The instrumentalization of the poor in the French novel of the Enlightenment

With a humanist pretext, the authorities who had assumed responsibility for the poor established a system that gave them a predefined role, condemning them to permanent and total dependence. Because of their lack of financial means, the poor would appear easy to manipulate. As simple tools in the hands of the rich, as foils, as guinea pigs, when they are not mutilated by their fellow man, the poor appear dehumanized, even denatured, in the novelistic universe of the eighteenth century.