Abstract
A parallel can be drawn between history and literature in the 18th century through the paradigm of the foundling. At that time, a third of children were abandoned, mainly for reasons of poverty, illegitimacy or because their mother had died in childbirth. Archive repositories are full of bills explaining the reasons for abandonment, and are often the only record of the words of mostly illiterate people. These bills could be accompanied by a trousseau or an object of recognition (ribbon, patent, playing card with an inscription on the back...), a real symbol of being able to find the child later on.
From Fielding's Tom Jones to Sedaine's Felix, from Rousseau's children to the famous Figaro, the foundling is a central figure in eighteenth-centuryliterature . He questions the values of nature and nurture that preoccupied the Enlightenment, and polarizes the notions of destiny and identity that characterize the modern individual. Sometimes a metaphor for the book abandoned to the public, sometimes a being deprived of a word (infans) that literature takes upon itself to give him, he thus embodies the essence of the novel.
