Frances Gouda examines the different rhetorical approaches to poverty, charity, and social welfare embraced by intellectuals and policy-makers in the Netherlands and France in the period 1815-1854. She explores the different discourses in Holland and France about the revolutionary threat implicit in working-class poverty. By analysing the ways in which both politicians and social critics either embellished or criticized the unreliable statistics on poverty and criminality complied in the nineteenth century, Gouda explores the differences in Dutch and French perspectives on responsibility, the role of the church and state, and ideas about civil society.