Nancy Fitch is Associate Professor of History at
Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass. 01002. She is
completing a study on the transition from feudal
ism to capitalism in central France.
ABSTRACT:
By the end of the nineteenth century, thousands of households in the
Allier supplemented family income by raising Parisian foundlings for the Bureau of
Public Assistance. The article surveys the developments that led to this situation and
the institutions that facilitated it; and argues that the "migration" of these children to
the countryside helped to produce a social transformation comparable in scope to
that which resulted from rural exodus elsewhere. Economic change in the Allier had
brought about acute shortages of male labor and this, combined with the
underemployment of women, made mercenary motherhood an attractive source of
additional labor and income. Mercenary motherhood meant something entirely
different for peasant and artisanal women than it did for agricultural day laborers or
sharecroppers. Economically, there can be little doubt that the presence of foundlings
enabled landlords to accumulate capital in the early stages of agricultural
development by allowing them to make labor-intensive agricultural improvements
whileforcing the cost of labor onto the French government.
