The Ledger Begins, But Does Not Follow
By the late 1700s, the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés in Paris was processing over 7,000 infants each year. Similar numbers moved through foundling institutions across Europe, from Lisbon to Naples. Their arrivals were recorded with clinical precision—scraps of cloth, handwritten notes, personal tokens catalogued beside the date of admission. The child’s name, if given, was often fabricated. The appearance of recordkeeping was exacting, but it masked a larger reality: these institutions were overwhelmed, and the archive captured only a controlled moment of entry, not a life.
The foundling wheel, long regarded as a mechanism of mercy, permitted mothers to deposit infants anonymously into the care of hospitals or religious orders. But anonymity was not neutrality. These wheels, sometimes installed behind monastery walls, served as legal and moral fictions. They allowed the quiet entry of children whose origins could not be spoken—those born of aristocratic indiscretion, clerical abuse, or servitude under threat. Once a child passed through the wheel, their past was sealed. The system, in effect, was built as much for sanctioned forgetting as it was for care.
Dispersal followed. Infants were rapidly assigned to rural wet nurses, often for years, and later absorbed into networks of labor—domestic service, agricultural colonies, military units. In some cases, foundlings were shipped to colonial outposts, repurposed as anonymous settlers. Mortality rates soared, especially in regions where payment structures rewarded volume over survival. The institutions that received these children rarely traced where they went. Officially, they were rescued. Administratively, they were erased.
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