A Critical History of French Children's Literature

Volume One: 1600–1830

Penelope E. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135872007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

These books are the first full-length, comprehensive study written in English of French children's literature. They provide both an overview of developments from the seventeenth century to the present day and detailed discussion of texts that are representative, innovative, or influential best-sellers in their own time and beyond. French children's literature is little known in the English-speaking world and, apart from a small number of writers and texts, has been relatively neglected in scholarly studies, despite the prominence of the study of children's literature as a discipline. This project is groundbreaking in its coverage of a wide range of genres, tracing the evolution of children's books in France from early courtesy books, fables and fairy tales, to eighteenth-century moral tales and educational drama, nineteenth-century novels of domestic realism and adventure stories and contemporary detective fiction and fantasy novels.

The discussion traces the relationship between children's literature and social change, revealing the extent to which children's books were informed by pedagogical, moral, religious and political agenda and explores the implications of the dual imperatives of instruction and amusement which have underpinned writing for young readers throughout the centuries.

1
CHILDREN AS READERS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The history of books for children must inevitably take into consideration the history of the child as reader. The development of literacy in France was a long and complex process with significant differences between regions and social classes, and generalised assumptions are therefore often untenable. The history of education, and of the diverse institutions in which children were taught to read, also presents problems of interpretation, not least because schooling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was patchy, not compulsory, and varied enormously in quality in different regions. Moreover, because of the ephemeral nature of books that were constantly handled by the young, few copies of basic schoolbooks like primers, catechisms, and grammars have survived. While it has been possible to establish with reasonable certainty from the inventories of schools and booksellers, and from personal accounts, what children were given to read by schoolmasters, private tutors, or parents in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have little knowledge of how this reading may have influenced children, or of their feelings and reactions. Contemporary accounts of individuals’ experience of reading offer useful insights, but can by no means be taken as universal.

It cannot be assumed, however, that because levels of literacy remained extremely low—especially amongst the rural poor—up until the French Revolution, children did not have access to narratives. It was common, from the early days of printed books, for readings to take place in the homes of those who could afford them. At these readings family members of all ages would be present, and the strong oral tradition amongst the peasantry meant that even the poorest and most educationally disadvantaged children heard folktales recounted by relatives or jongleurs, the minstrels who travelled the countryside with tales and legends. The influence of both high and popular culture on the development of children’s literature is, in fact, an important part of this story.

In the seventeenth century, then, children’s literature as such (in the sense of a body of works written with a young readership specifically in mind) did not yet exist in France, and available material other than school textbooks was largely restricted to books that had been written for an adult readership and, in the scholastic context, belonged to centuries past. There were, nevertheless, texts written for children, even for a specific child, that became more widely read by young and adult readers alike in subsequent centuries. By and large, it was pedagogues who wrote for children at this time, and it is not surprising, therefore, that their works had a clearly didactic agenda. Even then, only gradually was concession made to the age, abilities, or interests of a young readership. The earliest books for the young were concerned first and foremost with the social and moral formation of the child and therefore looked ahead to the adult that the child would become. This chapter looks at some of the earliest types of writing available to or produced for youth in the seventeenth century and suggests how some of this material was influential in the growth of a literature specifically designed for them.

Since many children’s first encounters with books and the implications of learning to read came in the school context, consideration will first be given to this area. The proliferation of different types of schools in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been extensively documented and cannot be encompassed in any detail here.¹ The discussion will therefore focus on the impact of these developments on children’s reading and on the provision of material deemed suitable for them. In the Middle Ages, when the cathedral chapters had the monopoly of school teaching, schools were primarily for those young boys destined for the church. They were taught to read Latin from a psalter or a book of hours, as well as writing and singing to church music, and they learnt psalms and prayers by heart. Early education was thus intimately linked with religious instruction, even for boys who were not entering the church, to enable them to follow and participate in the liturgy and read pious works. At the end of the sixteenth century, as part of the agenda of the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation, the church sought, as a matter of urgency, to reaffirm Catholic truths via the appropriation of that weapon of the Reformation, the written word, and to inculcate orthodox piety via instruction.² Roger Chartier identifies three areas of priority for the seventeenth-century educational reformers of the Catholic Counter-Reformation: religious instruction; the rudiments of writing, reading, and arithmetic; and the refinement of manners.³ The establishment of the petites écoles, or little schools, by a number of teaching orders in urban and rural areas in order to produce good Catholics and useful citizens and to solve the widespread problem of undisciplined and ignorent young people, catered for a broad range of pupils—including, in some areas, girls. They offered an elementary education in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and, in the case of the more able boys, prepared them for entrance to the collèges.⁴ A further aim was a social one, to inculcate norms of behaviour through the teaching of such fundamental virtues as respect, obedience, and purity. Morals, manners, and the importance of discipline and self-control were taught from the livres de civilité, or courtesy books, to be discussed later in this chapter. Religious education was the most important aim, underpinning all these skills with an emphasis on the teaching of the catechism, the responses of the Mass, prayers, and church doctrine, and use was made of a range of primers or psalters that the pupils brought from home. In the late seventeenth century, in the charity schools inaugurated by Charles Démia in Lyons and by Jean-Baptiste de la Salle, the founder of the order of the Frères des écoles chrétiennes, which established free schools for the poor and for mendicant children throughout France between 1679 and 1718, a similar syllabus of very basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic aimed to equip their pupils for useful employment. These schools established the use of uniform texts, primers, psalters, and courtesy books provided by the school authorities and, in a move that was still innovative, privileged French as the medium for instruction.

The first primer used in the petites écoles and in privately run, feepaying schools was often a Latin abécédaire, or alphabet book, of which the most widespread from the start of the sixteenth century was a small booklet adorned on the first page with a cross, which gave it its name, La Croix de Dieu, or Croix Depardieu.⁵ This text, which remained similar in form until the early decades of the nineteenth century, contained the alphabet in different typefaces, a table of syllables (syllabaire), and the most important prayers, like the Pater, Ave, and Credo, in Latin. The use of such a text meant that reading skills were essentially linked with material with which the pupils were already orally familiar. When pupils progressed to the catechism, this was often taught from a copy belonging to the master or priest, and the responses were learnt by repetition. In the latter part of the century, it was realised that catechisms, written by theologians for the use of the clergy, needed to be made more user-friendly in order to allow the young or inexperienced reader to grasp and appreciate the essential aspects of church doctrine, and versions more suitable to different ages began to appear. The Catéchisme historique, contenant en abrégé l’histoire sainte et la doctrine chrétienne (1683) of Claude Fleury, tutor to the grandsons of Louis XIV, became a best-seller throughout the eighteenth century, and was predicated upon the use of brief narratives based on the Scriptures to stimulate children’s interest and help them to retain the content: ‘Tout le monde peut entendre et retenir une histoire, où la suite des faits engage insensiblement, et où l’imagination trouve prise … . Surtout ce sont les enfants qui en sont le plus avides, parce que tout a pour eux l’agrément de la nouveauté.’⁶ Fleury’s recognition of the needs of young and inexperienced readers, outlined in his accompanying introduction ‘Du dessein et de l’usage de ce catéchisme’, foreshadows a strategy of mediating instruction through interesting illustrative example that was to be employed in many didactic children’s books for decades to come.

The Jesuit colleges, which dominated what today would be called secondary education for the first forty years of the seventeenth century in France, and those of the Oratorians, taught a wider curriculum of Latin and Greek grammar, rhetoric, and the classical humanities, although this still served a clear religious agenda. The Jesuits followed closely the policies set out in the Ratio studiorum of 1599, which recommended frequent and extensive exercises in memorization and recitation.⁷ Children’s reading, although ranging more broadly, was nevertheless strictly controlled in the collèges, since being able to read opened up the individual to dangerous material that might undermine the church’s influence. There was, therefore, a strong emphasis on pious works to inculcate sound religious doctrine, and the works of classical authors, although admired for their style, were carefully monitored and censored. Latin and Greek—and hence, pagan—texts were read in approved versions or in the form of collections of extracts put together by the masters. In what can be seen as a remarkable aspect of the Jesuits’ educational programme, the works of the ancients were thus appropriated and made to serve the cause of religion: pagan elements were removed or selected for criticism, and the epic heroes were shown as exemplifying traditional Christian virtues in general and those—such as bravery, loyalty, and self-sacrifice—deemed admirable in the seventeenth century in particular.⁸ Thus, the reading of the classics was linked with religious teaching, and the pupils were sheltered from those elements perceived as pernicious by the ‘editors’—the schoolmasters themselves. Control over the cultural agenda thus ensured the perpetuation of the social and moral values of the dominant elite, just as the emphasis on rhetoric and the encouragement of school drama (discussed later in this chapter) had as its objective the mastering of the art of speaking in public for those destined to propagate those values in positions in church or state. Such educational policies were not without their critics however: Fleury, a former pupil, disapproved of the emphasis on memorization in his treatise Traité du choix et de la méthode des études (1686), suggesting that it would be more useful to ‘remplir la mémoire des connoissances qui sont d’usage dans la vie’.⁹ Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a product of the Jesuit Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, had objected in his ‘De l’institution des enfants’ (1580) to a system that trained children to learn by rote and regurgitate concepts without understanding them, preferring observation, experience of the world, and the development of personal discernment to the production of dispirited mules laden with books.¹⁰

Teaching and learning at the Jesuit schools still depended on the use of Latin. A significant innovation in the petites écoles of Port-Royal in Paris, run under the auspices of Jansenists in the mid-seventeenth century and offering a complete education to the sons of well-to-do parents in opposition to the Jesuits, was that the boys were taught to read first in French rather than in Latin. The Port-Royal schools, which operated between 1637 and 1660 and counted Jean Racine amongst their pupils, were short-lived and regularly attacked by the Jesuits, who regarded Jansenist beliefs as heretical, but produced a number of educational treatises and textbooks that were of significant influence on other educational reformers. Pierre Coustel, in his Règles de l’instruction des enfans (1687), for example, recommended teaching in the vernacular as a more efficient medium for teaching and learning, a method later endorsed by Jean-Baptiste de La Salle in his influential La Conduite des Ecoles chrétiennes (1705) as more logical and sensible, especially in the case of poor children in the charity schools who would never use Latin and ran the risk of not being able to learn to read at all.¹¹ Evidence from contemporary accounts of Port-Royal reveals that a wide and varied classical education was provided and that the boys read the classics in adaptations or in French translations. Amongst the writers from whom rigorously expurgated selections were provided were Aesop, Aristophanes, Cicero, Herodotus, Homer, Horace, Livy, Phaedrus, Pliny, Plutarch, Quintilian, Seneca, Sophocles, Tacitus, Thucydides, and Virgil.¹² Concern was with the moral instruction afforded by the subject matter as much as with the style, and pupils were encouraged to learn passages by heart and to keep a commonplace book in which to record the more striking passages.¹³ In his Règles, Coustel foreshadows John Locke in using the image of the ‘table raze’ or soft wax to describe the young child’s mind, insisting that ‘il est important de remplir d’abord leur esprit des plus pures lumières de la vérité, et des plus solides maximes de la morale’.¹⁴

Yet what of girls’ education and their access to books? The general consensus of opinion was that girls should be prepared for one of two vocations: the convent or domesticity. Those girls who received any kind of formal education before the seventeenth century were taught either at home or in convents where the education they received was dominated by religious instruction.¹⁵ The number of convent schools run by religious orders like the Congrégation Notre Dame, the Ursulines, and the Visitandines grew sharply in the seventeenth century, catering for both paying boarders and day pupils who were taught for free. The girls, mainly between the ages of four and eighteen, were taught religious doctrine and practical skills that would make them bonnes chrétiennes first and foremost, or, if a religious vocation was not taken up, good wives and mothers. The girls taught by the Port-Royal nuns since the thirteenth century had nothing in the seventeenth century like the educational opportunities their brothers enjoyed, and training for a religious vocation was still far more prominent. The Règlements pour les enfans de Port-Royal, drawn up by Jacqueline Pascal, who was put in charge of the education of girls in 1655, indicates that the curriculum consisted of reading, writing, and needlework. Reading, unlike in the boys’ schools, was restricted to works of a pious nature and was intended to have a moral rather than an intellectual aim. As will be seen later, the question of girls reading was perceived as intensely problematic by pedagogues in their educational treatises of this period, not only because intellectual attainments were seen as unnecessary and undesirable but because of the threats to feminine virtue of access to dangerous material. Jacqueline Pascal made it clear in her Règlements that reading, or listening to reading, should not be a matter of pleasure or curiosity but an encouragement to the girls to apply the moral lessons to themselves.¹⁶ The books listed by Pascal that were used in the girls’ schools indicate a wide range including selected letters of Saint Jerome, passages from Saint Teresa of Avila, a translation of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi, and the lives of saints and the church fathers, but few of even these pious works were left in the pupils’ hands.¹⁷ In the elementary petites écoles, in some of which girls were still being taught alongside boys despite the disapproval of the church authorities, the education they received was even more rudimentary, often limited to reading and the teaching of Christian virtues alongside practical skills to equip them for domesticity, and their access to books was severely limited.

It cannot simply be assumed, however, that the young only read books at school. Although books were expensive and only available to the well-to-do, children of wealthy parents who had more than a smattering of literacy had access to more varied reading material and would have been able to browse through the contents of their parents’ library. Competent readers might not only have found there breviaries, books of hours, the lives of saints, and pious works like the Imitation de Jésus-Christ, but the legends of the fairy Mélusine, the Roman de Renart, and the knightly adventures of Perceforest, Lancelot du Lac, and Amadis. They would also have been able to tackle translations of Livy, Ovid, Plutarch, or Tacitus; vernacular works by Pierre Corneille, René Descartes, or François Rabelais; and books on history, travel, and military strategies without there being any perceived need to adapt or expurgate them. We have first-hand evidence from Montaigne that he read classical authors like Ovid and Virgil outside of his collège in the mid-sixteenth century, claiming that otherwise he would have brought from his collège only a hatred of books ‘comme fait quasi toute nostre noblesse’, and from Mme Roland, more than a century later, that she avidly devoured the contents of the libraries of her parents and relatives.¹⁸ Indeed, the first glimmerings of a different attitude towards childhood in the seventeenth century and of the child as a creature to be protected and carefully moulded can be detected in the recognition of the need to provide expurgated versions and collections of selected extracts of works of literature appropriate for this young and impressionable readership.¹⁹

It would appear that in a century where the emphasis was on instilling piety, forming the character and the manners and morals of the young, and reading was seen as a means to these ends and not a leisure pursuit, children found little in the way of enjoyable, entertaining reading matter that was produced specifically for them. In this respect, it is possible to advance the view that the children of the poor were slightly more advantaged, since they had access, via the oral tradition, to the fairy tales, ballads, legends, and chivalry tales of popular culture that sought to entertain rather than or as well as instruct.²⁰ An important development in popular culture was the introduction of the little chapbooks, or livres de colportage, of the Bibliothèque bleue. These inexpensive booklets, produced by Troyes printers (notably the Oudots and the Garniers) from the early seventeenth century and at their most popular in the eighteenth as the scope, output, and demand grew, are often associated with the lower classes in rural areas, but were, in fact, read at all levels of society and initially by an urban public, spreading to the countryside in the course of the eighteenth century.²¹ These cheaply produced chapbooks, with their blue, red, green, or marbled covers and crude woodcut illustrations, were sold by peddlers and in some places by booksellers. They mediated to a wide public a huge variety of texts, from simple abécédaires, arithmetic books, religiou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 CHILDREN AS READERS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
• 2 FABLES AND FAIRY TALES
• 3 INSTRUCTION AND AMUSEMENT
• 4 CHANGING NARRATIVES
• 5 L’AMI DES ENFANS AND PERFORMATIVE MORALITY
• 6 CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION (AND AFTERWARDS)
• 7 THE END OF THE BEGINNING
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY