Abstract
Nancy Fitch is Associate Professor of History at Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass. 01002. She is completing a study on the transition from feudal ism to capitalism in central France.ABSTRACT: By the end of the nineteenth century, thousands of households in the Allier supplemented family income by raising Parisian foundlings for the Bureau of Public Assistance. The article surveys the developments that led to this situation and the institutions that facilitated it; and argues that the "migration" of these children to the countryside helped to produce a social transformation comparable in scope to that which resulted from rural exodus elsewhere. Economic change in the Allier had brought about acute shortages of male labor and this, combined with the underemployment of women, made mercenary motherhood an attractive source of additional labor and income. Mercenary motherhood meant something entirely different for peasant and artisanal women than it did for agricultural day laborers or sharecroppers. Economically, there can be little doubt that the presence of foundlings enabled landlords to accumulate capital in the early stages of agricultural development by allowing them to make labor-intensive agricultural improvements whileforcing the cost of labor onto the French government.
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