The Uncharitable Revolution

The French Revolution and the Poor, by Alan Forrest

175 pp. (Blackwell, Oxford, 1981)

Politicians share one unlovable sempiternal trait: the rigid conviction that they and those of like minds hold the key to the resolution of their countries' wills and that, given power, they will succeed where others of a different persuasion have failed. Those of Revolutionary France confronted the issue of the poor, confident that it lay within their power to effect a social transformation so radical that the problems of begging, vagrancy and unemployment would be totally eradicated, and this volume is about how their efforts foundered.