Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

by H. Sutherland Edwards

The thieves of Jewish race are, according to M. Ducamp, those among whom handkerchief-stealing descends from father to son. They are formidable not for their audacity, for they scarcely ever commit murder, but by their persistence in a criminal career, by the inviolable secrecy maintained among them, their marvellous patience, and the facilities they possess for concealing themselves in the houses of their co-religionists. Jewish thieves are hardly ever at open war with society. They maintain a secret, subtle struggle. They seem to be taking a silent revenge, and it might be said that they have right on their side and that they are only taking back—as the opportunity presents itself—the property of which their ancestors had been so often, so violently, and so unjustly deprived by ours. Sometimes they form associations and rob wholesale. They have their correspondents, their depots, their purchasers, their account-books. Everything that is brought to them can be turned to account, from the lead of the house-pipes to a lady’s feather. The chief calls himself a commission agent and sends goods to South America, Germany, and Russia. The German-Jewish jargon which they speak among themselves is incomprehensible to the rest of the world and helps to save them from detection. Concealing their secret actions behind an ostensibly honest trade, they are the first deceivers in the world. There are numbers of criminals, however, who, whatever instincts they may have inherited, have not been trained to crime. “A child,” says the writer already cited on this subject, which he has studied so thoroughly, “stops away from school. He acquires idle habits and, coming home late, is beaten by his father. The effect of the lesson lasts a little while; but he has tasted the liberty he loves, he has experienced the pleasure of keeping away from books—the books he hates; and fearing the paternal correction, he takes care the next time he plays truant not to return home. He sleeps beneath an archway, and if he escapes the attention of the police wakes up the next morning to find himself on the pavement of the great city without a sou in his pocket. Being very hungry, he contrives to steal a sausage. The first step has now been taken. Young as he is, he has acquired a fatal knowledge. He has learned how to live without working, and he is now almost certainly lost. Vice has taken possession of him; crime awaits him. As he gets older he is urged on by all the passions of the young man. He steals some money from his father, from his employer: wherever the chance presents itself. If he is taken, he is condemned by a compassionate judge to a brief term of imprisonment, during which he lives among the vilest. He hears nothing but the boasts of criminals, who pride themselves on their atrocious actions and inspire him with a desire to imitate them. On leaving gaol he meets some of his prison companions. His timid operations of former days are turned into ridicule. The talk is now of burglary, of affairs which involve some risk but return handsome profits. The crime is resolved upon. An imprudent person happens to witness its commission, calls for the police, and is killed. The little vagabond of other days has become an assassin, and will end his career on the scaffold. Physical energy and moral weakness: such are the two principal features in the character of nearly all criminals. Some of them affect to be at war with a society in which the poor man, according to them, has no place. Mere nonsense. In a society so profoundly democratic as ours, in which waiters have become kings, the sons of innkeepers prime ministers, and foundlings illustrious men of science, there is a place for everyone.[{324}]”

CHAPTER XLV.
PARISIAN MENDICANCY: THE PARIS POOR.

Parisian Mendicancy in the Sixteenth Century—The General Hospital—Louis XV. and the Beggars—The Revolution—Mendicancy as a Regular Profession—The Organ-grinders and the Trade in Italian Children—The French Treatment of the Poor—Asylums, Alms-houses, and Retreats—The Droit des Pauvres—The Cost of the Poor.

IN Paris, formerly, mendicancy was so grave and manifest a plague that it could escape the eyes of no one, and there is not a single Paris historian who has omitted to write upon the subject. The documents which subsist in reference to it—Parliamentary decrees, for instance, and royal edicts, would supply material for a complete history of mendicity, not only detailed but even anecdotal. There was a time when the beggars of Paris organised themselves into troops, which were under the command of a chief. The members of these troops understood their business. The orphans and other little scamps, in groups of three or four, would go out into the streets shivering and half-naked, weeping and begging for bread; ostensible husbands and wives, with their own or other people’s children, exhibited certificates to the effect that their property had been destroyed by lightning; the marchandiers were merchants whom some conflagration had reduced to misery; the piètres excelled in tying their calves up to their thighs and proceeding legless on crutches; while the sabouleux rolled on the ground, with leaps and contortions, foaming—thanks to a piece of soap which they kept in their mouths—as though they were epileptic.

In this connection a droll anecdote may be told. A veteran Parisian beggar had a very beautiful daughter, and many a suitor petitioned the father for her hand. One day a retired soldier, who had taken to mendicancy, came to him to implore the paternal consent. “What are your qualifications?” asked the old man. “I have only one leg,” replied the amorous warrior. “Bah!” cried the father, “you have no chance; only yesterday I refused a man without either legs or arms.”

In the middle ages, however, the humours of mendicancy, were frequently lost in the gravity of the perils to which a city infested by cunning and desperate beggars was exposed. An edict was issued in 1524 condemning mendicants to be whipped and banished. It apparently had little effect, for in the following year they were ordered to quit Paris under pain of being hanged. In 1532 the Parliament ordered that, chained in pairs, they should be employed to clean out the sewers, which at this period were, for the most part, open. In 1561 an ordinance of Charles IX. sentenced all beggars to the galleys during the remainder of their life; for in those days, the offender who once found[{325}] himself chained to the oar never went on shore again. A Parliamentary decree of 1606 proclaimed that all beggars should be whipped in public by the assistants of the executioner; a particular mark, moreover, was to be placed on their shoulder; while, in virtue of an ordinance of 1602, their heads were shaved—a punishment which was at least beneficial to them from a hygienic point of view.

And now we reach the moment when severely punitive laws against mendicancy were about to give way to preventive measures characterised by humanity. The first person to occupy himself with the fate of the mendicants seems to have been a certain theoretical reformer named Jean Douet de Romp Croissant. He published, in pamphlet form, a series of memoirs addressed to the Queen Regent. Many of the schemes he put forward were wild in the extreme, but his writings contain the germs of one or two excellent institutions. He proposed the organisation of those State pawnshops which were ultimately to be opened in France, though not until 1778. In view of the filthy condition of the Paris streets, the dangers to which pedestrians were exposed from highwaymen, and the extraordinary number of beggars then in the capital, he proposed to employ these beggars in cleaning the town and protecting the citizens. His idea was to place a beggar at every fifty yards along the thoroughfares, armed with a brush and shovel, so as to remove the refuse and to be able to call his next neighbour to the rescue should any wayfarer fall into the hands of thieves. The scheme had its practical and reasonable side, but no attempt was ever made to execute it.

It is to Louis XIV., or more correctly, to M. de Belièvre, first president of the Parliament, that the honour is due of having first acted in this matter with deliberation, method, and success. An edict of the 4th of May, 1656, created the General Hospital, chiefly composed of three establishments: Notre Dame de la Pitié; the Maison de St. Denis or Petit Arsenal, familiarly known as Salpetrière; and Bicêtre. According to Sauval the number of beggars in Paris then exceeded forty thousand. They formed “an independent people, who knew neither law, nor religion, nor superior, nor police; impiety, sensuality, libertinage, were all that reigned amongst them.” De Belièvre’s measure was already accepted in principle, but grave doubts were entertained respecting its application.

The authorities feared that so vast a crowd of lawless people might be able to defy their power. Everything, however, was effected in an orderly manner, and with a facility by no means anticipated. It was announced in all the churches that, on the 7th of May, 1657, the General Hospital would be open to as many of the poor as deserved admission, and at the same time criers went about the streets proclaiming a warning to beggars against ever asking alms again. On the 14th of May every beggar who could be found in Paris was arrested and shut up. The city now found itself delivered from an ancient and formidable scourge.