This chapter focuses on the emergence of industrial pauperism in France during the first half of the 19th century. It explores the liberal elites’ first responses to the spread of new forms of exclusion and deprivation which were determined by the advent of the industrial regime. Hence, it retraces the rise of unprecedented activities of social investigation that focused on the subaltern classes in an effort to develop a scientific understanding of the problem of pauperism. The aim of the chapter is to describe the way in which these investigations progressively brought the issue of wage labour into focus as an object of scientific knowledge and administration, and as a pivot to develop strategies for governing the ‘social question’. To exemplify this process, the chapter considers the work of Louis-René Villermé, a social research pioneer who conducted the first inquiry on labour in European history.