Growing up as Workers in Nineteenth-Century Paris: The Case of the Orphans of the Prince Imperial

Abstract

It would not be easy to forget Emile Zola's graphic portrayal of child laborers in the mines of Anzin, and the numerous descriptions of youngsters dissipating their strength in the cotton mills of the last century still disconcert the reader today. Yet, the situation of working-class children in the nineteenth century has not proved a fertile ground for historical research. We possess little solid information about the integration of youngsters into the labor force. Their place in the family has begun to receive sophisticated treatment; but, thus far, interpretations of working-class domestic relations follow from the untested assumption that poverty and insecurity produced insensitive or exploitive parenting. Lawrence Stone characterizes child-rearing practices among eighteenth-century English workers as often indifferent, cruel, erratic, and unpredictable, and few students of the subject have been prepared to argue that this changed substantially before the end of the nineteenth century in the French context.1 Maurice Crubellier has recently asserted that until around 1880, the family in the workers' milieu faired rather poorly.2 Michelle Perrot, Alain Corbin, Joan Scott, and Louise Tilly seem to agree that the familialization of the working classes oc