Among
the huge number of abandoned children (around 3 millions in France between 1750 and 1800),
a large part reached adulthood, but only some had access to marriage. In the European
traditional societies, marriage was an essential step to found a family, and it can be
considered as an indicator of social integration.
In this
paper, we looked for all marriages, recorded in the city of Lyons (the second French town
by the number of its inhabitants), including a former foundling. Thus, we can describe
the patterns of marriage of foundlings : sex, age, professional occupation,
geographic mobility before marriage. We also can observe, on the same criteria, their
spouses who, with very few exceptions, all are legitimate-born. Since we constituted a
control sample with the same number of marriages between two legitimate-born spouses, we
can notice potential differences between the spouses of former abandoned children and the
general population.
