Nobody's children?
Enlightenment foundlings, identity and individual rights
Catriona Seth
Summary
Many factors were responsible for the considerable surge in abandoned children in Europe in the eighteenth century. Archive holdings in France, in particular in major provincial towns, contain numerous surviving notes and tokens left with them: playing cards, ribbons, bracelets, coins etc. These moving papers and objects, along with pictures, novels, letters and diaries, provide different kinds of valuable information for researchers. They offer an insight into Enlightenment conceptions of identity and how it can be defined. Three main types of approach can be noted and are sometimes used separately or together. Documentary or circumstantial evidence (baptismal certificates, indications of the time when the baby was placed in the foundling wheel, descriptions of the clothes he or she was wearing etc.) can help ascertain who a person is thanks to external factors. Physical resemblance to a family member, deformities or deliberate scarring make the body recognisable. The notion of an inner instinct which naturally links a mother to her son or daughter is upheld by some commentators like Diderot as ensuring that close relatives should be able to know each other instinctively.
Eighteenth-century writers used foundlings as the heroes of numerous fictional tales, but they also saw them as providing an analogy of what becomes of a written work once it is published, particularly if it is anonymous. The omnipresence of references to foundlings in literature shows how important the paradigm of the abandoned child was and how it contributed to the emergence of the modern novel.
Considerations on when children can or should be cut off from their birth family, whether or not they are orphaned, and specific cases of more or less successful adoptions or fostering in prerevolutionary France invite us to take the long view and to reflect at once on modern practices, on current legislation regarding the rights of the child and the mother, and on claims that, whatever the circumstances, we are all entitled to know our full identity.
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