ABSTRACT
The endemic early modern warfare had many consequences for children and their work, while communities pressed or ruined by wars must have provided a barren soil for any new sensitivity to children. In many parts of Europe the number of poor had increased since the sixteenth century, a process that has been connected with structural changes in the labour market, unemployment, a long-term decline in real wages, and population growth. This chapter describes how the new policy was implemented with regard to children. It starts with France, and proceeds roughly in the order in which the new doctrine spread in Europe, ending with the late ancien regime German and French charitable institutions, which were rather like manufactories. It discusses the process in which formal education or schooling became established as elite and bourgeois breeding grounds for social distinction and upward social mobility.
