Colin Heywood.Growing Up in France: From the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic.:Growing Up in France: From the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic

Abstract

When Colin Heywood published his first book, Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France: Work, Health and Education among the Classes Populaires (1988), the history of childhood in France was in its infancy. In his new book the history of childhood has reached its maturity, as Heywood's extensive bibliography attests. This book covers not only the “long childhood,” roughly from age seven through twenty-five, but also the longue durée, from the mid-eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth. The first third of this exhaustively researched study begins with an analysis of cultural constructions and representations of childhood. The second examines the lived experiences of children within the family and among friends, and the third section covers children's lives as they leave their families, attending school, going to work, and marrying. By privileging a plethora of personal reminiscences of childhood derived from correspondence, oral histories, diaries, autobiographies, and memoirs—what Heywood calls “ego documents”—he allows specialists and generalists alike to share the remembered experiences of famous and obscure French men and women from many walks of life. Heywood's work adds a new dimension to histories of childhood. Previous works, largely inspired by social history, have focused on church and state policies, social programs, and institutions for children, furnishing a history of how adults defined, treated, and provided for children. Heywood acknowledges those earlier histories “from above” but concentrates on history “from below”: the experiences of children themselves, albeit remembered by those children when they were adults. Since adults rarely recall their earliest years, Heywood pays scant attention to infancy, a well-covered aspect of the history of childhood that has been the focus of historians of welfare, public policy, motherhood, or medicine.