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Yes, in the year 1911, an orphanage in Paris held a raffle where the prizes were live, kicking, crying babies.
The weirdest thing about the entire affair, though, might be that it was actually a good thing. Without context, if you heard that an orphanage held a baby raffle, the first thing you’d probably assume is that they’re not allowed to be an orphanage anymore. The vocabulary here makes the whole thing sound like something out of Snowpiercer rather than anything approaching acceptable childcare.
Not to say the description of what happened is inaccurate. This was indeed your classic raffle, the kind that you usually enter hoping for playoff tickets and end up taking home a basket of soap from.
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The details we have are thanks to a 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics that described the aptly and adorably named Loterie de Bebes. Thankfully, there were some basic guidelines in place, with prospective parents having to be vetted beforehand. They’d also gotten the go-ahead from the authorities, which is probably a good thing to sort out before the babies exchange hands.
So, why do they do this? Because they were bored? Because they had a big, spinning wheel lying around and figured they should use it?
No, the fact is, orphans in Paris at the time were pretty much plum screwed when it came to finding parents. In no small part because adoption of young children wouldn’t be legal until 1923. So, the raffle wasn’t much more than a sneaky adoption event, just with a big wheel instead of interviews and paperwork. The babies that were won in the raffle were lucky, too. At the time, if you were without parents, you had basically two paths: child laborer or street urchin. You were either Oliver Twist, or watching a child named Oliver get his arm twisted in heavy machinery for pittance wages.
All of which is to say, it may sound weird now, but it was just an orphanage doing the best they could given the weird rules of early 1900s France.
I never thought I’d read about a baby raffle and come away with a warmed heart, but here we are. Will something like this ever happen again? Oh, absolutely not. You would go to big-time prison for it and probably get shanked before you could Scotch-tape a picture of your family to the cell wall.