Abstract
In her novels, the comtesse de Ségur (1799–1874) often decried the harmful effects of punitive violence against little girls, although she also advocated its merits. As a pedagogical principle and an instrument of oppression, the use of force against female characters affects all social relations in the economy of her novels, from routine educational violence to physical assault. A sequential analysis of these phenomena will show how violence evolves in time and space through two corpuses of texts: the first three novels, or ‘Fleurville trilogy’ and the pair formed by the last two novels, Diloy le chemineau and Après la pluie le beau temps. We will also see how, in these narratives, the family as an institution, through its custodians, parents and surrogates, imposes on little girls a subtext of epistemic violence, embedded in the practice of ‘silencing’ the child victim.
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