An equally rigorous treatment is to be applied to those who, being in the receipt of parochial relief, are disobedient, or give rise to well-founded complaint. They may be forbidden to enter inns, or drinking-shops, and punished in the above-mentioned manner if they disobey.
Parishes may require their overseers to watch the conduct of those who, from extravagance, drunkenness, debauchery, or other misbehaviour, are in danger of poverty, and to proceed legally to have them placed under restrictions. Such persons may be forbidden by the prefect, on the application of the parish, to frequent, for a certain period, inns and drinking-shops.
If a person who has received relief subsequently obtains any property, his parish may demand to be reimbursed their expenditure on his behalf, but without interest; and though they may not have exercised their right during his life, they may proceed against his estate after his death.
No pauper can marry without the consent of his parish, nor without having reimbursed it for the relief which he has received. The same law applies to widowers, who, while married, had received relief for themselves or their children. None who are relieved in consequence of sickness or infirmity should be allowed to marry, except in extreme cases.
No minister, unless with the permission of the parish, ought to announce from the pulpit the intended marriage of one whom he knows to be in the receipt of relief.
If children, in consequence of the idleness, debauchery, gambling, or voluntary desertion of their father, become chargeable to the parish, and it is alleged that the father if he had been industrious and frugal could have supported them, the overseers may bring an action against him for the amount of the relief which has been afforded to his children; and if he do not pay he may be suspended from the exercise of all civil rights and claims as a bourgeois, or be sentenced to not exceeding two years’ imprisonment in a house of correction. A second offence is to be more severely punished.
A mother wilfully abandoning her children shall be taken back to her parish and there kept to work. If she refuse, or attempt to escape, she may, on the requisition of her parish, and subject to an appeal to the Council of State, be sentenced to not exceeding three years’ imprisonment in a house of correction.
Women who have had several bastards chargeable to the parish may, on the requisition of their parishes, be similarly punished. No one receiving, or who has received, parochial assistance, either on his own account or on that of his children can, unless specially authorized so to do by his parish, be present at parochial meetings, until he has repaid all the sums advanced to him.
If any person entitled to parochial relief shall be refused, or insufficiently relieved, he may complain to the Prefect, who shall thereupon hear the allegations of the parish, and ascertain the condition of the complainant, with the assistance, if he has any doubt as to the existence or degree of his bodily infirmities, of a physician. The Prefect may then order such relief as may appear to him necessary, but no part of it is to be given in money.
It appears, however, to have been unsuccessful; for 12 years after, the government, after having in vain offered rewards for good advice on the subject (p. 225), by an ordonnance dated the 14th April, 1819, absolutely forbade the levying of rates higher than the average of those of the years 1813, 1814, and 1815. The failure of so coarse a remedy might have been predicted, and accordingly we find the present state of the country thus described in the official report (p. 214):—