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1. “Moses Saved from the Waters” The Origins of the Society for Maternal Charity When the members of the Society for Maternal Charity met in assembly on February 13, 1789, they set lofty goals for their organization, notably to “Save the life and l’état for a multitude of citizens sacrificed to extreme poverty; restore morality in indigent families; spare them from a crime; attach a prize to the observation of their duties.”1 The society thus took on one of the most pressing problems in Ancien Régime France: the ever-growing number of foundlings, abandoned due to poverty. The problem of foundlings and abandoned children was an old one in France. Since the twelfth century, various charitable individuals had taken steps to care for abandoned children. Saint Vincent de Paul took up the cause in the seventeenth century and focused attention on the Hôpital des Enfants Trouvés (Foundling Hospital) in Paris. In 1670 the Hôpital des Enfants Trouv és was incorporated into the central organization of the Hôpital Général de Paris, which brought the problem of foundlings and abandoned children under the control of the state, although the Foundling Hospital was still administered with the help of private charity.2 The state assumption of control over the Enfants Trouvés coincided with a dramatic increase in the number of admissions to the Maison de la Couche, the facility of the hospital that accepted infants not yet weaned. In fact, over the next century, the number of children admitted increased almost twenty-five-fold, from 312 admissions in 1670 to a high of 7,676 in 1772, although the number admitted per year stabilized at approximately 5,800 for the remainder of the Ancien Régime.3 The sheer numbers, as well as the expense of these abandoned children, excited concern over the course of the eighteenth century, especially among those who recognized the high death rates among those infants admitted.4 30 chapter 1 The difficulty in procuring wet nurses for foundlings contributed to their catastrophic mortality rate. In the last six months of 1781, 85.7 percent of newborns admitted to the foundling hospice died before their first birthday and 92.1 percent died before they turned eight years old.5 However, even more shocking to many was the high proportion of legitimate children abandoned by their parents at the Foundling Hospital, which had been conceived as a place for unwed mothers to abandon the unwanted fruit of their sin. This fact was brought to public attention in the treatise L’administration des finances, written by Louis XVI’s director general of finances, Jacques Necker, in 1784. In it, he deplored the high number of children exposed each year and suggested that “One cannot but feel distress in observing that the increase in care by the government diminishes the remorse of the parents and increases each day the number of abandoned children.” He noted further that “His Majesty has noticed . . . with regret that the majority come from legitimate relationships.”6 Both the king and Necker were mistaken. While it appears that the proportion of legitimate children left at the Foundling Hospital was on the rise in the eighteenth century, most historians agree that it was no more than one-third.7 Still, to most observers, even this proportion was unacceptable, since the abandoned child faced not only a high risk of death in infancy, but also lost his or her état, knowledge of parents and status. Foundlings and abandoned children were presumed illegitimate; the traditional antipathy toward “bastards” as both depraved and a burden led some to consider this loss of status to be as damaging as the loss of a loving mother and father.8 But those worried about child abandonment increasingly emphasized the loss of a mother’s nurture, as well as her milk. Yvonne Knibiehler and Catherine Fouquet point out that while “Maternal love has always existed,” philosophers, doctors, and statesman increasingly focused their attention on the function of mothers after 1750.9 Among the philosophes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in particular idealized the image of the loving mother in his two best-sellers, the popular novel La nouvelle Héloïse and his treatise on education , Émile. As the mother’s care was deemed essential to the well-being of the child, the behavior of the mother and the nature of true motherhood came under increasing scrutiny.10 The poor mother and her nursling aroused the interest of...

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