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Though its extent might vary with current economic trends, poverty was a constant state. It is hard to define since material expectations vary among generations, social groups, and countries. If those with sufficient land or a wage large enough to allow for the replacement of tools and stock are held to be above the poverty line, then at least a quarter of Europe’s inhabitants were below it. They were the bas peuple whom the French engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban observed in the 1690s, “three-fourths of them…dressed in nothing but half-rotting, tattered linen”; a century later the philosopher the ...(100 of 156573 words)