Naitre rien: Des orphelins de Duplessis, de la creche a l'asile (review)

This anthropological study of social exclusion is based on the life histories of fifteen 'orphans' of French-speaking Quebec. Born out of wedlock or abandoned by their mothers, wards of the state under the virtual tutorship of religious communities, untouched for the most part by the laws of compulsory schooling and child labour, they shared a fate of transfers between Catholic institutions, placements in families, jails, and working placements, with the psychiatric hospital as a terminal, despite the fact that they experienced no mental illness. Left to their own devices after the government of the province emptied mental asylums in the mid-sixties, they came to the attention of Rose Dufour when she was conducting interviews for a study on homelessness.

Since their appearance on a popular television show in 1989, revelations of their extreme circumstances, discussions about the responsibility for their abuses, the question of reparations, and the problem of changing social values about illegitimacy and the entitlements of dependent children, all have been at the forefront of the news in the province. Historians have started to tackle this sensitive question, the Bulletin d'histoire politique devoting a special issue to the topic in 1999, Marie-Paule Malouin publishing a monograph about institutional practices for 'children in difficulty' between 1940 and 1960, and the economists Martin Poirier and Léo-Paul Lauzon assembling a report on the economy of religious charities.

Naître rien investigates the nature of the relationship between these men and their society, at all stages of their lives, to explain what beliefs and practices made their paths possible. The first part of the book reads as a collection of individual oral histories. Dufour complements these data with portraits of institutions drawn from the Bédard report on psychiatric hospitals commissioned in 1962 by the Quebec Department of Health, field studies conducted by social workers of the time, and a handful of interviews with nuns and social workers. The second part of the study analyses the accounts, with the help of the anthropology of family life - the domain of specialization of her collaborator, Brigitte Garneau. Her own work about members of religious communities and young homeless people serves as a useful reference. The main themes are the attribution of names and the logic of the transitions between places of living.

A portrait of survival in conditions of severe deprivation and exploitation emerges, which signals the resilience of children as well as the consequences of the lack of social relations and of education. Their inability to perform the basic tasks related to personal hygiene and feeding compromised their future lives irredeemably. The tools of anthropology are used best to depict the symbolic world of the orphans, showing how the absence of the rituals of birthdays and Christian celebrations taxed their identity, or how a thorough system of attribution of unusual names jeopardized later experiences.

The orphans' tales depicts the contributions, and the severe limitations, of institutions of care and of placement run by religious communities, condoned by the provincial and municipal authorities, with the assistance of doctors and police officers, in the immediate aftermath of the war. The study of individuals so little protected sheds light on the darkest zones of immunity, where humans can be treated as chattel, rejected for a physical 'defect' or used as the object of perversions. The fifteen testimonies recall the stories of many young inmates who did not survive, those who preferred suicide, were murdered, or lost their minds.

The physical, emotional, and spiritual elements of support - all received most intermittently - were dependent on the arbitrariness of adults' attention. In her conclusion, Dufour recognizes a series of elements necessary for this support to lead either to a better treatment in the institution, or to some small measure of social or family inclusion. The violence was the harshest when a nun in authority gave licence to lay wardens to punish a child. A...