ABSTRACT
The period between 1500 and 1860 can be divided into two time spans: 1500–1750 and 1750–1860. In both, government and voluntary organisations had to decide what to do with children whom parents were unable or unwilling to rear. What distinguished the second period was the scale of the involvement of central governments. At root the problem facing authorities was that children constituted a large percentage of the poor. Families were ‘overburdened’ with children. Between 1500 and 1750 there was a decisive shift from charitable action initiated and controlled by the Church to one where laymen were the dominant force. From the mid-eighteenth century, enlightened absolutists throughout the Continent strove to set up systems of compulsory schooling, though with only limited success. They, or voluntary organisations close to them, were also involved in founding and running foundling hospitals and orphanages, these often justified by the argument that the children from them would turn out to be servants of the state, as soldiers or seamen or factory workers. Hopes for such initiatives were at their height in the early stages of the French Revolution, but even when the tide of opinion changed it proved impossible for governments to disentangle themselves from the enterprises they had encouraged.
