To peer in imagination into the hovels of the poor or to walk down streets with open drains between houses decayed into crowded tenements, to visit shanty towns outside the walls, such as London’s Bethnal Green or Paris’s Faubourg Saint-Marcel, to learn that the latter city’s great open sewer was not covered until 1740, is to understand why mortality rates among the poor were so high. In town and country they lived in one or two rooms, often under the same roof as their animals, sleeping on straw, eating with their fingers or with a knife and spoon, washing infrequently, and tolerating lice and fleas. Outside, dung and refuse attracted flies and rodents. Luckier people, particularly in the north, might have had glass in their windows, but light was less important than warmth. In airless rooms, thick with the odours of dampness, defecation, smoke, and unwashed bodies, rheumatic or bronchial ailments might be the least of troubles. Deficient diet in childhood could mean rickety legs. Crude methods of delivery might cause permanent damage to both mothers and children who survived the attentions of the local midwife. The baby who survived (one in four died in the first year of life) was launched on a hazardous journey.
Some diseases, such as measles, seem to have been more virulent then than now. Typhus, spread by lice and fleas, and typhoid, waterborne, killed many. Tuberculosis was less common than it was to become. Cancer, though hard to recognize from contemporary accounts, was certainly rare: with relatively little smoking and with so many other diseases competing for the vulnerable body, that is not surprising. There were few illnesses, mental or physical, of the kind today caused by stress. Alcoholism was less common, despite the increase in the drinking of spirits that debauched city dwellers: cheap gin became a significant social problem in William Hogarth’s London. Abnormalities resulting from inbreeding were frequent in mountain valleys or on remote coasts.
Syphilis had been a growing menace since its introduction in the 16th century, and it was rife among prostitutes and their patrons: it was a common cause of blindness in children. Women, hapless victims of male-dominated morality, were frequently denied the chance of early mercury treatment because of the stigma attached to the disease. Scrofula, a gangrenous tubercular condition of the lymph glands, was known as “the king’s evil” because it was thought to be curable by the king’s touch: Louis XIV practiced the ceremony conscientiously. Malaria was endemic in some swampy areas. Though drainage schemes were taken up by enlightened sovereigns, prevention awaited inexpensive quinine. Nor could doctors do more than let smallpox take its course before the general introduction of vaccines. The plague, chiefly an urban disease that was deadliest in summer and dreaded as a sentence of death, could be combated only by measures of quarantine such as those enforced around Marseille in 1720, when it made its last appearance in France. Its last European visitation was at Messina in 1740. Deliverance from plague was not the least reason for Europeans of the Enlightenment to believe that they were entering a happier age. Poverty
Though its extent might vary with current economic trends, poverty was a constant state. It is hard to define since material expectations vary among generations, social groups, and countries. If those with sufficient land or a wage large enough to allow for the replacement of tools and stock are held to be above the poverty line, then at least a quarter of Europe’s inhabitants were below it. They were the bas peuple whom the French engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban observed in the 1690s, “three-fourths of them…dressed in nothing but half-rotting, tattered linen”; a century later the philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet described those who “possess neither goods nor chattels [and are] destined to fall into misery at the least accident.” That could be illness or injury to a breadwinner, the failure of a crop or death of a cow, fire or flood, or the death or bankruptcy of an employer. Sometimes poverty showed itself in a whole community demoralized through sickness—as by malaria in Italy’s Pontine Marshes and goitre in Alpine valleys—or through the sapping of vitality when the young left to find work. Factors could be the unequal struggle with a poor soil or the exactions of a landowner: so the agricultural writer Arthur Young, at Combourg, wondered that the seigneur, “this Monsieur de Chateaubriant, …has nerves strung for such a residence amidst such filth and poverty.” Many were victims of an imprisoning socioeconomic regime, such as Castilian latifundia or Polish serfdom. A trade depression, a change of fashion, or an invention that made traditional manufacturing obsolete could bring destitution to busy cities such as Leiden, Lyon, Florence, or Norwich or to specialized communities such as the silk weavers of 18th-century England’s Spitalfields.
Taxes, on top of rents and dues, might be the decisive factor in the slide from sufficiency to destitution. A member of the Castilian Cortes of 1621 described the results: “Numerous places have become depopulated and disappeared from the map. …The vassals who formerly cultivated them now wander the roads with their wives and children.” Some had always been beyond the reach of the collector of taxes and rents, such as the bracchianti (day labourers) described by a Mantuan doctor as “without a scrap of land, without homes, lacking everything except a great brood of children…with a humble train of a few sheep and baggage consisting of a tattered bedstead, a mouldy cask, some rustic tools and a few pots and pans.”
Moneylenders were pivotal figures in village society. In southern Italy, merchants advanced money on wheat in contratti alla voce (oral agreements). The difference between the arranged price and that at harvest time, when the loan was repaid, represented their profit. Throughout Europe, land changed hands between lender and borrower: foreclosure and forfeit is an aspect of primitive capitalism often overlooked in the focus on trade and manufacturing. Society, even in long-settled areas, revealed a constant flux. As the 20th-century French historian Marc Bloch pointed out, hierarchy was always present in some degree, even in districts where sharecropping meant dependence on the owner’s seed and stock. In the typical village of western Europe, there were gradations between the well-to-do farmer, for whom others worked and whose strips would grow if he continued to be thrifty, and the day labourer, who lived on casual labour, hedging, ditching, thatching, repairing terraces, pruning vines, or making roads.
Urban poverty posed the biggest threat to governments. The situation became alarming after 1750 because the rise in population forced food prices up, while the employers’ advantage in the labour market depressed wages. Between 1730 and 1789, living costs in France rose by 62 percent; in Germany the price of rye for the staple black bread rose by up to 30 percent while wages fell. In Italian cities the poor depended on the authorities’ control of markets, prices, and food supplies. The riots of Genoa in 1746 show what was liable to happen if they failed. The causes of riots varied. In England, in 1766, grievances included the Irish, Roman Catholics, the press-gang, and gin taxes. The source was almost invariably poverty measured against a vague conception of a “fair wage,” fanned by rumours about hoarding and the creating of false prices. Paris was not uniquely dangerous. Before 1789, when the fury of the mob acquired political importance, the Gordon Riots (1780) had shown the way in which London could be taken over by a mob. The problem originated in rural poverty. Improvements in agriculture, such as enclosure, did not necessarily provide more work. Where there were no improvements or old abuses continued—such as the short-term leases of southern Italy, which encouraged tenants to over-crop and so exhaust the soil—the city provided the only hope. Naples, with the greatest profusion of beggars in the streets, was the most swollen of cities: at 438,000 in 1797, the population had risen by 25 percent in 30 years.