Historian’s discovery of childhood

Abstract

The “discovery of childhood” is a tricky notion because childhood is as much a fact of a biological and psychological nature as a cultural notion that through the centuries has been the object of changing perceptions, definitions, and images. Children barely speak in history; virtually everything we know about them is mediated by adults. Then how to interpret the theme? This introductory paper proposes a triple approach. It examines firstly, and forcibly very roughly, the discovery of the child in social discourse and social practice throughout history. Secondly, it analyses the invention of childhood in scholarly practice, focussing in particular on the influential study by Philippe Ariès. Thirdly, it briefly recalls the interplay between scholarly work and personal commitment with regard to the discovery of the child as an “historical sensation”.

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Historian’s discovery of childhood
Willem Frijhoff
a
a
Department of History, VU-University, Amsterdam/Erasmus
School of History, Culture and Communication, Erasmus
University, Rotterdam, Netherlands
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Historian’s discovery of childhood
Willem Frijhoff*
Department of History, VU-University, Amsterdam/Erasmus School of History, Culture and
Communication, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands
(Received 9 January 2011; final version received 22 November 2011)
The “discovery of childhood” is a tricky notion because childhood is as much a
fact of a biological and psychological nature as a cultural notion that through
the centuries has been the object of changing perceptions, definitions, and
images. Children barely speak in history; virtually everything we know about
them is mediated by adults. Then how to interpret the theme? This introductory
paper proposes a triple approach. It examines firstly, and forcibly very roughly,
the discovery of the child in social discourse and social practice throughout
history. Secondly, it analyses the invention of childhood in scholarly practice,
focussing in particular on the influential study by Philippe Ariès. Thirdly, it
briefly recalls the interplay between scholarly work and personal commitment
with regard to the discovery of the child as an “historical sensation”.
Keywords: childhood; history of education; adolescence
Historian’s discovery of childhood
Eureka! I have found it! Suddenly the outcome is clear; uncertainty is gone! The
future is bright! That is the emblem of this conference on the discovery of child-
hood. But is it correct? Is it applicable to our research? Does it enhance our knowl-
edge or our historical practice? This opening contribution wants to be an appetizer,
proposing avenues for scholarly debate or discussion, not a synthesis of the work to
come. One thing is certain, however: childhood is as much a fact of a biological and
psychological nature as it is a cultural notion that through the centuries has been the
object of ever-changing perceptions and definitions, images, approaches, and emo-
tions. Discovery of childhood can, therefore, be understood in two ways: either as a
discovery of the child as a young human being in its historical conditions or as a
narrative construction of the child and childhood in our scholarly work.
1
To be true, a huge paradox looms around childhood. Children are virtually mute
in the sources of history. Yet the practice of their education, from infancy to
*Email: willem.frijhoff@gmail.com
1
Since this text has been conceived as a general opening lecture, it does not pretend at
reflecting in any way the current state of the huge amount of literature on the child in his-
tory. The footnotes only intend to open the theme for further reading on the issues con-
cerned. Due to my own sphere of interest and the importance of the discovery theme, I
focus more on the early modern period and on the child, as such, than on the school system
in later centuries, which has been the object of many studies but seems less embedded in
categories of intellectual or emotional discovery. The reader may adapt these reflections to
his or her own scholarly concerns.
Paedagogica Historica
Vol. 48, No. 1, February 2012, 11–29
ISSN 0030-9230 print/ISSN 1477-674X online
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university, is one of the most loquacious fields of scholarship. Adults speak for
children, often and loudly, not only throughout history, but also in the writing of
history itself. One hundred years ago the Swedish feminist Ellen Key created a
child-centred approach of history with her educational treatise The Century of the
Child.
2
But however central to reform pedagogy and educational agency, for the
historian, that child remains fundamentally an object of research. Actually, no child
has ever written an educational treatise, a history of educational practices, or an
analysis of his/her own childish images. And I dare state that no child has ever dis-
covered itself as a child. The child is not self-reflexive in history; as a historical
issue, it is a virtual theme of discovery by others.
3
By the phenomenon that psy-
chology calls “childhood amnesia”, the growing child loses the memory of its early
experiences and of the infant it has been. Subsequently, the memorial functions
develop, but it is not before adolescence that young men or women start to wonder
about themselves as an object of reflection and discover themselves as a subject of
conscious memorisation, of self-fashioning, and indeed, as an agent of history.
4
However, precisely as an object of self-discovery, the child does not really
respond to the historical categories of its inventors. By constructing its personality
in constantly renewed settings and under continuously changing conditions, the
child escapes the definitions drawn of its historical existence by elder scholars. The
child is always in advance of its historians. The memory of the child we have all
been does not suffi ce to explain childhood in the present, and the present sensitivity
towards childhood is inadequate for our historical consciousness of the child. That
is exactly the reason why the Eureka formula applies so perfectly to the child and
to childhood. As a historical category, “the child” is always invention by others, its
discoverers, or inventors.
5
Therefore, I am rather sceptical about the possibility of a
“global history of childhood”, as recent works suggest.
6
In spite of its apparent
2
Ellen Key, Barnets århundrade [The Century of the Child] (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1900); Key,
The Century of the Child (New York: Putnam, 1909). On this path-breaking work and its influ-
ence: Christine Henry-Huthmacher, 1900–2000: das Jahrhundert des Kindes. Verheissungen,
Realität, Herausforderungen (Saint-Augustin: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 2001); Christine
Swientek, Von der “Majestät des Kindes” zu “Monsterkid und Co”: das “Jahrhundert des
Kindes” von seinem Ende her betrachtet (Freiburg im Breisgau: Lambertus Verlag, 2002); and
Michael Zuckerman, ed., Beyond the Century of the Child: Cultural History and Developmen-
tal Psychology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
3
This does not mean that the child is just a passive object of education or indeed of history, but
its agency escapes self-analysis. Cf. the critical remarks of Bruce Bellingham, “The History of
Childhood Since the ‘Invention of Childhood’: Some Issues in the Eighties,” The Journal of
Family History 13, no. 3 (1988): 347–58.
4
The notion of self-fashioning has been introduced by Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-
Fashioning: More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980) and developed
in his later work, which is considered as the inauguration of New Historicism, an historical-
critical approach to literary sources in history.
5
For an overview from early agricultural societies to the present, see Peter N. Stearns, Child-
hood in World History (New York: Routledge, 2008) and his assessment: “Defining Happy
Childhoods: Assessing a Recent Change,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3,
no. 3 (2010): 343–65. Other surveys of experiences and perceptions of childhood: Hugh
Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (London: Longman,
1995), several translations; Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Child-
hood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001); and the
BBC series by Hugh Cunningham, “The Invention of Childhood” (2006).
6
Cf. the title of the journal Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research, but most of its
contents appear to be anything but really global.
12 W. Frijhoff
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self-evidence, “childhood” is for the historian of education an analytical category
that escapes generalisation in time and space. It can be and must be discovered and
redefined over and over again.
7
Yet, even if the child has been the first object of the history of education over time,
its primary object is not the child in itself but the way we deal with it. It is about our
concern, our commitment, our agency, and our image of the child, the young people,
the adolescents, and the pre-adults. The imagery of childhood, how children should
be, how they should quit their childish age, and how we have experienced this by our-
selves, is the central focus of our discipline, the history of education, more precisely
defined as the history of children’s education. Such research aims are packed in the
words of scholarship, of philosophy or pedagogy, of anthropology and sociology, and
even of cultural sciences – but that is package, not reality. The reality – if I may use
that tricky concept – is personal, it is our confrontation with the child we have been
and we may unconsciously see or want to discover in the child we study or that we
project into our scholarly work.
8
Indeed, in cultural analysis every cultural image
refers to forms of sedimentation of physical, visual, and mental images and experi-
ences. Properly analysed, history of education tells us as much about ourselves and
our predecessors in this field as about childhood and its equivalents as objects of
research. It brings a historian easily to a sense of discovery and, consequently, either
to a close personal involvement in his or her research theme and to its emotional
appropriation as an element of identity-finding in the past or to a true sense of other-
ness in the face of a lost world. History of education constantly challenges us to trans-
form our desires of identity by recognising otherness.
9
In all, there are three major reasons for reflecting upon the Eureka moment:
firstly, because the discovery of childhood reveals the discourse on the child and
the social practices attached to it in the global society; secondly, because it reveals
the interest taken in childhood and education as a scholarly practice; thirdly, and
not in the least, because the Eureka factor steers our personal research.
Discovery of the child in social discourse and social practice
When reflecting upon the discovery of the child in social discourse and social
practice, examples come to the fore in abundance. Let me just quote some forms of
intervention or representation that we may discover on a travel through the history
7
See for a similar plea from a psychological viewpoint, chapter 7: J. Amos Hatch, “Studying
Childhood as a Cultural Invention. A Rationale and Framework,” in Qualitative Research in Early
Childhood Settings, ed. Hatch (Westport CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1995): 117–33.
8
Just one example: Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of
Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (London: Virago Press, 1995), offers a beautiful analysis of
the curiosity-driven interest in childhood by adult scholars, focused on Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe’s “Bildungsroman”, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) and the historical recep-
tion of the girl Mignon, his unlucky protégée.
9
For history writing as confrontation with otherness (altérité), I may refer, in particular, to the
work of the French historian and psychoanalyst Michel de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire
(Paris: Gallimard, 1975), or Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988); Heterologies. Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1986). See also Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation
and its Other (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); and Willem Frijhoff. “Michel de Certeau
(1925–1986),” in French Historians 1900–2000: The New Historical Writing in Twentieth-
Century France, ed. Philip Daileader and Philip Whalen (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell,
2010), 77–92.
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of childhood. First of all: mythology. Children have been many times discovered as
historical founders of their society or in primeval symbolic situations. The child as
founder or icon is an archetype that transcends the boundaries of cultures and
religions. Think of the legendary discovery of Romulus and Remus, the founding
twins of Rome; of the foundling Moses in the basket on the river Nile, founder of
Israel as a community (Exodus 2:1–10); of the child Jesus found in the temple of
Jerusalem, as an icon of childish wisdom (Luke 2:41–52); of the narrative on the
courageous young boy Hans Brinker, who with his thumb in the dike, prevented
the country of the Dutch to be destroyed by a flood;
10
and even of Pocahontas, the
young native American icon of intercultural encounter, restored to children’s
memory in 1995 by a Walt Disney Studio’s feature film.
Children are considered to be near to God. They are either seen as unspoiled
intermediaries between God and man, like the child prophets of the Camisards after
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and of other persecuted groups crav-
ing for a message from heaven, or as easy examples of god-fearing life, like the
children who died young and whose pious death-bed was exalted in stories for a
broad public.
11
Actually, a surprising number of early Christian martyrs were chil-
dren or adolescents, not to speak of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem murdered by
King Herod (Matthew 2:16–18).
12
Moreover, in a perverted vision of martyrdom, it
was always children that Jews or other enemies of Christendom tortured and
brought to death in their hatred of the Christian God. The discovery of such a mar-
tyred child inevitably led to a pogrom. That happened for the first time at Trent in
1475, when two-year-old Simon was discovered tortured to death on the day of the
Jewish Passover, which was interpreted as a ritual death and imputed on the local
Jews.
13
The time slot is revealing: this is the period of discovery of the child as an
autonomous human being of which Philippe Ariès has spoken. I shall come back to
it soon. Simultaneously, the cult of the Holy Child Jesus appears, becoming one of
the most popular devotions in Rome, in Prague, and elsewhere. Promoted by the
10
This fictional young boy, who has his statue in the Holland village of Spaarndam near
Haarlem, was invented by Mary Mapes Dodge in her historical novel Hans Brinker, or the
Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1865), an immen-
sely popular, much printed, and translated story that, throughout many decades, made the
young hero for foreign readers the archetype of the courageous Dutchman fighting the men-
ace of the sea. See Annett Stott, “Images of Dutchness in the United States,” in Four Centu-
ries of Dutch-American Relations 1609–2009, ed. Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van
Minnen and Giles Scott-Smith (Amsterdam: Boom, 2009), 238–49.
11
See, for instance: Leendert F. Groenendijk, Fred A. van Lieburg, and John Exalto, “‘Away
with all the Pleasant Things in the World...’: Model Death-bed Accounts of Two Young
Victims of the Plague of 1664 in the Dutch town of Leyden,” Paedagogica Historica 46,
no. 3 (June 2010): 271–88; and more broadly: Josef N. Neumann and Udo Sträter, eds., Das
Kind in Pietismus und Aufklärung (Halle: Franckesche Stiftungen, 2000). On the Camisard
child prophets: Georgia Cosmos, Huguenot Prophecy and Clandestine Worship in the Eigh-
teenth Century: “The Sacred Theatre of the Cévennes” (Aldershot, VT: Ashgate, 2005).
12
On holy children: Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society. The Two
Worlds of Western Christendom 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982),
19–47 (chapter 1: “Children”) and 48–72 (chapter 2: “Adolescents”); Anna Benvenuti Papi,
Bambini santi. Rappresentazione dell’infanzia e modelli agiografici (Turin: Rosenberg &
Sellier, 1991); and Diana Wood, ed., The Church and Childhood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
13
Ronny Po-chia Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1992); and Patricia Healy Wasyliw, Martyrdom, Murder, and Magic: Child Saints
and Their Cults in Medieval Europe (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).
14 W. Frijhoff
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spirituality of the French School of Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629) as a cult
of the proximity of God through his representation on earth, the Child Jesus was
either represented by his Incarnation, as a wrapped-up baby, or with the instruments
of his passion as a pre-figuration of the adult Christ.
14
Throughout history, children have often been an object of fascination, love, or
admiration. Fascination has made the extremely detailed journal of Jean Héroard
(1551–1628), the physician of the young royal child that would soon become the
French King Louis XIII, an almost inexhaustible source of historical discoveries.
15
Fascination with children’s unsuspected world and autonomous sense of group pair-
ing speaks in the stories about children’s crusades.
16
Several narratives speak of his-
torical experiences for isolating children and depriving them of any form of
linguistic communication in order to discover what the original language is they
will spontaneously speak – by Pharaoh Psammetichus according to Herodotus, by
the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II according to his chronicler Salimbene, by
the Mogul Emperor Akbar, and by King James V of Scotland – or what they will
reveal about their natural inclinations before any contact with culture.
17
Admiration
has brought us the notion of the “child prodigy”, the best known example of which
is, of course, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart but the most eminent being Christian
Friedrich Heinecken, an exceptionally gifted child of Lübeck who died in 1725 at
age four in odour of perfect erudition.
18
That notion closely related to a sense of
discovery of something prodigious appears only in the eighteenth century. It refers
clearly not so much to the child’s performances as such, because in earlier centuries
children performed curious things as well, played music, or were actors at the the-
atre – think of gifted young boys, such as Hugo Grotius, or Blaise Pascal, or the
seventeenth-century polyglot miracle Anna Maria van Schurman.
19
The prodigious
character of the child’s performance was a question of recognition of the newly
perceived, twofold otherness of the child: firstly, with regard to the little adult he
had been considered before and secondly, because of the perceived distance
between the new standard-child and the individual youngster who proved capable
of an exceptional performance.
20
14
Jean Simard, Une iconographie du clergé français au XVIIe siècle: Les dévotions de
l’école française et les sources de l’imagerie religieuse en France et au Québec (Québec:
Presses de l’Université Laval, 1976).
15
Madeleine Foisil, ed., Le Journal de Jean Héroard, médecin de Louis XIII (Paris: Fayard,
1989).
16
Peter Raedts, “The Children’s Crusade of 1212,” Journal of Medieval History 3 (1977):
279–324.
17
This early form of proto-anthropological linguistics reflects the search for the original lan-
guage by scholars of the Renaissance. See Umberto Eco, La ricerca della lingua perfetta
nella cultura europea (Rome: Laterza, 1993), or Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language,
trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
18
Fred Barlow, Mental Prodigies (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952), 135–6. See also
Willem Frijhoff, “Enfants saints, enfants prodiges: l’expérience religieuse au passage de
l’enfance à l’âge adulte,” Paedagogica Historica 29, no. 1 (1993): 53–76.
19
For an early catalogue of all sorts of gifted or famous children: Michel Masson, Les
Enfants célèbres ou histoire des enfants de tous les siècles et de tous les pays qui se sont
immortalisés par le malheur, la piété, le courage, le génie, le savoir et les talents (Paris:
Didier, 1841; several reprints until Milano: Signorelli, 1956).
20
See also the interesting list of fictional child prodigies in different media throughout the
last centuries: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_child_prodigies
(accessed 9 January, 2011).
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In the nineteenth and twentieth century, the elaboration of a multifaceted image
of the child, of its capacities and needs, and of the forms of intervention that educa-
tion required has brought a growing and still continuing number of discoveries con-
cerning aspects of childhood in society and the needs or the assumed needs of
children: the criminal child, the abandoned child, and the mentally-disturbed child
are only three of the figures responsible for increasing institutional intervention in
childhood following major discoveries by concerned citizens or scholars. In fact,
the whole childhood industry refers for its legitimacy to a perpetual stream of dis-
coveries concerning the well-being and the best education of children. Think, for
instance, of the ever-growing rise of the public space devoted to children: schools,
playgrounds, sports grounds, zoos and children’s farms, entertainment, such as the
puppet theatre or the circus, or fairy places like Disneyland, and most particularly,
children’s rooms in private houses. Indeed, the desire to attribute a separate room to
each child in the family is one of the most important factors of the building explo-
sion of the last decades. Museums and libraries have made us discover the material
culture of children from the past, such as children’s dresses, toys, songs and riddles,
books and prints, including children’s versions of the Holy Scriptures. Cameras,
records, discs, gameboys and DVD’s, cell phones and iPads, and their whole after-
life on the internet, constitute certainly the next area for discovery for historians of
education...
But children have also been discovered as useful instruments for nation build-
ing. They appeal easily to values of youthful strength and heroism, as in the case
of Joseph Bara (1779–1793), the martyr and child-hero of the French Revolution
immortalised on a famous painting by Jacques-Louis David.
21
All the totalitarian
systems in the world, of whatever ideology and on whatever continent, have heavily
invested in the child: from the forced military service of orphans and abandoned
children in eighteenth-century Europe and the Napoleonic Empire to the Hitler
Jugend, from Stalin’s Pioneers and Komsomol youngsters to the Guardians of
Mao’s Revolution, and not to forget the child-soldiers of the African dictators and
rebellious armies.
22
In fact, ever since the child has been recognised as a social being with its own
rights and a full-blown personality, and childhood has been discovered as an area
of social intervention, child-centred research has widened the mental gap between
the child and the adult, increasing at the same time the facilities for a true discovery
of the child and its needs. In the eyes of a historian of childhood, the Convention
on the Rights of the Child, adopted on 20 November 1989 by the United Nations,
is, therefore, fraught with some ambiguity.
23
Recognising the full rights of child-
hood, it also keeps children confined into their childhood and the interpretation
given to this stage of life in the different parts of the world, streamlining their
personality ever more into a standard child, distrustful with regard to autonomous
21
A. Soboul, “Sentiments religieux et cultes populaires pendant la Révolution: saintes patriotes
et martyrs de la liberté,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 28 (1957): 193–213.
22
Simonetta Polenghi, Fanciulli soldati. La militarizzazione dell’infanzia abbandonata nel-
l’Europa moderna (Rome: Carocci, 2003); and the articles in “Youth Culture and Educa-
tion,” in Education and Cultural Transmission: Historical Studies of Continuity and Change
in Families, Schooling and Youth Cultures, eds. Johan Sturm, Jeroen Dekker, Richard
Aldrich and Frank Simon, supplementary series, Paedagogica Historica 2 (1996): 263–335.
23
United Nations, http://www.unesco.org/education/pdf/CHILD_E.PDF.
16 W. Frijhoff
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growth, and rejecting the right to adventure.
24
Scholars may freely experience a
Eureka feeling, but children must fight harder and more often for their own right to
discovery.
Historical discourse
The preceding reflections remain confined to external arguments. But the discovery
of infancy and childhood as a meaningful analytical category also needs sources
from the inside, and those sources do not really abound because children do not
write, or at least, when writing, they do not yet reflect autonomously upon their
personal past. Autobiographies may help disclosing the discourse on childhood. But
autobiographies suffer from the bias of time, from retro-interpretation in the light of
later-life experiences, and above all, from oblivion and the loss of memory.
25
Yet
by careful analysis, we may distinguish memory strategies in autobiography,
different according to time frames, group adhesion, or cultural context. Oral history
may be another instrument.
26
But obviously, oral history does not go beyond what
memory specialists Jan and Aleida Assmann have called the three-generation phase
of “communicative memory” between living persons.
27
As Rudolf Dekker has
shown in his analysis of several hundreds of Dutch autobiographies from the past
centuries, childhood enters the narrative of the self only in the late eighteenth cen-
tury. It does so in two ways. The first way is the awareness of the adult writer that
his or her youth was a completely idle period; the other way is the narrative con-
struction of youth as a time of happiness, thanks to the carelessness of a young-
ster’s life properly cared for by others.
28
Before the nineteenth century, however,
24
When this lecture was held, the 14-year old Dutch sailing girl Laura was on the front
pages of the media because she had just started her world tour against the will of virtually
all the agencies for child protection.
25
For the huge field of memory studies, see Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, eds., Cultural
Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008);
Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead, eds., Theories of Memory: A Reader (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Endel Tulving and Fergus I.M. Craik, eds., The
Oxford Handbook of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Anne Whitehead,
Memory [The New Critical Idiom] (London: Routledge, 2009), online resource.
26
See, for instance, the analysis of oral autobiographies of childhood from the 1960s to
1990s by Sally Alexander, “Memory Talks: London Childhoods,” in Memory: Histories,
Theories, Debates , ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New York: Fordham Univer-
sity Press, 2010), 235–45.
27
Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” in Erll and Nünning, Cultural
Memory Studies, 109–18; Harald Welzer, “Communicative Memory”, in ibid., 285 –98;
Astrid Erll, Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Eine Einführung (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 2005).
28
Rudolf Dekker, Childhood, Memory and Autobiography in Holland: From the Golden Age
to Romanticism (London: MacMillan Press, 2000). Other surveys: Diana Bjorklund, Inter-
preting the Self: Two Hundred Years of American Autobiography (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998); and Jean-Pierre Bardet, Élisabeth Arnould, and François-Joseph Rug-
giu, eds., Les écrits du for privé en Europe (du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine):
Enquêtes, Analyses, Publications (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2010). For
a rather early and exceptional childhood diary and the problems of its analysis, see Arianne
Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected
in a Boyhood Diary, trans. Diane Webb (Leiden: Brill, 2009). After 1800 such diaries
become more common, but their content is often disappointing, and their use remains subject
to caution because of parental constraint or control.
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autobiography rarely returns beyond adulthood; it does not care for childhood expe-
rience and, most often, neither for adolescence. It is as if the child did not exist by
itself, the adult being a mere product of education without having experienced a
proper childish lifetime. The Utrecht burgomaster Hendrik Aernout Laan, for
instance, wrote in 1798, when he was 63 years old:
In his childish years one passes time doing nothing, and one is happy to kill the time.
Life is boring. One likes to play all the time without being aware that this would be
boring also, as a day of vacation makes clear. Furthermore there are disagreements
with playmates about what to do. One wants to play this, the other that, and thus one
is a burden to himself and his parents. The only pleasure is the expectation of things,
which once arrived, are disappointing. In this way, with much sorrow and trouble for
one’s elders, one passes his childhood and with reluctance and with chastisements,
one is lucky to have learnt at least something.
29
Is this thoughtful presentation of a meaningless youth, the discovery of a lack of
proper childhood, really the memory of an apparently unlucky boy, or is it the a
posteriori construction of a rejected form of childhood? Are these pessimistic state-
ments a form of reconstructed memory, a conjuration of the demons of a spoiled
past, a moralising reflection of a modern citizen obsessed by productivity, or a
simple statement with social hindsight without any personal memory involved?
Another author, much better known, has told us of his childhood in the same
period in a quite different way. I refer, of course, to the founding father of the sense
of childhood, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). In his Confessions, Rousseau
tells us his experience of quitting childhood at the home of a befriended minister at
Bossey in the Swiss countryside where he was boarded, together with a cousin. His
narrative makes clear that he discovered all by himself the passage from youth to
adulthood, and that all of a sudden, he saw childhood as a time frame and a life
period in itself. One day Jean-Jacques was punished unjustly for a very small
offence falsely attributed to him. A tooth of a comb, put to dry near the fire, was
broken in a room where he alone had been present, and he was accused of breaking
the comb. He denied violently having done so:
This affair was thought serious; the mischief, the lie, the obstinacy, were considered
equally deserving of punishment ... My uncle Bernard was written to; he arrived; and
my poor cousin being charged with a crime no less serious, we were conducted to the
same execution, which was inflicted with great severity... As this severity could not
draw from me the expected acknowledgment, which obstinacy brought on several rep-
etitions, and reduced me to a deplorable situation, yet I was immovable, and resolutely
determined to suffer death rather than submit. Force, at length, was obliged to yield to
the diabolical infatuation of a child ... and I came out of this dreadful trial, torn, it is
true, but triumphant ...
This occurrence terminated my infantine serenity; from that moment I ceased to enjoy
a pure unadulterated happiness, and on a retrospection of the pleasures of my child-
hood, I yet feel they ended here. We continued at Bossey some months after this
event, but were like our first parents in the Garden of Eden after they had lost their
innocence; in appearance our situation was the same, in effect it was totally different.
Affection, respect, intimacy, confidence, no longer attached the pupils to their guides;
29
Rudolf Dekker, “Childhood in Dutch Autobiographies, 1600–1850. Changing Memory
Strategies,” in Sturm et al., Education and Cultural Transmission,65–76, quotation 70. Several
other contributions in this volume are also of particular interest for our theme.
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we beheld them no longer as divinities, who could read the secrets of our hearts; we
were less ashamed of committing faults, more afraid of being accused of them: we
learned to dissemble, to rebel, to lie: all the vices common to our years began to cor-
rupt our happy innocence, mingle with our sports, and embitter our amusements. The
country itself, losing those sweet and simple charms which captivate the heart,
appeared a gloomy desert, or covered with a veil that concealed its beauties. We culti-
vated our little gardens no more: our flowers were neglected ...We were disgusted
with our situation; our preceptors were weary of us. In a word, my uncle wrote for
our return, and we left Mr. and Miss Lambercier [his landlords] without feeling any
regret at the separation.
30
This beautiful text describes wonderfully the discovery of childhood through its
loss, in fact, its patient construction by the young man who had gone beyond it and
would keep forever a romantic nostalgia towards the years of presumed innocence.
Innocence is, of course, the picture of the self that Jean-Jacques wants us to make
believe. Or was it unconsciousness? Was it perhaps ignorance of the value of one’s
actions? Whatever the case, we may learn from this text that childhood is discov-
ered once it is over, either in its lucky or in its unlucky variant.
Representation
So much will be clear; childhood as a well-defined period of life is always an
object of representation, even when it is ignored in narrative. In fact, even before
the discovery of childhood by the historians, popular representation distinguished it
clearly as a stage of life.
31
Childhood was represented as the first step on the ladder
of the ages of life, every human being going through childhood until the age of 10,
youth until 20, and so on, until death at age 80 or 100. Traditionally, such divisions
are linked up with the theory of the humours of early medicine: in the humoural
system, the temperament of young people is considered to be heat and moist, and
therefore, life-giving. Metaphorically, childhood corresponds with the season of
spring. But the divisions were not invariable; they changed according to time, place,
author, or printmaker. Some scholars designed more refined distinctions. In his book
The Touchstone of Complexions, the sixteenth-century Dutch physician Levinus
Lemnius (1505–1568), famous in his time, distinguished, for instance, between
infancy (age 1 to 7), childhood (age 7 to 15), puberty (age 15 to 18), adolescence
(age 18 to 25), and youth (age 25 to 35).
32
Obviously, in this ladder of life, the
physical observations of the physician are corrected by the cultural considerations
of the citizen – age 25 being, in his country, the age of majority and 35 years
approximately the limit for entering political of fice. In other societies, majority
could be attained at a much lower age, which would affect the representation of
childhood at the same time, not to speak of gender distinctions.
The ladder of life also normally distinguished a period identified as adolescence,
but even more than childhood, adolescence has long been neglected in cultural
30
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, ed. S.W. Orson (London: The Aldus Society,
1903), vol. 1, 22–5, http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/rousseau/confessions.pdf.
31
I am grateful to Benjamin B. Roberts for having communicated the manuscript of his
forthcoming book: Sex and Drugs before Rock ‘n’ Roll. Youth Culture and Masculinity dur-
ing Holland’s Golden Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012).
32
Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions (London: Thomas Marsh, 1576), trans. of De
habitu et constitutione corporis (Antwerp: Guil. Simon, 1561).
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history and, for that matter, in history of education. To be true, it certainly is more
difficult to define. The very concept of such an intermediary stage between youth
and adulthood is questioned for former periods and other societies. Adolescence
does not correspond to a clear, unchanging period in a life course throughout the
centuries, and until rather recently – in fact, until the democratisation of secondary
and higher schooling in the twentieth century – adolescents could not be caught in
a single institutional frame as was the case with primary school pupils. Adolescents
could be apprentices, workers, peasants, students, or idle youngsters, and occasion-
ally, even married people, especially girls, though after marriage, at whatever age,
young people were mostly considered adults.
In the 1960s and 1970s adolescence has been discovered as a new development
in the early modern period. The psychologist Erik H. Erikson (1902–1994) had
defined eight stages of human development, among which were adolescence, but
his attempts, and still more those of Lloyd deMause (
⁄
1931), at a psycho-historical
approach, proved difficult to accept for historians of education suspicious of too
rigid time frames in history and more respectful of a changing evolution of the age
of puberty and sexual maturity.
33
The historical construction of adolescence was
due to the historians themselves, for instance, to the pioneering study of the Dutch
historian of psychology Harry Peeters on children and youngsters in the Renais-
sance period until 1650. Peeters recognised adolescence as a period of emotional
upheaval and unbalanced, ambivalent behaviour.
34
Others followed, trying to dis-
cover by methodical research patterns of meaningful adolescent behaviour, for
example, Natalie Zemon Davis in a seminal article on youth groups and charivaris
in early modern France published in 1971 that has much influenced later research
in Europe and America.
35
It was not really education or the practice of child-rearing
that was at stake in these studies, but the psychological, anthropological, and cul-
tural approach of an age group and its age-related symbolic agency in society. In
later years Robert Muchembled, in his Invention of Modern Man (1988), explained
the rise of the modern adolescent in Northern France and Flanders at the end of the
fifteenth century when the patriarchal structure of the family waned away and
tensions between adult males and unmarried sons grew.
36
Still a decade later Ilana
Krausman Ben-Amos and Paul Griffiths discovered adolescence for the early mod-
ern English world, and a collective volume under the direction of Giovanni Levi
and Jean-Claude Schmitt achieved the consecration of adolescence as a full-fledged
historical age-group in a liminal position between childhood and adulthood.
37
33
Erikson, Childhood and Society (London: Imago, 1950); and Lloyd deMause, The History
of Childhood: The Untold Story of Child Abuse (New York: The Psychohistory Press, 1974).
34
Peeters, Kind en jeugdige in het begin van de moderne tijd (ca. 1500-ca. 1650) (Meppel:
Boom, 1966); B.B. Roberts, Through the Keyhole. Dutch Child-rearing Practices in the 17
th
and 18
th
Century: Three Urban Families (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998).
35
Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule. Youth Groups and Charivaris in Early Modern France,”
Past & Present 50 (1971): 41–75.
36
Robert Muchembled, L’invention de l’homme moderne (Paris: Fayard, 1988).
37
Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1994); Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in
England 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude
Schmitt, eds., A History of Young People in the West, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997).
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Again, it is probably no coincidence that in 2002 a multidisciplinary volume
edited by Konrad Eisenbichler was published under the title The Premodern Teen-
ager.
38
Adolescence had conquered its place as an intermediary phase between
childhood and adulthood, but the most appropriate name for that life phase
remained uncertain. The harmless notion of “teenager” suggests that the discovery
of pre-modern adolescence was also, and perhaps heavily, dependent on the analysis
of contemporary youth groups. In other words, that awareness of present-day social
representations had guided the perception and the discovery of the past. Yet, former
centuries must have been conscious of an adolescent age group with its own inter-
nal consistency. The tour de France of the apprentices of many crafts, the interna-
tional tour of foreign professionals and merchants’ sons, and the grand tour of
young students, for instance, were life experiences bound to a precise phase in the
development of the young man’s personality, and the cultural practices attached to
those travels, as well as the subsisting travel diaries, show awareness of that state.
39
The same holds for the famous “abbeys”, the more or less informal structures in
which local youth groups socialised, transmitting from generation to generation
strict rules, symbols, and rituals.
40
Scholarly practice
It will be clear that a satisfactory discussion of the discovery of childhood in schol-
arly practice would ask a virtual history of our whole discipline. Even neglecting
Antiquity and the Middle Ages, hundreds of names of scholars and educators would
have to be mentioned.
41
The list would go from Erasmus of Rotterdam, who
defined the child in negative terms as a small human being to be mended and
civilised, an object of social acculturation, through to Comenius, Pestalozzi, Froe-
bel, Claparède, and Montessori, discovering the self-educability of the child, to,
naming only some modern educators at random, Ferrer i Guàrdia, Korczak,
38
Konrad Eisenbichler, The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150–1650 (Toronto:
Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2002).
39
The classical study is Émile Coornaert, Les Compagnonnages en France du Moyen Age à
nos jours (Paris: Les Éditions Ouvrières, 1966; 3d ed. 1976). Further: Jean-Pierre Bayard,
Le Compagnonnage en France (Paris: Payot, 1978); Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages.
Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989); François Icher, Les Compagnons, ou l’amour de la belle ouvrage in
Découvertes Gallimard, no. 255 (Paris: Gallimard, 2004); Cynthia Maria Truant, The Rites
of Labor. Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994); and Sigrid Wadauer, Die Tour der Gesellen. Mobilität und Biogra-
phie im Handwerk vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2004).
On the peregrinatio academica and the Grand Tour lately: Rainer Babel and Werner Paravi-
cini, eds., Grand Tour. Adeliges Reisen und europäische Kultur vom 14. bis zum 18. Jahr-
hundert. Akten der internationalen Kolloquien in der Villa Vigoni 1999 und im Deutschen
Historischen Institut Paris 2000 in Beihefte der Francia, no. 60 (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke
Verlag, 2005).
40
Norbert Schindler, “Guardians of Disorder: The Dawn of the Modern Age,” in Levi and
Schmitt, History of Young People, 241–82; and Gerard Rooijakkers, Rituele repertoires.
Volkscultuur in oostelijk Noord-Brabant, 1559–1853 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1994).
41
For the Antiquity, see quite recently, for instance, the contributions of Vinciane Pirenne-
Delforge (on Greece) and Véronique Dasen (on Rome) in the special issue, “Politics of
Child Care in Historical Perspective,” Paedagogica Historica 46, no. 6 (December 2010):
673–84 and 685–97.
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Makarenko, Illich, Françoise Dolto, and even Boris Cyrulnik with his notion of
resilience, founded on the discovery of the astonishing ability of the child to con-
front, resist, and surmount major traumas in his young life. But let me confine
myself to some general remarks and one question.
Generally speaking, three great streams of scholarly research may be distin-
guished for our theme. Firstly, scholars have discovered the historical existence of
the child, its agency, and its family and social context as a fact in itself. They have
described it as a meaningful category for research and education, independently
from scholarly theory and social intervention. Secondly, scholars and educators have
discovered and defined children’s normality, their creativity, and their deviant
behaviour in history from the point of view of their cognitive, social, and emotional
development. Thirdly, scholars have discovered how the child was constructed
through interventions in the medical, physical, and social field, for instance, through
the “desire of educating”, as Jeroen Dekker has called it in the Dutch title of a
recent book, through the medicalisation of infancy, or through the criminalisation of
deviant behaviour.
42
Globally speaking, the child is discovered – or rediscovered –
from the eighteenth century onwards. A new global vision of the child is developed,
somewhat paradoxically, at the crossroads of two opposing movements. Firstly, the
child is not considered any more as a young adult but as a person in its own right
and its own stage of development. Yet, secondly, the child really is an adult under
construction and must be considered a full member of society with a childish, but
not fundamentally different way of growing up, learning, and socialising, which
authorises adult interventions on all the levels and in all the domains of the child’s
life.
43
The question to be answered is, therefore, quite simple: Did people in past times
really and always recognise children in their own right? Did they truly love their
children? And if there really was a change in parental concern throughout history,
how come? Before the second half of the twentieth century the question was hardly
asked because either the answer was a self-evident “yes, of course”, or the question
was without object because the general conviction among historians was that chil-
dren were considered as adults in pocket format, be it un-gendered. However, new
trends in history-writing changed those perspectives. The 1960s and 1970s have
brought us what we may perhaps call a discovery of the child in negative – neither
insisting on what the child really was, nor starting from the social and institutional
world of child care and schooling – as a positive history of education usually does,
because history is normally about what happens, virtually never about what does
not happen. On the contrary, the new historians preferred to insist on attitudes
42
Dekker, Het verlangen naar opvoeden: over de groei van de pedagogische ruimte in
Nederland sinds de Gouden Eeuw tot omstreeks 1900 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2006);
Dekker, Educational Ambitions in History. Childhood and Education in an Expanding Edu-
cational Space from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, trans. unknown (Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang, 2010); see also Dekker’s The Will to Change the Child. Re-education
Homes for Children at Risk in Nineteenth Century Western Europe (Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang, 2001).
43
For what follows, see, in particular, the chapters in Egle Becchi and Dominique Julia, eds.,
Storia dell’infanzia (Rome: Laterza, 1996). For the French translation of the above, see His-
toire de l’enfance en Occident, vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998). See also Marie-Made-
leine Compère, “L’enfance,” and “La jeunesse,” in Histoire de l’éducation en Europe. Essai
comparatif sur la façon dont elle s’écrit (Paris: INRP, 1995), 155–82, 183–206; and Regina
Sirota, “French Childhood Sociology,” Current Sociology 58, no. 2 (2010): 250–71.
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towards the child, either positive or negative, on representations of childhood, and
hence, on practices, and on forms of agency recognising the child as such. The
history of mentalities, first in France, then elsewhere, has discovered the child as a
forgotten category of pre-modern life itself.
Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) is often said to have been the first author who
successfully historicised the child, or better, the attitude toward the child.
44
Significantly, he was a private historian in the margin of the academic profession.
He was, therefore, mentally free to remain open to new discoveries. According to
Ariès, until the early modern era, childhood would have been a historical fact
neglected on purpose by the very historical actors, and consequently, remained
invisible for the historians themselves. Medieval and early-modern parents were
reluctant to attach themselves to children who, in those diffi cult times, passed away
in huge numbers by sickness, plague, or accident before attaining adulthood and
even adolescence. Protecting themselves from a life of grief, parents could and
would care for their children but without emotional involvement. Consequently,
after the very first years of physical care directed at the pure survival of the child,
education itself remained loose, amorphous, and largely unspoken, being merely a
repetition of the same ages-old, impersonal wisdom that had been the basis of their
own formation. In the early modern period, however, attitudes changed. The child
was discovered by the nobility and the bourgeoisie, who attached a growing impor-
tance to an education that fitted the format of what was now more and more known
as “the child”, and scholarship followed with the discovery of the child as an object
of philosophical reasoning (Rousseau), pedagogical intervention (Campe, Pest-
alozzi), and social concern (Francke at Halle).
Did Ariès himself experience a Eureka moment, a true sense of discovery of the
early modern child?
45
Ariès’ views were anything but instantaneous discoveries. He
had worked for many years on the historical demography of France, and his wife,
who was an art historian, made him sensitive to the visual representations of child-
hood. These two streams of research converged towards the recognition of a funda-
mental change somewhere in the early modern period. Starting from a structural,
demographic perspective involving the role of the family in society, Ariès moved
slowly towards a history of subjective attitudes with regard to the objective demo-
graphic data, leading finally to the obvious statement that the mentalities had chan-
ged. However, for the translation of the development of this scholarly research into
a book with a strong thesis, one more step was required – perhaps not in the form
of a Eureka moment, a singular experience, but certainly in the form of a Eureka
time frame. In fact, the discovery of the child was strongly related to Ariès’ per-
sonal history, involving his curiosity as a young man educated in a very traditional
Catholic family turned to a past that was definitely lost and his sense of a strong
44
Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage Books,
1962); original French version: L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Plon,
1960). Some assessments: Adrian Wilson, “The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An
Appraisal of Philippe Ariès,” History and Theory 19, no. 2 (February 1980): 132–53; S. Ryan
Johansson, “Centuries of Childhood/Centuries of Parenting: Philippe Ariès and the Moderniza-
tion of Privileged Infancy,” Journal of Family History 12, no.4 (1987): 343–67; Colin
Heywood, “Centuries of Childhood; An Anniversary – and an Epitaph?,” The Journal of the
History of Childhood and Youth 3, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 341–65.
45
Guillaume Gros, “Philippe Ariès: naissance et postérité d’ un modèle interprétatif de
l’enfance,” Histoire de l’éducation no. 125 (January–March 2010): 49–72.
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rupture between childhood and adulthood, through the stern education of a Jesuit
college. In Centuries of Childhood, Ariès retrieved with scholarly methods a kind
of golden age of childhood, a warmer image of childhood and the family, and of
the relation between the child and his parents, than he found in his own society. He
rediscovered the child that was lost.
Notwithstanding the inevitable and often justified criticism of his linear evolu-
tion model, the impact of Ariès’ book has been tremendous in all the disciplines
concerned.
46
By stating the historical weight of the love for the child or its con-
scious or unconscious repression, historians drafted a great narrative and a broad
picture, not of the child itself, but essentially of the child in educational context, of
family life, as the title of Ariès’ book told explicitly. This was a new social history,
where everything fell into place: art, literature, ideas, values, philosophy, and even
social history. Ariès’ study was widely acclaimed as a major breakthrough in the
history of mentalities, and he enjoyed this as a personal victory in the field of
historical scholarship.
Ariès’ discovery of childhood brought other scholars to similar discoveries, reas-
sessments, or reappraisals. All of a sudden, pictures of children in history were
looked at with different eyes. Visual representation of the child came up as a fash-
ionable theme of art history. Children on paintings were recognised as children, not
any longer as an imitation of adults, or a clone of their parents.
47
From behind
seemingly dull views of young people disguised as small adults, children became
visible in their own right, and they were seen in another way; not as dressed up
puppets with toys considered as mere objects of art history, but as young human
beings whose pictorial attributes testified to the rise of specific ideas on education,
gender, and cultural practices. The 1970s and 1980s have brought a large harvest of
picture books, exhibitions, and studies on the child in history, some plausible with
regard to the grand narratives of history, others rather controversial, such as Simon
Schama’s interpretations of childhood in the chapter “In the Republic of Children”
in his influential and widely acclaimed Embarrassment of Riches (1987) on the
early modern Dutch Republic.
48
Anyway, the child was back as an autonomous object of historiography. Hence-
forth, the educational past was definitely understood in a different way. It is against
this background that we must understand the success story of other major narratives
involving children in the past, such as that of Michel Foucault (1926–1984). His
view of disciplining the body of the child by surveying and punishing him and by
46
See for criticism: Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge,
1990); Pierre Riché, Être enfant au Moyen Âge. Anthologie de textes consacrés à la vie de
l’enfant du V
e
au XV
e
siècle (Paris: Fabert, 2010); and Winfried Speitkamp, Jugend in der
Neuzeit : Deutschland vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupr-
echt, 1998). For a balanced assessment of a later period: Colin Heywood, Growing up in
France: From the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
47
See for instance: Anita Schorsch, Images of Childhood: An Illustrated Social History (New
York: Mayflower Books, 1979); Mary Frances Durantini, The Child in Seventeenth-century
Dutch Painting (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983); Danièle Alexandre-Bidon and
Monique Closson, L’Enfant à l’ombre des cathédrales (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon,
1985); and Jan Baptist Bedaux and Rudi Ekkart, eds., Pride and Joy: Childrens’ Portraits in
the Netherlands 1500–1700 (Ghent: Ludion Press, 2000).
48
Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden
Age (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1987), 481–561.
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restructuring society as a grid of institutions in which young and old are enclosed
for the benefit of their own education as docile members of our society, owes much
to Ariès’ image of the child as a modern narrative interpretation. Ariès himself had
already hinted in his work at “le grand renfermement” (the great confinement) of
youth in schools, colleges, workhouses, and other disciplining institutions.
The French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto (1908–1988), famous for her sensi-
tive work with adolescent youngsters, discovered through Ariès’ book an older con-
ception of youth than the present-day adolescents she had to work with – a youth,
as it were, radiating from its autonomous self.
49
That youth was not yet smothered
by the pressure of socially prevailing images of childhood, neither totally embedded
in established family structures nor suffocated by educational hyper-care. These his-
torical images guided her personal discovery of present-day youth and her passion-
ate and sustained pleas for taking adolescents seriously as autonomous youngsters
with their own language and set of practices that are to be respected as a real, be it
transitory, phase of the life course of every human being.
Other minor scholars used Ariès’ thesis as a jumping-board for their own dis-
coveries in the field of childhood and education. The French philosopher Élisabeth
Badinter (
⁄
1944), for instance, started through books, conferences, and audiovisual
media what I would call a public crusade against the assumption of the innate char-
acter of maternal love for one’s children; parental love would have been virtually
absent before the modern era, and maternal love had made a rather late apparition
in history.
50
Her thesis, founded mostly on normative and literary texts, was pre-
sented as a real personal discovery. In that era of enhanced gender-sensitiveness,
she was comforted in her thesis by other discoveries concerning the frequency of
wet-nursing, boarding-out of infants and children, and child abandonment. The
important point for our theme is not really to know whether these authors are right
or whether and how exactly they more or less consciously followed dominant
streams of ideas and sensitivities in modern society that do not always resist close
methodological scrutiny. The point is that, in their own perception, they have dis-
covered hitherto hidden dimensions of childhood, child care, and child neglect,
enhancing our body of knowledge about childhood and education.
Discoveries rediscovered
It is probably no coincidence that another discovery of childhood was rediscovered
in the same period. That is the illusion of the discovery of the original child,
unspoiled by civilisation. In the preceding decades, the German sociologist Norbert
Elias (1897–1990) had written some substantial studies on the social and mental
disciplining of former societies seen through the prism of the history of manners,
state formation, and the diffusion of civilisation, in brief: education in a
broad sense, including age groups, social categories, and citizenship. I refer, in par-
ticular, to his seminal The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic
49
Françoise Dolto, La Cause de enfants (Parois: Laffont, 1985), 9–10; quoted by Gros,
“Philippe Ariès,” 61–2.
50
Badinter, L’Amour en plus: Histoire de l’amour maternel (XVII
e
-XX
e
siècle) (Paris: Flamma-
rion, 1981); trans. unknown: Mother Love: Myth and Reality. Motherhood in Modern history
(New York: Macmillan, 1981). Critically: Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child
relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
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Investigations, published in German as early as 1939.
51
After the 1960s these stud-
ies were discovered by a large public, first in the Netherlands, where Elias formed a
sociological school, then in Germany, America, and finally, also in the Latin coun-
tries. Elias’ work touched a broad, interdisciplinary range of readers, exercising, by
and large, a considerable influence on our global image of the social and cultural
evolution of former societies. The strong accent which he put on the unavoidable
progress of the civilising process in society, because it was embedded in the global
process of state formation, was enhanced by other system builders, such as Michel
Foucault. It must also have created a number of sceptics who longed for a less
oppressing vision of society’s evolution, exemplified in the persistence of uncivi-
lised remnants of former worlds.
It is in this context that we must place the resurgence of old narratives on “natu-
ral” children, growing up beyond culture. The story of the discovery of uncivilised
children gained new momentum. Those uncivilised children were also called wild
boys, wolf children (because they were thought to have been raised by wolves), or
feral children (that is, coming from the woods).
52
Feral children fascinate because
they represent an intermediary state between nature and culture, nature and nurture,
and as such, they seem to permit discovery of the “true” child. The most important
example is, of course, the myth of the twins Romulus and Remus, quoted before,
the founding children of the imperial city of Rome; though of royal descent, they
were rejected by their parents and raised by a wolf, as wolf children, as well as by
a shepherd, who represents in this mythical narrative the near-natural state of civili-
sation. As late as 1965 such a child, left alone first by his parents, then by a shep-
herd, and grown up alone during 12 years in the wilderness of the Sierra Morena,
was discovered in Spain.
53
One of these rediscovered children was the wild boy called Victor de l’Aveyron,
who lived from about 1790 to 1828. He is best known because of the movie L’En-
fant Sauvage of François Truffaut, issued in 1970. Victor was discovered as a feral
or wolf child at the age of approximately 10 years in the French department Avey-
ron by three hunters. He was naked, did not speak, climbed into trees, and gesticu-
lated without apparent self-control. The young physician Jean Itard (1774–1838)
took him under his protection in 1801 and tried during five years, without much
51
Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations , vol. 2
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1969–1982); original German edition: Über dem Prozess der Zivilisa-
tion, vol. 2 (Basle: Haus zum Falken, 1939).
52
Lucien Malson, Les Enfants sauvages: mythes et réalités (Paris: UGE, 1964); trans. J.
White: Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature (London: New Left Books, 1972).
A catalogue of historical cases in: Robert M. Zingg, “Feral Man and Extreme Cases of Isola-
tion,” The American Journal of Psychology 53, no. 4 (October 1940): 487–517; Brita Rang,
“‘When the Social Environment of a Child Approaches Zero’. Wolfskinderen en de ontwik-
keling van de menswetenschappen,” Comenius no. 27 (Fall 1987): 316–42; see also the criti-
cal assessments by Matteo Baraldi, I Bambini perduti: il mito del ragazzo selvaggio da
Kipling a Malouf (Rome: Quodlibet, 2006); and Serge Aroles, L’Énigme des enfants-loups.
Une certitude biologique mais un déni des archives, 1303–1954 (Paris: Publibook, 2007).
53
Gabriel Janer Manila, Marcos, the Wild Child of the Sierra Morena (London: Souvenir
Press, 1982).
26 W. Frijhoff
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success, to educate him according to the standard of social life of his society.
54
Another example, perhaps still more famous, was Kaspar Hauser (1812–1833),
whose enigmatic life has been the theme of many books, studies, and artistic perfor-
mances throughout the last two centuries, notably a play by Peter Handtke (1968)
and a movie by Werner Herzog (1975).
55
At his discovery in the streets of Nürn-
berg at age 16, the totally neglected young boy just knew his own name. Having
regained some consciousness of the cultural universe, he told that he had been
locked up in a dark, isolated cell for 15 years. Soon speculation told that he was a
hidden, natural child of the Marquess of Baden, Stephanie de Beauharnais. In 1832
the local judge Anselm von Feuerbach published a treatise on the boy in which he
tried to infer from the limited physical, mental, and social aptitudes of the boy the
elements of the original state of childhood.
Whether such children in the past may have been autistic boys, as present-day
physicians suggest, or real victims of neglect or mischief, does not matter for our
theme. The point is that they have been the object of an emotional act of discovery
by individual scholars and by the larger public, and of suggestive representation by
art performers who thought that insight into their origin and nature would unravel
the mystery of youth, of childhood, or of the genesis of culture and social values.
The presentation of children in uncommon states quite often entails a real feeling of
discovery because it suggests a true insight into a hitherto unnoticed or undiscov-
ered dimension of the human mind or human nature, the implication being that
adults are always spoiled by civilisation. But what is normal? What is standard?
Anthropology has added yet other forms of discovery: the discovery of the group
dynamics and the social rules of younger age classes, mostly hidden from the sight
of the adults: adolescents, of course, and students, but children as well have their
own hierarchy, initiation rites, sexual life, according to their own development, and,
therefore, difficult to discover for adults, especially in the past. In many cases, the
sense of discovery of modalities of childhood passes through the analysis of such
forms of symbolic agency.
Personal practice
I must be brief with regard to the third point of interest of the Eureka moment
mentioned above. It is, in fact, an appeal on the historians for a continuing self-
examination, an examination of conscience. Historically, the discovery of the child
by historians goes parallel to the discovery of the self. Self-consciousness, the sense
of irreducible individuality, uniqueness, has started from the Renaissance. That was
the beginning of conscious self-fashioning, as Stephen Greenblatt has defined it, a
54
Jean Itard, Victor de l’Aveyron [Paris, 1801–06] (Paris: Allia, 1994); Harlan L. Lane, The
Wild Boy of Aveyron (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); trans. C. Butel:
L’Enfant sauvage de l’Aveyron : l’évolution de la pédagogie, d’Itard à Montessori (Paris:
Payot, 1979); Roger R. Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of
Aveyron (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980); Itard’s report is also included in the different
editions of Malson, Les Enfants sauvages.
55
Johann Mayer and Peter Tradowsky, Kaspar Hauser, das Kind von Europa (Stuttgart:
Urachhaus, 1984); and Martin Kitchen, Kaspar Hauser, Europe’s Child (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2001).
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notion concomitant to education.
56
The irreducible sense of self, the I, Ich, je,isa
notion of modernity: the personal self must be construed and brought to fulfilment
by self-education or by the help of others. We all know that the cultural history of
the West can been interpreted as a slow deployment of unique forms of self-
consciousness, even if anthropologists, psychologists, and biologists are entitled to
ask sceptic questions with regard to that global image.
The historical entanglement of childhood and the self must keep us awake.
Discovery of childhood can easily evolve into the start of a personal discovery of
our selves – into the transfer of values from the historical child to the modern histo-
rian and vice versa. Children don’t let us go unconcerned. We invest in their under-
standing, and we invest more if, like in history, the child tends to escape our
immediate apprehension. Any personal story is, of course, singular and not really
repeatable. Yet you may recognise some of your own concerns in my personal
experience, which I take the liberty to present here in three phrases, not for my
own sake, but because it is so evidently at the heart of our theme. Some years ago
I wrote a biography of a young seventeenth-century Dutch adolescent, focussing on
the rather exceptional sources of his adolescent experience as a mystical believer.
57
This was for me a true, emotionally demanding discovery, not only of that particu-
lar young man, but of the way adolescents could perform meaningful agency, and
of the mentality of that society. But discovery of a person from the past asks for
empathy, for involvement in the psychic categories and mechanisms of his or her
time frame.
The real problem for the historian of education is then, in my experience, to
remain faithful to the categories of life from the past, as well as to those of the
present, in a constant mutual confrontation, but without letting oneself pass the
frontier of the present and without totally immersing into the past or identifying
with the child that has been. History is now, not in the past. We only see the child
of the past well if we manage to keep a closely guarded distance – because the
emotions have to be ours, not those of the past. Emotions are about the meaning of
history for the present, not for former times. But emotions are tricky. Our whole
scientific education has been turned towards the elimination of emotions and
personal sensation. Yet, many years ago, our great Dutch cultural historian Johan
Huizinga (1872–1945) has coined the celebrated concept of “historical sensation”,
that is, the emotional feeling of a real, personal involvement in a past event, a per-
son’s history or a historical remnant, through a direct contact. In other words: the
Eureka word.
58
The personal discovery of a child or of children in history may well
be such a historical sensation. We all need the personal emotions as well as the
professional caution that such a discovery deserves.
56
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. See further the assessments of current research
on this theme in John Jeffries Martin, ed., The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad: Rewriting
Histories (London: Routledge, 2003); and Klaus Bergdolt, Berndt Hamm, and Andreas Tön-
nesmann, eds., Das Kind in der Renaissance in Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renais-
sanceforschung, no. 25 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009).
57
Willem Frijhoff, Fulfilling God ’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogar-
dus 1607–1647, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Leiden: Brill, 2007); original, unabridged
Dutch version: Wegen van Evert Willemsz. Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf,
1607–1647 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1995).
58
See Frank Ankersmit, “Huizinga and the Experience of the Past,” in Sublime Historical
Experience (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 119–39.
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Notes on contributor
Willem Frijhoff is emeritus professor of Early Modern History at the VU-University,
Amsterdam and a member of the Editorial Board of Paedagogica Historica. He holds from
2010 to 2012 the Erasmus Chair for Humanities on behalf of the G.Ph. Verhagen
Foundation at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and is the 2011 recipient of the Descartes-
Huygens Prize for French and Dutch scientific cooperation. Currently he chairs the thematic
research programme “Cultural Heritage and Cultural Dynamics” of the Dutch National
Research Organization (NWO). His research interests concern themes of cultural and
religious history, with a strong accent on cultural practices and representations, cultural
transfer, and social memory. He published, in particular, on secondary schooling and higher
education in Western Europe and colonial North America. His works in English include:
1650: Hard-Won Unity (Assen & Basingstoke 2004), with Marijke Spies, and Fulfilling
God’s Mission. The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus 1607–1647 (Leiden &
Boston 2007). Address: Jan van Ghestellaan 25, NL – 3054 CE Rotterdam, The
Netherlands.
Paedagogica Historica 29
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