Such thoughts made Malthus very unpopular among "progressive" circles at the time; in the nineteenth century he was laughed off as the founder of the "dismal science," economics. But was he in fact so dismal? In the final, grandiose chapter of his Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society one finds in the Reverend Thomas the smile of Monsieur Vincent. "Evil exists in the world, not to create despair, but activity," he concluded. And he quoted Shakespeare:
Hope springs eternal in the human breast,
Alan never is, but always to be blest.
"We are not patiently to submit to it, but to exert ourselves to avoid it," thought Malthus. That same emphasis on perpetual activity had coloured the philosophy of Vincent de Paul. And it would be the mark of the very Parisian philosophy of existentialism in the twentieth century.
BETWEEN VINCENT DE Paul's death in 1660, the same year Louis XIV took personal control of the monarchy, and the French Révolution of 1789, the population of Paris doubled; the strain on charitable work for unwanted children had perhaps quadrupled, though no statistics are available. The worst was yet to come. Le tour kept turning.
The saint's buoyant mysticism had been converted into earnest politics during his lifetime. A royal decree of 1656 established the Hopital Général, a vast administration designed to control all works connected with the sick, the mad, the poor, the disabled—along with orphans and foundlings. Conforming to the novel concerns with hygiene and clean city air, hospitals in principle were pushed out of the city centre and ambitious building projects were started, such as La Salpêtrière near the old gunpowder warehouse of Faubourg Saint-Victor, or the hospital out in distant Bicêtre (named after another English churchman, the Bishop of Winchester who had been a landowner there). Louis' kingdom in Paris was, after the anarchy of the Fronde, gaining control of local government. As the hospitals were moved eastwards, so the wealth and the gloire of government was moved westwards into the virtually uninhabited spaces of Saint-Germain, the Invalides and, on the Right Bank, beyond the Tuileries out to the Trocadero: the modern east-west axis of Paris was being born.
The works of charity were thus dispersed under the panoply of the Grand Monarque's administration. It made France strong and Paris unique, not just in the way in which it siphoned off political power to the centre, but also, most significantly, in the way it treated its children. Childcare became one of the chief preoccupations of the Hôpital Général. Under Louis XIV, le tour spread to Rue Saint-Victor in Bicêtre and Rue Neuve-Notre-Dame in Paris, just a few paces from the cathedral and, conveniently, right opposite the maternity wards of the Hôtel-Dieu, the one major hospital to remain in the city centre.
Paris's grim tours became poles of attraction, not simply for the city but for the whole Paris basin and beyond into the Îie de France, southwards into the Loire Country and the Nivernais, westwards into Normandy and, along with Louis' wars and refugees, eastwards into Champagne, Lorraine and Alsace. Child-dumping became a national industry.
Following the mercantilist tradition established by Louis' finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the industry was regulated over the course of the eighteenth century. Child abandonment was an accepted fact. The Hôpital Général even recommended two methods for ridding oneself of unwanted offspring. Exposition, or "exposure," was the most popular, one that continued on into the nineteenth century. The child would be left in a public place like a market or a well-frequented street, sometimes with a note attachéd. Here is a typical police report, dated 10 May 1840, for the Fifth Arrondissement Commissariat (today's Eighth):
Declaration of Monsieur and Madame X, fruit merchants living in Paris, who brought to our bureau a little girl aged six to eight months whom they found abandoned and exposed on the pavement of Rue Duphot, in front of No. 4, at nine o'clock in the morning, when they were going to collect provisions at the Halle; they brought also a packet of baby wear belonging to the child who, because of the care she required, was sent to the foundling hospital, along with the packet found beside her. No paper was found on her or in the packet, and despite the enquiry conducted, neither the mother nor the perpetrator of this exposition has yet been identified.
The second method of abandonment was through the tour. In the eighteenth century midwives and meneurs, that is, intermediaries of Paris's thriving wet-nursing industry, would often for a pittance perform the task for parents. Royal decrees provided financial help to the hospices dépositoires, and they also attempted to control the transportation and "care" that these abandoned infants were subjected to in rural hovels as far afield as Brittany and Burgundy. Money would be, in theory, paid to the Père defamille, not the wet-nurse herself, until the child was aged twelve, when boys were expected to support themselves, either as agricultural workers or as apprentices in some trade. In towns, particularly Paris, they usually ended up in orphanages, lunatic asylums or old-age hospitals.
The Hospice Saint-Vincent-de-Paul was administered by the Daughters of Charity and had its own rules: boys were returned from the wet-nurse at twelve to be placed as apprentices; girls came back at fifteen. In July 1793 abandoned children were nationalized; they became, as in the national hymn, "enfants de lapatrie," wards of the state. Religious congregations were banned and, by Napoleonic decree of 1811, the depositing of abandoned children was centralized in the Hospice de la Seine, which set up headquarters down in Hell, the Rue d'Enfer. Vincent de Paul's Daughters of Charity returned with the Restoration of 1815 and it was they who "manned" the station in Hell Street through the nineteenth century. That squeaking wooden cylinder never stopped turning.
"During the day," wrote the novelist Alphonse Esquiros in 1847, "nothing about the Hospice of Foundling Children appears out of the ordinary. Its functions only begin at the hour of darkness and of crime." We know at midnight Hell Street was deserted. A single light filters from behind a curtained window in the distance, the only sign of life: "Here is Charity at work! The quiet clink of a bell alerts your ear; the sound of the wooden cylinder in the wall; a woman covered in a shawl, her head hidden under a black veil, slides by you in the shadows. It is done, the secret abandonment is accomplished: a poor newborn child has just fallen into the pit of Charity."
CHARITY HAD FALLEN to Hell. The population of Paris had risen to its first million. The Swiss banker Jacques Necker—forever remembered for his handling of the financial crisis of 1788-89—reported for the year 1784, during his first spell at the Ministry of Finance, that the number of abandoned children surviving in Paris had reached 40,000. That was nothing compared with the bleak figures of the decades to come. By 1820, when Louis XVIII ruled France from the Tuileries Palace, a total of over 100,000 children had been "exposed" in the King's capital or swivelled through the tour. By the Révolution of 1848 the number had risen to a grim 130,000. From then on it very gradually declined. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in the summer of 1870 it was down to a mere 100,000 again.
The tour would continue to function until well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The campaign to abolish it was as vicious as the campaign against slavery; indeed, it had the same origin. "Just as Rome had its slaves' war, who can assure France she will not have her foundlings' war?" asked the philanthropist Louis Desloges in 1854, exasperated at over two decades of fruitless effort. It was the Due de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt who founded the Societe de la Morale Chretienne in 1821, uniting a hundred French peers; their aim was to finance a campaign to extinguish poverty, provide elementary instruction for all, abolish slavery, abolish the death penalty—and suppress the tour. Consistent with the teaching of Saint Vincent de Paul, the Society set up Comité's d Action for each project. But the Society almost fell to pieces over what to do in the presence of that damnable swinging tour.
With the Révolution the tour had been taken over by the centralized Administration des Hospices de la Seine which made Louis XIV's army of bureaucrats within the Hôpital General look like a gentlemen's club. "The displacements, cond
ucted with prudence and precaution, are without notable inconvenience for the children thus transplanted," was the Administration's nice reply to the growing foundlings scandal during Louis Philippe's reign. One of the moral dilemmas in the debate was who to defend: the mother or the child?
Alphonse Lamartine, revolutionary and poet, defended the mother. Her dignity had to be respected, her anonymity had to be maintained—he was an abolitionist over slavery, but he did not want to abolish Vincent de Paul's tour. Haven't these poor women suffered enough? "Have they not been exposed to rigour? pain? exile? barbarism? Ask those poverty-stricken mothers. Ask their lost children, who become suicidal at a precocious age." Lamartine's conscience was torn over the issue. He was so aware of the suffering of the children, too. He was appalled by the "almost funereal convoys" of "expatriated children" he saw on the nation's roads—long files of peasant nurses and lost babies with white faces. And one can understand why. It was a priggish group of "Economists" who cried out loudest for the tour's abolition, not for humane reasons, but because it encouraged debauchery in Paris and was a heavy tax burden for the "honest men" of trade. In the debate on the tour it was not easy to differentiate between the good, the bad and the ugly.
Another major campaigner in the debate was Maxime du Camp, the journalist. He visited the reception bureau of the Hospice de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul down in Hell during the early 1850s. He described the dirty bits of paper found with the abandoned babies: "Please, protect it," "I cannot keep this child," "She has been baptized, her name is . . ." The centre, with its sick and lunatic children brought back from rural hovels, did not compare well with an American slavers' market. He cursed that tour as a type of deferred abortion.
The short Second Republic of 1848 attempted to suppress it, but even the most progressive people balked at this. In 1853 it was briefly suppressed—and then it was noted how expositions in the streets and markets rose. The Economists succeeded in reviving it in 1856, and expositions declined. It was abolished for good in 1863, the year Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in the USA.
What prevented another rise in expositions was a policy of support for the mother, usually poor and single. Children were still brought in to the Hospice de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul—a practice that was formally ended only in 1901. Mothers were allowed, by virtue of a law of 1793, to give birth under the name X at the neighbouring maternity hospital of Port-Royal—a practice that formally ceased only under Francois Mitterrand's presidency in 1987.
SAINT VINCENT DE PAUL'S tour would never have sustained such enormous numbers of abandoned children had there not been a vast wet-nursing industry, another peculiarity of Paris and its dependent provinces. The industry was built on a complex division of labour. Men called meneurs travelled around France seeking wet-nurses who would cater to Paris's needs. In 1866 half the children born in the city, that is around 25,000 babies out of a total of 53,000 births, were nourished by mercantile breasts supplied by the outlying rural economy. "Trading on one's breasts has become a means of earning one's living," a report as late as 1898 noted.
Wet-nursing was the largest industry in Paris, driven over the centuries more by the supply of impoverished peasant women than by the demand for their breasts. Kingjean, back in 1284, tried to protect these women from rapacious meneurs. Since then there had always been an ongoing battle between the advocates of a "free trade" that would work through private networks and those who wanted a tightly controlled state administration. The latter was always strong, but it never achieved a complete monopoly; indeed its very existence probably encouraged others to compete —they mutually nourished, if one may say, one another. Just as royalty in the eighteenth century tried to set down rules on the abandonment of children, so did it attempt to regularize the wet-nursing business. In the nineteenth century a central Grand Bureau was established on Rue Sainte-Apolline, about a hundred paces down from Rue du Paradis, where Saint Vincent de Paul's charitable works had begun. You can still see the building, just on the other side of the overhead métro that skirts the boulevards.
The division of labour rapidly developed. The wealthiest Parisians had their own connections and farmed out their children to the neighbouring countryside. It was the poor, under compulsion to work, who used the services of the Bureau. "The courtyard by the entry cannot contain all the nurses," wrote one witness in the 1820s. "They obstruct the street and risk the danger of being run over, and they do annoy the passers-by" "You often meet there old women of the most disgusting appearance," it was reported in the article on "Nurses" in the Diction-naire des Sciences medicales, published in 1819. "Their withered breasts promise poor food for a child. They have been practising the trade for twenty or thirty years, their language is gross, and the rudeness of their manners can only give rise to the wildest alarm." One Director, Monsieur Pierret, confessed in 1829 to being on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He tells the awful story, unfortunately all too common, of a child being returned to her poor mother having been disfigured by burns— peasant households rarely possessed fire-guards. "I am the first to receive the reproaches of these saddened parents," he wrote. "I have myself a child being nursed in the country."
The meneurs were an uncouth lot, most of them starting out as wagon drivers, innkeepers, pimps or barbers (who doubled as surgeons): they knew where there was rural poverty and how they could get childbearing women to abandon their homes and infants for Paris. Country doctors in the early nineteenth century reported how whole cantons and arrondissements were turned into female deserts. Doctor Monot, for ex- ample, reported in 1858 on the villages emptied in his own canton of Montsauche in the Nievre because of women leaving for Paris; "a third of the women who have given birth here have left." Huge convoys for Paris were organized by meneurs; then after a month or so back they would trundle with Paris's babies. A letter from a certain Campaigne de Bois-simene to the Minister of the Interior on 17 February 1808 describes how the women were "installed with their nurslings in small, poorly covered carts drawn by one or two nags . . . The poor children suffered the impossible." Pay was irregular, indeed it often as not never came through. "I have never travelled on the roads of the Perche," read a report of 1866, "without being overcome with emotion, seeing these huge meneur's wagons in which nurses and nurslings returning from Paris are piled in pell-mell like animals returning from market. This revolting vehicle is known aptly as a Purgatory."
One may well ask what kind of population grew up in Paris where one in ten of its children had been abandoned and over half of them had been surrendered to poor mercantile wet-nurses. Patrick Stiskind's cult novel, Perfume, has its historical inaccuracies—most notably among its early eighteenth-century characters who manage to count in French francs. But the tale he tells of his murderer hero, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, abandoned at infancy and put out to wet-nurses, contains more than a grain of the terrible truth. Historians today often mock the fears contemporaries expressed of "the mob" and the "dangerous classes." But historians do not have to walk the streets of Paris in the days when they were lit by oil and gas lamps—if lit at all. And they do not have to face the scream of the mobs in the revolutions of 1789,1830 and 1848, which could be blood-curdling; nor have they sat amongst the kind of crowds that gathered for a nice drawn-out public execution. Paris was not simply picaresque; it was fetid and savage—a condition the good Saint Vincent de Paul had tried desperately to improve.
The scale of the wet-nursing business was unique to Paris, though Marseille did at one point in the eighteenth century manage to overtake the capital. In 1866, three years after the abolition of the tour, Napoleon Ill' s Minister of Public Instruction, Victor Duruy, set up a Commission to investigate the matter. The reports that it presented were devastating. "Of the 20,000 children confided to women in the country, how many survive?" asked one Monsieur Brochard. "Nobody knows. Many nurses depart with a newborn and never return. We agree with Monsieur Boys de Loury: departure with a nurse is a form of conscription for infants. Little Parisians die wit
hout anybody noticing." When the Second Empire crumbled before Prussia's armies in 1870, complaints about France's peculiar institution became shrill. "In Belgium and Great Britain feeding by the mother is honoured," it was said. "Here we have the 'luxury of Administration' which has been deployed to create an industry out of wet-nursing."
It was no longer charity, it had gone beyond all control; it was child murder. In 1874 a major new law was passed at the instance of the Moderate Republican Theophile Roussel, himself a country doctor. Certificates were demanded from all nurses; committees of inspection were set up. The appalling mortality rates of infants did decline because the law, unlike any that had preceded it, was executed. Moreover, the wealthy of Paris were now taking their rural nurses into their own homes. But what really broke the vicious cycle was a campaign that encouraged mothers to feed their own children: "What unites all the best advantages for the newborn child?" ran the 1904 poster: "LE LAITDE SA MAMAN"— Mother's Milk.
3
TROCADÉRO
AT métro STOP NO. 3, the Trocadero, one emerges into what is, by common accord, the prettiest spot in Paris. The hill of Chaillot—the historic name of the place—is not the highest in Paris, but this view over the Seine, just where the river swings south-westwards, is unequalled by any other. The Eiffel Tower is before us, the Champ de Mars is at our feet, the École Militaire lies beyond. In this delightful setting we shall consider a story of love, war—and psychoanalysis. It is a strange Parisian fact: in this city there are more practising Freudian psychoanalysts today than in any other city in the world, save Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Metro Stop Paris Page 4
