ABSTRACT
In February 1901 les Remplaçantes, a play about wet-nurses by Eugène Brieux, began a successful run at the Antoine theater in Paris; in eight editions by 1907, the play also enjoyed a considerable success with the reading public.3 The hero of the play is Dr Richon, an old country doctor, who receives Dr Tirelle, a Parisian physician visiting the sticks in order to examine a wet-nurse before she is hired to suckle the baby of a Parisienne. Richon does not allow his patient-mothers to give their babies the bottle. In that at least, he and the bourgeoises of Paris are in agreement. Breastfeeding is in fashion. (The medical view was that well-off society women in France were not in the habit of breastfeeding.4) Of course it is not possible for a Parisian woman to be shut up for a year because “an unfortunate accident made her a mother.” So wet-nurses are in demand, preferably unmarried mothers, for they are cheaper and unencumbered. Nearly all the women from Richon’s village go to Paris as wet-nurses: the area is “maintained by the misery and vice of Paris.” The nursing activity brings in money and venereal disease. When Richon gets invited to a Paris salon to entertain the natives, the tables get turned as he denounces the system that draws wet-nurses from the countryside, thus leaving the rural cemeteries full of babies who had to be given the bottle because their mothers were suckling les petits parisiens. (The death of the wetnurse’s baby is a key event in the fine film La Ravisseuse, 2005.) A bureaucracy was responsible for running the system: a bureau de placement required wetnurses to bring their babies to Paris for scrutiny and then sent the babies back to ignorant relatives. The country doctor gives the Parisian women something other than the social scene to think about.
