EN
The aim of the study is to analyse and interpret how the ideas of the Vienna court about the form and aims of institutional care for orphaned children developed in the course of the 18th century under the influence of the theoretical conceptions of the time, and to what degree these ideas were successfully put into practice. At first Maria Theresia preferred the training of orphaned children for manual work, but from the 1770s she began to emphasize their education and military training. Joseph II did not see orphanages as educational, but only as care institutions, and the majority of their inmates were placed with foster parents in return for small payments.