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This article examines the mid-nineteenth century question of l’assistance judiciaire [judicial assistance]. Liberal commentators, jurists, and lawmakers raised questions of enduring significance about balancing the relationship between individual freedom and social order through governmental action. Their conversations had major consequences for what this article calls poor civil outsiders ( étrangers civils), that is, those who were both subject to civil law and excluded from or on the margins of the judicial domain. Civil outsiders thus became the object of new readings that changed the meanings attributed to these individuals estranged from the supposedly democratic realm of justice by their inability to pay court fees. After 1848, reassessing the civil outsider became increasingly important for liberal legislators. By simultaneously emphasizing and obscuring the operation of difference within civil equality, the legal regime of assistance judiciaire, introduced by the law of January 22, 1851 transformed the familiar, dangerous poor into worrisome strangers of an unprecedented sort.