‘A dead letter in the hands of local authorities’? implementing public health legislation in French provincial cities, 1850-60

This chapter explores the concept of ‘negotiated settlement’ between state bureaucrats and local authorities when implementing public health legislation in mid-century France. Using the 13 April 1850 law on unhealthy dwellings as a case study, the chapter challenges contemporary and historical assumptions that successes and failures of national legislation at the local level depended solely upon local engagement or disengagement. Instead, by focusing on two French departments with pressing urban working-class housing issues – the Nord and the Rhône – this chapter reveals the complicated relationship between the French regional administrators (prefects) and municipal agents and experts in both the Second Republic (1848-52) and Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852-70). Through a close analysis of the different level of activity in these departments across the first decade of the housing legislation’s existence, this chapter refocuses our understanding of the mid-century revolution in government: this revolution relied as much on engaged individual regional bureaucrats as much as it did on local dynamism. Success came when state priorities and local concerns aligned through negotiation between individual prefects and municipal authorities, whereas limitations and failures were as much the fault of disinterested or uninformed prefects as they were of local authorities.