Should abandoned children be baptised?

During the Ancien Regime, all abandoned children had to be baptised into the Catholic faith, a norm accepted by both the royal State and the Church. The French Revolution and, subsequently, the Concordat of 1801 established a secular, civil state, leading to the legal recognition of other religious faiths. This transformation necessitated the adjustment of regulations and practices relating to the baptism of abandoned children. The push for secularisation under the Third Republic was reflected in a scrupulous respect for the religious heritage of a child’s family. In 1905, the law which separated the Church from the State radicalised this process: the religious identity of the child was no longer considered to be the administration’s concern.