AHR

American Historical Review

AP

Archives privées

CCRH

Cahiers du Centre de recherches historiques

CHR

Catholic Historical Review

FH

French History

FHR

French Historical Studies

HES

Histoire, économie, et société

HJ

Historical Journal

JEEH

Journal of European Economic History

JH

Jewish History

JMEH

Journal of Modern European History

JSH

Journal of Social History

Early in the afternoon of Tuesday 4 May 1897 the foremost charity event of Paris, the twelfth annual Charity Bazaar, opened at the Palais de l'Industrie, 15 rue Jean-Goujon. The bazaar was a highlight of the social calendar. Months in advance the baron de Mackau, president of the organising committee, had contacted women of Parisian high society (mondaines)Footnote ¹ who were to run the event on the day and invite their relatives and acquaintances. About 1,600 people attended the bazaar opening on this spring afternoon. Most of the men left for their clubs after the official speeches, leaving the women to mingle and encourage visitors to buy goods. Twenty-one stalls had been set up to raise money for local and national organisations. Champagne flowed, people admired the specially installed medieval décor, and they purchased notebooks, dolls, tea cosies and trinkets.Footnote ²

Soon after 4 p.m. the projector that had been set up to show a short film exploded into flames. Within minutes the building had become a furnace, fuelled by wooden furnishings and the highly flammable clothing of its terrified occupants. Of the 124 people killed, 119 were women. Members of high society lost relatives, friends and acquaintances in the blaze. The afternoon was etched indelibly upon people's memories. For a fortnight following the tragedy Le Figaro published reports from the scene as well as personal stories, messages of condolence, cancellation notices and lists of donations to a subscription fund organised by the paper. L'Illustration carried photographs of fifty-nine of the victims plus articles on the official memorial service that took place at Notre-Dame on 8 May.Footnote ³

The records of this terrible accident have much to tell us about the practice of charity in le monde. First, charitable activity was family-oriented and gendered feminine. Charity was a way for noble families to demonstrate their membership of high society, and women were most responsible for representing their family in charity work. Mondains attended the annual bazaar because an aunt, sister or cousin had invited them, and on hearing the news that the palais was ablaze their immediate thought was of female relatives whom they knew or suspected to be in the building. The fire devastated families; some lost female members from two generations because daughters and nieces had been helping their mothers or aunts on the day. Said Le Figaro, ‘How may we bid farewell to those so cherished and mourned, who left behind them such charm and grace, such pain and tenderness? And what may be said to those who remain, whose future is one of suffering and grief?’Footnote ⁴

The loss of life, predominantly female life, was reported as both a senseless accident and martyrdom: victims of the fire were ‘martyrs of charity’. This reflects the way in which women, more so than men, were credited with the moral goodness that made them responsible for carrying out charity work and providing an example to children. In gendered terms noble women's prominence in charity was justified using the same rhetoric as that which described middle-class women as ‘angels of the home’. By succouring the needy and weak, especially unwed mothers and children, mondaines fulfilled a symbolic maternal role. In this respect their activities have something in common with the charity of bourgeoises in northern France that Bonnie Smith argues was propelled by the spiritual force of caritas.Footnote ⁵

The second point that emerges from records of the Charity Bazaar fire, however, is that members of the aristocracy performed works of charity in ways that were specific to their class. There were crucial differences between the charitable practices of the nobility and those of the bourgeoisie. To learn more about those differences, and the motives for charity work among high society nobles, a grasp upon the historical context is needed.

In nineteenth-century France there was a long-standing tension between two contrasting types of charity. The tension was a recurrent theme in literature as a new style of preventative, moralising and interventionist bienfaisance gradually replaced the simpler material charité that had functioned under the ancien régime. A consequence of the increasing push towards moralisation was that leisured upper-class women were obliged to devote more of their time to charity work. Leisure called for costly luxurious living, and one function of charity was to absolve the nobility from charges of personal extravagance even as it reinforced pecuniary status.Footnote ⁶

By 1897 there were 3,227 charitable institutions operating in Paris and its vicinity; they covered a broad range of concerns from apprentice training, to hospital care, workers' accommodation and orphan education. To support those institutions high society women performed various kinds of work. Some of their activities were also undertaken by middle-class women so it is perhaps not surprising that noblewomen's participation tends to be subsumed within studies of ‘bourgeois’ charity networks. Noblewomen and bourgeoises visited the recipients of charity as dames visiteuses; they also volunteered as fundraising coordinators (quêteuses) for special events.Footnote ⁷

The distinctive feature of the charitable service of a Parisian noblewoman was the type of position she held on committees of dames patronnesses. Honorary executive positions such as president or vice-president were routinely allotted to a female aristocrat. It was not uncommon for a noblewoman to chair a committee of female patrons and her husband to chair a committee of male patrons. Separate committees for women and men reflected a gendered division of roles: women took charge of running social events, whilst men were more involved in administrative tasks. The duties of office represented an additional burden of responsibility for a noblewoman for, unlike the men, she was expected to combine committee work with visits and fundraising. The baronne Carayon La Tour, for example, who died in the fire, typically spent her mornings at an infirmary for cancer and leprosy sufferers; in the afternoon she presided over meetings of the Cercles Catholiques d'Ouvriers.Footnote ⁸

Aristocratic patronage of charities was not new to France in the three decades before World War I. Barbara Diefendorf has shown that in the earlier context of the Catholic Reformation Parisian noblewomen founded convents and charitable institutions near their country estates and became leaders of a rapidly growing organisation, the Dames de la Charité. The high proportion of titled aristocrats among the Dames served as ‘a rich repository of social and economic capital with which to sustain existing charitable activities and sponsor new ones’.Footnote ⁹

Similarly, between 1880 and 1914, wealth and elite status continued to give the nobility an edge in charity work that the middle classes did not possess. A feature of this period, however, which was also part of the longer-term evolution of the nobility, is that Parisian nobles were inclined to augment their wealth by marrying the heirs of rich industrialists and bankers. Arno Mayer has described the gradual process that took place across Europe during the nineteenth century as old aristocratic elites melded with the wealthy haute bourgeoisie to produce a new ‘upper class’. The economic capital of banking and industrial families made them eligible, and indeed likely, to engage in philanthropic deeds as a way of mimicking aristocratic practices.Footnote ¹⁰

In the late nineteenth century, therefore, nobles deployed social and symbolic forms of capital to preserve their socio-cultural dominance. Aristocratic ancestry, or ‘blue blood’, was the most effective tool in this regard. The reason why noblewomen and men chaired charity committees, as they did for those for the performing arts, was that ‘blue blood’ signified authority, prestige and power. A fine example of a blue-blooded patron was HRH la duchesse Sophie d'Alençon. Her death in the fire was a tragedy for the Orléans family; the resulting publicity will not have harmed the Noviciat Dominicain of which she had been president.Footnote ¹¹ ‘Blue blood’ also meant that nobles could call upon titled relatives to support a charitable cause. Presidency of committees placed aristocrats in a strong position to recruit members of their own families, including the younger generation, to charity work. Strategic use of marital and kinship ties had formed the very basis of aristocratic patronage back into the early modern period.Footnote ¹²

The third point about charity in Parisian high society is that religion, as well as gender and class, informed the ways in which nobles involved themselves in charity work. The mondaines who operated the stalls at the bazaar generally did so as representatives of Catholic and parish-based organisations. On the list are to be found, for example, Oeuvres de la Paroisse Saint-Ambroise (often there was a collection of groups within one parish), Oeuvres des Enfants et Jeunes Filles Aveugles de Saint-Paul, Orphelinat de Sainte-Anges, and Écoles Libres de la Paroisse Saint-Louis-en-l'Isle. There were also non-sectarian organisations, like the Société Philanthropique, and national organisations, all functioning independently of government control. At Stall 14 was the Office Central des Institutions Charitables et Oeuvres du Travail (later renamed Office Central des Oeuvres de Bienfaisance) which linked private charities across France. At Stall 1 was a Red Cross organisation, the Société de Secours aux Blessés, which had served the nation in the Franco-Prussian War.Footnote ¹³

This mix of organisations, predominantly Catholic but with some non-sectarian groups and umbrella bodies, suggests that the relationship between religion and the charitable practice of nobles was complex. Before that relationship can be examined further, it needs to be located within the broader social and political context.

One of the important results of intermarriage between the nobility and rich industrial and banking families was to bring non-Catholics into a predominantly Catholic milieu. Among them were descendants of wealthy Jews originating from other parts of Europe, and Jewish or Protestant Americans, the so-called ‘dollar princesses’.Footnote ¹⁴ Whilst marriages between spouses of different faiths were not uncommon in le monde at the turn of the century, there were tensions surrounding the issue of assimilation.

In 1894 those tensions were aggravated by the arrest and conviction for treason of a Jew, Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906) divided French society into pro- and anti-Dreyfusard camps and fed the growth of antisemitic literature. Given that the Charity Bazaar fire, in May 1897, fell between the first trial of Dreyfus and his retrial, it is not surprising that religious tension emerges in sources from this period. Readers of Le Figaro speculated about who could have made the anonymous donation of nearly one million francs to the paper's subscription. When the donor was revealed to be a Jewish widow, Madame Jules Lebaudy, her act of generosity was attacked in La Libre Parole.Footnote ¹⁵ At the official mourning ceremony in Notre-Dame, an ecumenical service, right-wing Catholics in the congregation were incensed by Fr Ollivier's sermon calling for religious tolerance. To them it seemed a political stunt.Footnote ¹⁶

In such a climate there were limits to the interaction between communities of different faiths. What is not certain is whether those limits outlasted the specific concerns of 1897. Was it possible in high society for Catholics, Jews and Protestants to collaborate on charitable projects? Did marriages between spouses of different faiths alter customary charitable practices in upper-class families? As David Higgs comments, ‘the tension between religious and social links among nobles merits much more investigation’.Footnote ¹⁷

A complicating factor is that under the Third Republic France was governed according to the principle of laïcité. Caroline Ford explains that this was ‘inspired by a deep-seated anticlericalism’ which has made French republicanism since the nineteenth century ‘uncompromisingly secular’. Between 1880 and 1914 the republican government brought in anticlerical legislation designed to remove the influence of the Church from French society. A major plank in this initiative was the 1901 Law on Associations that forced the closure of many religious congregations including teaching orders. The implementation of this law led to the separation of Church and State in 1905.Footnote ¹⁸

The political context, therefore, raises additional questions about the motives of Parisian nobles in the practice of charity. Did aristocrats working for religious-based charities have different aims from republican social reformers upholding the spirit of ‘solidarism’? Were private philanthropists acting in competition with the developing welfare state?Footnote ¹⁹

This article seeks to address such questions by exploring the place of religion within the design and practice of charity by Parisian nobles in the three decades before World War I. It is argued that charity was a dynamic field of social networking for the nobility. It helped to entrench class and gender distinctions in high society; it also exposed religious differences in a milieu that was not exclusively Catholic. In France of the Third Republic, the nobility needed to make strategic use of its social networks to uphold its authority in a variety of socio-cultural fields. This examination of elite charitable practices looks critically at the power of the nobility to sustain religious influence in French society.

How was woman's responsibility for charity understood within le monde in the nineteenth century? In her book, Charité à travers la vie (1912), the comtesse d'Haussonville explored the theme of duty using an extract, ‘La Femme dévouée’, from Mgr Mermillod's ‘Conférences aux femmes chrétiennes’. The priest's message was unequivocal: ‘Your [Christian women's] devotion must exercise itself above all within the family.’ Under ‘the providential order that God has established’, a woman's primary obligation was ‘devotion to [her] children’; it was for her ‘to elevate these young souls in order to make of them great souls’. The extension of domestic Christianity for well-to-do women was outreach to the poor: ‘Devotion, however, cannot remain simply [in the family]. God has favoured you by your birth, by your fortune, by your position in the social hierarchy … Give alms therefore; but not in a disdainful manner; do not scorn, because you have greater wealth, those for whom you provide.’Footnote ²⁰ This was the message received, and echoed by, Christian well-to-do women: caritas should flow through their interactions with all people for the glory of God. To be a handmaiden of the Church meant choosing one of two paths: celibacy for female religious and motherhood for married women.Footnote ²¹ The paths were parallel, for all Christian women were to relay Christ's message of compassion into society through acts of charity.

During adolescence aristocratic girls came under the influence of their mothers and other female relatives with regard to charity work. Parish youth groups allowed for organised participation. Presidency of one such group, the Patronage de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, founded in 1851 in the parish of Saint-Sulpice, remained within the Uzès family for more than fifty years. It was passed down through three generations from mother to daughter. A similar organisation, the Association des Jeunes Gens de Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, founded in 1853, established a programme for young Christians to make weekly visits to the poor to distribute bread, meat, fuel, clothes and shoes. Money was raised through donations from the congregation, collected on a monthly basis.Footnote ²²

Naturally, as daughters grew older they did not always obey the wishes or follow the example of the older generation. The comtesse Élisabeth Greffulhe resisted pressure from her mother-in-law, the comtesse Félicie Greffulhe, longstanding president of the Société Philanthropique, to volunteer as a stall operator at the 1897 Charity Bazaar. Élisabeth was thirty-seven at the time and had established her own preferences in charity work. She responded to cases brought to her attention by the Office Central des Oeuvres de Bienfaisance, and worked in partnership with her husband on projects in the parish of her in-laws' country estate, Bois-Boudran.Footnote ²³

Records of charity work undertaken by comte Henri and comtesse Élisabeth Greffulhe give some idea of the diversity of private charity that coexisted with state-funded social welfare in its nascent stage. The two channels of aid should not be seen as entirely separate. One of the most influential figures in early social Catholicism, ‘the grand patriarch’ of the patronage movement, comte Armand de Melun, was a firm believer in the need for both governmental and private action to help the poor. Some nobles served voluntarily on bureaux de bienfaisance and worked with government ministers on projects to deal with social problems.Footnote ²⁴ After developing a picture of private charity efforts, through the example of one family, I will discuss how the concerns of benefactors intersected with major currents in government welfare policy.

In the parish of Fontenailles, the Greffulhes took over from Henri's parents in funding the local church and two schools run by female orders, the École Greffulhe de Nangis and the École de Fontenailles. The budget for the work of the church in 1888, including payments made to the curé, the Fontenailles and the Nangis sisters, totalled 25,800 francs. In 1904 the budget for the École de Nangis was 6,930 francs (excluding building maintenance costs, taxes and insurance) and the budget for the École de Fontenailles, 2,900 francs. The comtesse attended annual prize day at the schools where she awarded books purchased at her own expense. She also organised a Christmas tree each year and distributed a toy and book to each child. Money was also allocated for the employment of women in the parish to make clothing for very poor schoolchildren and for the distribution of bread and soup to families.Footnote ²⁵

From the kinds of financial aid given by the Greffulhes we can see a continuing sense of noblesse oblige, which in this unusual case combined with Henri's republicanism.Footnote ²⁶ Under the ancien régime, charity had been understood as ‘a sort of social glue, which bound by mutual ties of obligation the rich and the poor’. Continuing into the nineteenth century, ‘noble charity typically began at the country home, which is to say at the château, which provided the main source of relief to the poor peasants and beggars’.Footnote ²⁷

The Catholic orientation of the Greffulhes' work deserves to be underlined. Historians differ on whether the nineteenth century witnessed a waning of faith among nobles that was exacerbated by theological factionalism. In a study of wills made by the Faubourg Saint-Germain nobility, Claire Biquard argues that this set of Parisian nobles retained a strong attachment to Catholicism that went beyond shallow conformism. The prevalence of invocations to God (slightly more pronounced in the second half of the century) and the high proportion of nobles who left a portion of their estate to benefit the work of the Church seem to indicate sustained religious conviction: ‘In the second half of the century nobles continue to remember the poor in their wills, but increasingly they supported institutions for education or assistance maintained by members of religious congregations.’Footnote ²⁸ Biquard's observations are borne out by the example of the Greffulhes' work in the parish of Fontenailles.

Part of the explanation for nobles leaving bequests to institutions run by religious orders lies in the web of relations established between mondaines, nuns, monks and clerics. Barbara Diefendorf has shown that this type of web existed during the Reformation when collaboration between clerics and lay people formed the very basis of the Catholic revival. Vincent de Paul, for instance, recognised the utility of aristocratic wealth and connections to the work of the Church. He encouraged some noblewomen to become patrons of charities by cultivating relations with them as a spiritual advisor.Footnote ²⁹ In the late nineteenth century similar collaborative links were a vital mechanism for counteracting attacks on the Church by the republican government.

Judith Stone has argued that republican ministers seeking tighter regulation, if not the elimination, of religious orders through the 1901 Law of Association faltered in confidence before the evidence in commissioned reports that religious orders cost nothing to local councils and were indispensable to the provision of health and education services. Alarmed and indignant at the sheer range of institutions run by women religious – including orphanages, hospitals, crèches, shelters, factories and clinics – anticlerical ministers were perhaps also impressed. Nuns were largely responsible for girls' education before 1880, and approximately one-half of all French hospitals, hospices and hospital-hospices (known collectively as the établissements hospitaliers) were operated by one or other of the Catholic sisterhoods. Stone concludes that ‘until the Third Republic, the French State had neither the interest nor the resources to meet these demands’. Nor could it meet them for some time. The 1880s saw the passage of laws guaranteeing free, obligatory and secular state primary education, but ‘almost two decades after these secularising laws were passed, at least 40 per cent of female education was still provided by the bonnes soeurs’.Footnote ³⁰ To understand where financial support for this work came from, we need to develop a fuller picture of nuns' relations with the wealthy upper class.

During the nineteenth century the membership of all types of religious orders in France increased exponentially. Many provincial noblewomen entered religious orders, particularly cloistered ones. Taking the veil seems to have been an accepted alternative to marriage for these women. Only in very rare instances, however, did a woman of Parisian high society become a nun. Nevertheless, the networks established among mondaines and nuns provided rich support for the expression of lay piety, as they had done in the early seventeenth century.Footnote ³¹ Girls from the nobility and haute bourgeoisie were often educated in convent schools and personal accounts of the experience indicate that ‘they gained an appreciation for the companionship and security of an enclosed, feminine community’.Footnote ³² Colette Cosnier has suggested convincingly that behind adolescent fantasies about permanent entry into a serene cloistered existence lay deep, unacknowledged fears of married life, especially concerning sex. In mature women's memoirs, ‘the convent of childhood, compared to the disappointments of adult life, seems an earthly paradise’.Footnote ³³

Memories of security and happiness at convent school may have made Parisian noblewomen sympathetic toward members of the eighty-one embattled female teaching congregations most bitterly attacked by government. According to one minister's report, female teaching congregations posed the greatest threat to the Republic ‘because women, given their social functions and their daily occupations … are less likely than men to be affected by life's experiences, the impression left by their first education is therefore more lasting and more forceful’. Celibacy, that aspect of the sisters' lifestyle that female adolescents so esteemed, was abhorrent to anticlerical males. They grew ever more obsessed with its unnaturalness as other reasons to justify the disbanding of congregations faded and the need to raise the nation's birth rate remained. Stone writes that in the eyes of republican ministers, nuns ‘took oaths to abstain from the most natural and most important of female responsibilities, the bearing of children’. Under their influence Frenchwomen ‘would be poorly equipped to fulfil their responsibilities as wives, and especially as republican mothers’. Worse, they could be infected with all manner of pathological vice.Footnote ³⁴

In the context of such opposition, how did upper-class women support religious congregations? Mondaines corresponded with senior sisters and monks on religious and charitable projects, and sometimes sustained contact after a project's completion. The baronne de Mackau's founding of the Convent d'Étrapagny with the help of Dominican monks, and the Hôpital de Perpetuel Secours at Levallois Perret run by Augustinian nuns, exemplify such partnerships.Footnote ³⁵

A project undertaken by the comtesse Greffulhe illustrates the inclusion of Parisian clergy in this network. Several clerics frequented the salons of le monde, the most assiduous of them being the abbé Arthur Mugnier, vicar at the Church of Thomas Aquinas and later at the church of Sainte-Clotilde. Known to his parishioners as the ‘apostle of the faubourg’, the abbé was beloved for his wit and was a friend and spiritual adviser to Catholics and non-Catholics alike (he was credited with several conversions).Footnote ³⁶ The abbé's connections were useful to the comtesse Greffulhe when, in September 1909, she needed to find a very wealthy sponsor to fund restoration of the convent and chapel of the Visitation at Annecy. Her primary motivation was personal interest in the life of St François de Sales, whose relics together with those of his female collaborator, Ste Jeanne de Chantal, were displayed in the chapel. The comtesse had been deeply affected by the presence of the relics when she had gone to pray in the chapel following an overnight stay in Annecy with her sister, the princesse de Caraman-Chimay. Speaking with one of the sisters, she had learned that the nuns were threatened with expulsion from the convent by the town council, and she promised to find a sponsor for the restoration. The nuns pinned all their hopes on the success of her efforts. The superior, Eugénie Bérard, wrote to the comtesse: ‘We continue to pray that divine Providence will assist you, and we ask our glorious Saints to reward you.’Footnote ³⁷

Such private, unreported support for religieuses went on amidst press attention to dramatic incidents where Catholic nobles occupied Parisian and provincial churches to protest at government policy of closing down congregations. David Higgs points out that ‘in the history of nineteenth-century Church–state relations nobles had an increasing propensity to support the clericals’, but not all did so from an ultramontane theological position, or indeed from a monarchist political one: ‘It is vain to look for a precise collective “noble” outlook on the policies followed by successive governments toward the church.’Footnote ³⁸ One motivation for charity work had always been recognition in the eyes of the faith. Good deeds, Christians believed, would elicit divine mercy: ‘we ask our glorious Saints to reward you’ assured Sr Bérard. Noble wills in which bequests to the poor are accompanied by bequests for masses for the repose of the soul signify religious belief permeating charitable action.Footnote ³⁹

Records of the princesse Cécile Murat's charity work document her connections with religious congregations and illustrate collaborations between mondaines and nuns to care for children. In February 1900 Sr Marie wrote to the princesse Murat from at the children's refuge, Notre-Dame de Charité, in Versailles requesting that she sponsor three orphaned adolescents, Eugénie, Adrienne and Angéline Lefevre. Offering the princesse these ‘three beautiful pearls’, Sr Marie asked whether the princesse would accept the title of honorary vice-president with her name at the top of the list of dames patronnesses on the fundraising committee. The princesse wrote back, agreeing to sponsor the children (at 360 francs each per year) but declining an active role in fundraising: ‘I would like to be honorary vice-president … but I cannot collect donations, I never do it … I do not have time to occupy myself usefully with the oeuvre – and I confess I do not like to be vice-president and do nothing.’Footnote ⁴⁰

Once or twice a year Sr Marie wrote to inform the princesse on the health and progress of the children, and sometimes to seek assistance in liaising with state officials for their care. In January 1905 Adrienne, who had suffered various types of illness, was hospitalised for rheumatism at the Asile de Versailles. Sr Marie asked the princesse to write to the prefect of Seine-et-Oise requesting the child's entry to the Asile Départmental des Petits-Près, a home for incurably ill girls. The princesse acted on this request and shortly afterward Adrienne was admitted to the Asile at a cost of 400 francs per year, half to be provided by the government and half by the princesse herself (who continued to sponsor all three girls until 1921). Before Adrienne's move, the princesse received a friend or relative's report on the children:

The Lefevre girls were not the only children sponsored by the princesse. She sponsored eleven who were being cared for by the nuns at the École Sainte Élisabeth, two children cared for by those at Châtillon St Bagneaux and one child cared for by the sisters at the École Chrétienne.

There is a symbolic maternalism in mondaines' sponsorship of enfants assistés (orphans and incurable children), and their contribution, with bourgeoises, to the establishment and running of crèches, children's hospitals, orphanages and maternal aid organisations. Whether Catholic mondaines thought of these activities in the terms proposed by Mgr Mermillod – charity as the extension of devotion shown within the family – is not easy to determine from existing documents and no doubt the women's motivations varied. In a letter to her friend Constance Bautte de Fauveau, detailing her acceptance of the presidency of the Oeuvre des Babys de St Ambroise, the baronne de Mackau described her impressions of the children she encountered in the faubourgs: ‘I feel incredible tenderness for all these children … How much could be done in these faubourgs! What a vast field for the exercise of devotion if one had the physical strength to match the situation!’Footnote ⁴² The baronne, steeped as she was in the teachings of the Church as well as being a mother herself, echoes the message of Christian women's duty expounded by Mermillod.

Perhaps not all mondaines were so spiritually motivated. One noble mayor, who published a pamphlet in 1861, had this advice for those who aspired to aristocratic ways: ‘Associate yourself with all the charitable works, you will get to know all the great names from whom charity flows as from a spring … Keep a good table in Paris and in your fine country château, you shall receive all those whom your charitable works shall have introduced you to.’ Whilst the mayor's intention was to encourage contact with exemplary people (the ‘great names’) there is more than a hint that interest in charity was beneficial to one's own social standing. Enfants assistés were a fashionable concern in le monde, with members of the Bonaparte family, including the prince impérial, being among the leading patrons of homes and orphanages.Footnote ⁴³

Networking and promotion were crucial to the success of philanthropy and during the 1880s and 1890s there was concern that the lack of real organisation hampered efforts. Léon Léfébure described private charities as ‘isolated from one another’: ‘[T]hey cannot help each other, nor can they measure their resources. It seems that a wall of China separates them … this isolation augments considerably the overhead costs and diminishes the resources that can be directly employed in the relief of the unfortunate.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Léfébure became the chief founder of the Office Central des Oeuvres de Bienfaisance that opened on 3 June 1896. Located at 175 boulevard Saint-Germain, the office ‘help[ed] charitable persons to find the best remedy for the destitute who solicit them’. Two types of membership were available at different annual rates, 50 francs or 10 francs, and anyone who donated over 500 francs became a membre fondateur. In 1900 the committee office-holders were the marquis de Vogüé (president), M. Georges Pilot and the comte d'Haussonville (vice-presidents), the marquise Costa de Beauregard (president of the dames patronnesses), the comtesse Frignet (vice-president) and the princesse de Broglie-Revel (secretary).Footnote ⁴⁵

The Murat charity records show how the office obtained benefactors and provided them with advice on institutional placements. To its members the office sent out recommendation notes with dryly worded ‘confidential information’ on needy individuals. In February 1904 the princesse accepted on recommendation the case of Madame Marie Rose Triquart. Widowed for three and a half years, Mme Triquart had been left in debt by her husband who had whittled away her dowry through bad business dealings at his Paris furniture store and betting on horses. She had worked as a seamstress, earning sixteen francs per day plus food, but on becoming deaf and developing congestion of the brain lost her source of income and required hospitalisation. The Office suggested that Mme Triquart be admitted to one of the hospitals run by the Soeurs de Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs in the departments of the Somme or Pas-de-Calais where the admission fee was 100 francs and ongoing residential care 300 francs per annum. At the age of sixty the widow was still too young to be a candidate for free admission.Footnote ⁴⁶

Interestingly, recipients of charity were informed of their benefactor's identity when their case was taken up. In a letter addressed to the princesse, Mme Triquart wrote that she had met with the Murats' secretary and been informed of the arrangements made for her hospitalisation at Pas-de-Calais. She expressed fears for her twelve-year-old grandson from whom she did not wish to be separated at such distance, and suggested an alternative institution, La Maison Labrousse at Bagnolet, which she was aware of, but not of the conditions for entry. Mme Triquart's letter, bravely worded as it is, suggests that information did circulate among the working class about the harsh conditions in hospitals and hospices. Food was very basic and some residents were required to work for nominal wages. John Weiss remarks that ‘probably the most severe costs were not physical but psychological: the isolation from friends and even spouses … the surrender of personal effects upon entry, the stigma of the obligatory coarse linen uniform’. Such treatment, Weiss notes, was designed to act as a deterrent destroying any notion that hospitals and hospices were pleasant retirement homes.Footnote ⁴⁷

In many ways the charity records of the Murat resemble those of the comtesse Élisabeth Greffulhe. There are recommendation notes from the office central, correspondence with religious congregations, and receipts for the annual Christmas tree and party that the princesse Cécile provided for children in the parish of the family estate, Rocquencourt. What sets the Murat charity records apart are files relating to bequests made in the name of the princess's deceased grandmother, Madame Cécile-Charlotte Furtado Heine, who was of Jewish origin. These include annual receipts of 1,500 hundred francs paid to the Communauté Israélite de Versailles for prayers at the grave of Mme Furtado Heine, and a 4,000 franc Furtado Heine donation to the Catholic Société de Charité Maternelle.Footnote ⁴⁸ The legacy of Mme Furtado Heine is revealed more fully in records of her charity work in the Murat archives, and they open up the issue of collaboration between mondaines of different faiths.

In December 1896, when Mme Furtado Heine died at the age of seventy-five, Parisians mourned the passing of ‘a woman of great heart’, the ‘high personification of charity’. She had done ambulance work during the Franco-Prussian war; donated her estate at Crosic to the assistance publique; and founded a crèche, a technical trade school for the blind (Mme Furtado Heine was herself blind), a children's hospital and a convalescence home for the military. In 1885, in recognition of a lifetime of charitable activity, she had been appointed officier of the Légion d'honneur; in 1887 she was made chevalier, thus being one of only a handful of women made légionnaires for religious work. For all these humanitarian accomplishments Mme Furtado Heine received widespread admiration, but she also attracted criticism. In Le Gaulois, her charitable intent was ascribed to richesse oblige; money had functioned as a replacement for noble birth. A reporter for La Croix suggested that, ‘If Mme Heine, born a Jew, had been able to do Catholic Works, they would have been far more fertile and precious at the time and for eternity.’Footnote ⁴⁹

Surfacing in these criticisms is resistance to the assimilation of Jews into high society through marriage with nobles. In the United States, the source of some rich brides, Catholicism remained anathema due to old colonial prejudice against the Irish, and there was pronounced antisemitism among the Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper class. American Jewry itself was divided since old immigrant families from western Europe looked down upon new immigrants, and people of Sephardic blood were considered the most aristocratic and cultured.Footnote ⁵⁰

Inter-faith marriage at the level of society from which private philanthropy sprang is something that Lee Shai Weissbach does not mention in his study of the French context in which Franco-Jewish notions of social responsibility developed. Such marriages cast important light upon the question of how values and attitudes were moulded. Here is the duchesse Élisabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre, whose stepmother was a Rothschild, describing some side effects of the charity carried out by her aunt, the baronne Thérèse de Rothschild:

Aunt Thérèse's reputation as a ‘stern daughter of the voice of God’ made her a butt of family jokes. Rather than being a positive influence upon the younger generation she served as a target for mockery.Footnote ⁵¹

Weissbach's study indicates that the French context shaped the mentalité of the Jewish elite in charity work in some important ways. For example, the traditional ideal of tzedakah (the Hebrew term for charity, also meaning justice) is that the donor and recipient of aid should not know one another. The Franco-Jewish elite, however, adopted the established French view that donors and recipients should develop relationships so that the former could exert moral influence. The baronne Thérèse, as her niece describes, received those whom she aided in her home:

The baronne's good deeds went beyond the provision of material handouts, simple charité, to an interactive maternal relationship with the poor in which she, as a well-to-do woman, exerted moral authority.Footnote ⁵²

This drive for moralisation, to break the ‘intimate connection between economic misery and moral depravity’, was the hallmark of bienfaisance and it characterises the private charity work of Jews, Catholics and Protestants as well as government intervention. There were two dominant thrusts to moralisation. One was to correct the environment of the poor in order to eradicate sinfulness, and the other to teach children and adolescents diligent work habits. The aim was to ensure that youth would not replicate the ills of past generations but be transformed instead into upstanding citizens who would benefit society rather than drain resources. Improvements to worker's housing, education, the protection of children and apprentice training were all part of the moralising campaign.Footnote ⁵³

Inspired by common goals, government and private benefactors of different faiths did collaborate on projects for social reform. The founding of the Musée Social in 1894 is one example of how political and religious differences were laid aside, in this instance because the founders shared a common discourse on raising workers' standard of living. The comte de Chambrun, a Catholic monarchist and owner of the Baccarat crystal works, financed the musée, which depended equally for its realisation upon the vision of Jules Siegfried, the minister of commerce and industry and an Alsatian Protestant.Footnote ⁵⁴

Parity of concerns also meant that Catholics, Jews and Protestants set up similar types of organisations separately. Weissbach notes that ‘Catholic religious bodies were the primary sponsors of early sociétés [de patronage]’, but by mid-century ‘the social elites within the French Protestant and Jewish communities had begun their own societies’. Weissbach focuses on societies that promoted apprentice training, an area in which the social Catholic leader, comte Armand de Melun, made pioneering efforts. In 1843 Melun had established the Oeuvre des Apprentis et Jeunes Ouvriers in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. By 1877 this oeuvre had expanded its programme to twenty-eight locations in and around Paris. In the same year a parallel Catholic female organisation, the Oeuvre du Patronage des Jeunes Ouvrières, had facilities in about ninety-three locations. Vocational training bodies established by Protestants and Jews included the Comité de Patronage des Apprentis et des Jeunes Ouvriers de la Confession d'Augsbourg created in 1847, and the Société de Patronage des Apprentis Israélites de Paris created in 1852.Footnote ⁵⁵

The rhetoric in which societies for apprentice training defined their goals was virtually identical regardless of religious affiliation and it repeated long-standing assumptions about the purpose of charity. Motivating the poor to help themselves, by providing employment, was fundamental: ‘the best form of charity is not to give money to the poor person but to permit him to improve his situation through work’, declared the Catholic Oeuvre de Torchon. Societies also professed to play a shepherding role, guiding youths along a healthy moral way and shielding them from the vices of working-class culture. A Jewish society sought ‘to save these urchins from the dangerous promiscuities of the workshop [and] to shelter their eyes and their ears from sights and conversations that may corrupt their hearts and taint their perceptions’. Alexandre Westphal insisted that, ‘the [Protestant] Church comprehends that its responsibility to the indigent classes does not end when a trade has been taught’. Since ‘life is treacherous like an ocean strewn with reefs’ youth patronage functions ‘to light beacons, dredge ports and multiply buoys and lifeboats’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Accounts of Protestant charity activities suggest an element of competition with Catholics, veiled by cooperative sentiment, as well as a distancing from Jewish charity. Declared Westphal:

Several organisations did discriminate along denominational lines. The Asile des Vieillards Protestants sheltered people sixty-five years or older who ‘must be of Protestant faith’. The Orphelinat de Fils received boys aged seven to fifteen years ‘without distinction of cult, but Protestant by preference’ whilst the Orphelinat des Filles took only Protestant girls aged seven to sixteen.Footnote ⁵⁷

Integrated in the Parisian Protestant charity network were Americans, some of who supported the philanthropic tradition alive among the upper class in the United States. In 1883 Miss Atterbury spent several months in Paris where she developed a special interest in the plight of shop girls who she observed were exposed to temptations and difficulties of all sorts. To help them, she founded the Oeuvre en Faveur des Demoiselles de Magasin. On her return to New York she placed direction of the oeuvre in the hands of a committee composed almost exclusively of Frenchwomen and continued to raise funds at home. According to Frank Puaux, the French were able ‘to admire once more the disinterestedness, the generosity, and the languid spirit of our American friends’. The oeuvre offered shopgirls a place to meet during the day where they could find ‘a welcoming tone, moral direction, [and] healthy distractions’. In the early 1890s between forty and fifty girls met in the afternoons to use the library, take courses in English and solfège, and entertain themselves with group book readings and musical soirées.Footnote ⁵⁸

Committee lists for charities provide valuable evidence of collaboration across religious, national and political boundaries. Strikingly, they indicate that a proportion of mondaines from non-Catholic backgrounds were very active in Catholic organisations. On 4 June 1874 the Société de Charité Maternelle staged the first of several annual fundraising events known as fêtes villageoises in the Jardin Besselièvre. On the lists of quêteuses for the fêtes of 1874 and 1875 are Mme Salomon Stern and Mme Louis Cahen, and on the list for 1876 the baronne Gustave de Rothschild appears as well. Women of Jewish origin were generous benefactors and were recognised for long-standing membership. In 1877 Mme Lebaudy was elected dame administrative of the société, and in 1880 members mourned the death of Mme Salomon Stern who in 1865 had been made a dame protectrice for her distinguished service. To honour Mme Stern's memory, her husband made a gift of 1,500 francs for sixteen unfortunate mothers admitted exceptionally to the care of the société according to the wish of the deceased. Other donations made in 1880 included 4,000 francs in the name of Furtado and 6,000 francs in the name of Furtado Heine.Footnote ⁵⁹

Relatives often participated together in activities of the Société de Charité Maternelle, providing further evidence of the cross-generational influence discussed earlier. On 30 April 1885 the société staged a fundraising fête followed by a musical soirée at the Galerie Georges Petit. Mme Louis Cahen and Mme Raphaël Cahen were among the staff on boutique L. The comtesse René de Maupeou, the administrator of boutique M, was helped by the comtesse Léon de Maupeou and the vicomtesse Alfred de Maupeou.Footnote ⁶⁰

Inter-faith collaboration did not always proceed harmoniously: there is evidence of tension and competition in the efforts made to honour the victims of the 1897 Charity Bazaar fire. On the committee for the subscription fund were Mmes de Ganay, Gramont, Greffulhe, Haussonville, L'Aigle, La Rochefoucauld-Doudeauville, Moustier, Pourtalès, Rohan, Rothschild, Uzès and Wagram. The idea of using a portion of the money from the fund to erect a monument or chapel on the site in rue Jean-Goujon was first raised by the comtesse Greffulhe. She suggested 1,000 francs be set aside but her proposal was rejected. The duchesse d'Uzès was in favour of the idea and suggested a more realistic sum of 200,000 francs, although this was still far short of the amount needed to purchase such a valuable block. The duchesse resigned from the committee when her suggestion was not endorsed. At this point two men took the matter up separately. The baron de Zuylen Van Nyvelt Van de Haar wrote a strongly worded letter to Le Figaro expressing his conviction that it was absolutely necessary to have a monument: ‘I consider that society has a sacred debt toward those poor dead women.’ The baron vowed to commit 10,000 francs if other subscribers would add to his contribution. Meanwhile the archbishop of Paris, Mgr Richard, who was also on the committee, issued a public notice saying that he was pursuing acquisition of the block for a monument. Contributions could be directed to his secretary or to local curés. The parish of Saint-Clotilde responded rapidly with donations totalling 430,000 francs.Footnote ⁶¹

Rumours about negotiations for the land sale were rife, for the owners of the block, who had made the building on it available for the bazaar, were M. Michael Heine and his niece, Mme Achille Fould. As speculation mounted about the archbishop's intervention, La Libre Parole mounted a concerted attack on M. Heine. Now that the land had been fertilised by the blood of the fire's victims, said the paper, the Jew could sell it to Catholics and make a tidy sum – it was a ‘truly Jewish’ business. The final arrangements for the land sale remained hidden from the Parisian public. On 6 June Le Figaro referred to Mgr Richard's task being complicated by the rights of the minority co-owner (Mme Fould) and by administrative arrangements made prior to the bazaar, but that M. Heine ‘had proved in this circumstance tactful and willing to oblige’. Three years to the day after the fire, on 4 May 1900, relatives and friends of the victims met to commemorate the opening of the chapel, Notre-Dame de Consolation. The ceremony was led by the abbé Gardey of Saint-Sulpice, and concluded with a prayer read jointly by the duchesse de Mortemart and HRH the duchesse de Vendôme.Footnote ⁶²

Clearly the Catholic majority dominated negotiations over the memorial to victims of the Charity Bazaar fire. How did non-Catholics feel about having a statue of the Virgin Mary peering down at the site where their relatives had been burnt alive? One poignant letter from the baron de Zuylen to the comtesse Greffulhe, after he had learnt about the chapel, speaks volumes: ‘I think it would produce a very bad effect on the public; for the whole block to be devoted to the construction of a Catholic chapel would naturally exclude Protestants, Jews and Greek Orthodox.’Footnote ⁶³

Here then is a very contradictory image to the rousing words of Alexandre Westphal published in 1899: that the solution to religious conflict ‘will be found in charity, or not at all!’Footnote ⁶⁴ Despite the collaborative efforts outlined in this article, charity sometimes pitted people of different faiths and different political outlooks against one another. Catholic benefactors, throughout the period from 1880 to 1914, operated from a hegemonic position and anticlerical republican opposition seems to have strengthened their resolve to support the Church. Was this situation about to change with the outbreak of world war?

From 1914 mondaines' charitable activities expanded as these women transformed their homes into hospitals, visited and raised funds to support the injured, learned to drive ambulances, and contributed in other ways to the war effort.Footnote ⁶⁵ In January 1915, the Protestant feminist Julie Siegfried gave a speech on the progress in women's attitudes since the Franco-Prussian War to the Alliance d'Hygiène Sociale and the Société des Infirmières-Visiteuses, presided over by the marquise de Ganay. The outbreak of world war, Siegfried said, had made women more aware that ‘to be really useful, it was essential that they learn to work with knowledge and method’. If heart was ‘a great force’ it could also be a weakness and the time had come for women's actions to be informed by science (a subtle message that religion was not enough); already women were taking their place near the most eminent surgeons.Footnote ⁶⁶

There was evolution too in regard to social questions:

Siegfried's view of women's role in the rapprochement of the well-to-do and the working class very nearly echoes (but with some important correctives) the writings of Mgr Mermillod: the sublime force of caritas was to spill over from the domestic sphere. Declared Siegfried:

Siegfried addressed her words to well-to-do women many of whom were attracted to the Catholic message espoused by organisations such as the Ligue Patriotique des Françaises (LPF) and the Ligue des Femmes Françaises (LFF). Founded in 1901 and 1902, when the anticlerical campaign was in full cry, by 1914 these organisations had 200,000 and 545,000 members respectively.Footnote ⁶⁹

In the late nineteenth century, and well beyond 1914, Parisian nobles made positive and diverse contributions toward the correction of social problems: from dire poverty among elderly and injured workers to lack of education and training for disadvantaged youth. The charitable practices of noble families served as a durable counterpart to state-funded welfare in France of the Third Republic, one that is wholly necessary to our understanding of the sources of aid. To be sure, at the turn of the century state-funded welfare was becoming better organised, and the public school system was gradually edging out convent school education for girls.Footnote ⁷⁰ For every sign, however, that the Catholic Church would in future be less crucial to the provision of medical attention, education, aged care and other services, there were other signs that the Republic was not yet ready to assume the burden borne by the religious orders.

The work of those orders was made possible through the personal links established between mondaines, clerics, monks and nuns. Further backing derived from aristocrats' presidency of patronage committees and influence on the younger generation. By continuing actively to support the Church in charity work, nobles showed that a democratic political system in France could not erase the centuries-old prestige and power of their families. The social networks of le monde that elite women maintained so assiduously between 1880 and 1914 were not closed in function; rather, they provided a springboard for nobles' social outreach and influence extending far into the twentieth century.