340Chapter 18
by using large forceps saved many lives but often pro-
duced horrifying injuries to the newborn or hemor-
rhaging in the mother. A delicate balance thus existed
between the deep pride in bearing children and a deep
fear of doing so. One of the most noted women of let-
ters in early modern Europe, Madame de Sévigné, ad-
vised her daughter of two rules for survival: “Don’t get
pregnant and don’t catch smallpox.”
The established churches, backed by the medical
profession, preached acceptance of the pain of child-
birth by teaching that it represented the divine will.
The explanation lay in the Bible. For “the sin of Eve” in
succumbing to Satan and being “the devil’s gateway” to
Adam, God punished all women with the words: “I will
greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sor-
row thou shalt bring forth children” (Gen. 3:16). Even
when the means to diminish the pain of childbirth be-
came available, this argument sustained opposition
to it.
The Life Cycle: Infancy and Childhood
Statistics show that surviving the first year of infancy
was more difficult than surviving birth. All across Eu-
rope, between 20 percent and 30 percent of the babies
born died before their first birthday (see table 18.5). An
additional one-fourth of all children did not live to be
eight, meaning that approximately half of the popula-
tion died in infancy or early childhood. A noted scien-
tist of the 1760s, Michael Lomonosev, calculated that
half of the infants born in Russia died before the age of
three. So frightful was this toll that many families did
not name a child until its first birthday; others gave a
cherished family name to more than one child in the
hope that one of them would carry it to adulthood. Jo-
hann Sebastian Bach fathered twenty children in two
marriages and reckoned himself fortunate that ten lived
into adulthood. The greatest historian of the century,
Edward Gibbon, was the only child of seven in his fam-
ily to survive infancy.
The newborn were acutely vulnerable to the bio-
logical old regime. Intestinal infections killed many in
the first months. Unheated housing claimed more. Epi-
demic diseases killed more infants and young children
than adults because some diseases, such as measles and
smallpox, left surviving adults immune to them. The
dangers touched all social classes. Madame de Montes-
pan, the mistress of King Louis XIV of France, had
seven children with him; three were born crippled or
deformed, three others died in childhood, and one
reached adulthood in good health.
Eighteenth-century parents commonly killed un-
wanted infants (daughters more often than sons) before
diseases did. Infanticide—frequently by smothering
the baby, usually by abandoning an infant to the
elements—has a long history in Western culture. The
mythical founders of Rome depicted on many emblems
of that city, Romulus and Remus, were abandoned in-
fants who were raised by a wolf; the newborn Moses
was abandoned to his fate on the Nile. Infanticide did
not constitute murder in eighteenth-century British law
(it was manslaughter) if done by the mother before the
baby reached age one. In France, however, where infan-
ticide was more common, Louis XIV ordered capital
punishment for it, although few mothers were ever exe-
cuted. The frequency of infanticide provoked instruc-
tions that all priests read the law in church in 1707 and
again in 1731. A study of police records has found that
more than 10 percent of all women arrested in Paris in
the eighteenth century were nonetheless charged withPercentages represent deaths before the first birthday;
they do not include stillbirths.
Percentage of
Country Period deaths before age 1
England pre-1750 18.7
1740–90 16.1
1780–1820 12.2
France pre-1750 25.2
1740–90 21.3
1780–1820 19.5
German states pre-1750 15.4
1740–90 38.8
1780–1820 23.6
Spain pre-1750 28.1
1740–90 27.3
1780–1820 22.0
Sweden pre-1750 n.a.
1740–90 22.5
1780–1820 18.7
United States 1995 0.8
Source: European data from Michael W. Flinn,The European Demo-
graphic System, 1500–1820(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1971), p.92; U.S. data from The World Almanac and Book of
Facts, 1997(Mahwah, N.J.: World Almanac Books, 1996), p. 962.
n.a. Not available.TABLE 18.5Infant Mortality in the Eighteenth Century