How does St. Vincent deal with absolute power? If the dominant force is so powerful, how do we deal with it? In the previous article, we showed that St. Vincent did not hesitate to confront power head-on. He used all his cultural and religious capital to challenge absolute power. This carried personal risks. But he also employed other ways to protect the poor. One of them is what I call “oblique resistance” or, to use Gandhi’s term, active nonviolence.
“Non-violence,” Gandhi writes, “is an active force of the highest order. It is soul force or the power of Godhead within us.”
St. Vincent de Paul once said: “If we use force, we could be going against God’s will.”
The Great Confinement
The Royal Edict of April 27, 1656, sought to prohibit begging and idleness, which were viewed as social ills in the city. Around 10 buildings throughout Paris were designated for this purpose: La Salpêtrière, La Pitié, Le Refuge, La Scipion, La Savonnerie, Bicêtre and others. This became known as the Paris Hôpital Général, or General Hospital, project.
The “archers of the hospital,” a type of police force for the poor, were organized to round up beggars and bring them to these institutions. Subsequent edicts prohibited begging 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.”
This is what Michel Foucault calls the “Great Confinement.”
The General Hospital was not a medical institution but a policing institution. It was a semi-judicial structure with “quasi-absolute sovereignty, jurisdiction without appeal, a writ of execution against which nothing can prevail — the Hôpital Général is a strange power that the King establishes between the police and the courts, at the limits of the law: a third order of repression.”
The directors for life possessed administrative, police, corrective and penal powers over all the poor in Paris, both inside and outside the General Hospital. They had access to “stakes, irons, prisons, and dungeons” within the hospital to carry out their mission.
Within a few years of the edict’s issuance, the General Hospital housed 6,000 people, about 1% of the city’s total population.
What was Vincent’s involvement in this project?
Years before the Royal Edict, in 1653, the Ladies of Charity, influential aristocratic women, presented Vincent with the idea of organizing all the beggars in the city. They wanted him to undertake the work because he was already well-known for institutions of this kind. They assured him that sufficient funding was available. Even La Salpêtrière had been given by the queen for their use.
But Vincent tempered their haste. He wanted them to discern further.
“The works of God,” he counseled, “come into being little by little, by degrees, and progressively.”
The Ladies were annoyed by his slowness. But this may have been his way of circumventing something he disliked in the proposal: the use of coercion and force.
The Ladies wanted the project on a large scale, which required compelling beggars to enter. Vincent wanted to accept only those who came voluntarily. Force should not be used to bring them in.
“If we use force,” he said, “we could be going against God’s will.”
While the Ladies were still discerning, the Royal Edict was issued and promulgated. The work instead went to the men assigned by the Parlement, operating under the conditions that Foucault described above.
Rethinking obedience to Divine Providence
It was a great relief to Vincent that the work was not entrusted to him or his community.
In a sense, his deliberate slowness prevented him from undertaking a project he believed was repressive. That same slowness served as a skillful delaying tactic. At the same time, it helped him avoid a possible clash with his longtime collaborators in the Ladies of Charity, especially the Duchesse d’Aiguillon, who was determined to pursue the project.
As we might say today, he achieved two objectives at once.
Within the Vincentian spiritual tradition, Vincent’s slowness has often been interpreted as a sign of his sensitivity and obedience to Divine Providence. He frequently advised his followers “not to go ahead of divine providence.”
But in this particular context, it also appears to have been an ingenious tactic of oblique resistance to overwhelming power.
Vincent’s difficulties were not yet over.
Not long after the Great Confinement began, he learned that the royal decree stipulated that priests of the Congregation of the Mission would serve as chaplains. About 20 priests were requested.
How could Vincent defy the king?
He met with his community and declined the request, citing “its many community commitments.”
That may sound like a weak excuse. If Vincent had been convinced of the project’s value, he could have reassigned personnel, as he did with other initiatives, including the Madagascar mission.
Yet even as Vincent refused the king’s wishes, he adopted measures that appeared, on the surface, to conform to the royal program. Perhaps this was done to avoid appearing openly defiant before such immense power.
First, he recommended other priests who might be available for the work. One of them was Louis Abelly, who served there for only five months.
Second, he suspended the soup kitchen at Saint-Lazare in deference to the program.
One day, a beggar confronted Vincent at the door of Saint-Lazare.
“Father, did not God command that alms be given to the poor?”
“That’s quite true, my friend,” Vincent replied, “but he also commanded us to obey the magistrates.”
Traditional interpretations see this exchange as an example of Vincent’s unconditional obedience to authority. But given the context, I can almost see the sarcasm on his face or a wink in his eye as he spoke those words. Soon afterward, Saint-Lazare resumed the distribution of soup and bread.
Vincent remained unconvinced that the poor should be incarcerated, nor did he believe that begging, a work of mercy deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, should be completely abolished.
One day, another beggar told him:
“Father, everyone in Paris is abusing you because they think you are the cause of the poor people being shut up in the big hospital.”
“Oh, very well,” Vincent replied, “I will pray for them.”
Oblique resistance
While official propaganda praised the Great Confinement as the “greatest charitable enterprise of the century,” Vincent consciously distanced himself from it, not through open defiance but through what I call “oblique resistance,” a tactic available to those facing overwhelming power.
While the court sought to eliminate social eyesores through the superficial window-dressing of confinement, Vincent worked to address the deeper causes of poverty and misery while mitigating the policy’s effects on people’s lives.
Foucault’s structural analysis of history may help us understand the broader dynamics of hegemonic politics, but it struggles to perceive the forms of resistance present in the everyday decisions of actual people. In this case, that person was Vincent de Paul.
A late 19th-century author, Boudignon, described Vincent in this way:
“We may compare him to that remarkable mechanical invention known as the screw. It works its way through without fret or noise; it does not split or spoil the material, but slowly, peacefully, progressively and steadily bores through wood, stone or even steel, for nothing can hinder its progress.”
Mahatma Gandhi is quoted as saying:
“The first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating … when it becomes active, travels with extraordinary velocity, and then it becomes a miracle.”
Father Daniel Franklin Pilario, C.M., is the President of Adamson University in Manila. He is a theologian, professor, and pastor of an urban poor community on the outskirts of the Philippine capital. He is also the Vincentian Chair for Social Justice at St. John’s University in New York.
