One of the unwritten laws of contemporary morality, the strictest and best respected of all, requires adults to avoid any reference, above all any humorous reference, to sexual matters in the presence of children. This notion was entirely foreign to the society of old. The modern reader of the diary in which Henri IV's physician, Heroard, recorded the details of the young Louis XIII's life is astonished by the liberties which people took with children, by the coarseness of the jokes they made, and by the indecency of gestures made in public which shocked nobody and which were regarded as perfectly natural. No other document can give us a better idea of the non-existence of the modern idea of childhood at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Louis XIII was not yet one year old: 'He laughed uproariously when his nanny waggled his cock with her fingers.' An amusing trick which the child soon copied. Calling a page, 'he shouted "Hey, there!" and pulled up his robe, showing him his cock.'
He was one year old :'In high spirits,' notes Heroard, 'he made everybody kiss his cock. This amused them all. Similarly everyone considered his behaviour towards two visitors, a certain de Bonieres and his daughter, highly amusing: 'He laughed at him, lifted up his robe and showed him his cock, but even more so to his daughter, for then, holding it and giving his little laugh, he shook the whole of his body up and down.' They thought this so funny that the child took care to repeat a gesture which had been such a success; in the presence of a 'little lady', 'he lifted up his coat, and showed her his cock with such fervour that he was quite beside himself. He lay on his back to show it to her. When he was just over a year old he was engaged to the Infanta of Spain; his attendants explained to him what this meant, and he understood them fairly well. 'They asked him: "Where is the Infanta's darling!" He put his hand on his cock.'
During his first three years nobody showed any reluctance or saw any harm in jokingly touching the child's sexual parts. 'The Marquise [de Verneuil] often put her hand under his coat; he got his nanny to lay him on her bed where she played with him, putting her hand under his coat. ''Mme de Verneuil wanted to play with him and took hold of his nipples; he pushed her away, saying: "Let go, let go, go away." He would not allow the Marquise to touch his nipples, because his nanny had told him: "Monsieur, never let anybody touch your nipples, or your cock, or they will cut it off." He remembered this.' Again: 'When he got up, he would not take his shirt and said: "Not my shirt, I want to give you all some milk from my cock." We held out our hands, and he pretended to give us all some milk, saying: "Pss, pss," and only then agreeing to take his shirt.'
It was a common joke, repeated time and again, to say to him: 'Monsieur, you haven't got a cock.' Then 'he replied: "Hey, here it is! " - laughing and lifting it up with one finger. These jokes were not limited to the servants, or to brainless youths, or to women of easy virtue such as the King's mistress. The Queen, his mother, made the same sort of joke: 'The Queen, touching his cock, said: "Son, I am holding your spout."' Even more astonishing is this passage: 'He was undressed and Madame too [his sister], and they were placed naked in bed with the King, where they kissed and twittered and gave great amusement to the King. The King asked him: "Son, where is the Infanta's bundle?" He showed it to him, saying: "There is no bone in it, Papa." Then, as it was slightly distended, he added: "There is now, there is sometimes.
The Court was amused, in fact, to see his first erections: 'Waking up at eight o'clock, he called Mile Bethouzay and said to her: "Zezai, my cock is like a drawbridge; see how it goes up and down." And he raised it and lowered it.'
By the age of four, 'he was taken to the Queen's apartments, where Mme de Guise showed him the Queen's bed and said to him: "Monsieur, this is where you were made." He replied: "With Mamma?"' 'He asked his nanny's husband: "What is that!" "That," came the reply, Is one of my silk stockings." "And those!" [after the manner of parlour-game questions] "Those are my breeches." "What are they made of?" "Velvet." "And that!" "That is a cod-piece." "What is inside!" "I don't know, Monsieur." "Why, a cock. Who is it for!" "I don't know, Monsieur." "Why, for Madame Doundoun [his nanny].
'He stood between the legs of Mme de Montglat [his governess, a very dignified, highly respectable woman, who however did not seem to be put out - any more than Heroard was - by all these jokes which we would consider insufferable today]. The King said: "Look at Madame de Montglat's son: she has just given birth." He went straight away and stood between the Queen's legs.'
When he was between five and six, people stopped talking about his sexual parts, while he started talking more about other people's. Mile Mercier, one of his chambermaids who had stayed up late the night before, was still in Led one morning, next to his bed (his servants, who were sometimes married, slept in his bedroom and do not appear to have allowed his presence to embarrass them). 'He played with her, toyed with her toes and the upper part of her legs, and told his nanny to go and get some birch twigs so that he could beat her, which he did...His nanny asked him: "What have you seen of Mercier's!" He replied calmly: "I have seen her arse." "What else have you seen!" He replied calmly and without laughing that he had seen her private.' On another occasion, 'after playing with Mile Mercier, he called me [Heroard] and told me that Mercier had a private as big as that (showing me his two fists) and that there was water inside.'
After 1608 this kind of joke disappeared: he had become a little man -attaining the fateful age of seven - and at this age he had to be taught decency in language and behaviour. When he was asked how children were born, he would reply, like Moliere's Agnes, 'through the ear'. Mme de Montglat scolded him when he showed his cock to the little Ventelet girl'. And if, when he awoke in the morning, he was still put in Mme de Montglat's bed between her and her husband, Heroard waxed indignant and noted in the margin of his diary: insignis impudentia. The boy of ten was forced to behave with a modesty which nobody had thought of expecting of the boy of five. Education scarcely began before the age of seven; moreover, these tardy scruples of decency are to be attributed to the beginnings of a reformation of manners, a sign of the religious and moral restoration which took place in the seventeenth century. It was as if education was held to be of no value before the approach of manhood.
By the time he was fourteen, however, Louis XIII had nothing more to learn, for it was at the age of fourteen years two months that he was put almost by force into his wife's bed. After the ceremony he 'retired and had supper in bed at a quarter to seven. M. de Gramont and a few young lords told him some broad stories to encourage him. He asked for his slippers and put on his robe and went to the Queen's bedchamber at eight o'clock, where he was put to bed beside the Queen his wife, in the presence of the Queen his mother; at a quarter past ten he returned after sleeping for about an hour and performing twice, according to what he told us; he arrived with his cock all red.'
The marriage of a boy of fourteen was perhaps becoming something of a rare occurrence. The marriage of a girl of thirteen was still very common.
There is no reason to believe that the moral climate was any different in other families, whether of nobles or commoners; the practice of associating children with the sexual ribaldries of adults formed part of contemporary manners. In Pascal's family, Jacqueline Pascal at the age of twelve was writing a poem about the Queen's pregnancy. Thomas Platter, in his memoirs of life as a medical student at the end of the sixteenth century, writes: 'I once met a child who played this trick [knotting a girl's aiguillette when she married, so that her husband became impotent] on his parents' maidservant. She begged him to break the spell by undoing the aiguillette. He agreed and the bridegroom, recovering his potency, was immediately cured.' Pere de Dainville, the historian of the Society of Jesus and of humanist pedagogics, also writes: 'The respect due to children was then [in the sixteenth century completely unknown. Everything was permitted in their presence: coarse language, scabrous actions and situations; they had heard everything and seen everything.' This lack of reserve with regard to children surprises us: we raise our eyebrows at the outspoken talk but even more at the bold gestures, the physical contacts, about which it is easy to imagine what a modern psycho-analyst would say. The psyche-analyst would be wrong. The attitude to sex, and doubtless sex itself, varies according to environment, and consequently according to period and mentality. Nowadays the physical contacts described by Heroard would strike us as bordering on sexual perversion and nobody would dare to indulge in them publicly. This was not the case at the beginning of the seventeenth century. There is an engraving of 1511 depicting a holy family: St Anne's behaviour strikes us as extremely odd - she is pushing the child's thighs apart as if she wanted to get at its privy parts and tickle them. It would be a mistake to see this as a piece of ribaldry. The practice of playing with children's privy parts formed part of a widespread tradition, which is still operative in Moslem circles. These have remained aloof not only from scientific progress but also from the great moral reformation, at first Christian, later secular, which disciplined eighteenth-century and particularly nineteenth-century society in England and France. Thus in Moslem society we find features which strike us as peculiar but which the worthy Heroard would not have found so surprising. Witness this passage from a novel entitled The Statue of Salt. The author is a Tunisian Jew, Albert Memmi, and his book is a curious document on traditional Tunisian society and the mentality of the young people who are semi-Westernized. The hero of the novel is describing a scene in the tram taking him to school in Tunis: 'In front of me were a Moslem and his son, a tiny little boy with a miniature tarboosh and henna on his hands; on my left a Djerban grocer on his way to market, with a basket between his legs and a pencil behind his ear. The Djerban, affected by the warmth and peace inside the tram, stirred in his seat. He smiled at the child, who smiled back with his eyes and looked at his father. The father, grateful and flattered, reassured him and smiled at the Djerban. "How old are you!" the grocer asked the child. "Two and a half," replied the father. "Has the cat got your tongue!" the grocer asked the child. "No," replied the father, "he hasn't been circumcised yet, but he will be soon." "Ah!" said the grocer. He had found something to talk about to the child. "Will you sell me your little anima?" "No!" said the child angrily. He obviously knew what the grocer meant, and the same offer had already been made to him. I too [the Jewish child] was familiar with this scene. I had taken part in it in my time, provoked by other people, with the same feelings of shame and desire, revulsion and inquisitive complicity. The child's eyes shone with the pleasure of incipient virility [a modern feeling, attributed to the child by the educated Memmi who is aware of recent discoveries as to early sexual awakening in children; in former times people believed that before puberty children had no sexual feelings] and also revulsion at this monstrous provocation. He looked at his father. His father smiled: it was a permissible game [our italics]. Our neighbours watched the traditional scene with complaisant approval. I'll give you ten francs for it," said the Djerban. "No," said the child. "Come now, sell me your little... " the Djerban went on. "No! No!" I'Il give you fifty francs for it." "No!" "I'll go as high as I can: a thousand francs!" "No!" The Djerban assumed an expression of greediness. " And I'Il throw in a bag of sweets as well! " "No! No! " "You still say no' That's your last word!" the Djerban shouted, pretending to be angry. "You still say no!" he repeated. "No!" Thereupon the grown-up threw himself upon the child, a terrible expression on his face, his hand brutally rummaging inside the child's fly. The child tried to fight him off with his fists. The father roared with laughter, the Djerban was convulsed with amusement, while our neighbours smiled broadly.
This twentieth-century scene surely enables us to understand better the seventeenth century before the moral reformation. We should avoid anachronisms, such as the explanation by Mme de Sevigne's latest editor that the baroque excesses of her mother love were due to incest. All that was involved was a game whose scabrous nature we should beware of exaggerating: there was nothing more scabrous about it than there is about the racy stories men tell each other nowadays.
This semi-innocence, which strikes us as corrupt or naive, explains the popularity of the theme of the urinating child as from the fifteenth century. The theme is treated in the illustrations of books of hours and in church pictures. n the calendars in the Hennessy book of hours and the Grimani breviary, dating from the early sixteenth century, a winter month is represented by the snow-covered village; the door of one house is open, and the woman of the house can be seen spinning, the man warming himself by the fire; the child is in full view, urinating on to the snow in front of the door.
A Flemish 'Ecce homo' by P. Pietersz, doubtless intended for a church, shows quite a few children in the crowd of onlookers: one mother is holding her child above the heads of the crowd so that he can have a better view. Some quick-witted boys are shinning up the doorposts. A child can be seen urinating, held by his mother. The magistrates of the High Court of Toulouse, when they heard Mass in the chapel in their own Palace of Justice, could have had their attention distracted by a similar scene. They had before them a great triptych depicting the story of John the Baptist. On the centre volet the Baptist was shown preaching. There were children in the crowd; a woman was suckling her child; there was a boy up a tree; a little way away, facing the magistrates, a child was holding up his robe and urinating.
The frequency with which one finds children in crowd scenes, and the repetition of certain themes (the child being breast-fed, the child urinating) in the fifteenth and especially the sixteenth century, are clear signs of a new and special interest.
It is noteworthy too that at this time one scene of religious iconography recurs frequently: the Circumcision. This scene is depicted in almost surgical detail. It seems in fact that the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple and the Circumcision were treated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as festivals of childhood: the only religious festivals of childhood before the solemn celebration of the First Communion. In the parish church of Saint-Nicolas we can see an early seventeenth-century painting which comes from the Abbey of Saint-Martin-des-Champs.
The scene of the Circumcision is surrounded by a crowd of children, some of them with their parents, others climbing the pillars to get a better view. For us, surely, there is something strange, almost shocking, about the choice of the Circumcision as a festival of childhood, depicted in the midst of children. Shocking for us, perhaps, but not for a present-day Moslem or for a man of the sixteenth or early seventeenth century.
Not only were children associated with an operation, admittedly of a religious nature, on the male sexual organ, but gestures and physical contacts were freely and publicly allowed which were forbidden as soon as the child reached the age of puberty, or in other words was practically adult. There were two reasons for this. In the first place the child under the age of puberty was believed to be unaware of or indifferent to sex. Thus gestures and allusions had no meaning for him; they became purely gratuitous and lost their sexual significance. Secondly, the idea did not yet exist that references to sexual matters, even when virtually devoid of dubious meanings, could soil childish innocence, either in fact or in the opinion people had of it: nobody thought that this innocence really existed.
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Such at least was the general opinion: it was no longer that of the moralists and pedagogues, or at least of the better ones, innovators who found little support for their ideas. Their retrospective importance is due to the fact that in the long run they managed to win acceptance for their ideas - which are ours too.
This current of ideas can be traced back to the fifteenth century, a period when it was strong enough to bring about a change in the traditional discipline of the schools. Gerson was then its principal representative. He expressed his ideas on the question with great clarity, showing himself to be an excellent observer, for his period, of childhood and its sexual practices. This study of the sexual manners of childhood, and the importance which he attributed to them by devoting a treatise to them, De confessione mollicei, reveal a novel attitude: this attitude can be compared to the indications we have already noted in iconography and dress as showing a new interest in childhood.
Gerson studies the sexual behaviour of children for the benefit of confessors, to help the latter to arouse a feeling of guilt in the hearts of their little penitents (between ten and twelve years of age). He knows that masturbation and erection without ejaculation are general practices: if someone is questioned and denies all experience of masturbation then he is lying. For Gerson, this is a very serious matter. The peccatum mollicei, even if, because of the child's age, it has not been accompanied by pollution... has taken away the child's virginity even more than if the child, at the same age, had gone with a woman'. What is more, it borders on sodomy. Gerson's judgment is closer to modern teaching, which regards masturbation as an inevitable stage of premature sexuality, than are the sarcastic remarks of the novelist Sorel, who sees it as the result of the scholastic confinement of the boarding-school.
The child, according to Gerson, does not feel any sense of guilt to begin with: 'Sentient ibi quemdam pruritum incognitum tum stat erectio and they think that it is permissible that se fricent ibi et se palpent et se tractent sicut in aliis locis dum pruritus inest.' This is a consequence of original corruption: ex corruptione naturae. We are still a long way from the idea of childish innocence, but we are already quite close to an objective knowledge of the child's behaviour, the originality of which is obvious in the light of what has been said above. How is childhood to be safeguarded against this danger. By the confessor's advice, but also by changing the way in which children are brought up, by behaving differently towards them. One should speak decently to them, using only chaste expressions. One should see that when playing together they do not kiss each other, touch each other with their bare hands, or look at each other: Jigerent oculi in eorum decore. One should guard against any promiscuity between children and adults, at least in bed: pueri capaces deli, puellae, jtlvenes should not sleep in the same bed as older people, even of the same sex; cohabitation in the same bed was a widespread practice then in all classes of society. We have seen that it still existed at the end of the sixteenth century, even at the French court: Henri IV's frolics with his son, Louis XIII, brought to his bed together with his sister, justified Gerson's prudence of nearly two hundred years before. Gerson forbids people to touch each other in in nudo, and warns his readers to beware 'a societaliatibus perversions Ube colloquia prove et guests impudici fiunt in lecto absque dormitione'.
Gerson returns to the topic in a sermon against lechery for the fourth Sunday of Advent: the child must prevent others from touching him or kissing him, and if he has failed to do so, he must report this in every instance in confession (this demand needs to be emphasized, because, generally speaking, people saw no harm in caresses). Later on, he suggests that it 'would be a good thing' to separate children at night - he recalls the case cited by St Jerome of a boy of nine who beget a child - but he does not dare to say more than 'it would be a good thing', for it was a general practice to put all the children of a family together when they were not sleeping with a valet, a maidservant or relatives.
In the regulations which he drew up for the school of Notre-Dame-de-Pans he tries to isolate the children, to keep them under the constant supervision of the master: this is the spirit of the new discipline which we shall study in a later chapter. The singing master must not teach cantilenas dissolutus impudicasque, and the boys must report any of their classmates who is guilty of misbehaviour or immodesty (punishable misdemeanours include speaking gallicum - instead of Latin - swearing, lying, cursing, dawdling in bed, missing the Hours, and chattering in church). A night-light must be kept burning in the dormitory: as much out of devotion to the image of Our Lady as for the natural functions, and so that they perform in the light the only acts which can and must be seen'. No child may change beds during the night: he must stay with the companion he has been given. Conventictua, vel societates ad partem extra alias are not allowed either by day or night. Every care is taken, in fact, to avoid special friendships and dangerous company, especially that of the servants: 'The servants must be forbidden to engage in any familiarity with the children, not excepting the clerks, the capellani the church staff [there is a certain absence of trust here]: they must not speak to the children except when the Masters are present.' Children not on the foundation are not to be allowed to mix with the schoolboys, even to study with them (except by special permission of the Superior),'so that our children do not contract bad habits from the example of others'. This is all quite new: it must not be imagined that life in the school was really like this. We shall see later what it was like and how much time and effort was needed to obtain strict discipline. Gerson was far ahead of the institutions of his time. His regulations are interesting for the moral ideal which they reveal, which had not been formulated with such clarity before, and which was to become the ideal of the Jesuits, of Port- Royal, of the Brothers of Christian Doctrine, and of all the moralists and strict pedagogues of the seventeenth century.
In the sixteenth century the pedagogues were more easygoing, for all that they took care not to overstep certain bounds. We know this from books written for the schoolboys, from which they learnt reading, writing, Latin vocabulary, and finally etiquette; the treatises on etiquette and the conversations which, to make the lesson more lifelike, involved several schoolboys or a schoolboy and a master. These dialogues are excellent documents on school life. In Vives's dialogues we find certain passages which would not have been to Gerson's taste but which were traditional: 'Which is the more shameful part: the part in front [note the discreet euphemism] or the hole in the arse?' 'Both parts are extremely improper, the behind because of its unpleasantness, and the other part because of lechery and dishonour.'
The coarsest jokes, as well as topics of anything but educational value, are to be found in these dialogues. In Charles Hoole's English dialogues we have a number of quarrels: one takes place in a tavern - and taverns at that time were far less respectable places than the modern public house. There is a lengthy argument about which inn sells the best beer. However, even in Vives a certain modesty is observed: 'The third finger is called the shameful one. Why?' "The master has said that he knows the reason, but that he does not want to give it because it is dirty and unpleasant; however, do not press the matter, for it is unseemly for a child of good character to ask about such unpleasant things.' This is quite remarkable for the time. Broad talk was so natural that even later on the strictest reformers would introduce into their sermons to children and students comparisons which would seem shocking today. Thus in 1653 we find the Jesuit Father Lebrun exhorting the 'noble boarders of Clermont College' to avoid gluttony: 'They are fastidious about their food, tanquam praegnantes mulierculae.'
But towards the end of the sixteenth century a much more obvious change took place: certain pedagogues, whose ideas were to carry weight and who would succeed in imposing their concepts and scruples on others, refused to allow children to be given indecent books any longer. The idea originated of providing expurgated editions of the classics for the use of children. This was a very important stage, which may be regarded as marking the beginning of respect for childhood. This attitude was to be found among both Catholics and Protestants, in France and England. Until then nobody had hesitated to give children Terence to read, for he was a classic. The Jesuits removed him from their curriculum. In England the schools used an expurgated edition by Cornelius Schonaeus, published in 1592 and reprinted in 1674 - Brinsley recommends it in his schoolmaster's manual.
The French Protestant schools used Cordier's conversations (1564), which took the place of the conversations of Erasmus, Vives, Mosellanus, etc. They reveal a new decorum, a desire to avoid any word or expression which might be considered offensive or indecent. The most chat is allowed is a joke about the uses of paper - 'schoolboy paper', envelope paper', 'blotting paper' - in a parlour game. Finally one boy gives up but the other guesses the answer: 'paper used for wiping your bottom in the privy'. An innocent concession to the traditional jokes. Cordier really could be 'put into anybody's hands'. In any case, his dialogues were used in conjunction with some religious dialogues by a certain S. Castellion.
Port-Royal in its turn produced a heavily expurgated edition of Terence: Cornedies of Terence made very decent while changing very little. As for modesty of behaviour, the Jesuit colleges introduced new precautions, duly recorded in the regulations, regarding the administration of corporal punishment. It was laid down that the breeches of the victims, adolescentum, were not to be removed, whatever the boy's rank or age'. Just enough of the skin was to be exposed as was necessary to inflict the punishment, but not more: non amplius.
A great change in manners took place in the course of the seventeenth century. The least of the liberties permitted at the court of Henri IV would not have been allowed by Mme de Maintenon with the King's children, legitimate or illegitimate, any more than they would have been in the homes of the free-thinkers. It was no longer a case of a few isolated moralists like Gerson, but of a great movement which manifested itself on all sides, not only in a rich moral and pedagogic literature but also in devotional practices and a new religious iconography.
An essential concept had won acceptance: that of the innocence of childhood. It was already to be found in Montaigne, for all that he had few illusions about the chastity of young students: ' A hundred schoolboys have caught the pox before getting to Aristotle's lesson, On Temperance. But he also tells an anecdote which reveals a different attitude: Albuquerque, 'in great danger of shipwreck, took a young boy on his shoulders, so that in their association in danger his innocence would serve him as a surety and a recommendation to obtain God's favour and bring him safely to land).21 A hundred years later, the idea of the innocence of childhood had become a commonplace. Witness the caption to an engraving by F. Guerard showing children's toys (dolls and drums): 'This is the age of innocence, to which we must all return in order to enjoy the happiness to come which is our hope on earth; the age when one can forgive anything, the age when hatred is unknown, when nothing can cause distress; the goIden age of human life, the age which defies Hell, the age when life is easy and death holds no terrors, the age to which the heavens are open. Let tender and gentle respect be shown to these young plants of the Church. Heaven is full of anger for whosoever scandalizes them.'
What a big way we have come to reach this point! It can be traced by means of an abundant literature, a few works of which we shall now examine.
L'Honneste garcon described as 'the art of instructing the nobility in virtue, learning and all the exercises suitable to its rank', and published by M. de Grenaille of Chatauniers,23 is a good example. The author had already written L'Honneste fille. The interest in education, in 'the institution of childhood', is worthy of note. The author knows that he is not the only writer on the subject and apologizes in his foreword: 'I do not believe that I am encroaching on M. Faret's province24 m dealing with a subject on which he has only touched, and in speaking of the education of those whom he has depicted in their finished condition... Here I lead the Boy from early infancy as far as youth. I deal first with his birth and then with his education; I polish his mind and his manners at the same time; I instruct him in both religion and the proprieties, so that he shall be neither impious nor superstitious.' Treatises on etiquette were already in print which were simply manuals of savoir-vivre, books on good manners, and they continued to enjoy widespread favour until the early nineteenth century. In addition to these etiquette books which were meant for children, in the early seventeenth century a pedagogic literature for the use of parents and teachers came into being. Although it referred to Quintilian, Plutarch and Erasmus, it was something new. So new that M. de Grenaille feels called upon to defend himself against those who see the education of youth as a practical matter and not a subject for a book. 'There is Quintilian, and so on... but there is something else, and the subject has a special seriousness for a Christian... Since the Lord of Lords summons little innocents to Him, I do not believe that any of His subjects has the right to repulse them, nor that men should show reluctance to educate them, seeing that in doing so they are simply initiating the angels.' The comparison of angels with children was to become a common theme of edification. 'It is said that an angel in the shape of a child enlightened St Augustine, but on the other hand he took pleasure in communicating his wisdom to children, and in his works we find treatises intended for them as well as others for the greatest theologians.' He cites St Louis, who wrote a directive for his son. 'Cardinal Bellarmin wrote a catechism for children. 'Richelieu, 'that great prince of the Church, gave instruction to the smallest as well as counsel to the greatest'. Montaigne too, whom one hardly expected to find in such good company, showed concern about bad teachers, especially pedants.
M. de Grenaille continues: 'It must not be imagined that when one speaks of childhood one is always speaking of something weak; on the contrary, I am going to show here that a condition which certain people consider contemptible is positively illustrious.' It was in fact at this time that people did talk of the weakness and imbecility of childhood. Hitherto they had tended to ignore childhood, as a transitional period soon finished with and of no importance. This stress laid on the contemptible side of childhood may have been a consequence of the classical spirit and its insistence on reason, but it was above all a reaction against the importance which the child had assumed in the family and the idea of the family. That feeling of irritation with childishness thus arose which is the modern reverse of the idea of childhood. With it went the contempt which that society of men of the open air and men of the world felt for the professor, the college regent, the 'pendant', at a time when the colleges were becoming more numerous and better attended, and when childhood was already beginning to remind adults of their schooldays. In reality, the antipathy to children shown by solemn or peevish spirits is evidence of the importance, in their eyes the excessive importance, which was attributed to childhood.
For the author of L'Honneste garcon, childhood is illustrious on account of Christ's childhood. This, he points out, was sometimes interpreted as a token of the humiliation accepted by Christ in adopting not only the human condition but the state of childhood: thereby putting himself on a lower level than the first Adam, according to St Bernard. On the other hand there are the holy children: the Holy Innocents, the child martyrs who refused to worship the idols, and the little Jew of St Gregory of Tours whose father tried to burn him in an oven because he had turned Christian. 'I can show too that in our own days the Faith has had its child martyrs as in past ages. The history of Japan tells of a little Louis who, at the age of twelve, showed greater courage than grown men. A woman died at the same stake as Dom Carlo Spinola, together with 'her little child', which shows that 'God draws his praises from the mouths of children'. And the author piles up the examples afforded by the holy children of tile two Testaments, adding a further example, drawn from French medieval history: 'I must not forget the courage of those French boys whose praises Nauclerus has sung, and who took the cross to the number of twenty thousand in the time of Pope Innocent III to go and deliver Jerusalem from the hands of the infidels.' The children's crusade.
We know that the children in the medieval verse-chronicles and romances of chivalry behaved like true knights, affording proof, in M. de Grenaille's eyes, of the courage and good sense of children. He cites the case of a child who appointed himself the champion of the Empress, the wife of the Emperor Conrad, against 'a famous gladiator'. 'Read in the romances of chivalry what the Rinaldos, the Tancreds and all those other knights are said to have done: legend does not attribute more to them in a single fight than true History grants that little Achilles.'
'After that, can anyone deny that the first age is comparable, indeed often preferable, to ah the rest?' 'Who would dare to say that God favours them on account favours older people more than children? He favours them on account of their innocence, which comes close to impeccability.' They have neither passions nor vices: 'Their lives seem to be most reasonable at a time when they seem least capable of using their reason.' Obviously there is no mention here of the peccatum mollicei, and in this respect the worthy nobleman of 1642 strikes the modern reader, familiar with psyche-analysis, as more old-fashioned than Gerson. The explanation is that the very idea of immodesty and sensuality in a child embarrasses M. de Grenaille, as being an argument used by those who consider childhood to be 'silly' and 'corrupt'.
This new attitude was to be found again at Port-Royal, exemplified first of ah by Saint-Cyran. His Jansenist biographers all tell us of the lofty idea he had of childhood and of the respect due to children: 'He admired the Son of God, who, in the most august functions of His ministry, would not allow children to be prevented from coming to Him, who kissed and blessed them, who commanded us not to despise or neglect them, and who finally spoke of them in terms so favourable and so astonishing that they are capable of dumbfounding those who scandalize the little ones. Accordingly M. de Saint-Cyran always showed children a kindness which amounted to a sort of respect, in order to do honour to the innocence in them and the Holy Ghost which inhabits them. M. de Saint-Cyran was very enlightened' and 'far from approving these worldly maxims [contempt for pedagogues], and as he was aware of the importance of the care and education of youth, he regarded it in a totally different light. However disagreeable and humiliating people might find it, he none the less employed persons of merit for it who never felt that they had any right to complain.'
The result was the formation of that moral concept which insisted on the weakness of childhood rather than on what M. de Grenaille called its 'illustrious nature', but which associated its weakness with its innocence, the true reflection of divine purity, and which placed education in the front rank of man's obligations. It reacted at one and the same time against indifference towards childhood, against an excessively affectionate and selfish attitude which turned the child into a plaything for adults and encouraged his caprices, and against the reverse of this last feeling, the contempt of the man of reason. This concept dominates late seventeenth-century literature. This is what Coustel wrote in his rules for the education of children on the need to love children and to overcome the repugnance which they arouse in thinking men: 'If one considers the child's exterior, which is nothing but weakness and infirmity of either body or mind, it cannot be denied that there is no apparent reason for holding it in high esteem. But one changes one s opinion if one looks into the future and acts in the light of Faith. 'Beyond the child one will then be able to see 'the good magistrate', 'the good priest',' the great lord'. But above all it must be remembered that children's souls, still possessed of their baptismal innocence, are the dwelling-place of Jesus Christ. 'God sets us an example by commanding Angels to accompany them on all their errands, without ever leaving them.'
That is why, according to Varet, 'the education of children is one of the most important things in the World. And Jacqueline Pascal, in the regulations for the little boarders of Port-Royal, writes: 'Looking after children is so important that we are bound to prefer that duty to all others when obedience imposes it on us, and what is more, to our personal pleasures, even if these are of a spiritual nature. This is not a case of isolated observations but of a real doctrine - generally accepted by Jesuits as by Oratorians or Jansenists - which partly accounts for the profusion of educational institutions, colleges, little schools and special establishments, and the evolution of school life in the direction of stricter discipline.
A few general principles that were deduced from this doctrine were cited as commonplaces in the literature of the time. For example, children must never be left alone. This principle dated back to the fifteenth century and originated in monastic experience, but it was never really put into practice until the seventeenth century, by which time the logic of it was obvious to the public at large and not simply to a handful of monks and 'pedants'. 'As far as possible, all the apertures of the cage must be closed...A few bars will be left open to allow the child to live and to enjoy good health; this is what is done with nightingales to make them sing and with parrots to teach them to talk.' This was done with a certain subtlety, for both the Jesuit colleges and the schools at Port-Royal had become increasingly familiar with child psychology. In the regulations for the children at Port-Royal we have Jacqueline Pascal writing: 'A close watch must be kept on the children, and they must never be left alone anywhere, whether they are ill or in good health.' But 'this constant supervision should be exercised gently and with a certain trustfulness calculated to make them think that one loves them, and that it is only to enjoy their company that one is with them. This makes them love this supervision rather than fear it. This principle was absolutely universal, but it was carried out to the letter only in the Jesuit boarding-schools, in the schools at Port-Royal and in some private boarding-schools; in other words it affected only a small number of very rich children. The object was to avoid the promiscuity of the colleges, which for a long time had a bad reputation, though not as long in France - thanks to the Jesuits - as in England. Coustel writes: 'As soon as the young people set foot in that sort of place [the college], they rapidly lose that innocence, that simplicity, that modesty which hitherto made them so pleasing to God and to men. There was a general reluctance to entrust a child to a single tutor: the extreme sociability of manners was opposed to this solution. It was held that the child ought to get to know people and converse with them from an early age; this was very important, even more necessary than Latin. It was better 'to put five or six children with a good man or two in a private house', an idea which Erasmus had already put forward.
The second principle was that children must not be pampered and must be accustomed to strict discipline early in life: 'Do not tell me that they are only children and that one must be patient with them. For the effects of concupiscence appear only too clearly at this age.' This was a reaction against the 'coddling' of children under eight, and against the opinion that they were too small to make it worth-while finding fault with them. Courtin's manual of etiquette of 1671 explains at some length: 'These little people are allowed to amuse themselves without anyone troubling to see whether they are behaving well or badly; they are permitted to do as they please; nothing is forbidden them; they laugh when they ought to cry, they cry when they ought to laugh, they talk when they ought to be silent, and they are mute when good manners require them to reply. It is cruelty to allow them to go on living in this way. The parents say that when they are bigger they will be corrected. Would it not be better to deal with them in such a way that there was nothing to correct?'
The third principle was modesty. At Port-Royal: 'As soon as they have retired for the night the girls' beds are faithfully inspected to see if they are lying with fitting modesty, and also to see if they are properly covered up in winter.' A real propaganda campaign was launched to try to eradicate the age-old habit of sleeping several to a bed. The same advice was repeated all the way through the seventeenth century. We find it, for instance, in La Civilite' chretienne by St Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, which was first published in 1713: 'Above all, one must not, unless one is married [this is a reservation which nobody would dream of introducing nowadays into a book intended for children, but at that time books intended for children were not read only by children], go to bed in the presence of a person of the opposite sex, this being utterly contrary to prudence and decency. It is even less permissible for persons of different sexes to sleep in the same bed, even in the case of very young children, for it is not fitting for even persons of the same sex to sleep together. These are two things which St Francis of Sales especially recommended to Mme de Chantal with regard to children.' And: 'Parents must teach their children to conceal their bodies from one another when going to bed.'
The insistence on decency was to be found again in the matter of reading and conversation: 'Teach them to read books in which purity of language and wholesome subject-matter are combined. ''When they start writing, do not allow them to be given examples full of unseemly expressions. We are a long way here from the outspoken talk of the child Louis XIII, which amused even the worthy Heroard. Naturally novel-reading, dancing and theatre-going were banned, and adults too were advised against indulging in these distractions. A close check was recommended on songs, an important and necessary precaution in a society where music was so popular: 'Take particular care to prevent your children from learning modern songs.' But the old songs were not rated any more highly: 'Of the songs which are known everywhere and which are taught to children as soon as they start to talk... there are scarcely any which are not full of the most horrible slanders and calumnies, and which are not biting satires which spare neither the sacred persons of the sovereigns nor those of the magistrates, nor those of the most innocent and pious persons.' These songs were described as expressing 'dissolute passions' and as being 'full of indecent expressions'.
St Jean-Baptiste de La Salle maintained this mistrust of entertainments: 'It is no more seemly for a Christian to attend a puppet-show [than a theatrical performance]'. 'A respectable person must regard entertainments of this sort with nothing but contempt... and parents must never allow their children to attend them.' Plays, balls, dances, and the 'more ordinary entertainments' provided by 'jugglers, mountebanks and tightrope walkers' were forbidden. Only educational games, that is to say, games which had been integrated in the educational system, were permitted; all other games were and remained suspect.
Another recommendation recurs frequently in this pedagogic literature, with its insistence on modesty': a warning not to leave children in the company of servants. This is a recommendation which went against an absolutely universal practice: 'Leave them as little as possible with servants, and especially with lackeys ['servants' had a wider significance then than it has now, and included what we would call companions]. These persons, in order to insinuate themselves into children's good graces, usually tell them nothing but nonsense and fill them with a love of gambling, amusement and vanity.'
Again, in the eighteenth century, we have the future Cardinal de Bernis recalling his childhood-he was born in 1715: 'Nothing is more dangerous for the morals and perhaps also for the health than to leave children too long in the care of the servants.' 'People take liberties with a child which they would not risk with a young man. This last sentence clearly refers to the mentality which we have analysed above in discussing the court of Henri IV and the scene between the Moslem boy and the Djerban in Tunis in the twentieth century. It still existed in the lower classes, but it was no longer tolerated in enlightened circles. The stress laid by the moralists on the need to separate children from the varied world of 'the servants' shows how well aware they were of the dangers presented by this promiscuity of children and servants (the servants themselves were often very young).
The fourth principle was simply another application of this insistence on decency and 'modesty': the old familiarity must be abandoned and its place taken by great moderation of manners and language, even in everyday life. This policy took the form of war on the use of the familiar 'tu' form. In the little Jansenist college of Le Chesnay: 'They had been so accustomed to treat each other with respect that they never used the tu form of address, nor were they ever known to make the slightest remark which they might have considered likely to offend certain of their companions.'
A 1671 manual of etiquette recognizes that good manners call for the vous form, but it has to make some concessions to the old French usage - this it does with a certain embarrassment: 'One normally says vous, and one must not say tu to anybody, unless it is to a little child and you are much older and it is customary for even the most polite and well-bred persons to speak thus. However, fathers with their children up to a certain age (in France until they are emancipated), masters with their pupils, and others in similar positions of authority, seem, according to common usage, to be allowed to say tu and toi. For close friends too, when they are conversing together, it is customary in certain places for them to say tu and toi; in other places people are more reserved and civilized. Even in the little schools, where the children were younger, St Jean- Baptiste de La Salle forbade the masters to use the tu form of address: 'They must speak to the children with reserve, never saying tu or toi, which would be showing too much familiarity.' It is certain that under this pressure the use of vous became more widespread. From Colonel Gerard's memoirs one learns with surprise that at the end of the eighteenth century a couple of soldiers, one aged twenty-five and the other twenty-three, could actually say vous to one another. And Colonel Gerard himself could use the vous form without feeling ridiculous.
At Mme de Maintenon's Saint-Cyr, the young ladies were told to avoid 'saying tu and toi, and adopting manners contrary to the proprieties'. 'One must never adapt oneself to children by means of childish language or manners; on the contrary, one must raise them to one's own level by always talking reasonably to them.'
Already, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the schoolboys in Cordier's dialogues were saying vous in the French text, whereas they naturally said tu in Latin.
In fact, the campaign for greater seriousness would triumph only in the nineteenth century, in spite of the contrary evolution of child welfare and more liberal, realistic pedagogics. An American professor of French, L. Wylie, who spent his sabbatical year 1950-1 in a village in the south of France, was astonished by the seriousness with which the masters at the primary school treated their pupils, and the parents, who were peasants, their children. The contrast with the American attitude struck him as enormous: 'Every step in the child's development seems to depend on the development of what people call its raison...' 'The child is now considered to be raisonnable, and it is expected to remain raisonnable.'
This raison, this self-control and this seriousness, which are required of the French child at an early age, while he is working for his certificate of study, and which are no longer known in the United States, are the final result of the campaign launched at the end of the sixteenth century by monks and moralists. It should be added that this state of mind is beginning to disappear from the French town: it remains only in the country, where the American observer met it.
The idea of childish innocence resulted in two kinds of attitude and behaviour towards childhood: firstly, safeguarding it against pollution by life, and particularly by the sexuality tolerated if not approved of among adults; and secondly, strengthening it by developing character and reason. We may see a contradiction here, for on the one hand childhood is preserved and on the other hand it is made older than its years; but the contradiction exists only for us of the twentieth century. The association of childhood with primitivism and irrationalism or prelogicism characterizes our contemporary concept of childhood. This concept made its appearance in Rousseau, but it belongs to twentieth-century history. It is only very recently that it passed from the theories of psychologists, pedagogues, psychiatrists and psyche-analysts into public opinion; it is this concept which Professor Wylie used as a standard of comparison by which to gauge that other attitude which he discovered in a village in the Vaucluse, and in which we can recognize the survival of another concept of childhood, a different and older concept, which was born in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which became general and popular from the seventeenth century on.
In this concept, which seems old to us in relation to our contemporary mentality, but which was new in relation to the Middle Ages, the ideas of innocence and reason were not opposed to one another. 'Si puer prout decet, vixit', is translated into French in a manual of etiquette of 1671 as: 'If the child has lived like a man...
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In this new moral climate, a whole pedagogic literature for children as distinct from books for adults made its appearance. It is extremely difficult, with the countless manuals of etiquette produced from the sixteenth century on, to distinguish between those intended for adults and those intended for children. This ambiguity is due to factors connected with the structure of the family and the relationship between the family and society, which are examined in the last part of this study.
The Jesuit Fathers published new manuals of etiquette or took over existing manuals, in the same way as they expurgated the classical writers or gave their patronage to treatises on gymnastics: witness Bienrkance de la conversation entre les hommes, written in the early 1600s for the boarders of the Society of Jesus at Pont-a-Mousson and La Fleche The Regles de la bienshance et de la civilite' chretienne for the use of the Christian boys' schools of St Jean-Baptiste de La Salle was published in 1713 and reprinted all through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth: this was a classic work for a long time and its influence on manners was probably considerable. However, even this work was not yet addressed directly and openly to children. Certain pieces of advice were intended rather for parents (for all that it was a book from which children learned how to read, which provided examples of handwriting, which taught them how to behave, and which they learned off by heart), or even for adults inadequately versed in good manners.
This ambiguity was dispelled in the new editions of the manuals of etiquette published in the second half of the eighteenth century. Here for instance is a 'simple and decent' manual of 1761: 'For the instruction of children, containing at the beginning the way to learn to read, pronounce and write correctly, newly revised [for all the manuals claimed to be new editions of the old manuals by Cordier, Erasmus or della Casa: it was a traditional genre, and any new ideas were cast in an old form, whence the continuation of certain notions which had undoubtedly gone out of fashion] and enlarged at the end with a fine Treatise on orthography. Drawn up by a Missionary with precepts and instructions for the education of Youth.' The tone of the book is new; the author addresses himself specifically to children and writes in a sentimental style: 'This book will not be useless to you, dear children, it will teach you... Note, none the less, dear children...''Dear child, whom I regard as a child of God and as a brother of Jesus Christ, begin early in life to look for the good...I intend to teach you the rules of a decent Christian.' 'As soon as you rise in the morning, make the sign of the cross.' 'If you are in the bedchamber of your Father and Mother, bid them good morning.' At school: 'Do not be disagreeable to your schoolfellows...' 'Do not talk in school.' 'Do not use the words tu and toi too often.' But this sweetness, this very eighteenth-century tenderness does not detract in any way from the ideal of character, logic and dignity which the author is trying to instill into the child: 'Dear children, do not be among those who talk incessantly and who do not give others time to say what they think.' 'Keep your promises; that is the duty of a man of honour.' The spirit is still that of the seventeenth century, but the manner is already that of the nineteenth: 'Dear children.' The child's province is clearly distinguished from that of the adult.
There still remained some strange survivals from the old indifference to the matter of age. For a long time Latin, and even Greek, had been taught to children in couplets wrongly attributed to Cato. The pseudo-Cato is quoted in Le Roman de la Rose. This practice continued throughout the seventeenth century at least, and there was still an edition of Cato's couplets in existence in 1802. But the spirit of these extremely crude moral recommendations is the spirit of the Byzantine Empire and the Middle Ages, which were totally devoid of the delicacy of Gerson, Cordier, the Jesuits, Port-Royal, and in fact of seventeenth-century opinion as a whole. Thus children continued to be given maxims of this kind to translate: 'Do not believe your wife when she complains about your servants, for the wife often detests those who love the husband.' Or else: 'Do not attempt to discover the designs of Providence by means of wizardry.' 'Flee the wife who seeks to rule by virtue of her dowry; do not retain her if she becomes unbearable', etc.
True, at the end of the sixteenth century these lessons in morality had been judged inadequate, and children were given Pibrac's quatrains, written at that time in a more Christian, more edifying and more modern spirit. But Pibrac's quatrains did not replace the pseudo-Cato; they simply joined him until the beginning of the nineteenth century: the last editions still contained both texts. The pseudo-Cato and Pibrac then sank together into oblivion.
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Corresponding to this evolution of the idea of childhood in the seventeenth century, a new tendency appeared in religious devotion and iconography.
From the beginning of the seventeenth century, religious painting, engraving and sculpture gave considerable importance to representation of the Infant Jesus, by himself, no longer with the Virgin or as one of the Holy Family. As can be seen from the Van Dyck at Dresden, the Infant Jesus is usually shown in a symbolic attitude: He has His foot on the serpent, is leaning on a globe, is holding a cross in the left hand, and with the other hand is giving a blessing. This dominating child is also shown standing erect over the doorways of certain churches (the Dalbade in Toulouse for instance). A special devotion was now offered to the Holy Childhood. It had been prepared for, in religious iconography at least, by all the pictures of the Holy Family, the Presentation and the Circumcision of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But in the seventeenth century it was given a different emphasis. The subject has been thoroughly explored. All that I would do here is to stress the connection which was immediately established between this devotion to the Holy Childhood and the great development of interest in childhood, of the provision of little schools and colleges, and of educational theory. Juilly College was dedicated by Cardinal de Btrulle to the mystery of the Infant Jesus. In her regulations for the little girl boarders at Port-Royal, Jacqueline Pascal inserted two prayers, one of which was also 'in honour of the mystery of the Childhood of Jesus Christ'. It deserves to be quoted here: 'Be like new-born children ... Grant, O Lord, that we may always be children in our simplicity and innocence, as people of the world are always children in their ignorance and weakness. [Here we find once more the two aspects of the concept of childhood in the seventeenth century, the innocence which has to be preserved, and the ignorance or weakness which has to be suppressed or modified.] Give us a holy childhood, which the course of the years may never take from us, and from which we may never pass into the old age of old Adam, or into the death that is sin; but which may make us increasingly new creatures in Jesus Christ and lead us to His glorious immortality.
A nun of the Carmelite convent at Beaune, Marguerite du Saint- Sacrement, was well known for her devotion to the Holy Childhood. Nicolas Rolland, the founder of several little schools at the end of the seventeenth century, made a pilgrimage to her tomb. On this occasion the prioress of the convent gave him 'a statue of the Infant Jesus which the venerable Sister Marguerite used to honour with her prayers The teaching institutes dedicated themselves to the Holy Childhood, as did Cardinal de Berulle's Oratorian colleges: in 1685 Pere Barre registered the Statuts et Reglements of the Christian charity schools of the Holy Infant Jesus. The Dames de Saint-Maur, the paragon of the teaching orders, assumed the official title: Institute of the Holy Infant Jesus. The first seal adopted by the Institution of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, the Ignorantine Friars, showed the Infant Jesus being led by St Joseph.
The moral and pedagogic literature of the seventeenth century frequently quotes those passages in the Gospel in which Jesus speaks of children. In L'Honneste garcon: 'Since the Lord of Lords summons little children to Him, I cannot see that any of His subjects has the right to reject them.' The prayer which Jacqueline Pascal inserts in her regulations for the children of Port-Royal paraphrases expressions used by Christ: 'Be like new-born children... Unless you become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.' And the end of this prayer recalls an episode in the Gospel which was to obtain new favour in the seventeenth century: 'Lord, permit us to be among those children whom you summon to you, whom you allow to approach you, and from whose mouths you draw your praises.'
The scene in question, in which Jesus asks little children to be allowed to come to Him, was not absolutely unknown in the iconography of former times; we have already had occasion to mention that Ottonian miniature in which children are depicted as adults, but on a smaller scale, gathered around Christ. Pictures of this scene are also to be found in the moralizing Bibles of the thirteenth century, but they are fairly rare and are treated as commonplace illustrations, devoid of any real fervour or significance. On the other hand, from the end of the sixteenth century on, this scene recurs frequently, especially in engraving, and it is obvious that it corresponds to a new and special form of devotion. This can be seen from a study of a fine print by Stradan, whose engravings, as is well known, were an inspiration to the artists of his time. The subject is given by the caption: 'Jesus parvulis oblatis imposuit manus et benedixit eis'. Jesus is seated. A woman is presenting her children - naked putti – to Him; other women and children are waiting their turn. It is significant that the child here is accompanied by his mother; in the medieval pictures, which were in closer conformity to the letter of the text, a text which did not appeal sufficiently to the artists' imagination to prompt them to embellish it, the children were alone with Christ. Here the child is not separated from his family: an indication of the fresh importance assumed by the family in the general sensibility. A Dutch painting of 1620 shows the same scene. Christ is squatting on the ground, in the middle of a crowd of children pressing round Him. Some are in their mothers' arms. Others, who are naked, are playing or fighting (the theme of putti fighting was a common one at the time), or crying and shouting. The bigger children are more reserved, and have their hands folded in prayer. Christ's expression is smiling and attentive: that mixture of tenderness and amusement which grown-ups of modern times, and the nineteenth century in particular, assume when speaking to children. He is holding one hand above one of the little heads, and is raising the other to bless another child running towards Him. This scene became extremely popular: the engraving was probably given to children as a devotional picture, just as they would later be given First Communion pictures. The catalogue of an exhibition at Tours in 1947 devoted to the child in art mentions an eighteenth-century engraving on the same subject.
Henceforth there was a religion for children, and one new devotion was to all intents and purposes reserved for them: that of the guardian angel. 'I would add', we read in L'Honneste garcon, 'that although all men are accompanied by these blessed spirits which minister to them in order to help them to make themselves fit to receive the inheritance of salvation, it seems that Jesus Christ granted only to children the privilege of having guardian angels. It is not that we do not share this privilege; but manhood derives it from childhood.' For their part, he explains, the angels prefer the 'suppleness' of children to the 'rebellious character of men'. And Fleury in his 1686 treatise on studies maintains that 'the Gospel forbids us to despise children for the excellent reason that they have blessed angels to guard them.' The soul guided by an angel, and depicted in the form of a child or a youth, became a familiar feature of religious iconography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are countless examples, for instance a Dominiquin in which a little child in a flared skirt is being defended by an angel, a rather effeminate boy of thirteen or fourteen, against the Devil, a middle-aged man who is lying in wait for him."" The angel is holding his shield between the child and the middle-aged man, providing an unexpected illustration of this sentence in L'Honneste garcon: God possesses the first age, but the Devil possesses in many persons the best parts of old age as well as of the age which the Apostle calls accomplished.'
The old theme of Tobias led by the angel would henceforth symbolize the soul-child and its guide, the guardian angel. Witness the fine painting by Tournier shown in London and Paris in 1958, and the engraving by Abraham Bosse. In an engraving by Mariette the angel is showing the child, whom it leads, other angels carrying the cross in the sky.
The theme of the guardian angel and the soul-child was used in the decoration of baptismal fonts. I have come across an example in a baroque church in the south of Germany, the church of the Cross at Donauworth. The lid of the font is surmounted by a globe with the serpent wound around it. On the globe, the angel, a somewhat effeminate young man, is guiding the soul-child. This depiction is not simply a symbolic representation of the soul in the traditional form of the child (incidentally, it is a curiously medieval idea to use the child as the symbol of the soul), but an illustration of a devotion peculiar to childhood and derived from the sacrament of baptism: the guardian angel.
The period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was also that of the child paragons. The historian of the Jesuit college of La Fleche recounts from the annals of the Congregation of La Fleche for 1722 the edifying life of Guillaume Ruffin, born on January 19th, 1657. In 1671, at the age of fourteen, he was in the third class. He belonged of course to the Congregation (a pious society confined to the good pupils and dedicated to the Virgin: it still exists, I believe, in the Jesuit colleges).
He used to visit the sick and he gave alms to the poor. In 1674 he had nearly finished his first year in the philosophy class (there were two at that time) when he fell ill. The Virgin appeared to him twice. He was told in advance of the date of his death, 'the day of the feast of my good Mother', the feast of the Assumption. While reading this text I found myself unable to banish a recollection of my own childhood, in a Jesuit college where some of the boys undertook a campaign for the canonization of a little pupil who had died some years before in the odour of sanctity, at least so his family maintained. It was quite easy to attain sanctity in a short Schoolboy's life, and that without any exceptional prodigies or particular precocity: on the contrary, by means of the mere application of the childish virtues, by the mere preservation of one's initial innocence. This was the case with St Louis of Gonzaga, often cited in seventeenth-century works dealing with the problems of education.
Apart from the lives of little saints, schoolchildren were given as subjects of edification accounts of the childhood years of full-grown saints - or else of their remorse at their misspent youth. In the annals of the Jesuit college of Air for 1634 we read: 'Our young people did not fail to have their sermons twice a week in Lent. It was Pere de Barry, the Rector, who addressed the aforesaid exhortations to them, taking as his subject the heroic deeds of the saints in their youth.' The previous Lent, in 1633, 'he had taken as his subject St Augustine's regrets for his youth.'
In the Middle Ages there were no religious festivals of childhood, apart from the great seasonal festivals which were often pagan rather than Christian. From the fifteenth century on, as we have already seen, artists depicted certain episodes, such as the Presentation of the Virgin and particularly the Circumcision, in the midst of a throng of children, many more than were usually present in the crowds of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. But these Old Testament festivals, for all that they had become festivals of childhood in religious iconography, could no longer play this role in religious life, especially in the refined religious life of seventeenth-century France. First Communion gradually became the great religious festival of childhood, which it still is today, even where the Christian observance is no longer practiced regularly. First Communion has also taken the place of the old folklore festivals. Perhaps it owes its continuation, in spite of the de-Christianization of the modern world, to the fact that it is the child's individual festival, celebrated collectively in church but more particularly in private, within the family: the most collective festivals are those which have disappeared most rapidly.
The increasingly solemn celebration of First Communion was due in the first place to the greater attention given, especially at Port-Royal, to the necessary conditions for the proper reception of the Eucharist. It seems probable that previously children took communion without any special preparation, much as they started going to Mass, and probably quite early in life, judging by the general precocity of manners and the mingling of children and adults in everyday life. Jacqueline Pascal, in her regulations for the children of Port-Royal, stresses the necessity of carefully gauging the moral and spiritual capacity of children before allowing them to take communion, and of preparing them for it a long time ahead: 'Young children, and especially those who are mischievous, frivolous or wedded to some considerable defect, must not be allowed to take communion. They must be made to wait until God has effected some change in them, and it is wise to wait a long time, a year for instance or at least six months, to see if their actions are followed up. For I have never regretted making children wait: on the contrary, this has always served to advance in virtue those who were already well disposed and to bring about a recognition of their unreadiness in those who were not. One cannot take too many precautions where First Communion is concerned: for often all the rest depend on that first one.'
First Communion was delayed at Port-Royal until after Confirmation: 'When we are given children who have not been confirmed... if they have not made their First Communion either, we usually defer it until after Confirmation, so that being filled with the spirit of Jesus, they are better prepared to receive His Sacred Body.'
By the eighteenth century, First Communion had become an organized ceremony in the convents and colleges. Colonel Gerard recalls for us in his memoirs his recollections of a difficult First Communion. He was born in 1766, one of six children in a poor family. Left an orphan, he worked as a servant from the age of ten until the curate of his parish, taking an interest in him, sent him to the Abbey of Saint-Avit where he had become assistant chaplain. The first chaplain was a Jesuit who took a dislike to the boy. He must have been about fifteen when he was 'admitted' - this was the current expression - to the First Communion: 'It had been decided that I should make my First Communion at the same time as several boarders. The day before, I was playing with the farm dog when M. de N., the Jesuit, happened to pass by. "Have you forgotten, he exclaimed, "that it is tomorrow you are due to receive Our Lord's Body and Blood?" The Abbess sent for me and informed me that I would not be taking part in the ceremony next day...Three months after doing penance... I made my First Communion. After my second, I was ordered to take communion every Sunday and Holy Day.'
First Communion had become the ceremony which it has remained. As early as the middle of the eighteenth century it was customary to commemorate the occasion with an inscription on a devotional picture. At Versailles in 1931 an engraving was exhibited showing St Francis of Assisi. On the back was written: 'To certify the First Communion made by Francois Bernard, on April 26th, 1767, Low Sunday, in the parish of Saint-Sebastien of Marry. Barail, pariah priest of Saint-Sebastien.' This was a certificate inspired by the official documents of the Catholic Church.
All that remained to be done was to add to the solemnity of the occasion by prescribing a special costume, and this was done in the nineteenth century.
The First Communion ceremony was the most visible manifestation of the idea of childhood between the seventeenth and the late nineteenth century: it celebrated at one and the same time the two contradictory aspects of that idea, the innocence of childhood on the one hand and on the other its rational appreciation of the sacred mysteries.
CONCLUSION
THE TWO CONCEPTS OF CHILDHOOD
In medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist; this is not to suggest that children were neglected, forsaken or despised. The idea of childhood is not to be confused with affection for children: it corresponds to an awareness of the particular nature of childhood, that particular nature which distinguishes the child from the adult, even the young adult. In medieval society this awareness was lacking. That is why, as soon as the child could live without the constant solicitude of his mother, his nanny or his cradle-rocker, he belonged to adult society. That adult society now strikes us as rather puerile: no doubt this is largely a matter of its mental age, but it is also due to its physical age, because it was partly made up of children and youths. Language did not give the word 'child' the restricted meaning we give it today: people said 'child' much as we say 'lad' in everyday speech. The absence of definition extended to every sort of social activity: games, crafts, arms. There is not a single collective picture of the times in which children are not to be found, nestling singly or in pairs in the trousse hung round women's necks, l or urinating in a corner, or playing their part in a traditional festival, or as apprentices in a workshop, or as pages serving a knight, etc.
The infant who was too fragile as yet to take part in the life of adults simply 'did not count): this is the expression used by Moliere, who bears witness to the survival in the seventeenth century of a very old attitude of mind. Argan in Le malade imaginaire has two daughters, one of marriageable age and little Louison who is just beginning to talk and walk. It is generally known that he is threatening to put his elder daughter in a convent to stop her philandering. His brother asks him: 'How is it, Brother, that rich as you are and having only one daughter, for I don't count the little one, you can talk of putting her in a convent?' The little one did not count because she could disappear.
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The quotation from Moliere shows the continuance of the archaic attitude to childhood. But this survival, for ah that it was stubborn, was precarious. From the fourteenth century on, there had been a tendency to express m art, iconography and religion (in the cult of the dead) the personality which children were seen to possess, and the poetic, familiar significance attributed to their special nature. We have followed the evolution of the putto and the child portrait. And we have seen that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the child or infant - at least in the upper classes of society - was given a special costume which marked him out from the adults. This specialization of the dress of children and especially of little boys, in a society in which clothes and outward appearances had considerable importance, bears witness to the change which had taken place in the general attitude towards children: they counted much more than Argan's brother imagined. In fact, Le malade imaginaire, which seems as hard on little children as do certain remarks by La Fontaine, contains a whole conversation between Argan and little Louison: 'Look at me, will you!' 'What is it, papa!' 'Here!' 'What?' 'Haven't you anything to tell me?' 'If you wish, I can tell you, to amuse you, the story of the Ass's Skin, or else the fable of the Fox and the Crow which I was taught not so long ago.' A new concept of childhood had appeared, in which the child, on account of his sweetness, simplicity and drollery, became a source of amusement and relaxation for the adult.
To begin with, the attitude was held by women, women whose task it was to look after children - mothers and nannies. In the sixteenth century edition of Le Grand Proprietaire de toutes choses we are told about the nanny: 'She rejoices when the child is happy, and feels sorry for the child when he is ill; she picks him up when he falls, she binds him when he tosses about, and she washes and cleans him when he is dirty.' She brings the child up and teaches him to talk: 'She pronounces the words as if she had a stammer, to teach him to talk better and more rapidly... she carries him in her hands, then on her shoulder, then on her lap, to play with him when he cries; she chews the child's meat for him when he has no teeth so that he can swallow profitably and without danger; she plays with the child to make him sleep and she binds his limbs to keep them straight so that he has no stiffness in his body, and she bathes and anoints him to nourish his flesh...' Thomas More dwells on the subject of the schoolboy being sent to school by his mother: 'When the little boy will not rise in time for her, but lies still abed and slugg, and when he is up, weepeth because he hath lien so long, fearing to be beaten at school for his late coming thither, she telleth him then that it is but early days, and he shall come time enough, and biddeth him: "Go, good son, I warrant thee, I have sent to thy master myself, take thy bread and butter with thee, thou shalt not be beaten at all."' Thus she sends him off sufficiently reassured not to burst into tears at the idea of leaving her at home, but she does not get to the bottom of the trouble and the late arrival will be well and truly beaten when he gets to school.
Children's little antics must always have seemed touching to mothers, nannies and cradlerockers, but their reactions formed part of the huge domain of unexpressed feelings. Henceforth people would no longer hesitate to recognize the pleasure they got from watching children's antics and 'coddling' them. We find Mme de Sevigne admitting, not without a certain affectation, how much time she spends playing with her granddaughter: 'I am reading the story of Christopher Columbus's discovery of the Indies, which is entertaining me greatly; but your daughter entertains me even more. I do so love her... she strokes your portrait and caresses it in such an amusing way that I have to kiss her straight away.' 'I have been playing with your daughter for an hour now; she is delightful.' And, as if she were afraid of some infection, she adds, with a levity which surprises us, for the death of a child is something serious for us and nothing to joke about: 'I do not want her to die.' For, as we have seen from Moliere, this first appreciation of childhood went with a certain indifference, or rather with the indifference that was traditional.
The 'coddling' attitude towards children is even better known to us by the critical reactions it provoked at the end of the sixteenth century and particularly in the seventeenth century. Peevish persons found insufferable the attention paid to children. Montaigne bristles: 'I cannot abide that passion for caressing new-born children, which have neither mental activities nor recognizable bodily shape by which to make themselves lovable, and I have never willingly suffered them to be fed in my presence.' He cannot accept the idea of loving children 'for our amusement, like monkeys', or taking pleasure in their 'frolickings, games and infantile nonsense'.
Another example of this state of mind, a century later, is to be seen in Coulanges, Mme de Sevigne's cousin. He was obviously exasperated by the way his friends and relatives fussed over their children, for he composed a song dedicated to 'fathers of families', urging them not to spoil their offspring or allow them to eat with adults.
It is important to note that this feeling of exasperation was as novel as 'coddling', and even more foreign than 'coddling' to the indifferent attitude of people in the Middle Ages. It was precisely to the presence of children that Montaigne and Coulanges, like Mme de Sevigne, were hypersensitive; it should be pointed out that Montaigne and Coulanges were more modern than Mme de Sevigne in so far as they considered it necessary to keep children apart from adults. They held that it was no longer desirable that children should mingle with adults, especially at table; no doubt because if they did they were 'spoiled' and became ill-mannered.
The seventeenth-century moralists and pedagogues shared the dislike felt by Montaigne and Coulanges for 'coddling'. Thus the austere Fleury, in his treatise on studies, speaks very much like Montaigne: 'When little children are caught in a trap, when they say something foolish, drawing a correct inference from an irrelevant principle which has been given to them, people burst out laughing, rejoice at having tricked them, or kiss and caress them as if they had worked out the correct answer. It is as if the poor children had been made only to amuse the adults, like little dogs or little monkeys.'
The author of Galatee, the manual of etiquette commonly used in the best colleges, those of the Jesuits, speaks like Coulanges: 'Those persons are greatly at fault who never talk of anything but their wives, their little children and their nannies. "My little son made me laugh so much! Just listen to this... "'
M. d'Argonne, in his treatise on education, L'Education deMonsieur de Moncade (1690), likewise complains that people take an interest in very small children only for the sake of their 'caresses' and 'antics'; too many parents 'value their children only in so far as they derive pleasure and entertainment from them'.
It is important to remember that at the end of the seventeenth century this 'coddling' was not practiced only by people of quality, who, in fact, were beginning to disdain it. Its presence in the lower classes was noted and denounced. J.-B. de La Salle in his Conduite des ecoles chretiennes (1720) states that the children of the poor are particularly ill-mannered because 'they do just as they please, their parents paying no attention to them, even treating them in an idolatrous manner: what the children want, they want too.'
In the moralists and pedagogues of the seventeenth century, we see that fondness for childhood and its special nature no longer found expression in amusement and 'coddling', but in psychological interest and moral solicitude. The child was no longer regarded as amusing or agreeable: 'Every man must be conscious of that insipidity of childhood which disgusts the sane mind; that coarseness of youth which finds pleasure in scarcely anything but material objects and which is only a very crude sketch of the man of thought.' Thus Balthazar Gratien in EI Dircreto, a treatise on education published in 1646 which was still being translated into French in 1723. (Only time call cure a person of childhood and youth, which are truly ages of imperfection in every respect.' To be understood, these opinions need to be put back ill their temporal context and compared with the other texts of the period. They have been interpreted by some historians as showing ignorance of childhood, but in fact they mark the beginning of a serious and realistic concept of childhood. For they do not suggest that people should accept the levity of childhood: that was the old mistake. In order to correct the behaviour of children, people must first of all understand it, and the texts of the late sixteenth century and the seventeenth century are full of comments on child psychology." The authors show a great solicitude for children, who are seen as witnesses to baptismal innocence, comparable to the angels, and close to Christ who loved them. But this interest calls for the development in them of a faculty of reasoning which is still fragile, a determined attempt to turn them into thinking men and good Christians. The tone is sometimes grim, the emphasis being laid on strictness as opposed to the laxity and facility of contemporary manners; but this is not always the case. There is even humour in Jacqueline Pascal, and undisguised tenderness. In the texts published towards the end of the century, an attempt is made to reconcile sweetness and reason. Thus the Abbe Goussault, a counsellor at the High Court, writes in Le Portrait d'une honnete femme: 'Familiarizing oneself with one's children, getting them to talk about all manner of things, treating them as sensible people and wining them over with sweetness, is an infallible secret for doing what one wants with them. They are young plants which need tending and watering frequently: a few words of advice offered at the right moment, a few marks of friendship and affection given now and then, touch them and bind them. A few caresses, a few little presents, a few words of cordiality and trust make an impression on their minds, and they are few in number that resist these sweet and easy methods of making them persons of honour and probity.''
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The first concept of childhood- characterized by 'coddling' – had made its appearance in the family circle, in the company of little children. The second, on the contrary, sprang from a source outside the family: churchmen or gentlemen of the robe, few in number before the sixteenth century, and a far greater number of moralists in the seventeenth century, eager to ensure disciplined, rational manners. They too had become alive to the formerly neglected phenomenon of childhood, but they were unwilling to regard children as charming toys, for they saw them as fragile creatures of God who needed to be both safeguarded and reformed. This concept in its turn passed into family life.
In the eighteenth century, we find those two elements in the family, together with a new element: concern about hygiene and physical health. Care of the body was not ignored by seventeenth-century moralists and pedagogues. People nursed the sick devotedly (at the same time taking every precaution to unmask malingerers), but any interest shown in healthy bodies had a moral purpose behind it: a delicate body encouraged luxury, sloth, concupiscence - all the vices in fact!
General de Martange's correspondence with his wife gives us some idea of a family's private life and preoccupations about a century after Mme de Sevigne. Martange was born in 1722 and married in 1754. He shows great interest in everything concerning his children's life, from 'coddling' to education; he watches closely over their health and even their hygiene. Everything to do with children and family life has become a matter worthy of attention. Not only the child's future but his presence and his very existence are of concern: the child has taken a central place in the family.
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