Honorabele particulieren als voorposten van de staat. Zorg om ongezonde woningen in Parijs, 1850-1880

Samenvatting

Honourable citizens as deputies of the state in its care for "insalubrious dwellings": the case of Haris between 1850 and 1880. Mid-nineteenth-century France state-care, aiming to remedy the physical and moral "downgrading" of the working-classes, was strongly rooted in paternalistic feelings of the well-to-do and depended for its implementation on the activities of unpaid commissioners. This article deals with the transformation of the state-care as to the sanitary dwelling conditions of the poor - bearing all the signs of a "civilising offensive" into a more centralised and more professionalised care in which the "honourable commissioners" were relegated to a more marginal role. Attention is paid to the part played by the urban "petty bourgeois" who in their quest for status and in their subsequent hygienic "protoprofessionalisation" linked up at first with the strivings of the commissioners for a more salubrious and respectable neighbourhood and who in a later phase - by way of their emancipation and changing demands - helped under way the municipalisation of the health care and thereby the "welfare state" itself.