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Accounting for Life: the Sciences of Human Need

Dana SimmonsDepartment of History

University of California, Riverside

Séminaire d’Histoire EconomiqueFebruary 4, 2008

In 1826 the Baron Joseph Marie de Gérando fantasized how to rid France of

poverty.

If, by a kind of fiction, we could completely take control and direct the indigent, by measuring and fixing the nature and the extent of his needs, we would apply all our aid to reducing his daily needs to the strictest necessity…. 1

Unfortunately, Gérando lamented, existing conditions did not allow such total

intervention into paupers’ private lives. “We must obtain that he do what we would do,”

he concluded, “by our advice and our prayers.”2

Gérando spent two decades during the Restoration and July Monarchy in a quest

to rationalize the administration of Parisian poor aid. He held a position of authority on

the subject as an administrator and law professor, author of several influential

publications. He left no stone unturned in his quest to adjust workers’ needs to meet their

means: his many proposals included a fuel-efficient stove, a gelatin diet, and an inflatable

1 Joseph Marie de Gérando, Le visiteur du pauvre (Paris: J. Renouard, 1826) 217.2 Ibid.

Simmons 4-2-2008 Accounting for Life

mattress in lieu of feather or cotton. All his efforts focused on a common objective: to

measure and minimize human need.

Gérando’s fantasy soon came to life. In the mid-nineteenth century, a new

paradigm emerged for measuring the human economy: the minimum standard of living.

During this period a complex of concepts arose for quantifying and normalizing life

functions.

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists fixed

quantities of food, air and other consumer goods deemed necessary to sustain life.

Investigators prescribed diets for pigs, nuns, railroad workers and schoolchildren. One

agronomist calculated how many grams of flour a ditch-digger needed to shovel one

cubic meter of earth.3 Modern architects used physiological measures of air capacity to

set their minimalist floor plans. Together these studies and measures defined what came

to be known as the minimum vital.

The notion of minimum needs is a key element of political economy and a

bedrock of modern social welfare. Still today, needs measures inflect almost every facet

of daily existence: from things like nutrition labels and school lunch programs, building

codes and migrant housing, to welfare and the poverty line. The notion that every human

being deserves a minimal standard of living constitutes the very basis of international

development aid. Yet this seemingly natural category lacks a critical historical account.

My work aims to provide one.4

3 Adrien de Gasparin, Cours d'agriculture, 5 vols., vol. 3 (Paris: Maison rustique, 1847), 58.4 This paper is derived from my manuscript, Bare Minimum: Science, Scarcity and Standards of Living in Modern France.

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In this paper I focus on one scientific standard, the family budget. I argue that this

measure, like other standards of living, served a very concrete and material set of class

interests. The “right to exist” mobilized low-income workers and welfare recipients

against industrial employers, agricultural landowners and their allies. As employers and

scientists worked to minimize the cost of labor, they calculated and optimized basic

human needs. Workers rapidly turned scientific measures back upon their makers to

demand better pay. The state, and legal standards for minimum wages and welfare,

responded to the changing balance of class power in French political life. In the realm of

consumption, regimes of scientific objectivity were tightly bound to political legitimacy.

Needs were not always counted. For eighteenth-century philosophes and

economic thinkers, need represented a qualitative ideal, the opposite of luxury. Jean-

Jacques Rousseau, for example, theorized need in a state of nature as the simple contact

between man and his environment. The author pictured natural man “eating his fill under

an oak tree, quenching his thirst at the nearest stream, making his bed at the foot of the

same tree that provided his meal, and with that, his needs were satisfied.”5 A chasm

clearly lies between this idyllic vision and modern standards of living. By quantifying

need, scientists and economists took it out of the purview of individual preferences or

politics, and placed it squarely in the rarified realm of expert knowledge.

Standards of living emerged from a historical moment, the mid-nineteenth

century, when accounting methods were broadly applied to life. These standards

represent one of many techniques for quantifying life, which gained momentum in that

5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes," in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 135.

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period. Numbers, of course, have a long history of use in descriptions of national wealth,

trade and private goods. However, systematic accounting of life functions came relatively

late in the story.

Life itself was first quantified in the early eighteenth century, in the context of the

Atlantic slave trade. Traders placed a monetary value on each slave’s life, and legal rules

set rations for slaves’ food and clothing.6 This type of quantification did not spread

beyond such a limited context until nearly a century later.

In the realm of political economy, Malthus, Ricardo and Say seemingly did not

consider quantitative analysis of wage rates to be an urgent task. In contrast to their

complex models of value creation, profit, rent and accumulation, they devoted little

attention to the mechanisms that fix workers’ pay. They diverged, often profoundly, in

their economic views. Yet all turned to bodily needs to explain the wage. Each offered

some version of a simple formula known as the “subsistence wage.” In his Traité

d’économie politique, first published in 1803, Jean-Baptiste Say defined it thusly: “…in

every country, the wage of [simple and crude] work never rises above that which is

rigorously necessary to live there.”7 David Ricardo formulated the same rule in similar

terms: “The natural price of labor is that price which is necessary to enable the laborers,

one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or

diminution.”8 The very summary treatment and unanimity which this equation received in

6 The French Code Noir established official daily food rations for Carribean slaves, while Americans set legal value on slave life. "Code noir, ou recueil d'édits, déclarations et arrêts concernant la discipline et le commerce des esclaves négres des îles françaises de l'Amérique," in Recueils de reglemens, edits, declarations et arrets: concernant le commerce, l'administration de la justice et la police des colonies françaises de l'Amérique (Paris: Les Libraires associez, 1745). 7 Jean Baptiste Say, Traité d'économie politique, ed. Horace Say (Paris: Guillaumin, 1841), 372. 8 David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, ed. Piero Sraffa and Maurice Dobb, 11 vols., vol. 1, The Works and Correspondance of David Ricardo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 93.

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political economic literature suggests that it lay at the ideological heart of those doctrines.

Following Schumpeter, Giovanna Procacci notes that the very existence of a minimum

limit to subsistence was more important to classical economists than any general theory

of wages.9

Nineteenth-century administrators and scientists, desirous of greater conformity

and exactitude, turned to more rigorously defined accounting techniques. In both

chemistry and economics, new instruments quantified data with increasing precision.

In parallel, the term “budget” expanded from its state-administrative meaning into the

private, domestic sphere. Once limited to the “revenues and expenses of the state,” the

word now referred to personal consumption.10 Social reformers and statisticians turned to

household budgets as a key source of data on consumption, moral behavior, and

prosperity. Accounting entered the realm of life.

Inspired by the fervor over Poor Law reforms underway across the Channel,

French authors in the 1830s and 1840s systematically began to calculate a mathematical

boundary between well-being and poverty. A slew of works appeared with titles that

indicated their object: Bigot de Morogues’ 1832 On the Misery of Workers, Villeneuve de

Bargemont’s 1834 Study on the Nature and Causes of Pauperism in France, Gérando’s

1839 On Indigence, or again Eugène Buret’s 1841 The Misery of the Laboring Classes.

9 Giovanna Procacci, Gouverner la misère. La question sociale en France, 1789-1848, L'Univers historique (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 134.10 It appears that the first recorded use of the term to signify personal income and expense was in Louis Sebastien Mercier’s Néologie: ou Vocabulaire de mots nouveaux, a renouveler, ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles (Paris: Moussard, 1801).

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These authors diverged in their policy views but shared a common program: in Gérando’s

words, “the classification of indigents, and the evaluation of the degrees of misery.”11

Gérando based his measure of misery on average wage rates and consumer

budgets. He recorded typical daily budgets for working families in various regions and

countries, and for a prisoner, a soldier, and a hospital patient. “One can see how difficult

it is to evaluate [needs], how impossible it is to assign them a universal and constant

value,” admitted Gérando. “[However] a more certain calculation can be established, on

which we have chosen to base our definition of indigence.” Gérando composed a

catalogue of “indispensable expenses for a family composed of father, mother and three

children.” He offered a typical budget for “workers in large cities” and another,

diminished set of figures for country folk. City dwellers, according to his calculations,

needed, at minimum:

Food.Bread at 16 centimes per day. Per year………………….….....296 fr 40 cMeat, eggs, cheese, vegetables, seasoning at 50 c per day..…..182,50Fermented drinks, at 25 c per day………………………..…….91,25Housing.Dwelling…………………………………….......50 frFire and lighting…………………………….......40Contributions…………………………………....10Replacement and maintenance of furniture…......30Clothing.Father…………….....50 frMother……………....30 Three children……....60TOTAL......................840 francs 15 centimes12

Gérando presented his list of minimum expenses as a standard for poor aid and a

yardstick with which to compare workers’ wages. A minimum consumer budget allowed

11 Ibid., 22.12 Ibid., 34.

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charitable givers to reduce their expenses, and employers to reduce their wages, to the

lowest level that guaranteed workers’ most basic needs.

In 1841 the widely circulated workers’ newspaper La Ruche Populaire published

a refutation of the Baron de Gérando’s On Indigence. The author, a copper turner named

Schacherer, passionately condemned the budgetary model.

Oh! Philanthropists! Your hearts are as false as the name that you give to yourselves is saintly. When will you cease to line us up like brutes, in order to keep count of our ills and our needs? When will you preach by example? What! You claim to convince us with the accuracy of your numbers, and you don’t have the heart to live our lives….13

Schacherer warned that the quantities contained in sample budgets served first

and foremost “to harden the hearts of the prosperous.” Gérando’s figures in hand,

municipal aid offices could claim that no one in their district qualified as a pauper.

Wealthy individuals, reassured that workers’ means were appropriate to their needs,

could turn away from charitable giving and invest more money in the stock market.14 The

magic of numbers would make poverty disappear from the eyes of the powerful.

Despite his unqualified condemnation of the budgetary exercise, Schacherer

nevertheless felt obliged to set the statistical record straight. By the time he had finished,

the author had compiled one of the most extensive lists to date of expenses and wages in

various towns and countries. Schacherer offered his own version of a worker’s budget

taken from “the least-paid class.” He revised quantities and prices for all of Gérando’s

categories, and included one more: “Obligatory rest days and holidays (which no

13 Schacherer, "Budget des travailleurs," La Ruche Populaire, (1841): 6.14 Ibid., 5.

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philanthropist speaks about)….215 fr 60 c.” Schacherer’s lowest-class worker’s family

lived for 1367 francs per year, a considerable jump from the economists’ calculations.15

This article appeared at a crux between the major strikes of 1832 and the 1848

revolution. Schacherer echoed the calls of many workers involved in these struggles

when he argued for increased wages on the basis of consumer needs and a right to

existence.

Though Schacherer roundly rebutted the social economists’ project, he

nevertheless kept the budgetary model intact. The author denounced the motives of the

so-called philanthropists, only to adopt their unit of measure himself. The budget served

Schacherer, and many workers, as unimpeachable proof that they could not live on

pittance wages. By turning the budget to their advantage, workers accepted that the

ground of the wage debate would be a measurement of need.

The printed duel between Gérando and Schacherer composed an early episode of

the decades-long contest between employers and workers over wages. In the nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries the question of work and wages was inextricable from a

minimum standard of living. So-called philanthropists, classical economists, socialists

and workers set forth conflicting claims for a wage-setting formula. Most expressed

wages as a function of consumer needs, reproduction and expenditure. Factors such as

productivity, work processes or output were nearly excluded from the debate. Social

reformers sought to uncover the minimum in statistical trends, then to shape those trends

by regulation and discipline. On the other hand, trade associations fought to expand the

parameters of basic need to include status, security and social participation.

15 Ibid., 5.

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If scientists and administrators had hoped that standards of living would shelter

food and wages from political debate, they failed resoundingly. Following Schacherer’s

example, workers’ newspapers and political activists challenged the new measurements.

Trade unions brandished statistics, dietary standards and family budgets to claim higher

wages in times of inflation. Needs, and standards of living, became part of the French

discourse on citizenship and economic rights.

Perhaps more than any other, Frédéric Le Play promoted the consumer budget as

a social scientific tool. Le Play was a virtuoso practitioner of the form. He specialized in

empirical studies describing working populations’ mores and morals; along the way he

invented and systematized the sociological monograph. Over a fifty-year span, he

gathered statistics on the domestic economy of hundreds of families across Europe and

Russia.16 The project culminated with the publication in 1855 of Ouvriers européens.

Le Play developed a methodical formula for income and consumption data that

took individual families as its unit of investigation, rather than national or municipal

averages.17 He meticulously divided this budgetary data into minute typologies.

“Resources” included wages, garden products, communal property; “expenditures”

ranged from food, housing and clothing, to insurance, religious expenses, education and

“improvident” spending on cabarets or makeup, to name only a few examples.18 Ouvriers

16 Le Play compiled the results of his expeditions in two multi-volume series published in several editions between 1853 and 1879: Ouvriers européens and Ouvriers du monde.17 The analysis of aggregate income and consumption, or “national wealth,” had a long and illustrious history from William Petty, Boisguillebert and Vauban to Lavoisier and Lagrange. See Paul Studenski, The Income of Nations. Theory, Measurement and Analysis: Past and Present (New York: New York University Press, 1958).18 One complete list of a Le Playist typology can be found in Congrès international de statistique, "Résolutions adoptées à Bruxelles. Budget économique des classes laborieuses. Dépenses habituelles de première nécessité. Dépenses improductives de luxe. Manière de rendre les resultats comparables," in

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européens spanned six volumes and contained over one hundred individual family

budgets.

In his Instruction on the Method of Observation known as the Family Monograph,

published a few years later, Le Play explicitly linked budgetary data and social status. “…

The complete and methodical table of the receipts and expenses of a family is, indeed, …

the only means by which to detail in depth the conditions of material and moral existence

of working populations.”19 Consumer expenses offered an index to the social identity of a

given family group.

The interest of such a sociological undertaking to a need-based notion of wages is

obvious. Le Play noted the potential usefulness of his work to “industrial organization,”

among other applications.20 He warned that social unrest flowed from a single source: the

elimination of the “customary” proportion between needs and pay rates.21 Le Play himself

had little interest in using his findings to set norms for industrial or agricultural wages.

His designed his life’s work to demonstrate that France should send its entire industrial

labor force back to well-ordered patriarchal family farms. Even so, he could not resist

noting his preference for reform efforts that “encourage the habits of work and thrift

among the lower classes [rather] than to seek to improve their material condition.”22 His

disciples eventually jettisoned the reactionary nostalgia that drove their master.

Compte-rendu général des travaux du Congrès International de statistique dans les séances tenus à Bruxelles 1853, Paris 1855, Vienne 1857, et Londres 1860., ed. Ernst Engel (Berlin: Imprimerie Royale (R. Decker), 1860).19 Frédéric Le Play, Instruction sur la méthode d'observation dite des monographies de familles, propre à l'ouvrage intitulé "Les ouvriers européens" (Paris: Société d'économie politique, 1862), 29.20 Ibid., 30.21 Frédéric Le Play, L'Organisation du travail selon la coutume des ateliers et la loi du Décalogue (Tours: A. Mame et fils, 1870), 144.22 Sanford Elwitt, The Third Republic Defended: Bourgeois Reform in France, 1880-1914 (Baton Rouge and Londer: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 24., citing La Réforme Sociale 2, p. ii.

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The International Statistical Congress, populated by emulators of Le Play,

adopted a standard format for family budgets in 1853 that clearly differentiated between

valid needs and excessive spending. ‘Spirited drinks’ and the cabaret figured prominently

in Le Playists’ typology of “improvident expenses,” along with “tobacco purchases;

losses in betting games and lotteries; ornaments and toiletries; theater attendance;

holidays and public celebrations; payment for loans on deposits at the pawn shop [mont

de piété].” Such malevolent and domestically dangerous activities stood in contrast to

“expenses for moral, religious and intellectual purposes,” covering school and church

fees, apprenticeships, books, mutual aid societies and savings accounts.23

Glaringly absent from most of these budgetary wage formulas were labor supply

and demand, professional identity, even the physical endurance and energy necessary to

carry out work. In lieu of reproduction and physical force stood desire and satisfaction,

custom, worldly sophistication and savvy. The limits of sufficiency, even of subsistence,

lay exclusively in the wants and expectations culturally embedded in the worker’s mind.

Even further, the contours of satisfaction itself could be extrapolated from the general

mores and habits of an entire population. Bigot de Morogues conceived his budgetary

minimum wage as a purely cultural and social norm: “The simplicity of mores, the

ignorance of the pleasures of life determine whether wages are sufficient: these alone

allow wages in some countries to remain at a rate lower than what would bring people to

the height of misery in other countries.”24 An accurate description of the way people lived

would suffice to establish a standard for wages.

23 See the category “Luxury Expenses or those Resulting from Improvidence” in Congrès international de statistique, "Résolutions adoptées à Bruxelles," 14.24 Pierre Marie Sébastien Bigot de Morogues, De la misère des ouvriers et de la marche à suivre pour y remédier (Paris: Huzard, 1832; reprint, Hachette, Bibliothèque nationale, 1971), 27. Emphasis mine.

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Trade unions and workers’ newspapers adopted this same format, the family

budget, in order to argue for higher wages. When French trade unions established a

common program at their National Congress in 1894, they called for a minimum wage

that “guarantees the strictly necessary needs of material life.”25 This political plank was

reaffirmed intermittently in national congresses over the following decade. Like the Parti

ouvrier, the trade unions sought to transfer the scientific measure of needs to workers

commissions. “In order to obtain a minimum for wages, it is urgent that each union

gather statistics of daily work, wages, work stoppages, food supplies, rents, etc., and send

them to their federal committee, according to their region.”26 The 1894 congress

envisioned a network of worker-statisticians, organized by trade and region.

In April 1887, the Socialist Paris municipal council passed a new rule on wages in

public works construction. “The City of Paris’s official [wage] series will be revised

annually,” the council decreed, “such that the price of wages will always remain in

relation to the price of foodstuffs [subsistances] and the general conditions of workers’

existence.”27 For the first time, consumer budgets appeared as a ground for city wage

regulations. The outraged deputy Auguste Bouge, enemy of all pernicious forms of

“collectivism,” angrily denounced this turn to a need-based wage standard. With a

municipal minimum wage in place, he grumbled, it would be “useless to evaluate a

worker’s work, all one needs is to estimate how much he needs to live.”28

25 6e Congrès national des syndicats de France. Compte rendu des travaux du congrès tenu à Nantes du 17 au 22 septembre 1894, (Nantes: Imprimerie George Schwob et fils, 1894), 81.26 Ibid., 82.27 Lambeau, Monographies municipales de la ville de Paris. Conditions du travail dans les chantiers communaux (1896) 1052. Cited in Raynaud, Vers le salaire minimum, 58.28 Bouge, "Les Conditions du travail et le collectivisme," 246.

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Needs and welfare

The story of needs, rights and science culminates in the modern welfare state. By

the mid-twentieth century French governments employed scores of dieticians,

sociologists, anthropologists and doctors to establish a “science of man,” an objective

measure of human need. They collected mountains of statistics on French people’s

consumption and income, their diets, housing conditions and fitness. These efforts helped

to shape a uniquely French version of welfare. The French welfare system distinguished

family needs from workers’ wages, charity payments from salaries.

The system depended on a clear demarcation between needs and luxuries, welfare

and the market. Yet no one could agree on a list of goods and services that defined basic

needs. Should one count raincoats or theater tickets? What about wine or newspapers? In

the end political discord between workers and employers, each wielding competing sets

of data, rendered it impossible for science to play a mediating role. Expert scientific

knowledge promised to depoliticize the social question. And once again, it failed

completely. Employers, economists and workers offered diametrically conflicting

answers. In part, their responses reflected an attempt to assert class control over goods.

Wages and welfare were the subject of a struggle over the means of consumption.

Basic needs, by definition, were the concern and the attribute of the working

classes. When products like newspapers, tobacco, bananas or visits to the theater entered

the category of needs, they ceased to serve as markers of distinction for the ‘superior’

classes. Sociologists have argued that consumption serves as a (masked) marker of class.

In particular, Pierre Bourdieu suggests that class conflict is perpetuated by the constant

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gap between what the lower classes “must own,” according to the norms of consumer

society, and what they can afford to pay for. This gap serves the interest of the

dominating classes.29

To define need, a minimal acceptable level of consumption, was to fix a social

hierarchy. Champions of workers’ rights celebrated their potential for an ever growing

standard of living. In response, bourgeois economists, scientists and policy makers

fought hardily to restrain ‘needs’ to their very minimum.30

The crux of this struggle was the relationship between consumption and

production. Trade unions and campaigners for a legal minimum wage asserted that the

two were identical, that a worker’s wages should be equal to the price of daily existence.

Employers and many economists saw production and consumption as distinct and

unrelated: wages should pay for a day’s labor, not for consumer goods. If workers and

their families needed help to buy bread, this problem lay outside of the purview of wage

setting. Over the course of the Third Republic, the latter model won out. The modern

French welfare system grew out of private initiatives by employers to refashion the wage

structure.31 Employers established two separate regimes of payment: wages would

correspond to a quantity of work. Needs, on the other hand, belonged in the realm of

supplemental payments, ‘family allowances’ and welfare. The distinction between wages

29 Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1979), 183-84.30 Janet Horne appears to support a class-based analysis of welfare programs in her work on the Musée Social. Following Geoff Eley, she notes that parapolitical, voluntary reformist organizations “helped the bourgeoisie assert its distinctive identity as a class.” Janet R. Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 105.31 “…The diverse family welfare programs and social insurance protections that France enjoys today grew out of employer initiatives and private mutual aid societies. …The central role of employer initiative and private actors relegated state officials to oversight functions that poorly befit the title of 'welfare state'.”Paul V. Dutton, Origins of the French Welfare State: The Struggle for Social Reform in France, 1914-1947, ed. Peter Baldwin, et al., New Studies in European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3.

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and welfare, production and need, was set into law as the foundation of a distinctly

French welfare state.

The separation of needs and work, consumers and producers, had ramifications

for both class and gender. Women and children, whether working or not, were seen as

pure consumers.32 Legal regulations of women’s work in the early twentieth century

reveal that their wages were viewed entirely in terms of their individual needs.33

Likewise, welfare initiatives, educational, hygienic and dietary programs, focused largely

on women’s and children’s consumption. After World War I, family allowances

completed the formal separation of a worker’s wages from women’s and children’s

subsistence. Women’s and children’s needs appeared as supplements to a male base

wage.34 The gendering of consumption and production formed an integral part of the

conflict over needs and wages in the Third Republic.

The class nature of this conflict expressed itself in debates over wage setting.

Workers and trade unions asserted the identity of work and needs, and presented a claim

to economic rights on the basis of citizenship. Employers and allied economists, on the

other hand, segregated needs from work. Workers responded by appropriating the

scientists’ measures and turning them to their advantage. They used consumer budgets to

32 Joan Scott analyzes the intersection of gender, production and consumption in nineteenth-century France far more elegantly than I in Joan Wallach Scott, "'L'ouvrière! Mot impie, sordide...' Women Workers in the Discourse of French Political Economy, 1840-1860," in Gender and the Politics of History, Gender and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). See especially pp.143-145.33 Another elegant analysis of gender, production and consumption in the context of minimum wage regulation is Judith Coffin, "Social Science Meets Sweated Labor: Reinterpreting Women's Work in Late Nineteenth-century France," Journal of Modern History 63, no. 2 (1991). A parallel separation seems to exist in the American minimum wage legislation for women, which focused on basic needs. See Alice Kessler-Harris, A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 12-13.34 See Laura Frader’s insights on the lack of a French movement in favor of family wages. Laura L. Frader, "Engendering Work and Wages: The French Labor Movement and the Family Wage," in Gender and Class in Modern Europe, ed. Laura L. Frader and Sonya O. Rose (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

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argue for an expanded notion of need and to tie needs to wages. Very few protested the

notion of a need-based minimum wage altogether.

The Third Republic put a bipartite model of wages and welfare into practice.

Emile Cheysson, moral reformer and a leader of the Society for Social Economy,

campaigned heavily in the 1880s for a need-based family allowance. Cheysson was the

first self-designated “social engineer” and an influential reformer, promoting paternalist

solutions to the social problem.35 Following Le Play, he identified the family as the center

of the social fabric and focused his efforts on ameliorating its birthrate, housing, diet and

hygiene.36 Cheysson, like other moralists of his time, warned against the development of

false needs. He encouraged employers to pay their workers with goods like bread instead

of money, since a monetary wage “can be wasted in less imperious and less legitimate

satisfactions.”37

Cheysson saw a conundrum in that most employers viewed the wage as a calculus

of profit and loss, whereas workers saw it as their means of survival. To solve this he

proposed that employers implement a broad range of charitable “subsidies, that is to say

donations [subventions, c’est-à-dire des libéralités.]”38 These donations might emanate

from employers, but also from communes or workers’ associations. In Cheysson’s mind

35 Elwitt, The Third Republic Defended, 58.36 See, for example Emile Cheysson, La Question de la dépopulation en France, Extract from the Revue Politique et Parlementaire October 1896 (Paris: Bureaux de la Revue Politique et Parlementaire, 1896), Emile Cheysson, Le Confort du logement populaire, Extract of the Bulletin de la Société française des Habitations à Bon Marché (Paris: Imprimerie Chaix, 1905), Emile Cheysson, Société anonyme de Passy-Auteuil pour les Habitations Ouvrières, Rapport à l'assemblée générale du 22 juin 1881, Extract from l'Economiste français, August 27 1881 (Paris: Imprimerie Chaix, 1881), Emile Cheysson and Alfred Toqué, Les budgets comparés des cent monographies de familles, 1890 ed. (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1984).37 Emile Cheysson, Le Salaire au point de vue statistique, économique et social, Extract from the Bulletin de la Société d'économie sociale (Paris: Bureaux de la Réforme Sociale, 1884), 14.38 Ibid., 16.

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they would cover a gamut of new and traditional goods: “coal allowances, schooling,

medical services, retirement pensions, all kinds of aid; …indemnities for sickness,

accidents, unemployment or old age; finally, in the countryside, grazing rights and the

right to scavenge [glanage].”39 In other words, welfare in its broadest sense. Cheysson’s

version of welfare, however, was not a right but a charitable offering. To employers

interested in social peace and productivity, he urged a strategy of “going beyond the

wage” to satisfy workers’ needs.40

Textile factory employers in northern France were the first private firms to adopt

the strategy of supplemental payments in the 1880s, followed by banks and service

companies for water and gas.41 Several state administrations, the Marines, Colonies,

Education, Customs and Finances among them, did so at roughly the same time.42

Industry-wide family allowance funds became standard in the interwar period. The textile

business, under pressure from foreign imports, used allowances to retain workers and to

penalize strikers. Other industries, metals foremost, used the supplements to control

workers’ wage demands.43 Moralists downplayed the instrumental motivations for family

allowances. Instead they celebrated their ability to “satisfy legitimate and incompressible

39 Ibid., 17.40 Ibid., 18.41 Leon Harmel’s factory in the Val-de-Bois is commonly cited as a predecessor for family allowances. For a breakdown of family allowances by date and company, see Jean Pinte, Les Allocations familiales. Origines. Régime légal (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1935), 69.42 A record of administrative family allowances is in Oualid and Picquenard, Salaires et tarifs, 242. Dutton notes that family allowances had been distributed by the French army in times of war since the Revolution. See Dutton, Origins of the French Welfare State, 17.43 Pederson, Family, dependence and the origins of the welfare state: Britain and France, 1914-1945, 226. As Pederson notes, “family policy is often wage policy in another guise” (413).

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needs, while avoiding the exaggerations which a uniform wage increase would not fail to

bring about.”44

A legal regime emerged for family allowances, which distinguished them

juridically from wage payments.45 Although the allowances first appeared as additions to

regular wages, employers and state officials soon took measures to distance the two. If

family allowances had been given the legal status of an extra salary, they would have

come under the jurisdiction of wage regulation. Allowances would then have counted in

calculating severance, indemnity and insurance payments. Family allowances would have

been recognized as a legally defensible right. Instead, allowances were assigned the legal

status of charitable donation [libéralité], revocable at will.46

The pro-natalist family allowance law of 1932 extracted allowances from

employer control altogether and legally mandated their level and distribution. While this

legislation formalized the family allowance as a state-guaranteed welfare payment, its

charitable history continued to influence its form and content. Pre-existing funds were

administered as before, and workers and unions were excluded from setting or

distributing allowances.47 “Without a doubt, family allowances are closer to a donation

[libéralité] than to a wage,” commented a 1935 law school thesis.48

44 Georges Bonvoisin, Allocations familiales et caisses de compensation. Leur origine, leur raison d'être, leurs effets, leur fonctionnement dans la Région Parisienne. (Paris: Lang, Blanchong et cie., 1927), 8.45 As far as I know, no contemporary historian of the French welfare state has noted this juridical distinction.46 Roger Picard, Le salaire et ses compléments. Allocations familiales. Assurances sociales, ed. Marcel Rivière, Bibliothèque des Sciences Politiques & Sociales (Paris: Librairie des Sciences Politiques et Sociales, 1928), 59.47 Dutton, Origins of the French Welfare State, 135-36.48 Pinte, Les Allocations familiales, 31.

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In the same period surrounding the First World War, trade unions and workers

claimed a full wage rate based on consumer needs and family budgets. Economic

instability required wartime workers to sacrifice their well being, while the war

“produced a powerful logic to redefine the notion of citizenship in terms of a minimum

wage.”49 Workers’ newspapers and union pamphlets repeatedly proclaimed their human

right to a decent living. Casimir Bartuel, Secretary of the Federation of Miners, produced

an exemplary report for the 1918 Congress of the Federation of Underground Workers.

In our society, whose existence the worker ensures and whose wealth the worker produces by his labor, does the worker have a right to remuneration in the form of cash value? Does he have a right to exist? Who would dare to pretend that he does not have that right? It is a natural, humane, logical, imprescriptible right. …What should be the point of departure for the application of this principle? The quantitative evaluation of representative values corresponding to what is necessary for the daily life of the worker and his family.50

Bartuel undertook a statistical study in the Isère region to determine “the price

necessary for a working household to live modestly, taking into account the intensive

physical effort asked of miners….” He composed a sample weekly budget based on a

simple diet of bread, meat, potatoes, dried vegetables, cheese, eggs, sugar, oil, coffee and

wine, and calculated the relative cost for the same items in 1914 and 1917.51

To this basic diet Bartuel added the cost of rent, clothing, heating, furniture, and

savings. He found a nearly threefold increase in the price of this package over the course

of the war. “The quantities indicated in this table,” he wrote, “constitute a strictly

49 Johnathan Manning, "Wages and Purchasing Power," in Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914-1919, ed. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 256.50 "Le Congrès de la Fédération des Travailleurs du Sous-sol. La question des salaires," L'Information ouvrière et sociale, August 29 1918, 1.51 Ibid., 2.

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indispensable [amount], and their market value corresponds exactly to the minimum

wage to which every worker in the region where these prices were collected has a

right.”52 Bartuel demanded that the state enforce this strict proportionality.

Massive strikes during and after the war all marched to a cost-of-living chorus.53

In the North these actions were amplified by food riots, demonstrations directly

concerned with the price of bread and other staples.54 The Labor Ministry estimated that

the cost of a basic family budget rose by 40% from 1914 to 1917; by contrast, average

wages rose by 20% in the period from 1911 to 1916. The result was a sharp descent of

real wages in most French professions and regions.55 Pamphlets and newspapers copied

sample budgets of postmen, teachers, office workers, and heavy laborers. “The best way

to give an account of the increasing cost of living, and to compare prices and wages, is

without a doubt to draw up current budgets for workers’ or functionaries’ families.”56

Miners and steel workers’ unions were at the forefront of the movement for cost-of-living

adjustments, which reached its peak in the mid-1920s.57

Henri Prêté, Secretary of the Committee on Action of Workers’ Organizations,

echoed a common refrain in his call for a legal minimum wage. “The basic reasoning

behind the current [workers’] movement and its demands, does not depend on the whim

of the unions; it stems from the imperious necessity to obtain what is indispensable to

live.” Prêté grounded workers’ wage claims in the inexorable nature of need. “It is a

52 Ibid.53 Oualid and Picquenard, Salaires et tarifs, 184-85. Dutton, Origins of the French Welfare State, 16-20. 54 John Barzman, "La "crise de la vie chère" de l'été 1919 au Havre," Le Mouvement social 170 (1995).55 Oualid and Picquenard, Salaires et tarifs, 21.56 "Budgets et salaires," L'Information ouvrière et sociale, July 20 1919.57 This claim is based on a survey of articles on the subject in the workers’ newspaper L’Information ouvrière et sociale, 1918-1928.

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pressing necessity to raise wages, to re-establish equilibrium between daily earnings and

the value of things necessary for life.”58

The most colorful critic of the interwar wage and family allowance system was

undoubtedly Hyacinthe Dubreuil, a locksmith, compagnon, and member of the CGT

leadership. Dubreuil is best remembered for his conversion to Taylorism during a period

of employment abroad at the Ford Factory. His Standards: American Labor as seen by a

French Worker (1929) had great success in France and even was published in the U.S.

under the title Robots or Men?59

In the early 1920s, however, Dubreuil occupied himself primarily with a scathing

critique of the need-based wage. “Over the past few years,” Dubreuil wrote in 1923,

“especially since the war brought on considerable economic unbalance, Cost of Living

commissions tranquilly have begun to establish that a worker needs so much bread, fat or

shoes, or so many movies, or even so many calories, to survive.” Dubreuil denounced

these measures as a “mechanical” form of “barbarity” which renders workers’ “sweat and

blood, their entire lives, in algebraic expressions.”60

Ever since this magnificent method was introduced, some absolutely stupefying arguments can be heard in wage negotiations between employers and workers. Just recently one of the more notorious of those employers, from an important company, squabbled like [Molière’s curmudgeonly character] Harpagon about the amount of meat that a worker should aspire to!… To see such a serious discussion fall so low is sickening …61

58 Henri Prêté, "L'Action syndicale et la hausse des salaires," L'Information ouvrière et sociale, March 10 1918.59 Hyacinthe Dubreuil, Robots or men? A French workman's experience in American industry, trans. Frances Merrill and Mason Merrill (New York: Harper, 1930).60 Hyacinthe Dubreuil, "Pour la République industrielle. Le Salaire ration," L'Information sociale. Action syndicale, organisation du travail, évolution économique, April 26 1923, 1.61 Ibid., 2.

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The miserly employer in Dubreuil’s story, unlike Molière’s, had managed to

outfox and mystify his opponents. “A great number of worker activists have allowed

themselves to be hypnotized by this odious arithmetic, and naively agree to argue about

the elements of its equation.” Workers’ unions do their adherents a grave disservice,

Dubreuil argued, by adopting quantitative measures of needs and the cost of living. Such

calculations mask the social worth and dignity of work, which the author considered the

real measure of its value. In anticipation of his later writings on Taylorism, Dubreuil

called for worker participation in factory management rather than a need-based wage

negotiation. “…We should raise the level of debate… to more honorable arguments than

the proportion of beans that are swimming in our meager soup!”62

Conclusion

Historians have long recognized that scientific measures have political

ramifications. Charles Maier, three decades ago, famously laid bare the politics of

twentieth-century scientific management. Scientific production, many believed, would

narrow the chasm between workers and managers, and harvest rewards for both.

Revolutionaries on the right and left invoked visions of efficient industry in the service of

an antiliberal political program. Bourgeois conservatives promoted technical

rationalization as a “social defense” against labor demands. Science would eliminate

class struggle.63

62 Ibid.63 Charles Maier, "Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s," Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 3 (1970). Reprinted in Charles Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 19-69. On the European sciences of work and their political ramifications, see also Anson Rabinbach’s classic Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). On the origins of the physics of work, see François Vatin, Le Travail, économie et physique 1780-1830, ed. Françoise Balibar, et al., Philosophies (Paris: Presses

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In modern France, however, scientific measures often served to sharpen class

politics. As this study demonstrates, technical measures of consumption like dietary and

housing standards actually fed class-based antagonisms. Standards of living form the flip

side of the modern science of work. Scientists immersed in the era of industrial

production sought to optimize labor and eliminate waste.64 To define basic human needs

was to set a minimal platform for wage levels; it was also to fix the state’s responsibility

to provide welfare benefits. Rational management may have appeared to promise a way

out of class conflict at the workplace. Yet scientific measures also served a struggle over

the means of consumption.

Consumer budgets and minimum standards were the subject of constant conflict

between employers, workers, and experts. The same measure and format – the consumer

budget – served contrary ends, often simultaneously: stingy employers used it as a cover

for labor savings, and workers to demand higher pay. Minimum measures began as the

invention of an emergent industrial bourgeoisie, eager to rationalize labor cost. Yet very

quickly it appeared in workers’ journals and meetings, in opposition to those same

employers. The need-based wage formed the basis for an ideology of poverty, yet also

grounded demands for economic entitlement. It represented a defining line between

decency and pauperism, yet also one between dignity and exploitation. It served to

express both a stingy desire to reduce workers’ consumption and, conversely, a

progressive vision of expanding well-being.

Universitaires de France, 1993). 64 Norton Wise, "Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century Britain," History of Science 27, no. 77 (1989).

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