Fictive Kinship: Wards and Foster-Parents in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

From the days of Saint Vincent de Paul in the 1630s to the mid-twentieth century, French foundlings, poor orphans and abandoned children were sent to the countryside, where they were fostered with peasant families. Each French département had its own Assistance publique (the bureaucracy in charge of abandoned children) and placed its wards with local foster-families. Children abandoned in Paris were scattered throughout the French territory and entrusted to a foster agency managed by a director. This minor official, the wards’ legal guardian, was charged with selecting the foster-parents and visiting the children four times a year. Rural fostering was codified by legislation. Under the laws of 20 March 1797 (30 ventôse an V, in the republican calendar) and of 27 June 1904, wards under the age of 13 had to be fostered with ‘families living in the countryside’.¹ In exchange for a state stipend, foster-parents had to nurture and raise the Assistance publique children. After their thirteenth birthday, the children were hired out to farmers to earn their living. Were foster-households nothing but a transient and painful interlude, or could they replace the care of the missing parents?