Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood: Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France

4. In the Public Interest: Charitable Associations and Public-utility Status

4. In the Public Interest Charitable Associations and Public-utility Status By the 1840s, the Society for Maternal Charity was a mature organization, boasting decades of successful outreach and consistent governmental support . All branches claimed to serve the public interest and attracted support from those most committed to the common good. The society devoted itself to goals—the preservation of children and appropriate maternal behavior— that met with the approval of state and municipal authorities. But even associations devoted to a good cause could incite consternation on the part of a French government that wanted them to serve as obedient tools to carry out its policies. So far this study has mainly considered the charitable efforts of maternal societies and the government’s desire to use them to achieve particular policy goals: to prevent the abandonment of children, to lower infant mortality, to funnel resources to poor nursing mothers, and to strengthen families by teaching women to become “better” mothers. The surveillance that these elite women provided was an important tool in the state’s efforts to create more stable families. However, the Society for Maternal Charity was also an association, and the French state’s relationship with associations was historically a troubled and ambivalent one.1 Paul Nourrisson notes that the French state traditionally looked askance at associations and sought to control their activities and status.2 At the same time that the dames visiteuses monitored the behavior of mothers under their care, national authorities monitored the activities of maternal charities. The state had always taken an intense interest in the activities and the financial health of maternal societies, demanding accountability and the right to approve the membership and regulations. But in the 1840s these demands 114 chapter 4 grew more onerous. In 1850 the administrative council of the Society for Maternal Charity of Bordeaux requested an opinion on its legal status from three local consultants. This mémoire was part of a process that had begun eight years earlier, when the society had requested what it thought would be pro forma authorization to accept two modest bequests. However, “to its great surprise, Monsieur the Minister of the Interior refused to accord or to cause that authorization, given that the Society would not have a legal existence, that it had not been lawfully recognized as an establishment of public utility.”3 The stubborn insistence on the part of the charity’s administrative council that the society did indeed possess this legal status, and the equally resolute insistence on the part of the government that the society had not followed the prescribed forms to acquire the official status of utilité publique, had led to a twelve-year standoff between the two—a standoff that illuminates not only the government’s heightened interest in controlling associations, even women’s charities, but also the centralizing tendencies of the French government , as well as local resistance to those efforts. While we may understand the desire for control over political organizations that might pose a threat to public order, especially given the French proclivity for revolutionary activity, why did the state seek to control benevolent organizations such as charities? Especially those controlled by women? Most historians agree that French administrators generally ignored the associational activities of women, and indeed, most female groups appear to have garnered little notice from authorities.4 While Annie Grange suggests that this lack of interest may be because there were so few female associations ,5 Catherine Duprat argues that their official “silence”—the absence of general assemblies and frequent publications, as well as their careful cultivation of the traditional, nonthreatening image of dames de charité—kept these associations largely out of public view, even though female sociétés de bienfaisance often received more generous treatment from municipal and national officials than did their male counterparts. However, most female associations lacked visible political and financial clout.6 But this was not true of maternal societies. Their political and financial importance invited governmental surveillance, especially by the 1840s. As part of its process of centralization, and in an effort to exert greater control over potentially subversive political, and other, associations, the July Monarchy took a series of steps to bring them all under closer scrutiny. Despite impeccable credentials as a model charity and despite its “unthreatening” female leadership, maternal societies, after decades of relatively smooth sailing, faced the same demands for accountability and conformity as male associations. Charitable...