Just this month, President Duterte of the Philippines instructed that idle people loitering on the streets and street children who sleep by the roadside by rounded up and incarcerated[1]. As a “father of the nation” (parenspatriae principle), he said he has the power to drive people off the streets or be arrested. His intention was seemingly good: to keep the streets safe for all citizens. But what if people have no houses to go to or what if the shanties they own are so congested that the only available space for another dweller is the streets?
This government program is not new. The patron saint of charity, Vincent de Paul, was confronted with the same dilemma in Paris of 1656. We might get some inspiration from him as to how to respond to this phenomenon in our times[2].
The Great Confinement
This was the project of the General Hospital that the great philosopher of our times, Michel Foucault also writes about in Madness and Civilization. The royal edict of April 27, 1656 sought to prohibit begging and idleness which were viewed as social ills of the city. About ten buildings throughout Paris were allotted for this project: La Salpêtrière, La Pitié, Le Refuge, La Scipion, La Savonnerie, Bicêtre, etc. Groups were organized to round up beggars and bring them to any of these institutions. Edicts of the subsequent years prohibited begging all throughout the city “under the pain of being whipped for the first offense, and for the second, condemned to the galleys if men and boys, and banished if women and girls[3].” This is what Foucault calls the “Great Confinement”.
The General Hospital was not a medical institution but a police institution. It was a semi-judicial structure with “quasi-absolute sovereignty, jurisdiction without appeal. The Hôpital Général was a strange power that the King established between the police and the courts and represented a third order of repression. The directors of this program had administrative, police, corrective and penal powers over all of the poor in Paris — both inside and outside the General Hospital. They had access to “stakes, irons, prisons, and dungeons” inside the hospital in order to fulfill their mission. It was noted that within a few years after the edict was issued, the General Hospital already housed 6000 persons … approximately 1% of the total population.
What was St. Vincent’s involvement in this project? In 1653, years before the royal edict, the Ladies of Charity, all aristocratic influential women, presented Vincent de Paul with a way to organize all the beggars of the city. They wanted Vincent to undertake that ministry because he was well-known for initiating such works. They assured him that they would provide him with sufficient funds for the project.
Discerning Slowness
But Vincent did not rush into the project … he wanted time for more discernment: The works of God,” he counseled, “come into being little by little, by degrees, and progressively.[4]” He was always heard to say: Do not rush ahead of divine providence.
The Ladies of Charity were quite upset by his slowness. The Ladies envisioned a large project that would force beggars to abandon their life on the streets. Vincent, however, wanted to accept only those persons who came to him voluntarily … force was not to be used to bring people into compliance. “If we use force, he said, we could be going against God’s will.”[5]
As the Ladies were waiting for Vincent to come to a decision, the Royal Edict was promulgated. The enforcement of the Edict was entrusted to the men assigned to that position by the Parlement. It was to Vincent’s great relief that the enforcement was not given to him and the members of his community. In a very real way his process of discernment prevented him from undertaking a work that he felt was repressive.
Within the Vincentian spiritual tradition, Vincent’s slowness has always been interpreted as a sign of his sensitivity to the voice of Providence. In this specific context, it also proved to be an ingenious and cunning tactic that enabled him to resist an overarching dominant power.
Direct Confrontation and Oblique Resistance
Photo by kamalayan Tropang Bilog
Vincent de Paul, despite his friendship with the King and his Ministers, was able to confront them and speak to them directly about the sufferings that the poor were forced to endure. During the War of the Fronde, for instance, he personally took Cardinal Mazarin, the Queen’s Prime Minister, to task: Your Eminence,” he said, sacrifice yourself. Withdraw from the country to save France. Throw yourself into the sea to appease the storm.”[6] After having said that, the following week he lost his seat on the Council of Conscience.
Vincent also tried other ways. Despite institutional warnings not to feed the beggars so that they might finally agree to be locked up, Vincent de Paul continued his soup kitchen, feeding them, helping the poor in various ways, protecting them from the violent impact of the government’s wars and politico-economic policies.
While official propaganda praised the Great Confinement as the “greatest charitable enterprise of the century,” Vincent consciously distanced himself from it through what I call oblique resistance– a tactic available to the weak when confronted with a stronger power. While the King and his followers wanted to eliminate this social eyesore through superficial window-dressing (confining and imprisoning the poor), St. Vincent did all he could to respond to the deeper causes of people’s misery and thus mitigate its impact on their lives.
Michel Foucault viewed Vincent’s care of the poor at St. Lazare as part of the royal project of the Great Confinement. His structural analysis of history might be helpful in understanding the greater dynamics at work in hegemonic politics, but as we saw above, it was unable to perceive the oblique resistances present in the everyday life and decisions of actual persons on the ground, people like the simple country priest named Vincent de Paul.
By: Daniel Franklin Pilario, C.M.
St. Vincent School of Theology
Adamson University
danielfranklinpilario@yahoo.com
Edited: Charles Plock, CM
Eastern Province
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[1]Cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcQsjdvot1Y
[2]This reflection is mainly based on my longer article entitled “Vincent de Paul in the Court: Responding to the Politics of Power,” Vincentiana (July – August, 2008), 294-314.
[3]Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: New Pantheon, 1965), 49.
[4]Pierre Coste, The Life and Works of Vincent de Paul, Vol. 3 (Westminster, Maryland: Newmann Press, 1952), 302.
[5]Jose Maria Roman, St. Vincent de Paul: A Biography (London: Milesende, 1999), 637.
[6]Jose Maria Roman, St. Vincent de Paul: A Biography (London: Milesende, 1999), 637.
