French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the philosophical treatise Emile, or On Education in 1762. In it, he imagines a situation in which a young tutor devotes 20 years to raising a single child. In the process, Rousseau lays out many of… [more]

Like much of early modern Europe, France saw increasing numbers of abandoned children, and new institutions designed to care for them. Orphanage records are one of a few rare types of sources available for historians to chart the histories of the… [more]