Abstract EN:

This doctoral thesis focuses on the memory that has been preserved of an institution in the northwest of france upon which no study has previously been conducted. This institution, a maternal center, closed in 1985. The buildings have been renovated, and no material trace remains of the medico-social activities of this place nevertheless, it simultaneously housed a regional maternity hospital ( 22 000 children were born there between 1928 and 1972 ), a refuge for single mothers, a day nursery, and a children's home. Over the course of the present study, at stake is better understanding the dark zones of kinship such as illegitimacy, abandonment and adoption as well as achieving a more astute knowledge of the fate reserved for women and children born in poverty, in restrictive institutions such as this one, which were created in a double perspective of assistance and discipline. In this place where archaism and modernity mixed, reclusion, categorization and supervision - all of which are characteristic of health institutions closed upon themselves were imposed upon women and children. The specificity of the ethnological approach suggested in this study is its attempt to approach as closely as possible memory of the people of this establishment, but also to follow a place, its history and its environment. The study of facts and representations over a long duration have been privileged throughout the testimonies gathered. Universe of confinement for its staff as well as for its residents, this place from which complex information have been extracted testifies at once to atypical practices and to a functioning subjugated to the inherent immobility of restrictive institutions. The combined memories of those who provided information - of all ages and social and professional situations - offer a picture that is particularly interesting in terms of the representations of personhood, health, body and symbolic life in an establishment characterized by closure.