Daily Life During the French Revolution (26 page)

BABIES AND WET-NURSES

Special care was taken of abandoned children, the future
hope of the revolution. These
enfants trouvés
(foundlings) increased in
number as the wars took many fathers. Government grants were dispersed to
operate the foundling centers, but soon funds dried up and the children’s
living situations reverted to the terrible conditions that had prevailed before
the revolution, with a 2 or 3 percent survival rate.

There was generally no shortage of babies and children in
the medical institutions. Foundling children abandoned on the steps added to the
inventory of unwanted infants brought in by the parents and of orphans.
Overcrowded conditions were generally the rule. After spending a little time in
a children’s ward, where the majority died while waiting for arrangements to be
made, the surviving infants usually spent their early years of life with a
wet-nurse.

Wet nursing was common in villages, especially those close
to large towns, from which thousands of babies of all classes were sent each
year to foster mothers who performed the service of breastfeeding. Even poor
working mothers sometimes put a child born out of wedlock into the hands of a
wet-nurse, maintaining contact with it if it survived. The trade was regulated,
and, at a special office in Paris, police kept dossiers on women engaged in
this business, supervising the agents whose job it was to connect the mothers
with the nurses. The government feared a drop in population, and breastfeeding
was felt to be the natural and healthy way to nourish a baby.

Montpellier’s General Hospital and that of Nîmes recruited
women in the impoverished villages of the Cévennes and paid them about four
livres a month to act as wet-nurses. Local wet-nurses were generally not
available since they could make more money from private families; but the
destitute women of the mountain villages were willing to take their chances
with contracting venereal diseases, which were sometimes carried by foundlings.
On occasion, the women would lie about their ability to feed the babies,
instead feeding them animal milk or water with boiled, old, and even moldy
bread in it. The journey to distribute the babies from the hospitals to the
villages, a distance of more than 60 miles, was slow and difficult. The
children were placed four at a time into a basket stuffed with straw and
cushions and hitched to a mule for the miserable ride to the Cévennes. Forty
percent of those who reached their destination alive died within the first
three months, and more than 70 percent died within the first year. Many deaths
were caused by malnutrition, neglect, and dysentery. Those sent to the villages
often sat in animal and human excrement, their mouths stuffed with rotting
rags, or were slung from the rafters in makeshift hammocks, their swaddling
clothes seldom changed. Similar baby-farming was carried out in other major
cities, including Paris, and often the agents failed to report the death of a
child to the authorities, pocketing the money for the child’s nurse instead.

At five, the children returned to the hospital (although in
a few cases they were adopted by the wet-nurse). Here they continued to be
exposed to unhealthy conditions, and, again, survival was at stake. For those
who managed to grow to adulthood, attempts were made to integrate them into
society, but all carried the melancholy scars of their past; most were sickly
and tended to become misfits in society at large.

CHARITY AND THE WELFARE STATE

One of the most serious problems in eighteenth-century
France was poverty. The poor and sick, the crippled, the old, the widows, the orphans—
all were of concern and were eligible for charity. Relief was administered
through the Catholic Church, and, although it did little more than preserve the
poor and afflicted at the most elemental level of existence, this aid saved
lives. Parish priests, as well as cathedral chapters and abbeys, took on the
role of distributing funds that came from donors abiding by their religious
obligation to give alms.

The desperate financial problems of the 1780s reduced royal
patronage for the poor. The number of destitute people reached staggering
proportions, and their suffering rose to unprecedented levels, with about one
in five people poverty-stricken.

Besides the sisters of various Catholic organizations, many
women were dedicated to charity. They lived mostly in small towns or villages
and were often widows, spinsters, or young single ladies. Most were of modest
means, but they saw charity as a way of enhancing the social life of the town.
Sometimes they gave their time to help the illiterate learn to read or gave a
few coins regularly to a destitute family. The abolition of the
dîme
or
church tithes curtailed the ability of the church to administer charity to the
poor.

The revolutionaries explored the issues and extent of
charity and poverty through the
Comité de Mendicité
(Committee for
Charity), hoping to find solutions that would benefit the recipients. They
stressed the role of the state in combating this blight on the nation. As under
the old regime, the poor were feared because they lived outside the established
modes of society, often begging or involved in crime. Nevertheless, it was
agreed that one function of the state was to help those who could not help
themselves. Old age, sickness, the premature death of the family breadwinner,
injury, and unemployment—all were common reasons for being poor. Vagaries of
climate and weather conditions, fires or flooding that destroyed crops, or
outbreaks of disease could reduce entire towns and countryside to a state of
virtual starvation.

In the early years of the revolution, poor relief was no
longer considered a form of charity; the right to receive necessary assistance
was seen as a basic human right. Every man had the right to feed and clothe
himself and his family. Relief was to be paid for by taxation, which went to
hospitals, state pensions, public work projects for the unemployed, and care
for abandoned children.

The government was heading toward a welfare state from
about 1789 to 1795. The reports of the
Comité de Mendicité
were
thorough, and the results indicated that the old regime and the church had
failed to give aid to the poor when and where it was needed. The committee
believed that poverty could be alleviated only by concentrating all relief
efforts in a centralized state authority. Only then could a rational program be
devised and better administered, on the basis of population densities and
fairly assessed taxes. It was felt that every community should have a charity
office to provide home relief for the aged and the ill. Workshops would also be
made available for those who were able-bodied but unemployed. Prisons were to
be established for those beggars who refused state relief measures. It was also
suggested the property of the church be split up in small lots and distributed
to the poor, since property and employment were the best safeguards against
increasing poverty. The committee recommended that hospitals (badly
administered, secretive, unhygienic money-wasters) be restricted to taking care
of orphans and foundlings waiting for foster homes and the homeless aged. The
sick could be better cared for at home.

The
Comité de Mendicité
proposed that able-bodied
men receive relief only in return for labor; the infirm would receive free food
and money financed by the government. State work schemes were arduous, the
tasks often menial, and unwilling workers were sent to 1 of the 34 poorhouses,
called
Dépôts de Mendicité.
The plan to register everyone needing help
failed. High prices, the rapidly declining assignat, price controls during the
Terror, industrial stagnation, the costs of the revolutionary wars—all
conspired to thwart the plans of the government.

State workshops to alleviate unemployment were introduced
in 1790 but were not well received by the general public and were discontinued
by the Directory. The proposals that might have created a welfare state and
lifted the nation out of poverty were soon in full retreat as the government,
lacking the money, experience, and bureaucracy needed to match the ideals with
the practice, reneged on its relief efforts and rejected financial
responsibility for the poor.

The beginning of the nineteenth century brought the
recovery of poor-relief institutions, which in part owed their salvation to the
rehabilitation of the Catholic Church under Napoleon.

REPORTS OF ENGLISH TRAVELERS

In the eighteenth century, charitable institutions,
prisons, and hospitals were as much on the agenda of tourists as Nôtre Dame and
the Tuileries gardens. Some English travelers reported their observations. On
the whole, the institutions in the provinces seemed more humane and less
offensive than those in Paris.

Harry Peckham, a barrister, traveled in France and
published an account of his tour in 1772. In it, he states:

the
whole kingdom swarms with beggars, an evidence of poverty, as well as defect in
the laws. The observation was confirmed at every inn I came to, by crowds of
wretches, whose whole appearance spoke of their misery. I have often passed
from the inn door to my chaise through a file of twenty or thirty of them; even
the churches are infested with them.

George Smollett visited the
Hôpital des Enfants Trouvés
and
remarked:

When
I first saw the infants at the
enfants trouvés
in Paris, so swathed with
bandages, that the very sight of them made my eyes water. . . .

Thomas Pennant left his account of a visit, stating that
nearly 6,000 foundlings were admitted annually and taken care of by the nuns,
the
Filles de Charité.
“Their names &ca are kept in a little linnen
purse and pinned to their Caps that their parents may know them if inclined to
take them.” It is not clear how the sisters would know their names if they had
been abandoned on the steps of a church or left in a ditch.

In October 1775, Mrs. Thrale and her companion, Admiral
John Jervis, visited a hospital as part of their sightseeing tour, and she
described it as “cleaner than any I have seen in France.” She also wrote, “and
the poor Infants at least die peaceably cleanly and in Bed—I saw whole Rows of
swathed Babies pining away to perfect Skeletons, & expiring in very neat
Cribs with each a Bottle hung on its Neck filled with some Milk Mess, which if
they can suck they may live, & if they cannot they must die.”

In 1776, Mrs. Montagu reported that she saw about 200
infants in their little beds, none above seven or eight days old: “if some had
not cried I should have taken them for dolls. After keeping them at most 8 days
they are sent to be nursed in the country.”

The
Hôtel-Dieu
in Paris also attracted many
travelers and foreign doctors who have left various comments. Thicknesse wrote
that the hospital was a noble charity and worthy of the name if it was well
regulated:

But
alas! it is no uncommon thing to see four, five, six, nay sometimes eight sick
persons in one bed, heads and tails, ill of different disorders, some dying,
some actually dead. Last winter a gentleman informed me that he heard one of
the patients there complain bitterly of the cold, and particularly of that
which he felt from the dead corpse which lay next to him in the bed!

Dr. James St. John, a London practitioner, was appalled by
what he saw at the
Hôtel-Die
u, commenting (besides remarking on the
number of patients in one bed):

The
corrupt air and effluvia in some parts of the hospital are more loathsome and
abominable than can be conceived. It is amazing, that there are men of
constitutions sufficiently vigorous, to recover in such a place of vermin,
filth, and horror.

Other visitors and writers of the period reported similar
conditions. Adam Walker, a science lecturer, who was there in 1785, remarked on
the size of the hospital as larger than any in London and on the number of
patients as more than would be found in all the hospitals in London, adding:

It
seems an assemblage of all human miseries! . . . In one bed . . . you may see
two or three wretches in all the stages of approach to death!

He goes on to describe more favorable features—clean,
high-ceilinged rooms and constant ventilation.

The following year, the Reverend Townsend confirmed seeing
many patients in one bed but stated that “The practice of stowing so many
miserable creatures in one bed is to be abolished.”

Edward Rigby, who practiced medicine in England, was in
Paris in 1789 and found the hospital that he visited in July to be “very dirty
and crowded, containing 8,000 patients.”

Visitors went to other hospitals in and around the capital,
such as the
Hôpital Général,
established primarily to meet the problem
of poverty, and two other multipurpose establishments—the
Salpêtrière
and
Bicêtre.
Pennant recorded his visit: