Buy ebook An age to work: working-class childhood in third republic paris miranda sachs cheap price
Sachs
Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://ebookmass.com/product/an-age-to-work-working-class-childhood-in-third-repu blic-paris-miranda-sachs/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant download maybe you interests ...
What Work Is (Working Class in American History) 1st Edition Bruno
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sachs, Miranda, author.
Title: An age to work : working-class childhood in third republic Paris / Miranda Sachs. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2022028807 (print) | LCCN 2022028808 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197638453 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197638460 | ISBN 9780197638484 | ISBN 9780197638477 (epub)
Classifcation: LCC HD6250 .F82 S33 2022 (print) | LCC HD6250 .F82 (ebook) | DDC 331.3/1094409034—dc23/eng/20220629 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028807 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028808
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197638453.001.0001
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
In memory of my grandparents, Marilyn and Morris Sachs
1.
2. “An Apprenticeship for Life”: Training the Republican Worker
3. Creating the Juvenile Delinquent
4. “An Insurmountable Distaste for Work”: Juvenile Delinquents in the
5. Blurred Spaces: Working-Class
6.
7.
Acknowledgments
My favorite part of most academic books is the acknowledgments section. My own acknowledgments section is bittersweet. In the decade since I began graduate school, the humanities have been in free fall. My generation of humanists has absorbed the cost. Although I am beginning a tenure-track position, I wrote this book while working as a contingent faculty member at three diferent institutions. Many of my peers, including many of the people I thank below, have had to leave academia. Generations of future students are poorer for it.
I have had the pleasure of studying and working alongside many thoughtful, generous scholars. John Merriman boisterously welcomed me to Yale and remained an enthusiastic supporter of my work for over a decade. It is strange to write about John in the past tense, as he was such a vibrant person. I so regret that I cannot share this fnal version of the book with him, as he taught me much about combing through the archives to fnd les parisiens des quartiers populaires. Jay Winter has posed many key questions that have helped me clarify my work and has provided numerous dinners at his home in Paris. Laura Lee Downs helped me appreciate the complexities of the history of childhood. She has been a generous mentor since my frst semester of graduate school. To Phil Nord, I remain indebted for helping me begin this journey.
At Oxford University Press, I would like to thank Nancy Tof. She saw the potential in my book manuscript and has guided me through the publishing process. Zara Cannon-Mohammed has worked hard to prepare my manuscript for publication. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. I am grateful to Adrienne Petty for connecting me to Nancy.
At each of the three departments where I have taught, my colleagues have provided invaluable insights into my work and to navigating the publishing process. My colleagues at William and Mary helped me to shape my initial argument and provided the funding that enabled me to add a chapter on the interwar period. My colleagues at Denison read multiple chapters and helped me conceive of the project as a book. As I complete this manuscript, my
colleagues at Texas State have continued to pose important questions and to guide me through the publishing process. I would like to thank the Swinney Faculty Writing Group for reading and commenting on one of my chapters.
Many historians have taken time to read sections of this book. I would like to thank Bruno Cabanes, Sara Damiano, Colin Heywood, Sarah Horwitz, Charlotte Kiechel, Ken Margerison, Susan Whitney, and Shao-yun Yang for agreeing to read portions of the manuscript. I would also like to acknowledge Nimisha Barton, Sarah Curtis, Quentin Deluermoz, Paula Fass, Sarah Fishman, Jérôme Krop, Lisa Morrison, Briony Neilson, Jessica Pliley, Caroline Ritter, Eleanor Rivera, Rebecca Rogers, Sophia Rosenfeld, Andrew Israel Ross, Birgitte Søland, and Holly White for sharing their knowledge and expertise. Alice Conklin welcomed me into Te Ohio State University French history community and has been unbelievably generous with her time and advice. I would like to thank her and her students at OSU for reading and commenting on one of my chapters.
Generous funding from the Fulbright Foundation, the George Lurcy Foundation, the Macmillan Center at Yale University, the Society for French Historical Studies, and the European Studies Program at William & Mary allowed me to conduct research in France. I am grateful for the work of Caroline Piketty and the staf at the Archives Nationales; to Vincent Tuchais and the staf of the Archives de Paris; and the stafs of the Archives de la Préfecture de Police, the Musée Sociale, the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the Archives de Catholicité, the Archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and the Bibliothèque Nationale Française, especially the librarian who suggested a number of the memoirs in Chapter 6. Tanks, too, to Florence Rodriguez at the École Estienne and the late Soeur Fromaget at the Archives of the Filles de la Charité.
Te highlight of the last decade has been the friends I’ve met along the way. Many of my fellow graduate students in New Haven deserve thanks for celebrating the joyful moments and providing support in the difcult ones. Among my fellow historians, I want to recognize Catherine Arnold, Kate Brackney, John Burden, Sarah If Decker, Rachel Johnston-White, Mireille Pardon, Eric Smith, and Amy Watson. Katherine Hindley, Angus Ledingham, and Shari Yosinski have helped me laugh since the frst week of graduate school. In Williamsburg, VA, I shared many happy evenings with Miles Canady, Matthew Franco, Amy Lemoncelli, and Monica Streifer. I was fortunate to fnd friends in Columbus, OH including Dan Blim, Jessica Burch, Mary Anne and John Cusato, Can Dalyan, Leslie Hempson, Lance
and Lauren Ingwersen, Julie Mujic, Mariana Saavedra Espinosa, and Adrian Young. A growing circle of friends in San Marcos, TX has provided welcome distractions as I completed the fnal revisions on this book. In France, I have wandered and debated with Baptiste Bonnefoy and Delia Guijarro Arribas, Meg Cychosz, and Mia Schatz. Tea Goldring has been an inciteful interlocutor on many occasions. Megan Brown has not only read a signifcant portion of the manuscript but has also been a tireless mentor and friend.
My French adopted family, the Moatis, have always welcomed me to Paris. Hila Calev and Aaron Hosios have provided years of generosity and friendship. My Lowell crew—Teresa Chan, Jenny C., Angela Huang, Merry Tu, Cynthia Yee, Diana Yeung, and Eliza Yu-Dietz—has remained an important fxture in my life for the better part of two decades.
To my students, you have challenged me and made me a better historian. To those of you who took classes on childhood or on youth culture, I am still refecting on many of the questions you have posed. Claire Nevin, Nina Whidden, and Vaidehi Kudhyadi have contributed to this book through their work as research assistants.
Finally, my family deserves credit for stubbornly believing this book could exist. My mom, Anne, encouraged me to be a reader and frst sparked my love of history by introducing me to Eleanor of Aquitaine. My dad, Zack, has provided decades of editorial assistance in both French and English. His passion for France inspired mine. My younger sister Lena is my oldest friend and ally. Colette, Rae, and Gabriel have ofered hospitality and advice. Ann, Paul, Sarah, Samuel, and Nathan have given me a second home in Tacoma. Justin Randolph has nurtured me with his humor, his cooking, and his steadfast support. Trough our discussions and through his scholarship, he exemplifes how to interrogate systems of inequality. Tis book is dedicated to the memory of my grandparents, Marilyn and Morris Sachs. My grandpa attended a technical high school in the 1930s and was able to explain the machinery in the photos of the Parisian vocational schools to me. Trough her books and her stories, my grandmother piqued my interest in the past. Above all, they devoted their lives to creating and to giving.
Sections of Chapter 3 frst appeared in “ ‘A Sad and . . . Odious Industry’: Te Problem of Child Begging in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 10, 2 (Spring 2017): 188–205. Copyright Te Johns Hopkins University Press.
Some of the material in Chapters 1 and 4 appears in “ ‘But the Child is Flighty, Playful, Curious’: Working-Class Boyhood and the Policing of Play,”
A portion of Chapter 5 is published in “When the Republic Came for the Nuns: Laicization, Labor Laws, and Religious Orders,” French Historical Studies 42, 3 (August 2019): 423–451 Copyright Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the publisher. www.dukeupress.edu
Introduction
Defning Childhood in Tird Republic Paris
“Take him from school . . . of an age to work . . . to earn his living,” so concludes Auguste Brepson’s semi-autobiographical novel, Un gosse (A Kid) 1 Published in 1928, the book documents the childhood of an impoverished, young Parisian. In the novel’s fnal scene, the protagonist’s grandmother, who is his caretaker, dies. Trough the fog of his grief, he overhears the adults around him planning his future. In his novel, Brepson’s family decides when he is “of an age to work.” But for most working-class children in Tird Republic France, the government’s child labor laws dictated how and when they entered the workforce. Te state, not the family, decided when the frst stage of childhood came to an end.
In the twenty-frst century, childhood unfolds and ends according to proscribed, fairly universal milestones based on numeric age. Until the late nineteenth century, this was not the case for working-class Parisians. Te barriers separating stages within childhood were not precise, numeric markers. Instead, childhood was more fuid.2 Te one constant was that parents and guardians expected children to contribute their labor and, eventually, their wages to support the family. A change in family circumstances, such as the death of a relative, determined when young people entered the formal workforce and earned compensation.3
From its inception in 1870, the French Tird Republic attempted to carve out childhood as a distinct, standardized stage of life. Trough laws on labor, education, and delinquency, its legislators imposed numeric barriers around and within childhood. Tese regulations instituted universal standards for when young people began school and when they were permitted to work.4 In 1912, the Republic established a juvenile court for young ofenders, ensuring that the legal system dealt with juvenile delinquents separately from adults.5 Legislators and reformers designed these policies to protect children. Infuenced by new ideas about children and their development, reformers
created classrooms and juvenile detention facilities to cater to young people’s unique needs as developing beings.
But gender- and class-based variations persisted within childhood. Even by the 1950s, almost a century afer the Republic’s founding (and a decade afer its ignominious collapse during World War II), only thirty-two thousand French youths graduated academic secondary school each year. By this period, the population of metropolitan France was around forty-two million.6 Why did disparities remain in this seemingly universal life stage? Te answer lies both with the legislators and reformers who created social welfare policies as well as with the functionaries and parents who had more control over young people’s day-to-day activities.
In the frst place, when republican legislators and reformers placed age-based regulations on working-class childhood, they hoped that these young people would grow up to become productive workers. Tey tried to introduce a more uniform version of working-class childhood, not to eliminate all the variations within childhood. Creating labor laws, primary schools, and vocational training programs were all attempts to standardize how working-class childhood unfolded. In establishing vocational training programs, the Republic sought to ensure that once a young person lef primary school, he or she received the technical and moral education necessary to become a skilled worker-citizen. Likewise, the expansion of welfare programs and the creation of the juvenile justice system removed young people from any infuences that might limit their desire to work and steered them toward a productive adulthood. For elites, the regulation of age was a tool of social control. By placing more regulations on childhood, the state gained more ability to supervise children’s development.
Te archives of the functionaries responsible for implementing these policies capture how this worked in practice. Labor inspectors, police ofcers, and vocational school directors all disseminated new ideas about childhood, while simultaneously ensuring that working-class children could and would mature into contributing members of the workforce. When a labor inspector visited a factory, he relied on quantifable measurements, such as young workers’ ages and physical development, to determine if young workers belonged in the factory. Examining magistrates in the criminal justice system (juges d’instruction) considered children’s intellectual maturity when recommending a sentence. Tese individuals all worked to protect young people and promote their normal development. Trough their actions, they defned childhood as a specifc life stage. But these individuals were also concerned with young people’s mental and physical capacity to
labor. For instance, police ofcers investigated an arrested youth’s employment history. Education reformers designed vocational school curriculums to direct youths toward more regular employment.
Working-class parents clashed with functionaries about how to structure childhood, but they agreed that their ofspring needed to labor. Within working-class communities, age remained more fuid. Parents resisted or subverted laws that limited their ability to put their ofspring to work. However, the disagreements between parents and functionaries were over when young people would enter the workforce, not whether they would. In many instances, parents were even more eager than state actors to place their children into productive roles. Many turned to state agencies for assistance with children who could not or would not work. Parents helped to ensure that their ofspring entered the labor force as soon as they were legally able (and sometimes before they were).
Trough its regulation of childhood, the Republic also reinforced the separation between girls’ and boys’ experiences of childhood. While child labor laws and vocational schools created a more uniform path through childhood for boys, the life course for girls remained less fxed. Motherhood loomed over girls’ lives, shaping their experiences as young workers. Te stages within girlhood were less precise, because girls, no matter their age, were always preparing for motherhood. Tey could only enter into professions that resembled domestic work, such as trades in the garment industry. Tese professions tended to escape the notice of labor inspectors. Girls were more likely to enter the workforce prematurely or work in conditions that violated the child labor laws. Tis lack of state supervision characterized girls’ time in the workforce. Te creation of gender-segregated vocational schools also encoded specifc trades as masculine or feminine.
By introducing age-based regulations on childhood, the Republic encoded and enforced the norm that working-class children had to grow into contributing members of the economy. As a result, the laws and institutions it designed to protect and nurture working-class children also formalized class- and gender-based divisions within childhood.
Childhood before the Republic
As industrialization and urbanization accelerated in the early nineteenth century, French elites started to regard young people as a distinct legal
category.7 In the late 1820s, reformers began calling for legislation to protect the youngest members of the industrial workforce. Tis idea gained support over the course of the 1830s.8 In 1841, the Chamber of Deputies under the July Monarchy passed France’s frst child labor legislation. Tis law barred children younger than eight from working and limited the workday for youths under sixteen.9 Although the Napoleonic Code had included separate rules for sentencing minors, it was only in the 1830s that legal scholars advocated for separate correctional facilities for young ofenders.10 In 1831, Paris opened the frst prison for juvenile ofenders.11 In the discussions that led to these changes, reformers and legislators began to identify young people as a distinct category of the laboring and criminal populations.
Te 1830s also marked a key moment in the development of education for the popular classes. In 1833, the July Monarchy passed the Guizot Law, which required every commune in France to have a public primary school.12 In the same decade, Catholic reformers opened the frst patronages local centers that provided supplemental vocational training for apprentices and young workers.13 Both schools and patronages were age-segregated spaces that catered to young people. July Monarchy legislators and Catholic reformers also envisioned such spaces as providing lessons on obedience and morality—the sorts of lessons that might keep a working-class population in check.
Te danger that industrial workspaces posed to young people’s minds and bodies inspired many of these reforms. In the agricultural economy, children labored alongside their parents. Te home and the workspace overlapped.14 Industrialization removed children from the home and their families. Girls and boys participated in almost every sector of industrial production. In the textile industry, they represented almost twenty percent of the workforce.15 Most young people in industry were teen-aged, but some employers hired children as young as seven.16 In factories, children interacted with machines that could damage their fragile bodies. It is no coincidence that reformers’ frst calls to regulate the work of young people coincided with the acceleration of the Industrial Revolution in France in the 1830s. Industrialization also upended how young people trained for work. In the frst decades of the nineteenth century, elites began agonizing over the “apprenticeship crisis,” as traditional modes of training young workers for skilled trades fell into disuse.17 Te breakdown of the apprenticeship system hastened children’s entry into crowded, industrial workspaces. It also threatened the craf industries that had traditionally been crucial to the French economy.18
Urbanization, too, drew elite attention to working-class children. As industrialization accelerated, people migrated to cities. Diseases fourished in the crowded neighborhoods of working-class Paris. While it is unclear if these areas also bred crime, elites certainly worried about the “dangerous classes.”19 Social economists, hygienists, and Catholic reformers theorized that poverty spawned immorality and disorder.20 Middle-class reformers believed the solution was to impose the bourgeois family model onto the laboring classes.21 To that end, they expanded aide to abandoned babies and unwed mothers.22 Tey also tried to create better housing for the laboring classes.23
Many of these reformers targeted children. In placing limits on children’s ability to participate in the workforce, reformers sought to introduce a more middle-class version of childhood to the laboring classes.24 By encouraging the working classes to care for their children, they attempted to promote domesticity. Trough regulating childhood, reformers and legislators tried to ensure that working-class children followed a prescribed path to adulthood. While many of these early reforms had mixed results—the law of 1841 was unevenly enforced, the frst Parisian juvenile prisons closed, and it took decades before some localities opened a primary school—they laid a framework for the Tird Republic.25 Tese reforms established young people as a distinct component of the laboring classes. Tey also introduced the idea that regulating childhood, and that creating a particular path to adulthood for the laboring classes, was a potential avenue for attacking the perceived immorality and unruliness of the laboring classes.
Te Tird Republic
In 1938, just two years before the Tird Republic’s collapse, Gustave Monod wrote, “Tough we might very well be a democracy, it’s all too clear that not all our institutions are democratic.”26 Monod, the director of the Academy of Paris, was critiquing the education system. But his statement highlights a tension within the Tird Republic. Te regime proclaimed its commitment to the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution while excluding all but white men from citizenship.
Founded in 1870, the Republic was an outlier in nineteenth-century Europe. It did not have a monarch. Instead, the Chamber of Deputies, elected by universal manhood sufrage, governed the country. Afer 1877, the political leaders of the Republic were primarily committed to representative
democracy and a secular state. While traditional elites, namely the landed nobility, held power in most of the rest of Europe, the bourgeoisie controlled the Republic’s institutions.27
But only men enjoyed these privileges. Male legislators cemented women’s exclusion from full citizenship by passing laws that defned them as a separate, vulnerable category of the population. For many male politicians, women could only contribute to the Republic as mothers. French women did not gain the right to vote until afer World War II.28 Whether through the regulation of prostitution, of women’s work, or of maternal care, the Republic placed women’s bodies under public scrutiny.29 Tese policies reinforced the patriarchal order and the division between male and female citizenship.30 Men wielded political power; women’s bodies were subject to state oversight. In addition, the greater regulation of women’s work resulted in their spatial segregation within the workforce.31
Similarly, in codifying the colonial subject as a distinct legal category, the Republic excluded the majority of non-European people in its empire from citizenship. Under the Republic, the French Empire expanded to include much of North Africa, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. While France promised citizenship to its imperial subjects, few ever gained it.32 In 1881, the same year that the Republic made primary education free, it passed the Code de indigénat in Algeria. Building on half a century of colonial rule, this code defned non-European subjects in Algeria as a legal category and subjected them to harsher legal punishments.33 By World War I, this notion of the indigénat existed throughout the French Empire and “provided legal cover . . . for colonial coercion.”34 Te enforcement of these laws bolstered the separation between French citizens and imperial subjects. Te growing state bureaucracy within metropolitan France and its colonies “worked to particularize segments of the population.”35 Te experience of white women in metropolitan France was vastly diferent from that of colonial subjects in Africa and Southeast Asia. But for both women and colonial subjects, republican legislators singled out these groups as distinct legal categories and subjected them to greater state oversight. As such, the legal codifcation of these categories formalized a social and political hierarchy dominated by French men. Te Republic’s approach to women and colonial subjects has striking parallels to its treatment of working-class children. By the fnal decades of the nineteenth century, many French elites regarded children as vulnerable beings who required special care and
attention. In this period, “a concern to save children for the enjoyment of childhood” increasingly motivated reformers across Europe and North America. Tese reformers pushed for laws to protect working children and opened institutions to protect the vulnerable.36 In France, a growing number of doctors published texts on the health and hygiene of young people. Tey were principally concerned with preventing infant mortality, but such discussions helped to create a distinct feld of pediatric medicine.37 For the French, the health of their youngest citizens held particular importance. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the birthrate in France had been declining. Afer the defeat in the Franco–Prussian War, anxiety over the birthrate increased.38
From the Republic’s earliest years, legislators encoded working-class children as a distinct category of the population. Many of the Republic’s frst social welfare reforms focused on young people. In 1874, it barred children younger than twelve from the workforce and established limits on the employment of those under sixteen.39 Te education laws of 1881 and 1882 made primary education free, secular, and mandatory for children between the ages of six and thirteen. In 1889, the Republic passed a law permitting the state to remove children from parents it deemed immoral.40 Alongside these national reforms, the city of Paris established vocational schools for young workers.41 It created separate institutions to treat vulnerable children and young delinquents.42
Although these reforms built on the projects of previous regimes, the Republic’s reforms were more efective in codifying childhood as a legal category. Te Republic’s laws created a legal defnition of childhood and established numeric barriers on when it began and ended. Te expansion of the state bureaucracy and the professionalization of the Parisian police ensured that a corps of state employees would enforce these laws.43 Labor inspectors surveilled workspaces and police investigated juvenile criminals. As labor inspectors cited errant factory owners or police determined whether to remove young people from their parents, they disseminated a more bureaucratic, modern way of measuring childhood. During the interwar period, functionaries drew on the emerging felds of pediatric medicine and psychology to assist young people. Vocational guidance centers measured a young person’s physical strength and intelligence. Social workers assessed young delinquents’ physical and psychological health.44 Teir work further defned childhood as a distinct life stage.
Tese regulations also led to the spatial separation of young people from the adult world. Even by the end of the nineteenth century, most workingclass youngsters spent their time in mixed-age spaces. Tey lived in crowded apartments, mingled in the streets with people of all ages, and trained alongside older workers.45 Young workers were smaller and less skilled than their adult companions in the workforce, but they were an integral part of production in many workshops. Tey were responsible for removing sheets of paper from printing presses or transporting molten glass from ovens in glassworks. In setting limits on young people’s work, labor laws forced employers to regard young workers as a distinct category. In some cases, this involved eliminating them from production. In other instances, employers created separate spaces within their workspaces where young workers trained. Te expansion of vocational schools and courses to train young workers further removed them from production. Although I do not focus on leisure, the summer camps, afer-school programs, or scouting organizations that developed during this period also removed young people from the adult world.46 By carving out childhood as a life stage and by removing young people to these spaces, republican legislators and reformers were not just protecting youngsters. Tey also gave the state more power to supervise the development of working-class children.
But this more uniform version of childhood did not align with the way working-class families conceived of childhood. As Brepson’s story demonstrates, a young person’s family usually determined when she or he entered the workforce. Just as they had in the agricultural economy, children labored from a young age. Tey ran errands for their parents or tended younger siblings. Girls in particular were expected to help out in the home. To a certain extent, the working classes did have to accept the Republic’s new version of childhood. Children under thirteen disappeared from the industrial labor force. But the archival record suggests that parents found ways to challenge the Republic’s version of childhood. Many parents wrote letters asking for exemptions to child labor laws. Tey removed their children prematurely from apprenticeships. A signifcant portion of the students at the city of Paris’ vocational schools did not complete their training, suggesting that parents did not agree with the way the schools altered the life course. Working-class parents expected their children to contribute to the family economy as soon as they were physically capable. Te child labor laws merely changed when that labor could be remunerated.
Te Education System
One of the Tird Republic’s most lasting legacies is its public primary school system. Tis system epitomizes the contradictions of the Republic. Republican legislators made primary school free and mandatory for all. However, as Gustave Monod stressed, the education system had its faults. Both the structure of the education system and the content it dispensed reinforced existing class- and gender-based divisions.47
On the surface, the Republic’s primary schools were instrumental in creating a more uniform experience of childhood. According to the Jules Ferry Laws of 1881 and 1882, all children between the ages of six and thirteen were supposed to pass through the Republic’s primary schools. In these schools, primary school teachers were responsible for instilling children with (secular) republican values.48 Eugen Weber has argued that the schools were instrumental in creating a more cohesive national identity, although other historians have contested this claim.49 Certainly, illiteracy declined. At the start of the Republic, around ffeen percent of military recruits could neither read nor write. By World War I, fewer than three percent fell into this category.50 By the 1930s, one-half of Parisian children were able to pass the exam for the certifcate of primary studies.51 To pass this exam, a student needed to demonstrate a measure of profciency in math, reading, and history.52 Te expansion of primary education ensured that an overwhelming majority of French girls and boys spent their days studying alongside their peers rather than laboring in mixed-age spaces.
And yet, primary schools did not facilitate much social mobility. Schools for the popular classes reminded students of their role in society by drilling them in the importance of “hard work.”53 In the working-class neighborhoods of Paris, classes were crowded. Even by the early twentieth century, classes in these neighborhoods had between forty and ffy students.54 Given that most working-class children lef school afer turning thirteen, they gained basic literacy and numeracy, but access to elite culture remained beyond their grasp. In addition, up to ten percent of Parisian children managed to elude truancy ofcers.55
Working-class youths had little access to secondary education. Most began working at thirteen, an experience that was quite diferent from their bourgeois peers who continued to attend school. Only a small fraction of the population received a classical secondary education. To prepare for these schools, elite boys attended elementary schools rather than the primary
schools that the majority of children attended. As a result, even from age six, the path of these boys diverged from the rest of the population.56 Te Tird Republic expanded the number of écoles primaires supérieures, schools that provided a modern post-primary education to the middle classes and the highest tiers of the laboring classes.57 Because they required youths to remain in school when they were legally able to labor, the écoles primaires supérieures were not an option for many working-class youths. Technical education, such as the vocational schools, remained a separate system.58 Only a fraction of the laboring classes even attended formal vocational schools.
Working-class parents also contributed to the lack of mobility by removing their children from the school system. Te majority of truant primary school students were older students who lef school early to enter the workforce.59 Many parents were loath to send their ofspring to secondary school. Parents wanted their children to begin working as soon as they could. When the city of Paris queried a group of primary school girls in 1877 about their future plans, a handful indicated that they wanted to continue their education, but that their parents needed them to begin earning a wage.60 Many workingclass parents could not aford for their children to attend school long enough to obtain the education necessary for a white-collar position.
In addition, the education system reinforced the separation between the genders. Until the 1960s, most French children attended gender-segregated primary schools.61 Textbooks reminded girls and boys of their separate duties in society. Girls received a curriculum designed to prepare them for motherhood.62 Public secondary schools for girls only existed in France afer the passage of the Victor Drury Law in 1867.63 As part of his program of expanding public education, Jules Ferry attempted to increase the number of secondary schools for girls with the Camille Sée Law of 1880.64 In these schools, young women still studied a distinct curriculum from their male peers. However, some of the graduates of these schools did become teachers or took on other professional jobs.65 In the 1920s, some secondary schools for boys began admitting girls, but many remained gender-segregated.66 For the laboring classes, the divisions in post-primary education were even frmer. Vocational training programs remained gender-segregated. If working-class girls pursued post-primary education, they received it in institutions that prepared them for professions considered to be female-appropriate.
Even as the school system perpetuated class- and gender-based divisions within childhood, it was part of a larger network of programs republican legislators developed for working-class children. To understand why
republican legislators built the school system the way they did, we need to consider how they envisioned childhood. To do so requires studying the school system within the larger context of the republican welfare state. Examining the creation and operation of that welfare state shows how republican elites, everyday functionaries, and working-class families conceived of childhood. By analyzing the development of welfare policies for young people, we can interrogate the history of working-class childhood as a category.
Defning Childhood
Te young people in this book are work-aged, but the borders around this category were fuid. In 1870, a ten-year-old could work. In 1937, a thirteenyear-old could not. Troughout this period, the lower limit of this stage, the barrier between work and school, remained a site of contestation. Many children participated in informal labor long before they entered the workforce. Likewise, the barrier between childhood and adulthood evolved. Te 1874 child labor law only applied to young people up to the age of sixteen, whereas the 1892 law raised this age to eighteen. Te division between girlhood and womanhood was even more fuid. Many of the provisions of the 1874 law applied to young women up to the age of twenty-one and the 1892 law included all women. Women always remained in a state of minority, as they never gained full political citizenship. Te beginning of formal adulthood was more fxed for men because they began their military service at eighteen and could vote at twenty-one.67 Based on the juvenile delinquency laws and the 1892 child labor law, I have primarily focused on young people between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, but I do note instances where I found younger children laboring.
Why not use “adolescence” to describe this intermediate stage? Te use of the terms “adolescence” and “adolescent” increased in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.68 Some labor inspectors did use the term “adolescence” to describe the population they surveyed. By the 1890s, a number of educational reformers and psychologists were focused on dealing with youngsters between school and adulthood. In their discussions, they set out a clear defnition for this intermediate stage.69 When Parisian educational reformers created vocational training programs, they catered to teen-aged workers. Trough these schools or classes, reformers tried to standardize
young workers’ frst years out of primary school. To a certain extent, these reformers were attempting to carve out adolescence within the working-class life course.70
However, elite conceptions of adolescence did not align with the way the laboring classes envisioned or experienced the years afer primary school. Scholars of the Global South have emphasized that “adolescence” is a Eurocentric concept and that European eforts to impose a standardized life course on non-white populations were a form of cultural imperialism.71 Even within Europe, the initial model of adolescence as an intermediate stage derived from the elite male life course. Between childhood in primary schools and autonomous adulthood, aristocratic and bourgeois boys spent their adolescence in secondary schools.72 Te Republic’s eforts to impose this life stage on the working-class life course had mixed results. Educational reformers never intended to create a universal version of adolescence. Tey wanted to encode working-class adolescence as a time to prepare for the workforce. Even so, their vocational schools were only accessible to an elite tier of the working classes. Of the students who attended, many lef the schools prematurely, suggesting that their parents did not envision a fxed intermediate stage as a necessary part of working-class childhood. For girls, the life course was even more fuid. As I have emphasized, ordinary French men and women did not always embrace the way doctors or legislators envisioned childhood. Te term adolescence connotes a strict separation between life stages that did not exist for most working-class children and youths.
While I have tried to be precise when assigning terminology to young people, I also must account for the fuidity that remained a feature of the working-class life course throughout this period. I limit my use of the term “adolescence” to instances where a historical actor specifcally employs the term and to my analysis of vocational schools. When I am discussing an individual or a group of young people who have completed primary school, but who are below the age of majority, I use the term “youth.” For primary school students or young people below the legal age to work, I use “child.” But the border between school and work was porous. Many parents tried to place their children into the workforce prematurely. Young people who were in the process of leaving school and entering the workforce do not ft neatly into one category. When I am dealing with a young person on this border, I use “child,” as it is a more inclusive term. When referring to young people under eighteen as a whole, I use “young people,” “youngsters,” or “children.” Similarly, I refer to this stage as “childhood.” From labor inspectors
compiling reports in the 1870s to social workers reporting on their activities in the 1930s, French ofcials used the term “child” to refer to this age group. When discussing a young person in relation to his or her parents, I use “child” interchangeably with “son,” “daughter,” or “ofspring.” In this instance, I use child to denote a relationship rather than an age group.73
As with many historians of childhood, I have faced the problem of fnding sources from the perspective of young people.74 State actors loom large in this book, as they compiled the majority of the sources on which I draw. Te few scattered examples I have of young people’s voices from the period, such as a disobedient apprentice’s testimony in a court hearing or girls’ responses to a survey asking them about their future professions, exist in sources produced by state actors. More ofen, I must rely on sources that describe young people’s actions—the accident report of an injured worker, the arrest of a thief—to reconstruct their experiences. Te details of the thief’s arrest suggest that he collaborated with other boys in his neighborhood, that he used a playful pseudonym, that he chose to steal wine for amusement rather than to survive. Tat the female worker burned her hand while making a hat tells us that she participated in production. But these types of sources rarely include a young person’s point of view. As such, the accident report cannot tell us whether the young worker was worried about her family, and the police record does not reveal whether the young thief stole the wine on a dare.
In Chapter 6, I integrate memoirs from individuals who grew up in working-class neighborhoods in Paris during this period. Tese memoirs provide a glimpse of young workers’ hopes and dreams, as well as the inner world of working-class neighborhoods where ofcial actors did not always penetrate. Nevertheless, these sources, too, have their limits. Te writers compiled them many years afer the events occurred. Most of the writers were artists and/or activists and so their experiences were exceptional. Te mass of young workers who learned a trade, worked twelve-hour shifs, and sought out amusement at the end of the workday have slipped into obscurity.
Paris
Te young people who appear in the following pages lived and worked in Paris, a city whose population boomed during the nineteenth century. In the Republic’s frst decades, the population of Paris reached its height. In the early 1870s, the city had 1.9 million inhabitants. By the start of World War I,
almost three million people lived in the city.75 Most adults living in Paris had been born outside the capital and tens of thousands of migrants continued to fock to the city each year.76 A small but growing minority of Parisians were immigrants, primarily from other European countries.77
At the heart of this city, bourgeois leisure culture fourished.78 In 1853, Napoleon III tasked the Baron George Eugène Haussmann with rebuilding the city. Haussmann ploughed through the working-class neighborhoods at the heart of the city and created wide-open boulevards.79 Opened between 1867 and 1905, Paris’ most famous department stores lined these boulevards, their giant glass windows tempting passersby.80 Bourgeois ladies and gentlemen promenaded in the manicured parks of the Tuileries or in smaller local squares.81 Teirs is the world preserved in the sun-dappled paintings of the Impressionists.82 It was not simply Parisians who took in the delights of the city. In 1889, thirty-two million people visited the Universal Exposition in the French capital and witnessed the brand-new spectacle of the Eifel Tower.83
Pushed to the neighborhoods at the city’s edge, Paris’ laboring classes were a diverse group. Teir ranks included women doing piecework in their homes, semi-skilled metalworkers, and highly trained furniture makers. Even by the frst decade of the twentieth century, almost one-third of workers labored in small ateliers or workshops with fewer than ten people.84 In the Republic’s frst decades, the absolute number of workers in certain traditional crafs, such as shoemaking or furniture making, remained constant, but declined as a proportion of the overall population.85 It was in the towns just outside Paris that entrepreneurs opened larger factories.86 Within Paris, the laboring classes lived primarily in the arrondissements at the northeast edge of the capital (the 19th and 20th), but there were also working-class neighborhoods in the south of the city (at the edge of the 13th and 14th arrondissements). Many skilled workers also lived in the 10th and 11th arrondissements. Crammed into small apartments, families in these communities had limited access to clean water and air. While Haussmann had expanded the city’s sewers to remove urban waste, few buildings in the outer neighborhoods connected to this network.87 In spite of these conditions, the working classes formed communities.
To a certain extent, the interaction between the state and children was unique in Paris.88 Te city government in Paris pioneered many of the reforms related to working-class childhood. Te Council General of Paris employed a labor inspector starting in 1864, a decade before the child labor
law of 1874 established a national corps of labor inspectors.89 Its municipal vocational schools were among the frst in the country.90 Te city introduced the policy of removing children who were in “moral danger” from their parents in 1881, eight years before the Republic instituted this policy at the national level.91 Compared with rural childhood, for instance, state actors had many more opportunities to interact with Parisian children and to shape childhood. However, rural children did attend primary school where they received lessons on becoming productive citizens from their teachers.92 Tese primary schools imposed structure on rural childhood and ensured that these youngsters matured into worker-citizens.
Over the course of its seventy years, the Tird Republic built a welfare state to serve working-class children. But the institutions it created formalized the social hierarchies of the nineteenth century, ensuring that they would last well into the twentieth.
1 Child Labor Legislation and the Regulation of Age
In 1907, M. Chardonal, a Parisian labor inspector, cited the printing frm of Wellhof & Roche for employing twenty-fve young workers in hazardous work conditions. Te danger? Te frm was printing Pierre Louÿs’ 1896 novel Aphrodite. According to an 1893 decree, employers could not hire workers under sixteen and young women under twenty-one to work in spaces that produced texts or images that might “injure their morality.” Chardonal determined that Aphrodite ft this description. Te book opens with a graphic account of a nude woman bathing. It goes on to recount the story of a Roman sculptor whose muse presents herself naked on the lighthouse of Alexandria, commits suicide, and whose corpse ultimately serves as the model for his masterpiece.1 Te local police court agreed that the work was “of a nature to shock the morality of children and young women” and levied a 125 franc fne on the printers.2
Te printers appealed the fne and hired a lawyer Henri Robert to argue the case before the Criminal Court of the Department of the Seine. Robert’s defense is a masterwork of legal wizardry, so much so that the printing frm published it afer the hearing.3 Robert attacked the charge on multiple fronts. He maintained that the book had artistic merits, but also claimed that the speed of the printing process did not give workers sufcient time to engage with the text. Trough this latter line of attack, he took his audience inside the workshop, giving us a sense of the place of young workers in this space. Robert claimed that the workers would not have had time to read the book, as the printing presses spat out eight hundred sheets an hour. Robert then explained that each printed page emerged covered in blotting paper, meaning that the text was not visible to anyone near the machines.4 Although Robert did not describe young workers’ role in production, his defense suggests that they were removing pages from the presses and working alongside these machines.
At the heart of the case was the nebulous issue of morality. Each side tried to defne what might be dangerous to young workers. Te labor inspector insisted that Aphrodite was a “flthy book that glorifes abortion . . . [and] lesbianism.”5 Robert responded that Aphrodite was no more risqué than the statues at the Luxembourg Gardens or postcards on display at news kiosks, both of which young workers freely encountered.6 Ultimately, the judges ruled with the inspector. Most of the young workers were younger than fourteen. Te judges stated that at this age “the soul is essentially malleable.” Moreover, “young workers . . . did not have the moral force” to resist any sensations the work might provoke.7 From the judges’ perspective, young workers were developing beings. As state actors, they had an obligation to impose standards on the workspace to protect the young workers.
Tis case captures the competing versions of working-class childhood present during the early Tird Republic. Both the labor inspector and the judges portrayed the young workers in the printshop as physically and morally vulnerable, and thus distinct from any adult workers with whom they labored. According to this logic, the print shop was unsafe for young workers as long as it printed Aphrodite. Tese functionaries used the precise measurement of age to distinguish “the children” in the print shop from adult workers. 8 However, Henri Robert, on behalf of the printing frm, argued that the young workers belonged in the print shop. When he described the production of books, he did not distinguish the young workers’ responsibilities. As such, he implied that they were integral to production.
Te labor inspector and judges in this case worked on behalf of the Tird Republic, which was endeavoring to defne working-class childhood as a discreet legal and social category. During the Tird Republic’s frst decades, legislators and reformers devoted signifcant attention to regulating and protecting the ofspring of the laboring classes. Tey expanded access to education and created a juvenile justice system for young ofenders. All these policies delineated young people as a separate category of the population. Trough the creation of schools and juvenile prisons, the Tird Republic carved out separate spaces for young people.
But legislators’ frst object was child labor. Te Republic’s frst piece of social welfare legislation was a child labor law, which it passed in 1874. As a result of this law, alongside additional laws passed in 1892 and 1900, the state gained new abilities to intervene in the formerly private spaces of the home and the family. Te power to measure age shifed away from working-class families to state actors, particularly labor inspectors. As labor inspectors
