0 - 521 - 86869 - 3 - Growing Up in France : From the Ancien Regime to the Third Republic

How French people tried to make sense of their childhood and adolescence in past centuries remains something of a mystery. That this should be the case for the medieval and early modern periods is hardly surprising, given that so few contemporaries chose to write about their formative years. For centuries, the majority of clerics maintained a low opinion of the young. St Augustine (354–430) led the way with a dismal image of his own past, his influential Confessions lingering on his sins rather than his virtues during the first stages of his life. He at least gave some account of the suffering and humiliation of his boyhood, and the ‘surfeit of hell’s pleasures’ during his teens.1 Other authorities preferred to ignore entirely those they saw as small creatures wallowing in sinfulness and deficient in both intellectual and moral qualities: the child was ‘a poor sighing animal, starting his life in torment’, as the twelfth-century monk William of Saint-Thierry put it.2 They assumed that it was reason that separated mankind from the animal kingdom, and so only took seriously those who had progressed from the early chaotic years to adulthood. A seventeenthcentury Jansenist from Port Royal wrote that ‘I only wish to count [life] from when one starts to be moved by reason, which normally does not happen before the age of twenty.’ The view of the young as deficient was by no means confined to the more austere wings of Christianity. The great Catholic orator and prelate Bossuet (1627–1704) lamented that much of his allotted three-score-and-ten years would count for nothing. Sleep he considered similar to death, childhood merely the life of a beast, and his own adolescence best erased.3 Similarly, fictional autobiographies written by members of the laity during the seventeenth and