In 1844, while he had been detained in the fort of Ham, in Picardy, since October 1840 for having, at the beginning of the same year, attempted to raise the army against the government of Louis-Philippe, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte published a brochure in Paris entitled Extinction of Pauperism. In this text, the nephew of Napoleon I and future Napoleon III set out a certain number of proposals to reduce to extinction the pauperism which, according to his own expression, struck the "working class". He was not the only one at the time to propose a programme of this type. Faced with the distressing sight of the working class districts of industrial cities, social reformers tried to find a solution that would eliminate what had recently been called "pauperism" in France, but had been known for a longer time in England.