ABSTRACT
Agen was the seat of an average-size French diocese and several tiers of criminal and civil tribunals alongside a score of monastic communities. The records of four urban and two suburban parishes are largely complete for the second half of the seventeenth century and beyond. Each of the urban parishes was socially distinct, however, and in the most “aristocratic” of the four, Saint-Etienne, commoners baptised too many girls, almost 20 percent more than in the poorest parish. Alongside annual variations in the sex ratio, which show the typical peaks in favour of boys in the aftermath of crises, we note here a distinct preference for boys in the upper classes too. The establishment of a general hospital for foundlings at the end of the seventeenth century helped the city adapt to a growing tendency towards the abandonment of illegitimate newborns of both sexes.
