Lecture by Antoine Rivière, historian, associate professor at université Paris 8 and member of the Institut d’histoire du temps présent, in association with la France généalogique - CEGF.
In Paris during the Third Republic, between 2,000 and 5,000 children were abandoned each year into the care of the Assistance publique. In the vast majority of cases, the parents who parted with their children in this way were young unmarried women. Poor, deserted by the father of their child, anxious to hide their “misconduct” from their parents or ordered by them to repair the “dishonor” that their out-of-wedlock motherhood brought upon the family, those whom the period called filles-mères were the emblematic figures of abandonment, forced into it by poverty and disgrace. As for the children, who became wards of the Assistance, they were sent to the countryside to live with foster parents, modest farmers paid by the administration, with whom they grew up, destined for farm work, never knowing either the identity of their birth mother or the reasons for their abandonment. This lecture sets out to retrace this history, whose echoes remain powerful today, carried forward by the descendants of the wards of the Assistance — children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren — who are increasingly numerous in searching for their origins in the archives of abandonment.
Price: Free lectures, open to all without reservation, subject to the limit of 90 available seats.
Source: paris.fr — photo: @Archives de Paris