Blood Ties and Fictive Ties: Adoption and Family Life in Early Modern France. - book reviews

Gager distinguishes between the Paris foundling hospital and the variety of other institutions endowed to care for legitimate, orphan children from whom foundlings were rigorously distinguished. She notes the existence of systems of short-term "fostering" of legitimate orphans that included stays at the wet nurse or apprenticeships in households in need of labor.

In Chapter 5, Gager examines forty-five cases of adoptions of foundlings in the years 1540-1677 in detail and finds them remarkably similar in many ways to private adoptions. Adults adopting foundling children seem to have been guided by some of the same motives as those involved in private adoptions, with the addition of a more self-conscious statement of charitable impulses that led them to take these stigmatized children into their homes. Foundling children were adopted well after they had passed through the perils of infancy. Boys' ages ranged from 4-8 and girls from 6-12. Like many observers of European foundling institutions, Gager expresses surprise that girls were adopted as often or more often than boys. Girls were particularly favored by unmarried women or widows. The author's earlier discussion of the availability of foster children helps underscore her belief that adoptions of foundlings were real adoptions, and not simply contracts for child labor. Gager observes little evolution in the form of the adoption contract from the sixteenth to the late seventeenth century except for a gradual decline in the use of the term "adoption" itself, which she interprets as possible evidence of notaries' increasing cognizance of the discrepancy between their practices and the prejudice against adoption in customary law.

A final chapter gives a brief overview of revolutionary sentiment favorable to adoption, in which successive cohorts of leaders saw adoption alternatively as a means to equalize social relations, divide great fortunes and therefore enforce brotherhood from above. Although Gager rightly argues that the practice of adoption that she has documented contributed to the continuous appeal of adoption as reality and symbol, one is most struck by the contrast between the overblown rhetoric of revolutionary pronouncements on adoption and the genuine feeling conveyed by the more austere notarial documents. Much to her credit, Gager is a sensitive reader of both kinds of sources. Another strength of the book comes from the author's familiarity with a range of cross-cultural studies of adoption which enables her to see her evidence in broad perspective.

As the author states, she is unable to inform us about the extensiveness of the practice of adoption in Paris or France, since she has focused intensively on those cases she was able to find in notarial documents rather than devising a more elaborate sampling strategy. One gets a sense that the formal practice may have been relatively rare. Yet several features of adoptive parents, children, and their environments suggest that despite certain cultural prejudices and suspicions, adoption was a relatively familiar and widely accepted practice among the middling sort in early modem France, especially in cases of childlessness.