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The seventeenth century witnessed profound reforms in the way French cities administered poor relief and charitable health care. New hospitals were built to confine the able bodied and existing hospitals sheltering the sick poor contracted new medical staff and shifted their focus towards offering more medical services. Whilst these moves have often been regarded as a coherent state led policy, recent scholarship has begun to question this assumption, and pick-up on more localised concerns, and resistance to centrally imposed policies. This book engages with these concerns, to investigate the links between charitable health care, poor relief, religion, national politics and urban social order in seventeenth-century France. In so doing, it revises our understanding of the roles played in these issues by the crown and social elites, arguing that central government's social policy was conservative and largely reactive to pressure from local elites. It suggests that Louis XIV's policy regarding the reform of poor relief and the creation of General Hospitals in each town and city, as enshrined in the edict of 1662, was largely driven by the religious concerns of the kingdom's devout and the financial fears of the Parisian elites that their city hospitals were overburdened. Only after the Sun King's reign did central government begin to take a proactive role in administering poor relief and health care, utilizing urban charitable institutions to further its own political goals. By reintegrating the social aspirations of urban elites into the history of French poor relief, this book shows how the key role they played in the reform of hospitals, inspired by a mix of religious, economic and social motivations. It concludes that the state could be a reluctant participant in reform, until pressured into action by assisting elite groups pursuing their own goals.
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HOSPITAL POLITICS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE The History of Medicine in Context Series Editors: Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Cambridge Department of History The Open University Titles in this series include: Health Care and Poor Relief in 18th and 19th Century Southern Europe Edited by Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham and Bernd Roeck Hospital Care and the British Standing Army, 1660–1714 Eric Gruber von Arni The Making of Addiction The ‘Use and Abuse’ of Opium in Nineteenth-Century Britain Louise Foxcroft Melancholy and the Care of the Soul Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England Jeremy Schmidt Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries Angela Montford Hospital Politics in Seventeenth-Century France The Crown, Urban Elites and the Poor TIM McHUGH © Tim McHugh 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Tim McHugh has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data McHugh, Tim Hospital Politics in Seventeenth-Century France : The Crown, Urban Elites and the Poor. – (The History of Medicine in Context) 1. Hospitals – France – History – 17th century. 2. Public welfare – France – History – 17th century. 3. Medical policy – France – History - 17th century. 4. Sociology, Urban – France – History - 17th century. 5. France – Social