GROWING UP IN FRANCE. From the Ancien Regime to the Third Republic. By Colin Heywood. 313pp. Cambridge University Press. Pounds 50 (US $96). 978 0 521
86869 3.
Colin Heywood's new book on childhood in France from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries illustrates how far the study of history has come during the past twenty years. His Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France, published in
1988, explored the impact of industrialization on child labour among the peasantry and working classes, and the campaign of the state to restrict child labour in the factories. It was based on archival sources, official reports and the studies of economists and educationists. The children themselves were objects rather than subjects; they scarcely had a voice. "Historians have now generally moved on from a Marxist-inspired preoccupation with class and its links to social structures", writes Heywood. "They have 'unhooked' political and socio-economic change" and "now place more emphasis on autonomous developments in the political and cultural sphere."
Consideration of child labour in field and factory is relegated to the final part of Growing Up in France. It is set in the context of the tension between work and school - the expansion of popular education and attempts by the authorities to lengthen the time children stayed in class. Heywood begins, however, with representations of childhood, in both treatises and images. The ghost of Philippe Aries, whose Centuries of Childhood (1960) postulated the "invention" of childhood in the seventeenth century and the need to quarantine and discipline children for long years in Catholic colleges, has only partially been laid to rest. Heywood argues that the Christian doctrine that children were stained by original sin and had to be saved from evil by a tough education was contested by an Enlightenment and Romantic notion of childhood innocence.
His hero is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who proclaimed in Emile that "there is no original perversity in the human heart" and that children were naturally good, perverted only by society. There are a few illustrations to support this, such as Greuze's adolescent girl, "Innocence", although Gericault's portrait of Louise Vernet, "exuding lustfulness", shows that the notion of the evil or "tribal" child survived in parallel through the nineteenth century until it linked up with Freudian notions of infant sexuality.
Alongside representations, Heywood explores the social practices which marked the successive phases of childhood, as defined by folklorists such as Andre Varagnac and Arnold van Gennep. Although Rousseau favoured breastfeeding, many French children got off to a poor start because of the widespread practice, common not only in the elite but also in groups like the Lyon silk-weavers, of sending infants out to wet nurses in the countryside, where the mortality rate was up to 40 per cent. First communion at the age of twelve or thirteen, when boys wore long trousers for the first time and girls long dresses, hailed entry into the Church, the world of work, or (for boys from the social elite) departure to board at a lycee or college. Girls were generally educated by nuns, since only piety and virginity were required before they were subjected to an arranged marriage. Children of course had their own peer-group practices, which involved the formation of gangs and ritualized battles between children of different villages, such as the "war of the buttons" in the Doubs, described in 1912 by Louis Pergaud, in which captured youths forfeited the buttons and braces of their clothing. Adolescence, when sexual and social identity was painfully discovered, became a big topic of debate around 1900.
Heywood describes how the young Sartre wrestled with this through reading, but does not discuss the emergence at this point of adolescent literature with its superheroes - Fantomas, Zigomar, Arsene Lupin. For young men, childhood came to an end with military service at the age of twenty, conscripts marching with trumpet and drum to the local town, where they were feted by the mayor, returning home to kiss the girls of their age before they left for new horizons.
The most important contribution of Heywood's study is his use of what he calls "ego-documents" - journals and diaries, letters between parents and children, autobiographies and autobiographical novels. These were long confined to the literate minority, but Heywood has unearthed a significant sample of texts, together with manuscript sources in a number of archives, and announces "the democratization of autobiographical writing". Many of these accounts obey the rules of genres such as the picaresque of Jacques-Louis Menetra's tour of France as an artisan in the 1750s, in which he related fifty-two sexual encounters, or the Christian conversion of young girls, followed by an early death, texts which were ruthlessly promoted by the Church. There are plentiful accounts of drunken fathers, cold mothers and sexual awakenings, although evidence of sexual abuse is inevitably airbrushed out.
Heywood argues that, over this period, a child-centred, affectionate model of the family, which was that of the bourgeoisie, broadly displaced the careless aristocratic model and the harsh popular model. The authoritarian patriarch declined and "the mother-daughter nexus became the backbone of the modern family". Sexual revolution was more or less kept in check.
What is missing, perhaps, in this sensitive and insightful book is an appreciation of childhood experience on the adult. Did the beatings inflicted on Jules Valles by his mother make him a revolutionary, or the smotherings of Andre Gide's mother incubate his homosexuality? But perhaps this is material for another book.
