Abstract
This article analyses the social response to the ‘Crime de Jully,’ a multiple murder case committed in rural France in 1909-1910 by two Swiss adolescent cowherds. Literate and ambitious, the boys claimed that they had been driven to murder because of their reading habits. Richard Joseph Jacquiard and Joseph Vienny represented dangerous liminal figures for contemporary French society : as criminals, adolescents (neither children nor adults), and as educated workers. Although the boys had not been educated or raised in France, the response was framed within a decades-long national debate over the effects of compulsory, secular education. As this article explores, in requiring all children to attend primary school republican authorities faced a fundamental dilemma : how to educate young people while not destabilizing the existing social order.
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