ABSTRACT
Rousseau reveals himself as a complex personality who embodied many of the aspirations and actualities of mid-18th century French society as he delivered contradictory messages via his own life and in his writing. Although he made impassioned arguments against the use of wet nurses for infant feeding, he had his own newborn children taken away from their mother and placed in a foundling hospital. In this chapter, I argue that Rousseau's 1762 exhortation, “let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves…and the state will be repeopled” so resonated with the upper middle class that it created a new, astonishing imagery in French art: actual—rather than imaginary—mothers actively nursing their infants. Rousseau asserted that children learned essential life lessons from their mother's milk, and that breastfeeding taught children how to form emotional ties with others and created their individual identities. Such learning was also fundamental to the stability of the family and to the essential moral well-being of France. Despite the new imagery, most French infants continued to be wet-nursed, resulting in a sustained, staggering rate of infant mortality. “La mère éducatrice”—the ideal mother who nursed and taught her children how to be connected to the rest of the family and to society—remained an aspiration that was infrequently embodied.
