ABSTRACT
In the mid-eighteenth century, threatened by overpopulation, the Foundling Hospital of Paris had to react. The administrators were considering reforming the practice of returning weaned children, who had grown up in a nurse’s home for five years, to Paris. They decided to entrust these children to volunteer families to raise and keep them in the countryside. This paper focuses on the development and challenges of this important reform for the children and the hospital. Moreover, one wonders if, beyond financial considerations which often dictated foundling politics, the administrators were not also thinking of the children’s needs with this reform.
