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Introduction

How French people tried to make sense of their childhood and adolescence in past centuries remains something of a mystery. That this should be the case for the medieval and early modern periods is hardly surprising, given that so few contemporaries chose to write about their formative years. For centuries, the majority of clerics maintained a low opinion of the young. St Augustine (354430) led the way with a dismal image of his own past, his inuential Confessions lingering on his sins rather than his virtues during the rst stages of his life. He at least gave some account of the suffering and humiliation of his boyhood, and the surfeit of hells pleasures during his teens.1 Other authorities preferred to ignore entirely those they saw as small creatures wallowing in sinfulness and decient in both intellectual and moral qualities: the child was a poor sighing animal, starting his life in torment, as the twelfth-century monk William of Saint-Thierry put it.2 They assumed that it was reason that separated mankind from the animal kingdom, and so only took seriously those who had progressed from the early chaotic years to adulthood. A seventeenthcentury Jansenist from Port Royal wrote that I only wish to count [life] from when one starts to be moved by reason, which normally does not happen before the age of twenty. The view of the young as decient was by no means conned to the more austere wings of Christianity. The great Catholic orator and prelate Bossuet (16271704) lamented that much of his allotted three-score-and-ten years would count for nothing. Sleep he considered similar to death, childhood merely the life of a beast, and his own adolescence best erased.3 Similarly, ctional autobiographies written by members of the laity during the seventeenth and
1 2 3

Saint Augustine, Confessions, transl. R. S. Pine-Cofn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), books I to IV. Pierre Rich e and Dani` ele Alexandre-Bidon, LEnfance au Moyen Age (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1994), p. 22. Discours sur les passions de lamour (n.d.) and Bossuet, M editations sur la bri` evet e de la vie (1695), cited in Georges Snyders, La P edagogie en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe si` ecles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), pp. 190 and 192 respectively.

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eighteenth centuries generally had little to say about the early years of life. The authors of these memoir novels found childhood uninteresting, and indeed simply unimportant. They assumed that one childhood was much like another: a long period when the individual personality was only gradually forming.4 There was, however, a counter-current in ecclesiastical thinking on childhood that emphasized its purity and innocence. This was a common theme in monastic literature, notably during the period of revival in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The author of the Life of Stephen of Obazine wrote that the simplicity and pure ignorance of children brought them close to divine knowledge and angelic purity, because they lacked the impure wiles of the worldly.5 The suggestion from Philippe Ari` es that there was a thousand-year silence on childhood after the fall of the Roman Empire now nds few takers. Nonetheless, the claim by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (171278) in the mid-eighteenth century that childhood is unknown had some justication.6 Come the modern period, childhood and adolescence slowly emerge from the shadows. Leading gures in the Enlightenment, such as John Locke (16321704) and Rousseau, found a ready audience for their positive image of the child. By the nineteenth century, some people thought of childhood as the most blessed period of life, and the child as a source of intuitive wisdom lacking in the adult. Poets as diverse as Victor Hugo and Jean Cocteau linked the poetic imagination to childhood. The child hero made a belated but striking entry into French literature in novels such as Jack (1876) by Alphonse Daudet and LEnfant (1879) by Jules Vall` es.7 Adolescence in its turn came to fascinate writers like Andr e Gide,
4

6 7

Philip Stewart, The Child Comes of Age, Yale French Studies, 40 (1968), 13441 (1367); Adrian P. L. Kempton, The Theme of Childhood in French EighteenthCentury Memoir Novels, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 132 (1975), 20525. Vie dEtienne dAubuzon cited by Rich e and Alexandre-Bidon, LEnfance, p. 25. See also William J. Bouwma, Christian Adulthood, Daedalus (Spring 1976), 7792; Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1990), ch. 1; James A. Schulz, The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 11001350 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 24451; and David Hunt, Parents and Children in History: The Psychology of Family Life in Early Modern France (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972). Philippe Ari` es, Centuries of Childhood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (London: Penguin, 1979 (1762)), p. 33. Max Primault, Henry Lhong and Jean Malrieu, Terres de lenfance: le mythe de lenfance dans la litt erature contemporaine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), passim; Aim e Dupuy, Un personnage nouveau du roman fran cais: lenfant (Paris: Hachette, 1931), Introduction; Victor Toursch, LEnfant fran cais a ` la n du XIXe si` ecle, dapr` es ses principaux romanciers (Paris: Les Presses modernes, 1939), passim; Rosemary Lloyd, The Land of Lost Content: Children and Childhood in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 35; Alphonse Daudet, Jack (Paris: Flammarion, 1973 (1876)); Jules Vall` es, LEnfant (Paris: Livre de poche, 1985 (1879)).

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Introduction

Jean Cocteau and Colette during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.8 Rousseau also launched the notion that what happened to the individual during childhood shaped the rest of his or her life. Following the success of his Confessions (1781), authors of autobiographies began almost as a matter of routine to include an account of their childhood. Readers now wanted to know about key inuences on a personality, about choices made or refused during the early years.9 In the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud (18561939) famously reinforced this line, writing that analytic experience has convinced us of the complete truth of the common assertion that the child is psychologically father of the man and that the events of his rst years are of paramount importance for his whole subsequent life.10 The welfare of the young also became a matter of state, as governments in France became concerned over the threat of depopulation and the degeneration of the race. A whole raft of experts, drawn from the worlds of medicine, education, the Catholic Church and psychology, gave advice supposedly for the benet of children and adolescents. Finally, reading and writing came to occupy a large amount of peoples time. From the late eighteenth century there survives a growing volume of personal diaries, family correspondence, memoirs, autobiographies and reminiscences of childhood. To begin with, the written word was largely the preserve of the nobility and the middle classes: on the eve of the French Revolution, according to the Maggiolo Enquiry, over a half of all bridegrooms and nearly three quarters of all brides were unable to sign their names. However near-universal literacy from the end of the nineteenth century enabled artisans, workers and peasants to begin penetrating the literary circuit.11 This outpouring of material has provided the sources for a range of innovative works on issues affecting the young in France. One might cite histories of childbirth, infant welfare, child abandonment, the
8

10 11

George Boas, The Cult of Childhood (London: Warburg Institute, 1966), pp. 8, 1012; Marina Bethlenfalvay, Les Visages de lenfant dans la litt erature fran caise du XIXe si` ecle: esquisse dune typologie (Geneva: Droz, 1979), p. 9; Justin OBrien, The Novel of Adolescence in France: The Study of a Literary Theme (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), pp. 89. See G erard Lahouati, LInvention de lenfance: le statut du souvenir denfance dans quelques autobiographies du XVIIIe si` ecle, and Christine Van Rogger Andreucci, Larbaud, Proust, C eline: points et contrepoints pour un mythe de lenfance, both in Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore and Isabelle Pebay-Clottes (eds.), Autour de lenfance (Biarritz: Atlantica, 1999), pp. 16390 and 21135. S. Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1949), cited by Ann Clarke and Alan Clarke, Early Experience and the Life Path (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000), p. 12. The most comprehensive study of the spread of literacy in France remains Fran cois Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

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wet-nursing business, child labour reform, education, reformatories for juvenile delinquents, colonies de vacances, organized youth movements and concepts of adolescence.12 However, it is a common complaint that histories of childhood tend to leave out the children. At best the mass of juveniles hover anonymously on the edge of the frame as victims, or suitable cases for treatment. In other words, the existing historiography generally adopts an adult-centred approach, revealing in some depth how adults in the past conceptualized childhood and adolescence, and what they did for (or to) children. Much of it ends up as a history of modern welfare institutions for young people. Where it has hesitated to venture until very recently is towards a more child-centred approach, engaging, for example, with what Richard N. Coe called the authentic small world of the young child, or the restlessness of youth.13 Yet every single French man and woman who survived to maturity spent years passing through the successive stages of life ordained by their particular background, experiencing the often searing impact of, among others, relatives, friends, teachers, doctors, priests and employers. Why should there be something of a blind spot in history for rst-hand accounts of such an extended period of everyones life?14 It surely stems from two sources: a reluctance by most historians to take seriously the concerns of young people, and a general wariness of notoriously suspect sources such as diaries and autobiographies.
12

13 14

From a vast literature, one might cite works such as J. G elis, M. Laget and M.-F. Morel, Entrer dans la vie: naissances et enfances dans la France traditionnelle (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1978); Rachel Fuchs, Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); George D. Sussman, Selling Mothers Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France, 1715 1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Robert Gildea, Education in Provincial France, 18001914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Catherine Rollet-Echalier, La Politique a ` l egard de la petite enfance sous la Troisi` eme R epublique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990); Lee Shai Weissbach, Child Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century France: Assuring the Future Harvest (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Jean-No el Luc, LInvention du jeune enfant au XIXe si` ecle: de la salle dasile a ` l ecole maternelle (Paris: Belin, 1997); Yves Roumajon, Enfants perdus, enfants punis: histoire de la jeunesse d elinqante en France: huit si` ecles de controverses (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989); Laura Lee Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 18801960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); David M. Pomfret, Young People and the European City: Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint-Etienne, 18901914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); and Agn` es Thierc e, Histoire de ladolescence, 18501914 (Paris: Belin, 1999). Richard N. Coe, When the Grass was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 356. An excellent pioneering survey, which made some use of novels and autobiographies (with some tendency to mix the two), was Maurice Crubellier, LEnfance et la jeunesse dans la soci et e fran caise, 18001950 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979). This work is indebted to its comprehensive outline of its subject. A more recent and up-dated survey is Catherine Rollet, Les Enfants au XIXe si` ecle (Paris: Hachette, 2001).

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For much of the twentieth century, historians and social scientists simply did not consider young people worth studying on their own terms. They preferred to remain on familiar territory, dominated by the adult male, such as political systems, wars and class structures, rather than the more humdrum domain of women and children. They evidently found it difcult to cope with the inevitably trivial concerns of children in particular, for it is indeed no mean challenge for a writer to convey to the reader the supreme signicance of the unspeakably, the absurdly trivial.15 As far as treatment of the young was concerned, all that mattered was their socialization and development, in preparation for the all-important stage of full adulthood. In other words, children were treated as adults-in-themaking, rather than as children in their own right.16 Only in the past few years have scholars in history and the social sciences begun to consider this latter approach. Moreover, there were doubts for a long time among historians over whether there was much in the way of source material for any such study. The sentiments approach to the history of the family, and its focus on parentchild relations, has proved vulnerable to the charge that its evidence is too subjective and fragmentary to allow rigorous documentation of change over time in various contexts. Above all, what was happening beyond the literate minority that produced most of the personal records on which such an approach relies has remained obscure. Even a champion of this school, during the 1970s, could loftily dismiss history based on literary sources as merely anecdotal, a haphazard collection of charming little stories.17 For as long as quantitative methods held sway in social history, it was tempting to opt instead for a demographic or a household economics approach, using hard data from sources such as census lists.18 However, in the late twentieth century, for many historians the sheen began to wear off the statistics, meaning appeared more interesting than function, and cultural history came to the fore. A number of historians have incorporated personal case studies into their work, providing a grass-roots perspective on certain aspects of growing up.19
15 16

17 18 19

Coe, When the Grass was Taller, p. xii. See, for example, Arlene Skolnick, Introduction: Rethinking Childhood, in Skolnick (ed.), Rethinking Childhood: Perspectives on Development and Society (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), pp. 115 (p. 11); Anne-Marie Ambert, Sociology of Childhood: The Place of Children in North American Sociology, Sociological Studies of Child Development, 1 (1986), 1131; Hans Peter Dreitzel (ed.), Childhood and Socialization (New York: Macmillan, 1973). Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 18. See Michael Anderson, Approaches to the History of the Western Family, 15001914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), ch. 3. Excellent examples include Mark Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat: The Education of the Court Nobility, 15801715 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Eric

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In the background, inspired in part by the pioneering work of the historian Philippe Ari` es in his Centuries of Childhood (1962), was the emergence of the movement known as the new social studies of childhood. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists as well as historians, it has provided both inspiration and theoretical support for this study.20 Three of its propositions stand out for our purposes. In the rst place, there is the call to give young people a more active role in their own history than has usually been the case. Instead of depicting them simply as passive receptacles of adult teaching, they gain a role as agents in determining their own existence.21 Research indicates that even infants are capable of manipulating and interacting with adults, despite the fact that the overall power relationship is heavily weighted towards the latter. The sociologist William A. Corsaro set out to show how children negotiate, share, and create culture with adults and each other.22 The upshot is that in this study the young move close to centre stage than is usual.
Mension-Rigau, LEnfance au ch ateau: l education familiale des e lites fran caises au vingti` eme si` ecle (Paris: Rivages, 1990); Denis Bertholet, Les Fran cais par eux-m emes, 18151885 (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1991); Mary Jo Maynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Michelle Perrot, Roles and Characters, in Philippe Ari` es and Georges Duby (eds.), A History of Private Life, vol. IV, pp. 167 239; Luc, LInvention du jeune enfant au XIXe si` ecle; Jean-Louis Lenhof, LEnfant et les mutations du travail industriel en France au XIXe si` ecle: le regard des contemporains, in Jean-Pierre Bardet, Jean-No el Luc, Isabelle Robin-Romero and Catherine Rollet (eds.), Lorsque lenfant grandit: entre d ependance et autonomie (Paris: Presses de lUniversit e de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003), pp. 73350; and Gabrielle Houbre, La Discipline de lamour: l education sentimentale des lles et des gar cons a ` l age du romantisme (Paris: Plon, 1997). For comparative purposes, one might cite Harvey J. Graff, Conicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 18701914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996); and Rudolf Dekker, Children, Memory and Autobiography in Holland: From the Golden Age to Romanticism (London: Macmillan, 1999. Alan Prout and Allison James, A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood? Provenance, Promise and Problems, in James and Prout (eds.), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (London: Falmer Press, 1990), pp. 734; and Allison James, Chris Jenks and Alan Prout, Theorizing Childhood (Cambridge: Polity, 1998). This is the theme of recent works in American historiography, such as of Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far West Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989) and Elliott West and Paula Petrick (eds.), Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 18501950 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992). William A. Corsaro, The Sociology of Childhood (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1997), p. 18. See also Prout and James, New Paradigm, p. 8; Jens Qvortrup, Childhood Matters: An Introduction, in Qvortrup et al. (eds.), Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics (Aldershot: Avebury, 1994), pp. 123 (pp. 35); and Berry Mayall, Towards a Sociology for Children: Thinking from Childrens Lives (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002), pp. 201.

20

21

22

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Secondly, there is the insistence on analysing the age category of childhood (and of adolescence) according to such variables as gender, social background and religious afliation.23 This means that one should be wary of broad generalizations about the experiences of children and adolescents in modern France, given the huge disparities in areas such as wealth and education. Indeed, it is the diversity of childhoods in different periods and places that stands out in recent scholarship, rather than any universal experience.24 Hence one needs to bear in mind the particular conguration of French inuences on the process of growing up during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At various points, this work will draw attention to a number of these, including the persistence of a large agricultural sector in the economy, the high proportion of married women in the active population (56 per cent of married women worked in France in 1906, compared to 9.6 per cent in England in 191125 ), the widespread resort to paid wet-nurses by workers and the lower-middle classes in the big cities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the early resort to birth control within marriage, the concern among ruling elites with depopulation, the long battle between Catholics and Republicans for the control of education, and the polarization of politics between the Left and the Right in the wake of the 1789 Revolution. Finally, and relatedly, there is the assertion that childhood and adolescence are to be understood as a social construction. That is to say, the search for the real or the essential child and adolescent is considered futile, given the huge variety of denitions we are now aware of in past societies and in other countries today. As William Kessen put it in 1979, anyone adopting a positivist approach now faces the nightmare that the child is essentially and eternally a cultural invention and that the variety of the childs denition is not the removable error of an incomplete science.26 Treating the concept of the child or the adolescent as a moveable feast, however, raises the problem of avoiding the extremes of
23 24 25 26

Prout and James, New Paradigm, p. 8. The starting point here was Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein (eds.), Childhood in Contemporary Cultures (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1955). Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), p. 196. William Kessen, The American Child and Other Cultural Inventions, American Psychologist, 34 (1979), 81520. See also William Kessen, The Child (New York: John Wiley, 1965); Frank S. Kessel and Alexander W. Siegel (eds.), The Child and Other Cultural Inventions (New York: Praeger, 1983); C. Philip Hwang, Michael E. Lamb and Irving E. Sigel (eds.), Images of Childhood (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996); and Robert A. Levine, Child Psychology and Anthropology: An Environmental View, in Catherine Panter-Brick (ed.), Biosocial Perspectives on Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 10230.

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Growing up in France

cultural and biological determinism. It is quite possible to study these stages of life in evolutionary and biological terms. Thus Barry Bogin denes childhood as the period following weaning, when the youngster still depends on older people for feeding and protection, and adolescence as the stage between puberty and the attainment of adult stature. He sees childhood as an evolutionary innovation, unique to Homo sapiens, that enabled human parents to raise a higher proportion of their offspring to maturity than any other species. This sociobiological perspective left him open to the criticism that he ignored the social and cultural inuences on childhood.27 Towards the other end of the spectrum, Allison James asserts that childhood is a social and cultural phenomenon: biological development must be seen as contextualising, rather than unequivocally determining, childrens experience. This provokes questions on the relationship between the biological base and the childs life. What, asked Martin Richards, marks out those parts of the child that are biological from those which are social?28 It is not easy to provide an answer, but one can hardly avoid some reference to the biological realities that underpin the adaptability of young people to their cultural environment.29 One should be aware that child psychology has always suffered from a tendency to make universal claims for its ndings when the basis for its empirical observations have come from a narrow, largely American, range of environments. All the same, in the present state of knowledge, there are grounds for thinking that during the rst twelve months or so of its life an infant has a biological predisposition to develop a special relationship with a caregiver: usually, but not invariably, the biological mother. According to the psychologist L. Alan Sroufe, the rst sign of an attachment relationship, distress at separation, shows a strikingly similar course across cultures with a peak onset commonly seen at about 9 months.30 Between eighteen and thirtysix months, there is a period when the acquisition of language is at its most rapid. More generally, as the structure of the central nervous system matures during the rst twelve years of life, it permits the release of abilities such as walking, talking and self-awareness. Hence every culture
27

28

29 30

Barry Bogin, Evolutionary and Biological Aspects of Childhood, and Martin Richards, The Meeting of Nature and Nurture and the Development of Children: Some Conclusions, in Panter-Brick, Biosocial Perspectives, pp. 1044 (pp. 10, 213, 30 and 38), and pp. 13145 (pp. 1323) respectively. Allison James, From the Childs Point of View: Issues in the Social Construction of Childhood, and Richards, The Meeting, in Panter-Brick, Biosocial Perspectives, pp. 44 65 (p. 47) and p. 135 respectively. See below, especially ch. 3. L. Alan Sroufe, Emotional Development: The Organization of Emotional Life in the Early Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 173.

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has some notion of the stages of life, linked more-or-less precisely to age gradations. However, their number and meanings are subject to considerable variation.31 In the nal analysis, one evidently needs to strike a balance between biological and environmental inuences on growing up. For a historical study such as this the emphasis is bound to be on the latter. The inclination here is to follow the sociological line that children and adolescents everywhere are immature biologically, but where each society differs in the ways that it interprets and attaches meaning to this immaturity.32 All this of course takes one back to adult discourses rather than to the young themselves. It remains important as a starting point for this work, given that prevailing conceptions of the child and the adolescent sooner or later had an impact on the way people treated their young in any given society. Robert E. Levine, for example, notes that parental practices and the parents organization of the childs environment are goal-driven, and the goals are largely derived from conceptions of care, infancy and childhood embedded in local cultural ideologies.33 By focusing systematically on what French people had to say about their early years, either at the time in letters and diaries, or retrospectively in autobiographies, childhood reminiscences and oral history projects, this study aims to harness this new paradigm to move on from the existing orientation of the historiography. It gives voice to a sample of young people from all levels of French society, rather than the usual cast of famous reformers, politicians and other adults in positions of authority. It analyses the way the individual child or adolescent reacted to the world around them, rather than the socio-political forces underlying legal and institutional developments. And it takes an interest in the later stages of childhood and adolescence, rather than the intensively studied areas of childbirth and infancy.34 This is not to deny the importance for the young of the institutional framework in which they grew up. Hence what follows balances the somewhat random testimony of individuals with the
31

32 34

This section relies on Levine, Child Psychology; Jerome Kagan, The Nature of the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and Josephine Klein, Our Need for Others and its Roots in Infancy (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1987), ch. 6. It is also inuenced by Nicholas Tucker, What is a Child? (London: Fontana, 1977); Emily Cahan, Jay Mechling, Brian Sutton-Smith and Sheldon H. White, The Elusive Historical Child: Ways of Knowing the Child of History and Psychology, in Glen H. Elder Jr, John Modell and Ross D. Parke (eds.), Children in Time and Place: Developmental and Historical Insights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 192223; and Chris Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 1996). 33 Levine, Child Psychology, p. 113. Prout and James, New Paradigm, p. 7. On the emphasis in current studies on such topics as the heavy mortality suffered by infants under the ancien r egime, and the little rituals designed to protect mothers and babies in these difcult circumstances, see Bardet et al., Introduction to Lorsque lenfant grandit, pp. 628 (p. 6).

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10

Growing up in France

context of changes affecting, say, the family, the school system, child labour legislation and marriage customs in modern France. In a study of this kind one is bound to ask whether conditions for young people improved or deteriorated over the long term in modern France. The general impression that lingers in the existing historical literature is a positive one of progress from philanthropic and state intervention. Given the numerous dimensions to young peoples existence, any comprehensive answer is in fact likely to be complex. A commonsense view would suggest that things have improved considerably for the young from the middle of the eighteenth century. Children and adolescents have taken their share of increased afuence with, on average, better food, clothing and housing, more varied leisure activities, improved medical treatment and more extensive education and training. Their interests have featured prominently in charitable initiatives and the development of the welfare state, from child protection agencies through to universities. The evidence of progress is hard to dispute when one considers such measurable gains as lower infant and child mortality, and rising literacy rates.35 An opposing tendency in the literature, however, highlights various drawbacks for the young in all this progress. Philippe Ari` es betrayed a certain sympathy for medieval practice in suggesting that young people enjoyed a relatively carefree existence before the discipline of the school system began to clamp down on an increasing proportion of them during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.36 The Marxist interpretation of history implies an increasingly rational exploitation of the young in the schools and workshops of capitalist society during the nineteenth century.37 The persistence of child labour in the twenty-rst century and critiques of mass schooling militate against easy optimism on contemporary society.38 This study veers towards a swings and roundabouts approach, arguing that there was a certain trade-off between the material benets brought by economic development and the pressures on young people in an increasingly mobile society.
35

36

37

38

Catherine Rollet and Patrice Bordelais, Infant Mortality in France, 17501950: Evaluation and Perspectives, in Carlo A. Corsini and Pier Paolo Viazzo (eds.), The Decline of Infant Mortality in Europe, 18001950 (Florence: UNICEF, 1993), pp. 5170; Fran cois Furet and Jacques Ozouf, The Spread of Literacy in France: A One-Way Ride, in Furet and Ozouf, Reading and Writing, pp. 557. Ari` es, Centuries of Childhood, ch. 10 and p. 397; Adrian Wilson, The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Ari` es, History and Theory, 19 (1980), 13253 (134). The Marxist critique is forcefully made in Roger Magraw, A History of the French Working Class, vol. I, The Age of Artisan Revolution, 185171 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 911. See, for example, Bernard Schlemmer (ed.), The Exploited Child, transl. Philip Dresner (London: Zed Books, 2005).

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