Poverty and Welfare in Modern German History

By Lutz Raphael

For many, the history of German social policy is defined primarily by that nation’s postwar emergence as a model of the European welfare state. As this comprehensive volume demonstrates, however, the question of how to care for the poor has had significant implications for German history throughout the modern era. Here, eight leading historians provide essential case studies and syntheses of current research into German welfare, from the Holy Roman Empire to the present day. Along the way, they trace the parallel historical dynamics that have continued to shape German society, including religious diversity, political exclusion and inclusion, and concepts of race and gender.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785333576

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

The Economy of Love

Welfare and Poor Relief in Catholic Territories of the Holy Roman Empire (1500 to 1800)

Sebastian Schmidt

Confessions and Welfare in Early Modern Historiography

Research on poverty, welfare provision and the lower social orders or outsiders in early modern Europe can be regarded as representing an established and independent branch of historiography.¹ At a very early stage, poor relief was interpreted by historians as a classic example of social disciplining.² These works primarily focused on urban developments in Central and Western Europe, where continuities in reform efforts can be traced between the medieval and early modern periods.³ In general, these titles assign little importance to confessional affiliation and the Reformation’s outcomes in shaping the development of welfare initiatives; they are instead interpreted as reflecting state building processes underway in both Catholic and Protestant territories and as reactions to the first manifestations of mass poverty since the late Middle Ages.⁴

Our understandings of the early modern poor, their lives and culture, have been advanced by the development of everyday and microhistory. Studies on England⁵ have been especially prominent in this regard and have exerted a considerable influence on research concerning poor relief in the Holy Roman Empire.⁶ If Martin Dinges’ work on Bordeaux already investigated the potential existence of a particular ‘poor mentality’ in 1991, this topic was much more central to Helmut Bräuer’s recent research on the poor in Upper Saxony.⁷ By examining sources containing biographic information and affording qualitative perspectives, recent historiography has finally portrayed the poor as actors with agency and not merely the subjects of welfare institutions and their regulations.⁸

If recent years have therefore witnessed the emergence of a wide spectrum of research findings concerning individual aspects of poverty and its presence in various regions, other topics remain neglected. This fact certainly applies to the Christian confessions’ roles in welfare provision, and especially trends within the Holy Roman Empire’s Catholic municipalities. This gap in existing literature is all the more surprising as the potential roles played by the confessions in the field of poor relief and welfare represent a topic of central historiographical importance. Admittedly, Robert Jütte’s pioneering 1984 work⁹ on the authorities’ provision of poor relief in Cologne and Frankfurt represented an early investigation into the potential influence of confessional difference on the formation of welfare policies. However, with regards to the Holy Roman Empire, the role of confessional factors in the emergence of specific welfare cultures can only be deemed well researched at the city level, not that of larger territorial states.¹⁰ Recent works regarding confession’s influence on the development of territorial poor relief, such as those of Hannes Ludyga and Tim Lorentzen, have come to completely different conclusions concerning the significance of confessional differences.¹¹

For the Reich as a whole, confessional contexts and the specific characteristics of Catholic welfare provision have not yet attracted attention in a systematically comparative way. In a European perspective the Reich may be seen as a space where confessional differences known from West European countries of different confession, such as France, England or Scotland, coexisted for a long period. In her classic 1974 study of poverty in eighteenth-century France, Olwen Hufton demonstrated that no central system of municipal welfare provision was established, but that rather responsibility in this field had remained in the hands of ecclesiastical institutions in existence since the medieval period.¹² If this argument also applies to the Holy Roman Empire, it would mean that established historiographical portrayals of a comparable structural transformation of welfare provision in both Protestant and Catholic territories can no longer be presumed. Konrad Dussel’s work has indeed revealed how fruitful it can be to devote greater attention to religious confession as a decisive influence in the formation of early modern welfare cultures. In his investigation of Speyer’s poor policies, he documents a noticeably different pattern of development than in contemporary Protestant territories, distinguished by loyalty to traditional religious beliefs and patterns of behaviour.¹³ On the contrary, the Elizabethan settlement of a general system of poor relief run by state authorities and funded by tax payers may seem the most advanced example of a Protestant solution to the problem. In the Reich similar approaches, such as that of Philipp of Hessen, the Duchy of Württemberg, or Frederik III, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, may be cited as support to an interpretation that underlines the impact of confessional culture and institutions.¹⁴

The extent to which confession-specific religious convictions influenced the formation of welfare legislation and the practices of charity within the Holy Roman Empire between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is a topic in need of further research. This chapter will analyse the changes that occurred within Catholic states’ welfare discourses following the Reformation, and what impact these had on legislation concerning the poor and the institutional practices of welfare provision into the eighteenth century. It will use the Empire’s electorates of Mainz and Trier as case studies to illuminate this last theme.

One must not forget that the confessional territorial states of the early modern period were largely taking up solutions developed in late medieval towns where the problems of poverty and destitution were concentrated and particularly urgent. Municipal welfare reforms were to be found across Western Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century. These reforms were connected with various centralization efforts on the part of local authorities, attempts to bring welfare provision under secular control and efforts to differentiate the poor along the lines of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ individuals. The key category in making this distinction was an individual’s readiness to work. This particular trend has frequently been seen in the historiography as heralding a decisive shift towards modernity. However, as a range of research projects have now demonstrated, this differentiation of the poor is hardly modern, but rather possesses an intellectual lineage stretching back to the classical world.¹⁵ It can be found embedded as a normative value in a range of early and high medieval texts and theoretical discussions, such as Justinian’s Code or Charlemagne’s laws. Differentiating between the poor unable to work and those unwilling to do so therefore forms one of the most consistent historic tests that welfare authorities have used to decide who is deserving of help and who is not. In recognizing this fact, we are nevertheless confronted with the problem of explaining what caused these moral categories and semantics to be transformed into institutional practices at the beginning of the early modern period.

Many social historians answer this question purely with reference to socio-economic contexts and the so-called ‘crisis of the late Middle Ages’. In the following pages, this chapter will argue in favour of an approach that takes into account the intellectual changes underway during the early modern period. For example, these decades witnessed a pronounced shift in the meanings of the terms ‘love’ and the ‘economy of love’; concepts which had been systematically described by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. It seems wise to present Aquinas’ concepts first, as his theory of welfare remained decisive in informing the activities of many Catholic institutions well into the early modern period. It must also be observed that contemporary Catholic theorists such as Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540) developed new concepts of welfare provision which were often held up as a model by Catholic rulers. In an instructive book, Andreas Keck has succeeded in comparing both of these welfare theories side by side.¹⁶ Following his line of argument, this chapter proposes the theory that in the Holy Roman Empire’s Catholic states, a particular type of welfare provision emerged which was above all shaped by the interaction of a wide spectrum of municipal political aspirations with local or decentralized institutional practices. Significant changes in the practices of welfare provision within Catholic states were only brought about in the eighteenth century by a stronger tendency on the part of governments to regulate various aspects of their populations’