These children, "abandoned or not", were declared by the French authorities of the Department for Health and Social Affairs to be wards of the state.
They were transported by the authorities from Reunion, in order to repopulate metropolitan departments mostly in the empty diagonal such as Creuse, Tarn, Gers, Lozère and East Pyrenees which had lost population to the movement from rural areas to metropolitan areas.
This forcible transport of children was organized under the leadership of Michel Debré, MP for Reunion at the time.
[1] Some were adopted, others stayed in homes or served as slave labor on the farms; the peasants across the Creuse used them as handymen or workers without wages.
In August 1968, in their newspaper Témoignages, the Reunionese people denounced a “child trafficking;” however, this state scandal was only publicized in the 2000s.