveness

The formidable, multifaceted challenge to the post-war welfare state was undoubtedly one of the major phenomena that shaped the political life of the protean 1980s. In Western Europe and in the United States, neoliberal state policies openly contested the idea that the state should protect the socio-economic well-being of its citizens and actively promote a more equitable distribution of wealth. A growing cohort of social policy experts of different political leanings gave their support to policies of 'privatization' – one of the buzzwords of the decade – arguing for a transfer of the production of goods and services from the public to the private sector. The rightness of the dismantling of the welfare state in the West seemed to be corroborated by the collapse of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the rapid shift of half of the continent from centrally planned to market economies. It was in this context of a general withdrawal of the state that social scientists started to debate the idea that welfare provision should involve not only the state but also a multitude of private actors including voluntary associations, religious institutions and, of course, companies.

In such a political climate, many historians aptly remarked that arguing for a 'mixed economy of welfare' was, in a certain way, reinventing the wheel. Building on many different national and local case studies, they demonstrated that the establishment of the welfare state was not solely to be understood as a response to the post-1945 national and international context. Instead, they showed how welfare policies had been slowly forming since the last quarter of the nineteenth century 'through the central state's gradual adoption and expansion of private local initiatives'.² Focusing on interactions and exchanges between the state and private organizations, this scholarship not only contributed to the writing of a longer history of welfare in the West but also demonstrated that that history is *constantly* 'a complex mix of public/private provision'.³ This body of research also showed that, even after 1945, the ideal of an all-encompassing, universal system of state welfare never entirely excluded private action. Quoting a well-known speech delivered by Lord Beveridge in the House of Lords in 1949, many historians referred to the
line between public and private as a ‘moving frontier’,⁴ never fixed once and for all and constantly renegotiated, even in those countries where welfare is considered to belong fundamentally to either the public (Germany, France) or private (United States) realm. In the following decades, this new way of looking at the history of welfare continued to be fruitful. Indeed, the same reasoning has since been applied to international relief and philanthropy, suggesting the idea of a ‘mixed political economy of giving’⁵ as a way to understand the close partnership between private philanthropy and the state in the United States since the end of the eighteenth century. Other research, focused on the British context, demonstrates how the state’s consistent intervention and funding of private humanitarian action overseas since the 1920s engendered a ‘mixed economy of relief’⁶ based on the continued dependence of the private sector upon public funds and support.

In what is now a rich body of scholarship, public-private connections in the field of social protection are usually analysed through three main questions. The first deals with the respective *proportions* of public and private provisions in the ‘welfare mix’ and how these proportions evolved over time. This is the key theme of a wealth of historical studies published from the 1990s onwards, whose objective has been to recognize the role of private actors in the ‘welfare mix’. For example, researching the case of Britain, Geoffrey Finlayson has shown that ‘between the years 1911 and 1949, while the frontiers of the state expanded, they did not expand to the extent that they left no room for the activity of voluntarism’.⁷ This statement is furthered by pinpointing which parts of the voluntary sector ‘declined’, which ‘remained strong’, and which ‘could not coexist with a universalist welfare state’. Other scholars – as Bernard Harris and Paul Bridgen have pointed out – have even attempted to quantitatively assess the respective weight of voluntary and statutory contributions to the mixed economy of welfare in various countries.⁸

It is often observed that public and private actors themselves played a crucial role in working to increase their respective shares. This leads us to a second key question in the history of the welfare mix, namely, that of *power*. The financial and regulatory dependence of private organizations upon public authorities often lies at the heart of this line of enquiry as well as the shifting relationships of collaboration, rivalry, and competition between private and public welfare initiatives. For example, in his innovative work on the history of old-age pensions in Switzerland, Matthieu Leimgruber has shown that the famous Swiss three-pillar pension system was the result of ongoing ‘struggles over the boundaries of state and private providers’.⁹ His book analyses how private companies, which had set up occupational pension schemes since the First World War, defended their ‘territory’ against attempts by the political elites to establish a statutory and universal old-age insurance scheme. Interestingly, Leimgruber repeatedly uses the metaphor of ‘containment’ to describe how private insurers successfully prevented public social insurance from encroaching on their ‘turf’ and safeguarded their ‘preserve’. At the same time, because corporate schemes have remained a key component of the old-age
welfare mix in Switzerland, their regulation by public authorities, whether cantonal or federal, was a constant matter of conflict during the twentieth century.¹⁰ Similarly, in his important book on philanthropy in America, Olivier Zunz has underscored that state and federal tax laws, in particular tax exemptions, have played a key role in enabling philanthropic foundations. Yet, these laws also offered the federal state a tool to ‘regulate charity’ by circumscribing what fell within its scope (e.g., education) and what did not (advocacy), thereby effectively influencing the activities and campaigns that philanthropic institutions could or could not engage in.¹¹

Taking note of the density of relations between public and private social welfare providers, scholars have developed a third line of enquiry when examining the welfare mix: that of the very *nature and thickness of the divide* between private and public realms. In an interlocking field of social protection in which people, money, practices, policies, and sometimes whole infrastructures circulate between the public and private sectors, it is sometimes very hard to draw a line between the two. As Zunz and others have shown, philanthropic institutions in the United States have developed an organic bond with state and federal social agencies over the years. For example, President Johnson's Great Society was based on 'an original fusion of private and public funds to deliver social services to the poor, many of which emerged from philanthropic pilot programs'.¹² During these years, the federal state became the primary funder for privately managed social programmes, carried out according to the priorities set out by the state.¹³ The blurring of the lines between public and private social action is not specific to the history of the United States and can also be found in continental Europe. Writing on the situation in Austria during the First World War, Tara Zahra has underlined that the newly created Ministry for Social Welfare 'harness[ed] the private [...] child welfare system to achieve its own goals' and chose to 'expand an infrastructure that nationalist activists [...] had already created from the bottom up'.¹⁴ In carrying out its assistance programs, the Austrian state relied heavily on these private, nationalist groups, who were able to raise large sums of money.¹⁵ Eventually, such close collaboration resulted in the creation of 'hybrid welfare structures in which the lines between public and private were far from clear'.¹⁶

These three questions remain crucial to any historical account of social protection, but the objective of this book is to explore yet another fundamental dimension of the history of the welfare mix, namely, its *productive nature*. This question is not completely absent from the aforementioned works, but it is never at their centre. What do interactions between public and private actors produce? How do they impact on the social protection effectively provided – its scope, its content, its underlying ideology? How do they change what social protection even covers? Indeed, the interaction between the public and private sectors does not amount to a zero-sum game, that is, a situation in which each party's gain or loss is balanced by the losses or gains of the other party. Though straight transfers of policies from the public to
the private realm (and vice versa) do happen, more often than not the inter-
action between the two sectors changes what these policies encompass, their
contents and targets. As Pat Thane recently observed with regard to the case
of the UK, ‘far from the “Big State” growing *at the expense* of a vibrant “Big
Society”, they have worked and changed together, often in *creative* tension,
*constructing* and sustaining the “mixed economy of welfare”.¹⁷ These critical
views also echoed works on the history of the state in France that substitute
quantitative approaches – that is, those that measure a greater or lesser degree
of involvement of the state – with approaches focused on the various forms
of the relationship of the state to society.¹⁸ Moreover, recent research ad-
dressing transnational schemes of social protection has demonstrated how the
interaction of public and private actors engenders the creation of new fields
of intervention, including the domains of the protection of children¹⁹ and
of migrants,²⁰ respectively, at the global level. In these cases, private-public
interactions even managed to generate new organizations and new areas for
both public and private action.²¹

The remainder of this introduction develops this new perspective. The
next section lays out the organization of the book and sums up each of the
eight chapters. After this, we discuss two historiographical and methodo-
logical lessons yielded by our approach and case studies. First, our choice to
devote equal analytical consideration to a wealth of public and private actors
allows us to set aside for good the historiographical state-centrism that has
previously been found in the history of welfare. Second, a close look at the
way public-private interactions work at the micro-level leads us to shed new
light on those individuals whose professional and activist careers straddle the
two realms, thereby playing a crucial role in fostering the productiveness of
public-private interactions.

Scaling and unpacking the public-private divide

In order to explore the different ways in which public-private entanglements
can be productive in the field of social protection, we have chosen to organ-
ize the eight case studies of this book by scales of analysis, starting from the
local level and ending with the international and global level. By varying the
scales of analysis – instead of sticking to only one such scale, for example,
the national one – this organization allows us to look at public-private en-
tanglements from different viewpoints and shows us multiple versions of the
same reality. Inspired by the work of micro-historians, we argue that there
is no value hierarchy between the scales: they all have something relevant to
say, and the change of focal length itself is particularly useful for exploring the
complexity of social phenomena.²² This means in particular that this collec-
tion, contrary to most works in the field of social protection, does not take the
primacy of the national level for granted and deliberately moves away from
methodological nationalism. This starting point allows the contributions in
this book to unpack the categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ by focusing on the
plurality of collective actors that populate the environment straddling the two realms. The 'public' is therefore not limited to the state and includes local or regional authorities or at the international level, intergovernmental organizations. Similarly, 'private' does not refer only to voluntary associations but also to political parties, trade unions, churches and companies.

The first two chapters of the book subvert methodological nationalism either by breaking the national level down into its constituent parts – in the case of federal Switzerland – or by using city-level comparisons between France and Germany, respectively. In her chapter on the policies towards illegitimate children in Switzerland in the twentieth century, Joëlle Droux focuses on the cantonal level in French-speaking Switzerland. Through a detailed analysis of exchanges between the public (cantonal and federal institutions) and the private (charities), she explores the specific possibilities for social protection provided by the organization of the Swiss Federation, which make it possible to set up specific organizations devoted to each sector of intervention. This specific institutional architecture created what Droux calls 'an ecosystem of close-knit relationships between the public and private sector', in which new social protection schemes could emerge, especially in the domain of child adoption. In the next chapter, Catherine Maurer compares French and German poor relief in the late nineteenth century at municipal level. Through the study of 15 cities on both sides of the Rhine, Maurer shows how the private (institutes and associations administered by Catholic orders and laity) and the public (city councils) never ceased to exist and cohabit in a peaceful, often virtuous way, even in two historical contexts that were apparently dominated by harsh opposition between the two, namely, the French Third Republic and the German Kulturkampf. This change in scale thus allows the author to reveal – especially for the French case – a rather unexpected 'philanthropic consensus'²³ at municipal level, far from the conflictual relationship between Church and state observed at the national level. In their texts, Maurer and Droux explore not only organizational dynamics but also the outputs that this organizational interdependence at different scales had with regard to the actual provision of social protection on the ground.

Following a well-established practice in the scholarship of social protection, the next three contributions in this book assign a major role to the national scale. In so doing, they not only construct a detailed chronology of public-private interactions, highlighting the dynamic tensions that shaped and reshaped them in the different spaces and time periods in question, but they also tackle case studies that are in some way unexpected or focus on spaces that have been neglected in the scholarship on the mixed economy of welfare. Axelle Brodiez-Dolino's chapter focuses on late twentieth-century France, a period conventionally described as being characterized by the retrenchment of the welfare state and parallel expansion of private agencies. Challenging this dominant narrative, the author argues for an analysis through the prism of the mixed economy of welfare – a concept largely
overlooked by the French research works on this topic and which makes it
possible to emphasize the concomitant growth of, and harmonious relations
between public and private welfare. She shows that in the early 1980s, the
French state tackled rising levels of poverty by massively subsidizing private
charitable associations – a new practice, considering a century-old history
dominated by conflict and separation between the two domains. Similarly,
the new public employment schemes of the 1990s were strongly supported by
private associations, who had in fact been the drivers behind this policy and
had tested it at the local level before it was given a statutory, national scope.

The next two chapters pursue the same goal of extending the concept of
the mixed economy of welfare beyond the areas where it is more commonly
applied, by addressing national cases from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.
First, Morgane Labbé's chapter, focused on interwar Poland, explores the
creative tension between a private organization (the Institute of Social Eco-
nomics, a voluntary association dominated by socialist activists) and a public
agency (the official Central Statistical Office, gathering experts restricted by
an ethical code of neutrality with regard to public service) in carrying out
scientific studies to investigate the conditions of the working class. The text
demonstrates how the complex interactions between these two expert organ-
izations, ranging from mistrust to competition and collaboration, fostered a
dynamic environment for carrying out surveys that produced expert knowl-
edge and thereby led to the construction of a more reliable cost-of-living
index. Second, Efi Avdela's contribution draws attention further South, with
a focus on the network of voluntary associations offering social provision to
various vulnerable groups in twentieth-century Greece. Avdela's text, exam-
ining the interwar years, the Second World War and the post-war period, in
turn, explores how actors in the public (the members of the governmental ad-
ministration) and private realms (activists in voluntary associations) produced
new geographies of interactions and, in so doing, managed to extend the bor-
ders of social protection in various ways. Labbé and Avdela's findings not only
contribute to the 'missing history'²⁴ of social protection in a region usually
considered as constituting the periphery of Europe and whose nation-states
are viewed as latecomers in a space dominated by continental empires, but
they also call into question the predominant view that these are weak states
that have failed in providing social protection to their citizens. With this
critical attention, both authors challenge the assumptions of a prevailing his-
toriography on Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, which are founded on the
features of the Western welfare states.²⁵

The last three chapters in this book address the welfare mix at the interna-
tional scale, a perspective that is rarely considered despite the fact that there
are significant relationships linking an array of collective actors at this level.
Célia Keren's chapter focuses on the evacuation scheme set up in order to
bring children from the short-lived Spanish Republic to France in the late
1930s. By reassessing the respective roles played by the public (the Spanish
government) and the private realm (foreign private committees in France),
this chapter shows that the child evacuation programme was in fact inspired,
promoted, created and widely run by activist groups outside Spain. At the
same time, Keren argues that this private activism contributed in no small
part to the gradual building of a complex, albeit short-lived, Spanish wel-
fare state. Linda Guerry's contribution on the first few years of activities of
the International Conference of Private Organizations for the Protection of
Migrants focuses on the interactions between this private umbrella organi-
zation and an international agency whose mandate is to advance social and
economic justice through setting international labour standards, the Inter-
national Labour Organization. The chapter demonstrates that international
public and private organizations that were deprived of the power to enact
laws were mutually dependent and required mutual support, learning from
and imitating each other in order to put pressure on the member-states. Ech-
oing Labbé, Guerry shows that the ILO, which did not have access to grass-
roots information on the living conditions of migrant populations, had to rely
on data produced by private organizations. In the last chapter of this book,
Auriane Guilbaud analyses the interactions between a private, for-profit or-
ganization, the US pharmaceutical giant Merck, and a public international
institution, the World Health Organization, between 1975 and 2000. Fo-
cusing on the joint efforts of these two bodies in the fight against a tropical
disease, the chapter highlights how the relationship between the two resulted
in the creation of a seminal drug donation programme in 1987, the Mectizan
Donation Program, which became a model for other similar schemes imple-
mented later. Guilbaud demonstrates how the interactions between public
and private resulted in changes not only in the two actors themselves but also
in the field of medical relief, thereby redefining the scope and nature of the
fight against onchocerciasis.

Taken together, this polyphonic, empirically grounded collection demon-
strates that organizations and policies do not simply shift from private to
public and back, and indeed that the respective perimeters of the public and
private sectors may grow and shrink together, changing the extent and bor-
ders of the field of social protection as a whole. In so doing, and through
their interactions, both sectors constantly reshape, expand or shrink the field
of social protection and the organizations that operate within that field at the
local, national and international scale.

Going beyond historiographical state-centrism

As mentioned above, well-established historiographical narratives on social
welfare are still very much centred on the state as the dominant actor. Al-
though this position sometimes remains implicit, the welfare state is still held
to be the gold standard of social protection, serving as the basis for compar-
ison. Even recent literature on the crisis of the welfare state still largely fo-
cuses on the state.²⁶ As shown by the two chapters of this book dealing with
France, the reluctance to think about private action is the result of a complex
interplay between political and historiographical cultures. Catherine Maurer, referring to the French case in particular, remarks that ‘the new ideological and political significance of welfare issues, and the conflicts that were sparked at the end of the nineteenth century’, made it impossible, over a long period, to conceive of a constructive relationship between the state and the Catholic Church. Axelle Brodiez-Dolino, again writing on France but focusing on a period one century later, comes to a similar conclusion when she states that a supposed long-term conflict between the Catholic Church and the state made public-private entanglements seem ‘improbable’, or even ‘inadmissible’, both in French public discourse and in historiography. Several contributions of this book therefore suggest that the border between national political cultures and social sciences is anything but impermeable. Other chapters in this book go a step further, tackling state initiatives that positively aim to render their private counterparts invisible. This is the case, for instance, of Célia Keren’s text, which shows how, as early as 1937, the Spanish Ministry of Education publicized the ongoing evacuation scheme as a state policy only, thereby hiding the crucial role that foreign humanitarian committees had played in it and continued to play. In this case, the project to make private action invisible reflected a precise political agenda of the nation-state, aimed at reasserting – at least on paper – its monopoly over ‘its’ children.

As a whole, this book questions an established historiography that identifies the emergence of the welfare state with the extension of civil rights to include social rights. This historiography entails a sequential view of the history of welfare centred around the successive figures of the state²⁷ – the welfare state being considered inseparable from the liberal and democratic state. This view is reinforced by most of the theoretical works in sociology and political science on welfare state regimes, which are themselves based on the political history of Western European states. Their typologies attribute a central role to the state and to the instituted and legal forms of protection and assume a founding association between the advent of capitalist liberalism and the emergence of the welfare state, whereby the latter was intended to correct the effects of the former.²⁸ These models, with their ideal-typical historical references, such as the ‘Beveridgian’ and the ‘Bismarckian’ welfare states, have held significant appeal because they help to classify the diversity of systems that exist across time and space and to make comparisons between welfare regimes and between the public policies adopted within these regimes. Historians have often criticized how these systemic analyses make an oversimplified use of historical temporalities, thereby obscuring the heterogeneity of social welfare provisions that have existed since the end of the nineteenth century.²⁹ In this book, we argue that these founding and characteristic features of the welfare state, which are taken up in these macro-comparative syntheses, marginalize or exclude other forms of social welfare that developed in Eastern or Southern countries and under various political regimes or at the international level.

The attempt in this book to overcome historiographical state-centrism has three main consequences. First, and contrary to most collections on the
mixed economy of welfare in several countries, this book is not concerned
with comparing various national welfare ‘systems’ – which, in practice, are
usually limited to Britain, Germany, the United States and the Nordic coun-
tries, with the occasional addition of France. We are interested instead in the
mechanisms that foster public-private interactions and their productiveness,
everywhere in Europe and at all levels. Second, once historians look past
this Leviathan, they find a plethora of nonprofit and for-profit actors such
as associations, corporations, municipalities, religious orders, international
organizations and NGOs which, with competing agendas in mind, made a
significant contribution to the expansion of social protection in Europe. In
this sense, this book aims to contribute to a growing body of scholarship that
challenges the well-established sociological view that civil society organiza-
tions, for-profit and nonprofit alike, must be considered to be independent
and clearly separate from the state. On the contrary, the chapters in this
book explore the grey area between public policies and voluntary action,
showing that ‘their borders were porous, shifting and subject to constant
negotiation’.³⁰ Third, moving beyond state-centrism allows the historian to
shift their attention from national governmental decision-making to other
public actors, such as municipalities (as is the case in Catherine Maurer’s
study) or international organizations (as in Linda Guerry’s chapter). Once
we free ourselves from the state-centred teleology, the resulting picture of
the field of social protection becomes multipolar, relational and populated
by many different kinds of actors. This is why one may ultimately wish to
follow Efi Avdela’s suggestion, who proposes to abandon the term ‘wel-
fare state’, which always entails a kind of ‘dichotomous conceptualisation of
“civil society” as the opposite of the “state”’, and instead to approach these
phenomena as the ‘mode of production of collective action in the field of
social provision’.

**Public-private interactions from below:
focusing on brokers**

Several chapters in this book focus not only on structures and institutions
but also on individuals and more precisely on those middlemen and middle-
women who managed to manoeuvre between careers in public institutions
and private organizations.³¹ As has sometimes been observed,³² scholarship
on social protection has often failed to take account of these kinds of figures.
First, they have often been perceived as being peripheral to both worlds, and
as a result, they have often occupied only a liminal place, or no place at all,
in conventional narratives on welfare. Second, and moreover, even when
these figures do hold central positions in both public institutions and pri-
vate organizations, they are usually remembered for only one of these roles.
The goal here is not only to produce a new narrative that takes account of
the scattered pieces of an individual experience but also rather to demon-
strate how their very ability to navigate between the public and the private
can engender an expansion of social provision. This book therefore assigns
crucial importance to brokers, notably inspired by the rich interdisciplinary
scholarship on brokerage.³³ In other words, the focus on brokers' careers
allows us to see 'productive entanglements' at their smallest, and in a sense
primordial, scale.

Overall, the texts in this collection present a varied range of trajectories of
people moving from one sphere to the other. Efi Avdela's chapter on social
provision in twentieth-century Greece follows the story of different sorts of
'public agents... acting in a private capacity, [who] were able to instigate the
creation of, participate in or create for themselves voluntary associations',
thereby 'extend[ing] the field of social protection'. These individuals are
therefore examples of public agents who decided also to engage in associa-
tional culture, in a way that blurred the border between the two. This strat-
egy turns out to be particularly creative in Greece, especially in moments of
greater political instability, upheavals and military conflicts; Avdela observes
that 'public employees and civil servants acting as private actors together
with volunteers' were so effective that they ended up substituting and 'per-
forming the state' in several domains of social action. But the movement be-
tween public and private domains does not flow in only one direction. Axelle
Brodiez-Dolino, for instance, detects the opposite movement as well from
the private to the public. Analysing the public-private entanglement in social
provision in late twentieth-century France, she remarks that 'several human-
itarian figures have also gone in the opposite direction, holding ministerial
offices', thus further complicating the picture. According to Brodiez-Dolino,
the proximity between 'advocates defending the "cause of the poor" and
"elites of the Social State"' is a permanent feature of the French case, which
peaked in the 1980s, such that one could even speak of a "revolving door"
between public and private welfare'. However, focusing too much on the
different possible directions of movement could be misleading. Indeed, the
chapters in this book stress the importance of actors being simultaneously en-
gaged on both sides of the public-private divide. This is particularly true, for
instance, in the chapter by Joëlle Droux. In her case study, brokers are simul-
taneously active on both sides of the public-private divide, establishing a rel-
atively stable 'symbiotic relationship', which, in the context of Francophone
Switzerland on which her chapter focuses, was at the very origin of new
mechanisms of social protection for illegitimate children. Multipositioning,
in both its diachronic and synchronic dimensions, therefore appears to be key
in making brokerages possible and in allowing public-private entanglements
to be productive.

The chapters in this book testify to a vast array of circumstances in which
brokers have met, developed skills and knowledge and, in this way, con-
tributed to the transformation of existing schemes of social protection. For
example, in her study on interwar Poland, Morgane Labbé draws attention
to the 'creation of joint study commissions' between the Central Statistical
Office and the Institute of Social Economics. In other words, Labbé's case
study stresses how public-private interactions often took place in ad hoc in-
stitutional frameworks where people coming from both sides of the divide
competed and cooperated. This institutionalized cooperation was, in this
case, productive: as well as generating ‘a better measurement of the real liv-
ing standards of workers’, the commission gave an ‘impetus to the implemen-
tation of statistical studies and surveys’. A similar stress on the institutional
dimension of the public-private entanglement is found in Auriane Guilbaud’s
study: in this case, the WHO and the pharmaceutical company Merck, after a
period of mutual mistrust, established a set of bodies (including the Secretar-
iat of the Mectizan Donation Program and the Mectizan Expert Committee)
which became the forum where the different parties could gather, negoti-
ate and design a programme against onchocerciasis. Important though they
might seem, these formalized, institutionalized loci are not the only ones that
deserve to be taken into account. The foundations for public-private entan-
glements in social protection were built not only in official meetings, plenary
sessions, commissions and so on but also, and sometimes very significantly, in
the world of informal interactions. The vast array of practices subsumed un-
der the term ‘associational sociability’³⁴ appears to be important for building
trust and familiarity between different actors. As remarked by Efi Avdela for
the Greek case, a

growing number of men and also women, of varied professional and
social backgrounds... as well as numerous state officials... 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.

Voluntary associations thus appear to be a space of encounter for individuals
operating on both sides of the public-private divide and the starting point for
the opening of a 'new common space of collective action'.

Through their focus on a range of different times and places, the chapters in
this book present to the reader a rich array of brokers’ careers. Even without
mobilizing the Bourdieusian notion of ‘capital’, it appears abundantly clear
that circulation across the public-private divide allowed brokers to build dif-
ferent sorts of cultural and relational assets and sometimes even to strengthen
their professional position. This is the case, for instance, in Auriane Guilbaud’s
study, which shows that brokers may be able to navigate between different
cultural systems and speak different languages – that is, those of the adminis-
tration and of voluntary action, respectively. The ability of intermediaries to
stand at the crossroad of different regimes of legitimacy is particularly clear
in her text: the fact that several key figures from Merck had formerly worked
with the World Health Organization played a crucial role in building recip-
rocal trust between private and public and helped both parties to realize the
benefits of collaboration, which were not otherwise self-evident. Yet, mobi-
lizing and exchanging different cultural and relational assets do not seem to
come without a price. Linda Guerry’s chapter in particular shows how gender affected the possibilities for such a ‘capital conversion’, especially in the case of movement from the private to the public sector of social protection. Focusing on the case of women social workers leading the international movement for the protection of migrant women, this text demonstrates clearly that there is a price – in Bourdieusian terms, a ‘conversion rate’³⁵ – for moving from one field to another. Focusing on brokers – a concept that has spread from politics to social sciences, and in particular to science studies – thus leads us to look at the history of welfare from a wider range of disciplinary perspectives, beyond social policy studies, and allows us to look at this history from below.

★★★

The eight texts that make up this book are the result of a joint effort to bear witness to the enduring presence of public-private interactions in social protection in a wide range of political formations – the centralized or federal state, nation or empire, municipality, international organizations and others. They draw conceptual inspiration from critical works on the established historiography of the welfare state, mainly from leading British historians. These attempts to investigate social welfare through the lens of the mixed economy of welfare have proven to be fruitful: the book demonstrates the primordial role of both institutions and individuals in expanding the domain of social protection and thereby contributes to the enrichment of this theoretical framework. One further goal of this book is to develop this framework for a comparative and transnational approach to social protection in order to provide the foundation for future studies in global welfare, including the history of non-European worlds and colonial experiences.

## Notes

1. This book was made possible by the generous support of two European research programmes: the international network 'European Trajectories in the Quest for Welfare and Democracy: Voluntary associations, families and the state, 1880s to the present', hosted at the European University Institute in Florence (2015-2018) and the COST Action 18119 'Who Cares in Europe?' (2019-2023). The editors would like to express their deepest gratitude to Sam Ferguson and Đài Lâm Tait for their thoughtful help in proofreading these texts.

2. L.L. Downs, *Childhood in the Promised Land. Working-class movements and the colonies de vacances in France, 1880-1960* (Durham, NC and London, 2002), XIV.

3. M.B. Katz and C. Sachße (eds), *The Mixed Economy of Social Welfare. Public/private relations in England, Germany and the United States, the 1870s to the 1930s* (Baden-Baden, 1996), 10.

4. G. Finlayson, 'A moving frontier. Voluntarism and the state in British social welfare 1911-1949', *Twentieth Century British History*, 1, 2 (1990), 183-206.

5. O. Zunz, *Philanthropy in America. A history* (Princeton, NJ, 2014), 6.

6. E. Baughan, 'Mrs Jellyby Nation. The British state and overseas aid in Europe, 1918-1925', Paper given at the European Social Science History Conference, Valencia, Spain (2016).
7 Finlayson, op. cit., 204.

8 B. Harris and P. Bridgen, ‘Introduction: 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), 6–7.

9 M. Leimgruber, *Solidarity without the State? Business and the shaping of the Swiss welfare state* (Cambridge, 2008), 287.

10 *Ibid.*, 108 and following.

11 Zunz, op. cit., 76–103, 207, 214–243.

12 *Ibid.*, 6.

13 *Ibid.*, 214 and following.

14 T. Zahra, *Kidnapped Souls. National indifference and the battle for children in the Bohemian lands, 1900–1948* (Ithaca, NY and London, 2008), 95.

15 *Ibid.*, 98.

16 *Ibid.*, 104.

17 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 (2012), 408–429, 22.

18 P. Rosanvallon, *L'État en France de 1789 à nos Jours* (Paris, 1990).

19 J. Droux, ‘L’internationalisation de la protection de l’enfance. Acteurs, concurrences et projets transnationaux (1900-1925)’, *Critique Internationale*, 52, 3 (2011), 17–33.

20 L. Guerry, ‘Mobilisations transnationales. Le cas de l’International Migration Service, 1921-1939’, *Monde(s). Histoire, Espaces, Relations*, 1, 5 (2014), 219-237.

21 S. Kott, ‘From transnational reformist network to international organization. The International Association for Labour Legislation and the International Labour Organization, 1900–1930’, 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, 2014), 239–258.

22 J. Revel (ed), *Jeux D’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience* (Paris, 1996).

23 C. Bec, *Assistance et République. La recherche d'un nouveau contrat social sous la IIIe République* (Paris, 1994).

24 W. Lorenz, ‘Social work and history’, in S. Hering and B. Waaldijk (eds), *Guardians of the Poor, Custodians of the Public. Welfare history in Eastern Europe, 1900–1960* (Opladen, 2006), 7–12.

25 M. Labbé, ‘De la Philanthropie à la protection sociale en Europe centrale et du Sud-Est (fin du XIXe siècle-entre-deux-guerres)’, *Revue D'histoire de la Protection Sociale*, 11, 1 (2018), 13–22.

26 A. Kessler-Harris and M. Vaudagna, *Democracy and the Welfare State. The two wests in the age of austerity* (New York, 2017).

27 Rosanvallon, op. cit.

28 G. Esping-Andersen, *The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism* (Cambridge and Princeton, NJ, 1990).

29 M. Dreyfus, M. Ruffat, V. Viet and D. Voldman, *Se Protéger, Être Protégé. Une histoire des assurances sociales en France* (Rennes, 2006).

30 F. Giomi and S. Petrungaro, ‘Voluntary associations, state, and gender in inter-war Yugoslavia. An introduction’, *European Review of History: Revue Européenne D'histoire*, 26, 1 (2019), 1–18.

31 O. Fillieule, ‘Some elements of an interactionist approach to political disengagement’, *Social Movement Studies*, 9, 1 (2010), 1–15. On a more theoretical level, see M. Darmon, ‘La Notion de carrière: Un instrument interactionniste d’objectivation’, *Politix*, 82, 2 (2008), 149–167.

32 Leimgruber, op. cit., 13.
14 Fabio Giomi et al.

33 S. Schaffer, et al., *The Brokered World. Go-betweens and global intelligence, 1770–1820* (Cambridge, 2009); B. Latour, *Reassembling the Social. An introduction to actor-network-theory* (Oxford, 2005).

34 M. Agulhon, ‘Introduction’, in *Pénitents et Francs-maçons de L’ancienne Provence* (Paris, 1984).

35 P. Bourdieu, ‘The forms of capital’, in I. Szeman and T. Kaposy (eds), *Cultural Theory: An anthology* (2010), 21.

## References

Agulhon, M., *Pénitents et Francs-maçons de L'ancienne Provence* (Paris, 1984).

Baughan, E., ‘Mrs Jellyby Nation. The British state and overseas aid in Europe, 1918–1925’, Paper given at the European Social Science History Conference, Valencia, Spain (2016).

Bec, C., *Assistance et République. La recherche d'un nouveau contrat social sous la IIIe République* (Paris, 1994).

Bourdieu, P., ‘The forms of capital’, in I. Szeman and T. Kaposy (eds), *Cultural Theory: An anthology* (Oxford, 2010), 15–29.

Darmon, M., ‘La Notion de carrière: Un instrument interactionniste d’objectivation’, *Politix*, 82, 2 (2008), 149–167.

Downs, L.L., *Childhood in the Promised Land. Working-class movements and the colonies de vacances in France, 1880–1960* (Durham, NC and London, 2002).

Dreyfus, M., M. Ruffat, V. Viet and D. Goldman, *Se Protéger, Être Protégé. Une histoire des assurances sociales en France* (Rennes, 2006).

Droux, J., ‘L’Internationalisation de la protection de l’enfance. Acteurs, concurrences et projets transnationaux (1900–1925)’, *Critique Internationale*, 52, 3 (2011), 17–33.

Esping-Andersen, G., *The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism* (Cambridge and Princeton, NJ, 1990).

Fillieule, O., ‘Some elements of an interactionist approach to political disengagement’, *Social Movement Studies*, 9, 1 (2010), 1–15.

Finlayson, G., ‘A moving frontier. Voluntarism and the state in British social welfare 1911–1949’, *Twentieth Century British History*, 1, 2 (1990), 183–206.

Giomi, F. and S. Petrungaro, ‘Voluntary associations, state, and gender in interwar Yugoslavia. An introduction’, *European Review of History: Revue Européenne D’histoire*, 26, 1 (2019), 1–18.

Guerry, L., ‘Mobilisations transnationales. Le cas de l’International migration service, 1921–1939’, *Monde(s). Histoire, Espaces, Relations*, 1, 5 (2014), 219–237.

Harris, B. and P. Bridgen, ‘Introduction. 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).

Hering, S. and B. Waaldijk, *Guardians of the Poor, Custodians of the Public. Welfare history in Eastern Europe, 1900–1960* (Opladen, 2006).

Katz, M.B. and C. Sachße (eds), *The Mixed Economy of Social Welfare. Public/private relations in England, Germany and the United States, the 1870s to the 1930s* (Baden-Baden, 1996).

Kessler-Harris, A. and M. Vaudagna, *Democracy and the Welfare State. The two wests in the age of austerity* (New York, 2017).

Kott, S., ‘From transnational reformist network to international organization. The International Association for Labour Legislation and the International Labour
Organization, 1900–1930', 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, 2014), 239–258.

Latour, B., *Reassembling the Social. An introduction to actor-network-theory* (Oxford, 2005).

Leimgruber, M., *Solidarity without the State? Business and the shaping of the Swiss welfare state* (Cambridge, 2008).

Revel, J. (ed), *Jeux D'échelles. La micro-analyse à l'expérience* (Paris, 1996).

Rosanvallon, P., *L'État en France de 1789 à nos Jours* (Paris, 1990).

Schaffer, S. et al., *The Brokered World. Go-betweens and global intelligence, 1770–1820* (Cambridge, 2009).

Thane, P., 'The Ben Pimlott memorial lecture 2011. The “Big Society” and the “Big State”: Creative tension or crowding out?', *Twentieth Century British History*, 23, 3 (2012), 408–429.

Zahra, T., *Kidnapped Souls. National indifference and the battle for children in the Bohemian lands, 1900–1948* (Ithaca, NY and London, 2008).

Zunz, O., *Philanthropy in America. A history* (Princeton, NJ, 2014).
# 1 A quintessential mixed economy?

The issue of illegitimacy as a testing ground for creative collaboration between public and private actors in French-speaking Switzerland, 1890–1960

Joëlle Droux

## Introduction

In 1941, the state of Geneva considered integrating into its public services an educational facility for delinquent teenagers, founded four years earlier by a private association, and that was running a huge deficit.¹ The director of the facility was strongly opposed to the idea:

> we must fight this decision because it would be the ruin of [our facility] forevermore and would drag it down into the depths of materialism. [...] We will only be able to play our social role if we remain outside all officialdom which kills the Spirit and place our organization above parties, influences, and labels.²

These words were uttered at a time when the state was increasingly intervening in matters of economy and welfare in connection with the mobilization (e.g., organizing a system of loss-of-income allowances for the families of called-up troops and creating the Wahlen Plan aimed at ensuring the country's agricultural self-sufficiency). Great Britain's Beveridge Plan would soon be published, fuelling debates in Switzerland about the future of welfare policy and prompting the charitable sector to question its role following this extension of state action. Like the director quoted above, many actors responded defensively, claiming to be championing Christian values in the face of what they considered the public sector's rampant materialism. However, they also sometimes took a more pugnacious stance, arguing that they had greater latitude and could therefore be more creative in how they tackled contemporary social issues.

This chapter examines these claims about the place and role of private charity in dealing with issues of welfare in the Swiss context. It does so by focusing on a specific area, namely the protection of illegitimate children.
Now that equality between children has been established irrespective of their parents' marital status, this issue has been forgotten, but for a long time it remained sensitive. Many countries began tackling it at the end of the nineteenth century, seeing this stigmatized group's vulnerability as a justification for state intervention.³ Switzerland was no exception and the issue was debated there from the 1890s onwards, in connection with plans to unify the country's Civil Code.⁴

Studying these questions in the Swiss context is particularly productive given the country's federal structure. By focusing on the interactions between private and public actors in debates and institutional creations relating to illegitimacy, this chapter shows, first, the pivotal role played by private actors in connecting the different levels at which public policy was organized (local, cantonal, regional – reflecting the different linguistic blocks – and federal). Second, it offers an understanding of the processes that allowed policy to evolve through an interplay between private and public actors managing, disseminating, testing and negotiating systems for care provision, whilst ensuring the reproduction of the dominant system of values.

These issues are examined here over a 70-year span, starting with the preliminary discussions on the draft Civil Code, which set out a general framework that would remain in place until legal reforms in the 1970s normalized the status of children born out of wedlock. Looking closely at the actors on the ground in French-speaking Switzerland, the chapter identifies the various positions taken by private initiatives, compared to public action, and does so in five parts. In the first part, the relevant provisions of the draft Code are discussed showing how its underlying principles were received by public opinion and especially among private actors. Private initiatives in care provision are examined in the second part, showing that these fell in line with the main principles of the Civil Code even before it had been adopted. In the third part, particular attention is given to the mechanisms which were put in place in the strongly decentralized Swiss context to help spread and promote both models of action and their underlying principles, looking at the role played by the Pro Juventute association, at the intersection of state welfare and private charity. Focusing on the local level, the fourth part shows that during the interwar years, there were particularly involved interactions between networks of private actors and public services, resulting in a division of labour when it came to managing the populations in question. Far from remaining limited to applying the federal framework alone, this ecosystem created by private-public collaboration even led to new and unprecedented forms of care provision. The fifth part concentrates on one particular example: the practice of adopting illegitimate children, which was based on one of the provisions of the Civil Code, albeit diverted from its original purpose when applied to the issue of illegitimacy. The implementation of this solution gave rise, in turn, to new mechanisms for intervention and regulation, lending legitimacy to the expertise of private actors in setting national welfare policy in this area.
## Illegitimate children and their mothers: the era of legal reforms

From the Ancien Régime onwards, situations of illegitimacy posed legal, economic and moral problems for state authorities. The existence of 'bastards' called into question the sacred institution of marriage and led to delicate situations when it came to transmitting family wealth and determining who was responsible for providing for these children.⁵ A multitude of regulations determined how illegitimacy was handled, resulting in extremely diverse local practices as evidenced by the Swiss case.⁶ Certain cantons tended to force fathers to support their illegitimate children financially by allowing paternity searches. This procedure was intended to allow mothers to demand maintenance from the supposed fathers. Other cantons, however, did not go down this path. These discrepancies led to complicated legal conflicts when the parents of the child came from regions that regulated illegitimacy differently.⁷ For a while, a more unified approach was established in the revolutionary era, with all the territories attached to France at that time adopting the French Civil Code (1804). This Code prohibited paternity searches and, when illegitimate children were not recognized by their fathers, rendered the mother solely responsible for providing for them.⁸ Most French-speaking cantons retained these provisions after the Restoration. As for the German-speaking cantons, they returned to their legal tradition that allowed for paternity proceedings. These diverse regimes for establishing filiation continued until the end of the nineteenth century.

Throughout the nineteenth century, illegitimate births – a phenomenon viewed as one variant of the social question – attracted the attention of moral and political authorities in various countries. At the very time when illegitimacy was in fact beginning to decline, its demographic and social effects became the focus of concern.⁹ In Switzerland, as elsewhere, a child welfare movement brought together a range of social actors, whether to ensure better legal protection for children in danger (abandoned or delinquent) or to fight against their mortality.¹⁰ In this regard, the revelation of mortality rates for children born outside of marriage caused a genuine wave of shock.¹¹ Some doctors sounded the alarm publicly: whereas illegitimate births only made up 5% of the country's births, the mortality rate in the first year of life was 28% for these children against 18% for their legitimate counterparts.¹² What's more, these statistics did not take into account infanticide, abortion or the abandonment of children resulting from pregnancies out of wedlock. The growing awareness of these indirect effects of illegitimacy caused important changes in social attitudes to gather pace in a number of countries: the judges and juries charged with sanctioning these crimes and offences increasingly shied away from applying the full force of the law to mothers who had either killed their children or tried to abort them, when they were persuaded that these mothers had been deceived and abandoned by the father.¹³
Many women's associations analysed the situation in similar terms, protesting against the effects of the double moral standard that tolerated men's indiscretions but repudiated their 'victims' (women they seduced and children they abandoned).¹⁴

Under the influence of these contestations, many countries were gripped by debates about the situation of illegitimate children.¹⁵ As discussions evolved, different proposals were produced to reduce the legal, social or health consequences of illegitimacy (e.g. regimes for establishing filiation, systems for providing support to single mothers and/or their illegitimate children, inheritance rights). These proposals were often inspired by reforms implemented in other national contexts, prompting a form of international harmonization in social responses to this issue. Thus, the reforms enacted in Sweden, Norway and Switzerland were influenced by German legislation.¹⁶ In the Swiss case, the question of illegitimate children drew the attention of the public sphere when the first unified Civil Code was being drawn up between 1896 and 1907.¹⁷ The initial draft, written by the professor of law Eugen Huber (1849–1923), contained several proposals for reforms in this regard.¹⁸ He suggested, in particular, making paternity searches mandatory for children born out of wedlock, for the whole country (they were already well established in German-speaking Switzerland but almost unheard of in the French-speaking part of the country). So as not to leave single mothers to deal with this weighty procedure on their own, the Swiss draft law provided for the mandatory declaration of all illegitimate births followed by a *curatelle* measure.¹⁹ The *curateur* appointed by the guardianship authorities had to start a paternity search within three months²⁰: the aim was to identify the father and then attempt to exact from him either legitimacy for the child by marriage²¹ or legal recognition of that child and a commitment to contribute to the cost of his or her upbringing.

Civil society was favourably disposed to this new system. Throughout the debates in parliament, the measures relating to illegitimacy were reported in numerous French-language press articles and were fairly positively received, for example by those jurists who welcomed them in the name of 'the equity [that] requires considerable improvements in the condition of natural children, the poorest of the poor'.²² The same satisfaction was expressed by women's movements, who hailed the fact that

paternity searches were petitioned for by the state before the competent tribunal without the *fille-mère*²³ [unwed mother] needing to apply, that is to say automatically and if necessary against her wishes.²⁴

This provision was seen as limiting the risk of fathers avoiding their obligations by taking advantage of the mothers' weakness. Politicians were also in agreement, including figures as conservative as the Fribourg *Conseiller d'Etat* (State councillor), catholic Georges Python (1856–1927), who saw it as 'a very equitable reform'.²⁵
All these different people conceived of this issue in the same way, reducing the situation of single mothers to that of *filles-mères* abandoned by the men who had seduced them. It lent further credence to the idea that the only way of supporting both mother and child was to place them under the guardianship of an authority with sufficient power to extract contributions from neglectful fathers. However, the impoverished situation of many single mothers was in fact far more varied. In Switzerland, as elsewhere, single mothers were not all young, inexperienced or naïve.²⁶ Some lived in consensual unions [*concubinage*] as they were unable to marry their partner either because it was too expensive or because it was impossible (e.g. when one or other was still married and had not divorced, a procedure that was also costly). Births outside marriage were thus not necessarily the reflection of sexual exploitation; they were often testament to the numerous difficulties that could prevent a legitimate union.²⁷ Whatever the reality of these contrasting situations, at the time, pregnancy out of wedlock continued to be analysed in terms of a stereotypical profile of female vulnerability, that is to say the young girl who had been deceived and abandoned, victim of male selfishness. The *tutelle* provisions laid out in the draft of the Swiss Civil Code therefore only responded to this specific situation. The system was designed to support those mothers and, by extension their children, left dealing with the financial consequences of a lack of paternal support. For the main part, then, this was a solution that shored up the gender roles inherent to the dominant patriarchal family model. By forcing fathers to take up their role as the financial providers of the household, this solution remained deeply anchored in this traditional framework.

However, such a support did have its limits. For example, when a Genevan liberal parliamentarian suggested allowing fathers legally to recognize the children of adultery or incest, in the name of treating all offspring equally, this was rejected by a majority of the conservatives, in the manner of Python who saw it as a form of 'destruction of the family'.²⁸ The same refusal was given to the suggestion made by certain representatives of the workers' movement calling for the removal of the provisions in the Code that prohibited paternal recognition for children whose mothers had allegedly had several sexual relations at the time of conception.²⁹ In the view of a majority of lawmakers, the law's support could only be provided to women who were the victims of male immorality and not those who had had several sexual partners and were henceforth considered to have deliberately transgressed traditional social roles. In cases where the defendant could convince the judges that this was the situation of the woman pursuing him, the Code provided for the proceedings to be dropped entirely.

Ultimately, the provisions of the Code relating to illegitimacy were broadly supported by a range of actors (reforming jurists, women's movements, philanthropists) as well by all the bourgeois parties. On this specific point of legislation, the Civil Code therefore enabled a process of legal and cultural
unification that was nevertheless compatible with the maintenance of certain cantonal idiosyncrasies, dear to the Catholic cantons. By making substantial concessions to the pre-eminence of the legitimate family, the final legal text made a selection from the possible measures put forward by the variegated proponents of reform for illegitimate children, resulting in real innovation when it came to providing care. For example, paternity searches mediated by a *curateur* were supposed to guarantee their effectiveness. The Code also gave illegitimate children the right to demand maintenance from their birth father, even if he already had legitimate children, although only the latter could inherit from him. Swiss society was therefore ready to reform, although not at any cost. The path chosen was that of *improving* the situation of illegitimate children and not of *ensuring equality* of legal status. On the contrary, with this new framework, the law confirmed their radical inequality in legal terms. The new Civil Code, passed by parliament in 1907 and implemented in 1912,³⁰ was nevertheless hailed as one of the most advanced of its time in terms of child protection.³¹

## The early mobilization of civil society

These debates had an impact on how private charities approached the question of illegitimate children, as illustrated by the case study of the canton of Geneva, an area particularly affected by out-of-wedlock pregnancies. The region was one of the most urbanized in Switzerland: the small canton (280 km² for 127,000 inhabitants in 1899) was essentially made up of the urban core of the city of Geneva itself (approximately 97,000 inhabitants) encircled by a very narrow strip of countryside. As in most of the country's urban centres,³² it had a fairly high illegitimacy rate (approximately 10% of recorded births in 1900, against 4.6% for the country as a whole). The canton of Geneva was quite welcoming towards single mothers: for example, the Maternity hospital, a cantonal public institution, accepted them readily, as learning material for students. Most of the women who gave birth there were either destitute or *filles-mères*, often from other cantons, drawn there by the free, anonymous care provision. This remained true throughout the first half of the twentieth century.³³

In order to provide for this population of lone women in precarious situations, a range of private initiatives began to introduce new methods of care provision, such as maternal asylums and *pouponnières* (residential nurseries), even before the new Civil Code was adopted. The prevailing assessment of the women's needs was based on the conviction that they were the victims of a double moral standard, so these establishments only catered to a subset of single mothers: those who were not in a stable conjugal relationship, abandoned by their community and their partners. The initiatives shared the aim of the Civil Code under discussion, in focusing on the protection of vulnerable unmarried mothers. The movement began with local committees
heavily influenced by the protestant elite close to abolitionist circles (who, for this reason, were particularly aware of the differential effects of the double moral standard relative to ‘fallen’ women). At the beginning of the twentieth century, they founded a shelter, La Miséricorde [Mercy], based on an Alsatian model (although Anglo-Saxon countries are known to have also introduced this sort of system at the same period).³⁴ La Miséricode was not necessarily accepted by everyone and its management acknowledged that it had been accused by the ‘pious people of Geneva [...] of encouraging vice’.³⁵ It nevertheless persevered, changing name in 1908 in favour of the deliberately less stigmatizing ‘La Retraite, œuvre de relèvement’ [The Retreat Rehabilitation Charity]. The intention was to offer a dozen of single mothers a discreet alternative to being hospitalized in public maternity wards. First and foremost, the intention was to avoid these women abandoning their children or resorting to infanticide in the short or medium term. The length of their stay, first set at six weeks, was progressively extended to six months with a view to creating the necessary conditions for forming an attachment to the baby. The mothers were, however, subjected to strict rules: the aim was to provide them not only with material assistance but also with moral oversight given that, in the founders’ eyes, their ‘sin’ was a sign of weak character. The women were kept under a strict regime (visits and correspondence were monitored) and required to complete household chores to pay for the cost of their stay (laundry, sewing, etc.) The establishment also had an educational mission, which was to teach the women to look after their babies.

The intention was to save these children by helping their mothers. The founders of La Retraite were well informed about the comparatively high death rate affecting illegitimate children and wished to close this gap, thanks to the mothers' efforts, made possible by the support given to them.³⁶ For this reason, as soon as they were able to return to work, the establishment offered to look after their children for a modest sum for a period ranging from one year (in 1908) to three years (as of 1911). During this time, the children remained under close medical supervision. The model was copied in Fribourg in 1908 and in the canton of Vaud in 1912. While these initiatives remained limited in number, they nevertheless reflected a change in the position adopted by the elites towards this social issue, across the confessional divide.

Another variant of this model was the *pouponnière*. The first of these institutions was founded in Geneva in 1906 by Dr Marguerite Champendal (1870–1928), the first Swiss woman to obtain a medical degree. This veritable healthcare entrepreneur, who maintained close ties with bourgeois feminist circles, devoted her entire career to infant care.³⁷ In 1901, drawing on the financial and material collaboration of women in the local elite, Champendal adapted the French *Gouttes de lait* model to Geneva.³⁸ The aim was to provide sterilized milk to mothers who could not breastfeed in order to fight the infant mortality linked to traditional artificial feeding practices. However, Champendal realized that many of these mothers did not have
the means to treat their babies' illnesses owing to their destitution or their
need to work. She therefore founded a small clinic to hospitalize these babies
called La Pouponnière (1906) and attached a training school for nurses to it:
the student nurses were responsible for the follow-up care of babies and their
mothers in their homes, providing help and advice at a time when techniques
related to the quality, handling and preparation of baby nutrition were un-
heard of among the working classes. Champendal's example spread: three
similar establishments were created in the canton (Petite Maisonnée, 1914;
Pouponnière des Amies de l'Enfance, 1918; Providence de Versoix, 1922).³⁹
The last two were supported by Catholic circles, offering further proof both
of the confessional consensus emerging around this issue and of how dynamic
Catholic charities were at the time.⁴⁰ These establishments worked in the
same way, pairing an infant care institution with a training centre. Many
unmarried mothers benefited from these facilities, which offered them an
alternative to mercenary wet-nursing.⁴¹ Moreover, these institutions could
often draw on the expertise of renowned paediatricians for whom they con-
stituted a rich source of practical experience. Pouponnières were funded by
collections and donations and by a new form of 'business patronage', particu-
larly from the milk industry (Guigoz, Nestlé) that saw an opportunity to test
innovative products (such as baby cereal and powdered milk).⁴² The boarding
house for student nurses provided working capital for the *pouponnières*, which
became training centres and employment opportunities for these new profes-
sions on the healthcare market.⁴³

When discussions of the Civil Code began, private initiatives had thus
already seized the opportunity to express support, by means of these inno-
vations, for a protective model of care provision for children. The intention
was to break with the past and the stigmatization of unmarried mothers and
their offspring. While these initiatives were originally mainly present in ur-
ban Protestant settings, they soon became more diverse, testifying to the
elites' increasing interest in the reforms set in motion by the law. They appear
to have met with the same approval in public opinion, as evidenced by the
numerous individual 'micro-donations' of a few francs per year received by
these institutions, recorded in their financial accounts. The goal of saving
children's lives by means of medicalized care provision focused on newborn
babies no doubt played a crucial role in creating this consensus around the re-
forming measures being put in place. By targeting that particular age group,
most at risk of death, this objective managed in part to obviate the risk that
the system would be perceived as encouraging immorality by making life too
'easy' for *filles-mères*.⁴⁴ On such a highly sensitive topic as family policy and
the regulation of sexual conduct, the private charities described here served
as a testing ground among the working class and elite charitable populations
but also a 'laboratory for state policy'.⁴⁵ After these initial local experiments,
which demonstrated the model's viability, public authorities then built upon
this overall assent to disseminate the model further.
Unification in decentralization: Pro Juventute and the
propagation of charitable works to help single mothers

The federal authorities did not remain entirely inactive in the face of these
early initiatives, but their scope for action was limited. Unlike a centralized
state, the Confederation's jurisdiction over the cantons was strictly limited
by the Constitution, especially in matters related to health. In this regard,
federal statistics for the early twentieth century revealed considerable dispar-
ities between cantons: while urban cantons saw clear progress in their fight
against infant mortality, the more rural ones (especially Fribourg and Valais)
lagged behind.⁴⁶ The federal authorities were aware of the need to raise the
level of services related to this cause and therefore, as had been their custom
since the mid-nineteenth century, made use of the charitable sector as a reg-
ulating tool to compensate the weaknesses of their own infrastructures.⁴⁷
In 1912, the Federal Council drew on the *Société Suisse d'utilité publique* – a
national welfare policy think tank – to create the Pro Juventute Foundation,
which thus became the child protection umbrella organization (*organisation faîtière*).⁴⁸ This foundation was supposed to promote child welfare activities
nationwide, acting as a centre for advice and advocacy in this regard. Pro
Juventute created district secretariats covering the whole country in order to
decentralize its work of encouraging private initiatives and channelling them
into certain types of action. To achieve this goal, the foundation defined
each year a priority theme and encouraged local initiatives to create specific
actions and works related to it. The 'Protecting mother and child' theme fo-
cused in particular on fighting infant mortality, and saving illegitimate chil-
dren was a prominent feature. In its monthly journal, in the three national
languages, Pro Juventute published many articles praising the work of the
*poupponnières* and maternal asylums and prompting emulation across the can-
tons. By expressing its support for existing private endeavours to help single
mothers, the foundation reinforced the depoliticizing of illegitimacy, thereby
encouraging its acceptance by public opinion. Through its activities, Pro Ju-
ventute indeed intended to exert 'a moral (and not a moralizing) influence on
mothers, whose individual situation should be given sympathetic and tactful
consideration'.⁴⁹ Pro Juventute thus incited private initiatives to develop these
innovative models, which it also strived to promote via financial help.

Indeed, Pro Juventute was also a platform for the redistribution of federal
funding, with the central state using this means to circumvent constitutional
barriers to direct action on its part. Between 1912 and 1934, the founda-
tion awarded grants of more than 3 million francs to charitable organiza-
tions helping pre-school children, and particularly those 'created above all
for illegitimate children and their mothers'.⁵⁰ For charities, this influx of
public money made up the rest of their budget alongside private donations
and locally awarded grants (from cantons or municipalities). Using financial
incentives as a soft means of unification, the Pro Juventute Foundation was
in fact following in a different way the intention of the law as set out in
the Civil Code. This collaborative dynamic allowed the network providing
care for single mothers and illegitimate children to maintain its activities and
extend its coverage: if the country only had 16 *pouponnières* in 1920 for over 3,200 births outside marriage⁵¹, this number rose to 24 in 1928. More than 120 baby clinics (*consultations de nourrissons*) were also founded, including *pouponnières*, mostly emanated from privative initiative: 41 were created by Pro Juventute or in collaboration with the foundation, allowing the rural and primarily Catholic cantons to catch up with the comparative lead established by the more urbanized regions.⁵²

Institutions, such as the maternity shelters and *pouponnières*, gave concrete form to the general ambitions laid out by the Civil Code by creating establishments capable of tempering the effects of the patriarchal system: they offered an institutional alternative to vulnerable unmarried women in order to help them to normalize their situations. The interlacing of public and private sector funding clearly illustrates a converging effort to co-construct this area of provision. The process was rooted in a shared conception of what this provision should be, that is to say a way of compensating socially for the fundamental inequalities of status between legitimate and illegitimate children rather than erasing the inequalities altogether. Pro Juventute's work in fact reinforced these unequal foundations insofar as it contributed to the propagation of the institutions that embodied them and to the coordination and merging of their methods without being seen to pose a challenge to the basic principles of federalism.

It is important, however, to remain cautious as far as the effects of this mobilization are concerned. While Switzerland undeniably recorded a substantial decrease in infant mortality (from 134 per thousand between 1901 and 1905 to 54 per thousand between 1926 and 1930), it is also true that the difference in mortality rates between legitimate and illegitimate children increased. A contemporary medical study thus highlighted that between 1876 and 1943, the mortality of illegitimate children 'was around 50% higher than that of legitimate children; today [in 1943] it is almost double that'.⁵³ One cannot deny that *pouponnières* produced positive results for mothers who were able to benefit from their support: thanks to their wide range of high quality care (artificial feeding, vaccinations, early screening and treatment for nutritional deficiencies), their mortality rate was lower than the national average.⁵⁴ However, these women undoubtedly represented a minority, given the small number of this category of institutions throughout Switzerland. Besides, their activities only offered a limited haven of protection to unmarried mothers, whose social and healthcare situations remained persistently precarious despite the public-private sector collaboration enabled by the Civil Code, as the example of Geneva will show.

## The symbiotic relationship between private initiatives and public services, between continuity and discontinuity

Private and public actors did not only collaborate when it came to providing material help to unmarried mothers and their children. They also
co-managed the legal *curatelle/tutelle* system, under which all illegitimate children were to be placed according to the provisions of the new Swiss Civil Code. The legal text required the cantons to set up such a *tutelle* system, based on the idea that single mothers were generally too weak to defend the rights of their future children against fathers who would potentially prove recalcitrant in paternity proceedings, but also to take good care of their babies. In Geneva, the laws determining how the Civil Code would be implemented outlined a procedure that continued to be followed almost unchanged for the first three quarters of the twentieth century.⁵⁵ Any unmarried woman who was pregnant or had given birth was appointed a *curateur* by the guardianship court. Until 1932, the *tuteur* was a private individual, often a lawyer. From 1932 onwards, a public service (*tuteur général* or public guardian) was given responsibility for the *tutelles* and *curatelles* of illegitimate children.

Numerous guardianship files kept in the archives of the canton of Geneva provide an understanding of how the procedures relating to the education and protection of illegitimate children unfolded.⁵⁶ In the majority of cases, mothers were identified and notified to the authorities in question in the hospital where they gave birth. Many of them, such as Dora T., a 27-year-old hotel employee, chose La Retraite. Dora arrived there in March 1935 and gave birth to her son in May, informing the *curateur* that the father was 'Marco O., Italian, mechanic, married, living in Geneva'.⁵⁷ Very few mothers, however, identified themselves to the guardianship court before giving birth since the appointment of a *curateur* produced a highly intrusive intervention in the private sphere, whereas the reflex of secrecy generally tended to prevail for mothers confronted with an unwanted pregnancy. Regardless of their reticence, the *curateur* had to determine the father's identity (a complicated task if the latter lived outside the canton or had run away to avoid his responsibilities) and then convince him to recognize the child legally and legitimize him or her through marriage (a third of children born out of wedlock were thus legitimized in the decade during which the Civil Code was implemented, against 24.2% in the period 1901-1910).⁵⁸ Failing this, the *curateur*'s mission was to force fathers to sign agreements determining maintenance for their children, in theory until they reached adulthood. In many cases, this manoeuvre sufficiently intimidated the men in question for them to sign the proposed agreement. This was the case, for example, for Pierre K., a 39-year-old employee in Geneva, who signed in March 1929 the following document:

> without wishing hereby to recognize that I am the father of the child
> [Thérèse, born in November 1928], which I in fact dispute being, I nev-
> ertheless undertake, in the interests of the mother and the child, to con-
> tribute to the maintenance of the little girl (50 francs a month until she
> reaches the age of 18).⁵⁹

Very often, however, none of these solutions were successful and the *curateur*
had to help single mothers with paternity proceedings to force fathers to face
up to their responsibilities by finding proof of the filiation (investigations with witnesses, correspondences, etc.).

At the end of the proceedings, the guardianship court would make a decision, either establishing paternity or not, and if necessary mandating that the father pay maintenance. A study focusing on 156 paternity proceedings judged in Lausanne in 1930 estimated that 60% resulted in this outcome.⁶⁰ The Civil Justice system then had to decide upon whom to confer paternal authority: the father, if he consented, the mother, if she were deemed apt, or, when neither seemed capable of taking on this responsibility, a *tuteur*. The *tuteur* could be a member of the family but was most often in fact the *curateur* who had followed the child's case since birth (from 1932 onwards, this was therefore the *tuteur général*). Under the pretext of protecting children, mothers were thus placed under a very strict and infantilizing form of supervision – despite the fact that almost 70% were not young girls but rather women aged between 21 and 30.⁶¹

As soon as the code's dispositions were put into practice, these new decision-making bodies developed links with the local network of private institutions. At Geneva's La Retraite, collaborative relationships with court-appointed *tuteurs* and *curateurs* were mentioned as early as 1913. During long paternity proceedings, it was in the *curateur*'s interests to direct mothers and their babies to these charities, especially when they were alone or abandoned, in order to insure that children received the appropriate level of care. Such was the case of a woman named Pierrette F., a servant who had given birth to her illegitimate daughter Sylvia in January 1929. Because the child's father did not regularly pay the maintenance to which he had agreed, the guardianship authorities prevailed upon the mother to place her daughter in a *pouponnière* where she was still to be found in January 1931.⁶² Thus relieved of any immediate concern for the child's survival, the *curateur* was able to focus instead on pursuing the legal and administrative aspects of the case. This was also what happened to a child named Noé N., born in November 1932 at Geneva's Maternité, illegitimate child of a divorced unemployed father and a 26-year-old homeless and destitute mother from Bern. Before organizing the return of the child back to his home canton in March 1933, the *curateur* placed him in La Petite Maisonnée.⁶³

There was therefore a division of labour between the *curateur* acting for the judicial authorities and the private charities providing for newborn babies and their mothers. The former was responsible for finding the funding to provide for the children housed in the *pouponnière*; meanwhile, the latter ensured continuity of care, even when payments were not made for quite a long period, leaving the *curateur* the time to find a solution from private or public aid (no such flexibility would have been found in a family placement). In 1929, the length of children's stays in La Petite Maisonnée *pouponnière* ranged from 12 days to two and a half years.⁶⁴ More often than not, these longer-term placements reflected the difficulties facing the mothers rather than a
deliberate choice on their part. This was the case, for example, for Françoise B., a 31-year-old worker in the textile industry, who, after giving birth to her daughter Noémie in January 1930, lived in La Providence *pouponnière* in the Geneva suburbs. Her child's father was an employee from Vaud who legally recognized the child under pressure from the *curateur*, but only committed to paying 30 francs per month towards his daughter's upkeep, as he was 'currently unemployed'. Appointing a *tuteur* for the child immediately after her birth did not resolve anything given that in December 1931, the father had six months maintenance payments in arrears. In February 1932, he was pursued through the courts by the *tuteur* for abandoning his family but could not pay his debt due to his continued unemployment. As for the mother, she stated: 'I would not ask him for anything to bring up my child if I earned enough, but this is impossible for me as I have to support my elderly mother'. In October 1932, the child was still in the *pouponnière*, where her mother visited her regularly, and the maintenance arrears were continuing to mount up.⁶⁵

This symbiotic relationship benefited to the public and private actors alike. For the guardianship authorities, the local network of *pouponnières* offered a reservoir of services for mothers, children, and *tuteurs* alike. As for the charities, they were sure that a flow of clients would be directed towards them, thus ensuring their continued existence. Or at least this was the plan. In reality, many *pouponnières* complained about the irregular payment of pensions due for the child support during its institutional placement by mothers or fathers and their continuing deficits. Just like the mothers, these institutions housing illegitimate children were the victims of a legal system that had refused to tackle the root of the problem (inequality of status) and had simply addressed its effects in order to avoid giving too many advantages to children born out of wedlock to the detriment of those born from conjugal unions. As it was, when the fathers did not wish or were unable to pay for their children's upkeep, both the mothers and the charities were powerless – the former were forced to place their children in a home and the latter had to appeal for grants and private donations. The symbiotic relationship based on a shared view of single mothers as so many minors in need of supervision and control certainly facilitated private-public collaboration in how the Civil Code's provisions were applied on the ground. It did, however, contribute to a collective inability to conceive of other forms of support such as allowances for single mothers, which already existed or were being discussed in other countries.⁶⁶ In the end, the implementation of the Swiss Civil Code turned out to be disappointing: based on a conservative vision of society shared by private and public actors, ultimately, it only marginally improved the daily life of single mothers and their children, and this because of the lack of capacity and will to question the privileged status of marriage and the traditional family. Nevertheless, this collaboration would also prove instrumental in the construction of new types of care provision.
An ecosystem of relationships conducive to innovation:
reinventing adoption, for better (or for worse...)

This ecosystem of close-knit relationships between the public and private sector triggered a new mechanism, namely adoption. As the preparatory debates for the Civil Code had unfolded, lawmakers had extended the possibility of adoption to the whole of Switzerland, whereas previously, it had only existed in a very small number of cantons.⁶⁷ The idea was to allow people who wished to help abandoned or orphaned children to adopt them. The system was therefore designed in the interests of the child rather than the adopters. Furthermore, the form of adoption championed by the Code was very restrictive: so-called simple adoption did not entirely detach adoptees from their birth families and limited their rights to inherit from their adoptive families; adopters had to be aged 40 or over and have no legitimate children; the birth family had to consent to the adoption; the adoption remained revocable.

By their own admission, lawmakers did not expect the mechanism to be used very frequently. In Switzerland, as elsewhere, they had only introduced adoption, which created a family perceived as artificial, with considerable reticence.⁶⁸ However, the result was in fact the exact opposite: adoption proved very popular. Lawmakers had apparently not taken into account the fact that, at the same time, there was high demand for children 'on the market'. This phenomenon, apparent in other countries during the nineteenth century, only appeared in Switzerland in the 1890s, testifying to a 'hunger' for parenthood especially on the part of infertile couples.⁶⁹ Indeed, countless offers of, and requests for, adoption appeared regularly in the Swiss press.⁷⁰

The demand for adoptable children contributed to changing the principles and practices of private and public actors working to protect illegitimate children. In French-speaking Switzerland, the case files of illegitimate children placed under *tutelle* show that, from the 1920s to 1930s onwards, the *poupomnières* and *tuteurs* began to turn to adoption as a means of caring for these infants. This evolution was not linked to any official encouragement or incitement, as the provisions of the Civil Code relating to adoption were not intended to be applied to illegitimate children.⁷¹ This is nevertheless what happened to many of them, for example, Jean O., an illegitimate boy born in November 1925, placed in a *poupomnière* by his *tuteur* shortly after his birth because his mother, Marie O., did not have the necessary means to keep him. The paternity search having failed to identify a father, the *curateur* and the *poupomnière* found themselves in a delicate situation when it came to determining who would pay for the child's stay. The *curateur* found the solution in a Genevan family that wished to adopt the boy. With the mother's agreement, the child was placed with Mr and Mrs T. as soon as he left the *poupomnière*, under the supervision of the lawyer who had, in the meantime, been appointed
the child’s *tuteur*. In February 1934, the latter authorized Mr and Mrs T. to adopt Jean on the grounds that he

had found with them the affection of real parents and that they provided all the guarantees one could hope for that they would give him a good upbringing. Given that the child has been abandoned by his mother and was not recognized by his father, it is to the highest degree and in every way in his interests that he be adopted by Mr and Mrs T.⁷²

While public and private actors had initially agreed on using *poupontières* to create a strong bond between mother and child, adoption offered a new solution. Making use of the demand from couples wishing to adopt, institutions and tutelary authorities thus crafted a new way of dealing with illegitimacy, diverting the Civil Code’s adoption provisions for this purpose. Evidence from *tutelle* files tend to demonstrate that they turned to adoption to ensure the protection of their wards because the *other* tools offered by the Civil Code to support single mothers had already proved relatively ineffectual. In the face of the financial difficulties plaguing both private and public child protection organizations, and the increasingly lengthy periods of time for which children were housed in institutions, adoption offered an adequate solution to all parties: couples wishing to adopt were satisfied; single mothers were freed from the burden of unwanted children; *tuteurs* were dispensed with the need for never-ending legal proceedings against fathers overdue with their payments; and, finally, children were provided with the stable families of which they had thus far been deprived. Together, these advantages made adoption desirable in the eyes of both the private and public-sector actors involved.

So much so that sometimes guardianship authorities did not hesitate to use their office to override the mothers' opposition to adoption proposals: the case of Ada G., a servant of German origin who had an illegitimate daughter in 1913 with a Genevan man, is a prime example of such a situation.⁷³ The paternity proceedings had sentenced the father to paying maintenance for little Ada-Maria, but her mother, in too precarious a situation, had failed to be granted paternal authority. The child was therefore placed under the *tutelle* of a lawyer, who had to consult the guardianship court for every important decision regarding his ward. The mother found another job as a servant in June 1913 and was therefore unable to keep her child. The *tuteur* placed Ada-Maria with Mr and Mrs R., shopkeepers in Geneva. In September 1915, the *tuteur* informed the court that the mother had left Geneva to live in a consensual union with her lover and concluded: 'she is not capable of bringing up the child, who will no doubt be entirely brought up by Mr and Mrs R. who would already like to adopt her'. However, in November 1917, the mother returned to Geneva and asked for her daughter back; the *tuteur*, who had paternal authority, refused on the grounds that her 'situation was not stable enough'. Despite protracted proceedings by the mother, the *tuteur* refused to give way, especially since 'Mrs R. does a lot for her [the child] and is bringing
her up well’. In the end, the mother signed an agreement with the adopters in July 1918, consenting to an adoption, before leaving Geneva to return to Germany. The *tuteur* authorized Mr and Mrs R. to adopt Ada-Maria in November 1927. The final letter in the voluminous case file was written in June 1929 by the girl’s birth mother. Suffering from an incurable illness, she stated that she ‘would like her daughter to be brought to her, so she could see her again at least for a few days’. The *tuteur* suspected that this was another trick and so began an investigation, which revealed that the mother was indeed terminally ill. There is no way of knowing whether or not the final meeting took place. But the case file certainly testifies to the fact that the mother never forgot a daughter (whom she had significantly named after herself) and that while she did eventually ‘consent’ to the adoption, she did so under some duress.

Recourse to adoption to resolve the problem posed by illegitimate chil-
dren subsequently spread in Switzerland, even though this mechanism was
not initially intended for this population. Indeed, an initial nationwide study
showed that, in 1943, 70% of adopted children were illegitimate.⁷⁴ Early in-
fant care institutions played an active role here: in the Catholic canton of Val-
ais, for example, the Pouponnière de Sion, founded in 1931, had organized
300 adoptions by the 1970s, mainly of illegitimate children.⁷⁵ This option
was nevertheless taken in a minority of cases when compared to other solu-
tions (e.g. legitimizing the children by marriage or leaving them under the
paternal authority of either their mother or father). Only 3% of illegitimate
children in the canton of Vaud were adopted in 1954 and only 6% of those
in the canton of Geneva between 1935 and 1939.⁷⁶ In total, the country only
recorded 6,000 adoptions between 1912 and 1943 (a third of which appar-
ently took place within the original family), proving that the legislation was
not an incitement.⁷⁷ Nevertheless, within the ecosystem of relationships in
the field of child protection, public and private partners ‘cobbled together’
a new social engineering technique independently from any official incite-
ment. They implemented it pragmatically in order to resolve the difficulties
of placing some of their illegitimate charges, whilst also responding to the
rising demand for children to adopt. This unexpected evolution contributed
to legitimating this new method for dealing with the social issue posed by
illegitimate children and subsequently paved the way for new means of reg-
ulating this practice.

From the interwar period onwards indeed, private charities began pro-
actively to regulate this new market by creating adoption offices, thereby
demonstrating their relatively early interest in this solution in Switzerland
compared to other countries.⁷⁸ As early as 1921, the Société d’Utilité Publique
des Femmes suisses (Swiss women’s society for public utility, a non-profit as-
sociation), founded its own ‘service for the free placement of children chosen
for adoption’ in Räpperswil) (canton of St Gall). The aim was to create an
intermediary organization responsible for mediating between the ‘demand’
of families seeking to adopt and the circles handling the ‘supply’ of adoptable
children, 'the vast majority of whom [were] children of illegitimate birth'.⁷⁹ The intervention by this kind of organization was supposed to formalize and ensure the safety of a process for which, at that point, no regulation existed beyond the brief articles in the Swiss Civil Code. This model of regulatory body was progressively imitated by several private associations: the religious community of L'Œuvre séraphique de charité in Fribourg (Seraphic charity work) in 1926; the Service social de justice (Social justice service) in 1933 in Lausanne; the Pro Familia foundation's adoption office in Geneva in 1947.⁸⁰ In the absence of a private body, public services took up this role, modelling their initiatives on those of their private counterparts, as was the case in the Neuchatel and Valais cantons. Whether private or public, this type of organization was run by rising numbers of social workers graduating from an increasing number of social services training schools.⁸¹ The adoption offices based their expertise on the methods of social work and developed a range of procedures and mechanisms to regulate adoptions (listing the available children and families seeking to adopt, filing administrative procedures with the guardianship authorities, making enquiries into the adopters and birth families, formulating requests for medical reports and providing a follow-up service).

Adoption bureaus were supposed to limit direct adoption practices, whether via newspaper announcements or institutions housing babies born out of wedlock. As we saw above, in Geneva, a certain number of legal criteria had to be fulfilled before an adoption authorization was provided allowing a *pouponnière* to ‘deliver’ children to their new families. However, this was not the case everywhere, as evidenced by enquiries that revealed less scrupulous practices according to the social workers who looked into these procedures:

> unhappily, there are still many women directors of institutions, in certain cantons, who rely on their personal judgement alone to entrust children to people they find congenial. The modern techniques of social enquiry require that the personal preferences of a social worker be supported by more objective information.⁸²

The adoption offices argued in favour of a professionalized approach to the issue, which at that point, they were the only ones to provide. They also did not hesitate to denounce the pressure placed on certain single mothers to abandon their children, particularly by the institutions where their children were placed (especially the *pouponnières*); but also, indirectly, by the guardianship authorities that ‘covered for’ or tolerated such practices, arguing, for example, that ‘the young mother should be given longer than a month to make her decision about the future of her child’.⁸³ Although they emerged from the private sector, the adoption offices therefore aimed to monitor and oversee these procedures and appeared suspicious of the public-private alliances that had, so far, taken them in hand. When necessary, they served as whistle-blowers regarding some of the methods employed, determining and assessing ‘good practice’ according to their own principles.
These overarching ambitions seemed to be reasonably well accepted by public child protection services, who were happy to hand over regulation to these new self-proclaimed governors of the adoption market. In Geneva, according to a 1956 enquiry,

before the [Pro Familia] adoption office was founded, the *tuteur* had a list of children to place and a list of families and the placements were more or less decided by order of enrolment rather than by compatibility, due to a lack of human resources and time.⁸⁴

Similarly, in the canton of Vaud: 'by tacit agreement, the vast majority of adoption cases which went through the official channels were subsequently taken forward by the “Service de justice” [a private office], better equipped for this sort of work'.⁸⁵ All the time and energy of these public services were taken up with the heavy management bureaucracy linked to care provision for unadoptable minors under *tutelle*, and they were considerably hindered in these tasks by a lack of human resources. They were therefore no doubt more than happy to rely on the interventions of private bodies. Especially given that, from the 1940s onwards, these private offices spontaneously worked together to harmonize their evaluation criteria⁸⁶ in order to guarantee parity of treatment for the families concerned, but also perhaps to resist more effectively those adoptive parents, birth mothers or institutions who might seek to elude their supervisory role by appealing to another cantonal body. This testifies to the fact that in Switzerland, as elsewhere, the emergence of these actors on a market that had not previously been regulated was not necessarily well-received by the families.⁸⁷ These bodies did claim to be working to make their procedures more safe, setting themselves up as the guarantors and arbiters of a respect for the rights of all parties (the right of adoptive parents to receive a child compatible with their preferences; the right of unmarried mothers to make choices freely and without undue influence; the right of children to acquire a new, economically and psychologically stable family). However, a high number of adoptions continued to be arranged without their involvement, particularly through interpersonal agreements ensuring absolute discretion of procedures, serving as testament to the persistent appeal of the 'free' market of adoption.⁸⁸

## Conclusion

Public services and private charities created a symbiotic relationship in providing solutions to the social issue of illegitimacy. The fact that they shared the same view of the populations in question made them all the more willing to share the responsibilities created by the Civil Code for public services in this area. Breaking with the prior tradition of blaming the unmarried women and disregarding the fate of their children, the Swiss Civil Code established a new way of analysing the situation of both mother and child: due to their weakness,
they were henceforth viewed as victims of a double moral standard and there-
fore in need of assistance and support from supposedly impartial guardian-
ship authorities (particularly when it came to pursuing paternity proceedings).
Building out from the same premise, the private sector developed a network of
charities providing this assistance (helping to rehabilitate mothers, providing
health care and food to ensure their babies' survival) and contributed to in-
troducing a more tolerant attitude towards these populations. These converg-
ing interests, and the shared viewpoints underpinning them, led the federal
authorities to create a powerful umbrella organization – the Pro Juventute
Foundation – responsible for organizing and unifying endeavours in this field.
The implementation of the Civil Code at cantonal level was modelled on this
burgeoning private provision, prompting tightly knit forms of collaboration
with newly created public services – not only applying the legal provisions but
also, as we have seen in the case of adoption, co-producing new ones. Private
initiatives drew on a sizeable reservoir of trust with local authorities to the
extent that they were able to take upon themselves the role of providing exper-
tise, oversight and coordination to both public services and private charities.

This ecosystem of relationships thus produced its own regulation, without requiring the federal authorities to legislate on the matter. However, the implementation of this quintessential mixed economy of welfare also had heavy consequences for the populations that relied upon it. Delegating regulation to the private sector removed all control from the federal state when it came to the transactions with the main parties involved (the mothers and children), thus leaving them without any protection in the face of potential coercion particularly when this was concerted. The examples cited earlier testify to the intersecting pressure that this ecosystem of relationships could exercise over vulnerable mothers when it came to adoption. The result was not necessarily better for adopted children, when they were adopted under conditions where such a constraint had been exercised by private and public actors so that the biological mother cedes her rights over her child. More in-depth research should be carried out on adoption files to find out what effects such procedures may have generated for these children when and if they discovered what had happened and with what consequences on their life course.

As it produced its own critique of these coercive procedures, the private
sector did take up the task of finding solutions by providing new procedures
for oversight and regulation in this field, carving out sufficient margin of
manoeuvre to act within the bounds of permissible actions set by the federal
framework. However, this had its own pernicious effects: these private actors,
closely linked to the implementation of systems for managing illegitimacy,
were not well-placed to articulate criticism of these systems. Unlike the char-
ity actors in the United Kingdom who served as whistle-blowers denouncing
the failings of existing systems of care provision and became active policy ad-
vocates in this area, the Swiss private sector remained muted in its critique.⁸⁹
It was only in the early 1960s that Pro Juventute publicly expressed criticisms
and demands for reform of the legal adoption framework in Switzerland.⁹⁰
Yet, from quite an early stage, dissertations written by students in social work following internships in public services or private organizations dedicated to the protection of illegitimate children had emphasized the failings of the Civil Code in this area. However, this never resulted in any lobbying force coming together to voice its concerns openly in the public arena. Instead, they took action quietly in the background and on the ground by setting up systems aimed at establishing new forms of care provision, in collaboration with and in response to the needs of the public services. In the 1960s, in Geneva, this produced changes in how illegitimacy was managed which affected both public services and private provision. The guardianship court was aware that many women were now deciding to take responsibility for their pregnancies on their own and therefore decided to ascribe paternity authority on principle to all single mothers. At the same time, the private sector was creating a new form of care provision for these mothers with 'maternity hotels' receiving comfortable levels of state funding: these establishments fell more in line with these women's desire for autonomy and with their emancipation and aimed to provide concrete help to the young mothers who had until then been 'ostracized by society'.⁹¹ The hotels offered low cost housing to mothers and children, whilst organizing an onsite childcare service for their newborn babies. This was noteworthy progress indeed, but it remained limited as it was only available for approximately 20 mothers.

The study of the relationships between public services and private charities in the field of welfare policies for illegitimate children would deserve to be extended beyond the 1960s, particularly given that these years led to a series of reforms in Swiss federal law concerning filiation and adoption. This protracted parliamentary process, starting in 1957, certainly involved the private sector closely, whose positions were conveyed by its umbrella organizations (especially Pro Juventute, Pro Familia and the Alliance des sociétés féminines suisses – Alliance of Swiss women's societies).⁹² The role then played by private charities, alongside public actors, in the process leading to (or resisting against) the modernization of welfare policy and the disappearance of the very notion of illegitimacy, still needs to be closely documented.

## Notes

1. I am most grateful to Fabio Gomi, Célia Keren and Morgane Labbé who tirelessly assisted during the conception and writing of this chapter in so many ways.

2. Archives d'Etat de Genève (subsequently AEG), *Archives de la Fondation officielle de l'enfance*, DIP 1985 va 5.3.505, the director of Les Ormeaux [the facility in question] to the head of the public education department, February 1941. All translations from archival sources and secondary literature are my own.

3. G. Brunet, *Aux Marges de la Famille et de la Société: Filles-mères et enfants assistés à Lyon au XIXe siècle* (Paris, 2008); R.G. Fuchs, *Contested Paternity. Constructing families in modern France* (Baltimore, MD, 2008); L. Gordon, *Pitied but not Entitled. Single mothers and the history of welfare* (New York, 1994); P. Laslett, K. Oosterveen, and R.M. Smith (eds), *Bastardy and Its Comparative History. Studies in the history of illegitimacy and marital non-conformism in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden,*
*North America, Jamaica and Japan* (Cambridge, MA, 1980); M. Quine, *Italy's Social Revolution: Charity and welfare from liberalism to fascism* (London, 2002); S. Swain, and R. Howe, *Single Mothers and Their Children: Disposal, punishment and survival in Australia* (Cambridge, 1995); P. Thane, and T. Evans, *Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried motherhood in twentieth-century England* (Oxford, 2012).

4 J. Droux, and V. Czaka, ‘Gefährdete kinder, beschützte kinder? Der fall der illegitimen kinder in der romandie (1900–1960)’, in B. Ziegler, G. Hauss, and M. Lengwiler (eds), *Zwischen Erinnerung und Aufarbeitung. Fürsorgerische Zwangsmassnahmen an Minderjährigen in der Schweiz im 20. Jahrhundert* (Zürich, 2018), 47–67.

5 L. Chappuis, ‘Enquêter, baptiser, réprimer: Le contrôle de la bâtardise à Genève au XVIIIe siècle (1750–1770)’, *Crime, Histoire et Sociétés*, 18, 1 (2014), 57–79.

6 G. Heim, *La Condition de l'Enfant Naturel dans le Code Civil Suisse* (Montpellier, 1924).

7 L. Chappuis, “‘Pourquoi la ville de Genève serait-elle chargée par préférence des bâtards des filles du pays de Vaud?’”: Le concordat de 1754 entre Genève et Berne sur les enfants naturels’, *Beccaria. Revue D'histoire du Droit de Punir* (2017), 159–189.

8 Except in the case of abduction or rape.

9 P. Laslett, ‘Introduction: Comparing illegitimacy over time and between cultures’, in P. Laslett, K. Oosterveen, and R.M. Smith (eds), *op. cit.*, 1–68.

10 V. Fildes, L. Marks, and H. Marland (eds), *Women and Children First. International maternal and infant welfare, 1870–1945* (London, 1992); J.L. Halpérin, *Histoire des Droits en Europe de 1750 à nos Jours* (Paris, 2004), 164–171; H. Hendricks, *Child Welfare, England, 1872–1989* (London/New-York, 1994).

11 L. Chambers, *Misconceptions. Unmarried motherhood and the Ontario children of unmarried parents Act, 1921 to 1969* (Toronto, 2007).

12 P.L. Ladame, *Des Enfants Illégitimes en Suisse* (n.p., 1886).

13 K.A. Lynch, ‘Infant mortality, child neglect, and child abandonment in European history: A comparative analysis’, in T. Bengtsson, and O. Saito (eds), *Population and Economy: From hunger to modern economic growth* (Oxford, 2000).

14 N. Le Bouteillec, ‘Parenté et illégitimité: Réformes du droit de la filiation et de la famille en Suède au début du 20ᵉ siècle’, *Annales de Démographie Historique*, 125, 1 (2013), 69–97; G. Frost, *Illegitimacy in English Law and Society, 1860–1930* (Manchester, 2016), 146–148; Fuchs, *op. cit.*, 146–151.

15 Particularly in Europe. In France, see Fuchs, *op. cit.*; in Italy, see Quine, *op. cit.*; in Germany, see E.R. Dickinson, *The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic* (Cambridge, MA, 1996); in Great Britain, see Frost, *Illegitimacy, op. cit.*

16 Le Bouteillec, *op. cit.*, 82; L.H. Robert, *De la Condition Juridique de l'Enfant Naturel dans le Code Civil Suisse et le Code Civil Allemand* (Geneva, 1912).

17 A constitutional amendment in 1898 gave the Confederation the right to unify civil law.

18 Droux and Czaka, *Gefährdete Kinder, op. cit.*.

19 A *curatelle* measure involved the guardianship authorities appointing a *curateur* to look after the interests of the illegitimate child for a set period of time (until the end of the paternity proceedings). This mandate did not infringe upon the mother's civil rights. A *tutelle* measure, on the other hand, involved appointing a *tuteur* to take responsibility for the child when the guardianship authorities had decided to restrict the parents' rights either by taking legal guardianship away from them altogether or by removing 'paternal authority'. The authorities very often appointed the same person to these positions in succession.

20 Guardianship authorities could be judicial (as in the canton of Geneva, which had a guardianship court) or civil (as in the canton of Valais, where the municipal office for wards [*chambres pupillaires communales*] took up this function).
21 Legitimacy could not be conferred by marriage if the father already had a wife.

22 'La recherche en paternité', *Le Confédéré*, 2 August 1905 (conférence d'E. Huber).

23 The French term *fille-mère*, used frequently in the sources consulted, is more specific than 'unwed mother' insofar as it suggests that the mother in question is a young girl (fille) rather than an adult woman.

24 *Le Confédéré*, 12 April 1896.

25 *La Liberté*, 23 November 1897.

26 I. Dubert, 'Trends and internal dynamics of illegitimacy in north-west Spain: Rural Galicia, 1570-1899', *Continuity and Change*, 33, 1 (2018), 87-116; T. Evans, 'The meanings and experiences of single mothers in 19th century Sidney, Australia', *Annales de Démographie Historique*, 127 (2014), 73-96.

27 G. Frost, *Living in Sin: Cohabiting as husband and wife in nineteenth-century England* (Manchester, 2008).

28 'Chronique des Chambres', *La Liberté*, 10 December 1905.

29 'La recherche en paternité', *La Sentinelle*, 8 July 1905.

30 The main measures relating to children born out of wedlock can be found in the seventh section of the Code: 'De l'établissement de la filiation' (Art. 252 to Art. 269).

31 C. Ott, *La Puissance Paternelle du Code Civil Suisse* (Neuchâtel, 1910).

32 P. Bairoch, J. Batou, and J.-P. Bovee, *Annuaire Statistique Rétrospectif de Genève* (Geneva, 1986), 34; 'Les naissances illégitimes par canton, 1900-1912', *Annuaire Fédéral Suisse* (Bern, 1913), 36; F. Walter, *La Suisse Urbaine (1750-1950)* (Geneva, 1994), 288.

33 P. Rieder, and J. Droux (eds), *À l'Orée de la Vie: Cent ans de gynécologie et d'obstétrique à la maternité de Genève* (Geneva, 2007).

34 S. Broder, *Tramps, Unfit Mothers and Neglected Children. Negotiating the family in late 19th century Philadelphia* (Philadelphia, PA, 2002), 125-155; Swain and Howe, op. cit., 74-80.

35 AEG, Archives privées 196.2.1, *Maison D'accueil Pour Mères Célibataires La Retraite*, Report 1908.

36 *Ibid*.

37 J. Droux, 'Marguerite Champendal: Entrepreneure en santé et pionnière de l'éducation des femmes à l'hygiène', in F. Laot, and C. Solar (eds), *Pionnières de l'Éducation des Adultes: Perspectives internationales* (Paris, 2018).

38 On this model: C. Rollet-Echallier, *La Politique à l'Égard de la Petite Enfance sous la IIIe République* (Paris, 1990).

39 *Les Amies de l'enfance*, May 1927.

40 H.U. Jost, 'Sociabilité, faits associatifs et vie politique en Suisse au 19ème siècle', in H.U. Jost, and A. Tanner (eds), *Sociabilité et Faits Associatifs* (Zurich, 1991), 7-29.

41 In the Geneva Petite Maisonnée in the mid-1920s, illegitimate children made up 70% of the babies admitted. See Frost, *Illegitimacy, op. cit.*, 210-216 on the risks associated with the placement of illegitimate children.

42 See A. Gueslin, *Les Gens de Rien: Une histoire de la grande pauvreté dans la France du XXe siècle* (Paris, 2004), 41 on the innovative qualities of business patronage between the wars.

43 J. Droux, 'Pour le bonheur des dames? Le rôle des écoles d'infirmières dans la diffusion de nouvelles normes d'hygiène maternelle et infantile en Suisse (1890-1940)', in O. Faure, and P. Bourdelais (eds), *Les Nouvelles Pratiques de Santé XVIIIe-XXe Siècles: Acteurs, objets, logiques sociales* (Paris, 2005).

44 P. Gautier, and A. Thévenod, *La Lutte Contre la Mortalité des Nourrissons en Suisse* (n.p., 1928): the main cause of death was 'congenital debility', in connection with poor maternal health at the time of birth, particularly prevalent among single mothers.
45 'Expérimentateur de la politique d'Etat'. Expression borrowed from Gueslin, *op. cit.*, 41.

46 A. Bosson, 'La lutte contre la mortalité des nourrissons en Suisse: Enjeux et mesures de prévention (1876-1930)', *Cahiers d'Histoire*, 47 (2002), 93-125.

47 Jost, *op. cit.*

48 On the Société Suisse d'utilité publique, see B. Schumacher (ed), *Un Devoir Librement Consenti: L'idée et l'action philanthropiques en Suisse de 1800 à nos jours* (Zurich, 2010). In Switzerland, an *organisation faîtière* [umbrella organization] refers to a federative association grouping together collective actors in a given sector on a voluntary basis without actually forcing them to merge: as a body, its role is to represent, promote discussion and to communicate information.

49 J.H. Graz, 'Protection de la mère et de son enfant', *Pro Juventute, Revue Suisse Pour la Protection de la Jeunesse* (subsequently PJ), 4-9 (1923), 48-52.

50 O. Binder, 25 Années Pro Juventute. Coup d'œil sur l'origine, l'organisation et l'activité de la fondation suisse Pro Juventute, 1912-1937 (Zurich, 1938), 56. Every year, the foundation received a grant from the federal authorities as well as the profits from the sale of stamps bearing the Pro Juventute emblem.

51 A. D'Espine, and T. Reh, 'L'hygiène infantile en Suisse au point de vue social', *Association des Pédiatres de Langue Française, 2ᵉ Congrès*, (Lyon, 1922), 415; 'Naisances illégitimes', *Annuaire Statistique de la Suisse*, 1920, 21.

52 A.M. Stahel-Frey, 'Les consultations de nourrissons en Suisse', *PJ*, 1934, 34-38.

53 L. Hersch, 'La baisse de la mortalité infantile en Suisse', *Médecine et Hygiène* (1943), 1-14.

54 V. Oulevey, 'Protection des nourrissons dans le canton de Vaud', *PJ*, 1936, 36: The mortality rate in the *pouponnières* in the canton of Vaud was only 1%, whereas the general rate was 5%.

55 Droux and Czaka, *Gefährdete Kinder, op. cit.*

56 The present research is based on a qualitative analysis of around 100 files related to situations of illegitimacy: it certainly does not allow us to affirm that this study is representative, but the recurrence of certain situations observed allows us to affirm that they do not only reflect specific situations. A number of studies collected in the professional literature, in particular, the year-end dissertations of Social work's students who had access to large amounts of data, have made it possible to quantify certain of the situations cited.

57 AEG, DJP, 1986 va 23/7.8, *Établissement de Curateurs aux Enfants Illégitimes, 1934-1947*, folder 10. All family names are fictional.

58 'Légitimations 1901-1930', *Annuaire Statistique Suisse*, 1930, 65.

59 AEG, DJP, 1986 va 23/24.118, *Tutelle des Mineurs*, dossier 1604.

60 M.L. Cornaz, *La Situation des Enfants Illégitimes à Lausanne* (n.p., 1930).

61 *Ibid.*

62 AEG, DJP, 1986 va 23/24.118, *Tutelle des Mineurs*, folder 1611.

63 AEG, DJP, 1986 va 23/24.135, *Tutelle des Mineurs*, folder 1897.

64 *Rapport Annuel de la Petite Maisonnée* (Geneva, 1929).

65 AEG, DJP, 1986 va 23/24.118, *Tutelle des Mineurs*, folder 1609.

66 On this assistance already provided to *filles-mères* in France in the nineteenth century, see Brunet, *op. cit.*, 113-121. In the USA, single mothers were often not eligible for mothers' grants, however; see K. Lindenmeyer, *'A Right to Childhood': The children's Bureau and child welfare, 1912-1946* (Chicago, IL, 1997), 152-160. On the British case, see: S. Pedersen, *Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France* (Cambridge, 1993), 150-151.

67 J. Droux, and V. Czaka, 'Désir d'enfants, illégitimité et adoption sous le régime du Code civil suisse (Suisse romande, 1910-1960)', *Annales de Démographie Historique*, 141 (2022), 2.
68 This reticence was probably stronger in English-speaking countries than in France: J.-P. Gutton, *Histoire de l'Adoption en France* (Paris, 1993); B. Melosh, *Strangers and Kin: The American way of adoption* (Cambridge, MA, 2002); S. Sales, *Adoption, Family and the Paradox of Origins* (Basingstoke, 2012).

69 S. Swain, 'Market forces: Defining the adoptable child, 1860–1940', *Social Policy & Society*, 11, 3 (2012), 399–414.

70 M.-B. Schoenenberger, *Histoire du Droit de l'Adoption de la Fin de l'Ancien Régime au Code Civil Suisse* (Freiburg, 1995), 265.

71 Droux and Czaka, 'Désir d'enfants', op. cit.; same point for the USA, see Melosh, op. cit., 20–21.

72 AEG, 1986 va 23.24.79.

73 AEG, 1986 va 23.24.18, *Tutelle des Mineurs*, folder 225.

74 C. Monnard, *L'Adoption dans la Pratique Juridique Suisse* (Lausanne, 1943), 16.

75 M.-F. Vouilloz Burnier, 'Les secours aux mères célibataires et à leurs enfants au XXe siècle', *Annales Valaisannes* (2017), 89–104.

76 Droux and Czaka, *Gefährdete Kinder*, op. cit.

77 Adoption by the grandparents or the mother's partner (M. Pidoux, *Faut-il En-courager l'Adoption? Enquête sur l'adoption dans le canton de Vaud* (Zurich, 1944), 31; Monnard, op. cit., 13–16.

78 See Melosh, op. cit. on the lack of enthusiasm for adoption shown by US social workers until the 1930s.

79 K. Ris, *Le Placement et l'Adoption des Enfants en Suisse et à l'Etranger* (Geneva, 1938).

80 Founded in 1942, Pro Familia is the umbrella organization grouping together the various associations working to support family life.

81 E. Jovelin (ed), *Histoire du Travail Social en Europe* (Paris, 2008).

82 L. Traber, *Étude sur 28 Cas d'Adoption Ayant Donné Lieu à des Difficultés: Enquête sur 28 enfants adoptés en séjour au pavillon d'observation 'le Bercail' à Lausanne de 1938 à 1955* (Geneva, 1956), 36.

83 Traber, op. cit., 24.

84 A. Lefkia, *Étude Comparée sur l'Adoption en France, en Suisse et en Grèce* (Geneva, 1956), 19.

85 Traber, op. cit., 12.

86 Droux and Czaka, 'Désir d'enfants', op. cit.

87 Sales, op. cit., 43–57.

88 Droux and Czaka, 'Désir d'enfants', op. cit.: according to a study conducted in the canton of Vaud in 1956, only 6 procedures out of the 31 taken into account were overseen by an adoption office; at the same time in the canton of Fribourg, this was only the case for 19 out of the 53 adoptions examined in a similar study.

89 Frost, *Illegitimacy*, op. cit, 146–178; Thane and Evans, op. cit.

90 'Vœux Pro Juventute pour l'enfant adoptif', *PJ*, 1960, 692–696.

91 AEG, 1986 va 5.2.14.5, *Archives de l'Office de la jeunesse*, Rapport sur les Hôtels maternels, May 1964.

92 'Message du conseil fédéral à l'Assemblée fédérale concernant la révision du code civil suisse (du 12 mai 1971)', *Feuille Fédérale*, (1971) 1222–1293.

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## 2 The co-constitution of public and private actors

Building the field of social protection in German and French cities at the end of the nineteenth century

Catherine Maurer

### Introduction

Among the various areas in which municipal powers and private, specifically denominational, actors have interacted in Western Europe, welfare and health care practices hold centre stage, owing to the long-standing commitment of Christians in that field but also to the early intervention of urban governments. This contribution focuses on such practices, using research that was conducted on the place and role of Catholics in health care and social action in French and German cities in the nineteenth century. The research is based on a corpus of 16 cities – eight French cities (Angers, Elbeuf, Lyon, Nancy, Neuilly, Orléans, Rouen and Saint-Etienne), seven German cities (Berlin, Bochum, Breslau, Cologne, Frankfurt, Königsberg and Würzburg) and the ‘Franco-German’ city of Strasbourg – chosen on the basis of surveys of charity works published between 1880 and 1906.¹ The 16 cases under study were thus quite randomly chosen, on the basis of the availability of surveys, but they nevertheless make it possible to consider very different situations in terms of demography (Elbeuf in Seine-Inférieure has a population of 20,000 inhabitants, compared to Berlin, with 2 million inhabitants); in terms of urban activities (Strasbourg or Cologne have ancient service sectors, unlike ‘boom towns’ founded on industrial development like Saint-Etienne or Bochum); finally, in terms of religion (some cities are almost exclusively ‘single-faith’ like Catholic Angers or Protestant Königsberg, whereas others welcome different religious faiths like Strasbourg or Breslau).

This paper will not dwell on the specifics of nineteenth-century Catholic ‘works of charity’ but will focus on the relationships between Catholic action and municipal welfare policies, which were at the end of the nineteenth century undergoing major changes in order to investigate the co-constitution of public and private actors. It will show that, although they both unquestionably did much to regulate tensions within the city and reduce ‘urban pathologies’, they still entertained complex relationships in the two countries under study.²
A tradition of cooperation between public welfare
services and private charity work

After the upheaval caused by the Reformation, private charitable organiza-
tions and municipal public welfare services established pacified relationships
of cooperation in the interest of both parties. First, municipal institutions,
especially in France, employed staff openly identifying as Catholic: this was
the case in hospitals, both before and after the radical break of the French
Revolution,³ but also in infant schools or orphanages in Elbeuf, Nancy,
Neuilly, Saint-Etienne, Strasbourg (where the statutes of the orphanage gave
equal importance to Protestant and Catholic denominations), Würzburg⁴
or Angers, which all resorted to the services of sisters from congregations.
Although most of the staff came from congregations, lay members of the
church could also work with municipal bodies, as in Frankfurt, where mem-
bers of the St. Elizabeth association (a female equivalent for the St. Vincent
de Paul conferences) provided the municipal employment office with their
help.⁵ Yet, the most revealing example of cooperation, and even partnership
between private and public sectors, was that of the French ‘charity bureaus’
(bureaux de charité): set up by the law of 1796, they were placed under the
supervision of the mayor, who acted as chairman, and managed by an ad-
ministrative board made up of five members appointed by the prefect, but, as
much regarding funding as practical work, they de jure and de facto relied on
private, especially denominational, initiatives.⁶ This ambivalent situation was
even more evident in multi-denominational cities where the composition of
the administrative board was meant to reflect the respective influence of each
religion present in the city. In Strasbourg, for instance, under French rule,
and even more patently from 1831 on, the board included Catholics as well as
Protestants, and a Catholic member was normally replaced by a Catholic, as
was the rule for Protestants.⁷ There was also a Jewish member, but only from
1907 on.⁸ In Nancy, the principle of denominational plurality was applied
to the volunteer organizations which were supervised by the charity bureau
and were in charge of the distribution of relief in different neighbourhoods:
as early as 1846 relief committees were organized in the Catholic parishes of
the city, as were a Protestant and an ‘Israelite’ committee.⁹ The essential role
played by these denominational initiatives in daily welfare work was thus
largely recognized.

Moreover, the charity bureaus, which could only function thanks to vol-
unteer work, very often relied on female congregations to carry out the tasks
that needed to be fulfilled, providing in-home relief and care for the poor.
In Angers, from the middle of the century on, a sister from one of the many
communities of the city assisted the ‘charity lady’ acting on behalf of the
charity bureau in each district, and ‘eight sisters from the congregation Saint-
Charles are in charge, under the supervision of the chemist, of preparing
the medicine which they deliver to the poor, in the two dispensaries of the
Bureau’.¹⁰ In Nancy, the Sisters of Mercy of St. Borromeo and the Sisters
of Charity of Strasbourg also provided relief on behalf of the charity bureau, such as ‘in-home care to the sick, free primary instruction for the poor children of the district and visits and care to poor young mothers’.¹¹ Similar practices could be observed in Elbeuf, Neuilly, Rouen, Saint-Etienne and many other French cities, whether the sisters worked alone or with lay members of the Church. Actual contracts could even be set up between the charity bureau and the congregations.¹²

German cities were not organized in the same way because, although their in-home relief programs also relied on volunteer work, the work was accomplished by Bürger employed in the service of the city rather than by clerics or lay members acting for denominational motives. This was the case in the system devised in Hamburg at the end of the eighteenth century or in the Elberfeld system which was adopted by many big German cities in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹³ Still, public services could be devolved to private denominational initiatives: in Breslau, for instance, 13 out of the 15 denominational infant schools, 8 of which were managed by sisters, were placed under the supervision of what could be considered as a municipal department of education.¹⁴

More simply, cooperation could also take the form of financial links. For instance, some German cities like Frankfurt went on managing foundations for the needy that had been set up by Catholics for Catholics. Most of all, in both France and Germany, cities granted direct and indirect subsidies to all types of initiatives. To associations for example: in Strasbourg, Jules Maillet, the chairman of the central council of the St. Vincent de Paul conferences,¹⁵ thus wrote in 1863: ‘The charity bureau is very favorable to us [...] With very limited resources, we nevertheless give much and obtain easily, either from the charity bureau or the prefecture, what is lacking from our treasurers’s funds’¹⁶; in Rouen, the Society of St. John Francis Regis was granted subsidies from the city council.¹⁷ The same was true for the institutions founded by congregations, like the St. Hedwig ‘rescue house’ (Rettungshaus) in Breslau, led by the Sisters of St. Hedwig, or the Little Sisters of the Poor homes in Strasbourg and Rouen. The congregation of the Little Sisters of the Poor had settled in Strasbourg in 1856 and as early as 1857, it contracted an agreement with the municipality: the city vowed to pay a subsidy if the sisters of the congregation accepted to care for the people that were sent to them.¹⁸ In Rouen, funds came both from the city administration and from the charity bureau. Other religious institutions also received grants: a day nursery in Rouen, an infant school in Bochum, the St. Hedwig hospital in Berlin¹⁹ or specialized institutes for the deaf and mute in Nancy and Strasbourg all benefited from them. To this financial help could be added other contributions from the department, the region or the province, from the State or the ruling sovereign, or even from his wife.

The granting of funds was not always entirely ‘free’ and could go along with an attempt at gaining control over private, especially Catholic, charitable organizations, as their representatives particularly feared. Were there
actual grounds for such fears? Was this long tradition of cooperation in danger
of being challenged as health care and social action increasingly appeared as
major ideological and political issues for the cities?

A challenged tradition in the second half of the
nineteenth century?

The German situation must be distinguished here from the French one: cer-
tainly, there were conflicts beyond the Vosges due to diverging interpreta-
tions of health care and social action depending on ideological positions, but
these interpretations did not spring quite from the same ideological back-
ground and did not lead to the same practices. In Germany, antagonistic rela-
tionships undeniably existed between Protestants (or liberal Protestants) and
Catholics, and they had an impact on the way welfare was organized; national
issues also sparked tensions, and the *Kulturkampf* constituted an unfavourable
context for denominational initiatives; yet, there was no real secular offensive
as was the case in France.

This does not mean that there were no problems, and new issues were in
fact raised by what some historians have described as the 'second confession-
alization' and by the integration of national minorities.²⁰ The two cities of
Berlin and (German) Strasbourg may best illustrate those points. In Berlin,
the outcry caused by the foundation of a house of the (Catholic) Good Shep-
herd (for 'stray' or 'endangered' young women) in Charlottenburg revealed
that the Prussian authorities favoured Protestant initiatives, whereas Catholic
institutions appeared to them as a threat, regardless of their social utility.²¹
The idea of creating the place was launched in 1856 and instantly sparked
protests in some Protestant newspapers against the 'Catholic convent of Char-
lottenburg'. The head of the province of Brandeburg, Eduard von Flottwell,
asked the Catholic episcopal delegate, Leopold Pelldram, who was promoting
the foundation of the house, for more information. The answer was that it
would be useful next to so big a city as Berlin and that a similar Protestant
institution had opened there a few years before. Von Flottwell then gave his
approval and vowed to support Pelldram, provided the place that had orig-
inally been marked out should be altered: 'such an institution should not be
located next to the royal castle, there is already nearby an evangelical church
whose heads would consider as a provocation the proximity of a Catholic
institution, associated to a public chapel'. Things moved ahead only one year
later: the church council of the Catholic parish of St. Hedwig was then al-
lowed to erect the building, provided it was 'surrounded by a 15-foot wall',
in order to conceal it from the eyes of passersby. The charitable institution
had to face other administrative and legal hassles, before, during and after the
*Kulturkampf* and even had to undergo lawsuits and police searches, although it
managed to carry on its activities. The house of the Good Shepherd was one
of the main targets of Prussian authorities, owing to its size and visibility, but
it was by no means the only institution to be affected by their denominational
biases, which also weighed in on orphan care and youth clubs.
In Strasbourg, the peculiar situation of Alsace, which had been annexed in
1871 to the German Empire – the national question, in short, was the crux of
the matter. This was reflected in a dispute involving one the main purveyors of
Catholic charity, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, who, in such exceptional
circumstances, suffered from the drawbacks of having originated in France, in
Paris, and above all of having maintained its links to the Parisian capital. Be-
tween 1873 and 1875, its activities in Alsace were therefore closely monitored,
and it was enjoined to break its relationships with the Parisian motherhouse.²²
The heads of the Society in Alsace officially announced that they had complied,
but the German authorities estimated that the break ‘might only be apparent or
temporary’.²³ Their misgivings were quite justified as the archives of the So-
ciety of St. Vincent de Paul show that, albeit with some caution, the epistolary
relationships between Alsace and Paris were maintained through go-betweens
or thanks to the trips made to the capital by members of the Society.²⁴

In the French cities, the secular assault against Catholic influence on health
care and social action became obvious from the beginning of the 1880s and
the republicanization of national, local and municipal bodies.²⁵ The simplest
and quickest move was financial: subsidies were directly or indirectly sup-
pressed and access to certain resources impeded. In Angers, the four Catholic
nurseries used to benefit from a yearly grant from the ministry of home affairs
and from a lottery organized every year with the authorization of the prefect.
In 1880, both grant and authorization were cancelled. The justification for
the suppression of the lottery was that ‘this institution [the nursery] must earn
its own resources to ensure its existence, without resorting every year, in a
quasi-permanent way, to charity, in the form of a lottery’.²⁶ In Nancy, the
lottery that provided the funds for the Apprentice house was not authorized
by the prefect from the middle of the 1880s; in Rouen, in 1888, the Little
Sisters of the Poor lost the ‘bread relief’ provided by the municipality.²⁷

The offensive could also take more radical forms, such as the undermin-
ing of the role that several people had played until then in the cooperation
between municipal institutions and private initiatives. This was the case, at
least partly and temporarily, in some hospitals.²⁸ In the field of infant edu-
cation, the creation of écoles maternelles (infant school) in 1881 by the Third
Republic and the secularization of the teaching staff of French public insti-
tutions starting in 1886 made it theoretically impossible to employ members
of congregations in municipal institutions. In Neuilly, the St. Cecilia asylum
was even forced to close down, and the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent
de Paul were discharged from managing the municipal orphanage.²⁹ Charity
bureaus were also impacted. In Angers, Léon Cosnier underlined that as early
as 1880, the makeup of the administrative board of the charity bureau had
been modified and the republican influence strengthened.³⁰ He added:

> This is not all: after the men, the women were also dismissed. Hence the
> enforcement of a measure so generally blamed and so detrimental to the
> interests of the poor, the substitution of secular agents for the Sisters of
> charity, in order to distribute relief on behalf of the charity Bureau.³¹
Cosnier lamented the measure for evident ideological reasons, but also because of the little availability of the people chosen to replace the sisters, who were ‘honorable people’ but already very busy since, as he explained, ‘the spouses of public servants had to be recruited, especially the heads of infant schools or women teachers’.³²

Regarding charity bureaus, Nancy can be considered as an extreme case because of the measures taken by the vice-president of the charity bureau, Léopold Lallement, from 1891 onwards.³³ This Protestant republican and advocate of the solidarism developed by Léon Bourgeois wanted to reform Nancy’s charity bureau by applying there his personal ideas about public welfare. This meant strengthening the role of the administrative board to the detriment of the relief committees set up by Catholic, Protestant and Jewish volunteers, which he thought were causing fragmentation and inefficiency. He did not wish volunteers to be totally pushed aside, but wanted them to be deprived of decision-making power and to become mere auxiliaries. The ulterior motive of enforcing secularization was also part of this ‘rationalization’ scheme, which started being implemented in 1894, as shows the breaking of the contract between the charity bureau and the congregation of the Sisters of Mercy of St. Borromeo the same year. In Rouen³⁴ or Lyon,³⁵ there were similar attempts at secularizing the administrative boards and staff employed by the charity bureaus.

As for the Catholics themselves, they were not always favourable to cooperating with public welfare services, especially in Germany. In the middle of the nineteenth century, during the *Katholikentage* (Catholic assemblies) of 1849 and 1857, the St Vincent de Paul conferences were advised not to work with municipal welfare services,³⁶ and the priests were asked not to accept the function of *Armenpfleger* (curator of the poor) laid out in the Elberfeld system. Some Catholics firmly believed that, even in the cities where they were a majority, care should be carried out under the aegis of Catholics societies of either lay members or clerics rather than by public services. At the end of the 1890s, when Bernhard Wuermeling, who was a member of one of the St Vincent de Paul conferences as well as the former deputy mayor of the city of Münster (Westphalia), made the case for a single board gathering together private charity and public welfare representatives in order to lay the ground for truly cooperative work, he faced the opposition of his coreligionists.³⁷ True, at the same time, in Cologne, a Catholic city but with a liberal city council, the members of the St Vincent de Paul conferences were still in open conflict with the managers of public welfare who had accused them of trying to define criteria for the attribution of relief, based on a specific conception of what ‘good’ moral or religious behaviour the poor should evince.³⁸ In a similar way, in Munich, until the First World War, the conferences kept as much distance as possible from municipal welfare services.³⁹ In this case, the reason for the tensions was the conferences’ absolutist Catholic position, according to which Catholics should be in charge
of all social problems and fight to the end in order not to be deprived of
responsibility, especially by liberals.

However, the new ideological and political significance of welfare issues
and the conflicts that sparked at the end of the nineteenth century should
not lead us to think that cooperation between public and private sectors had
become very complicated or even impossible. On both sides of the Rhine,
discussion groups, associations such as the *Deutscher Verein für Armenpflege und
Wohltätigkeit*, national and international conferences on public welfare and
private charity were striving to rethink this relationship.⁴⁰ Cities did not all
similarly experience disputes and conflicts, and the strategies of the different
actors were not always consistent. Finally, new forms of cooperation progres-
sively emerged.

Working together after all

In almost all of the cities under study, there does not seem to have been any
instance of a permanent and merciless war between municipal welfare ser-
vices and private, especially Catholic, charity. The disputes and conflicts pre-
viously mentioned may themselves be qualified. In Berlin, for instance, the
preference given to Protestant charities by the Prussian authorities was tem-
pered by the benevolence that Queen Augusta, though Protestant, showed
towards Catholic congregations, especially the Sisters of the Good Shepherd
and the Grey Nuns. Wilhelm I's wife paid several visits to these congrega-
tions, offered them precious gifts or money and went so far as to welcome
ailing sisters in her castle in Potsdam and to kiss those who were bedridden.⁴¹
She was a sponsor who was sometimes able to attenuate the measures taken
or considered against the communities.⁴² Apart from this particular case,
once the turmoil of the *Kulturkampf* was over, some institutions reopened or
were sent residents by public authorities: in 1888, the Brothers of the Poor
of St. Francis were thus allowed to reopen the orphanage of Berlin-Moabit
that had been closed in 1876 and even to create a school there in 1891, which
was an important conciliatory gesture as Prussian authorities had always been
very suspicious of the teaching provided by congregations.⁴³ In other parts
of Prussia, in the diocese of Warmia, the regional parliament decided for the
first time in 1899 to grant financial help to the Catholic hospital of Braun-
sberg, whereas it had so far only sponsored Protestant institutions.⁴⁴ In Stras-
bourg, after the unrest felt at the beginning of the 1870s, things quieted down
for the St Vincent de Paul conferences. In 1880, Eugène Petiti, chairman of
the superior council of Alsace, wrote to Paris:

As for the rest, we are going on peacefully and most of all without fear
of power, which has become quite benevolent since the marshal of Man-
teuffel was appointed governor (...) As for our conferences in Alsace, we
are corresponding with them in all freedom.⁴⁵
They were allowed to pursue their activity without any further trouble, to celebrate with great pomp the fiftieth anniversary of the Strasbourg conferences in 1891⁴⁶ and to maintain their links with Paris.

Even in French cities, the secular attack was not always coherent or followed through. To take up the case of Angers, which was well documented by Léon Cosnier despite his prejudiced views, we can see that although the sisters were discharged from providing in-home relief, they yet kept on working at the hospital and at the municipal orphanage. In the last case, they were upheld thanks to a landslide vote of the city council, which occurred in 1887 after attacks from an anticlerical councilor.⁴⁷ In Neuilly, the infant school, city orphanage and 'house of the elderly' had to do without congregations, but congregations still managed in-door relief and care on behalf of the charity bureau.⁴⁸ The nursery and deaf-mute institute in Rouen, the institute for the young blind in Nancy kept their subsidies. Even in Paris, where the city administration was known for its staunch anticlerical stance, there was no univocal way of dealing with Catholic charitable institutions: in the 1880s, for instance, the city council kept on paying subsidies to the nursing home of the Brothers of St. John of God and to the *Oeuvre de l'Hospitalité du travail* (an association helping people unable to work).⁴⁹

These examples suggest that the two partners, public welfare services and private charitable associations, often needed each other too much to engage in a face-off, all the more so as they were now opposed on an even more contested ground, education, in France as in Germany. In some German cities, the awareness of their mutual interests led to more than the sporadic actions, which have just been mentioned, and prompted new forms of cooperation. In the city of Münster, there had been since the beginning of the nineteenth century a powerful tradition of cooperation between Catholic charity and municipal welfare, as shown, in particular, by the strong presence of clerics in the *Armenkommission*, the equivalent to the administrative board of the French charity bureaus.⁵⁰ This practice remained unbroken when a version of the Elberfeld system, which gave a preponderant role to volunteer work, was introduced in 1894, all the more as the fervently Catholic Bernhard Wuermeling, who was elected 'second Bürgermeister' in 1899, was also the chairman of the *Armenkommission*.⁵¹ Besides, officially, the system did not refer to the Elberfeld model, but rather to the St Vincent de Paul conferences, which had been very active in the city since 1849. When the reform was enforced, 11.3% of the *Armenpfleger* registered by the municipal services were members of the St Vincent de Paul conferences; between 1894 and 1913, 9.6% of the *Armenpfleger* were clerics. The conferences also acted as go-betweens in order to make city councilors accept a reform that was costly in terms of public spending.

In Strasbourg, the overhaul of in-home relief that was launched by Rudolf Schwander, who became the mayor of Strasbourg in 1906, also included close cooperation with private charitable organizations, be they
Catholic or Protestant. A first sign was the appointment in 1902 in the administrative board of the charity bureau of Paul Müller-Simonis, a Catholic priest, who became the first Catholic cleric in this body since 1826.⁵² In 1905, in the well-argued report he produced to promote his reform plans, Schwander devoted a whole section to the description of the 'relationships between public welfare and private charity'. According to him, public welfare was needed in the most distressing cases and when the life of the individual was endangered, while private charity was to focus on less dramatic situations, in which the aim was to avoid downfall. Schwander therefore called for the 'sharing' of care duties between public welfare and private charity and, like Bernhard Wuermeling, advocated the creation of 'a kind of central board of charity in which important questions about public welfare and private charity would be debated, in which common institutions would be discussed on common bases'.⁵³ The reform defended by Schwander was implemented in 1906 and the representatives of the different denominations were very much involved in the new system, which has often been said to have led to growing professionalization of municipal welfare workers, but which was most of all characterized by close association between volunteer workers, endowed with decision-making power, and salaried workers, whose number was increased. Catholics made up a large part of the volunteers in charge of distributing relief, and Paul Müller-Simonis held regular conferences in the training courses that were organized for these auxiliaries to public welfare.⁵⁴ But another Catholic much involved in charity work, Joseph Weydmann, also became one the main public welfare officers of the city, when he was appointed head of the municipal welfare service in 1906, and entrusted with the task of enforcing the reform of in-home relief.⁵⁵ The case of Strasbourg is particularly interesting because the 'system of Strasbourg' which was applied from 1906 on became a model for Germany as a whole, instead of the Elberfeld system. In fact, regarding Catholics' involvement in in-home municipal care work, it can be noticed that before the First World War, Wuermeling managed to make his views become more widely accepted and that, even in Cologne, the St Vincent de Paul conferences were taking a more active part in municipal welfare work as such.⁵⁶

In the beginning of the twentieth century, a well-accepted 'philanthropic consensus'⁵⁷ thus seems to have prevailed in some German cities, whereas in many French cities, it was often officially rejected while being unofficially tolerated. The growing complexity of the relationships between public welfare and private charity, and the difficulty of coming up with a univocal definition, revealed that health care and social action had become, at the end of the nineteenth century, an ideological and political issue for cities, leading to confrontation as well as cooperation between two modes of regulation, which were both time-honoured and yet both undergoing deep mutations.
Notes

1 This research was conducted during the process of writing my habilitation thesis, which was published under the title *La Ville Charitable. Les œuvres sociales catholiques en France et en Allemagne au XIXe siècle* (Paris, 2012). On the French side, I used the following surveys: L. Cosnier, *La Charité à Angers* (Angers, 1889-1890); M. Du Camp, *La Charité Privée à Paris* (Paris, 1885); V. Duval, *La Charité à Rouen. Les œuvres catholiques* (Rouen, 1895); J-S. Girard, *La Charité à Nancy* (Nancy, 1890); A. Legrand, *Neuilly Charitable, Petit Manuel des Oeuvres Paroissiales de la Ville de Neuilly* (Paris, 1905); Manuel des Œuvres et des Institutions Catholiques pour la Ville de Saint-Etienne (Saint-Etienne, 1880); Manuel des Œuvres. Institutions religieuses et charitables de Paris et principaux établissements des départements pouvant recevoir des orphelins, des indigents et des malades de Paris* (Paris, 1891); Manuel des Œuvres Orléanaises (Orléans, 1890); A. Vachet, *Lyon et ses Œuvres* (Lyon, 1900); Ville d'Elbeuf: œuvres de bienfaisance et de moralisation fondées et entretenues par la charité privée des catholiques* (Elbeuf, 1896). On the German side: M. Brandts, *Die Katholischen Wohltätigkeits-Anstalten und Vereine Sowie das Katholisch-sociale Vereinswesen Insbesondere in der Erzdiözese Köln* (Cologne, 1895); H. Fournelle, *Die Katholische Caritas in Berlin* (Berlin, 1900); W. Liese, *Die Katholischen Wohltätigkeitsanstalten und Sozialen Vereine in der Diözese Paderborn* (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1906); G. Matern, *Die Katholischen Wohltätigkeits-Anstalten und Vereine Sowie das Katholisch-soziale Vereinsleben in der Diöcese Ermland* (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1900); P. Müller-Simonis, *Die kath. Wohltätigkeits-Anstalten u. Vereine sowie das kath.-soziale Vereinswesen in der Diözese Strassburg*. Hrsg v. Kath. Charitas-Sekretariate zu Straßburg (Strasbourg, 1999); H. Pesch, *Die Wohltätigkeitsanstalten der Christlichen Barmherzigkeit in Wien* (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1891); A. Saltzgeber, *Die Katholischen Wohltätigkeits-Anstalten u. – Vereine Sowie das Katholisch-soziale Vereinswesen in der Diözese Breslau Preuss. Anteils, einschl. des Delegaturbezirks* (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1904); J. Strieth, *Die katholischen Wohltätigkeits-Anstalten und Vereine sowie das kath.-soziale Vereinsleben in der Diözese Limburg* (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1903); A. Winterstein, *Die katholischen Wohltätigkeitsanstalten und Vereine sowie das katholisch-sociale Vereinswesen in der Diözese Würzburg* (Würzburg, 1897). In the following pages, the surveys will be referenced by name of author, the first word of the title in case there is no mention of any author, and the name of the relevant city or diocese. I also consulted some archival sources.

2 Y. Marec (ed), *Villes en Crise? Les politiques municipales face aux pathologies urbaines (fin XVIII-fin XXe siècle)* (Paris, 2005).

3 C. Maurer, ‘Hôpital et catholicité dans la ville du XIXe siècle: Essai de comparaison franco-allemande’, in J. Lalouette (ed), *L’Hôpital entre Religions et Laïcité du Moyen-Age à nos Jours* (Paris, 2006), 261–275.

4 In this case, the orphanage was in fact a state institution: Winterstein, *Würzburg, op. cit.*, 20.

5 Strieth, *Limburg, op. cit.*, 86.

6 On charity bureaus, see A. Gueslin, *Gens Pauvres, Pauvres Gens Dans la France du XIXe Siècle* (Paris, 1998), 265–277.

7 Strasbourg Municipal Archives (subsequently AMS), 71 MW 24: Members [of the charity bureau] 1800–1870, documents regarding the renewal of one-fifth of the members. Between 1831 and 1853, the members of the administrative board included three Catholics and two Protestants. In 1872, there were two Catholics and three Protestants.

8 AMS, 71 MW 26, *Akta betr. Armenatsmitglieder von 1904–1924*, minutes of the meeting of the charity bureau of 22 June 1907.

9 Girard, *Nancy, op. cit.*, 454. But in Rouen, in the 1830s, the mayor opposed the creation of the fifteenth bureau that would have been dedicated to the Protestant
poor. Y. Marec, *Bienfaisance Communale et Protection Sociale à Rouen (1796-1927)* (Paris, 2002), vol. 1, 107.

10 Cosnier, *Angers, op. cit.*, vol. 2, 329-330.

11 Girard, *Nancy, op. cit.*, 456-457.

12 Gueslin, *op. cit.*, 274.

13 The 'system' that was put in place in 1853 in the industrial town of Elberfeld consisted of in-home relief entirely provided by male volunteer citizens. The town was divided up into districts comprising a maximum of four families under the protection of a volunteer *Armenpfleger* (curator of the poor). Municipal welfare services merely controlled the system. For all these aspects, see C. Sachsse, and F. Tennstedt, *Geschichte der Armenfürsorge in Deutschland* (Stuttgart, 1980-1998), vol. 1: *Vom Spätmittelalter bis zum 1. Weltkrieg*. For a description of the Elberfeld system in French, see C. Maurer, *Le Modèle Allemand de la charité: La Caritas de Guillaume II à Hitler* (Strasbourg, 1999), 27-28. For a list of the main cities in which the Elberfeld system was introduced, see G. Steinmetz, *Regulating the Social. The welfare state and local politics in imperial Germany* (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 159. The cities relevant to this study are Berlin, Breslau (in 1893/95), Frankfurt am Main (in 1883) and Königsberg.

14 Saltzgeber, *Breslau, op. cit.*, 12-13. Similar cases of cooperation in French cities, particularly in Lyon and Strasbourg, are mentioned in J.N. Luc, *L'Invention du Jeune Enfant au XIXe siècle. De la salle d'asile à l'école maternelle* (Paris, 1997), 211-212.

15 On the Society and the Conferences of St. Vincent de Paul in France, see especially M. Brejon de Lavergnée, *La Société de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul au XIXe Siècle. Un fleuron du catholicisme social* (Paris, 2008).

16 Centre national des archives de l'Église de France (National Centre of the Archives of the Church of France, subsequently CNAEF), *Archives de la Société de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul* (*Archives of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, subsequently AS-SVP*), files concerning the relations with the conferences of Alsace, 33 LA 385, letter of J. Maillet to the president of the SSVP, 29 January 1863.

17 Duval, *Rouen, op. cit.*, 460.

18 AMS, 71 MW 41, *Protokoll-Buch der Sitzungen des Armenrats*, meeting of 20 November 1909.

19 The city of Berlin in fact granted a loan with a low interest rate to fund the new hospital: Fournelle, *Berlin, op. cit.*, 239.

20 On the 'second confessionnalization', see O. Blaschke, 'Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter', *Geschichte und Gesellschaft*, 26 (2000), 38-75; O. Blaschke (ed), *Konfessionen im Konflikt. Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970: Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter* (Göttingen, 2002).

21 Fournelle, *Berlin, op. cit.*, 186-213.

22 See especially Archives of the Bas-Rhin Department (subsequently ADBR), D 98 449, *Religiöse Genossenschaften und die Heils-Armee 1873-1918*, circular letter of 5 April and complementary instructions of 22 April 1873.

23 ADBR, D 98 449, summary of the answers of the *Kreisdirektoren* established by the services of the *Bezirkspräsidium*, 24 March 1875, and circular letter of the *Oberpräsident*, 17 April 1875.

24 See, for instance, CNAEF, *ASSVP*, 33 LA 385, Letters of J. Maillet (4 and 20 February 1875) and of chemist J. Beno (8 February 1875).

25 For an overview, see M. Agulhon, 'Les citadins et la politique', in M. Agulhon (ed), *La Ville de l'Âge Industriel. Histoire de la France urbaine* (Paris, 1998), 626-652.

26 Letter of mayor J. Guitton dated from 1 December 1880, quoted in Cosnier, *Angers, op. cit.*, vol. 1, 32-33.

27 Duval, *Rouen, op. cit.*, 560-561.
54 *Catherine Maurer*

28 See Maurer, 'L'hôpital entre religions et laïcité', *op. cit.* In Paris, the hospital staff was completely secularized. This was not the case elsewhere.

29 Legrand, *Neuilly, op. cit.*, 16. A very republican, and even radical, municipal government had indeed come to power in Neuilly at the end of the 1870s: see C. Echalier, 'Une commune de banlieue au XIXe siècle: Neuilly' (Master's thesis, Paris, 1966), 145-149.

30 Cosnier, *Angers, op. cit.*, vol. 2, 326 and 332.

31 *Ibid.*, 332.

32 *Ibid.*, 335.

33 He is now well-known, thanks to the work of P. Quincy-Lefebvre: see 'Léopold Lallement, un nouveau départ pour le bureau de bienfaisance de Nancy', *Annales de l'Est*, 40, 1 (1988), 11-25, and 'Naissance et affirmation d'un service public dans le monde de la charité. L'exemple du bureau de bienfaisance de Nancy 1850-1914', in A. Gueslin, and P. Guillaume (eds), *De la Charité Médiévale à la Sécurité Sociale* (Paris, 1992), 91-96.

34 Marec, *Bienfaisance, op. cit.*, vol.1, partie III. Duval does not mention the subject, however, probably because at the time he was writing, it was still too early for the effects of the changes described by Marec to be fully observed.

35 In Lyon, attacks against the charity bureau by the municipal council, which was dominated by anticlerical republicans, were especially fierce between 1875 and the early 1890s: T.B. Smith, 'Republicans, Catholics and social reform: Lyon (1870-1920)', *French History*, 12 (1998), 246-275, 252-253.

36 E. Frie, 'Katholische Wohlfahrtskultur im Wilhelminischen Reich: Der "Charitasverband für das katholische Deutschland", die Vinzenzvereine und der "kommunale Sozialliberalismus"', in J.-C. Kaiser, and W. Loth (eds), *Soziale Reform im Kaiserreich. Protestantismus, katholizismus und sozialpolitik* (Stuttgart, 1997), 184-201, 195.

37 *Ibid.*, 195-196.

38 *Ibid.*, 196-197.

39 W. Rudloff, *Die Wohlfahrtsstadt. Kommunale Ernährungs-, Fürsorge und Wohnungspolitik am Beispiel Münchens 1910-1933* (Göttingen, 1998), vol. 1, 549. As in most big German cities under the Kaiserreich, the municipal administration in Munich was under the influence of liberals, even if they only became interested in welfare issues at the beginning of the twentieth century.

40 These questions have already been dealt with in the books by Sachsse and Tennstedt for Germany and by Marec for France and will not be developed here.

41 Fournelle, *Berlin, op. cit.*, 265-266.

42 For the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, see *ibid.*, 193.

43 See *ibid.* and the article by M. Borutta, 'Enemies at the gate; the Moabit Klostersurm and the Kulturkampf: Germany', in C. Clark and W. Kaiser (eds), *Culture Wars. Secular-Catholic conflict in nineteenth-century Europe* (Cambridge, 2003), 227-254.

44 Matern, *Ermland, op. cit.*, 2.

45 CNAEF, *ASSVP, 33 LA 385*, Letter of 20 November 1880.

46 See *Jubilé de la Société de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul de Strasbourg 1840-1890* (Strasbourg, 1892).

47 Cosnier, *Angers, op. cit.*, vol. 1, 179-180.

48 Legrand, *Neuilly, op. cit.*, 37.

49 Du Camp, *Paris, op. cit.*, 122.

50 See the article by T. Küster, 'Bürgertum und städtische Armut. Gesellschaftlicher Wandel im Urbanisierungsprozeß am Beispiel der kommunalen Armenfürsorge in Münster', *Westfälische Forschungen*, 43 (1993), 58-80.

51 Frie, 'Katholische Wohlfahrtskultur', 195 and E. Frie, "'Da nun die städtische Armenpflege der Armenpflege des St. Vincenz-Josefs-Verein gleichen soll ...' - Offene Armenfürsorge der Stadt Münster um die Jahrhundertwende', in F.-J.
Jacobi (ed), *Stadtgesellschaft im Wandel. Untersuchungen zur Sozialgeschichte Münsters im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert* (Münster, 1995), 13–59, especially 25–35, 37, 46–48.

52 On Paul Müller-Simonis, see C. Maurer, ‘Priester als Gründer Sozialeinrichtungen. Der Fall Paul Müller-Simonis (1862–1930)’, *Römische Quartalschrift für Christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte*, 104 (2009), 247–256.

53 R. Schwander, *Bericht über die Neuordnung der Hausarmenpflege* (Strasbourg, 1905), 42–43.

54 For example, in 1910: *Blätter für das Straßburger Armenwesen*, III (December 1909 and January 1910), 37–39.

55 AMS, 71 MW 39, meeting of 29 January 1906. On Joseph Weydmann, see also C. Baechler, ‘Joseph Weydmann’, in B. Vogler (ed), *L’Alsace, Dictionnaire du Monde Religieux dans la France Contemporaine* (Paris, 1987), 460–461.

56 Report mentioned in Frie, ‘Katholische Wohlfahrtskultur’, op. cit., 198.

57 This notion is developed in C. Bec, *Assistance et République. La recherche d'un nouveau contrat social sous la IIIe République* (Paris, 1994).

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## 3 A “mixed economy of welfare” model

The complementary and mutual
growth of public and private
welfare in France (1970s–2000s)

Axelle Brodiez-Dolino

### Introduction

The relationship between philanthropic organisations and the public authorities is often thought of as a zero-sum game: either the welfare state grows, by implementing laws and public measures, and takes a bite out of the space occupied by private associations by implementing laws and public services... or it withdraws (or even, as was the case in the nineteenth century, is barely present) and leaves it up to charitable aid to fill the gaps. The first case can be attributed to periods of expansion in welfare when the “right to aid” appears to take precedence over “charitable duty”¹ – always unpredictable and often patronising. The latter case is par excellence a description of the Keynesian model’s waning fortunes since the late 1970s and the subsequent rise of neoliberalism – leading, especially but not uniquely in the United Kingdom and the United States, to a reduction in public spending and the retrenchment of the welfare state.²

On closer inspection, however, the French welfare model does not appear to fit the scenario described above, and this is what we will be exploring in this chapter. In France, there appears instead to have been phases of mutual growth between public and private welfare during periods of economic crisis and pressing societal need, followed by a subsiding of these interventions, or stagnation, or slower growth, when the need is felt to be less pressing. Thus, the relationship between the public and private spheres should be understood as a ‘mixed economy of welfare’,³ a largely neglected concept in current French research, where the growth of one does not limit, but instead stimulates the growth of the other. From this perspective, the relationship between the public authorities and philanthropic organisations is worth revisiting. Certainly, it has been one of a carefully maintained ‘opposition’⁴ and has long been shaped by a secular/religious opposition, with associations taking on a ‘tribunician role’⁵ and publicly voicing their discontent (one example is the celebrated French priest abbé Pierre, famous for his public ‘tirades’⁶) – however, it is also a largely complementary relationship. The lasting nature of this relationship, cast from a religious mould in a highly secularised France, and