In the course of the eighteenth century in France, the tendency to send infants off to wet nurses, the high incidence of child neglect and abandonment, and the declining fertility rate and increasing use of contraception were trends that cut across classes, occupational groups, and rural — urban distinctions.70 But they clearly had different meanings and motivations depending on who the women were. For women of the salons, a smaller family and fewer maternal duties meant a way of being "free" and at the same time of distinguishing their status from that of middle — class and poor women. For the silk weaver in Lyons or the wife of a craftsman, the wet-nurse system and fertility control (including abortion) were necessities dictated by the conditions of her work and economic constraints.
Most European historians agree that the infant mortality rate in late — eighteenth-century France was exceedingly high; in some regions, about one in four infants sent out to the country to wet nurses died before the age of one year. This was a serious problem.71 But the causes of high mortality had to do with the entire social organization of child care, in particular, long-distance travel under arduous conditions; the poverty and malnourishment of many wet nurses, even if infants managed to arrive safely; and the absence of alternative child-care arrangements other than foundling homes for working women, who made up a large part of the clientele of rural wet nurses. These conditions obviously affected some classes more harshly than others; they were class specific. In fact, mortality rates were much lower for infants who were not sent long distances, and "most of the infants placed in the country did not die there, but returned to their natural mothers in the city after the period of their nursing."72 It is thus remarkable that demographic historians today echo the eighteenth-century writers in blaming infant deaths on the presumed callousness, indifference, and "selfishness" of mothers, rather than on a range of conditions that clearly structured child-care practices, especially for poor and working-class women.
Legal sanctions, as well as moral and economic ones, in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also affected social classes differently. These sanctions reinforced women’s exclusive responsibility for children and therefore their special concern to limit their number of children. Unlike English law, French law gave fathers few absolute rights over children, but it also gave them few responsibilities.73 Both legal and economic burdens of fertility tended to fall most heavily on poor women. Poor and laboring women were not likely to read moral tracts on maternal nursing or literature on domestic manners and morals; nor, we might suppose, were they the objects of sexual chivalry. Especially if they were single and working in towns, away from kin and native village, they were vulnerable to seduction and abandonment and confined to a pool of working-class men, as potential lovers and husbands, that was occupationally itinerant, unstable, and small. (In Lyons, for example, women silk workers outnumbered men in the town, and 40 percent of the women remained unmarried at age fifty.74) These conditions resulted in high rates of illegitimacy, often the result of expectations thwarted by circumstance, which were reinforced by the tendency of French law to put all the burden of responsibility and proof for illegitimate children on the woman. Whereas a sixteenth-century law providing for declarations de grossesse had required that a father’s identity be revealed in court and that he be obliged to make payment to the girl,
… in the course of the 18th century, bourgeois opinion would no longer tolerate that procedure, and the girl had to prove the culpability of the man she claimed to be the father of her child. It became very difficult and time-consuming to get indemnification. After the French Revolution, the Civil Code forbade even searching for the father of an illegitimate child [recherche de paternite]. Henceforth an unmarried mother would be considered solely responsible for the conception of her child, and she alone would pay.75
Married women among the working class and poor were also compelled by material conditions and the prevailing marriage laws to assume most of the burden of maintaining children. The "family economy" among the poor in prerevolutionary France relied greatly on "the earning capacity, the labor and the sheer ingenuity of women"; they, not their husbands, were generally regarded as responsible for providing the children with food. Not only was it "easier for a father to opt out than for a mother to do so," but bureaux de charite assumed that the mother was the one responsible, "dealt directly" with her, and made eligibility for relief contingent upon her "piety, thrift and readiness to work."76 Moreover, many women with children were neither single nor married; rather, they were partners in a "free union" in which both the male and the state had little legal obligation to provide them with financial support in the care of their children. Such women did not regard themselves as "debauched" or "matriarchal" but as victims of economic and social injustice. Working — class women active in the revolutionary movements of 1789, 1848, and 1871 continually put forward demands for family allowances, state pensions, and the status of "legitimacy" for children born in such unions.77 This suggests that they would have preferred to keep their children and raise them if they had had the necessary social supports.
The major consequence of the lack of such supports was an extraordinarily high rate of infant abandonment among both single and married poor women. "In the second half of the eighteenth century, there were 20 to 40 foundlings for every 100 births in Paris"—some 40,000 abandoned infants every year in the decade before the revolution.78 While there is certainly evidence that many abandonments arose out of conditions of misery and destitution, it is also true that the class composition and situation of the parents varied, as did their motives in abandoning their infants. A carefully detailed study shows a definite correlation between ‘"the curve of abandoned children" in Paris between the 1720s and the 1780s and "the curve of the price of wheat."79 Yet abandonment did not occur only among the poorest or as a temporary remedy, but almost as frequently among a cross section of Parisian "bourgeois," including artisans, shopkeepers, domestic servants, and even the well-to-do, who were themselves experiencing hard times. Among both the very poor and the quasi-middle — class (artisans and shopkeepers) from the center of Paris, who "appear most frequently in the admission records," there were many who had no intention of reclaiming their children, increasingly so in the immediate prerevolutionary years. This is evident from the fact that they left no identification and that increasingly the hospital became filled with newborns rather than older children. Abandonment was "a step frequently decided upon before the infant’s birth," a deliberately chosen method of "family limitation."80 This decision nearly always stemmed from "the material difficulties of life" rather than "immorality," callousness, or "concealed infanticide"; most such parents were honestly ignorant of the high risk of mortality to which they exposed their children and thought they were providing them with food and shelter. It should be noted that, despite the high number of "illegitimate" children among the abandoned, the majority were probably either the legitimate offspring of married couples or the offspring of the "free unions" so common among the working class. Out of their own needs, these couples (especially the women among them) put into practice the view that deliberate abandonment of infants one "could not support" was an acceptable "family limitation" practice.
In sum, the following facts seem clear. First, abandonment was a popularly accepted method of "fertility control," though one practiced mainly by the working class and the poor. Thus, the adoption of "Malthusian" thinking and behavior is surely not limited in this period to the upper classes, although both the conditions prompting it and the methods used differ among the poor and artisan classes. Fertility control practices do not "trickle down" from the upper to the lower classes, but are accommodated by different social groups to their particular circumstances.81 To limit the analysis of changing fertility control practices during the French "transition" to coitus interruptus, abstinence, and bourgeois family relations is to exclude from that analysis the particular forms of control upon which the masses actively relied.
Second, incentives for abandonment, as for abortion and infanticide— which were also practiced widely among the lower classes throughout the eighteenth century82—included not only economic constraints but also a cultural and legal context that placed disproportionate burdens for children’s care on mothers. The failure or inability of fathers to support infants, the difficulties in securing declarations of paternity or indemnifications for illegitimate children or children of "free unions," no doubt contributed significantly in this period to the rise in abandonments, infanticide, and abortion. But to understand this is greatly to expand our analysis of the French fertility decline—to see that it had different implications and contours for different groups of women. Understanding changes in fertility is clearly impossible without considering the situation of women, the class and occupational differences among them, and the place of abortion in their consciousness and their daily life.