Daily Life in the Old Regime341infanticide. In central and eastern Europe, many mid-
wives were also “killing nurses” who murdered babies
for their parents.
A slightly more humane reaction to unwanted ba-
bies was to abandon them in public places in the hope
that someone else would care for them. That happened
so often that cities established hospitals for foundlings.
The practice had begun at Rome in the late Middle
Ages when Pope Innocent III found that he could sel-
dom cross the Tiber River without seeing babies thrown
into it. Paris established its foundling hospital in 1670.
Thomas Coram opened the foundling hospital at Lon-
don in 1739 because he could not endure the frequency
with which he saw dying babies lying in the gutters and
dead ones thrown onto dung-heaps. The London
Foundling Hospital could scarcely handle all of the
city’s abandoned babies: In 1758, twenty-three hundred
foundlings (under age one) were found abandoned in
the streets of London. Abandonment increased in peri-
ods of famine and when the illegitimate birthrate rose
(as it did during the eighteenth century). French data
show that the famine of 1693–94 doubled the aban-
donment of children at Paris and tripled it at Lyon.
Abandonments at Paris grew to an annual average of
five thousand in the late eighteenth century, with a
peak of 7,676 in 1772, which is a rate of twenty-one
babies abandoned every day. Studies of foundlings in
Italy have shown that 11 percent to 15 percent of all
babies born at Milan between 1700 and 1729 were
abandoned each year; at Venice, the figures ranged be-
tween 8 percent and 9 percent in 1756–87 (see illustra-
tion 18.4).
The abandonment of children at this rate over-
whelmed the ability of church or state to help. With
390,000 abandonments at the Foundling Hospital of
Paris between 1640 and 1789—with thirty abandon-
ments on the single night of April 20, 1720—the
prospects for these children were bleak. Finances were
inadequate, partly because churches feared that fine fa-
cilities might encourage illicit sexuality, so the condi-
tions in foundling homes stayed grim. Whereas 50
percent of the general population survived childhood,
only 10 percent of abandoned children reached age
ten. The infant (before age one) death rates for
foundling homes in the late eighteenth century were 90
percent in Dublin, 80 percent in Paris, and only 52 per-
cent in London (where infants were farmed out to wet
nurses). Of 37,600 children admitted to the Foundling
Hospital of Moscow between 1766 and 1786, more
than thirty thousand died. The prospects of the sur-
vivors were poor, but one noteworthy exception was
Jean d’Alembert, a mathematician and coeditor of the
Encyclopédie, who was discovered in a pine box at a
Parisian church in 1717.
Young children were often separated from their
parents for long periods of time. Immediately after
birth, many were sent to wet nurses, foster mothers
whose occupation was the breast feeding of infants.
The studies of France show that more than 95 percent
of the babies born in Paris in 1780 were nursed com-
mercially, 75 percent going to wet nurses in theIllustration 18.4
Abandoned Children.One of the most common forms of
population control in the eighteenth century (and continuing
through the nineteenth century) was the abandonment of new-
born children. Because so many babies were left at churches and
public buildings, and a shocking number were left to die out-
doors, governments created foundling homes where babies could
be abandoned. To encourage mothers to use foundling homes,
many of them (such as this one in Italy) built revolving doors to
the outside, allowing women to leave a baby without being seen
or speaking to anyone.