The aim of this contribution is to describe the Parisian charitable world in the Belle Époque period. For this purpose, we rely on two charity directories, namely Paris charitable et prévoyant (1897) and the Manuel des œuvres (1900). A network analysis based on these two sources allows us to proceed to an empirical observation of this world. This observation contrasts with the official representation of charity as it was represented in the 1900 Assistance Congress. The network analysis allows us to identify an institutional core, which included the major and expected charitable organisations that took part in the congress. But this core also included Catholic charitable organisations and female congregations, which did not take part in the Congress. A “bottom-up” description of the whole charity world shows that it was highly fragmented into hundreds of small-size charitable organisations, devoted to local causes and to a limited population, relying on independent initiatives and competing with each other. However, the most central organisations were interlinked through Catholic congregations, which were working for Church charities as well as for secular ones. A number of people having different origins, trajectories and denominational affiliations but forming a “reform galaxy” were also connecting these organisations. The picture shows eventually how the factions who were divided by the Dreyfus Affair and the dispute over the separation of Church and State were cooperating in charity work.