In 1881 the historian Carre expressed astonishment on studying the records of the Oratorian college at Troyes in the seventeenth century: 'The reports on some of the pupils are deplorable, and I doubt whether a pupil at a modern lycee could merit reports of that sort.' The remark would certainly be true of the young adults, but not as true as it would be of the children. The difference in manners between the two societies, that of the seventeenth century and our own, can best be seen in the children and young people, who for a very long time retained archaic, medieval characteristics which were already partly effaced in the adult world. We have studied the progress in school and other academic institutions of a modern concept of childhood: we have seen how a minority wedded to ideas of order, clarity and authority tried to introduce into society by means of education a new way of life opposed to the anarchical impulsiveness of the old manners. This minority exerted pressure from the outside on the world of childhood, but the latter held out for a long time and remained until the end of the seventeenth century in France, until the beginning of the nineteenth century in England, a sort of islet of archaism. It was later to become the focus of the modernization of society.
Schoolchildren used to be armed. The Jesuits' ratio studiorum provided for their disarmament on entering the college, weapons being placed in safe custody in return for a receipt, and handed back to the pupil when he went out. In 1680, the disciplinary regulations of the College de Bourgogne repeated this rule: 'Neither firearms nor swords are to be retained in pupils' rooms and those who possess such weapons must hand them over to the Principal, who will keep them in a place chosen for that purpose.' It is hard to imagine a rule of that sort in our present-day colleges or lycees! The youngest children, from the age of five, could already wear a sword, which was not simply for ornament or prestige: L'Estoile tells how on Shrove Monday this month [in 1588] the King sent the civil and criminal lieutenant, his public attorney at the Chastelet, and the commissioners [examining commissioners, at once examining magistrates and police superintendents] with some sergeants to the University of Paris to disarm the students who during the Saint-Germain fair had gone there armed to behave insolently.' And much later, in 1709, the records of the Oratorian college at Troyes mention a pupil who was threatening to run his master through :gladio minatus est praeceptori. The judicial authorities of towns with colleges were for ever forbidding the pupils to wear swords: witness this edict of March 20th,1675, issued by the High Court of Dijon: 'Since the majority of the young people of the city, although destined for the robe [but we know now that there was really less difference between gentlemen of the robe and gentlemen of the sword than historians had thought: they came from the same families] and still at school [in the rhetoric or logic classes], and several other persons unfit to wear a sword, none the less wore one wherever they went, and since this license was harmful, not only on account of the scandal it caused the public, but also on account of the quarrels and brawls which often resulted from it...' For a long time the High Court at Dijon went on repeating the same prohibition, even as late as 1753, as if the regulation had not become out of date, if not effective.
Even when he had deposited his sword in the armoury, before going into the college, the schoolboy could still be a dangerous character: in 1661, at Beaune, an Oratorian Father was soundly beaten by his pupils and the High Court of Dijon had to extend to other offensive weapons the ban already applied to the sword, forbidding 'all students to carry sticks, stakes and other offensive weapons in the classrooms of the house of the aforementioned Priests of the Oratory'.
The masters often had to cope with real armed revolts, and mutinies were common and violent. Take for instance the one staged by the pupils of the Jesuit college of La Fleche one carnival day in 1646. It will be seen that this was a far more serious affair than the minor demonstrations of young schoolboys or even older students nowadays.
The carnival at that time was a festival of youth in which the whole population took part: it was accompanied by great gaiety and great disorderliness. The authorities charged with maintaining order were broadminded in their attitude, like the authorities in Moslem countries at the end of Ramadan. However, the magistrate of La Fleche had taken the precaution of forbidding the election of a king, abbot or prior of youth: the traditional master of ceremonies and organizer of the carnival celebrations. The atmosphere was all the more electric that year in that some of the older pupils of the college had had to suffer the humiliating poena scholastica, a public flogging by the corrector. They considered that they had been dishonoured and were plotting revenge. The school records of the time are full of stories of pupils who had been punished and who took their revenge by beating up their masters, who had to send for the police. At La Fleche on the evening of Shrove Tuesday, the day-boys, who had sided with their schoolmates, introduced one of their number into the college disguised as a woman. But neither the Fathers nor the Brothers were taken off their guard: these monks knew what they were up against and defended themselves energetically. The Brothers managed to capture one of the mutineers who had drawn his sword and locked him up. The brawl then changed in character and turned into a riot: 'This made the others angrier than before. They went to the armourers and provided themselves with weapons.' Here we recognize the state of nerves which is still characteristic of Arab crowds, and which can easily turn a trivial incident into an orgy of killing and looting; we ourselves find it increasingly difficult to imagine this state of mind.
The students were armed: those involved were day-boys at the college who lived in the pedagogicas and in lodgings approved by the principal: the oldest among them were those in the philosophy classes. 'They spent the night under arms and laid siege to ah the doors of the college by which it could be handed over [in the morning] to justice.' One can imagine the excitement of this Shrove Tuesday vigil. In the morning they forced their way into the college: 'When morning came, they entered the college under arms, repeating their threats that they would have their companion back willy-nilly, and that they would capture a Jesuit or a boarder by way of reprisal.' In spite of this invasion, the Fathers and their obedient pupils got ready to follow the usual routine of a peaceful day: 'The rebels.., stood in the avenues, armed with swords, sticks, black-jacks, and stones, driving back the pupils who came out when the bell rang to go to the classrooms.' The affair threatened to take an ugly turn if the Fathers refused to lose face and release their prisoner. They too had their stock of weapons, and they armed their servants, not only with sticks, but also with halberds and above all with muskets: they had the superiority of fire-power on their side. The Jesuits' servants then attempted a sortie which nearly won them a bloodless victory: the sight of the muskets inspired a healthy mistrust. Unfortunately one of the mutineers held his ground: 'Instead of retreating like the other rebels in the troop, he advanced on the servant who was holding the musket with its muzzle pointing upwards [there may well have been only one musket!], and hurling himself on the man and his weapon, tried to force him to surrender it...As ill-luck would have it, the bolt of the musket was released in this struggle and the musket went off, the bullet going through the master's cassock [a master had intervened in the fight] which was caught between the barrel of the musket and the student's belly, passing between the skin and the flesh of the belly without entering a vital organ, and finally striking the thighbone.'
These school mutinies did not always turn into armed riots: they sometimes took the form of strikes and picketing. In 1633 the court, 'informed that the logic students of the college of this city of Dijon have withdrawn without the permission of the rectors and masters, and are forcibly and violently preventing their companions from entering the aforementioned college', ordered them to return to school and instructed the mayor to help the masters to punish the rebels.7 In 1672, at Orleans, a twenty-year-old rhetorician stirred up his classmates against their master. The pupils of the Protestant academies were no more law-abiding:" in 1649, at Die, the logicians barricaded themselves inside the college, prevented the masters and the pupils of the other classes from entering, fired pistol-shots, fouled the rostra in the first and third classrooms, threw the benches in the second classroom out of the window, tore up the books, and finally climbed out of the windows of the fourth classroom, scandalizing the public. Sometimes indeed they would attack passers-by with their swords, when they did not make do with the traditional fireworks. In France the great school mutinies would stop at the end of the seventeenth century. One has the impression that a disciplinary system already over a century old succeeded then, but only then, in curbing the turbulence of youth. The eighteenth century was a period of calm; there would be some demonstrations in the lycees in the first half of the nineteenth century, but for political reasons: the boys were demonstrating for or against Poland, against the Jesuits, and so on. This was a very different state of mind, akin to that of modern times. Henceforth, apart from the traditional festivities, only politics would produce disorders which generally remained within the limits of the student rag.
In England, on the other hand, the schools did not enjoy this period of remission in the eighteenth century. Mutinies, far from decreasing in number and finally disappearing, became increasingly frequent and violent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There was indiscipline and rebellion everywhere. At Winchester, in the late eighteenth century, the boys occupied the school for two days and hoisted the red flag. In 1818 two companies of troops with fixed bayonets had to be called in to suppress a rising of the pupils. At Rugby, the pupils set fire to their books and desks and withdrew to an island which had to be taken by assault by the army. There were similar incidents at Eton. In 1768 the praeposters or monitors - the good pupils - of the sixth form seceded and left the school. In 1783 there was a revolt against the headmaster, with rooms pillaged and windows broken. In 1818 the school authorities brought forward the time when the gate was locked, to prevent the boys from going hunting: the latter, after pelting their master with rotten eggs, knocked down part of the wall, and the troublemakers had to be taken by force. Mutiny had become one of the typical and picturesque aspects of the idea contemporaries had of school life. King George III, meeting some Eton boys at Windsor, and joking with them about the two main features of their life, floggings and mutinies, asked: 'Have you had any mutinies lately, eh, eh!'
In England, the last important mutiny occurred at Marlborough as late as 1851. At Eton there was none after 1832, when the last one ended with the flogging of eighty boys: order was then restored.
In France, during the first half of the seventeenth century, one of the forms that violence took was the duel. The preceptors sometimes set their charges an example in this respect. Thus the future Markchal de Bassompierre, who in 1591 entered the third class at the college of Freiburg-im-Breisgau together with his brother, writes in his memoirs: 'We spent only five months there because Grouet, our preceptor, killed La Motte, who used to teach us dancing.' The annals of Air College for 1634 record: 'Some of our pupils having been so unruly as to fight and quarrel, even challenging one another to duels, it was decided to put a stop to this, especially as after school they would sometimes start fighting in front of the college, scandalizing the neighbours, the passers-by and the other pupils.' These brawls after school must have been frequent occurrences: Pere de Dainville quotes 'quarrels outside and fights with stones and other weapons which take place [at Avignon] between the children who go to the Jesuit schools in that town and those who go to the master-scribes and other masters and pedagogues: fights which distract them from their studies and in which they risk being wounded unto death'.
In 1572, in the same town, in the course of a brawl between schoolboys from Saint-Nicolas and some workmen, a schoolboy was apparently killed with a stone. In 1513, on Corpus Christi Day, the schoolboys of Saint-Nicolas had laid claim to their place in the procession with the aid of sticks and swords. The captain, mad with anger, tried to arrest them and pursued them right into the chapel where they had taken refuge. One of them, to strengthen a right of sanctuary in which he had no great confidence, had taken the chalice and held it in his hand. The captain cuffed him but did not dare to snatch the chalice from him.
'Then', state the Aix annals, 'there was a great fight between the Philosophy class and the Humanities class, and the Rector informed President du Chaine -who had a few of the boys imprisoned before handing them over to the college corrector. In 1646: ' One of our pupils [at Air], a nobleman from Sisteron and a metaphysician, was killed in a duel without having the opportunity to show any sign of contrition. There were four of them who fought, two of whom were not students. It was at nine o'clock in the morning, and they had spent the night together in the Carthusians' barn, in order to be able to fight more conveniently afterwards. A few months before, another pupil in the third class had been killed in the same way by a surgeon and had died just as un-Christian a death.' A pupil in the third class, not one of the older boys. Louis Legendre, born in 1655, tells us in his memoirs that one of his brothers died 'from a sword-thrust when he tried to separate two students who were fighting'." These duels were common occurrences. At Air the rector, alarmed at their frequency, 'went to the classrooms of the philosophy, rhetoric, humanities and third classes, after summoning there a great many of the little boys of the fourth and fifth [whose tender years afforded them no protection against this contagion of violence], and there he pointed out to them the evil in dueling and forbade them to indulge in dueling under pain of severe penalties'.
In France these private battles, very common at the time of the League and the Fronde, grew less frequent and practically disappeared during the second half of the seventeenth century, as did the collective battles and the mutinies: one has the impression that the turbulent, unruly population of the schools had finally been tamed. But in England the school records of the eighteenth century still mention cases of violence half-way between ragging and dueling: a pupil called Cottel was expelled laesionem enormem Philippo Lys crudeliter et saepessime - in other words for 'bullying'. These fights changed in the early nineteenth century into wrestling or boxing matches, respected by the masters, before the reform of the public schools: Thomas Hughes shows us some of these in Tom Brown's Schooldays.
During the same period, violence was also prevalent among adults: Richelieu too banned dueling, which was decimating his nobility. Villages and trade guilds fought each other like gangs of boys after school. The spirit of violence spread to the whole of society, to ah its ranks, noble and villein alike, and to all its ages, children, youths or adults. The only ones to escape its influence were the little group of churchmen, statesmen and moralists who, apart from the great currents of contemporary manners, were painstakingly building the social structure of the world to come.
This spirit of violence went with considerable license with regard to wine and women. In the Middle Ages, schoolboys drank heavily, and college statutes recognized the mug of wine as a forfeit for minor offences and accepted it as a symbol of initiation and brotherhood. They codified a custom, trying to regulate it in order to avoid its abuse, since they did not dare to suppress it. In the sixteenth century, drinking was officially prohibited in school, at least in France and Geneva: according to Cordier, if pupils drank hard in their rooms, it was 'secretly', and if the culprits were caught they knew what to expect. It is interesting to note the progress made by the authorities: first they regulated drinking, then they flatly prohibited it. But a deeply rooted habit could not be changed immediately for all that; the boys simply did their drinking out of school, in the neighbouring taverns. In Schottenius's dialogues, set in Cologne in 1524-5, we have a schoolboy saying to another: 'Come with me; I know where the drinking students hide. 'I suppose you often go with them,' says his companion. 'Now and then,' comes tile reply, 'when I have some money.' At Pont-a-Mousson, a drunken rhetorician killed one of his schoolmates. In the records of the Oratorian college at Troyes, at the beginning of the eighteenth century: vine dediti catlinonam olent, or again, bibere doctiorcs quam studere. If French students became more sober in the eighteenth century, thanks to a more efficient disciplinary system, their English counterparts, at least in the university colleges, were still upholding the medieval traditions of Pantagruehan tippling ill the early nineteenth century. Ruskin, at his first supper-party at Christ Church, held his own only by pouring the punch down his waistcoat, after which he helped to carry four of his companions headfirst back to their rooms.
In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries public opinion regarded the student as a libertine and the terror of fathers and husbands, a sort of adventurer after the fashion of Villon, with all the risks that that implied: 'A hundred scholars', Montaigne tells us, 'have caught the pox before getting to their Aristotle lesson.' And boys read Aristotle young! In Larivey's comedy, Les Ecoliers, the lodging-house keeper or (host', Nicolas, for all that he knows his lodgers only too well, declares with a hint of envy: 'As for me, if I were a woman, I would rather go with a student than with the most splendid courtiers in France. A student, ah! he's the pearl of mankind. What sweet words, what gracious manners, what high spirits!' Anyone would think he was referring to the students of Murger's Vie de Boheme or Flaubert's Education sentimentale; but the lodgers of Nicolas were ordinary schoolboys, big schoolboys perhaps, but nothing in their everyday life entirely distinguished them from the smaller boys. In 1460 at Dijon a labourer's son, who was studying at the Dijon school and was aged about seventeen, was lodged in the house of a vineyard owner who provided him with nothing but bed and soup (the boy supplemented this hot soup with his own personal provisions). He did not waste time, and his association with his host's 'chambermaid', a girl of fourteen who helped him to force the lock of the nearest hotel, obviously went deeper than mere friendship. Here, one hundred and fifty years later, is the complaint of another of Larivey's characters, the father of an inconveniently beautiful daughter: 'It seems to me that Paris has been put in such a plight by these lberaines and fairground hunters [the students] that chickens have to be kept cooped up, and even then they are none too safe.) And yet the time was past when the authorities waited for the third repetition of the offence before expelling the scholar who had introduced a woman into his college or pedagogica, according to certain statutes noted by Rashdall. The 1379 statutes of Narbonne College forbade the pupils to invite any woman, however respectable, to lunch or dinner in the school, under pain of a fine of five sous. Was that expensive!
In their colleges the Jesuits demanded the strictest morality: Pere Lainez exhorted his pupils to 'abstain from the pleasures of the Aesh'. Francion does not attempt to disguise the fact that he had to wait until he left school before losing his innocence with an ugly old woman he had met at an inn. Between their classes and their pedagogicas or authorized lodgings, Pupils had few opportunities to meet women: this was the beginning of the sexual claustration which would henceforth characterize college life and which the statutes of the medieval foundations had never been able to impose completely. It was understood in the seventeenth century that women were received only in the chapel, and provision was made for a room reserved for this kind of visitor who could not go any further: the parlour. At the College de Bourgogne, according to the disciplinary regulations of 1680, 'women shall not enter the college rooms, except for the mothers of gentlemen who may ask to see them. Conversation may be had with other women, when absolutely necessary, in the chapel, pending the installation of a room for this purpose.'
Henceforth woman was the intruder, ridiculed by a masculine community which desired her and excluded her at the same time. This scene, described by Sorel, has something modern about it, and one might imagine oneself in the courtyard of a twentieth-century boys' school into which a girl had wandered by mistake: 'Our schoolmates hissed and whistled at the girls and women they saw entering the courtyard of our college.' But this strict morality encountered a resistance to which the college records bear witness, as if it were in advance of its time. At Troyes, as early as the end of the first half of the seventeenth century, we find these observations: Sunt suspectis aut pravissimis moribus -pravitatem illius si noveris, vis poteris lacrirnos continere - faex scholae-vitiorum omnium colluvies et sentina. And at Caen in 1677: Ejectus ob impudentia (admittedly at the age of eighteen). Impudentia et arrogantiafamosus. This is why, in the seventeenth century, towns with big colleges were subject to special police supervision. Thus at La Fleche in 1625 prostitution was more strictly controlled than it was elsewhere: 'Neither women nor girls of evil and scandalous reputation' could approach - in principle at least - within seven miles of the town. Tavern-keepers, gambling-den proprietors and hotel-keepers were forbidden to put students up or to take them in as lodgers: the tavern was still a place of ill repute, frequented by women of easy virtue, soldiers, vagabonds, sharpers - and students too, despite all prohibitions. In 1602 Crispin de Pas published a series of engravings depicting school life. Here we see not only the departure for school, scenes inside the college, the library, various sports such as ballgames, or tennis, the social graces represented by a dancing lesson, but a merry gathering in a place which looks like a cross between a tavern and a brothel, where men and youths are drinking with women to the sound of music. It seems possible that the regulations of the civil authorities at La Fleche were not very strictly observed.
Fiinally these college towns had a curfew: at nine o'clock at night all the inhabitants had to lock their doors. Similarly at Tournon, in the same period (1612), it was forbidden to go out after eight o'clock. In this way it was hoped to prevent schoolboys who lodged in the town from sleeping out. These measures were no longer necessary at Mauriac in the late eighteenth century, when Marmontel went to school there. School life had become much quieter, already closer to that of French schoolboys in the nineteenth century, clearly separated by a stricter discipline from the students who enjoyed the same complete freedom as adults. In England, on the contrary, the old freedom of morals continued in the public schools throughout the eighteenth century until the reforms of the years 1830-50. In England in 1760 it was possible to write, as Montaigne did in France two centuries earlier, that a public-schoolboy 'had practiced more vices by the age of sixteen than anyone else would have heard of by sixty'.
Schoolboys, as we have already said, lived more often than not on food brought to the local market every week by relatives or neighbours. But they also lived by begging. In sixteenth-century Germany there is abundant evidence on this point. The little band of students, greenhorns and old hands, to which Thomas Platter belonged, and which led a vagabond life from one town to the next, lived either by thieving and scrounging on the roads and in the country, or by the begging of the greenhorns who went singing in the streets and taverns: When I went into a tavern, people enjoyed hearing me talk the Valais dialect, and gladly gave me something. At Neuburg 'those of us greenhorns who could sing went singing round the town; for my part I did some begging. 'In the evening I often made five or six journeys to bring our old hands who stayed in school my takings for the day.' 'Sometimes, in the summer, we would go and beg for some beer in the beer-houses after supper.' Thomas, it should be added, was a very skilful beggar.
Begging by children was tolerated, even approved by public opinion. The bands of scholars exploited this state of mind to the full, training the youngest boys for begging, while the oldest specialized in stealing and scrounging. There were eight companions, with Thomas Platter, on the Dresden Road: they split up into several groups, one for hunting geese, another for picking swedes and onions in the fields and gardens. 'As for the youngest of us, we were sent to Neumark, the nearest town, to beg for bread and salt.) They had no luck that day, for the inhabitants fired at them over the town walls as soon as they lit their camp-fires. Schoolboys whose voices were beginning to break no longer had any success. At about the age of nineteen, Thomas Platter tried to earn his living by singing in the streets of Zurich: 'People pushed me aside: I had the deep voice of an old hand.'
The practice of begging in childhood was so generally accepted, at least in sixteenth-century Germany, that Mosellanus describes it in his pedology. This is a collection of conversations between Leipzig schoolboys. Begging occupies an honourable place in their lives. 'As soon as Mass is over,' says Laurent, 'I shall run so fast to the rich people's door that I shall be, if not among the first, at least among the second and third to be given alms.' 'You will be hard put to it to beat me,' says his friend.
'We shall see.' These alms, an indispensable part of the scholar's income, also had a traditional character and were associated with customs dating back to ancient times. I quote Mosellanus once more: 'Tomorrow is St Martin's Day.' 'Well, what of it?' 'We scholars reap a rich harvest that day. First of all, people give us more to eat than usual, and then it is customary for tile poor to go from door to door to be given alms. I hope to collect enough to get me through the winter without too much hardship.' And again: 'Who's coming into the country with me! We'll go begging for eggs in accordance with the old custom.' His friend refuses, partly out of shame and partly because he does not think the game is worth the candle: 'Is there anything more degrading than hanging around farms for the sake of nine or ten eggs !' 'But how am I to appease my hunger!' 'Here in town you can at least husband your time.'
Another German dialogue of the same period as Schottenius's describes the same customs at Cologne. 'What are you doing with that stick!' 'Tomorrow we are going to go begging from door to door. ''Begging for what!' 'A little piece of pork or a little loaf of rye bread.' 'Where does that custom come from?' 'I remember seeing a statue of St Blaise in church, holding a pig's head stuck on the end of a stick.' The historian of these dialogues, Massebiau, adds that in his day, in 1878, St Blaise was the patron saint of children and cattle in Germany. On his feast day, the priest used to bless bread and salt. Even in our own time, children in the United States go from door to door one October day, asking for little presents and sweets: a relic of customs which once corresponded to the alimentary needs of children living at some distance from their homes. One may incidentally wonder if begging by children was not tolerated longer in Germany than anywhere else. In 1877 the young Wagner was in the second class at the Kreuzschule in Dresden: he was fourteen years old. He wanted to go to see his mother in Dresden; as he had no money, he set off on foot, asking travellers he met on the way for alms. Yet he cannot have looked like a wretched little beggar-boy. In later times it is unlikely that he would have been allowed to get very far. Nowadays he would be a hitch-hiker.
In England the traditions of the public schools preserve the memory of these begging customs. At Eton, on the day of the reception and initiation of the new boys or 'freshmen', the pupils used to go out in groups along the neighbouring roads: they would stop the passers-by and force them to give them some money in return for a little salt – the salt used to sprinkle over the freshmen. The English historian of Eton sees here something half-way between robbery and mendacity.
In France, on the other hand, even in the sixteenth-century texts, there is no mention of begging at all. We have already drawn attention to the silence of French documents on the subject of student japes: mendacity would seem to have been linked with japes and rags in student manners. The disciplinary system of the colleges and pedagogicas in France must have limited, if not suppressed, vagabond customs which were more deeply rooted in other countries. Yet the population of tile Paris schools was still extremely free and easy in the sixteenth century. The humanist Buchanan describes a classroom in the early sixteenth century in these terms: 'While the master shouts himself hoarse, these lazy children sit noting and thinking of their pleasures. One boy who is absent has paid one of his companions to answer in his place. Another has lost his breeches, while yet another is looking at his foot which is poking through a hole in his shoe.' The educational reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries punished pupils who neglected their appearance: they must have been more successful than the founders of colleges in the late Middle Ages, who required their scholars to dress in a way which was no longer fashionable: no shoes with pointed toes, no short, tight-fitting clothes.
Respect in the colleges and even in the pensions or pedagogicas for a stricter system of discipline brought about the disappearance of the bohemian martinet. Provided with a better environment, the schoolboy behaved better. However, it was only with the greatest difficulty that the school authorities got rid of certain habits, the inveterate legacy of an easygoing past: thus pupils who were tired of a certain course, or more often who wanted to escape a punishment, used to change masters without obtaining the permission of either their family or the university. For a long time this was regarded as a right they possessed. Then it was seen as a sign of indiscipline on the part of the pupils, an invitation to an unpleasant rivalry between the masters, and from then on war was waged on this floating population. The 1598 reformation of the University of Paris would seem to have got the better of it. But it would take a long time before greater regularity in school attendance could be achieved. Boys found it an easy matter to play truant from Mathurin Cordier's school, as is shown by this fragment of dialogue between two friends, one of whom is absconding: 'When are you coming back to school!' 'I don't know.' 'Why aren't you telling your father!' 'Do you think I care about him!' The records for the seventeenth century still reveal a goodly number of premature departures without permission. At Caen in 1677, fifty-one pupils in the humanities class left school in the middle of the year, without waiting for it to end; some because they refused to be punished (ejectus medio anno quod debitas paenas non subire voluerit), others because their families had sent for them, being unable to support them any more; others simply on an impulse: abiit, seu effugit ne paenas absentiae daret, for punishments were inflicted for these unauthorized absences, which must have been frequent. Saepe obfuit, pigerrimus et rnalus. Sine causa 15 ante finem diebrrs agens a domi - 15 ante finem diebus obfuit sine causa cum esset in urbe. Obiit proprio motu (at the age of fifteen).
By the eighteenth century the schoolboy had been more or less tamed, despite certain habits of independence which lasted as long as the dayschool system or the custom of living in lodgings, and which disappeared only 111 the nineteenth century with the spread of the boarding-school system or the extension of the child's stay at home.
The modern reader will have been surprised by the unseemliness of these manners: they strike us as incompatible with our ideas of childhood and early adolescence, and we barely tolerate them in adults in the lower classes, as the sign of a mental age the wrong side of maturity. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people situated schoolboys in the same picaresque world as soldiers, valets and beggars. Worthy citizens with landed property mistrusted all equally. A canon of Dijon, speaking of the gilded youth of the town (which included the son of the President of the High Court) and of its departure in 1592 to go to the Universities of the Law at Toulouse', called it vermin: 'We are well rid of that vermin' -as if he were speaking of a gang of thugs. One of the characters in Larivey's comedy likens certain schoolboys to the outsiders who live on the fringe of civilized society: 'I do not regard them as schoolboys but as free men, living without law and without appetite' – and 'free men' meant something like tramps or truants. The very word truant, which in modern French slang denotes an adult, comes from the scholastic Latin trutanus ('vagabond'), a word applied chiefly to vagabond scholars, the plague of school society in the past. It still retains this meaning in English, where the word 'truant' normally refers to a child who stays away from school. Here we can see links whose importance we can only guess at, between scholastic terminology and popular slang. It needed the pressure of the pedagogues to separate the schoolboy from the bohemian adult, both of whom were the heirs of a time when elegance of speech and dress was limited not even to the cleric but to the courtly adult. A new moral concept was to distinguish the child, or at least the schoolboy, and set him apart: the concept of the well-bred child. It scarcely existed in the sixteenth century; it was formed in the seventeenth century. We know that it was the product of the reforming opinions of an elite of thinkers and moralists who occupied high positions in Church or State. The well-bred child would be preserved from the roughness and immorality which would become the special characteristics of the lower classes. In France this well-bred child would be the little bourgeois. In England he would be the gentleman, a social type unknown before the nineteenth century, and which a threatened aristocracy would create, thanks to the public schools, to defend itself against the progress of democracy. The old medieval unruliness was abandoned first of ah by children, last of all by the lower classes: today it remains the mark of the hooligan, of the last heir of the old vagabonds, beggars and outlaws.
CONCLUSION
SCHOOL AND THE DURATION OF CHILDHOOD>
We have studied the beginnings and development of two views of childhood. According to the first, which was widely held, children were creatures to be 'coddled' and childhood was held to last hardly beyond infancy; the second, which expressed the realization of the innocence and the weakness of childhood, and consequently of the duty of adults to safeguard the former and strengthen the latter, was confined for a long time to a small minority of lawyers, priests and moralists. But for their influence, the child would have remained simply the poupart or bambino, the sweet, funny little creature with whom people played affectionately but with liberty, if not indeed with license, and without any thought of morality or education. Once he had passed the age of five or seven, the child was immediately absorbed into the world of adults: this concept of a brief childhood lasted for a long time in the lower classes. The moralists and pedagogues of the seventeenth century, heirs of a tradition going back to Gerson, to the fifteenth-century reformers of the University of Paris, to the founders of colleges in the late Middle Ages, succeeded in imposing their considered concept of a long childhood thanks to the success of the educational institutions and practices which they guided and supervised. We find the same men, obsessed with educational questions, at the origins of both the modern concept of childhood and the modern concept of schooling.
Childhood was extended beyond the years when the little man still walked on a 'leading-string' or spoke his 'jargon, when an intermediary stage, hitherto rare and henceforth more and more common, was introduced between the period of the robe with a collar and the period of the recognized adult: the stage of the school, of the college. The age groups in our societies are organized around institutions; thus adolescence, never clearly defined under the ancien regime, was distinguished in the nineteenth century and indeed already in the late eighteenth century by conscription and later by military service. The schoolboy or scholar or student- the terms were used interchangeably until the nineteenth century - of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was to a long childhood what the conscript of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to adolescence.
However, this demographic function of the school was not immediately recognized as a necessity. On the contrary, for a long time the school remained indifferent to the separation and distinction of the ages, became it did not regard the education of children as its essential aim. Nothing predisposed the medieval Latin school for this function of moral and social education. The medieval school was not intended for children: it was a sort of technical school for the instruction of clerics, young or old' as Michault's Doctrinal put it. Thus it welcomed equally and indifferently children, youths, adults, the precocious and the backward, at the foot of the magisterial rostrum.
Until the eighteenth century at least, a great deal of this mentality remained in school life and manners. We have seen how tardy was the division into separate and regular classes, and how the various ages remained mixed up within each class, with children between ten and thirteen sitting next to adolescents between fifteen and twenty. In common parlance, to say that someone was of school age did not necessarily mean that that person was a child, for school age could also be taken to mean the limit beyond which a pupil had small hope of success. That is how we must interpret the advice given by Theresa Panza to her husband Sancho as he sets off on an expedition with Don Quixote: 'Do not forget me or your children. Remember that our Sanchico is already fifteen and that it is time for him to go to school if it is agreed that his uncle the priest is going to make a churchman of him. 'l People went to school when they could, very early or very late. This way of looking at things continued throughout the seventeenth century, in spite of contrary influences. Sufficient traces of it would remain in the eighteenth century for the oldest pedagogues, after the Revolution, to remember it and to recall, in order to condemn it, the practice under the ancien regime of keeping old pupils on at school. It would not disappear for good until the nineteenth century.
This indifference shown by the school to the education of children was not characteristic simply of oId-fashioned conservatives. It is important to note that the humanists of the Renaissance shared it with their enemies, the traditional schoolmen. Like the pedagogues of the Middle Ages, they confused education with culture, spreading education over the whole span of human life, without giving a special Value to childhood or youth. As a result they exerted only a slight influence on the structure of the school, and their role has been grossly exaggerated by literary historians. The real innovators were the scholastic reformers of the fifteenth century, Cardinal d'Estouteville, Gerson, the organizers of the colleges and pedagogicas, and finally and above all the Jesuits, the Oratorians and the Jansenists in the seventeenth century. With them we see the appearance of an awareness of the special nature of childhood, knowledge of child psychology, and the desire to devise a method suited to that psychology.
The college under the ancien regime thus retained characteristics of its ancestor, the Latin cathedral school, for a very long time; many years passed before it became an institution specially intended for children.
***************
Not everybody, by any means, went to a college or even to a little school. Among those who never went to a college, or who spent only one or two years there, the old habits of precocity remained as in the Middle Ages. The concept of a very short childhood held good. In the seventeenth century, schooling did not necessarily go with good birth. Many young nobles ignored the college, avoided the academy, and went straight into active service in the army. In her famous account of Turenne's death in 1675 Mme de Sevigne mentions the presence beside the Marechal of his fourteen-year-old nephew. At the end of Louis XIV's reign there were fourteen-year-old lieutenants in the army. Chevert joined the army at the age of eleven.
This precocity was also to be found in the ranks. Mme de Sevigne, who, as E. G. Leonard points out, was decidedly interested in military matters, tells this anecdote: 'Despreaux has been with Gourville to see M. le Prince. M. le Prince sent him to look at his army. "Well, what do you think of it!" asked M. le Prince. "Your Royal Highness," said Despreaux, "I think it will be very good when it reaches its majority. Because the oldest soldier in it isn't eighteen. " '
Common to both officers and men in the seventeenth century, this precocity would continue for a long time in the rank and file; it disappeared in the eighteenth century among the officers, who entered the army only after a more or less complete schooling, sometimes prolonged by training in special military schools.
If schooling in the seventeenth century was not yet the monopoly of one class, it remained the monopoly of one sex. Women were excluded. The result was that in their lives the habits of precocity and a brief childhood remained unchanged from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. 'Since the age of twelve, thanks to God whose life is eternal, I have taken a husband five times at the church porch.' Thus one of Chaucer's women in the fourteenth century. But at the end of the sixteenth century we find Catherine Marion marrying Antoine Amauld at the age of thirteen. And she was sufficiently mistress of the house to give 'a slap to her first chambermaid, a girl of twenty, for not resisting a caress which someone gave her'. The person who wrote these lines, Catherine Lemaitre, had herself been married at the age of fourteen. There was talk of marrying off her other sister, Anne, at the age of twelve, and only the little girl's religious vocation put a stop to this project. The suitor was in no hurry and was fond of the family for, so Catherine Lemaitre tells us, 'not only did he delay marrying until she [Anne] had made her profession, but he even put off his marriage Until he had seen the entry into religion of the youngest of the family, the little girl who, when his marriage to my sister Anne was being discussed, was a child of six'. At the most an engagement of four to six years: Moreover, by the age of ten, girls were already little women: a precocity due in part to an upbringing which taught girls to behave very early in life like grown-ups. 'At the age of ten, that little girl's mind was so developed that she ran the whole house for Mme Amauld, who deliberately made her do this to train her in the work of a wife and mother, since that was to be her station in life.'
Apart from this domestic apprenticeship, girls were given virtually no education. In families where the boys went to college, they learned nothing. Fenelon complains of this ignorance as a general phenomenon. He admits that considerable trouble is taken over boys: 'The greatest experts have taken pains to lay down rules in this respect. How many masters and colleges there are! How much money is spent on the printing of books, on scientific research, on methods of teaching foreign languages, on choosing professors... and this shows the high opinion people have of the education of boys.' But the girls! 'It is considered perfectly permissible to abandon girls willy-nilly to the guidance of ignorant or indiscreet mothers.'" The result was that women could scarcely read and write: 'Teach a girl to read and write correctly. It is shameful but common to see women of ,it and manners unable to pronounce what they read: either they hesitate or they read in a sing-song voice... They are even more at fault in their spelling, and in shaping and joining letters of the alphabet when writing.' They were virtually illiterate. People got into the habit of entrusting girls to convents which were not intended for education, and where they performed pious exercises and were given exclusively religious instruction.
At the end of the century Mme de Maintenon's Saint-Cyr would provide a model institution of a modern type for girls, who entered it between the ages of seven and twelve and left when they were about twenty." Complaints about the little co-educational schools and the teaching of the Ursulines indicate a general tendency in favour of feminine education, but it would operate with a time-lag of about two centuries.
From the fifteenth century on, and especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite the persistence of the medieval attitude of indifference to age, the college tended to devote itself essentially to the education of youth, drawing its inspiration from the psychological principles which were found, and which we recognize today, in Cordier, in the Jesuits' ratio, and in the abundant pedagogical literature of Port-Royal. The need for discipline was recognized: a steady, organic discipline, very different from the violence of an authority regarded with scant respect. The lawyers knew that the unruly society under their jurisdiction called for a strong hand, but school discipline was torn of a very different spirit and tradition. It originated in ecclesiastical or religious discipline; it was not so much an instrument of coercion as an instrument of moral and spiritual improvement, and it was adopted not only for its efficiency, because it was the necessary condition of work in common, but also because of its intrinsic moral and ascetic value. The pedagogues would adapt it to a system of supervising children which, at least in theory, was constantly in operation, night and day alike.
The essential difference between the medieval school and the modern college lies inn the introduction of discipline. Discipline was gradually extended from the colleges to the private pensions where the schoolboys lodged, and sometimes to the town itself, though generally without any success in practice. The masters tended to subject the schoolboy to an ever stricter control in which parents, from the end of the seventeenth century on, increasingly came to see the best conditions for a good education. The authorities were led to increase the hitherto restricted numbers of boarders, and the ideal institution of the nineteenth century would be a boarding-school, whether lycee, little seminary, religious college or ecole normale. In spite of the survival of certain archaic features, discipline would give the college under the ancien regime a modern character foreshadowing the present-day secondary school. This discipline not only took the form of better supervision inside school, but it tended to force parents to respect the complete school cycle. Schooling would admittedly become a matter for children and youths- that is to say it would no longer encroach as in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance on adult life - but it would be comparatively long (though not as long as in the Middle Ages). People would no longer be content with spending a year or two at school as was often still the practice in the early seventeenth century, both for impoverished or hurried nobles and for humble folk anxious to give their children a smattering of Latin. The school cycle at the end of the eighteenth century was fairly similar to that in the nineteenth century: four or five years at least. The child would be subjected for the duration of his schooling to an increasingly strict and effective discipline, and this discipline separated the child who suffered it from the liberty enjoyed by the adult. Thus childhood was extended by almost the entire duration of the school cycle.
On the one hand there was the school population, on the other there were those who, in accordance with immemorial custom, went straight into adult life as soon as they could walk and talk. This division did not correspond to social conditions. True, the nucleus of the school population consisted of future burgesses, lawyers and churchmen. But, as we have seen, there were nobles who never went to school, and artisans and peasants who did. Girls of good family were no Letter educated than girls of the lower classes, and they could be worse educated, for girls of the people sometimes learnt to (write to perfection as a trade. The school population, at a time when the college gave almost all the types of instruction which we nowadays label primary, secondary and higher, did not correspond nearly as closely as it does today to the contour of the social classes. The movement of educational apostleship in the late seventeenth century, which resulted in the foundation of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, was not confined to the poor. The poor schools were invaded by children of the lower middle class, as the lower classes in the colleges were by little artisans and peasants.
Things could have developed in such a way that the French educational system would have been based on a single school: after all, until the eighteenth century, the ancien regime knew only one school. School attendance would have extended socially and geographically; the length of the school cycle, on the other hand, would have varied according to the vocation; only lawyers and churchmen would have completed the full course, including two or three years of philosophy corresponding to the modern university course; the rest, artisans or soldiers, would have stopped at an earlier stage. That was in fact the situation about the middle of the seventeenth century: the colleges and Latin schools spread a circular network around a big college providing a full course of tuition, and the density of this network diminished towards the periphery. It consisted of a host of schools which contained only the lower classes of the school cycle. This may seem surprising when one considers the rigidity and diversity of the social hierarchy under the ancien regime: educational practice differed less according to rank than according to function. Consequently the basic attitudes, like many features of everyday life, did not differ much more.
This state of affairs did not last, and after the eighteenth century the single school was replaced by a dual educational system in which each branch corresponds not to an age group, but to a social class: the lycee or the college for the middle class (secondary education) and the school for the lower class primary education). Secondary education is a long business. Primary education remained a short affair for a very long time, and in both France and England it needed the social revolutions which followed the two World Wars to prolong it. Perhaps one of the reasons for this social specialization is in fact to be found in the technical requirements of a long education, once it was firmly established as part of modern life; it was no longer possible to tolerate the coexistence of pupils who were not determined right from the start to go on to the very end, to accept all the rules of the game - for the rules of an enclosed community, whether it is a school or a religious body, demand the same total abandonment as gambling. Once the long cycle had been established, there was no longer any room for those who, on account of their station in life, their parents' profession, or their financial circumstances, could neither follow it through, nor intend to follow it through, to the end.
But there was another cause of this evolution: the action of those men of authority, reason and learning, whom we have already found at the origin of all the great changes in manners between the Middle Ages and modern times. It was they, as we have pointed out, who realized the special nature of childhood, and the moral and social importance of the systematic education of children in special institutions devised for that purpose. Very soon some of them were disturbed at the extent of their success - a sociological success of which they were not always aware. Richelieu, who wanted to found a model academy in the utopian city he intended to build at Richelieu, and Colbert after him, expressed fears of an overabundance of intellectuals and a shortage of manual labour: an old theme which generations of middle-class conservatives have handed down to our own day. In the seventeenth century, these precursors, despite their eminent reputations, talked to deaf ears: they could do nothing to halt the progress of the colleges, or their spread into the country. But in the eighteenth century their prejudice was adopted by those 'enlightened' people who in many respects appear as their successors; these men of the Enlightenment, thanks to their numbers and their connections, could influence public opinion to an extent which no group of jurists, clerics or intellectuals could have dreamt of before. Some of them, such as Condorcet, remained faithful to the idea of universal education open to all. But most of them proposed - as soon as the Jesuits had been expelled – to confine to a single social class the privilege of the long classical education, and to condemn the lower classes to an inferior, exclusively practical, type of instruction.
We know too that the concept of childhood found its most modern expression in these same circles of enlightened bourgeois who admired Greuze and read Emile and Pamela. But the old ways of life have survived almost until the present day in the lower classes, which have not been subjected for so long a period to the influence of the school. We may even ask ourselves whether, in this respect, there was not a retrogression during the first half of the nineteenth century, under the influence of the demand for child labour in the textile industry. Child labour retained this characteristic of medieval society: the precocity of the entry into adult life. The whole complexion of life was changed by the differences in the educational treatment of the middle-class and the lower-class child. There is accordingly a remarkable synchronism between the modern age group and the social group: both originated at the same time, in the late eighteenth century, and in the same milieu - the middle class.
| My Philosophy Page | Webster U. Philosophy Department |
| Philosophy for Children | Critical Thinking | Current Semester | Education | Existentialism |
| Miscellaneous Topics | Moral Philosophy | Peace Issues | Voluntary Economic Simplicity | |
Bob Corbett corbetre@webster.edu