Fondateurs, administrateurs et auteurs face aux enfants délaissés en France aux xvii^e-xviii^e siècles

Was there any change in the discourses of authors who were interested in the question of abandonment between the Catholic counter-reformation and the Enlightenment ? The words that are used in these discourses reveal that these children are categorised according to the circumstances in which they were exposed, found or taken in care. Writings about those children also drew attention to their status of victims – victims of immorality in the seventeenth century, of mortality in the eighteenth. Furthermore, abandoned children having no ties, were they to be perceived as God’s children, or the Nation’s children ?