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Philippe Ariès on Education and Society in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Irene Q. Brown
Irene Q. Brown*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

Like a kaleidoscope, Philippe Ariès has brilliantly assembled a multitude of colorful illustrations and episodes to demonstrate the discovery of the modern idea of childhood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He establishes a familiar rhythm as each chapter traces this discovery from another vantage point: the child as seen in works of art, the child playing games, praying at home, or attending school. Each time he uses the Middle Ages as a starting point where the child received no special attention apart from his elders. The total effect produced by Ariès' sensitive and probing treatment is one of great immediacy, of an actual, lively world in the past that has been very much neglected.

Type
Notes and Documents
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , Fall 1967 , pp. 357 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © 1967 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. Philippe Ari$ès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1962).Google Scholar

2. Ibid., p. 58.Google Scholar

3. Ibid., p. 336.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., p. 354. Google Scholar

5. Ibid., p. 404. This is my translation of the original “aux riches artisans, aux riches laboureurs.” Philippe Ariès, L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien régime (Paris: Plon, 1960), p. 457. Baldick mistakenly translates “laboureur” as laborer. However, in the ancien régime, “laboureur” described a landowning agricultural worker who also owned beasts of burden. Marc Bloch distinguishes him from the simple “manouvrier,” who has to rely on his hands for his work. “C'est n'est pas un hasard si, dès le XVIIIe siècle, fermier était devenu presque synonyme de laboureur; aujourd'hui encore, le langage courant entend par ferme, sans aucune idée de précision juridique, toute exploitation rurale un peu importante.” Marc Bloch, Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française, I (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960), 197-200.Google Scholar

6. Centuries of Childhood, p. 330.Google Scholar

7. Fleury, Claude Traité du choix et de la méthode des études (Nismes: Pierre Beaume, 1784), pp. 168–74; 110, 126-28; 248-63.Google Scholar

8. Artz, Frederick B. The Development of Technical Education in France, 1500-1850 (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1966), pp. 98–99, 104.Google Scholar