Philippe Ariès’s discovery of childhood after fifty years: the impact of a classic study on educational research

Abstract

This article looks at the impact of Philippe Ariès’s classic L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien regime, published in 1960. His well-known idea of the emergence of ‘Le sentiment de l’enfance’ caused a lively debate among historians and social scientists resulting in fundamental contributions to our knowledge about the early phase of the life cycle and about family life in former times. Moreover, Ariès introduced a new and innovative use of sources and put new topics on the scientific agenda that would dominate the agenda of the history of education and childhood for many years. Ariès’s book perfectly satisfied both the scientific need for historicising the social sciences and the societal need considering the family, childhood, youth, and the relationship between the sexes, as historical instead of structural or even natural phenomena. With conceiving, as Ariès did, the history of the family and of childhood and youth as a story of continuity and change, it became possible to contemplate about making the family more egalitarian, the relationship between children and parents, and between pupils and schoolmasters more communicative, and intersexual relations more based on autonomy. So, Ariès, the ‘anarchist of the right’, became the hero of modernisation.