Young Subjects: Children, State-Building, and Social Reform in the Eighteenth-Century French World 9780228006893

Table of contents :
Cover
Young Subjects
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Investing in Children: Lyon’s Charitable Community
2 The Lyonnais Laboratory: Educational Experimentation
3 Children Spread Reform
4 Parisian Children of the State
5 Trafficking in Children: Pronatalism and Population in North America
6 Children of the Empire: Cruxes of Imperial Strategy
Epilogue: A Revolution in Childhood
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Young Subjects

States, People, and the History of Social Change Series editors Rosalind Crone and Heather Shore The States, People, and the History of Social Change series brings together cutting-edge books written by academic historians on criminal justice, welfare, education, health, and other areas of social change and social policy. The ways in which states, governments, and local communities have responded to “social problems” can be seen across many different temporal and geographical contexts. From the early modern period to contemporary times, states have attempted to shape the lives of their inhabitants in important ways. Books in this series explore how groups and individuals have negotiated the use of state power and policy to regulate, change, control, or improve peoples’ lives and the consequences of these processes. The series welcomes international scholars whose research explores social policy (and its earlier equivalents) as well as other responses to social need, in historical perspective. 1 Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s–1830s Steven King 2 The People’s Health Health Intervention and Delivery in Mao’s China, 1949–1983 Zhou Xun 3 Young Subjects Children, State-Building, and Social Reform in the Eighteenth-Century French World Julia M. Gossard

Young Subjects Children, State-Building, and Social Reform in the Eighteenth-Century French World



julia m. gossard

m c gill-queen’s university press Montreal & Kingston · London · Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 isbn 978-0-2280-0565-0 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0689-3 (epdf) isbn 978-0-2280-0690-9 (epub) Legal deposit first quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free Funding in support of publication has been provided by the History Department and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah State University.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Young subjects : children, state-building, and social reform in the eighteenth-century French world / Julia M. Gossard. Names: Gossard, Julia M., 1987- author. Series: States, people, and the history of social change ; 3. Description: Series statement: States, people, and the history of social change ; 3 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200358812 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200359126 | isbn 9780228005650 (hardcover) | isbn 9780228006893 (pdf) | isbn 9780228006909 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Children—France—Social conditions—18th century. | lcsh: Child labor—France—History—18th century. | lcsh: Social reformers—France—History—18th century. | lcsh: Social problems—France—History—18th century. | lcsh: Children—Government policy—France—History—18th century. | lcsh: France—Social conditions—18th century. Classification: lcc hq792.f8 g67 2021 | ddc 305.23/0944 09033—dc23 This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in 11/14 Minion

For my parents, Dawn-L and Jim Gossard

Contents

Figures | ix Acknowledgments | xi

Introduction | 3 1 Investing in Children: Lyon’s Charitable Community | 22 2 The Lyonnais Laboratory: Educational Experimentation | 44 3 Children Spread Reform | 78 4 Parisian Children of the State | 111 5 Trafficking in Children: Pronatalism and Population in North America | 146 6 Children of the Empire: Cruxes of Imperial Strategy | 166

Epilogue: A Revolution in Childhood | 200 Notes | 211 Index | 251

Figures

1.1 Geometrical Map of Lyon subject to new alignments, augmented with new neighborhoods, and enriched with prominent buildings. “Plan géométral de la Ville de Lyon Assujetti aux nouveaux alignements, augmenté des quartiers neufs et enrichi des bâtiments principaux,” Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica (GE B 6943) | 26 2.1 Youths’ Apprenticeship Reading Lesson. “Leçon d’apprentissage de lecture pour enfants,” Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica (X-12865) | 64 2.2 Pedagogical playing cards. “Pièces d’un jeu de cartes pédagogiques,” Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica (8 S 3631) | 69 5.1 Transport of girls to the Hospital. “Le Transport des filles de joye à l’Hôpital,” Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica, (RESERVE QB-370 (7)-FT 4) | 163 7.1 The motherland teaches all her children, she nurtures them all in her womb and enlightens them with reason. “La Patrie instruit ses enfants, elle les reçoit tous dans son sein et la Raison les éclaire,” Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica (QB-1 (1793-08-10)-FOL) | 204

Acknowledgments

For the past decade, I have nurtured this project from its humble infancy as a thesis, to its adolescence as a dissertation, and finally, to its adulthood as a book. But, over this decade, I have not been alone in supporting its maturation. I owe a debt of gratitude to several individuals and organizations that provided me with financial and mentoring support. First, the History Department and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (ch a ss) at Utah State University generously funded the completion and publication of this book. In addition to a semester off from teaching to finish writing this book, the History Department and ch a ss have funded publication workshops, archival trips, and conference presentations and provided excellent mentoring. Additionally, the Institute for Historical Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, where I held an inaugural postdoctoral research fellowship in 2015– 16, provided me with an entire academic year to convert my dissertation into an initial manuscript for submission. The Department of History and the Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin, as well, awarded me a prestigious Named/Endowed Dissertation Completion Fellowship to finish my dissertation and full funding through my doctoral program. Several organizations and archives awarded my project research fellowships at different stages. The American Historical Association’s Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant for Research in European, African, or Asian History as well as a Newberry Library Short-Term Research Fellowship sponsored my final stages of research at the Newberry Library in 2017. The Omohundro Institute

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of Early American History & Culture invited me to present at their annual colloquia in 2019. The Society for French Historical Studies Marjorie M. and Lancelot L. Farrar Memorial Award for the Best Dissertation in Progress at a North American University and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Robert R. Palmer Research Travel Award provided essential funds to undertake research in 2012 and 2013. The Mellon Foundation underwrote my participation in the Newberry Library’s French Paleography course that made archival research a feasible endeavour. The archivists and librarians at the archives I visited deserve recognition here as well. The Archives Départementales du Rhône and the Archives Municipales de Lyon, in particular, were so accommodating and helpful to an early career researcher. Additionally, McGill-Queen’s University Press (mqup) has been a pleasure to work with for my first book. My editor Kyla Madden provided much guidance and advice. Her helpful conversations about the use of the term “agency” and “childhood” have made this work better. Shelagh Plunkett served as an excellent copy editor. My deepest thanks to the two anonymous readers. Their comments, thoughts, and queries helped to create a stronger analytical framework. Thank you. One of the best decisions I have made in life was to study under Julie Hardwick at The University of Texas at Austin. As all of her former students will attest to, Julie is one of the kindest mentors and also one of the most demanding. She prepares her students to be entrepreneurial. It equips them well for their lives as professional historians. Julie is my fiercest professional advocate, one of my strongest cheerleaders, and one of my most trusted advisors. I am so deeply appreciative of the professional and personal bonds Julie has sewn with me. Gratitude is also due to my undergraduate advisor Kathleen Wellman who inspired a love of French history in me when I enrolled in a freshman honours seminar on “French Queens and Mistresses” at Southern Methodist University. I am so grateful to have been Kathleen’s program assistant and assistant director for seven summers at smu-in-Paris. Not only were these some of the most enjoyable summers I’ve had but they provided me with access to the archives at critical stages. Thank you to Kathleen as well for her continued support and encouragement of my academic career and personal ambitions. Dozens of colleagues and friends have read and discussed parts of this book at various stages, providing feedback and ideas. For their generosity of time

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and intellect, I thank Bianca Premo, Alison Frazier, Brian Levack, Robert Olwell, Neil Kamil, Marc Bizer, Chris Corley, Steven Mintz, Clare Crowston, Dena Goodman, Susan Desan, Jeffrey Merrick, Karin Wulf, Holly White, Ashley Bruckbauer, Laurie Wood, Meghan Roberts, Danna Agmon, Katie Jarvis, Anne Verjus, Alan Kahan, Courtney Meador, Katherine Godwin, Shaz Ahmadi, Christopher Rose, Peter Hamilton, Alex Truax, Ben Breen, Samantha Rubino, Jacob Doss, Natalie Cincotta, Eddie Watson, and Alexander Taft. Several of my colleagues at Utah State University, especially the Works in Progress Group, have provided helpful advice on chapters: Tammy Proctor, Joe Ward, James Sanders, Victoria Grieve, Norm Jones, Fran Titchener, Lawrence Culver, Patrick Mason, Dan McInerney, Angela Diaz, Jeannie Sur, Dominic Sur, Felipe Valencia, Seth Archer, Eliza Rosenberg, and Rebecca Andersen. Two of my undergraduate students also helped in the statistical analysis of data through summer mentorship grants: Arie French and Zion Steiner. As it takes a village, I certainly will have forgotten someone. Thank you to all my friends and colleagues. The first reader of this manuscript was my husband, Chris Babits. In addition to being a supportive, loving, and hilarious husband, Chris is one of my most trusted writing partners. He caught every missing or errant comma. I love going through life and through history with you. Thank you, too, to my closest friends Jessica McLoughlin and Natalie Akilian Harrell. Our friendships have kept me laughing and joyful since we were young. And finally, thank you to my most benevolent and dedicated patrons, Dawn-L and Jim Gossard. In many ways, this book is also yours. You both steadfastly encouraged me throughout my life to follow my passions. Even in 2008 as I graduated college at the start of a global financial collapse, you supported my decision to pursue a PhD. In fact, you helped me to obtain funding and to thrive during my time in Austin, Lyon, and Paris. I am so thankful for our relationship, your unwavering support of my career, and daily encouragement. Mom, you have always pushed me to challenge myself. This has made me into the woman I am today. I am so happy that I got to share Lyon with you in 2012, and I hope you’ll remember walking through the old city with me on the way back from our pizza place laughing about the early modern drunkards. Dad, one of the most valuable lessons you taught me was how to write a creative introduction to an assignment about my summer vacation in first grade. I teach my students that lesson now, passing down the wisdom

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and creativity. Though I haven’t sent you an essay to look at in a while, I still consider you one of my greatest and most enthusiastic critics. I love you both. Thank you. I would also like to acknowledge the immense historical moment that has shaded the revisions of this book: the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. As of today, 24 May 2020, the United States has lost more than 100,000 individuals to the virus and 350,000 people have died across the globe. In some ways it seems unfathomable that I have concentrated on revising this manuscript while fearful of catching the virus, anxious about the economy, and afraid for my family, friends, and strangers alike. Yet, for me work as well as history have always been places of solace in difficult times. I am reminded, too, of the massive role that disease has played in the past. Though not discussed in this work, many of the children I study were quarantined at different points in their lives as the bubonic plague and other pestilence spread through Lyon and Paris, causing extreme economic, social, and political fallout. But, those societies adapted, learned, and continued to thrive. I hope that we can learn from the past (including the very recent past), listen to the scientists, wear our masks, be personally responsible, and that by the time this book appears in print, COVID-19 is history.

Young Subjects

Introduction

 Jean Morel was ten years old in 1698 when his father, a taffeta maker, and new stepmother, a silk worker, enrolled him in Lyon’s École de Charité de Saint Michel. For several years, Jean’s father, François, was listed as one of the poorest men in the Saint Michel parish. François had struggled to make ends meet after the death of Jean’s mother in 1695 despite holding a steady job in the textile industry and remarrying, making him a member of Lyon’s “honourable poor.”1 As such, Francois’s family was eligible for charitable services at several social institutions, including Lyon’s Aumône Générale2 and écoles de charité. Sending Jean to École de Charité de Saint Michel not only afforded Jean a better education than he would have received otherwise, but it also provided Jean’s family with access to even more poor relief. Jean attended the charity school for five years, learning to read, write, count, keep account books, as well as to cut and dye textiles, especially linen and silk. Completing his education immediately after his fifteenth birthday in 1703, Jean was apprenticed to Marcel Dulaine, a taffeta maker. The Bureau des Écoles paid for Jean’s apprenticeship so that Jean’s family incurred no additional costs for his rearing and training.3 The same year that Jean entered the Saint Michel charity school in Lyon, twelve-year-old Philibert Terret was transferred to Paris’s Hôpital de La Trinité. A month before he entered the hospital-orphanage, his mother passed away at l’Hôtel Dieu de Paris from an undisclosed illness. Some years prior to the death of Philibert’s mother, the army had conscripted Philibert’s father,

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a blacksmith, to assist in the ongoing conflicts in the Rhineland,4 and he was presumed dead when Philibert was placed in the hospital-orphanage. With the passing of his mother and no extended family to take him in, Philibert became an enfant de l’état or a ward of the state. But, since Philibert could prove his father had been a blacksmith, he was not considered an ordinary orphan. Instead of residing at a hospital-orphanage that served as a type of holding facility until children were old enough to leave, Philibert gained a place at the specialized La Trinité. Here, Philibert took part in a select training program for orphans in reading, writing, mathematics, and trade skills. Working closely for two years under a gunsmith who had a shop at the hospitalorphanage, Philibert learned much about metalwork, arms, and weaponry. His vocational training, along with the hospital-orphanage’s support, all but guaranteed Philibert an apprenticeship when he left the facility. After four years of living and studying at La Trinité, Philibert signed an apprenticeship contract covered by La Trinité and the blacksmiths’ guild with Paul Mercier, a master blacksmith, and left the institution.5 A destitute orphan, Françoise Baiselat was also taken in by l’Hôpital de La Trinité during her youth. Like Philibert, she received a rudimentary education and craft skills, but as the population of the hospital-orphanage grew, the institution became unable to care for every orphan that lived in the institution. At seventeen years old, Françoise and forty-eight other girls from La Trinité were loaded onto carts and driven to the Atlantic port city of La Rochelle. There, Françoise boarded a ship that set sail to Nouvelle France in 1668. These girls, known as filles du roi (king’s daughters), were part of a pronatalist program to build the population of France’s North American territories through reproduction. Furnished by the king with a dowry and a trousseau, Françoise married within two months of her arrival in Québec. Thirty years later, in 1698, Françoise was forty-seven-years old and no longer a child. She was marrying for the third time and had twelve children in tow. Her presence in New France represented the hope of the French Crown to build a prosperous, industrious, and moral society in overseas colonies through the forced migration of children. It became her responsibility to build the French empire with the continued birth of French subjects across the Atlantic.6 At the same time that Françoise and other girls were sent westward to North America, children like Paul Clairambault, travelled eastward to build France’s presence in the Levant, the Ottoman Empire, and Asia. Only thirteen

Introduction

5

years old at the end of the seventeenth century, Paul was part of Colbert’s jeunes de langues program that resided in Constantinople. Sent to learn various Ottoman languages, including Turkish and Arabic, as well as Ottoman culture and trading practices, Paul and his fellow language youths, acted as cultural brokers between France and the Ottoman Empire, exchanging ideas, languages, and cultures.7 Spread across the early modern French globe at the turn of the eighteenth century, these four children never met, conversed, or even knew about each other, but they were connected through their participation in social reform programs. During the early modern period, charitable institutions like écoles de charité, hospital-orphanage schools, and foreign schools proliferated throughout France and its colonies. Embedded in these social reform institutions were complex and intertwined relationships between the French state, the Catholic Church, the local wealthy elite, and the working poor. At the nexus of these institutions and their social reform projects was the early modern child. Children were a central focus for state, religious, municipal authorities, reformers, and their own families in early modern France in many regards: as key sources of labour, as future taxpayers, as potential criminals, as purveyors of immorality, as prospective colonial subjects, and as future fathers and mothers. Most importantly, these stakeholders saw children as sites of inculcation to improve morality, family relations, subjecthood, and trade. Employing “childhood” as a central category for historical analysis, Young Subjects interrogates how children and their experiences were essential to the successes and failures of related social welfare projects in écoles de charité, hospital-orphanages, and colonial programs. These reform projects intertwined childhood, commerce, work, fidelity, state formation, and global colonization with Catholic morality between 1520 and 1789. These forces took effect in major urban centres of metropolitan France, especially Lyon and Paris, as well as her colonies in Louisiana, Québec, and the nascent French empire in the east. Through these various reform projects, the church, the state, local elites, and parents acknowledged the importance of childhood as a formative period of development. Authorities attempted to mould a new generation of “moral, productive workers and faithful subjects of His Majesty”8 who could be counted on to act as agents of social change. Inculcated children were expected

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to impart the ideals of Catholic morality, hard work, and fidelity to the monarchy to their families, communities, and indigenous peoples in the colonies. Simultaneously, children could serve as important tools of surveillance, reporting the misdeeds of their family and communities to the authorities, thus enabling an improvement of the working poor literally from the bottom up. For working poor parents and their children, these reform projects offered new alternatives for future employment, additional conduits of poor relief, and other incentives from the state, church, and community. But, children did not always behave how authorities hoped they would. Children’s reactions to, participation in, and defiance of educational programs guided the trajectory of early modern French social reform and state building projects.

d oi n g t h e h i story o f ch i l d h o o d a n d yo u t h Young Subjects advances the study of childhood and youth in the early modern period by analyzing what society thought about children and by emphasizing children’s experiences in the past. Specifically, Young Subjects argues that social reform hinged on children’s individual compliance with and defiance of local and state-sponsored educational programs in charity schools, hospitals, orphanages, and imperial projects. The book’s title speaks to the layered power dynamics of youthful subjecthood. Educational institutions encouraged children to be representatives of the state, community, church, and empire. These programs taught important lessons about early modern subjecthood, emphasizing that youths were supposed to be simultaneously submissive to the authority of certain officials and institutions while also acting as independent agents. Youths were oftentimes manipulated into serving the ambitions of others through intensive inculcation methods, acting in ways that supported the overall goals of reform. But, children were also responsible for subjugating others and spreading ideals of subjecthood. Whether in their own homes or on different continents, these children were expected to coerce both children and adults into state-building projects in charity schools, foundling hospitals, and their communities or perform as tiny diplomats in the Ottoman Empire, Siam, and North America. In this way, children acted as agents of the state. At the same time, youths could – and did – make decisions that went against the wishes of the state, complicating social reform and state-building projects. By

Introduction

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examining how children negotiated patriarchal authority in households and in the greater community as agents of schools and state programs, Young Subjects provides a nuanced understanding of how early modern patriarchy operated, existed, and was, at times, contested. Since children left few written records of their own prior to the nineteenth century, scholars of early modern childhood and youth are often challenged by the extant source base. Although historians like Colin Heywood have used children’s ego-documents (like diaries, letters, memoirs, and even art) to explicate late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century children’s mentality, these records were exclusively the products of elite children.9 Poor children rarely left, if they even created, such documents and objects in the early modern period, making it very difficult for scholars to piece together children’s voices, thoughts, and experiences. The evidence base for scholars of childhood and youth has therefore been prescriptive sources that write about childhood, children, and youth. Peter Stearns remarked on this methodological reality, writing that the history of childhood is “mainly centered on what adults were doing or saying” about children, especially in the areas of law and policy.10 In these types of studies, children are present, but their own thoughts and actions are not necessarily the main focus of the work. In Bastards: Politics, Family, and Law in Early Modern France, for instance, Matthew Gerber documents many illegitimate children, though he does not emphasize those children’s experiences. Instead, Gerber traces the legal status of illegitimate children from the sixteenth century into the early nineteenth century using judicial codes, legal cases, and state documents to complicate our understanding of how legal theory and practice operated.11 Gerber’s book can be included in the history of childhood and youth because it reveals how society viewed the legal status of illegitimacy throughout various early modern centuries. Like Bastards, this book draws on a number of prescriptive and institutional sources to examine how sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century France understood, perceived, and codified childhood and youth. Young Subjects relies on educational treatises, schoolmasters’ guides and personal journals, the minutes from school administration meetings, hospital-orphanage records, early French imperial records, and other state documents gathered in numerous archives across France and the United States. These records illuminate the centrality of children to social and educational reform projects in

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France and throughout the greater early modern world. These sources specifically reveal the top-down methods that were employed to inculcate children. Taking inspiration from feminist and subaltern history,12 these sources can also be read “against the grain” to access children’s experiences. In 2008, Mary Jo Maynes argued that since many records about children do not “speak directly from their experiences,” historians “have trouble conceptualizing children and youth as historical actors.” Even though these documents do not include children “speak[ing] for themselves,” by reading between the lines we can access past children’s experiences.13 For instance, in reports from school administrators’ meetings, stories of children’s behaviour – both good and bad – can be recovered and analyzed. Occasionally, schoolmasters’ diaries include anecdotes from children that provide insight into a range of children’s emotions, anxieties, concerns, and desires. From hospital-orphanage records, a historian can largely piece together daily life in these institutions, providing a sense of how youths went about their days. By scouring baptismal records, marriage records, apprenticeship contracts, charity school records, and poor relief lists, it is possible to approximate how an individual lived in the early modern period. Although none of these records were authored by children, they provide myriad details about their lives and, occasionally, snippets of their voices. With this source material, I employ what Mona Gleason has referred to as “empathic inference” to “think deeply and critically about how young people might have responded” to situations in the past.14 Using “childhood” as a central category of historical analysis does not assume that children were always powerless. Nor were children consistently at odds with patriarchal power structures. Power was multidirectional and contingent. Social reform was not a strictly top-down process mandated by the French state, the Catholic Church, or the nobility. Instead, local communities, including children, were actively involved in social reform that addressed local problems while simultaneously helping to centralize the early modern state. Bianca Premo used a similar approach in her pioneering work, Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima.15 Examining eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms in Lima, Premo argued that children often held positions as “political agents” in early modern society. Inculcated according to the state’s ideals through educational institutions, legal reforms, and family reforms, these child actors worked to change society from

Introduction

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the bottom up. Following in this vein, Young Subjects provides a new model of how to think about the role of French children as central to social, economic, and political changes during the early modern period. Children were fundamental actors not only within the confines of the early modern family but also in the larger community, asserting agency as students, community members, and transimperial subjects capable of enacting social reform. The history of early modern childhood becomes much more complicated, dynamic, and complete when children’s experiences in and resistance to educational and social reform are scrutinized. In examining youth experience, the question of children’s agency looms large. In a society that supposedly demanded adherence to repressive, hierarchical, and patriarchal forms of social and legal organization, did children have the ability to “choose” to cooperate with these educational programs? The educational reform programs discussed in Young Subjects were a part of the patriarchal model that the French state, Catholic Church, and local communities idealized. Much scholarship of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France paints a political and social landscape that was avowedly patriarchal, both in ideology and in rhetoric. Yet, as historians like Julie Hardwick, Clare Crowston, Amy Erickson, and Laura Gowing have argued, patriarchy-inpractice was a much more nuanced system that individuals negotiated and maneuvered, particularly in relationship to the histories of women and gender.16 Within the confines of patriarchy, there were still opportunities to express individual autonomy. Early modern French children’s expression of agency parallels these scholars’ interpretations of patriarchy, agency, and coercion. Children were certainly coerced through intense inculcation methods to act as agents of the French state as well as their local communities. But, these same children were often viewed as and understood themselves to be cocreators and stakeholders in reform projects. The design of these programs awarded a substantial amount of agency to youths. Children could, and often times did, choose to cooperate with the educational objectives of certain institutions and state programs. Despite scholarly debates over the term’s usefulness,17 I employ “agency” to mean “autonomy,” revealing the ability of youths to make their own decisions in a patriarchal society. Although many scholars have considered youth autonomy to be expressed in direct opposition or resistance to patriarchy, such was not always the case. That interpretation limits our understanding of patri-

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archy to a binary struggle between oppressors and oppressed. By examining youth’s agency, we can better interrogate to what extent children were able to both shape and impact their experiences in the past, holding power in certain circumstances while lacking it in others.18 Much like women, youths often navigated patriarchy in their daily lives, maneuvering for and expressing power despite not being able to legally hold power themselves. In rejecting this binary approach, this book provides a more complex understanding of how patriarchal power in state building, social reform, and daily life was negotiated and articulated in regards to children, childhood, and youth.19 Throughout Young Subjects, institutions imbued with patriarchal power, like the French Crown, schools, and communities, provided the space for children to express their individual agency. This existed in both overt and subtle ways, even when it came at the expense of the state. Therefore, our understanding of how power dynamics operated within patriarchy becomes even more complicated with the interrogation of children’s experiences.

situat ing the history of children, ch i l d h o o d , a n d yo u t h Since one of the more common experiences children share is formal and informal education, childhood studies and the history of education often overlap. One of the most important contributions of educational historiography to childhood studies is that it has completely dismissed the “Ariès thesis,”20 which stated that childhood was not a formative period of development before the seventeenth century. From the prescriptive literature as well as from the experiences of children within the classroom, the medieval and early modern church, state, family, and community understood children as malleable beings that could be moulded to a society’s particular standards. Even if the results of education were not always to a society’s liking, it is clear that people perceived a difference between children and adults, seeing adults as less likely to change and children as more susceptible to influence from others. Scholars of early modern French education have predominately focused on the development of humanism in universities, private schools, and among tutors as well as the more controversial elite educational reforms of the late

Introduction

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eighteenth century that Rousseau and other philosophes touted.21 Absent from much of this historiography is the establishment of nonelite educational institutions and programs throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Other scholarship notes the novelty of nineteenth-century education focused on ordinary, untitled, and less privileged people.22 But, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century account books, rent books, receipts, passbooks, contracts, memorandums, and letters demonstrate that these ordinary people had, at the very least, a rudimentary education. Young Subjects, then, intervenes in the history of education to demonstrate how those from the lowest levels of society attained some form of literacy, numeracy, and vocational skills through the establishment and expansion of educational reform programs starting in the mid-seventeenth century. Historians of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, such as Gerald Strauss, Barbara Diefendorf, Elizabeth Rapley, and Jean-Pierre Gutton, have all mentioned the trend of wealthy individuals to establish charity schools and other educational programs throughout European urban centres.23 These works, however, do not focus specifically on the impacts and dynamics of these educational institutions. Instead, these scholars are primarily interested in explaining the larger impulse of charitable giving that the Catholic Reformation popularized, which included charity schools and other poor relief institutions. Chapter 1, “Investing in Children: Lyon’s Charitable Community,” benefits from these studies, illuminating how the Catholic Reformation influenced the first benefactors of Lyon’s charity schools. While those works primarily take a top-down approach to Catholic social reform, seeing it largely as a movement imposed upon the laity from the upper echelons of society, more recent scholarship has approached reform as a multidirectional process. With the expansion of religious instruction in rural communities that bolstered the spread of the Catholic Reformation throughout France, Karen E. Carter models a new analysis of the history of nonelite education in her 2011 book, Creating Catholics: Catechisms and Primary Education in Early Modern France.24 Using a variety of printed and manuscript catechisms created between the late sixteenth century and the late eighteenth century, Carter argued that in rural France, in particular, Catholic reform was “the result of interactions between the clergy and the laity.”25 Primary education afforded the clergy and local communities the ability to indoctrinate children and youths

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in ways that they saw fit. Carter not only provided a more nuanced interpretation of the Catholic Reformation but also complicated our understanding of absolutist state building, demonstrating that rural communities were able to orchestrate social and religious reform through catechism training. Young Subjects follows in Carter’s historiographical vein to explore how the French state as well as local communities simultaneously used primary education to inculcate ideas about good behaviour, work, and subjecthood. My book also benefits from and adds new dimensions to scholars’ revised notions of the “Great Confinement.”26 Michel Foucault named the period between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century the “Great Confinement” because he saw the rise of hospitals, asylums, orphanages, and poor houses as indicative of a state-orchestrated attempt to rid the streets of “undesirable characters” such as prostitutes, beggars, blasphemers, vagrants, and “the mad.” Instead of thinking of the proliferation of poor relief institutions as a way to rid society of undesirables, though, scholars like Kathryn Norberg and James B. Collins have reframed the Great Confinement as a period of experimentation in socialized care.27 Hospitals focused on the convalescence of the sick, the rehabilitation of recalcitrant youths, and the reformation of the poor. Young Subjects contends that the schooling and vocational training of the masses was also part of this nascent socialized care. Vocational training, in particular, occupies a large part of Young Subjects. A growing historiography on vocational education considers the relationship of youths to wider issues of labour history, guild history and organization, as well as innovations in education. Much of this work focuses largely on eighteenth-century Paris. Clare Crowston, for example, has explained that vocational training, including apprenticeship, was viewed as an essential part of a youth’s education in Paris.28 Additionally, Crowston demonstrated that apprenticeship and vocational training were not restricted to males since lace makers and seamstresses had their own, female-exclusive guilds. Her work has done much to expand our knowledge of the Parisian educational system, artisanal trades, guilds, and gendered assumptions of work. Young Subjects argues that many of the same training practices that Crowston described were present in seventeenth-century Lyon as well. Lyonnais charity schools provided inspiration for the administration, curriculum, and goals of charity schools and preapprenticeship programs throughout the French kingdom by the eighteenth century.

Introduction

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In addition to exploring children’s experiences within early modern education, this book locates children as historical actors in the state-building process. Most historians of the early modern state still work within William Beik’s provincial revisionism model of absolutism.29 Recent work on state building has expanded beyond the nobility to consider how “ordinary” people, especially women, were agents of both political and economic collaboration in the early modern state-building process.30 In a similar way to how Julie Hardwick argues that the lives, jobs, and daily experiences of women affected the larger processes of state formation,31 Young Subjects illustrates how poor children both consciously and unconsciously contributed to state centralization. Children functioned as agents of the early modern state, building France’s power in continental Europe, North America, and the nascent eastern empire. Children as agents of state building are especially apparent in the book’s discussion of the early modern French empire in North America. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister, secretary of the navy, and architect of seventeenth-century imperialist projects, harnessed children, both poor and wealthy, as agents of colonization through pronatalist agendas. Leslie Tuttle and André Burguière32 have examined the rise of pronatalism in early modern France, acknowledging a concerted effort on the part of the French Crown to build the population both at home and in the colonies by incentivizing the reproduction of large families. Young Subjects, though, brings attention to the youths that were essential to growing the North American population – filles du roi and the Mississippi Company’s forçats. This book also analyzes children in France’s trading posts in the Mediterranean, Levant, and Southeast Asia. Following in the historiographical developments of Junko Takeda, Ashley Bruckbauer, Natalie Rothman, and Eric Dursteler, Young Subjects considers how trade as well as political relationships were orchestrated between different parts of the early modern world.33 Examining French children’s roles as social, cultural, and economic brokers in the Ottoman Empire and Siam, Young Subjects adds new perspectives to the historiography of France’s eastward early modern empire. In particular, colonial authorities’ reactions to children’s experiences, whether successes or failures, abroad help explain the French orientalist view that dominated much of France’s colonization efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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defining the age of childho od Modern developmental psychology identifies seven distinct stages that children progress through during the first twenty years of their lives: infant, toddler, early child, child, preadolescent, adolescent, and early adult.34 Each of these stages is marked by changes not only in a child’s physical growth but also in a child’s mental and social maturation.35 With the proliferation of stages, age has become much more fixed in modern society than it was in the early modern period. Historians, unlike modern developmental psychologists, interpret age as more fluid and as a “historically contingent system of power relations and cultural expressions.”36 Numerical age can serve as a “chronological marker” or a “set of sign posts” imbued with social and cultural meanings that help measure one’s “progress through the life cycle.”37 There are severe limitations in thinking about childhood as only something marked off by numerical age, though. Rather than take this approach, scholars must analyze what constituted childhood, adulthood, and the sometimes grey area of youth in order to understand how historical societies operated and expressed power through contingent terms like enfant (child) and jeune (youth). Although early modern French rhetoric did not have the vocabulary to describe the significant physical, social, and mental developments contemporary psychologists use, enfant and jeune were employed simultaneously to describe anyone from a newborn to an economically dependent, single person in their twenties. Lacking distinct rhetoric to describe developmental stages, historians have to read the differences in childhood stages back into early modern texts. These early modern French usages of enfant and jeune, in turn, mean that most of the children discussed in this book are between the ages of seven and twenty-five. Childhood, however, was mutable in the early modern period. In fact, by examining the changing definitions of usages of words like enfant, jeune, fille, and garçon across seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dictionaries and legal documents, a dissonance between legal definitions and social practice becomes apparent. These sources reveal that life stages mattered far more than numeric age. Furthermore, the legal and practical definitions of life stages broke down across gendered lines. Patriarchy was just as pervasive in definitions of age as it was in familial organization, social hierarchies, and politics.

Introduction

15

For males, childhood was a liminal legal category, but females were always legally relegated to the status of a minor. Yet, for both girls and boys, age – and the types of power that came with it – was a malleable concept. In other words, depending on who was interpreting one’s social status, age could provide either power or oppression. The words enfant, jeune, garçon, homme, fille, and femme were also used to describe males and females, whether children (girls and boys) or adults (men and women). As already mentioned, enfant and jeune were used as synonyms to cover a wide range of children throughout the early modern period. In 1606, “a boy or girl in young age to about the age of seven or eight” could be called an enfant.38 While this was the official dictionary definition, people used this word to colloquially describe people as old as twenty-five. More commonly, though, it referred to individuals between infancy and about the age of thirteen or fourteen. Jeune was also defined in 1606 as “one in his first stage of life until about twelve or thirteen.”39 To better reflect the popular usage and connotations of these terms, in 1762, the dictionary updated the definitions of both enfant and jeune to “those in the flowering of life from infancy to apprenticeship or marriage, depending on sex.”40 This update was important because it accounted for the wider application of the terms’ use in popular speech. Furthermore, it acknowledged how childhood was gendered. Childhood transitioned into youth at the age of apprenticeship for males, whereas females extended childhood usually until marriage. Importantly, legal and economic status helped to define early modern French childhood in crucial ways. As a legal category, childhood was expressed as the age of “minority.”41 Throughout the French empire, jurists, notaries, and lawyers recognized that a minor was a “young man under the age of twenty-five who did not yet have the administration of his own goods.”42 The age of twenty-five corresponded to the ending of the tutelle or legal guardianship of children.43 The key to minority, then, was the lack of a legal identity. As a minor, boys were incapable of negotiating contracts or making other financial decisions independent of a guardian, parent, or master. Majority was a turning point when men ended their legal subjugation to another male and became an independent legal entity. But, despite the inclusion of twenty-five as the age of majority in legal codes, other records, like contracts, notarial documents, and apprenticeship

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records, demonstrate that this age was routinely overlooked. In fact, “minority” was an adaptable category. A young man could extend minority if he failed to sufficiently provide for himself. Conversely, he could shorten minority if he was able to establish himself early. For instance, François Martin, an embroidery apprentice, did not enter his majority until age twenty-nine. When he was twenty-four his parents placed him in a juvenile detention centre for failing to seek permanent employment after his apprenticeship contract ended. Upon being released at the age of twenty-nine with an employment offer, Martin entered his majority.44 His parents’ ability and decision to imprison him demonstrated the lack of power minors had over their own lives and the malleability of minority status. Unlike Martin, François Piqueret entered majority early when, at twenty-one, he was able to open his own successful linen shop in Lyon’s Saint Etienne parish. Viewed as being financially stable and independent, Piqueret negotiated trading contracts on his own accord and supervised a staff of fifteen.45 For both of these young men, it was not necessarily numeric age that determined majority status but their employment record and financial solvency. Before achieving the legal status of “majority,” economic distinctions marked the phases of male childhood. As an example, a boy legally became an apprentis, or apprentice, when he entered into formal training with a master craftsman. Although an apprentice was still technically considered a minor and a child, he was defined as “an older child who was in the process of being trained in certain craft skills.”46 He was in a liminal space as an apprentice – somewhere between childhood and adulthood. Modern rhetoric uses the word “adolescence” to describe this period. Apprenticeship usually occurred anywhere between thirteen and fifteen years of age, depending upon the male’s educational background and prior knowledge of the craft. During this period, which could last from seven to eleven years, males were referred to as apprentis or garçon. Used more colloquially, garçon also covered those who were of age to receive an apprenticeship but for a variety of reasons did not hold one. In 1606, garçon was used as a “wide term to describe any male child between infancy until his age of majority.”47 For boys, childhood was a temporary life stage when one received training and guidance in preparation for adulthood. Women, however, were relegated to the eternal status of a minor. Salic law denied women a legal identity since they could not own property and negoti-

Introduction

17

ate contracts themselves.48 Known as coverture, women had to be legally covered by a patriarch’s status. Coverture necessitated that women had to be dependent on a male figure, whether a father, husband, brother, uncle, or even son. The very words used to describe females demonstrate the omnipresence of patriarchy in social consciousness. Women only had two choices to describe their age: fille or femme. Both of these words described a woman according to her familial status. A fille was a daughter or a girl. A femme was a wife or a woman. Whether a child or an adult, women were subjugated to male authority through birth or marriage. Furthermore, these words insisted that a female left girlhood and entered womanhood through marriage. From 1606 to 1787, the definition of femme (woman) always included the attainment of marriage. A woman was “a female who was married.” There was not a specific age requirement as there was with men, just a prerequisite of marriage.49 Although marriage was an important life stage in both male and female lives, it only marked a transition in age for women. The definitions of homme and adulte between 1606 and 1787 mentioned nothing about a man’s marital status and, as such, a man’s adulthood was not solely dependent on his marital status. Alongside marriage, the status of “parent” created another categorical shift to adulthood. Parenthood, or motherhood, played a more impactful role in women’s life cycles than in men’s. Although women were still in a minor legal status, subservient to their husbands, the addition of offspring created a family hierarchy that placed mothers and fathers on higher tiers than their children. Parental authority extended to both men and women. So, one of the final ways a woman could become an adult was by having a child of her own. This carried a social responsibility that separated a “girl” from a “woman.” However, unmarried women who had a child were always referred to as fille, especially fille débauchée (debauched girl), regardless of age or number of children. This indicates that a female could only be considered an adult so long as she obeyed the hierarchical and patriarchal family model that society stressed. Important to note, though, is that reproductive abilities alone did not mark the end of childhood for men or for women. In fact, the assumption that childhood ends with “biological markers such as menarche” or puberty is a “particularly modern construction” that emerged in the late nineteenth century.50 Although achieving puberty meant someone was capable of procreation, social

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mores dictated that reproduction should only happen in marriage. The definitions provided for puberty in the seventeenth century were highly gendered, focusing only on males’ biological and physical development. There is no indication that this was anything more than a period of physical growth and surely not a period of sexual development. For example, in 1606, puberty was defined as “the development of a male’s genitals.” Instead of mentioning sexual maturity or even the possibility of procreation, this definition is shrouded in the most basic of biological terms. Furthermore, by mentioning only male puberty, it ignored the start of menses for women and the start of her fertile period. The 1694 definition became even more curious about sexuality since it omitted any reference to the development of sexual organs at all. Instead, it defined puberty as “a boy of about thirteen or fourteen and a girl of about twelve.” Finally, in 1707, the definition was expanded to acknowledge sexual development. Puberty was “the age at which sexual reproduction becomes biologically possible. [For] boys this is about fourteen years of age and [for] girls about twelve years of age.” Yet, even in this definition, the idea of sexual reproduction is only possible, not expected or encouraged. Perhaps reflecting changes in attitudes toward sexuality during the Enlightenment,51 in 1762, the definition of puberty included mention of sexual reproduction for both males and females. However, this same definition added that puberty was the earliest point at which marriage was legal and morally allowed, insinuating that sex was only allowed within the confines of marriage. As we know from the high number of illegitimate births as well as pregnancy at the time of marriage, many people were sexually active in their childhoods.52 But, according to the official definitions, sex was only deemed appropriate once a person was married and financially solvent – key markers for determining adulthood. Penetrative sex, then, was restricted to adults and not adolescents.53 Despite the deficiency in words to describe the various stages of childhood, adolescence, and emerging adulthood, early modern French society did understand the inherent differences and nuances between these categories. Early modern people understood that a child of eighteen was necessarily different from a child of eight, and they recognized children’s mental, physical, and cultural developments at different ages. The dearth of vocabulary for childhood stages further emphasizes the malleability of childhood’s definition that is discussed in several chapters. Therefore, the use of the terms “child” and

Introduction

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“children” are used throughout the book not in the strict modern sense but in the wider early modern French definitions of the terms. Young Subjects is divided into six thematic and regional chapters that follow a roughly chronological development of French childhood from the midseventeenth century to the French Revolution. The first chapter, “Investing in Children: Lyon’s Charitable Community,” explores how France’s “second city,” Lyon, sought to address local problems of immorality, social stratification, and economic sluggishness through the establishment of charity schools. Over the course of a century, the entire Lyonnais community sustained the charity schools in order to mould a new generation of moral and productive subjectworkers. The second chapter, “The Lyonnais Laboratory: Education Experimentation,” examines how administrators, local magistrates, the wealthy elite, and the working poor used these charity schools as laboratories of sorts. In these institutions, experiments with different pedagogies, techniques, and programs took place to prompt social reform among the Lyonnais poor, targeting children from specific backgrounds who could act as political, religious, economic, and social reformers. How youths impacted Lyonnais society is explored in the third chapter, “Children Spread Reform.” As agents of social change, Lyonnais charity school students played fundamental roles in the “educating, moralizing, and Christianizing”54 of Lyon’s “lower sorts”55 outside the classroom. It was the responsibility of students to act as teachers to their families, improving the lower sorts literally from the bottom up. Children and the institutions that served them became the nexus of social reform and concern. As a result of the children’s success, educational programs using the Lyonnais model quickly spread across the French empire, inspiring local municipalities, the French state, and even colonial administrators to view and employ children in new capacities. One place that this model spread to was Paris. The fourth chapter, “Parisian Children of the State,” uses the city’s enfants de l’état (children of the state) to argue that by their very nature as wards of the state, the French Crown and community could employ and repurpose orphaned and abandoned children in several different capacities. At the same time that enfants de l’état provided Paris’s economy and guilds with additional skilled workers, journeymen, and labourers, as Louis XIV’s 1670 edict stated, enfants de l’état also furnished the French state with an easily accessible pool of colonial habitants. In order to create workers for the city’s economy, the Parisian community, with support

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from the Crown, implemented a vocational training program on the Lyonnais charity school model for enfants de l’état at Hôpital de La Trinité. The fifth chapter, “Trafficking in Children: Pronatalism and Population in North America,” examines how many of these enfants de l’état were repurposed and sent to France’s colonies in North America. Cooperating with the French Crown, notably Colbert in the seventeenth century and later the Mississippi Company in the eighteenth, Parisian hospital-orphanages56 coerced the migration of enfants de l’état to Canada and Louisiana in order to populate France’s colonial territories. For Colbert and Louis XIV, the same solution applied to creating subjects abroad as it did for metropolitan France: incentivize early marriage and large families through pronatalism programs. Sending enfants de l’état to the colonies was a continuation of early modern pronatalist agendas that sought to populate the territories with adolescents who would then grow the French population through marriage and reproduction. These new migrants were to implant a French society in the North American soil, building France’s power abroad. The sixth chapter, “Children of the Empire: Cruxes of Imperial Strategy,” further examines the roles of children in France’s early modern expansion. This chapter contends that children were crucial to the French imperial plan not only in number but also as individual subjects. When abroad, children had to adapt to lives that were vastly different in experience from those in continental France. Often in order to survive and thrive in their new locations, children had to create hybrid identities that disregarded the rules and regulations the French state proposed. Whereas educational institutions were founded in North America to correct and combat the supposed loss of French identity among petits habitants, educational programs in the Ottoman Empire and Siam instigated and perpetuated a hybridity in French adolescent identity. In acting as cultural brokers, children displayed agency by learning about other cultures and self-fashioning identities as transimperial subjects, sensitive to both French and foreign cultures. These North American and Eastern educational institutions and the French children they served became cruxes of imperial French strategy in order to build France’s political, cultural, and economic power abroad. Children and the educational institutions that served them were sites of social reproduction where Catholic morality, fidelity to the monarchy, and hard work met in prescription and in practice. Even though they were re-

Introduction

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garded as the most subservient members of society, children were vital actors in the historical process. Children’s experiences in social reform programs – their enthusiastic participation in, tepid acceptance of, or adamant rejection of – helped guide the trajectory of state formation, religious reformation, and colonization.

1 Investing in Children: Lyon’s Charitable Community

 After another sleepless night thanks to the “incessant ruckus” caused by children “howling in the streets,” Claude Rigault, a silk and fine textile merchant, went to Lyon’s Hôtel de Ville in March 1662 to file a complaint with the city’s magistrates. He explained that for months a “number of unsupervised children” had been running up and down the streets near the Cathedral of Saint Jean, playing and screaming “at all hours of the day and night.” The children, both boys and girls around ten years old, were not only running in the streets but also “causing a great disturbance” to the community on a daily basis by “throwing rocks at well-behaved children, at women, at shopkeepers, at clergymen, and at [his] employees.” As a wealthy merchant, Rigault lived just off of the Place Saint Jean in an apartment above his shop. Although in the 1660s the wealthy occupied much of that neighbourhood in Lyon, a number of beggars, vagrants, and unsupervised children were frequently present in the streets, soliciting donations from the well-off residents. Though Rigault was annoyed by the sheer presence of these children, he was even more concerned by the fact that “neither at noon nor at midnight [were] these children’s parents in sight.” Allowing these children to frolic in the streets made them “susceptible to the worst vices [like] gambling, theft, begging, and [even] prostitution.” The Hôtel de Ville filed Rigault’s complaint, adding it to an ever-growing dossier that contained numerous other complaints of poor parents’ and children’s supposedly licentious behaviour.1

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The size of the Hôtel de Ville’s dossier indicates that complaints like Rigault’s were not uncommon. Since the mid-seventeenth century, wealthy residents’ complaints to the Hôtel de Ville regarding the immorality of Lyon’s poor had been on the rise. In the 1650s, only a handful of complaints were filed, with less than ten per year in most cases. Merchants and elites alike registered these complaints, usually criticizing drunkards and vagrants. But by the 1660s, there was a clear shift in the frequency of these reports. In fact, sixty-three similar grievances, fifty-eight of which were from different individuals, were included in the same dossier as Rigault’s report, indicating that this type of behaviour was starting to preoccupy elite consciousness as well as civil administration. However, the lack of immediate action on the part of the Hôtel de Ville suggests that the city officials may have been unsure how to proceed or they may have viewed this as a problem outside their jurisdiction. As the Church, by way of the Hôtel Dieu, was typically in charge of helping to alleviate the suffering of the poor through the Aumône Générale, the city magistrates may have seen this a matter to be addressed in tandem with the Church. Therefore, in the summer of 1662, the Hôtel de Ville transferred the dossier to the archbishop of the diocese of Lyon, Camille de Neufville de Villeroy, asking for his advice and cooperation in ameliorating the suffering of the poor and appeasing the rich residents. The most frequent concern, cited in thirty-two cases, of the dossier was the lack of adult supervision for poor children. This number of complaints is striking, suggesting that poor children were running wild in the streets of Lyon at all hours of the day, a cause for concern about both the morality and productivity of the poor. Almost immediately after receiving the dossier, Neufville, in consultation with clergymen, city magistrates, wealthy residents, and even poor workers themselves, embarked on a program of social rehabilitation and reform to curb immorality, eliminate vice, and, in effect, make Lyon a more moral and prosperous community. At the centre of early modern Lyonnais social reform stood children, especially poor children. The Lyonnais community sought to answer the city’s problems of immorality and economic inefficiency through the establishment of institutions focused on poor children’s vocational training. In an era where formal education was considered accessible only to elites, this was

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an innovative concept. The entire Lyonnais community, from city authorities, the nobility, merchants, clergymen, poor parents, and even the children themselves, worked tirelessly with each other to establish and sustain charity schools that educated children from a targeted section of the Lyonnais poor population. Through an intensive vocational education, Lyonnais charity schools could mould a new generation of “moral, productive workers and faithful subjects of His Majesty.”2 The Lyonnais community’s attention to charitable reform through charity schools did not occur in a vacuum. At the same time charity schools were being established, the Hôtel Dieu de Lyon underwent reform, expanding its poor relief services through the Aumône Générale that provided food, clothing, temporary housing, and even employment services to Lyon’s poor. Additionally, the Hôtel Dieu cared for, raised, and educated the city’s abandoned and orphaned children at the orphanage, La Charité. The very name of this orphanage underscores the extensive network of charitable services that existed during the seventeenth century. However, there was less community attention given to the orphans compared to the intensity with which the Lyonnais community focused on charity schoolchildren. The community’s attention to projects of social and religious reform during this period was much more pronounced compared to other early modern French cities.3 The Lyonnais community were the main instigators, organizers, and supporters of reform based around children. The state eventually intervened with monetary donations and political support, but these Lyonnais charity schools did not draw considerable funds from the Crown until the later eighteenth century. Instead, the Catholic Church, the local wealthy elite, merchants, and the poor provided the funds, donations, and the people necessary to establish and run the institutions that inculcated poor children. Furthermore, the purpose of these charity schools was not to simply build French subjects but instead to address local problems in the community with the menu peuple (lower sorts). By the 1680s, the écoles de charité had become cornerstones of Lyon’s social, political, economic, and religious topography. This chapter, “Investing in Children,” argues that the écoles de charité were community-sponsored projects. The establishment and continued existence of these schools depended on the wealthy elite and the poor, specifically poor parents. Rich archival sources including donation records, parents’ petitions for their children’s admission, entry interviews, school regulations, school-

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masters’ personal journals, and official meeting notes from the Bureau des Écoles des Pauvres are examined in this chapter. These sources reveal that the reasons for establishing and continuing support of these schools shifted from the seventeenth century’s charitable impulse to correct morality to the eighteenth century’s insistence on the creation of industrious workers that could sustain the Lyonnais and Rhône economies. At the core of these projects were early modern understandings of childhood and youth as key periods of intellectual and professional development. Through methods of inculcation, morality could be improved, economic issues abated, and youths could be moulded according to society’s standards. By focusing less on the role of the state in the establishment of charity schools and more on the community’s grassroots efforts, the chapter provides an additional example to Catholic Reformation studies that explore how the masses, not just the state, were able to initiate and implement early modern social reform.4 As Philip T. Hoffman has argued in the case of Lyon, the Catholic Reformation created a bond between the urban elite, merchants, the clergy, and the larger Lyonnais community that was expressed through the establishment of charitable institutions.5 Similarly, the subsequent pages examine the Catholic Reformation’s zeal for charitable giving.6 Through these charitable donations, elites were responsible for the rise of institutionalized social care and reform (such as hospitals, orphanages, and schools) throughout early modern France. This trend of elite giving was certainly part of Lyonnais society in the seventeenth century, as the donation records prove. But, over time, the Catholic Reformation’s influence waned, replaced by the more practical concern of creating a sustainable economy through the education of skilled workers.

lyon: a site r ipe for ex per imentat ion Lyon stood as a major economic hub for southeastern France as well as western Europe in the early modern era.7 The city benefited from its geographic location at the confluence of the Saône and Rhône rivers, which allowed for long-distance trade. Similarly, Lyon was at the convergence of a number of major overland trade routes from Paris, Flanders, Italy, and the greater Mediterranean region. As such, Lyon hosted a number of large festivals each year,

Figure 1.1 Map of Lyon during the eighteenth century

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attracting merchants, buyers, and peddlers to its bustling markets. Despite seeing tremendous growth in their economic status during the fifteenth century, by the last half of the sixteenth century, Lyon’s economic and political power was in sharp decline. As the Wars of Religion, which pitted Protestants against Catholics, spread across France, Lyon became a Ligue stronghold. Formed in 1576 by Herni de Guise after he unified several Catholic confraternities, the Ligue believed it was their responsibility to protect the French from the rise of Protestantism and the Huguenots. Using the doctrine extra ecclesiam nulla salus,8 the Ligue justified their fight against Protestantism as a type of crusade to combat heresy. At the same time that the group fought heresy, the Ligue took on a political dimension. The de Guise family used the Ligue’s support as a way to challenge the authority of the French Crown, especially that of King Henri III who they viewed as being too lenient and willing to placate the Huguenots.9 The de Guises and the Ligue hoped to usurp power from Henri III and establish a new dynasty on the French throne. Lyon’s position as a Ligue stronghold greatly hindered the city’s relationship with the Valois kings and it placed the city in a precarious political position as a symbol of disobedience toward the French monarchy. Even more problematic, Lyon’s economic foundations began to weaken as a result of the Ligue’s power. Although the Ligue promoted the internal and Catholic evolution of commercial institutions, the intercity and interregional trade that Lyon depended upon diminished. Merchants, especially those in the silk, lace, and textile trades whose clients included Parisian nobles and foreign elites, faced economic ruin as they were pressured to cease trading with those against Ligue power. Commerce quickly declined during the 1570s and 1580s. But, with the death of the “king of the Ligue,” the cardinal of Bourbon, Henri de Guise, in 1593, the resistance to royal authority the Lyonnais Ligue supported started to wane. By 4 September 1594 when Henri IV made an official visit to Lyon, the Ligue had completely lost power, and the city was brought back under the royal fold of the Bourbons. Lyonnais merchants, nobles, clergymen, civil administrators, and members of the honourable poor spent the seventeenth century reconstructing and rehabilitating their city to the position of glory that they perceived had existed before the Wars of Religion and Ligue influence. The local community spurred this reconstruction with the clergy, the elite, municipal authorities,

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and the poor working in tandem. Écoles de charité were both results of and solutions to this rehabilitation process. The city’s physical layout and architecture changed during this period as well. At the start of the seventeenth century, Lyon was situated primarily under the Fourvière hills on the right bank of the Saône. This medieval city was home to many wealthy families who built Renaissance-style hôtels particuliers on the rue du Boeuf, rue de L’Ainerie, and the Place Saint-Jean. But, living just south and north of these hôtels particuliers on the other side of the Place Saint-Jean in the south and Saint Paul church in the north, the working poor resided in cramped brick and mortar houses, connected by long walkways called traboules. Many of the city’s merchants created small workshops in these same areas, making the journeymen’s houses both homes and sites of labour. However, as the textile trade began to expand and the population rose, merchants found it necessary to move farther east, across the Saône to the peninsula known as the presqu’île. This new area attracted merchants because of the possibility of building larger workshops. By the middle of the seventeenth century, craftsmen, journeymen, and day labourers had moved to the presqu’île and with them, the large textile workshops. Lyonnais magistrates also decided to move the central municipal administration, the Hôtel de Ville, to the presqu’île in the 1640s. With both the Hôtel Dieu on the banks of the Rhône River and the Hôtel de Ville at the Place des Terreaux, the presqu’île became a central hub of Lyonnais civic life and administration. Nobles, merchants, journeymen, day labourers, and the poor used and supported these institutions, growing the city and the presqu’île throughout the early modern period to a population of at least 150,000 residents by the eighteenth century.10 Merchants controlled much of the social and political scene. In fact, the majority of people who were considered part of the highest echelon of Lyonnais society were usually untitled merchants, traders, or bank investors, many of whom were foreign born. Though these businessmen rarely held municipal offices like their titled noble counterparts, their “loans to the city and the king” afforded them “considerable influence in municipal affairs” and society.11 With the small number of noblesse d’épée, these merchants and bankers took the social place that upper nobility would usually have occupied. Lyon’s “lower” nobility consisted primarily of lawyers to the seigniorial and royal courts, native merchants with smaller enterprises, tax collectors, barristers, and

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magistrates of the sénéchaussée. Immediately underneath the lower nobility was a relatively prosperous and politically active group of artisans and merchants. This group accounted for a “type of middle-class”12 that was certainly above the working poor but not quite on the same social or economic standing as members of the elite. The majority of the population, usually referred to as the menu peuple, was at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Distinguished by poverty and financial insecurity, this group was composed of silk workers, day labourers, and journeymen who had little influence on city governance.13 This social hierarchy stood Lyon apart from other French cities. The power that Lyon’s mayor and aldermen held over the organization and conduct of urban crafts was unique. Most other cities were subject to heavy royal interference in their local economies. Lyonnais local government, called the consulate, had “ultimate jurisdiction over the personnel and technique of its industries.”14 The consulate, which was staffed by men from wealthy commercial families, not only had control over the types of industries developed in Lyon but the local laws and customs of the Lyonnais region. As such, the Lyonnais consulate was acutely aware of the needs of its community, relying on their own to fix their issues instead of deferring to the Crown for assistance. Though the Catholic clergy had its own hierarchy, ecclesiastical men were often regarded as distinguished members of society.15 The most prominent ecclesiastical member was the archbishop of Lyon, Camille de Neufville de Villeroy.16 Along with assistance from the Hôtel de Ville, the prévost des marchans et échevins (the provost of merchants and magistrates), and other elite men in Lyonnais society, Neufville helped guide Lyon’s rehabilitation process. As a religious leader, one of Neufville’s top priorities was to reform the clergy, improving their religious quality. Neufville hoped this would in turn reform the laity and ameliorate the conditions of the poor.17 This was Neufville’s goal when he hired priest Charles Démia,18 a former Lyon resident who had been working in the Saint Sulpice parish of Paris, as his advisor. Originally, keeping with Neufville’s focus on improving the clergy, Démia suggested establishing a seminary to educate parish priests since many of Lyon’s priests were, in Démia’s words, “rather ill informed.”19 Better educated parish priests would provide better religious services and more adequately educate their parishioners, leading to a trickling down of moral and educational improvement. But, at the same time he interviewed parish priests, Démia also spoke with many members of Lyon’s honourable poor.20 Démia

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was particularly interested in talking with children of the honourable poor since “they [were] the most innocent [and the] most vulnerable” residents.21 In late 1664, as plans started to solidify for the seminary, Démia met with nearly 300 of Lyon’s poorest children and adults individually. From these meetings, Démia realized the task of “moralizing” and “educating” the Lyonnais population was going to be a much larger project than simply furthering the education of the priests.22 Even though the priests were in dire need of reform and education, the situation and status of the Lyonnais laity convinced Démia that a more ambitious plan was needed to make noticeable changes to society. During his initial visits to the Saint George, Saint Pierre, and Saint Charles parishes Démia noticed that Lyon’s poor had “slid further into depravity” than he had realized when he agreed to serve as advisor.23 Even though the Church was “obliged to foster education” of the catechism and other Catholic tenets among “the ignorant laity,”24 Démia noted the majority of the Lyonnais population remained uneducated in both. Additionally, Démia remarked that the laity’s ability to read, write, and speak proper French was abysmal.25 Furthermore, Démia commented on the general behaviour of the poor as “striking” due to their lack of “civility.”26 Démia observed that many of the children wore tattered and soiled shirtdresses while the parents were equally ill dressed. Many of the parents seemed “eager to return to their illicit activities in the streets” while their children attended to various household duties, such as cooking or watching over their siblings.27 In many ways, Démia saw a society in distress. Children were taking on immense responsibilities in their families, caring for their younger siblings and disaffected parents. With this observation, though, Démia recognized that Lyonnais children were cornerstones to their families as caregivers, wage earners, and often times as authority figures for younger siblings. Most importantly, Démia saw that children were capable of, and perhaps used to, difficult or even hard work. Reflecting on his interviews and observations, Démia determined that a seminary “simply would not meet the demands of the growing problem in Lyon’s parishes.” Instead, Démia insisted that the archbishop immediately establish “a school that would cater to Lyon’s depraved and uneducated youth.”28 With this decision, Démia shifted the project of social reform to focus on children instead of adults. Children were at the forefront of reform because children were society’s future. If society were to change for good, Démia and

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the other reformers would have to invest in the future, not in the past. Neufville agreed, though he had doubts as to whether the poor would be willing to attend the schools and whether his wealthy donors would support a charity school for the poor over a seminary for the clergy.

fundr aising throug h fear Despite their concerns, Démia and Neufville began fundraising for the charity school immediately. Citing the synod of Trent’s 1563 edict to “promote Christian education,” Démia was able to acquire 10,000 livres from the Lyonnais clergy, an additional 5,000 livres from Neufville’s family account, and plenty of donations from Lyon’s noble and merchant elite in the form of cash, annuities, and buildings for schools. Interestingly, neither Neufville nor Démia solicited funding from the French Crown, choosing instead to keep this a community-funded project. Neufville and Démia also resolved that the écoles de charité would not be under the direct purview of the Church or the office of the archbishop as parish schools were in other cities because these schools would fulfill both religious and secular goals. To maximize efficiency in recruiting funds for the écoles de charité, Neufville and Démia established the Bureau des Écoles des Pauvres, an independent, civil organization responsible for the “establishment, administration, and oversight of all schools in Lyon.”29 Démia became the bureau’s director until his death in 1689. Originally, fear of social instability due to an increasingly visible poor motivated benefactors. In addition to financiers, Lyon attracted journeymen and day labourers to the textile trade, especially silk, and to construction projects that expanded the city during the seventeenth century. Even with the rise in commercial activity, many people, notably those who lacked adequate training in specialized skills such as silk work, blacksmithing, tanning, or construction, found themselves unemployed, especially during the winter. Seeing a rising number of unemployed people wandering the streets, the elite became preoccupied by the poor’s supposed idleness. Regardless of the elite’s perceptions, the actual unemployment rate of the seventeenth century was far less than that of the previous century and gradually decreased over time. In spite of the real numbers, the elite believed there was a large number of abandoned

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children, rising unemployment, and a morally corrupt poor. With this, Lyonnais elite felt social stability was on the verge of dissolving.30 Démia capitalized on these fears. In a 1668 proposal presented to Lyon’s prévost des marchans et échevins and “most important inhabitants of Lyon” Démia argued the “necessity and utility” of establishing schools in several of the city’s parishes to curb the licentious behaviour that preoccupied elite and noble consciousness. Assisted by four or more échevins, the prévost was the head of municipal affairs in the city and handled provisions; public works projects such as building courthouses, roads, and bridges; certain municipal taxes; and had jurisdiction over commercial matters.31 By approaching the prévost des marchans et échevins as well as the “most important inhabitants of Lyon,” Démia made this project a civil as well as an ecclesiastical concern. In this proposal, Démia played on the nobles’ fears and insisted that educating the poor should have been of the “utmost importance to the state” since the poor made up the majority of the population.32 Yet, the French Crown “totally neglected the importance of educating poor children from honest families.”33 Démia suggested that it was the community’s responsibility to step in where the Crown had been unable to support its subjects. Unlike the Foucauldian interpretation of a “Great Confinement” where the monarchy hid and enclosed the poor,34 this project sought to reform society through more public ways, organized at the will of the community. By providing an education to these children, the “debauchery which undermined social stability could be eliminated.”35 Echoing elite concerns, Démia emphasized that without a proper Christian education, youths could easily “fall into laziness … [and] become uncontrollable libertines, schemers, blasphemers, and fighters.”36 To assure “public tranquility” and “reduce the stress of the magistrates,” children had to be taught “in their infancy” to “respect God, magistrates, and law.”37 Through various pedagogical exercises, including reading and writing assignments,38 écoles de charité would emphasize the importance of being “good servants of God, loyal subjects of His Majesty, respectful members of their society, and hardworking, loyal labourers.”39 These initial appeals to the future of public safety and social stability were successful in raising support and funding from Lyon’s wealthy elite. Immediately after he presented this proposal, the prévost des marchans et échevins pledged to “support Démia’s ambitious but necessary goals in establishing schools” by

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“promising [to provide] up to 3,000 livres annually” for the “maintenance and support of the schools.”40 However, the prévost noted their continued support was contingent upon the establishment and satisfactory progress of the schools in “dissuading the menu peuple from depraved actions.”41 After the prévost des marchans and the échevins made their commitment, individual donations from the elite community quickly followed, with the benefactors initially citing moral reasons for their donations. Individual donations led to the establishment of the first Lyonnais école de charité in the Saint Pierre parish in 1670. Situated on the banks of the Sâone, the Saint Pierre parish was home to a large number of journeymen and workers but was not necessarily one of the city’s poorest parishes. According to a list Démia formulated in 1668, Saint Pierre was actually more prosperous than the Saint Paul, Saint George, Saint Charles, and Saint André parishes.42 However, the reason the school was established here instead of more needy parishes was because the initial benefactors specified that their donations were to be used for the establishment of a school in the Saint Pierre parish. These patrons held manifold motivations for wanting the first charity school established in Saint Pierre. First, the parish either included or was adjacent to several wealthy neighbourhoods on the western side of Lyon. In the 1650s the number of workers who resided in the neighbourhood, many of whom were employees of the benefactors, drastically increased due to the expanded presence of textile houses. Worried about the moral character of their neighbourhood with the increased number of workers in the area, the benefactors wanted to ensure that the children of their employees were properly educated and instilled with good morals. The schools would not only ensure a safer neighbourhood by promoting moral behaviour among children but also improve the elite’s neighbours, many of whom were also their workers. For example, Jean François Barrieu Meyzonne, a wealthy silk merchant, lived on the rue du grand côte that traversed the Saint Pierre parish. His workshop was located on the same road and consequently many of his workers also lived in the parish. By donating three houses on the rue du sel in 1670, Meyzonne ensured that a school would be established in Saint Pierre for the children of his workers. Similarly, Monsieurs de Moulceau and de Glorieu agreed to pay 200 livres annually as well as an initial 5,000 livres “for the establishment and maintenance of a school for the poor in the Saint Pierre” parish. These business partners “facilitated the export of silk, cotton, and vari-

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ous manufactured goods” to other regions of France as well as “the importation of common necessities” to Lyon. Of their fifty workers, forty-five lived in or near the Saint Pierre parish, making it the “best location” for a school in “order to moralize our lower people.” Following the lead of Meyzonne, de Moulceau, and de Glorieu, by late 1670, other merchants as well as a few members of the lesser nobility, including Jean Manis and Pencot du Tour, provided both buildings and the cash necessary to maintain the school. The following January the school opened with sixty students and an endowment of three large houses and almost 5,200 livres for expenses. By September 1672, benefactors were likely pleased as many, including de Moulceau, recommitted funds to the school, citing the improvement of the poor’s morality. In response, new people, such as wealthy widow Marie Claudel, started to donate in order “to continue the successful moralization of Saint Pierre’s inhabitants.”43 Following the success of Saint Pierre, other charity schools were quickly established under the elite’s zeal to eliminate immorality among the poor. Both the École Charitable de Saint Charles and the École Charitable de Saint Paul were founded in 1671 through donations from the local merchant elite and nobility. Since it attracted the most donations from the nobility, the records from the Saint Paul school paint a detailed image of this struggling parish in the seventeenth century. Nestled underneath the Fourvière hills on the banks of the Saône, Saint Paul was one of the poorest parishes in Lyon. Not coincidentally, according to abandonment records, more children were abandoned from the Saint Paul parish than any other parish in Lyon.44 The high rate of child abandonment combined with the large number of charitable donations to the parish indicates that the majority of Saint Paul residents were struggling financially. Saint Paul also suffered from increasing numbers of vagrancy. Rich merchants who lived in Lyon, especially around the Place du Change, consistently complained to the Hôtel de Ville about the rising number of poor people, adults and children, gambling in the streets, begging for money, and generally causing a ruckus. For wealthy residents, anxiety about the urban environment first took the form of complaints to the Hôtel de Ville and later, individual investment in community solutions, namely the charity schools. For example, Jean Besset, a lawyer, and his wife, Marie Cachet, lived in a house on the Place du Change that bordered the Saint Paul parish. In 1670, Besset filed a complaint at the

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Hôtel de Ville about the growing number of vagrants who lived near his street, making his neighbourhood “increasingly undesirable.”45 A year later, he and Cachet bequeathed “two small, but well-appointed and ideally located, neighbouring buildings” as well as an initial gift of 3,000 livres for the establishment of a charity school in the Saint Paul parish. The buildings had been part of Cachet’s dowry and the cash was from a recent “successful investment” of Besset. They donated the house and the money “in order to help alleviate the suffering of the poor [but] … most importantly, to safeguard society against immoral behaviour and activities.”46 For Besset and Cachet, supporting these schools would not only improve the character of the menu peuple but also make their neighbourhood safer. Besset and Cachet’s donations also make it clear that the community saw action as a necessary step to solving the problems that plagued their city. Making a complaint to the Hôtel de Ville did not result in the type of change or action that Besset and Cachet had wanted. Therefore, they went directly to the écoles de charité to institute change. The charity schools became a conduit through which the elite could initiate social reform and enact immediate social change. Although the monarchy had remained rather quiet regarding its support of the charity schools, Louis XIV demonstrated his implicit support through lettres patentes to the bureau in 1673. However, the first clear commendation the French Crown made was not until 1679, nearly fifteen years after the project began. In a letter addressed to the “Maîtres des Écoles et Bureau de Saint Charles,” Louis XIV explained that according to his intendant as well as numerous other noblemen, “since the establishment of these schools [in Lyon] there has been a visible change in the popular conduct of the people.”47 To encourage progress, Louis XIV bequeathed a small building to the École Charitable de Saint Charles and 3,000 livres to be used at other écoles de charité, including Saint Pierre and Saint Paul. The building and funds provided by Louis XIV allowed Saint Charles to expand its student population significantly, as well as to hire two new schoolmasters in 1680.48 For Louis XIV this donation was a way the monarchy could extend its reach directly to the lower sorts in an effort to centralize authority and power. By donating to the bureau, Louis XIV reminded the organization of its subservience to the Crown and reiterated that the organization existed because Louis XIV had granted it permission to exist. In return, it was implied that charity schools would educate children to be loyal subjects of the French Crown. Educating children to be

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loyal subjects would strengthen monarchical power and influence, especially in a provincial city far from the immediate influence of Louis XIV’s court and that had a history of being at odds with the Crown. Although the Crown’s donation and intervention were important, écoles de charité were primarily the community’s responsibility. Without donations from wealthy individuals the schools would not have been able to open. Fearful about the future of their neighbourhoods, wealthy nobles, merchants, and magistrates agreed with Démia that it was the community’s responsibility not only to care for the poor but also to change the poor, moulding them into more acceptable subjects with solid morals. These elite individuals understood that one of the only ways to see a change in the conduct of the poor was to become actively involved in the process of social reform through charity schools concentrated on children. Although fear of immorality spurred these initial investments, over the course of the eighteenth century elite society began to understand that the charity schools provided more than moral instruction to the poor.

creat ing wor kers Observing how the charity schools educated poor children in both Christian ideals and advantageous skills, the wealthy elite began to think of the schools not solely as sites of moralization but also as sites of vocational training for the poor. Slowly, merchants and manufacturers utilized schools’ resources by hiring former students and having current students serve as quasi apprentices, allowing the benefactors to witness firsthand how these charity schools moulded their students into loyal and efficient workers. As crime rates and unemployment steadily dropped over the course of the 1670s and 1680s,49 what became an even greater incentive for donors was the economic advantage that these students and schools promised. The bureau’s administrative records, assembly meeting notes, and donation records indicate that in the eighteenth century the focus on correcting “immoral behaviour” was of secondary importance to the more pressing issue of creating manufacturing houses and a strong Lyonnais economy that was backed by “good fathers and good mothers.” The eighteenth-century donation records are incredibly telling as to how the community saw poor children –

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as capital. Benefactors understood that by improving vocational education among the population, their workers would eventually be more qualified. For instance, in 1734 Messire Philliberte de Chastillon, a textile merchant, donated a house in the Saint Paul parish for the expansion of the charity school there so that “more children may be educated in textile production.”50 His son, Nicolas de Chastillon, inherited the business in the 1740s and noted in a donation record of 2,000 livres, paid annually for ten years starting in 1744, that his father “had regularly employed former charity schoolchildren thanks to their excellent skills and craftsmanship.” Nicolas resolved to hire these schoolchildren as they “make excellent embroiderers.”51 Charity schoolchildren provided the skilled employees necessary to grow the de Chastillon business over the course of the eighteenth century. Other eighteenth-century donation records indicate this type of economic incentive for support of the schools. Interestingly, both boys and girls were considered capital, with almost equal donations made to girls’ schools as to the traditional écoles de charité. For example, Demoiselle Louise de Camot, widow of a prosperous lace producer, donated 50 livres per month to the École du Travail in 1760 because the girls “could later be employed as lace makers.”52 Female work, especially in the textile trade, was viewed as incredibly important to the Lyonnais economy. Women provided the dexterity necessary for intricate embroidery, crocheting, and lacemaking. The vocational education that children received made these schoolchildren important capital to merchants wanting to grow their business. Aside from preparing possible permanent employees, in the eighteenth century in particular, merchants, craftsmen, and even noblemen and women would go to the écoles de charité to find temporary workers. The Bureau des Écoles became essentially an early modern temp agency. The assembly records are full of examples of merchants requesting help with temporary projects, such as leather tanning, cleaning out their storehouses, or helping with building projects to expand the business. Noblemen and women also went to the charity schools to find domestic servants and valets.53 For example, in 1705 Marchand Tupin asked for a schoolchild who “could write and count” to be employed in his boutique while his associate was recovering from an illness.54 Similarly, in 1712, Messire Carrette, an attorney, needed to find a temporary domestic servant while his regular domestic was visiting her ailing father in

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the nearby village of Saint Etienne.55 As these records indicate, charity schools became centres not only for education but also for finding employees. The community’s faith in these institutions was evident both in their use of the employees and from the continued high rate of donations in the eighteenth century. All eighteen charity schools received upwards of ten donations per week ranging from 20 livres to more than 20,000 from 1710 to the late 1770s.56 In 1766, the Bureau des Écoles des Pauvres created a “Projet de mémoire pour les écoles” to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the bureau and écoles de charité in Lyon. A letter written from the directeur des écoles in 1764 to the archbishop of Lyon stated that thanks to the cooperation of the Lyonnais community, the Catholic Church, and his majesty “no one can ignore the number of manufacturing houses established in Lyon since the establishment of the schools that [give] Lyon such riches and pride.”57 Here, the directeur des écoles acknowledged the important role that the schools had in the development of the Lyonnais economy by educating children in the arts and crafts of textile production. The directeur continued that “without the support of the merchants, manufacturers, and others [who] employed schoolchildren as their domestics, apprentices, journeymen, and labourers”58 the schools would not have succeeded. Thanks to the community, these schools were established and children became a focus of social reform. But the Lyonnais community included not only the noble and wealthy elite but also the poor.

pa rents’ pa rt icipat ion The Lyonnais nobility and wealthy merchants provided the essential capital to construct the charity schools, but without the cooperation and assistance of poor parents, the educational reform projects would have been fruitless. Since parents rarely left written records, their incentives in supporting the écoles de charité are more ambiguous and harder to locate than those of wealthy benefactors. Much of the information about poor parents comes from the same sources as charity schoolchildren: petitions for admission and home visits. Both sets of documents recognize that poor parents had a choice in sending their children to these charity schools and, therefore, in the formation of social reform.

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Charity school recruitment occurred in several different ways over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Initially, the bureau, in consultation with the parish priest, reviewed the poor relief lists of every parish, noting the poorest families. The parish priests also made recommendations about which families they were worried about, either for moral reasons or because the family had been struggling financially. Using these lists in the 1670s, Démia and other bureau members approached families directly, pleading with them to send their children to the charity schools. With the exception of “two particularly obstinate” fathers from the Saint Charles parish, all of the fathers Démia and schoolmasters met with agreed to send their children to the school and participate in the social experiment.59 Poor parents’ participation became widespread as charity schools grew more popular after charity school graduates were hired as temporary day labourers and received full apprenticeships. By the 1680s, Démia and the bureau no longer had to personally recruit students. Instead, parents went to their parish priest, the Hôtel Dieu, or the bureau directly and petitioned for their child’s admission to a charity school. These petitions for admission were formulaic documents, listing the parents’ names, their occupations (if applicable), their child’s age, the number of children and household members, and the state of their financial affairs. In addition to this information, the petitions almost always ended with the statement that the parents “only wished to create a better life for [their] children, yet were unable to do so because of [their] own ignorance.”60 This last line underlined an important sentiment that the bureau wanted to see from poor families: parents were willing to make changes to better their families and their children’s futures but were unable to do so given their circumstances. It also implied that despite being authorities in their own families, parents recognized the authority of schoolmasters in education and job preparation. For many Lyonnais families, though, sending a child to a charity school may not have immediately made sense since the family would lose a source of cheap labour and steady income. To counter these disadvantages, écoles de charité offered many incentives to poor families. The immediate benefits included additional free bread; alms on Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and other saints’ days; clothing for their children, and guaranteed medical assistance from the Hôtel Dieu. These terms were discussed with parents at the first home inspection, called the visite générale, during which schoolmasters drew

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up a contract with parents. These contracts, though usually no more than three lines long, reveal much about parents and their incentives. Schoolmasters (sometimes escorted by a civil deputy depending on the parish) arrived with presents for the family, including “several loaves of bread, clothing, an item for the father’s craft, and another gift, usually paper and ink for the student.”61 According to the règlemens (regulatory codes) these initial gifts were to “convince the parents of the charitable spirit of the schools.”62 In the Saint Charles parish, most schoolmasters agreed to send “additional loaves of bread” to families “two times per month” and to “pay for all costs of the student’s education, including clothing and supplies.”63 In subsequent visits, schoolmasters would often note that families “were extremely appreciative of the extra bread” and that “it was absolutely necessary for their survival.”64 At a meeting of the bureau in December 1681, M. Durand, a schoolmaster in the Saint Paul parish, indicated that parents were “begging [him] to allow their children to enter the school” so that “the families could receive extra bread” and “other gifts” that were not included “in regular alms to the poor.”65 Lyon’s poor families began to see the écoles de charité as conduits through which additional resources could be obtained. In addition to bread, clothing, and other alms certain families, especially bakers, butchers, and blacksmiths, could also receive funding for their shops. If the child’s family agreed, one or two advanced students would be sent to work in their shops, learning the trade in a hands-on environment. In addition to the supplemental workers, the family also received “appropriate compensation”66 for educating these children in the particular trade. This way the family was provided with free labour to make up for any loss sustained by the absence of their own child. Furthermore, the bureau paid the father to use his facilities and to impart knowledge of the trade to the students. As the schools grew in size and popularity across Lyon, placement became more competitive and fewer students in more advanced years were being placed in charity families’ workshops. However, it appears that many of these families were retained for schoolchildren in the lower years to gain experience before being placed as an apprentice in a better workshop.67 Additionally, the écoles de charité made efforts to employ the services of their students’ families in constructing and renovating the schools. For instance, at the Saint Pierre school in 1678 four masons were chosen to help with the renovation of a schoolhouse “because their daughters and sons were going

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to attend the school.”68 Similarly, if a school had a baker’s child enrolled, that school typically bought some of its bread from that baker. In this way, schools also helped to bolster the economy by employing the school’s parents and possibly provided parents with new clients. It also emphasizes how the écoles de charité sought to engage the entire community in the project of social reform. Employing parents furthered their involvement with and approval of the schools and their children’s education, diffusing the goals of the charity schools further into the poor community. Aside from the material advantages of sending their children to these schools, the visite records also indicate that parents felt the schools might help improve their family’s social status. Specifically, these schools were able to place students in better apprenticeships than they would have been able to secure themselves. For instance, the Piget family told the Saint Paul schoolmaster in 1681 that their son “secured a highly coveted apprenticeship in printing”69 that he would not have otherwise received. Additionally, in the Saint Charles parish, the Lemercet family indicated that their eldest son who had not been educated at the écoles de charité did not have “as nearly as good of an apprenticeship” as their second son who, as a result of his education at the charity school, was serving “as an apprentice for a successful blacksmith.”70 Parents saw the écoles de charité as a way for their children to gradually move up the social ladder, improving their family’s reputation and economic status. Though they did not have delusional expectations of their children becoming noblemen or serving in a high political position, many parents believed the schools could help their children escape the confines of poverty and gain financial security. Regardless of their reasons for participation, it is still noteworthy that by the end of the 1680s the bureau received well over 500 petitions for admission per year.71 It is clear that parents acknowledged the important role charity schools played in educational reform projects that focused on their children. Although the majority of petitions for admission are no longer extant, the bureau noted the number of petitions each year in their records and retained about forty copies of petitions from 1680 until the 1770s. Importantly, a petition for enrolment did not guarantee a child’s enrolment. The register of petitions named many children who never appeared on class lists, indicating that the bureau was selective in who they selected to attend. From the records it is clear that this was a targeted, selective plan, focusing on choosing children

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from specific artisanal and social backgrounds. However, this did not dissuade parents from choosing to participate in and support écoles de charité. Donation records, bureau assembly notes, and parents’ participation and cooperation all emphasize the roles that different parts of the Lyonnais community played in the creation of these schools, and therefore, in social reform. This was not a project that was mandated from the monarchy and trickled down to the provinces. It was a community-sponsored project aimed at improving the conditions of the poor through the inculcation of the city’s children.

2 The Lyonnais Laboratory: Educational Experimentation

 Jean Claude Anjou was eleven years old when he first walked through the doors of the École Charitable de Saint Pierre in 1698. With his father, a tondeur de soye,1 and his mother in tow, Jean Claude entered the school’s courtyard. There he likely saw children of neighbours and friends scurrying to get to their classrooms on time for morning prayers – hurrying as much for religious devotion as to avoid chores that afternoon. Welcoming Jean Claude and his parents to Saint Pierre, the headmaster ushered the family into his office, a small chamber on the ground floor of the donated house, to begin the entry interview. Although the headmaster had Jean Claude’s petition for admission, he still needed to conduct an interview with the family in order to officially record Jean Claude’s information into the school’s registers. The headmaster started with the important details – the child’s full name, age, father’s name, and father’s profession – all of which Jean Claude’s parents verified. Next, the headmaster had the family confess that they were baptized and confirmed Catholics, committed to the faith. His parents then marked the register next to Jean Claude’s name, signifying that they agreed to routine home inspections by the bureau three times per year; to regularly attend church and all feast day masses; and to abstain from sin and immorality as much as possible. Failure to abide by these standards would result in their child’s dismissal from Saint Pierre. The headmaster then assigned Jean Claude’s parents a home inspection date. He explained that at this visit a contract would be drafted

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between the schoolmaster and the parents regarding the responsibilities of both parties in the new schoolchild’s education and care.2 After bidding his parents farewell, Jean Claude took several diagnostic tests that measured his knowledge of reading, writing, mathematics, and the Catechism. The headmaster also asked Jean Claude if he knew any particular craft skills. Jean Claude then demonstrated the proper way to clean and cut unrefined silk – skills he learned from his father. The headmaster used the results from these diagnostic exercises to place Jean Claude into the appropriate class or bande. Since Jean Claude displayed an adequate knowledge of the Catechism, could read and write, exhibited some knowledge of mathematics, and had familiarity with silk he was placed into the third bande. Jean Claude then started his first day of school at Saint Pierre, joining boys and girls from his parish in a Lyonnais educational experiment. Jean Claude spent two years at Saint Pierre, developing his knowledge of reading, writing, mathematics, the catechism, and craftwork. At thirteen years old, Jean Claude completed his education and went to work in Marchand Claude Vautel’s silk shop. With ever increasing demands for silk in the rising Lyonnais textile economy, Claude Vautel asked the bureau to find him a young, skilled wage-labourer. The bureau recommended Jean Claude as an excellent fit for the job. Vautel employed Jean Claude for two years, but this was not an apprenticeship as thirteen was too young to officially be an apprentice.3 Therefore, when Jean Claude was almost fifteen he began looking for an apprenticeship. Although Vautel did not take apprentices himself, he knew of several men looking for one. The bureau also stepped in to help find Jean Claude an official apprenticeship, and on 30 April 1701, Jean Claude signed a contract with Antoine Gardier, a maître tondeur de soye. As was customary, Gardier agreed to apprentice Jean Claude for five years, noting that Jean Claude’s “skills were advanced for a boy of his age.”4 According to apprenticeship records, in 1706 when Jean Claude Anjou was twenty years old, he successfully completed his apprenticeship with Gardier.5 Almost thirty-five years after completing his apprenticeship, it appears Jean Claude was still working in the silk trade as a J.C. Anjou, registered as a compagnon de soye, in La Grande Fabrique de Lyon’s 1739 register of maîtresouvriers. Aside from this record, Jean Claude all but disappears from the available documents. He never appeared on a Lyonnais parish poor list,

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the Aumône Générale, or at the Hôtel Dieu indicating he never received institutional poor relief. To the Bureau des Écoles de Pauvres, schoolmasters, and the elite donors that supported the écoles de charité, this outcome was ideal. He was from a working poor background, secured an apprenticeship, completed that apprenticeship, obtained employment, and he never again relied on the city or the French Crown’s poor relief services. He likely became a loyal, industrious, and moral Catholic worker who helped support the Lyonnais economy and community, all thanks to the charity school education he received as a young adolescent. Jean Claude Anjou would have been considered the model charity schoolchild. His adult life seems to have fulfilled goals the charity schools and their sponsors envisioned when establishing these institutions. Jean Claude Anjou’s experiences at the École Charitable de Saint Pierre, from his entry interview with his parents, to the diagnostic tests, to the vocational education, and finally to his placement and assistance in obtaining a job and apprenticeship, raise a number of important interpretive issues. First, the process through which Jean Claude was admitted to Saint Pierre was standard admitting procedure. All students who entered an école de charité were subject to the same interview with their parents, given the same diagnostic tests, and placed in bandes based on their abilities. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the bureau, under the leadership of reform-minded headmaster Charles Démia, drafted an ever-evolving document of rules, regulations, and pedagogical practices that became known as the règlemens. Carefully taking the experiences and advice of schoolmasters and schoolchildren into consideration, the regulations adapted and evolved to fit the needs of Lyonnais children. Second, Jean Claude’s narrative raises questions about the role of pedagogy in French society. He received an education with an experimental curriculum that fostered vocational training in tandem with a more traditional education in reading, writing, and arithmetic. This curriculum was a large part of the experimental règlemens and hinged on the students’ reception to and participation in the application of pedagogical methods. The change from an educational model focused solely on religious and moral instruction to one that emphasized vocational skills was an important shift spurred by benefactors’ donations as well as by demand from children and parents. Third, Jean

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Claude’s history emphasizes the role that Jean Claude played himself in the direction of his life and in overall social reform. Without his parents’ and his own commitment to the educational program in écoles de charité, he would not have received the type of job and apprenticeship he did. It was up to charity schoolchildren to apply what they learned at the écoles de charité to their lives outside of the classroom walls. All of these issues hinge on the notion of early modern children as agents of social reform. Power did not just flow downwards from the schoolmasters to the children but upwards as well. Children’s continual participation and frank assessment of the experimental curriculum made these schools and the social reform that followed possible.

écoles de char ité and educat ion Although charitable schools had been established both in Rouen and Paris earlier in the seventeenth century, Lyon’s charity schools were largely new kinds of institutions. Other charitable schools focused primarily on catechism training and the basic literacy skills that demanded. Administrators in Lyon, however, saw the classroom as a laboratory and the students as guinea pigs. Schoolmasters conducted pedagogical experiments to varying levels of success. Children’s agency, actions, behaviour, resistance, failure, and attainment of knowledge impacted every aspect of this experiment. Children and the institutions that served them became the nexus of social reform and concern in Lyon. French historians have long acknowledged the existence of écoles de charité, lumping them into the category of petites écoles, or primary schools. But petites écoles, a term coined by and often employed in early modern French society, is a problematic label for the wide number of schools it encompasses. In addition to écoles de charité, petites écoles also include parish schools and tuition-based primary schools. Lyonnais écoles de charité broke with both tuition-based primary schools and parish schools to provide a free, specialized vocational-heavy education to a targeted child population with families from specific artisanal and trade backgrounds. Although some works, like Roger Chartier, Marie-Madeleine Compère, and Dominique Julia’s L’Éducation en

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France and Karen Carter’s Creating Catholics attempt to make distinctions between the different types of petites écoles, the differences of parish schools, charity schools, and tuition-based schools remain imprecise.6 Historians of Lyon, such as Sarah Curtis, Jean-Pierre Gutton, and Andre Latrielle have recognized the unique qualities of the Lyonnais charity schools. Each has discussed how the charity schools answered some of Lyon’s most pressing problems in regards to poverty and religious instruction. Yet, for these scholars, the Lyonnais charity schools and schoolchildren are not necessarily the focal points of their works. Instead, these historians are more interested in Catholic reform and studies of societal poverty at large.7 This chapter, though, sees charity schools as central pieces in social reform and the students as important agents of change. Despite recognizing the existence of écoles de charité, whether in Lyon or elsewhere, investigation of primary education still remains marginal in the historiography of early modern education and pedagogy. Instead, this historiography is more concerned with the history of the early modern university system and elite, secondary education.8 For example, Mark Motley’s Becoming a French Aristocrat, Barbara Whitehead’s Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe, and Dena Goodman’s Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters all describe the practices of elite education, especially in relation to women, at the end of the seventeenth century and through the Enlightenment period.9 These works explain how elite families valued education and saw their children as commodities that had to be properly cultivated for future marriage alliances and patronage networks. Basing their monographs on elite pedagogical guides, private tutors’ records, student journals, memoirs, as well as on material culture, such as writing desks and paper, these studies employ evidence that only speaks to the education of the elite. But, much like elite families, poor families also saw their children as important and potentially valuable commodities. With such focus on elite education either at the primary, secondary, or university levels, it is not surprising that charity schools, or any type of nonelite education, have not received considerable historiographical attention. Of the work that is available on nonelite education, much can be considered institutional histories of particular types of schools. There is very little discussion of the daily practices of school life, children’s experiences within these schools, or the differences between ideal pedagogy and the practice of pedagogy. For example, Nicholas Orme’s article “For Richer, For Poorer? Free

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Education in England” and Roger Chartier, Dominique Julia, and MarieMadeline Compère’s L’Éducation en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècles shed light on the existence of nonelite educational institutions in England and France, such as charity schools and local primary schools, but they do not provide information about the experiences of children within these institutions.10 Instead, they simply lay the preliminary steps for further investigation into nonelite education. This chapter, “The Lyonnais Laboratory,” goes beyond the scope of Orme, Chartier, Julia, and Compère to analyze nonelite education in charity schools, exploring and explaining the daily practices within the schools, concentrating on children’s experiences and their roles both in the classroom and in the community. In doing so, this chapter follows a trend in Italian educational historiography, one that pays much more attention to the experiences of children within primary schools by examining and dissecting the ideal and actual practices in the development of règlemens, class lists, journals, and children’s worksheets.11 This chapter also explores the significance and practice of informal education, a critical arena that is often elided in the historiography of education. Much early modern learning occurred outside of the school walls through education within the home, during apprenticeships, or through “on the job” experience. Clare Crowston has made an important, though preliminary intervention into the historiography of informal educational institutions in early modern France with the publication of her 2005 article “L’apprentissage hors des corporations: Les formations professionnelles alternatives à Paris sous l’Ancien régime.” In describing the formal and informal education of apprentices, Crowston notes that “formal education” in institutions such as charity schools or petites écoles was often “the first step”12 required to obtain a good apprenticeship. “The Lyonnais Laboratory” furthers this notion and also explores how children themselves fostered informal education in the household and Lyonnais community. Additionally, his chapter provides a new early modern French model of the history of childhood and children by contending that children, acting as agents of their local community, were central to the social, economic, and political changes that occurred in the early modern era. First established as community projects to improve the moral conditions and behaviour of the working poor, by the eighteenth century, charity schools became critically important sites of

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vocational training. By providing detailed examples of children’s experiences in the charity schools, this chapter offers insight into children’s lived experiences in the early modern era. As agents of social change, these children played essential roles in the “educating, moralizing, and Christianizing”13 of Lyon’s lower sorts outside the classroom as well. Students had the responsibility to act as teachers to their families, improving the lower sorts literally from the bottom up.

coll abor at ion in dr aft ing the rég lemens Children were an important part of this community and the collaborative process of creating these social reform institutions. Although Démia is often cited as the sole author of the règlemens, the drafting of this living document involved a cacophony of voices from schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, parents, and schoolchildren in its creation and perfection over the course of nearly one hundred years. For example, Antoine Bouillet, Saint Paul headmaster and general bureau member, spoke at length at the June 1675 assembly meeting about the difficulty in “achieving conformity” to the standards set forth in Démia’s règlemens. In addition to lacking necessary equipment and supplies, such as blackboards, books, Bibles, writing instruments, and abacuses, Bouillet noted that children, by their very nature as children, were often capricious, restless, and ill-behaved. With support from the Saint George schoolmaster, Bouillet asked Démia to amend some of the regulations to better suit “poor children who had to first perfect the basics of civility” before they could learn to “read, write, or count.” Receptive to these suggestions the directeur resolved to address the problems of the règlemens regularly and, in cooperation with the rest of the schoolmasters, to find solutions and make changes when necessary.14 At almost every subsequent bureau meeting, the assembly discussed how their lessons were progressing, noting which pedagogical exercises were working and which needed revision. Bouillet’s complaints and the actions taken afterward to rectify his and others’ concerns underline the novel, experimental, and collaborative process of establishing charity schools and a curriculum for social reform. Drafting the règlemens began in 1674 when Démia asked the prévost des marchans et échevins for funds to develop a curriculum for the écoles de char-

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ité that would stress “the acquisition of skills.”15 Although working poor children needed to learn how to read, write, and count, they also needed training in certain crafts that could prepare them for apprenticeships and trade. By developing a curriculum that stressed this, the schools had the potential to “not only produce moral, obedient subjects and Christians” but also “could instil a love of work” in the children “from a young age.”16 The result would be “loyal, efficient, and productive workers for the workshops, merchants, and manufacturers of Lyon.”17 These “hardworking workers” were “essential to Lyon’s industry if it were to survive”18 and thrive. In response, the prévost des marchans et échevins as well as several notable residents, including Sieur Jean François Barrieu, Nicholas Ponchon, and Pierre Bouillet, provided Démia with 4,000 livres to “develop a curriculum that would prepare students for their future jobs in the arts and trades.”19 In the introduction to one of Démia’s earliest handwritten drafts of the règlemens, he promised to “shape honest, industrious, and efficient workers” at the écoles de charité.20 To prepare students for “apprenticeships, commerce, and service to the state,” students were educated in five major subjects: religion, reading, writing, mathematics, and craft skills necessary to particular trades.21 Although Démia’s règlemens borrowed some pedagogical practices from guides like the Jesuits’ Ratio Studiorum (1559), it broke with traditional pedagogy by being suited for a much different audience and purpose.22 The règlemens specified that there was no need to provide charity schoolchildren with an education in Latin or Greek since it would be of little practical use to these children. Instead, the règlemens emphasized a specialized curriculum that stressed reading and writing in the vernacular, mathematics, and skill acquisition. Underlying the règlemens was the assumption that children were capable of learning and applying their vocational and moral lessons outside the school walls, positioning children as agents of social change. This assumption was ingenious for the period as pedagogy predominantly presumed that nonelite society was both incapable of and uninterested in learning. The règlemens’s specialized curriculum of vocational education also makes Lyonnais charity schools stand out in comparison to other charity schools in seventeenth-century France. These other écoles de charité had no standard, official curriculum, students cycled in and out of schools on a weekly basis, and instruction focused solely on religious education, especially Catechism lessons. These other charity schools were intended to literally create Catholics,

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“forcing the code of social behaviour found in the Catechism.”23 These schools were intended for a religious purpose, with reading and writing taking secondary importance to religious instruction. Although these schools provided a free education, as did the Lyonnais schools, the scope of that education was entirely different. Furthermore, Lyon’s écoles de charité are exceptional because of their influence on other schools established in various cities in the eighteenth century. Lyonnais charity schools did much to inspire changes in pedagogy and social reform, acting as models for the establishment of charity schools in Paris, Dijon, Reims, and even in colonial towns like New Orleans and Montréal. Tracing the règlemens’s development from the first handwritten edition in Démia’s journal around 1668, to the first printed edition in 1681, to an edition celebrating the centennial of the charity schools in 1766 reveals a number of striking developments in pedagogy and the ways in which children were understood and participated in Lyonnais society. Most noticeably, in the 1668 handwritten version and the 1681 printed edition, the preface states that the “necessity and utility in establishing these institutions” comes from the need to “educate and train moral Catholics, loyal subjects of His Majesty, and industrious workers.” The purpose of these schools was to create French Catholic workers. The rhetoric used to describe the advantages of these charity schools focuses on both the improvement of “Catholic tenets” and “the perfection of morality” and also on the “profitability to Lyon’s industries.”24 This rhetoric, as well as the remarks by the prévost des marchans, échevins, and many benefactors, accentuates the argument that over the course of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, the economic promises these schools provided in the form of workers became much more important goals and purposes of these schools. These seventeenth-century règlemens make it clear that an improvement of Catholic morality was just as important as increasing the quality of workers. However, the preface of the 1766 printed edition, titled “Projet de Mémoire,” displays another transition in the purpose and goals of these schools. Replacing the rhetoric of morality, the creation of honest families holds a prominent place in this version of the règlemens. According to the 1766 edition, the “principal objective” in educating the poor children of Lyon, who “lived in ignorance of religion, literature, and writing,” was to “create honest fathers, honourable mothers, and good families.”25 Though only a slight change in

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rhetoric, the connotations of these two objectives are striking. By the eighteenth century, the charity schools’ purpose had shifted from simply erasing immortality to the building of honest, ideal families for economic gain. Immorality no longer solely preoccupied community consciousness. Instead, the community and the schools themselves saw both moral and practical advantages to the schools. Economic gains as well as a moral workforce were the goals. Whether or not those goals were met will be addressed later, but this shift in goals is important to note because it better explains how the schools conceptualized themselves and how society understood the purpose of the écoles de charité over the course of the ancien régime.

chil d- ce n t re d c u r r i c u lu m Especially important are the class lists that schools and seminaries kept. These lists often provide information about children such as their age, temperament, abilities, certain physical characteristics or deformities, and usually details about their parents. However, class lists or attendance records for nonelite schools are extremely rare. Although early modern universities and collèges kept meticulous records on their students, nonelite schools rarely retained such detailed records mainly due to a lack of infrastructure. But, because of Lyon’s well-managed Bureau des Écoles and the règlemens that stated “all schoolmasters must keep registers and notes about their students,”26 a number of class lists, registers, and journals are extant. The information contained in Lyon’s écoles de charité’s archives is both a surprising and precious source for an accurate and complete description of charity schoolchildren. Much of the information about early modern schoolchildren comes from four main sources: entry interviews, class lists, home visits, and schoolmaster accounts. From the very moment a child was admitted to a charity school, administrators classified them according to the child’s experience in or exposure to certain trades and skills as well as to their previous educational abilities. Using that information, charity schoolchildren were organized into bandes, or classes, with students who were similarly adept. Unlike the modern school system where age is pivotal to children’s assignment in classes, age was of little importance to the early modern charity school (aside from determining whether or not the child was eligible to attend school). The classification of

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children according to particular skills and trades also underlines the economic function and impetus of these schools. An entry interview was essential to determining a child’s placement in the correct bande, as Jean Claude Anjou’s experience at the beginning of the chapter demonstrated. Once a petition for admission was successful and a child was admitted, the parents and child had to attend an entry interview and have their home inspected by schoolmasters. For the entry interview, mothers and fathers were required to accompany their child to the school’s office on the first day of class, as Jean Claude’s parents did. The schoolmaster carefully recorded the student’s first name and last name, along with his or her age, sex, father’s name, and father’s employment. Though they were not required to, occasionally headmasters would also record where the student was baptized.27 Mothers, unless single, were rarely mentioned by name in these entry interviews, though they were required to be present. After having their information recorded, new students and their parents would then have to confess that they were both baptized and confirmed Catholics as well as committed to the Catholic faith before students were allowed to enter class. The parents then signed, or sometimes marked a cross or an ‘x’ if they were illiterate, next to their child’s name to signify that they agreed to routine home inspections by the bureau three times per year, to regularly attend Church and all feast day masses, and to abstain from sin and immorality as much as possible. Failure to abide by these standards resulted in their child’s dismissal from the charity schools. The parents were then assigned a home inspection date called the visite général and were told that at that inspection the schoolmaster and parents would draw up a contract together regarding the responsibilities of both parties in the schoolchild’s education and care.28 This entry interview acknowledged and established several important and reciprocal relationships. First, it recognized that parents as much as children were essential to charity schools. By requiring parents to physically be present and agree to surveillance, the bureau made parents demonstrate their commitment to social reform. Parents had a choice in sending their child to a charity school, and by coming to an entry interview parents solidified their participation in the reform project. Furthermore, the entry interview established a reciprocal relationship between parents and schools. Parents had to abide by the rules and regulations in order for their children to continue attending school. The school then provided an education to the child as well as

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additional poor relief to the family. In this way, the schools impacted social reform not only in the classroom but also in the household. Entry interviews were probably some of the only times parents would have entered the school since the règlemens forbade anyone but students on the grounds. Though mainly a record-keeping task, the entry interview was significant since it established a relationship with the poor community. After an entry interview with their parents, children were taken to another room where schoolmasters conducted diagnostic tests in reading, writing, mathematics, the Catechism, and particular trades. Once schoolmasters determined the child’s ability, children were placed into the appropriate bande. Previous education, not necessarily the age of students, determined how bandes were organized.29 As a result, even a student who was twelve but had no previous formal education might start in the first bande, while a nine-yearold with some education could be placed into a more advanced bande. Although age did not exclusively determine the organization of bandes, it did regulate who could attend school and who could not. The règlemens stated that students younger than seven and older than sixteen could not attend school. However, schoolmasters often ignored this rule, especially in regards to younger children. Between 1697 and 1706, the écoles enrolled seventy-one boys and girls who were six years old, the majority of whom were placed in the first bande.30 Older students seem to have been less common, but exceptions were made to the sixteen-year-old restriction, especially in the more advanced bandes. As long as a student started school on or before age sixteen they could complete their education, leading to several students being as old as eighteen when they finished. Despite these exceptions to the rules, the average age of enrolment in charity schools before 1745 was ten years, with the majority of these students placed into the second bande.31 Ten also corresponded to the age at which most children would start part-time employment, demonstrating that this was a common age for children to leave the home. The average age of enrolment increased with each bande: the first bande had an average age of nine years, the second bande was ten years, the third bande was ten-and-a-half years, the fourth bande was eleven years, and, when applicable, the fifth bande had an average age of enrolment of twelve years. Most of Lyon’s charity schools had four to five bandes depending on the total number of students enrolled, though the majority of schools had four. Schoolchildren were primarily young adolescents, old enough to perform physical

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labour and crafts, find their way around the city alone, and make their own decisions and form opinions. The minimum age requirements suggest that society understood age as an important prerequisite of sorts. With each year, children were deemed more capable of certain physical tasks and more intellectually competent. Yet, few people knew their exact age. Although many people could have easily found their baptismal records from their parish churches, baptisms could occur as late as eighteen months after birth, making it a poor indicator of exact age. But the règlemens insisted on the importance of exact age as a precondition to enrolment, ability, and function. This presents a contradiction between the idealized and practice. In reality, the requirements and definition of one’s age were likely far more nuanced, demonstrating how age, much like gender, can be socially constructed. Since the most important age-specific requirement for enrolment was that schoolchildren possess some level of selfsufficiency, it is safe to assume that they served a function greater than a daycare. Although childcare was desperately needed in early modern France, especially for working families, charity schools served a larger function. The mission of these schools was to train students and prepare them for careers and apprenticeships, not to just provide free childcare. Bandes were not particularly large, with an average size of eleven students, though a bande could be as large as thirty students if necessary. In 1681, the schoolmasters petitioned the bureau to cap the number of students in each bande at twenty-five since many classrooms could not accommodate more than this number and teaching became more difficult.32 Instead of limiting the total number of enrolments, the headmasters hired more teachers and made multiple classes of the same bandes in the 1680s. This allowed the maximum number of students to be educated at their correct levels while also reducing the stress on schoolmasters and the size of each class. It also helped solve the problem of coeducation, with schools making separate first, second, third, and fourth bandes for girls. Originally, bandes were coeducational, meaning boys and girls were educated side-by-side in the same classroom. The enrolment of boys and girls remained rather consistent over the years with about 51 per cent of boys and 49 per cent of girls. Though a slight majority of boys, the number of girls demonstrates that écoles de charité viewed female education just as important as male education. Although schoolmasters appear to have given little thought

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to coeducation, viewing it as necessary due to tight budgets and limited space, in 1680 the bureau received a warning from Louis XIV. Tipped off by his intendant about the coeducation of schoolchildren, Louis XIV demanded the schools immediately separate boys and girls, at the very least, into different bandes and that actions be taken to remove girls entirely from the grounds and into their own charity schools.33 The records do not indicate that anyone in Lyon complained about the mingling of the sexes in the schools and classroom, but the state certainly felt it was problematic. Louis XIV’s reprimand cited the division of sexes in tuition-based petites écoles as precedent. This was a rare intervention of the French Crown in the affairs of charity schools. Although the French Crown did provide some monetary and political support to the schools, the Crown rarely gave the écoles de charité specific instructions or directions. But, coeducation posed a serious problem to the Crown. It is important to note that the Crown did not oppose the education of girls but rather coeducation. The Crown asked for separation of the sexes into different classrooms or schools and not a censure on female education. By demanding a separation versus a censure, the French Crown gave implicit support to the education of girls, implying it was worthwhile. Furthermore, the community’s response to this demand signified that the Lyonnais community was devoted to the education of both boys and girls. Many Lyonnais schools, including Saint Charles, Saint George, Saint Paul, Saint Nizier, Saint Michel, and La Platière, eventually caved to royal demands. These schools separated boys and girls into different classrooms, although their curriculum remained the same regardless of sex. By not creating a separate curriculum for girls even after separating them into different classrooms and bandes, this suggests the bureau did not perceive girls as being less capable of learning or instruction. In elite pedagogy at the time, much of the activities and curriculum designed for girls assumed a certain lack of intellectual prowess, having girls focus on reading and writing with the hope girls would develop into wellspoken court women who could cultivate social relationships.34 The écoles de charité did not see this as their goal and instead provided girls with the same basic curriculum as boys. That is not to say that the bureau did not attempt to teach proper gender roles and identities. Although both boys and girls followed the same basic methods of instruction, literacy exercises, and numerical problems when it came to trade acquisition, there was a difference between trades “acceptable”

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for boys and those for girls. For example, girls were never instructed in trades that carried certain masculine connotations like masonry and carpentry. Any trade that also necessitated eventual membership in a guild, like blacksmithing or tanning, was restricted to boys. Since most guilds were closed to women, teaching them those skills would not have been the most efficient use of resources. Often, girls were relegated to skills involving textiles. For instance, girls often learned how to dye cotton, stitch clothing, or embroider intricate details onto linens. The silk trade, however, was a site of coeducation, perhaps because of how central silk was to the Lyonnais economy. Both boys and girls received vocational training, often side-by-side, in everything from silkworm production and dye creation to embellishment and embroidery. Silk was neither masculine nor feminine in Lyon. Coeducation, whether in the formal classroom or on the shop floor, remained a contentious issue between the Lyonnais authorities and the French Crown. In 1745 girls must still have been acquiring an education alongside boys in certain charity schools in the city because the bureau received another notice regarding the subject.35 Despite these remonstrances, coeducation remained a common and well-accepted Lyonnais practice. In addition to information about the age and gender of students, class lists and registers reveal a great deal about students’ families and their backgrounds and suggest that the écoles de charité targeted children from certain artisanal backgrounds. The most important prerequisite was that parents, notably fathers, were employed in an “honourable profession” but “unable to provide a reasonable education to his children due to his own lack of education and necessary funds.”36 Since the silk, cloth, and textile industries provided the backbone of Lyon’s economy, many students were children of silk and textile workers.37 According to the registers, between 1697 and 1706, 66 per cent of students attending écoles de charité had a father employed in some aspect of textile work, including cord weavers, crocheters, cotton workers, silk workers, embroiderers, satin workers, taffeta makers, dyers, and wool weavers.38 Taffeta work was the most common profession with 13.51 per cent of fathers working in the field, followed by cord weaving with 8.92 per cent, and silk work with 7.93 per cent. Other common professions included manual and day labourers, most of who worked in the textile industry, as well as masons, gardeners and groundskeepers, valets, carpenters, printers, bakers, butchers, and tavern keepers.39

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Only on rare occasions did the schools enrol a student of a mendicant or pauvre, meaning an unemployed father. Single mothers were sometimes listed instead of fathers and were almost always identified as laundresses – important and labour-intensive jobs. These professions and the lack of pauvre children suggest that the schools were not intended for the whole of poor society. Only those families who were employed but struggling financially were allowed to enrol their children. This incentivized parents to remain employed in order to receive additional poor relief as well as to have their children educated. It further indicates a significant economic motivation and purpose to create workers in particular trades. Parents’ professions were important both to the recruiting process as well as to the curriculum in each school. Depending on the parish and how many students came from specific artisanal backgrounds, schools hired vocational teachers in different trades to teach the fourth and fifth bande students. For instance, since the majority of students at the Saint Michel school were sons or daughters of tailors and taffeta makers, the school hired maîtres of each craft to teach students the art of tailoring and taffeta making. Similarly, at the Saint George school a number of students were from carpenter families, leading the school to hire a carpenter in 1697 to teach woodwork.40 However, just because a student was from a specific artisanal background did not necessarily mean that they would be educated in that craft. To meet the varying demands of the Lyonnais economy, over the course of the eighteenth century, many of the students who came from backgrounds in fishing, boating, or transportation were instead educated in carpentry, masonry, and stonework to help create well-skilled workers for the building projects, like the renovation of the Hôtel Dieu, that expanded and rehabilitated the city. Likewise, a number of day-labourers’ children were taught specific craft skills, such as how to sheer sheep and then refine and weave the wool. The bureau, in consultation with the elite and city magistrates, worked to foster the development of craft skills in high demand in order to sustain the economy. Orphans and abandoned children could also be admitted to écoles de charité, but this was not common until the end of the eighteenth century. Orphaned or abandoned children were admitted to the écoles de charité if the Hôtel Dieu was willing to sponsor their education for at least five years.41 The rate at which orphan and abandoned children were enrolled in the schools remained low throughout the seventeenth century since the Hôtel Dieu had its

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own internal school housed at La Charité. Much like the charity schools, the Hôtel Dieu school emphasized religious education alongside vocational training. Not nearly as rigorous as a charity school education in terms of reading, writing, and mathematics, it did provide these children with at least some educational background.42 Why the Hôtel Dieu did not send all the children over the age of seven to the écoles de charité remains somewhat elusive. Likely this had to do with the bureau’s targeted demographics, with the bureau not wanting to accept children with little knowledge of trade. Charity schools may also have been unable to sustain the massive increase in student population that would have resulted from accommodating the sheer number of Hôtel Dieu children. Similarly, since the Hôtel Dieu was constantly in a state of fiscal distress, the hospital may not have been in a position to pay for these children’s education. Additionally, since the Hôtel Dieu used many of these children as workers and assistants in the hospitals, having the children go to the écoles de charité might have created a labour shortage. Furthermore, donors to the schools were not interested in orphans but rather the children of their own workers. Regardless of the reasons, enrolment of orphaned children remained low. Unlike in Paris, where pedagogical innovations concentrated on orphans, in Lyon these children were more marginalized from society in the early modern period. One of the first and only instances in the seventeenth century of orphans or abandoned children being accepted to the charity schools occurred in 1699. That year, the Saint Charles parish accepted seven children – four boys and three girls – to their school from La Charité. This is the only instance of enfants trouvés being accepted to the charity schools until the late eighteenth century when several students were sent to the Saint Paul, Saint Nizier, and Saint Vincent schools at the request of La Charité.43 The majority of students from the Hôtel Dieu, and later the Hôpital de la Charité,44 were between the ages of ten and thirteen and had some previous instruction in a skill such as embroidery or loom work.45 Children might have gained these skills from working alongside their parents in various jobs, especially if the parents were skilled workers or journeymen. These children were sent to the charity schools to get more proper training in their crafts than what the Hôtel Dieu could provide. These few orphaned and abandoned children were an exception as the majority of charity schoolchildren were the sons and daughters of skilled but financially struggling workers in textile production. These demographics are important

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to understand when examining the curriculum as the children’s backgrounds played a role in the development of the règlemens. Since bandes were not organized according to age or sex, they were instead organized according to the students’ aptitudes. The diagnostic tests Jean Claude Anjou took during his entry interview were used to determine placement. Most students entered the schools at the second bande, having displayed some basic knowledge of the Catechism, reading, writing, and mathematics. The average placement of these children in the second bande versus the first suggests that levels of illiteracy among the working poor were actually much lower than previously thought. Children most likely became familiar with the alphabet and the written word through their families. Although few students arrived with a sophisticated knowledge of reading, writing, the Catechism, or mathematics, many did have at least some familiarity with these subjects through their families. Instead of moving progressively through each bande step-by-step, students were evaluated at the end of a six-month period to determine what bande they should be moved to or if they needed to stay in the same bande for another six-month term.46 Students would typically stay in the same bande for at least twelve months, but occasionally students advanced faster, even skipping bandes if deemed appropriate.47 Démia believed that given “four or five years of continual schooling, children should have the capabilities and knowledge required to serve as an apprentice or employee in the professional arts and trades.”48 Pacing education this way made it possible for every student to receive an individual, specialized education. Emphasis was on the student’s individual progress and not on an entire class’s ability. From the règlemens, children’s schedules, what they learned, how they learned it, and the role that children played in education can be reconstructed. Each bande had a different baseline curriculum focused on what the students needed to practice most, whether it was reading, writing, the Catechism, or mathematics. Most of the curriculum was changed over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with methods deleted, further clarification of confusing practices added, or completely new instructions given in each new edition of the règlemens. These amendments to the document elucidate how building the curriculum was a constantly evolving, experimental process with students’ responses essential to the pedagogical experiment. Without students’ engagement with and response to the curriculum, the charity

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schools would not have survived. Additionally, examining the curriculum of these bandes elucidates what the children were learning as well as the goals of the charity schools as centres of social reform. Even though each bande was assigned a different curriculum, each charity schoolchild’s schedule was roughly the same, dominated by education and vocational training. Children attended school six days a week from seven in the morning to seven at night with a two-hour break for lunch and a small respite. Due to the frequency of feast days and other holidays, however, school was rarely held more than eighteen days per month. Much like modern schools, the écoles de charité provided a summer break for students in August as well as a considerable break in December and January around the Catholic holidays. In order to attend the écoles de charité schoolchildren and their parents had to sign an attendance contract of sorts, specifying students would attend every school day unless they were ill.49 If students were ill three or more days in a row, the schoolmaster would come to the student’s household to “assess whether or not the child or the family [was] in need of medical attention from the Hôtel Dieu.”50 Excessive absences or failure of the parents to send their children to school would result in expulsion from the école de charité. Children who skipped school without their parents’ permission to “play, gamble, or otherwise amuse themselves in the streets” would also be expelled and “severely reprimanded” by the schoolmaster, the parish priest, and their parents.51 Abiding by the attendance policy was paramount. The règlemens provided baselines and goals for each bande, detailing what a student should know before moving on to another bande. Since first bande students had little to no previous reading, writing, counting, or religious education, students concentrated on the most basic lessons in this bande. Considerable time was spent mastering the French alphabet. The schoolmaster was “encouraged to sing or play games with the students” in order to help them “remember the different letters and their proper order.”52 Once students “learned how to recite the alphabet in the proper order,” they were introduced to “the letter’s physical form” through “wooden blocks with painted letters.”53 Younger students responded well to these types of activities according to schoolmasters. The songs and painted blocks engaged them and could be considered a type of playtime activity. For example, the Saint Michel schoolmaster reported that several of his students, both boys and girls aged about nine years old, regularly sang the alphabet and wanted to spell different words out with

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the blocks, greatly enjoying these activities.54 Orthography became a game for children while they simultaneously learned important rules about spelling, phonetics, and reading. But, this method of instruction did not account for older children in the bande. Older students complained to schoolmasters that singing and playing with blocks did not interest them.55 The Saint George schoolchildren, especially those in their early teenage years, were vocal about their dislike of game or song-based learning.56 Hearing these complaints, schoolmasters worried that if students “felt too juvenile” playing with blocks or singing they might become disengaged and the lesson would fail.57 Although Démia insisted that this was “the best way to teach” and would “encourage those students to learn faster,”58 many schoolmasters defied this advice and instead wrote “the letters out on small boards as well” for the older students. By engaging the older students in the bande differently than the younger students, they were able to “learn more effectively.”59 The adaptation of teaching methods again underlines the experimental nature of this process. Schoolmasters had to listen not only to the bureau’s direction but also to their students in order to receive feedback and make pedagogy more effective. The overall agenda was not to simply design an ideal curriculum but to make a practical curriculum that achieved success with students. In addition to learning the alphabet, first bande students gradually learned the Catechism and different prayers. More so in the seventeenth century than in the eighteenth century, headmasters and parish priests stressed the importance of being Catholic, having students routinely confess to being loyal Catholics. This practice indicates a preoccupation with stamping out Protestantism as a part of the Catholic Reformation in the seventeenth century. Although children of “New Catholics” do not frequently appear in the records, anti-Protestant sentiment was so prevalent in Lyon and throughout France during this period that children were inculcated to identify as loyal Catholics.60 The practice of confessing one’s Catholic identity became less of a concern in the eighteenth century as religious and anti-Huguenot fervour tempered. Even though students still learned the Catechism, attended mass, and certainly identified as Catholic, the zeal to eliminate heresy, notably Protestantism, had waned. Despite the pressure for children to identify as loyal Catholics, Catechism instruction was approached with less vigour compared to the other subjects

Figure 2.1 Above and opposite This workbook introducing students to letters and symbols was commonly used as a pedagogy manual in schools as well as in apprenticeship trainings.

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students learned. Every other week, the headmaster or parish priest made visits to the first bande to teach Catholic beliefs and tenets. But as the eighteenth century progressed, Catechism lessons happened on a more infrequent basis. Although still invested in making Catholic workers, religious education was secondary to more technical skills. This decline in religious fervour indicates the schools and children were filling less religious and more practical purposes. The Catholic requisite did not disappear, though it became slightly less stringently upheld in the later eighteenth century. Officially, in order to move to the second bande, students had to demonstrate some familiarity with the Catechism and other Catholic prayers, recite the alphabet in its entirety, recognize the printed letters, and read small words such as un, il, elle, on, non, and oui when written on the board or formed out of the wooden blocks.61 In order to master these skills, most students stayed in the first bande for two six-month sessions or one full year. But from the later eighteenth-century records, it appears that schoolmasters and parish priests stopped testing students for knowledge in the Catechism in order to move to the next bande and instead only monitored their progress in literacy. The emphasis on reading continued in the second bande as students learned phonetics and spelling. Since many of the students in the seventeenth century were foreign-born or came from other provinces, a number of children had distinctly different French accents that, according to schoolmasters, “were horrendous.”62 In fact, one of the most common complaints schoolmasters made about children at the bureau meetings regarded their bad accents. Nicolas Bigot also noted this in his inspection of the Écoles des Pauvres Filles de Saint Paul, recording that “nearly all the girls had ill pronunciation.”63 In his handwritten règlemens, Démia had not anticipated needing to correct students’ accents.64 Instead, this was an issue added to the règlemens at the request of schoolmasters in the late 1670s. To improve accents and standardize speech among the students, schoolmasters and mistresses engaged in a type of nascent speech therapy, emphasizing the pronunciation of French when speaking and reading aloud. Although the schoolmasters and mistresses could supervise and perfect accents inside the classroom, it was up to students to maintain their accents outside of school. So as not to regress with their accents, students were strongly encouraged to “correct their families and neighbours” when their pronunciation of French was wrong.65 In this way, écoles de charité and students

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could effect a change in pronunciation even outside the classroom, perhaps standardizing speech in the Lyonnais community. Standardized pronunciation was essential because of its effects on orthography. The methods schoolteachers employed to teach spelling were predicated on phonetics.66 Even though orthography remained quite disparate throughout France until the late eighteenth century, the charity schools attempted to standardize it, and therefore phonetics, among Lyonnais schoolchildren. Students were initially introduced to letters, phonetics, and spelling without being able to compose the letters onto paper themselves since reading and writing were not viewed as two parts of the same whole in early modern pedagogy. Before learning how to write, second bande students had to master phonetics and, therefore, spelling. Students then began composing small words by sounding out the syllables and letters. Using the same wooden blocks from the first bande, students “would join the proper letters to make syllables and then eventually more complicated words.”67 Students knew how to spell and the order of letters in words before knowing how to compose those words onto paper. Unlike in the tuition-based petites écoles, students were not taught to read or write in Latin since “it would be of little practical use to them.”68 Schoolchildren only learned how to read and write in the French vernacular. The only time they employed Latin was during Catechism lessons, but it appears this was more of a memorization of words versus being able to read Latin. The education charity school students received was a practical one, focusing on the skills they needed to succeed later in life which included literacy in the vernacular not in Latin. Writing was taught as an art form of sorts, with special attention paid to the style, shape, and size of letters. Using small worksheets schoolmasters made by hand, students learned how to “form all the letters, both capital and lower case” on paper. They first traced the letters on the worksheets with pencils, getting a sense of the letters’ “form, shape, curves, and angles.” Eventually students were provided with ink to practice drawing the letters, but schoolmasters often noted that writing with ink proved challenging for the “less dexterous students.”69 Once students had grasped the letters’ forms, they practiced writing their own names, small words, and finally, very short sentences. Although schoolteachers corrected students’ spelling, by the second bande students were

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expected to know the proper order of letters in words, and therefore, more attention was given to the child’s handwriting style and form.70 By the end of their time in the second bande, students were expected to be able to “read small stories and compose coherent simple sentences with little difficulty.”71 With so many different components involved in learning literacy, the second bande was usually the longest bande at around eighteen months. In the third bande students continued practicing to read and write; in particular this was to make students familiar with the sorts of daily documents they would encounter later as merchants, journeymen, and craftsmen. After reading French fables aloud to one another, students composed letters and small memorandums to each other to practice reading and writing. Schoolmasters did not encourage creative writing of short stories or poems as was done in tuition-based petites écoles. Instead, students wrote letters about their father’s professions, about their favourite activities, and what they did to help their families at home.72 Again, the curriculum emphasized the relevance of these educational skills to children’s eventual careers. Mathematics was an important practical skill that students began to learn during the third bande. It was an area where the experimental nature of Lyon’s charity school pedagogy is obvious. In fact, many schoolmasters and mistresses themselves struggled with how to teach mathematics. In several of the bureau’s inspections from the late 1680s, Nicolas Bigot mentioned that many of the schoolmasters were ignoring arithmetic altogether, choosing instead to focus on reading and writing.73 This was troubling to Bigot as mathematics played a large role in vocational training – the cornerstone of a charity school education. Speaking to the schoolmasters at Saint Paul, Saint Nizier, and Saint Michel, Bigot determined that many of the schoolmasters and mistresses were simply “uncomfortable with numbers” since they did not use them in daily life.74 Although the règlemens included detailed instructions on how to teach mathematics, many schoolmasters still felt ill prepared. To counter this, the bureau arranged for some mathematically inclined schoolmasters, like Michel Armand, the headmaster of Saint Charles, led workshops for other schoolmasters on the subject. Although the bureau did not indicate how these workshops progressed, by 1691 the school inspection records indicate that math was taught in each school, perhaps suggesting these workshops helped. The règlemens’s mathematical curriculum emphasized the practical value of arithmetic. Students in the third bande first began learning mathematics

Figure 2.2 Often schoolmasters taught with the assistance of playing cards or flash cards similar to these to teach reading, spellings, and even counting.

by learning how to count. Using their fingers to count aloud to ten and then to twenty, students progressed to counting silently without their fingers or instruments to fifty and one hundred.75 Once students mastered how to count “by two, by ten, by twenty, by fifty, and by one hundred,” they learned “how to compose the numbers on paper.”76 Students learned both Arabic and Roman numerals, mastering how to write them before progressing to calculations. Not surprisingly, students struggled most with learning addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Just as with modern students, schoolmasters employed small flash cards, times tables, and worksheets to help students practice their computations. Because of the rigor involved in learning math, students rarely progressed to the fourth bande until at least a year in the third bande. In addition to mastering how to count, write, and compute Arabic and Roman numerals students were also taught chiffres de finance. Used in account books, invoices, contracts, and memorandums, chiffres de finance were shorthand and abbreviations for amounts, measurements, and other numbers.77 By

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teaching students chiffres de finance, the charity schools provided students with a more advanced understanding of their trade and the economy, noting the proper methods for bookkeeping. The inclusion of chiffres de finance in the curriculum is an excellent example of how children and parents’ participation and responses to the curriculum were indispensable. Originally, chiffres de finance were not part of the charity schools’ mathematical curriculum. It was not until the 1681 edition that the règlemens included instructions for schoolteachers of how to teach chiffres de finance. According to the bureau, starting in the late 1670s students and parents alike repeatedly asked schoolteachers to include chiffres de finance in their lessons, as these numbers were regularly used in the marketplace and bookkeeping. The desire of the community to learn more about these specialized business numbers resulted in their inclusion in the règlemens. Feedback from these parties was taken seriously and applied appropriately to the curriculum. During the third bande students learned how to compose, read, and count chiffres de finance, but in the fourth bande students applied their knowledge of these numbers to documents and mock transactions. Since the Lyonnais community used chiffres de finance in its accounting records, students needed to learn these specialized numbers in order to both read and keep accurate, detailed records that were in accordance with the conventions of the time. At the same time that students focused on mathematics in the third bande, students were also required to focus on the Catechism more intensely. Students typically were taught through the use of petit Catechisms specially “designed for children” who were just learning to read.78 These petit Catechisms were significantly shorter than the average 127-page adult Catechism, rounding out at about sixty pages. Aside from the actual Catechism, these workbooks contained information regarding the commandments, the parish, mass attendance, feast days, and tithes.79 Children’s Catechism workbooks were not only more concise but also easier to understand with shorter sentences and explanations provided than in other Catechism books. Using these materials to study the Catechism in the first three bandes, after Easter students in the third bande were asked to recite the Catechism in its entirety before the schoolmaster, headmaster, and parish priest. If a student was unable to fully recite the Catechism, he or she was required to attend regular lessons with the headmaster and would not be permitted to advance to the fourth bande.

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Students in the fourth and fifth bandes were considered both literate and numerate. There was little difference in the curriculum of the fourth and fifth bandes. These more advanced students divided their time between learning in the classroom and participating in their family’s business, in a craftsman’s workshop, or in a manufacturing house as a quasi-apprentice.80 In the classroom, students in both bandes used their newly developed reading, writing, and counting skills to read business contracts, practice keeping account books, and make mock purchases and sales.81 Additionally, teachers introduced various laws and organizations related to finances.82 At the Saint Pierre school, the prévost des marchans et échevins routinely visited the fourth bande in the 1730s to explain to students how different laws about measurements, pricing, and trade affected the Lyonnais economy. The classroom education shifted to supplement vocational education in the fourth and fifth bandes that was considered more important and the students’ primary focus.

vo cat ional t r aining Since many of the schoolteachers had little experience in artisanal production, schools often had to hire guildsmen, craftsmen, and artisans to teach students craft skills. At the Écoles de Filles de Saint Michel in 1710, for instance, the school hired several passementiers and crocheteurs to teach the young girls how to embroider silk and cotton as well as how to crochet. Similarly, at La Platière the school employed three masons and two carpenters who taught fourth bande boys building and woodworking techniques. However, at schools that did not employ in-house craftsmen, students were sent into the community to learn. The bureau helped fourth bande students acquire part-time positions at silk workshops, taffeta weavers’ workshops, metal refineries, leather tanneries, butchers’ shops, a candle maker’s workshop, a baker’s shop, and at various construction sites sponsored by the city of Lyon or the French state, including the completion of the Hôtel de Ville and the expansion of the Hôtel Dieu. These students, like Jean Claude Anjou, were usually too young to have been able to get an apprenticeship, but the experience served as a type of quasi apprenticeship where they honed their skills. For example, several students from Saint Paul were sent to Jacques Roulet’s boulangerie to learn how to bake

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bread. Roulet requested one to two students every year to work in his shop, helping to knead, bake, and sell the bread that fed the parish until his death in 1685.83 Students were often employed in various jobs within the silk and textile industries as well. In 1692, Paul Gros asked for two students to assist with loom work in his silk house. Similarly, in 1701 Laurens Vallel employed four students as part time embroiderers at a workshop in the Saint Vincent parish. These types of part-time and quasi-apprenticeship jobs were often arranged by the bureau with the explicit instructions that the charity schoolchildren were working there to learn about the trade or craft, meaning that they needed to be provided with training.84 The bureau made regular inspections of the worksites and had students submit feedback about their positions. Students were usually satisfied and commented that they were learning how to apply classroom knowledge to real world experiences. For example, in 1705 two students from La Platière, Barthelemy Ménetier and Antoine Trouillé, were sent to work as satinaires for maître Roullet, where they learned how to weave, dye, and cut satin. During the inspection of maître Roullet’s workshop, both boys indicated that they had “learned so much about satin” and were “happy to be outside the classroom,” putting their skills to work. These boys were pleased with their training and saw the advantages to their curriculum.85 In addition to the silk industry, other local institutions sought the employment of écoles de charité students. For example, the Hôtel Dieu also requested advanced students in 1710 when renovation projects (to create more space) were well underway. Students from Saint George, Saint Pierre, and Saint Vincent were enlisted as manual labourers, working under masons, helping to cut stones, cart them to the Hôtel Dieu, and lay them as paving. Although an arduous project, these students learned valuable skills about masonry that allowed at least two of them to receive full-time positions as masons when they completed their education at the écoles.86 Though the students were technically not yet apprentices, they were exposed to the trades they would later be apprenticed into, allowing them to have shorter apprenticeships and for the craftsmen to take on better skilled apprentices. According to Saint Charles’s schoolmaster in 1679, “the requests of craftsmen and manufacturers to receive students from our school far exceed[ed] the number of students available,”87 suggesting that merchants, manufac-

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turers, and craftsmen saw the advantages of educating these students in their workshops. Children were temporary skilled workers as well as future permanent employees or apprentices. Compared to the curriculum of mostly private, tuition-based petites écoles that emphasized a humanist education in preparation for university studies,88 it is striking to see how much the écoles de charité’s curriculum was geared towards the development of a vocational education. Charity school students were only taught the skills they needed to have to become well-qualified, efficient workers. Vocational, on-the-job training was essential to this goal. The system of quasi apprenticeships worked to provide the students with the trade and craft skills they needed to be employable and to survive. Vocational training was one result of a charity school education but another was the psychological impact that the curriculum had on young minds, subjugating them to clearly defined authorities like the city magistrates, the elite, the Church, and the king. This is apparent in the status-heavy language used in reading and writing exercises that emphasize that children were subject to their parents’ authority, but as adults, they would be subject to the “city magistrates,” to “the king,” and “to the Church.” Analyzing worksheets and pedagogical exercises in the second and third bandes, ideas about how the authority of the monarch and city magistrates were ingrained into young children’s minds are clear. For example, a typical sentence students would practice writing was, Je suis un sujet de sa Majesté le roi.89 This sentence underlines the subservience of the French people to the monarch, asserting that a person’s role was as a subject, a position that was answerable to and dependent on the king. Young minds were taught to conceive of themselves as subjects. Additionally, in the third bande students would typically read stories about the monarch’s power or the glory of the Church. This further emphasized children as inferior subjects to both institutions. Whether it was in the second bande, where students repeatedly wrote and recited they were “subjects of his majesty, the king,” or in the fifth bande, where they were taught about laws and regulations, children were repeatedly told of their inferior social status. In no way were these schools meant to increase social mobility. Educating students in such a way, the écoles de charité intended for students to gain the skills necessary to become efficient, effective workers and to emphasize their social roles as inferior to the king, the Church, city magistrates, and their employers.

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To evaluate whether or not students achieved these goals requires a bit of investigation. As Jean Claude’s vignette at the start of the chapter demonstrates, tracing children to adulthood is often an impossible task because of the lack of extant archival sources. Class lists after 1707 are rare and rather inconsistent, with headmasters not recording the students’ full names, ages, or father’s professions. This makes it more difficult to track and confirm someone’s identity. Furthermore, the apprenticeship records for the last decades of the seventeenth century until the 1730s are in states of disrepair at the Archives Municipales de Lyon. Therefore, of the 4,438 student records available from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is only possible to trace 217 students to apprenticeships – 145 young men and seventy-two young women. Although apprenticeship contracts technically were only applicable to young men, it appears that in the eighteenth century in Lyon, they used the term apprentis for women as well, especially in the silk trade. Of the seventy-two young women, forty-three were employed as embroiderers, fifteen as satin makers, eight as taffeta makers, and six as domestiques.90 All of these women had masters, many of whom also appear on the male apprenticeship records, suggesting that these arrangements were considered apprenticeships, even if they were not legally recognized as such. The young men’s apprenticeships were also primarily in the textile trades. Of the 145 young men, 102 were apprenticed into taffeta making, thirty were cord weavers, and the remaining thirteen were silk workers.91 Although 4,221 students are unaccounted for in terms of apprenticeships or jobs, some information can be gathered from bureau notes, indicating that many students found employment once their studies were completed. Furthermore, just because these other students cannot be traced does not necessarily mean that they were not apprenticed. They simply may have shown up in the records that are now destroyed. To assess what happened to children when they completed their education at charity schools, we can build a profile of several children’s individual experiences, determining whether or not they became steadily employed workers. Using available charity school, apprenticeship, and employment records, several children, like Jean Claude Anjou, can be traced to the start of adulthood when they began their careers. Some of these students stayed in the same professions as their fathers. For example, Pierre Vachot’s father was a futainier in the Saint George parish. After Pierre completed his education at the Saint George school in 1701, Claude Boitton, a maître futainier, apprenticed

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him for five years. According to the records, Pierre went on to obtain a job as a futainier with Boitton. Similarly, Jean Gaillard was a student at the Saint Pierre school in 1728. His father had been a canut or silk worker. Jean remained in the silk industry like his father, earning an apprenticeship with Maurice Charmont in 1730. Afterwards, Jean was employed through La Grande Fabrique de Lyon as a compagnon de soie, staying in the profession.92 Likely due to a need to create more workers for certain trades, some former students changed professions from their parents. For example, Georges David, an alumnus of the Saint Michel charity school, received an apprenticeship with Antoine Pitaut, a cord weaver in 1706. Georges’ father was a taffeta maker, but Georges entered the cord weaving business where he was not only apprenticed but also worked as a journeyman for many years according to apprenticeship records.93 This shift was not drastic, as both Georges and his father were employed in the textile industry, but it does suggest that perhaps the charity schools saw a need to create more cord weavers than taffeta makers at the time. Likewise, Jacques Dufresne’s father was a silk dyer, as was his brother. But the former Saint Paul charity school student was apprenticed as an embroiderer in 1701. Later he received a job at a silk workshop owned by a wealthy Lyonnais merchant.94 These boys’ charity school educations reveals that children were able to secure both apprenticeships and jobs once they completed their education. Although only a few former students can be traced to apprenticeships or jobs due to the lack of extant records, it is still important to note that these children were receiving apprenticeships or jobs and fulfilling their obligations. Another indication of whether or not the charity schools were successful in positioning students to be moral, industrious, and financially solvent workers is through examining the Hôtel Dieu and Aumône Générale’s poor relief and child abandonment records. Of the 4,438 students with records, 816 former students (18.3 per cent) appear on the Aumône Générale or Hôtel Dieu’s records as receiving poor relief at some point in their lives. The majority of these former students appear on the lists later in life when they would have been unable to work or were sick. Child abandonment records kept by the Hôtel Dieu and La Charité indicate that of the parents who voluntarily surrendered their children, only seventeen were former charity schoolchildren, most of who were single mothers. These low rates could indicate that the charity schools were successful in at least helping to curb some of the perceived

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immoral behaviour and economic strife that characterized the lower sorts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The charity schools continued to grow in size and number throughout the eighteenth century. According to the 1766 Projet de Mémoire, there were twenty-two charity schools, nine of which were for girls, established in Lyon and the Lyonnais region. They estimated that over the course of the previous one hundred years more than 40,000 children were educated in those institutions. Although this seems like a high estimate from the available records, at the very least, there were enough charity schoolchildren for the elite, the city magistrates, the Church, and even the French Crown to take notice of these schools. The Lyonnais laboratory had a profound impact on the course of social reform in other French cities and throughout the French empire. In the early 1790s, both the bureau and the schools appear to have ceased operations. The records are unclear as to why the schools closed, but it seems likely that anti-Catholic sentiments during the Revolutionary period played a role in the temporary shutdown of these institutions. Even though the bureau was not technically a religious institution, because of its close association with the archbishop and parish priests during the de-Christianization of France these institutions may have been targeted. Furthering the notion that the closure likely had to do with the connotation of these schools as religious entities, the schools did not reopen until 1801, the same year the Catholic Church’s power was reestablished in France under the Concordat of 1801. In the interim, some schoolmasters and mistresses continued to educate children, though not on a charitable basis, meaning education temporarily reverted to a paid system. Both the National Assembly and later Napoleon addressed this issue and made children’s education compulsory and free. Despite the lack of schools for almost a decade, when the schools reopened in 1801, many of the donors from the 1780s who were still alive recommitted funds to the schools. These donations underline that the schools had become a cornerstone to Lyonnais community, with society perceiving a need and interest in the education of children. The histories of education, social reform, and children are often intertwined in the early modern period. As the records indicate, only a handful of children from the working poor can be traced from childhood to adulthood like Jean Claude Anjou. But this does not mean that children were on the periphery of history. As the charity schools indicate, children were key members of the early

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modern Lyonnais community. The écoles de charité’s records provide a window through which children’s experiences and society’s understanding of children and childhood can be recovered and examined. The establishment and maintenance of charity schools was an experimental process in which children were fundamental. There was no perfect model for an educational institution upon which Charles Démia, Archbishop Neufville, the schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, Lyonnais elite, or the poor could draw upon. Experimenting with pedagogical practices, methods, and exercises, schoolmasters adapted to the responses of children to develop the règlemens. Children’s actions, behaviour, and attainment of knowledge affected every direction of this experiment. The initiatives of the écoles de charité indicate that early modern French society understood childhood as a formative period of development. As the next chapter will demonstrate, children played vital roles in the “educating, moralizing, and Christianizing”95 of Lyon’s lower sorts outside the classroom as well. Students acted as teachers to their larger community, families, and friends, teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, and the Catechism to anyone who would listen. Applying their vocational training to apprenticeships and jobs, children worked to support the ever-growing Lyonnais and Rhône economies. In these ways, children improved the lower sorts. As these institutions spread to other early modern cities, the focus on children as agents of social reform continued. Lyon was an extraordinary city for the early modern period. Its community, both elite and nonelite, worked together to enact social reform through children that addressed local economic, social, religious, and political problems. Without the participation and cooperation of children, these écoles de charité would not have existed. The best indication of these schools’ success, however, may be in their continued existence as well as their influence on other educational institutions throughout the French empire.

3 Children Spread Reform

 Children are expected to abide by the schools’ regulations at home. Schoolmasters will make note, during the [visite general], whether [the student] acts appropriately [and whether] the student is dedicated to and making progress in improve[ing] the quality and knowledge of their parents, siblings, and their households.1 The écoles de charité revolutionized education among the poor in Lyon, placing children and their needs at the centre of local social reform at the turn of the eighteenth century. At every step in this educational experiment, children were agents of change. As the previous chapter demonstrated, children were essential to the formation of the règlemens and daily life in the schools. But, equally important, children were expected to act as reformers in their households and communities. Outside of school, charity schoolchildren were supposed to teach their families, neighbours, and anyone who would listen how to read, write, count, add, subtract, and how to preform basic craft skills. Schoolchildren were also responsible for extending knowledge of Catholic tenets, adherence to Catholic practices, and notions about legality and illegality. As the opening passage indicates, by having children spread their knowledge from the classroom and into the home, charity schools could improve the literacy, numeracy, and morality of their communities from inside the household.

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Previous to the advent of charity schools, the working poor home was considered a rather impenetrable space. But, with child reformers, suddenly the Catholic Church, the French state, and local municipalities could penetrate this barrier. Children were able to act as religious reformers, advancing the Catholic Reformation among their families. Schoolchildren became education reformers, teaching literacy, numeracy, and craft skills to their parents, siblings, friends, and neighbours. As nascent French nationalists, they helped to spread French identity and loyalty to the monarchy. Additionally, schoolchildren were moral reformers, policing the actions of their family members, neighbours, and strangers. These many roles placed children in authoritative positions within the family and community that greatly complicates our understandings of patriarchal society, demonstrating the many ways in which patriarchy was contested and negotiated from below in early modern French society. Outside of Lyon, the success of these charity schoolchildren inspired educational reform throughout the French kingdom. To meet their own unique demands, parish administrators, religious orders, or merchant organizations in other communities spearheaded educational reform for poor children using Démia’s standards and methods. Whether in large cities or small towns, ideas regarding childhood education and childhood itself were pervasive in the discussions and actions of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social reform projects. These communities saw and acknowledged the tremendous impact children could have on their own societies. Beyond the confines of school walls, children had to make choices about how they would or would not advance social reform, deciding to go along with instructions from schoolmasters, ignore the regulations entirely, or outwardly resist.

catholic child refor mers In the first decades of the Lyonnais schools’ existence, religious instruction was of paramount importance. As the règlemens made clear, one of the primary responsibilities of children was to spread knowledge of and loyalty to Catholicism, strengthening the flock in both the home and the poor community. As agents of the Catholic Reformation, children were expected to “lead their families to mass every Sunday morning” and “feast days.”2 Given that

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there could be up to seventeen feast days per month, this was a hefty goal. Students were also required to engage in regular discussions with siblings, parents, and other household members regarding the Catechism, explaining what they had learned. If the student was “old enough to have memorized the Catechism, the student should attempt to teach [it] to his family.”3 The bureau’s records indicate students did practice the Catechism with their families and their friends. In an assembly meeting in 1676, the Saint Nizier schoolmaster remarked that “one of [his] students, called Buny, regularly recited and taught the Catechism with a great deal of zeal and maturity outside of the school to the silk workers in his neighbourhood.”4 Furthermore, during several home visits in the 1690s, schoolmasters noted that families made “considerable progress” in learning the Catechism thanks to the “recitation of it with their children.”5 In requiring schoolchildren to do these tasks, the Catholic Church extended its influence into the household, a task that had proven difficult for the Church in the past. Perhaps religious devotion was enough to persuade some children to act as Catholic Reformers, but the schools offered additional incentive as well. To encourage schoolchildren to get their families to attend church, arriving at mass more than three times in one month without one’s family was considered a failure on the student’s part. If this happened, the student was required to attend additional Catechism lessons with the headmaster or parish priest during lunch or on Sunday afternoon. At these special sessions, the student would review the Catechism and discuss how his or her family could be convinced to attend mass. Schoolmasters suggested that if students encountered resistance from their families, students “should remind them of the zealous charity of the Church and the glory of God.”6 If the family, especially the mother or father, still refused and “were being idle during the hours of mass,” they were to report this behaviour to the headmaster the following Monday so that “the necessary actions could be taken” to rectify the situation.7 Usually the parents would receive a warning from the headmaster that their actions endangered their student’s education and soul. Schoolchildren assisted schoolmasters and the parish priests not only in advancing Catholicism among the masses but also in furthering the religious education and practices of the laity. Older students, usually those enrolled in the fourth or fifth bande, were encouraged to “assist in the giving of alms to the mendicants”8 at the Hôtel Dieu at least one feast day per month. These

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students provided food, clothing, and other necessities to the residents of the Hôtel Dieu and spent the day “praying with the poor.”9 On a separate feast day, these same students were also encouraged to help teach the alphabet or counting to those who requested such lessons from the parish priest. Children provided much needed assistance to the priests and schoolmasters on feast days and were, according to one schoolmaster, “able to reach a much larger section of the population”10 than had previously been possible without their assistance. The list of those demanding lessons in reading and writing from parish priests was rather long. According to the Saint Paul parish records, thirty adults, mostly males, requested reading lessons from their parish priest. To meet the demand, advanced schoolchildren helped as many of these people as possible, by using religious texts to teach literacy. But, undoubtedly, these men could apply their reading lessons to their commercial lives as well. In addition to increasing literacy among the lower groups, these schoolchildren served as visible models of good Catholics for others to emulate. They attended mass regularly and knew the Catechism. Most importantly, schoolchildren demonstrated religious devotion by engaging in charitable deeds and productive work. Seeing their acts of kindness, generosity, and piousness, both adults and other children, especially those who were recipients of the charitable goods, would be moved to act similarly. At least, that was the logic behind the requirements. In extending the knowledge of Catholicism to their families and to the laity, charity schoolchildren became active agents of the Catholic Reformation in their community. Although Catholic zeal waned in the eighteenth century in charity schools, their commitment to improving the poor community did not. The charity schools were able to diffuse their influence into the household and community through children who acted as educators themselves. Schoolmasters requested that students routinely “engage their families in their studies” through homework, whether it was reading, writing, mathematics, or even crafts. This activity was much easier for students in the first and second bandes since their “homework” was usually practicing mnemonic devices, such as songs, to remember the alphabet, phonetics, or spelling and grammar rules. For example, first bande students often sang the order of the alphabet, important Saints’ days, and even popular psalms. Hearing these catchy songs, siblings or parents might acquire some of the information.11 Since many of the schoolmasters had previously been tutors or had tutors themselves, they were familiar with

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the success of this type of indirect learning in elite schools. They knew that by assigning homework, charity schoolchildren could spread certain ideas to their families. For students in the third, fourth, and fifth bandes, however, imparting knowledge at home was a much more difficult and involved process. Since more advanced students’ exercises usually revolved around writing or reading, they could not actively engage their families in these activities as easily. Once students began to write or to read, schoolmasters suggested that they should teach the “physical forms of the letters” to siblings, parents, servants, or others who might benefit from this information.12 In 1687, at the request of several schoolchildren in Saint George, the bureau, with the assistance of wealthy book printer Antoine Arnauld, obtained supplies, like sheets of paper and writing instruments, for students to take home. Schoolmasters hoped these supplies would pique family members’ curiosity and encourage them to practice writing.13 In addition to getting their families to write, students were also encouraged to practice what the bureau labelled “family reading” in which the student would read aloud from a sheet, usually a Biblical story or fable, and pass it around to their siblings and parents to see the different words and create recognition.14 Given the high labour demands of seventeenth and eighteenth century Lyonnais families, it is doubtful that many had the time or patience to practice family reading.15 Many families may have seen the benefit of having their children learn to read and write but may not have had the resources or time to learn it as well. Schoolchildren had more success in teaching their families about numbers, underlining the economic applicability of their education. Students in the third, fourth, and fifth bandes were expected to teach their fathers, mothers, and siblings how to count and identify numbers. Just as they were advised to sing songs about spelling aloud or to read aloud, students were encouraged to count aloud in the presence of other family members. It was hoped that through hearing students repeat the same words, family members would also memorize this same pattern, advancing their knowledge of mathematics. In addition to teaching their families the order of numbers, students helped family members count first on their fingers, then with physical objects, and finally in silence just as the students themselves had learned.

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Furthermore, the very advanced students – those preparing for their apprenticeships – acted as commercial agents by helping their families keep track of accounts. If a student’s father or uncle was in charge of a workshop or store, schoolmasters encouraged the children, both boys and girls, to “practice arithmetic” by double checking their family’s account books. It was unlikely that schoolmasters saw this only as a learning opportunity for the student but also knew there were practical advantages to having them use the account books. Students could find mistakes and teach their fathers, uncles, or brothers about arithmetic, account keeping, and chiffres de finance. In this way, not only were children learning how to be more effective and efficient with bookkeeping but so were their families. This was apparent in 1708 at a bureau meeting when the Saint Paul schoolmaster mentioned that a student had successfully applied his mathematical skills outside the classroom and into the home. The Saint Paul schoolmaster explained that one of his students, Joseph Almard, was put in charge of his father’s account book, keeping track of the carpenter’s expenses and payments.16 His father noted during one of the home inspections that this greatly assisted with his business.17 Students applying their knowledge at home and in the community was exactly what the bureau had hoped to see happen with the establishment of the charity schools. To determine if children were truly making an impact on their families and to ensure that families were not undermining the work of the schools, the schoolmaster, and occasionally a civil deputy, conducted household inspections, known as the visite générale. As chapters 1 and 2 detailed, these occurred three times per year in September, May, “and one other month choice, preferably in the winter.”18 During the very first visite générale, schoolmasters and parents drew up contracts together regarding the family’s responsibility and the school’s obligation to the children. Schoolmasters also examined the parents’ knowledge of “the Catechism, reading, writing, civility, spelling, and general skills”19 through a battery of oral and, when necessary, written exercises. The headmasters held low expectations for the families, indicating in the règlemens that “if the parents and family members display[ed] ignorance, this [was] to be expected, but carefully addressed.”20 These types of statements help us better understand how society conceived of the lower sorts. In addition to

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viewing them as an immoral group, elite society held the preconceived notion that the majority were uneducated and ignorant.21 But, this was not always reflective of reality. The extant visite générale records demonstrate that the investment of working poor families in education was considerable. Although a number of families were considered “absolutely uneducated,” schoolmasters most commonly noted that fathers had a basic reading proficiency in French and those involved in trade could keep accounts with a degree of accuracy. Mothers rarely had a reading or writing proficiency, but some mothers did show a degree of numeracy, perhaps due to the frequency that women kept account books during this period. Consistent with Démia’s findings in the 1660s, schoolmasters throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century noted that almost no one, whether fathers, mothers, grandparents, or siblings, knew the Catechism.22 Therefore, while adult men may have had a rudimentary knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic, it was not up to the bureau’s standards. Only a few visite générale records from the eighteenth century exist and most of those are from the first two decades so tracing the evolution in family knowledge is difficult. However, the bureau notes that visits continued throughout the eighteenth century, with families showing “some signs of improvement.”23 In addition to testing the education of the household, during the visite générale the family was also judged on other aspects of their lives. The father or male head of household, possibly a brother or uncle, had to provide “proof of employment” by taking the schoolmaster to his “workshop, shop, or place of work.”24 This was the only way that fathers or male heads of household could establish proof of employment. If the male head of household changed jobs or became unemployed in between inspections, it was his responsibility to “alert the schoolmaster immediately.”25 Though the records do not specify what happened in situations where the father lost his job, class lists never indicate that a child had a habitually unemployed father. The mother was not required to show proof of employment, but she was judged on the quality of house she kept. This speaks volumes to the gendered nature of family responsibilities in premodern Europe. As the primary caregiver to children and the keeper of domestic order, in the bureau’s eyes, the mother was accountable for the physical state of the household. If the house

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did not include “adequate sleeping quarters, reasonable food, and an environment to foster Christian learning,” a child could not attend an école de charité until the “mother had attended to these issues.”26 The behaviour of mothers was also a more pressing concern to the bureau throughout this period, with schoolmasters often complaining of mothers who “neglected their children,” either by leaving them at the school overnight or by not adequately dressing them. For example, in 1689 her son and daughter’s schoolmasters repeatedly warned Paulette Quinn that if she did not better dress her children for the winter months with the clothes the bureau had provided earlier in the year, her children would be expelled. Interestingly, the bureau records note that Messire Arnaud, the treasurer of the bureau, suggested contacting the children’s father for assistance; however, the assembly agreed that this was “the responsibility of the mother.”27 This denoted both a responsibility of mothers as well as a clear delineation in gendered responsibilities between parents. This point also reflects a general sentiment seen throughout the bureau’s records that suggests mothers were largely responsible for what schoolmasters and benefactors saw as a moral decline in the working poor. Similar to arguments made in the twentieth century about working mothers, the Lyonnais elite saw mothers who worked full time as potentially damaging for children. But, at the same time, they continued to educate girls in crafts with the understanding they would be both future workers in the city’s factories as well as mothers. To borrow Judith Bennett’s term, this view is reflective of the “patriarchal equilibrium” that has persisted throughout the centuries.28 Siblings and any other members of the family or household were interviewed as well, though not with as much vigour as the parents were. In interviewing siblings, the schoolmasters focused intensely on “the civility of the student,” taking note of any “contention between siblings, rowdy fights, lewd behaviour, or irreverent speech.”29 Schoolmasters noted that “a child’s relationship to [his] siblings could predict how that child will interact with students” in the classroom and in the streets. With all these interviews, the first home visit was always the most time-consuming and thorough inspection, usually requiring the schoolmaster to spend several hours with the family. Subsequent visits went much faster, with the schoolmaster usually only staying for about an hour at the family’s residence. During these visits, parents, siblings, and other household members were

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required to “demonstrate proper and improved Christian comportment, continued employment, behaviour appropriate of a loyal subject of His Majesty, and advancement in reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic.”30 If any family member did not show improvement in one or more of these areas, the entire family was reprimanded and the student was required to meet with the schoolmaster to find ways to “help improve [the] family’s shortcomings.”31 The promise of additional charity, employment, and assistance was often enough to convince parents to send their children to their parish’s charity school and to submit to the intense scrutiny of schoolmasters, the Church, and the community through regular household inspections. Since attendance at the écoles de charité dramatically increased during the 1680s, it can be assumed that families saw the economic and social advantages of sending their children to the charity schools despite this surveillance. Possibly parents perceived a correlation between the schools, work, and the improving economy or perhaps they appreciated the additional charity opportunities. With this level of surveillance, it does bring into question how much of charity school children’s behaviour and comportment was coerced. For some children, the threat of additional Catechism lessons was enough to motivate them to teach their family prayers. For some like Jacques Rossignoud, though, schoolmasters’ threats and potential punishments seemed to make little difference. Jacques’ father, a cordmaker, never attended mass with his family. Since the records from this family’s home visits no longer exist, it is difficult to assume what the underlying issues might have been that kept the father from mass. Regardless of reason, because of his repeated failure to get his father to the religious service, Rossignoud was labelled “obstinate” by a schoolmaster in the official class lists. Rossignoud appeared on Catechism records from 1701 to 1703, though another note indicates that he often skipped this instruction even when it was part of a punishment. Despite this apparent defiance, Rossignoud never faced extreme punishment or expulsion according to the records. Perhaps schoolmasters saw it as their mission to ensure he received an education despite his recalcitrant behaviour. Or, perhaps, his story and the behaviour of more than one hundred other students marked as “obstinate” tell a different story: not every student was a rule-abiding, model student. The relative silence around misbehaviour and severe punishment for said misbehaviour is striking when examining these institutional documents. There

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are plenty of examples of good behaviour, recorded perhaps for posterity’s sake to demonstrate how these schools and teachers imparted positive change. There are also plenty of examples of students’ small infractions or minor issues, but outright defiance or serious student misbehaviour is minimally recorded. Since adolescence is a period often depicted as one marked by tensions with authority in the modern era, does this reveal that adolescents in the early modern period, at least in Lyon, did not experience this? Possibly. But more likely it did not serve the interest of administrators to note their students’ defiance. It would put their authority and control into question. The silence regarding the defiance of students becomes even more striking as the records reveal plenty of information regarding community members’ misbehaviour as told by students.

tat tletale refor mers In addition to serving as teachers in the family setting, students also had the responsibility of building nascent early modern French nationalism or, at least, loyalty to the French state.32 This nascent nation building can be seen through the dissemination of proper French speech as well as the community policing of various laws. Administrators saw language and laws as binding subjects under one unified kingdom of France. As the previous chapter emphasized, children were taught proper French over regional dialects and variations in the classroom. Students were supposed to encourage others to speak with the “correct” accent. Although it is difficult to know what this proper accent sounded like, in the bureau meeting notes from April 1698, administrators complained that the improper accent was “without spirit and slow,”33 suggesting the proper accent was more pronounced. Whatever the case, schoolchildren were expected to help their parents, siblings, and neighbours correct their speech. This emphasis on accent correction is in line with the seventeenth-century French focus on the standardization of language. French identity could be wrapped into language and speech, facilitating exchange among and between every Frenchman. In addition to correcting accents, teaching students the law could foster a sense of French loyalty, and thereby strengthening the authority of the state

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and of the local community. Students became a type of police force34 within the family with the addition of a new surveillance code in 1689 in the règlemens that stated, children are strongly encouraged and required to report the misdeeds of their parents, siblings, and other household members to their teacher and schoolmaster without delay. If misdeeds are tolerated in the household, the morality of students and future subjects of His Majesty are in jeopardy.35 This surveillance code created an unprecedented level of state, church, and municipal supervision within the household. It also afforded children a certain kind of authority and position within the family not previously recognized. At several of the early bureau meetings, Démia insisted that children be instilled with a clear sense of legality and illegality. In all bandes, students were introduced to and reminded of the various “laws of the city,” especially if any had recently changed or if there had been an increase in a particular crime. Special attention was paid to laws that Démia viewed as “crimes typically committed by the poor,” including gambling, drunkenness, theft, and deception. If students “observed their parents, siblings, friends, or [other household] members”36 committing illegal acts, they were supposed to remind the offender of their fault, asking them to cease their actions immediately. If the “ill behaviour” continued or “was repeatedly committed on a frequent basis,” students were required to report the person to the headmaster.37 The offender would then be subject to the applicable punishments and even to legal action. By educating schoolchildren in the laws and requiring them to report any unlawful or lewd actions to the schoolmasters, children became the police of moral practice within the household. The city and state magistrates extended their power into the household via surveillance systems made up of children. Not surprisingly, members of the child-police force were slow to start reporting their own family’s misdeeds. But, children were quick to tattle on their neighbours and strangers. Most of the complaints detailed those “poor crimes” the règlemens warned of, including gambling, drunkenness, theft, idleness, bad language, and prostitution. For example, in the 1690s boys at the École Charitable de Saint George in Lyon told their schoolmaster about a group of

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affaneux, or day labourers, who regularly gambled on the banks of the Saône, noting that these affaneux were often drunk and disorderly. According to the boys, the affaneux made it difficult to walk home since the labourers would often shout, tease, or otherwise harass the schoolchildren. One of the boys even claimed that one of the drunk affaneux stole his younger sister’s bonnet after screaming lewd comments at her, leaving her distraught and scared. The boys explained they had repeatedly told the affaneux to stop their drunken behaviour but to no avail. The schoolmaster indicated that after receiving this complaint, he immediately visited with these affaneux, threatening to tell their employers and “for the moment” convincing them to move down the river so as to not disrupt the children.38 In March 1700, Pernette Dupont, a twelve-year-old girl in Lyon’s École Charitable de Saint Michel, told her schoolmistress about suspected prostitution. She witnessed her neighbour, an embroideress of about seventeen years old, frequently “going behind a building on the rue Lanterne” to spend time with “many different men, almost on a daily basis.” As Julie Hardwick has argued, young couples often engaged in public displays of affection in public spaces like streets, parks, and riverbanks. But when couples quite literally hid in the shadows of alleys, their behaviour became suspect.39 Therefore, the embroideress’s behaviour would have seemed rather dubious. The schoolmistress, most likely suspecting that the neighbour was a prostitute, explained she would go remind the girl of “proper feminine behaviour” and the “punishments for such illicit behaviour.”40 Many boys also tattled on their neighbours or strangers for theft. In July 1757, fifteen-year-old Georges Etienne Du Marché reported to the Saint Michel schoolmaster in Lyon that he witnessed “several small cases of theft from grocers’ carts along the Saône” over the course of the previous month. Although Georges could not name the thieves, the schoolmaster indicated he would walk with Georges in the morning for the next week to see if he noticed “any instances of theft” so they could “punish the dirty thieves” and “ensure the grocers were compensated.” A month later, a note indicated that the schoolmaster and Georges had caught four silk apprentices, each aged about sixteen, stealing various food, including apples, leeks, and fish, from grocers’ carts. The cases of theft were handed over to the Hôtel de Ville, but the grocers thanked the Saint Michel schoolmaster and Georges with a “hearty supply of fresh fish

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and barley.”41 This is one of the only instances in which the schoolmaster and student acted as detectives and physically detained suspected criminals. Normally, the children and schoolmasters did not go to such extremes. Even though these stereotypically “poor crimes” were most likely unsurprising to the authorities, it is important to note that the children, having been inculcated with ideas about correct social mores, saw this behaviour as being unacceptable and, therefore, reported it. Children’s decisions to tattle at all is important to understanding the contested nature of patriarchy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Despite tattling on neighbours and strangers almost immediately after the release of these surveillance codes, children were hesitant to disclose their family members’ misdeeds. Tattling on strangers or neighbours likely had little consequence to children’s daily lives, whereas reporting on a family member could spell trouble for a child. It was not until 1701, twelve years after the child-police code was added to the Lyonnais règlemens, that records indicate that a student officially reported a family member’s misbehaviour to a schoolmaster. This first case was discussed at the October 1701 meeting of the Bureau des Écoles des Pauvres de Lyon. The Saint Nizier headmaster professed that one of his students, Jean Buvet, claimed that his father, François, a taffeta worker, and mother, Annette, a laundress, regularly left him, his three younger brothers, and two infant sisters for days at a time in order to drink and gamble on the outskirts of the city. Jean told the schoolmaster that his father had been unemployed for some time and that his mother provided for the family by picking up laundress jobs from the city’s various textile manufacturers. Jean also explained that his parents never went to church and refused his advice to attend a recent feast day mass. When Jean informed his parents that he had “no choice but to tell Monsieur Le Maître [about] their behaviour,” François angrily grabbed Jean by the arm and scolded him. According to the règlemens, the official punishment for the parents’ continued immoral behaviour was supposed to be their child’s expulsion from the charity school.42 According to the register, François was livid after learning of his family’s punishment. Yelling at the administrator, François insisted that Jean was “a disrespectful liar.” Jean’s accusation eroded François’s authority and demonstrated Jean’s disobedience and lack of respect. Jean was absent from school for eight days. He later described this as “a punishment” for tattling on his parents. During those eight days, Jean indicated that he was only allowed to

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eat a small portion of bread once a day and was regularly beaten for having reported his parents.43 In subsequent home visits, schoolmasters reported that there was “noticeable tension” in the family and that “François [was] hostile” towards both the schoolmaster and his son. This suggested that Jean’s decision to inform on his family had negative effects on family dynamics.44 This first case is rather representative of subsequent cases made in terms of how a child filed a report, what type of crime was committed, how the administrators dealt with the case, and how the family, notably the father, responded to the punishment. Charity schoolchildren tattled on their parents more than they did on their siblings or other household members. Of the 302 family reports available in the records, 291 regarded the misbehaviour of either a father or mother. In the remaining family cases that reported a sibling or a household member the child almost always indicated that their sibling had tried to correct his or her behaviour but had repeatedly fallen back into bad practices. Schoolchildren indicated that they had brought their siblings’ bad behaviour to their parents’ attention, but their parents had done nothing to correct it. This was the case with Josef Mascon, who told his schoolmaster in 1744 that his sister, Anthoinette, and his father’s apprentice, Paul, were regularly having sex, though they were not engaged. Anthoinette, aged “about eighteen,” was a shopkeeper at her uncle’s bonnet shop and Paul, aged “about twenty,” was in his fourth year of service with Josef ’s father, a wool worker. Josef informed his father repeatedly about his suspicions and explained to the schoolmaster he was concerned “for his sister’s reputation.” Apparently, Josef ’s father did not believe the accusations because he questioned how Paul, who he worked with “every day, almost all day” could find the time to engage in such an affair. Josef ’s father also wondered where this could have happened since their residence was “comprised of only three small rooms.” Even though Josef said that he followed Anthoinette twice and both times found her in a nearby park, unclothed, and in the bushes with the apprentice, his father refused to listen, dismissing it as an “imaginative story.” The schoolmaster, however, took the complaint seriously. At the family’s next home visit, the schoolmaster questioned Joseph’s father, Anthoinette, and Paul about their possible trysts. The schoolmaster determined that the two were involved sexually. He sternly reprimanded Josef ’s father for allowing such a relationship to exist. Josef ’s parents, but not Anthoinette and Paul, were

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required to attend additional masses and extra Catechism lessons for at least three months in order for the family to collect their alms that year. Other than the schoolmaster rebuking the couple, Anthoinette and Paul were shielded from punishment. They were to “practice the Catechism regularly” but not required to attend additional masses. Though Anthoinette and Paul were older adolescents bordering on adulthood, they were still considered children. In this way, the responsibility shifted from the children to the parents, with the schoolmaster placing blame with the parents’ bad household management.45 This insinuates that parents were supposed to monitor and control their adolescents’ sexual behaviour. In both Alice and Josef ’s cases, schoolchildren viewed the authority of schoolmasters as superior to their own parents’ authority. While schoolchildren were careful to emphasize their siblings’ naiveté and willingness to adapt, children rarely insisted that their parents were willing to change their behaviour. Instead, they indicated that parents ignored their child’s authoritative instructions, leaving the child no choice but to divulge their crimes to teachers. In terms of the types of misdeeds reported, children focused on revealing their family’s, especially parents’, immoral behaviour. This included such offences as refusing to attend Church, ignorance of the Catechism or other Catholic beliefs, drunkenness, sexually illicit behaviour, or idleness. At times, it is clear that a student was not tattling but rather divulging details about their parents to ask for assistance or guidance from an exterior authority figure. Children who reported their parents for habitual drunkenness, in particular, read like cries for help from defenseless children. Although all of these records could be interpreted as children’s complete acceptance, conscious or otherwise, of the surveillance policy and the goals of social reform, it is important to also consider that reporting this could help the family instead of harm and punish it. Although moral crimes were recorded with the most frequency, children also reported other types of illegal activity, especially those that contravened certain trade and financial laws. For example, in 1721 at the St George school, a student in his fourth year, Laurent Trisse, informed his schoolmaster that his father, Mathieu, a butcher, often failed to correctly log his sales in the account book. In addition to sometimes forgetting to write down sales, Laurent said that his father’s arithmetic was terrible. As part of their curriculum during the fourth year, charity schoolchildren became familiar with various accounting

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practices. Schoolmasters encouraged children with parents who kept account books to double check their parents’ entries, correct any mistakes, and teach their family about proper bookkeeping methods. Although this was a way for children to gain a type of “real world” application of their skills, it also encouraged correct accounting in the community, which could bolster the economy. Therefore, Laurent’s inspection of his father’s account books was not an uncommon activity, but it did elicit the schoolmaster’s suspicions. Hearing about the butcher’s errors, the schoolmaster immediately informed the prévost des marchans et échevins, who then handed the case over to the Hôtel de Ville. The magistrates expressed concern that Mathieu had avoided paying taxes by deliberately misreporting purchases and sales in his account book. Mathieu tried to defend this as a simple mistake due to his “ignorance of numbers,” but the Hôtel de Ville fined him fifty livres to be paid out over the course of three years. Furthermore, he was no longer allowed to supply the St George charity school with meat, effectively losing his contract with the Bureau des Écoles which paid Mathieu an average of ten livres per month for different cuts of meat. According to the St George schoolmaster, this caused quite a bit of tension between the father and son, with the two routinely arguing and physically fighting in the streets outside of the butcher shop.46 Only rarely, as in the butcher’s case or with reports of theft, were these complaints handed over to the jurisdiction of the municipal authorities. Although the Hôtel de Ville and different civil magistrates often consulted with the schools on the course of action to take, parents were almost never formally tried for their misdeeds. Instead, the charity schools created a sort of informal punitive system to correct immoral behaviour and illegal activity among charity school families. Punishments varied greatly from case to case but usually involved the stripping of a charitable service for a set amount of time or having the family attend Catechism lessons and masses. Even though the règlemens indicated that children would be expelled for their parents’ misbehaviour, this punishment was never handed out. Administrators usually discussed this as an option (as they did with Jean Buvet) but determined that keeping the child in school allowed them to both continue surveillance of an immoral family as well as to continue improving the behaviour of the poor. When parents were confronted with their children’s reports, they rarely tried to defend their actions. Instead, they focused on the insolence and insubor-

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dination of their child. Often speaking about their role as a patriarch, and therefore as a type of monarch within the family, fathers argued their child’s report was an affront to their power over the home – to paternalism. There was a clear sense, especially among fathers, that their patriarchal authority was supposed to reign supreme over their children. Although the available documents contain mostly father’s responses to these accusations (perhaps indicating a gendered assumption about what schoolmasters and scribes deemed noteworthy in discussions with parents), on occasion mothers’ voices were recorded. Mothers usually asserted some dominance over a child, indicating that in the familial hierarchies, mothers also held authority over children. Mothers used the same language as fathers, calling a child “ungrateful,” “disobedient,” or “disrespectful.” This rhetoric is telling in terms of how parents conceptualized their own positions and that of their children in the family hierarchy. Above all, parents were supposed to wield power and authority. Children were supposed to be obedient to their parents. Acting in defiance of their parents’ wishes was intolerable. Parents were often heavy handed with their children, correcting their behaviour physically through beatings and intense labour. Through the fear corporal punishment created, parents believed children learned to respect them. Parents considered snitching a dangerous reversal of the patriarchal power dynamic. It demonstrated a lack of the obedience, respect, and gratitude that were necessary factors in child-parent relations. Therefore, parents were unsurprisingly resistant to their children acting in positions of authority. These responses also indicate that early modern families saw their household as a type of impenetrable space that should not be subject to the scrutiny or surveillance of outside forces.47 In other words, parental authority was supposed to be absolute in the household. The surveillance code impinged on this power. Parents predictably exhibited hostility and “tension” towards their children and school administrators after the report was launched. As was the case with Jean Buvet and Laurent Trisse, these feelings existed for some time after the punishment was over, with both mothers and fathers routinely arguing with their children in public. In home visit records,48 some parents could not recover from their children’s breach of trust. On a few occasions, parents decided to send their children to live with relatives or a neighbour. For example, Gaston de la Croix from Lyon revealed his stepfather’s penchant for gambling and was immediately taken to the nearby village of Saint Etienne to live for three

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months with his deceased father’s brother. Additionally, Gabrielle Lucern moved in with her neighbour in Lyon for nearly a year after revealing her parents’ idle drunkenness in 1769.49 It is possible that in all of these cases, the child’s displacement was the result of financial necessity. These families lost some form of charitable assistance as a result of their child’s report, which likely would have caused immediate and dire economic strain. Having a child temporarily live elsewhere may have been a deliberate and conscious strategy to ease financial strife. It is also possible that forcing the child to move may have been a parental strategy to reassert dominance. Deciding to remove the child from the house may have indicated to the child that his or her parents still had control over of their families’ fate. Much like how parents used lettres de cachets50 to punish and correct children’s behaviour through incarceration, parents may have used temporary and forcible displacement similarly. The child’s time away would serve as a punishment of social isolation. Most children, though, remained in the home despite parents who were often furious and distraught with them. Conflicts, like that between Laurent Trisse and his father, existed and sometimes boiled over into the streets. But, families had to find ways to move beyond these incidents. For most of these families, the children’s surveillance meant that they had to be viewed suspiciously, although children were still important to receive charitable assistance. Examining these records illustrates that the 1689 addition of a surveillance code to the charity school règlemens generated an unprecedented type of state, church, and municipal supervision within the family and household by way of children. But these records cannot and do not reveal children’s individual incentives for tattling on their neighbours, friends, and families. This is a methodological reality that hampers an even deeper analysis of how this surveillance code might have provided a space for children to air their grievances with their families and to assert power. What these cases provide us with, though, are examples of how the patriarchal family was not nearly as hierarchical in practice as historians assume. Although children are almost always discussed as being the most subordinate members of the early modern household, bound by their familial ties, the surveillance code provided them an opportunity to extend power over their parents. Despite the fact that these children were acting defiantly towards their parents, they were abiding by an external authority – that of charity schools and

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schoolmasters. The amount of coercion involved in child-police forces is important to consider when analyzing the children’s actions. By educating schoolchildren in legality and requiring them to report any unlawful or lewd actions to their schoolmasters, city and state magistrates extended their power into the household via informal legal systems made up of children. Children were repeatedly inculcated and used as surveillance tools. For this reason, arguing that this was truly a child’s “choice” is somewhat problematic. These institutions saw how useful children could be as a means of infiltrating the lower sorts. Elites cleverly used children to improve society from the bottom up, according to prescribed ideas about morality, work, and the state. But what these records do not reveal are children’s individual incentives for going along with these policies. Perhaps they were successfully inculcated or maybe they saw the charity schools as a mediator for familial conflicts. Whatever the case, without clear testimonies, children’s incentives remain conjecture. Yet, their actions are not insignificant. Despite not being able to analyze individual incentive, these cases contest the hierarchical model of family patriarchy. At the same time that children pushed back against household hierarchy they managed to help solidify social strata in the late seventeenth century. As guilds began to subcontract work to various journeymen, nonelite society began to develop its own social hierarchy. Despite the rise in journeymen, there was not a corresponding expansion of guild master positions. Instead, the position of guild master came to be understood as one of particular status and wealth. Though guild masters may not necessarily have been elite in traditional terms (as they were rarely members of the noblesse de robe or noblesse de l’épée), their wealth and position as controllers of certain industries placed them significantly above journeymen and the working poor. At the same time, while students were actively being educated and fashioned to improve France’s economic productivity, they were constantly forced to confront their inferior status. Schoolmasters were “never to give false hope” to the students that they could rise to the ranks of guild master.51 Instead, students were repeatedly “reminded of their position as workers and employers.”52 The écoles de charité explained and reinforced the lesson that students could not expect to move upwards in the social hierarchy by much. By articulating and exposing these ideas to students early on, teachers taught students to internalize their positions as workers and subjects. Children could help the Church, the state, and

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the elite to establish and ensure traditional social hierarchies. Although a student might move out of “depraved poverty” once done with their education, they should not have expected to move beyond a worker for the rest of his or her life. This was essential to a stable society. When people accepted their positions and placement in the social hierarchy, there would be no need for rebellion or change.

refor m spre ads w ith t r ade Child reformers were successful in enacting change in Lyon. In fact, they were so successful that other cities took note of the Lyonnais example and set out to reform their own education system around the Lyonnais model. Just months before his death in 1689 Charles Démia wrote a letter to Camille de Neufville de Villeroy, his close friend and the archbishop of Lyon, reflecting on their nearly twenty-five years of work together establishing écoles de charité in Lyon’s poorest parishes. This letter, one of the last exchanged between to the two, was added as a preface to the eighteenth-century printed editions of Démia’s règlemens, serving as an introduction to the text. Although this letter is laden with pride in the success of the schools, it also demonstrates that Démia understood the important impact his experiments in Lyon had on educational reform in the rest of early modern France: Without a doubt, Monseigneur, one of our greatest contributions [has been] to inspire [our] most Christian monarch to think [about] establishing similar institutions throughout his entire kingdom; Since his Majesty had been informed of the fruits of [this] Diocese … [he] declared in the month of February 1688 … to establish strong schools throughout the kingdom … [Also] for the Church [we] have provided the instruction of good morals to children, [we] educated his Majesty’s subjects and attached [them] to his service, but most of all, [we provided] genuinely happy, well-behaved residents and workers of the town and Diocese [of Lyon].53 This letter was the fulfillment of a promise that Démia made twenty-five years earlier to the magistrates, clergy, and wealthy residents of Lyon. In exchange

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for supporting his plan to establish écoles de charité in Lyon’s poorest parishes, Démia guaranteed significant social reform (especially among the lower sorts), economic prosperity, and increased moral and physical security. But, this letter is also significant because it acknowledges the spread of social reform centred on children from Lyon to other French cities. In the final decades of the seventeenth century, Démia’s règlemens and information about Lyonnais charity schools extended throughout the French kingdom with schools founded in both small towns and large urban centres. Historians54 have often attributed the rise in charity and parish schools to Louis XIV’s 1698 mandate that required “schoolmasters and mistresses [to] be appointed in all parishes where there currently are none as soon as possible.” Using the Lyonnais schools as a model for emulation, schoolmasters and mistresses were “to instruct all children … in the Catechism and prayers … [and to] teach reading and even writing.”55 With this edict, the French state acknowledged the profound impact that charity schools had on the French population. More importantly, through this decree the state insinuated that children were imperative to society’s development. This mandate came several years after many communities had already established charity and parish schools. Instead of a prescriptive measure that drew a response from below, the 1698 mandate was the result of individual communities making the decision to establish educational institutions and the king taking notice of these actions. In the case of charity schools – whether in small towns or large cities – reform came from below. Charity schools and educational institutions that catered to the poor sections of France’s population proliferated not because of a royal mandate but because of individual communities’ investments in social reform attentive to children and their education. Over the last quarter of the seventeenth century, local governing bodies, whether parish administrators, religious orders, or merchant organizations, spearheaded educational reform on the Lyonnais model in order to meet their communities’ unique demands. The French state did not demand blanket reforms across the kingdom but instead local communities tailored these educational programs to meet their own economic, social, and religious requirements. Groups in Dijon, Troyès, Châlons-en-Champagne, and Reims all struggled with similar issues of social discontent during the 1670s. Learning of Lyon’s success with charity schools, these communities obtained copies of

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Démia’s règlemens, either directly from the Bureau des Écoles or through another method, and designed educational programs on this model. Much of this reputation likely travelled with merchants as the first several schools to adopt Lyonnais practices ran along the major trade route between Lyon, Dijon, and the Champagne region. Through the implementation of these programs in cities throughout France, children and their education were considered key for enacting social reform. In May 1678, Monsieur Gonthier, grand vicaire de la compagnie du Saint Sacrement56 in Dijon, wrote to Monsieur Manis, the bureau’s secretary, asking if the bureau might be willing to send a copy of the règlemens to Dijon for his use. Gonthier indicated he had heard about the success of the institutions in bolstering the “quality of the poor.” Along with other elites, Gonthier was worried about the increasingly depraved and impoverished menu peuple that had moved into the city from the countryside. Eager to establish similar poor schools in Dijon, Gonthier hoped that the Lyonnais example could be easily implemented in his city. According to the notes of the bureau’s June 1678 meeting, every schoolmaster and administrator expressed his support for sending a copy of the règlemens to Dijon. M. Arnauld, a wealthy bookseller and bureau member was particularly enthusiastic, vowing to “personally ensure that a copy is created in the finest quality.” In July 1678, the bureau indicated they sent a copy of the règlemens as well as a list of their current books to Dijon. The bureau noted that this was an indication that their social experiments with charity schools were becoming both well known and well respected.57 Much like Lyon, Dijon was the economic centre for its region, Burgundy, and experienced a large influx in the population of artisans during the seventeenth century. But, unlike Lyon, Dijon’s artisan population was comprised mostly of master craftsmen rather than journeymen. In 1678, there were 910 master artisans compared to the 373 wine journeymen in the town. As James Farr has argued, this artisanal section of the city’s population formed a kind of “nascent class” that separated itself from the journeymen and vignerons, or winemakers, beneath them, and from the elite legal, mercantile, and noble group above them.58 This artisanal nascent class saw itself as more aligned with the elite group above them and did much to separate themselves from association with manual labourers. In particular, this artisanal class participated in charitable activities in cooperation with the elite groups. Therefore, Dijon’s charity schools were a joint venture between the masters and the elite bankers,

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lawyers, and nobles above them, together wishing to change the character of Dijon’s struggling poor. In addition to wanting to “rid the city of vice and immorality” through education, according to Gonthier, Dijon could also benefit from a school’s ability to “better equip children with trade skills.”59 With this statement, Gonthier expressed that the school was not solely for religious or moral purposes but was also for economic gain. Having secured enough funds from the community, in 1695 the École Charitable de Dijon opened its doors to an inaugural class of eighty-five students, most of whom were the sons and daughters of vignerons and journeymen. The school operated on the Lyonnais règlemens, though the curriculum was slightly adjusted to meet the needs of Dijon’s community. In particular, vocational education concentrated on skills necessary to the wine trade.60 Over the course of the eighteenth century at least two more charity schools opened in Dijon and the larger Burgundy region, demonstrating the community’s commitment to providing children of the honourable poor with a moral and vocational education. Following the path of trade northward towards the Champagne region, the next request for the Lyonnais règlemens came from the town of Troyes in 1681. According to the Bureau des Écoles, the Chambre de Commerce de Troyes requested “a copy of Monsieur Démia’s works.”61 Much like Lyon, Troyes had been a Ligue stronghold in the sixteenth century. As a result, its foires, or marketplaces, were suspended throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ruining the town’s economy and access to trade. Making matters worse, a fire swept through Troyes in 1524, destroying nearly half of the town. Even though the town was brought back under monarchical control, Troyes’s economy in 1681 was still in the process of rebuilding itself. Many of the town’s wealthiest merchants had relocated to Dijon, Reims, or Paris when the Ligue took control of the city, leaving Troyes without a large group of merchants or bankers to stimulate the economy.62 Those merchants and noblemen who had stayed in Troyes, most of whom had been Ligue supporters, worked to literally rebuild their city over the next century. The elites sponsored projects to reconstruct the town’s infrastructure, employing most of the peasants as masons, bricklayers, carpenters, and general labourers. But with such an abysmal economic situation, most of Troyes’s population was destitute in 1681. The construction projects were not steady and often stalled when money ran out, leaving the journeymen and day la-

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bourers without work. As a result, Troyes experienced a rapid rise in vagrancy that worried town leaders.63 Vice and immorality ran rampant in the impoverished town when M. François Bourdieux, a salt merchant and member of the Troyes Chambre de Commerce, wrote to the bureau. Since Lyon had been able to revitalize its economy and infrastructure after the disastrous Ligue presence, Troyes Chambre de Commerce looked to Lyon for inspiration. The chambre de commerce attributed part of Lyon’s success to the foundation of the charity schools. Bourdieux explained that he and the other members of the chambre de commerce wanted to “immediately make one, if not more, charity schools for the children of the town’s poor.” The bureau responded enthusiastically and Troyes received one of the first printed editions of Démia’s règlemens in August 1681.64 In addition to sending the règlemens, Lyon’s Bureau des Écoles arranged for two schoolmasters to visit Troyes and meet with the chambre de commerce as well as various parish priests. Furthermore, individual bureau members donated fifteen petit Catechism manuals, thirty-five stacks of paper from Lyon’s printers, various kinds of writing utensils and ink, and numerous books for children to read.65 With the help of these schoolmasters and the supplies, Troyes opened an école de charité in 1685, with twenty-seven students. The Bureau des Écoles noted that in Troyes, children learned how to be carpenters, masons, and construction workers, helping to restore their town’s infrastructure.66 Children were also trained in more specialized trades like salt refining, grain selling, and baking, all of which the town and region were in desperate need of. According to the notes, a strong relationship continued to exist between Troyes and the Lyonnais Bureau des Écoles until the late eighteenth century, with Lyonnais schoolmasters often visiting the town, bringing supplies and materials with them. Following the trade route farther into the Champagne region, on the outskirts of Reims, the small town of Châlons-en-Champagne established an école charitable in 1686. Unlike Dijon or Troyes, Châlons-en-Champagne did not appear to have had any contact with Lyon’s Bureau des Écoles, suggesting that the information about charity schools was disseminated in another fashion, perhaps through a merchant or a travelling schoolmaster. The only information available about this school comes from a report compiled in 1735 on the “state of hospitals” in the region. Detailing the “condition of hospitals, poor houses, and orphanages” in Reims and the surrounding areas, a short

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paragraph describes the establishment of a “school for the poor children of Châlons-en-Champagne.” The school, staffed by “guild members,” provided an “education in reading, writing, counting, and craft skills.” The school “did not teach the Catechism as this was already done by the parish priests,”67 indicating that this school was more likely a preapprenticeship program. Although it is not known if Châlons-en-Champagne had a copy of Lyon’s règlemens, the objectives described in the report indicate that the school was established in the same vein as other écoles charitables at the time. The Châlons-en-Champagne school is an excellent example of how education was perceived as a two-step process involving first traditional reading and writing and later, vocational skills. By not emphasizing religion in the school, Châlons-en-Champagne acknowledged that education could provide the basic skills necessary for later apprenticeships and jobs. Much like Parisian écoles gratuite, the community understood the value of an education as being primarily vocational in nature. In many ways, the Châlons-en-Champagne school was a tool of the guilds to inculcate various ideas and skills. Continuing on the trade route into the heart of the Champagne region, in 1689 wealthy merchants in Reims proposed the establishment of an école charitable. According to the group of merchants who wrote to the bureau, Reims had increased rapidly in population, as many peasants from the countryside moved into the city during the 1660s. With this change in population, the merchant elite noticed a “lack of skilled labourers” along with “increased immorality.” The merchants thought the best way to address both of these issues was through the establishment of “more stringent apprenticeship systems in the guilds along with a school for the poor.”68 Over the next decade, the Bureau des Écoles sent seven copies of Démia’s règlemens, provided various recommendations and suggestions, and even had the directeur général visit Reims in 1701.69 Despite these efforts, the merchants were unsuccessful in garnering support for their school. Reims’s archbishop, Charles Maurice Le Tellier, refused to lend his support to the proposal, citing the existing Catechism and parish schools as sufficient for the poor.70 It was not until 1710 when the new archbishop, François de Mailly, took control that an école de charité was established that combined religious education with vocational training.71 The proliferation of charity schools along a major trade route is not necessarily surprising. Since Lyonnais charity schools did much to improve the city’s economy, merchants undoubtedly saw the benefits of providing the poor in

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their own cities with such an education. The growth of these schools was likely the result of merchant intervention in social reform. None of these communities was under a state mandate or were following the advice of the Crown, which would come later in 1698. Instead, seeing the success of the Lyonnais institutions in bolstering the Rhône economy through the education of children, these communities adapted the Lyonnais model to fit their local needs. Aside from moving northwest along the major trade routes, Lyon’s charity schools also impacted the local Rhône region. A much smaller and closer town to Lyon, Saint Etienne, similarly petitioned the bureau for a copy of the règlemens in 1689. Given the proximity of the town to Lyon, the schoolmaster at an existing parish school also asked for “a visit from a schoolmaster” in order to implement a curriculum geared toward poor children.72 In 1690, two Lyonnais schoolmasters went to Saint Etienne with several copies of the règlemens, additional books, stacks of paper, writing instruments, and other supplies that might help the small Saint Etienne school. With the schoolmaster’s help, Saint Etienne redesigned its parish school in the style of Lyonnais charity schools and reopened its doors in 1691.73 Since Saint Etienne had a large number of farmers and peasants, its charity school served a much different population and purpose than Lyonnais charity schools. The Saint Etienne regulations were adjusted to fit the more agricultural population. Growing crops and raising sheep, Saint Etienne’s peasants often travelled to Lyon to sell their goods in the city’s markets. The farmers felt it was necessary to learn more about the “merchant practices” employed in Lyon, demonstrating the effect of urbanization on the Rhône region. In particular, the peasants increasingly asked the schoolmaster to teach their children “reading and counting” so that their families could “conduct business” with Lyonnais merchants.74 With this in mind, the Saint Etienne règlemens heavily stressed mathematics, especially relating to grain prices. Even though this town had a population of fewer than 2,000 people, the community still found it necessary to implement educational reform in order to educate their children. Saint Etienne’s école de charité remained a cornerstone of the town until the late eighteenth century. In 1703, revealing the growth of Lyon’s size, population, and influence, the Saint Etienne charity school, along with another school in the nearby Saint Chaumont, came under the purview of the Bureau des Écoles.75 Although noteworthy, the establishment of charity schools on the Lyonnais model in Saint Etienne and Saint

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Chaumont could be considered part of the wider narrative of Lyon’s educational history. Over the course of the eighteenth century the charity schools, and the ideas they expressed about children’s roles in society, extended far beyond the larger Rhône, Burgundy, and Champagne regions. By 1735 there were charity schools in every major urban centre, including Marseilles, Toulon, Montpellier, Poitiers, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Foix, Bourges, Orléans, Tours, Angers, Nantes, Rennes, Chartres, Auxerrois, and Rouen, demonstrating the wide dissemination of Lyonnais practices. Although the Crown’s 1698 mandate may have incentivized the creation of some of these schools, most were the result of community engagement in social reform focused on children.

children and refor m in the capital Most notably, the Lyonnais models spread to Paris. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Paris saw a massive influx in children. The Lyonnais model for free education transformed Paris’s existing school system by putting children in active roles and positions. But, much like the other local communities that adopted the Lyonnais model, Paris adapted the system to best fit its population and needs. In 1525, priests in Paris’s Saint Etienne du Mont’s parish created a small école gratuite, or free school, to instruct the “poor of the parish” in reading, writing, and, most importantly, the Catechism. The école gratuite met weekly and provided an education not only to boys but to adult men as well, free of charge. Sharing the responsibilities from week-toweek, the priests operated the school on a voluntary basis and garnered funds from the parish’s fabrique and through private charitable donations. Unsurprisingly, due to the school’s loose administration and organization, the école gratuite failed to attract many students. In fact, at most, the règlemens indicate that priests expected to receive no more than ten to twelve students per week. Although the records indicate that the school never ceased operations, it certainly was not a priority for the parish. Throughout the sixteenth century, most likely in response to the growing threat of Protestantism, other parishes, like Saint Sulpice and Saint Eustache, opened comparable schools. Priests volunteered to teach reading, writing, and the Catechism to all those

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interested when extra time allowed. Although reading and writing occupied sections of these schools’ concentration, the sixteenth-century écoles gratuite focused heavily on these skills as they pertained to a religious education, making the schools a type of extended Catechism training. Despite the religious conflict in the sixteenth century, these schools were not priorities until the last quarter of the seventeenth century.76 Almost every Parisian parish established at least one école gratuite during the 1670s and the 1680s both as a way to educate the parish’s children and as a way to participate in the Catholic Reformation. Although these schools provided religious instruction, especially Catechism lessons, the écoles gratuites, much like Lyonnais écoles de charité, provided students with vocational training. Eventually, by the late 1670s and the 1680s, Démia’s methods had travelled back to Paris, where parish priests began to implement Lyonnais lessons and its règlemens into their schools. Although Démia’s règlemens were not printed until 1681, La Compagnie du Saint Sacrement disseminated a number of handwritten copies to Parisian parishes in the 1670s. In fact, as the Bureau des Écoles in Lyon noted in a meeting record from 1679, “in seven of the poorest parishes in Paris, the règlemens have been instituted.”77 Despite not saying in which parishes adopted some of the Lyonnais regulations, this note indicates that La Compagnie was actively transmitting these ideas across the kingdom, using Lyon as an example of the types of schools that should be created. But unlike in Lyon, Parisian charity schools were not established by a central bureaucratic organization. Instead, it was up to each parish to establish its own schools. What resulted was a patchwork of loosely similar charity schools that varied from parish to parish with no standard curriculum or admitting procedure. Most of the parishes that received a copy of the règlemens already had at least one école gratuite in operation. Saint Sulpice, for instance, had three écoles gratuites in 1678 when they requested a copy of the règlemens that was later provided by the Paris branch of La Compagnie de Saint Sacrement. In the petition, the Saint Sulpice curé noted that they had problems with defining a clear curriculum and with incentivizing attendance.78 After receiving the règlemens, Saint Sulpice reorganized its school structure, creating individual bandes and hiring additional schoolmasters. Furthermore, they established clear rules about the kinds of children who could attend the school, indicating

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that these schools were meant to not only teach about religion but also to reform society, with more careful attention paid to vocational training and preapprenticeship skills. Saint Sulpice was one of the first parishes to institute an admittance policy for its écoles gratuites, limiting enrolment to their charitable institutions. Just like in Lyon, charity schools were limited to children of the honourable, working poor who could reform and educate their families and the wider community. Taken almost verbatim from the Lyonnais règlemens, the 1689 règlemens de l’école pour des pauvres enfants de Saint Sulpice states that for a child to attend an école des pauvres, a parent, preferably the father, had to “know a trade or have a vocation.” Children with parents who “begged in the street [or] were unemployed” would not be granted admission to the schools since these children had “little to offer in the way of providing examples to the larger community.”79 This regulation suggests that marginalized subsections of poor society, like beggars and vagrants, were perhaps thought of as incorrigible and not even worth the time involved in reform. The limited enrolment records from Saint Paul, Saint Sulpice, and Saint Etienne du Mont indicate that only twelve children out of more than 1,300 over the course of the eighteenth century had parents who were unemployed, beggars, or drunkards. Instead, the majority had fathers who worked in an artisanal trade like tanning, blacksmithing, shoe repair, textiles, or baking. The school’s objective was to attract children from families that had a history in artisanal trades in order to foster reform among these families who fit the ideal stereotype of the honourable, working poor. In contrast to Lyon none of the Parisian charity schools’ attendance policies required that families be registered on their parish’s poor relief lists. Parisian parents simply had to attest to the fact that their child needed to receive a free education because of a strain on the family’s finances. Examining the extant records from Saint Paul and Saint Sulpice, 278 out of 320 children, or 86 per cent of the charity schoolchildren, had fathers who were maîtres in their fields.80 This is a stark contrast to the Lyonnais demographics, where the majority of children had fathers who worked as journeymen. Given this employment demographic in Parisian schools, it is possible that the charity schools were used less as repositories for truly disadvantaged, poor children but rather as free educational institutions for a very select subset of the poor, preparing them for apprenticeship.

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In several schools in the Saint Paul and Saint Etienne du Mont parishes, parents could also pay a small fee to have their child educated, combining free education with paid education. If a child failed to meet the “requirements set forth by the règlemens” and there was “sufficient space to accommodate additional children,” parents could pay a fee of ten livres every three months for their child to attend school. According to Saint Etienne du Mont’s records, a number of parents chose this option since in 1692 the parish received 575 livres in revenue from parents of charity schoolchildren.81 Operating these schools as both free and paid institutions indicates that although they were still meant for the poor, these institutions clearly served a different subset of the poor compared to Lyon.82 In Paris, these institutions served children of the “lower middling sorts”83 who may have been fiscally challenged but not necessarily suffering. It also indicates that the focus of social reform in Parisian charity schools was concentrated on a different group of children and society – those from the artisanal working poor. Also lacking in Paris was a clear incentive system for sending children to charity schools. The règlemens at Saint Sulpice, Saint Paul, and Saint Etienne du Mont do not specify that parents received additional bread, alms, or other incentives to encourage their children to attend school. Although schoolchildren received two meals daily, a new pair of clothes, and materials necessary for their education, including writing utensils, paper, and Catechism books, there is no indication that parents were provided with any additional support.84 Unfortunately, the records are not complete enough to be able to determine if the families receiving the most bread, alms, and assistance also had children attending charity schools. Given the different criteria for admittance in Paris compared to Lyon, it is perhaps less likely that there was a correlation in the Parisian charity schools. When the lack of both an incentive system and the prerequisite of poor relief registration is considered, it becomes clear that there was a more stratified organization of the poor in Paris, resulting in different educational charitable institutions for different subsections of the poor. Charity schools were for children of artisanal workers who used these institutions, as Clare Crowston has argued, as preapprenticeship programs where students cultivated skills with the objective of reading and drawing up contracts, bookkeeping, or executing their clients’ orders.85 The official rhetoric of most charity schools claimed that their guiding principle was for students to learn to “live with the

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Fear of God” and “the first elements of Christianity” in order to prevent poor children from falling into the “ignorance” that plagued their parents. It was only through an example of morality and education that children could “show their fathers and mothers [how] to serve God.”86 But in addition to teaching the “Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Faith, [how to] pray to God, to read, and to write,” the charity schools also stressed vocational skills like geometry, sculpture, needlework, and various arithmetic models that would prepare children well for their apprenticeships.87 In 1698, the Saint Sulpice parish released a report on the status of their schools, demonstrating how they understood the usefulness of these institutions. In addition to providing children with a solid Catholic education, teaching both the Catechism and the tenets of the faith, the schools also “raise[d] almost two thousand poor children for different trades, who without this help would err in the streets.”88 These schools were intended to produce skilled children who could go on to gain apprenticeships. Without a central organizing body, the curriculum varied from parish to parish, but all parishes shared the idea that children were to learn to read, write, and count in preparation for apprenticeships. Copying Démia’s 1681 règlemens almost word-for-word, Saint Paul’s regulations stated that children “in their third year learned chiffres de finance [so that] they [could] accurately keep account” books and read business contracts. Saint Eustache also copied the Lyonnais methods by having children “practice weighing, pricing, and making sales.”89 These activities prepared children for their roles as apprentices. Parisian écoles gratuites were not unique or innovative in their methods of vocational training but, instead, took inspiration from Démia’s règlemens and Lyonnais practices. Although the purpose and curriculum of these schools did not vary much from their Lyonnais counterpart, the fee system that existed in Paris greatly separated the two charity enterprises. Parisian charity schools sought to educate children of good reputation but difficult economic standing. Instead of educating the poorest children of the parish, these schools served more as institutions reserved for the lower middling sorts who could not afford the steep tuition at the petites écoles that various religious organizations operated. The poorest children were educated at the Écoles des Frères Chrétiennes. However, these free schools, organized by Jean Baptiste de la Salle, did not have vocational training until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. As a result, a

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subsection of the working poor probably felt that the parish lacked a real educational institution for their children. The parishes were more concerned with organizing the reform of children of the lower middling sorts. Borrowing sections of Démia’s règlemens verbatim, parish charity schools shared the belief that the Lyonnais schools espoused that traditional forms of education, such as reading, writing, and counting, should support and guide vocational training. But, this education was not open to all members of the honourable poor in Paris. Instead, these parishes took Démia’s règlemens and amended them to fit different ends – educating the children of artisans and skilled workers. Parisian municipal authorities, guilds, the Catholic Church, the elite, and the state were far more concerned with developing a solution to the growing problem of abandoned and orphaned children than they were to educational reform for the working poor during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the next chapter, “Enfants de l’État,” will reveal, orphans and foundlings presented a growing threat to Parisian social order since orphans’ very existence defied patriarchal order. Given this danger, orphaned and abandoned children became the cornerstone of negotiations between the French state and local communities in social reforms that hinged on the organization of education in French hospital-orphanages. When Démia penned his letter to Lyon’s Archbishop Camille de Neufville de Villeroy in 1689, he understood that his pedagogical experiment had and would continue to have far-reaching implications throughout France. Although Démia attributed this success to the king, as he likely had to do for political purposes. The proliferation of charity schools across France during the late seventeenth century was the result of individual communities responding to local concerns. Louis XIV’s 1698 royal mandate was, in part, the result of a significant response at the local level, with towns and cities making investments in social reform attentive to children and their education through charity and free schools. In the eighteenth century, the proliferation of charity and free schools across France was likely a combination of the influence of the royal mandate as well as continued local investment in social reform through children’s education. As part of his continued campaign to rid the kingdom of “mendicancy in all of its forms,” in 1764 Louis XV ordered a report on the “state of all hospitals

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and royal institutions that cater[ed] to the poor.”90 Every institution that received an annual rent, a tax exemption, or other “royal favour” had to disclose its donations, how its funds were used, and how many people the institution served. This massive dossier, spanning more than 2,000 folios and five archival boxes in the Joly de Fleury collection at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, is organized by town and reveals that at least 137 official charity or free schools existed across twenty-three towns by 1764. In addition to Lyon, Paris, Dijon, Troyes, Reims, and Châlons-en-Champagne, free schools were established in Rouen, Marseilles, Montpellier, Toulon, Toulouse, Foix, Bordeaux, Limoges, Bourges, Poitiers, Tours, Angers, Nantes, Rennes, Orléans, Chartres, and Tonnerre in the eighteenth century, demonstrating a huge proliferation of educational institutions in the following century. Combined with another forty schools that the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes established, the eighteenth century saw continued enthusiasm for social reform through children’s education. Lyon and Démia’s charity schools first moved northwest, following the route of trade, with communities adapting Démia’s methods for their communities. Whether in a small town like Troyès, a large city like Paris, or even, as a future chapter will demonstrate, across the Atlantic, poor children and their education were pervasive concerns and seen as solutions to a community’s problems. Paris adopted Lyonnais methods and practices not only in écoles gratuites but also in hospital-orphanage schools as the next chapter shows. With a rising population of poor and abandoned children, Paris’s hospitals had to find a way to make sure that these children became productive and loyal subjects, both in Paris and in the larger empire. Orphans and foundlings as well as their education and training were then at the centre of Parisian discussions of social reform. The community, the Church, the guilds, and the states met in hospital-orphanages like l’Hôpital de La Trinité that established vocational programs to educate, train, and prepare these disenfranchised children for life as worker-subjects.

4 Parisian Children of the State

 Charlotte Richard was ten years old when her mother unexpectedly died in 1721. Her father, Christophe Nicolas L’Anglais, a mason, was suddenly left to care for three children under the age of twelve. Unable to provide neither “resources nor fortune” to care for and educate his three children on a single income, L’Anglais petitioned the Hôpital de La Trinité1 to admit his daughter Charlotte to the hospital-orphanage where she could receive vocational training. Two weeks after he made the petition, Charlotte Richard became a resident of La Trinité. This was a common scene in early modern Paris. Parents, because of the death of a spouse, a change in jobs, or other circumstances, often sought support from the state-sponsored hospitals, orphanages, and poor-relief centres. Finding himself in this position, L’Anglais knew his daughter would receive vocational training that would help her eventually gain employment. Instead of abandoning her or taking her to Paris’s central hospital, the Hôtel Dieu, L’Anglais knew to seek out admission for his daughter at this specific hospital-orphanage. It was a familiar institution to L’Anglais since he had lived at La Trinité some years prior, receiving a “good education and fruitful apprenticeship” as a result. Although some could interpret L’Anglais’ petition as a failure of his status as a father and mason, as well as a failure of La Trinité itself, to create a situation financially stable enough to withstand this type of circumstance, he was actually viewed as a model alumnus. His incapacity to care for his children and provide them with an education was not the result of his

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inability to gain employment, because of drunkenness, or due to habitual poverty. Rather, in the administrators’ eyes, the family’s poverty was a tragedy – L’Anglais’ wife’s untimely death – the result of bad luck and circumstance instead of parents’ neglectful misbehaviour.2 The expansion of hospital-orphanages over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represented a shift in Parisian society’s perception of orphans, foundlings, and the poor. Viewed as nuisances, tiny succubae living off of society’s back, in earlier eras, by the seventeenth century, orphans were understood as wards of the state. Hospital-orphanages were, therefore, early experiments in socialized state care. In June 1670, Louis XIV put this into law, writing that any orphaned or abandoned child was “under the protection of the state … they [were] enfants de l’état [children of the state].” These children, if educated and raised properly in local- and state-sponsored hospital-orphanages throughout France, “could become workers in the cities.” They might provide “commercial good” for the city or they could be “inhabitants in the colonies that are being established” and strengthen the empire.3 Although the term “l’état” carries heavy connotations of the absolutist monarchy, this term refers more widely to society-at-large, including municipal authorities, confraternities, private benefactors, guilds and corporations, the working poor, as well as the monarchy. Each of these stakeholders understood that they were responsible for providing for wards of the state. For example, in 1746 prominent lawyer and philanthropist Charles Arrault published an article in the Mercure de France4 in which he explained that enfants de l’état “belonged to no one entity in particular, they belonged to the public at large.” Enfants de l’état were vital members of early modern France and as such they, as well as the institutions that cared for them, “must be preserved. Humanity begs it; religion demands it; and society profits from it.” Arrault’s sentiment represented a well-established belief among the French government, elites, the Catholic Church, and local communities that the “glory and power of the state”5 were intrinsically linked to the fates of enfants de l’état. Arrault’s statement implies what all these stakeholders also understood: enfants de l’état were valuable investments in the future. Child subjects, especially orphaned and abandoned children, presented an opportunity for the French state and local communities to enact wide social reform, state-building programs, and economic growth. The French Crown and community envisioned orphaned and abandoned children in several dif-

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ferent ways. Enfants de l’état provided Paris’s economy and guilds with skilled workers, journeymen, and labourers. Eventually, as discussed in chapter 5, enfants de l’état also furnished the French state with an easily accessible pool of colonial inhabitants as Louis XIV’s 1670 edict implied. Social reform involving enfants de l’état was not simply mandated by the Crown and applied by the Parisian community. Instead, these organizations worked together, negotiated, and expanded reform in order for enfants de l’état to implement change from the bottom up. In order to create workers for the city’s economy, the Parisian community, with support from the Crown, implemented a vocational training program on the Lyonnais charity school model for enfants de l’état at Hôpital de La Trinité. The early modern hospital system provides historians with innumerable institutional sources. In Paris alone, the Archives d’Assistance Publique Hôpitaux de Paris and the Bibliothèque Nationale hold thousands of archival boxes of material ranging from architectural plans, to medical records, to the schedules that orphans kept. Despite this extensive institutional record, few documents remain that were created by enfants de l’état, if they ever existed in the first place. This chapter reads institutional sources against the grain to get around this quandary.6 Much like the Lyonnais charity school students, the orphans at La Trinité were able to express some autonomy. This chapter examines not only how the state, in its widest definition, viewed enfants de l’état as valuable commodities but also how orphans understood their roles and responsibilities in these institutions. In doing so, this chapter highlights the experiences of enfants de l’état to the extent that the sources allow.

a new v i ew of confinement The hôpital, or hospital, went hand-in-hand with enfants de l’état, developing as an institution through which the state, Church, and community could communicate and inculcate social mores, morality, and strategic objectives to create ideal children who had the potential to influence Parisian society through their roles first as apprentices and later as workers. In early modern Europe, hospitals were much more than the modern lexicon of the word suggests. Other than providing medical assistance and care, early modern “hospitals” were also centres of public assistance, prisons, and orphanages. These facilities acted as

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“refuges for the unfortunate but also active moral, religious, and even judicial force[s].”7 Reflecting on the development of a highly bureaucratic and specialized system of hospitals in Paris, Jacques René Tenon, a surgeon at Hôtel Dieu in Paris, published Mémoires sur les hôpitaux de Paris (1788) that outlined the contemporary state of Parisian public assistance and health institutions.8 Paris had more than twenty public assistance institutions that served as veteran’s hospitals, homes for the invalid, facilities for prostitutes, and orphanages. These hospitals, homes, hospices, and homeless shelters have received extensive attention from Michel Foucault and his critics. Pointing to the establishment of hospitals in the mid-1600s, Foucault argued that hospitals were the manifestation of “absolute power” meant to confine “one out of every one hundred inhabitants” of Paris.9 In dubbing the period from the 1650s, with the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris, to the outbreak of the French Revolution as “The Great Confinement,” Foucault paints an image of a brutally oppressive French state. Foucault interprets the rise of institutionalized care as a way to “shut up the mad,” the poor, and the idle. Through confinement in state-sponsored centres, the French Crown could “clean up the streets” of Paris and rid society of undesirables.10 The prisoners, as Foucault refers to them, also served economic purposes. During periods of economic solvency, the prisoners provided “cheap manpower” for the institutions. In times of financial crisis, having the prisoners interred could “protect against agitations and uprisings.”11 The Great Confinement, according to Foucault was a clear example of how the absolute monarchy imposed power over its subjects, insisting on moral and virtuous behaviour in order to avoid punishment through confinement. Foucault’s understanding of the Great Confinement reveals a highly bureaucratic organization of hospitals, orphanages, and correctional houses that developed during the early modern period. These facilities economically benefitted the state through the residents’ labour. But, the overall goals of and daily realities in these institutions were different. Explaining the wide variety of institutions and their purposes, Tenon divided Paris’s hospitals into three main categories: hospitals for the sick, hospitals that housed invalids, and poor houses.12 Tenon’s eighteenth-century description of these facilities align with more recent scholarship of the Great Confinement that critiques Foucault’s assessment. Historians like Colin B. Jones, Kathryn Norberg, and James Collins have demonstrated that though the state was actively

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involved in the quick creation of these facilities, it was not to permanently confine individuals. Instead, the hospitals, poor houses, and orphanages sought to rehabilitate those who sought their services. As such, these institutions, in other words, represent early forms of socialized care for those in need. This chapter adopts that understanding of institutional care, especially in regards to orphanages. Although absolutist power certainly resonated through these facilities, markedly so in relationship to inculcation, their purpose was not to erase undesirable people from society. It was to care for society and to improve the living conditions of those in need. Confinement was less about punishment and more about rehabilitation.13 Education in orphanages was one way that the French Crown and the hospital bureaucracy sought to rehabilitate society. The Hôpital des Enfants Trouvés and the Hôpital de La Trinité took on the immense task of transforming Parisian enfants de l’état into productive, loyal, Catholic subjects. Once properly inculcated, wards of the state could be beneficial subjects to the French state, the Catholic Church, and the local community. At the core of both these hospital-orphanages was the idea that enfants de l’état could and would make important contributions to their communities. Care of abandoned children, though, was not always understood as the state’s responsibility. In the Middle Ages, for instance, foundling care was largely the burden of the Catholic Church. But, by the early modern period, with ever-increasing abandonment, the Catholic Church often fell short in its ability to adequately care for abandoned and orphaned children. The seventeenth and eighteenth century, then, was a period of transition in which the Catholic Church, the French state, and local municipal authorities worked together in caring for foundlings, with the state and community bearing the main financial and administrative burden. The moniker enfants de l’état demonstrates the change in connotation that occurred from church to state and community responsibility during the early modern era.

cl assify ing enfants de l’état Enfants de l’état was an all-encompassing term that was assigned to the collective mass of orphaned or abandoned children. Registers at any French hospital in the ancien régime demonstrate that administrators, though they may

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have referred to orphans and abandoned children en masse as wards of the state, had several categories to classify individual children admitted to their institutions. This provides an insightful counter to the lack of early modern French rhetoric used to describe childhood in general. Since much of the terminology hospital-orphanages used was imbued with notions of morality and, therefore, what type of assistance a child could receive, it is unsurprising that specificity developed around classifying orphaned and abandoned children. Hospitals first divided children according to their birth status as either légitime (legitimately born) or illégitime (illegitimately born). After establishing this, administrators used a variety of additional labels to record children in their registers. Orphelin, abandonné, and delaissé were usually considered légitime (children produced from legitimate marriages).14 An orphelin (orphan) was commonly defined as a child who was born to a legal and legitimate marriage and one or both of his or her parents had died. Often, in the registers orphans were recorded only as légitime instead of orphelin, underlining the connotation of orphans being the result of bad luck and circumstance and not necessarily their parents’ vice or illicit behaviour.15 Only when it was clear that the orphan was a bastard, as in the cases of women giving birth to and subsequently dying at the hospital, did the registers read orphelin illégitime. Despite the illegitimate status of their birth, these orphelins illégitimes were still considered, at least according to the authorities, more the result of bad circumstance than of vice. Additionally, identified as légitime were enfants abandonnés and enfants délaissés (abandoned children). These children were abandoned directly at the hospitals with the parents registering the abandonment with administrators. Although some of the smaller provincial hospitals did not permit this practice, most urban hospitals in Paris, Lyon, Rouen, Marseilles, and Dijon allowed for parents to legally abandon their children.16 Since most parents could easily prove their marital status with a marriage certificate, enfants abandonnés or délaissés were usually described as legitimate births. However, over the course of the eighteenth century, especially in Paris, abandonné was not necessarily associated with legitimacy. In the case of domestiques, many of whom registered their pregnancies in advance of having a child, their illegitimate children were still noted as abandonnés when the women either had a child at the Hôtel Dieu or chose to abandon a son or daughter. Gradually, abandonné became less associated with legitimacy and more with the choice

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of the parent(s) to identify themselves to hospital administration instead of abandoning the child anonymously. The remaining two categories, exposé and trouvé, had significant overlap and were mired with connotations of illegitimacy and illicit behaviour. An enfant exposé or an enfant trouvé could be defined as a foundling – a child, usually an infant – left in a public place, such as a baker’s doorstep, late at night or in the very early hours of the morning. On occasion, the child was left with a token, such as a note or a piece of cloth, to relay information about the child’s name and baptismal status.17 However, because exposition d’enfant (infant exposure) was a crime just as serious as infanticide, these tokens rarely identified the parents.18 In most cities and hospitals, there was little difference between the two terms and it was up to the discretion of the institution to choose whether to use exposé or trouvé. At Lyon’s Hôpital de la Charité, for example, foundlings were only recorded as enfants exposés. The term trouvé was not commonly used in the Lyonnais records to describe a foundling. Inversely, in the Vendée region, Hôpital Général de Fontenay-le-Comte only used trouvé to describe foundlings. In some cities, like Paris, the two terms were used to describe two similar but slightly varied categories. At Hôpital des Enfants Trouvés, the label exposé was used to refer to a child who was exposed to the elements through abandonment in a public place and died either at the site of abandonment or shortly thereafter. Administrators used trouvé to describe a child found alive and who survived the initial registration process. In cases of both exposés and trouvés in any city, the administrators usually had no way to determine if a child was the result of a legitimate marriage or not, especially considering these children were often far too young to speak. According to most hospital regulations, administrators were supposed to legally “presume [the children] to be legitimate,”19 but often the administrators spoke of exposés and trouvés as bastards. Unlike orphelins, these children were not usually considered the result of bad circumstance or luck. Instead, they were the “children of the immoral and the ill-behaved,” which meant they “demanded special attention to avoid vice.”20 Exposés and trouvés tended to outnumber orphelins considerably in most institutions, making hospital-orphanages usually considered sites that required immense attention to the proper conduct and inculcation of children who were more prone to immorality and vice due to their inherent condition as offspring of the lascivious poor.

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French adoption practices help to explain the proliferation of hospital-orphanages during the ancien régime. Since adoption had the potential to threaten and disrupt natural familial bloodlines, cultural, religious, and political entities strongly discouraged adoption. Inheritance laws throughout the kingdom21 tended to block adopted children from becoming legitimate heirs, thus removing adoption’s incentives for most families and couples. Informal adoption, however, usually conducted through the use of notaries as legal mediators, did occur on occasion in Paris. The primary motivation in informal adoption was childlessness of a couple or the death of a godchild’s parent.22 As the population rose in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century, hospital-orphanages routinely sought families and couples to informally and permanently, adopt or foster institutionalized children.23 But, even with informal adoption and fostering, the majority of orphaned and abandoned children were left to the care of hospital-orphanages like Hôpital du Saint Esprit, La Trinité, and Hôpital des Enfants Trouvés. The classification of enfants de l’état into these different categories, was particularly important because this status determined in which hospital-orphanage the child resided. Although a child could be abandoned at or admitted to any facility, the child was normally transferred to the appropriate location once their status was determined and registered. Each hospital-orphanage had clearly defined requirements for admission, with some facilities reserved for légitime children and others for illégitime. Both Hôpital du Saint-Esprit and Hôpital de La Trinité were originally reserved for orphaned or abandoned children “born in legal marriage.”24 Saint Esprit’s regulations support the notion that exposés and trouvés were thought of as illégitime, as the hospital-orphanage specifically banned foundlings “who are left in the churches, parishes, or on the streets” from admission since they were not unable to “attest to the fact that they were born in legal marriage and in the city of Paris.”25 Proving a child’s birth into a “loyal” marriage required the presentation of a number of different legal documents to hospital-orphanage administrators. For example, La Trinité’s conditions requises stated that in order for a child to be admitted and housed at La Trinité, the child or his parent must meet five requirements: 1. They are born in Paris (or surrounding suburb) under a loyal marriage. 2. They are orphaned of either a father or mother.

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3. They do not have a brother nor a sister living inside the hospital. 4. They are of competent age, between nine and twelve years. 5. They are registered on l’aumône de grand bureau. These requirements had to be proved through the presentation of a “baptismal record, death certificate, [or] a letter from a parent, godparent, or maître de l’hôpital.”26 Although parents or extended family members could present these documents to the administration, most of the time, administrators had to track the documents down in various parish registers with the help of parish priests. When these documents could not be found or their legitimacy was in doubt, visits and testaments signed by extended family, godparents, or neighbours could substitute for the documents.27 Of paramount importance to the hospital’s administration, these were the only documents that could help determine a child’s status as légitime or illégitime. The preservation and record keeping of these documents also does much to demonstrate the rise both in bureaucratic record keeping and the increased participation of the populace in the early modern legal system. Hospital-orphanages’ obsession with only providing care to children of “loyal marriage” represented two common fears pervasive in both Paris and the larger French state. First, as Saint Esprit’s letters patent describe, if the hospital-orphanage accepted children of dubious origin then all children at the institution would be suspect. It would make it “difficult for girls and boys to contract marriages with the ‘honourable poor’ once of age.”28 Unable to contract good marriages, these boys and girls would continue a cycle of immorality that could result in additional illegitimate births in the future. Preserving the “honourable poor” was of utmost priority to the elite who sponsored charitable institutions.29 Furthermore, if they allowed foundlings in their hospital, it would tacitly condone extramarital sex as these hospitalorphanages would become repositories for the “affairs of unmarried men and women.”30 Although these fears about potentially poor marriage prospects and the wanton behaviour of the poor were well established fears in Parisian and, more broadly, French society during the early modern period, the administrators also realized that they would be far less likely to receive charitable donations from benefactors if they supported foundlings versus orphans, as rich benefactors were less likely to donate large funds to potentially immoral children. While the decision to deny foundlings care may have been inspired

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by fears regarding immorality, this was also a savvy business strategy to garner the greatest number of donations.

l a t r inité: a product ive hospital-or phanage Despite La Trinité’s clearly stated admission policy denying the care of foundlings, in 1552 the Parlement de Paris mandated that, due to the growing number of foundling children putting undue stress on the Hôtel Dieu, La Trinité was required to accept foundlings. The Parlement de Paris promised that the hospital-orphanage would receive a yearly pension to cover the burdensome expenses associated with caring for foundlings. Even though La Trinité began accepting and caring for illégitime children in 1552, it did not officially update its admission policy until 1721. According to the new policies, children had to be “born in Paris, aged appropriately, healthy, and orphaned of at least one parent,”31 officially recognizing La Trinité as a hospital-orphanage for legitimate and illegitimate orphans alike. But, one relic from the first admission policy remained in the 1721 règlemens. In addition to denying admission to foundlings, La Trinité also discriminated against légitime children whose parents had served as “manual labourers, domestic servants, or any other of this sort.” Though these children were légitime, they were not from the correct subset of the poor to which La Trinité catered. Instead, according to the règlemens, “the Hôpital Général [was] good enough”32 to provide care. Retaining this regulation served two purposes. It was most likely developed as a way to circumvent the parlement’s mandate to accept trouvés. Since there was usually no way to determine a foundling parent’s occupation, let alone paternity or maternity, administrators at La Trinité often tried to use this regulation as precedent for refusing entry to foundlings, especially when the institution faced budgetary crises. However, Hôpital-Général, which eventually became the main governing institution of all state-sponsored hospitals in Paris, rarely let La Trinité use this regulation to deny admission to a foundling. But also, this limited the overall enrolment of La Trinité and enabled the educational program to be more specialized. Even though La Trinité was forced to accept most foundlings, they were allowed to discriminate against légitimes on the basis of their parents’ occu-

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pations, which made the hospital-orphanage serve a different purpose than Saint Esprit which allowed all légitimes, regardless of parents’ professions. Another important addition to the 1721 règlemens that proved La Trinité was an institution for specific kinds of légitime children was the entry fee. If a child with one living parent in an “honourable profession” was admitted to the hospital-orphanage, the parent was required to pay either forty livres for a daughter or fifty livres for a son. This entry fee could be paid out over the course of several years, if necessary, and if the child was reunited with his or her family within two years, the hospital would pay this amount towards the child’s apprenticeship or marriage contract. Much like the tuition fee associated with parish charity schools, this entry fee indicated to the poor that La Trinité was not open to all members of the community. The administrators thought that by adding this fee it would “dissuade parents from dishonourable repute and trades” from petitioning the hospital.33 Furthermore, making the fee payable towards apprenticeship also underlined the notion that the hospital-orphanage envisioned itself as a place of temporary, not permanent, care for children. From the records it is difficult to tell whether this was a rule in name only or if the fee was actually charged to parents. Given that many of the parents who petitioned for their child’s admission to the hospital cited extreme financial distress on account of the death of a spouse, it is likely that even if a parent was charged that fee, few were able to pay. This regulation may have been added to further separate La Trinité from a standard hospitalorphanage and to indicate to the community that it was an institution for the children of the artisanal, honourable poor. According to the admission requirements, La Trinité’s “appropriate age” of admission was a minimum of nine years old for both boys and girls. Before this age, légitime children resided at Saint Esprit and illégitime were under the care of Enfants Trouvés.34 Though separate institutions, Saint Esprit, La Trinité, and Enfants Trouvés were all part of a larger system of hospital-orphanages that provided care, housing, and education to enfants de l’état. In providing support to the hospital-orphanages, the community made important decisions about the lives of enfants de l’état. Those at Saint Esprit and Enfants Trouvés were much more likely to be conscripted into the military or navy. La Trinité, with its heavy attention from guilds, however, was primarily focused on creating workers and later on colonial habitants.

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Since enfants de l’état were understood as commodities to the Parisian community as well as the French state, La Trinité’s administrators sought to supply children with the educational and vocational skills necessary to become skilled workers, craftsmen, loyal soldiers, ideal colonists, and excellent mothers and fathers to a new generation of French children. With increased interest in this educational program, La Trinité was transformed from solely a hospital-orphanage into a community centre of sorts, where Parisians, the Church, and the state met, communicated, and worked together to raise a new generation of productive workers. Although certainly coerced because of their dependent positions, enfants de l’état still exercised agency. Making decisions about their vocational preferences, appearances, and ultimately their preapprenticeships, enfants de l’état had a hand in directing their futures. Furthermore, the educational program required not only priests to teach the Catechism but also skilled workers to teach vocational skills, with guildsmen and lay people taking on important roles within the schools as teachers. La Trinité created a system of minimanufactures or workshops where these maîtres could work alongside the students, making goods and selling them with cheap labour. Enfants de l’état and La Trinité represented extensive community and state investment in children as future workers. Enrolment in La Trinité happened in three different ways. First, children who returned from wet nursing and survived their stay at Enfants Trouvés were transferred to the care of La Trinité when they had reached at least nine years old.35 Saint Esprit also transferred légitime children to the care of La Trinité when it was discovered that the child’s parents had a particular background in a trade, such as textile work, blacksmithing, clock making, and tanning. For these first two enrolment types, no petition for admission was necessary. Instead, the administrators at the various hospitals simply marked in their registers that children were moved to a new facility. The third option for enrolment was for a parent or family member to file an official request to La Trinité for the enrolment of an orphelin. In this case, the parent, godparent, or extended family member had to provide enough documentation or testify that the child met the prerequisites for admission. The enrolment records for La Trinité from 1740–62 indicate that the hospitalorphanage served an average of 203 children per year, with 148 transferred from Enfants Trouvés, less than ten from Saint Esprit, and the remaining the result

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of petitions for admission.36 Although not all petitions remain, 193 of these documents survive, allowing a partial glimpse into the formal process of petitioning for a child’s enrolment.37 Of these petitions, parents filed 152 and extended family members, godparents, or parish priests requested the remaining forty-one petitions. Following a formula of sorts that emphasized the child’s dire need for a vocational education, 189 of these petitions for admission were successful, resulting in 214 enrolled students. The extant petitions further elucidate the purpose of La Trinité, the type of student enrolled in the hospitalorphanage, and key student demographics. The earliest example of a petition comes from this chapter’s opening narrative of Charlotte Richard and Christophe Nicolas L’Anglais in 1721. Revisiting their story is important as this petition reveals a number of interpretive issues. Following the death of his wife in 1720, Christophe Nicolas L’Anglais, a Parisian mason, was left to care for three children, two boys and one girl, under the age of twelve. Having “no resources or fortune to care for or educate his children due to the unexpected death of his wife,” L’Anglais petitioned the administrators at La Trinité to admit his daughter, Charlotte Richard, to the hospital’s school. L’Anglais noted that he had been educated at La Trinité’s school some years prior, learning “the fundamentals of Christianity, morality, and, most importantly, hard work.” Pleading to the administrators, L’Anglais explained he would be unable to “ensure his children the life he was afforded [thanks] to La Trinité [including] a good education and fruitful apprenticeship.” L’Anglais concluded his petition by stating he had “been an ideal subject of his Majesty and a hard, industrious worker in his job” as La Trinité had taught him. Two weeks later, Charlotte was admitted to the hospital-orphanage.38 L’Anglais’ request for admission was rather formulaic. In addition to citing the death of a spouse, all successful petitions demonstrated a clear financial distress that impeded the parents’ aspirations for their child’s education, apprenticeship, and eventual life. Most importantly, parents emphasized that they understood the role of La Trinité not as simply an orphanage but as an institution that would provide the education the parent no longer could afford. L’Anglais made it apparent that had his wife not died, he would have been able to provide his children with the type of education that they deserved. Since the extant petitions for admission provide a relatively small sample of the actual number of petitions filed, it is unclear whether fathers or mothers

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were more likely to petition for their child’s admission following a spouse’s death. Out of the 193 documents that survived, only thirty-six mothers petitioned for their child’s enrolment but this might just be a result of which documents survived. There was little difference between the ways in which a mother or a father petitioned for their child’s admission to La Trinité. For example, in 1747 Marie Françoise Dupont asked La Trinité to take in her eleven-year-old daughter Marie Etienne. The previous year her husband, Noel Etienne Cartier, “a loyal, Catholic wood worker from Paris” died after a fire tore through their neighbourhood. Having “worked hard for 26 years in the community,” Marie Françoise explained that she and her husband had started to teach their daughter about the “fine craft of lace,” since Marie Françoise and Noel’s sisters were employed in the lace business. However, without Noel’s income, Marie Françoise “no longer ha[d] the resources to pay for [her] daughter’s education or apprenticeship.” Having no other options to ensure that her daughter would be “properly cared for, nourished, and educated,” Marie Françoise asked the administrators to “demonstrate Catholic charity” towards her daughter. Three weeks later, Marie Etienne was enrolled at La Trinité.39 This petition, though coming from a mother, followed the same general formula as L’Anglais’s, making sure to demonstrate that had a parent not died, the child would have received an education. Whether coming from the mother or from the father, this point seemed to be of the utmost importance to La Trinité when determining which orphelins to admit to the facility. Of the four rejected petitions for admission that still exist in the records, two are from parents who failed to demonstrate a desire to provide their children with an appropriate education. Thomas Francer, a mason “left in the charge of three young girls,” aged nine, eleven, and fourteen, asked La Trinité to provide “production, nourishment, and housing” to his daughters in 1748. Since his wife, Charlotte, had died two years previously he was left with “no support or resources to care for his daughters.” Francer did not mention any skills his daughters already possessed or his plans to educate them. La Trinité denied Francer’s request and a small note on the bottom of the page reading “Saint Esprit” may suggest that the children were admitted to Saint Esprit instead.40 Although the administrators did not provide justification for why the sisters were rejected, it seems likely that Francer’s lack of interest in his daughters’ education may have played a part in the administration’s decision to deny admission.

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This was also the case in 1753 with a carpenter, Jean-Baptiste Villot. In a short petition of only three lines, Villot testified that his wife had died in 1749 after a serious illness, leaving him to raise two sons alone. Villot asked that the administrators accept his eldest son, Guillaume, to La Trinité to be “nourished and protected.” The petition ended with a statement that Guillaume, his father, and his mother were all “faithful Catholics with good morals.”41 Much like Francer, Villot failed to mention his desire to provide his children with a good education, likely resulting in his son’s rejection from the hospital-orphanage. The failed petitions for admission reveal that administrators believed that an education, especially a vocational education, was a birthright for legitimate children. Had their parents survived, they would have been provided with an education fitting to their socioeconomic status. If a parent did not demonstrate this desire, it indicated to administrators that the children would not have been provided with such training if fate had not intervened, perhaps making them less deserving of education and investment. The two remaining failed petitions were from mothers. The first, filed in 1761, came from Pauline de Roux, a domestique. Though the petition for her twelve-year-old son Paul Saulette was vague regarding her profession, the administrators wrote “une domestique” at the top of the petition, indicating that they determined the mother to be a domestic servant. Because of this, her son was ineligible for admission to the hospital-orphanage. At the bottom of the petition it indicates that Paul was transferred to the care of Hôpital-Général.42 None of the extant approved petitions for admission came from a domestique or ouvrier. However, since the enrolment records include several children with domestiques or ouvriers as their parents, it is possible that those surviving petitions are not representative of the whole and the rule regarding domestiques was not strictly followed. The final rejected petition was filed in 1766 and reveals a great deal about the understanding and transference of parental authority and familial construction during the eighteenth century. Angélique Courcelle, a shopkeeper, began her petition by explaining she was currently pregnant and had remarried. In 1763 her first husband, François Broque, died from a long illness, leaving her son, Jean Broque, “an orphan without a father.” Courcelle married her second husband, Antoine Morel, a boulanger, in 1764. Now a mother to Jean, aged ten, an infant daughter, and to an unborn child, Courcelle said she “had no option but to transfer Jean’s care” to La Trinité. Morel could not afford to

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pay for his own children as well as Jean’s education. Courcelle made it clear that had François lived, Jean would have received excellent training in candle making, his father’s trade. It was on this note that Angélique asked La Trinité to accept her son so that he might “be properly educated, cared for, and nourished.” The petition was rejected on the basis that Jean was not truly an orphan. Evidenced by a small summary on the bottom of the document, the procureur général deemed that “Morel was responsible for the education, nourishment, and care of Jean.”43 Although Morel technically did not adopt Jean, the paternal responsibility still transferred to him after he married Courcelle. In the case of orphans, their paternity and their status as orphans were determined not only by their biological status but also by their mother’s marital status. From these petitions, it is evident that the parents’ incentives for institutionalizing children were primarily financial, removing parents from the responsibility of paying for their child’s care, education, and eventual apprenticeship. Unlike in Lyon where parents retained custody and were provided with alms, additional bread, and other benefits, parents who relinquished their children to public care received no additional benefits. In fact, parents likely faced a certain level of guilt, shame, and public embarrassment in handing their children over to public care. But, the economic burden of raising a child without a spouse was simply too much for these widows and widowers to handle. La Trinité’s practice of rarely refusing enrolment to légitime orphelins was based on the notion that these children, who had come from specific artisanal backgrounds, had, in a sense, a birthright to not only a good education but also to an apprenticeship at least at the level that they would have received had they not been orphaned. This was further supported in the official legal classification of these orphelin children as fils ou filles des maîtres, or sons and daughters of master craftsmen. Once children were admitted, La Trinité was granted legal guardianship over orphelins and trouvés who became “sons and daughters of the hospital.” Regardless of their parents’ actual status, these children were legally considered fils ou filles des maîtres, which guaranteed they would have access to an apprenticeship. The hospital-orphanage’s obsession with proving the legitimacy of its orphans is surprising considering about 60 per cent of the facility’s population came from Enfants Trouvés.44 It was nearly impossible to prove a trouvé’s status as legitimate unless the parents had willingly abandoned the child at Hôpital-

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Général, the parents had died at Hôtel Dieu, or if the child was old enough to identify his or her parents at the time of abandonment. But, preoccupation with determining a child’s status may have been a way to ensure that La Trinité remained a unique institution in comparison to other hospital-orphanages. Because of the specialized educational program at La Trinité, the administrators had to be selective in their enrolment decisions. Tilière, a schoolmaster at La Trinité, expressed this sentiment in a letter to the Saint-Sacrement Confraternity in 1761. Thanking the confraternity for a 25,000 livres donation, Tilière proclaimed that this “donation will help ensure La Trinité can continue to uphold the rules of admission,” making it “independent from the other hospitals [so that] necessary children will find an education and gain their lives.”45 The obsession with proving a child’s status as a legitimate orphan made La Trinité an institution that catered, at least partially, to a select subset of the poor.

children’s lives at l a t r inité In 1742 the maître des enfants presented a report to the Bureau de l’HôpitalGénéral on the “state and conditions of ” La Trinité. To begin his report, the maître explained that before coming under “the care of the hospital, many of these children lived in a state of squalor in comparison to the excellent facilities at La Trinité.” Commenting on urban life, the maître spoke about the dirt, rotting food scraps, animal waste, and excrement that filled the streets and gutters of Paris, especially in neighbourhoods inhabited by the middling sorts. These conditions led to rampant vermin, pestilence, and disease in the city. Furthermore, the maître painted an image of urban life as being one where children were clothed in soiled and worn rags, ate nothing more than broth and bread, and were often left to care for themselves when their parents were working. This image was certainly exaggerated but it served to demonstrate how La Trinité could be viewed as “a haven or refuge for forgotten children.”46 In particular, this report drew attention to the role of hygiene, living conditions, and diet in the hospital-orphanage, covering the ability of La Trinité to adequately clothe children; the state of La Trinité’s facilities including where the children slept, learned, and prayed; as well as what children ate on a daily basis and why. These three points were covered in additional règlemens, reports, and memorandums throughout the eighteenth century, providing a lens

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through which the daily experience of children can be glimpsed. Examining the living conditions, schedules, chores, and responsibilities of these children helps to elucidate their daily lived experience as well as an understanding of their self-identification and society’s ideas of these children. All chores, including cleaning and cooking, were divided among the children, with each child having certain responsibilities according to their sex and, if already assigned a trade, their future vocation. These chores were conducted throughout the day in a tightly regimented schedule. The day began for both boys and girls at 5h00 in the summer and 5h30 in the winter. Morning prayers began promptly at 6h00 in the summer and 6h30 in the winter, leaving about an hour for children to perform their morning chores. During this time, children dressed themselves, made their beds, stored any belongings, and emptied their bedpans. According to architectural plans of La Trinité, the ground and first floors of the hospital were reserved for workshops, shops, classrooms, the refectory, and hospital administration. The second and third floors of the hospital, along with the attic, housed children. Boys occupied the second and the majority of the third floor, with girls living in the attic and on the third floor in separate rooms from the boys as necessary. The rooms were large, housing up to forty children in each. Children were usually assigned at least one bedmate with which they shared a bed and traded the responsibility of making the bed on their own agreement. Small cupboards allowed children to store their trousseaux and any other belongings such as dolls, trinkets, books, Bibles, or toys. These items had to be put away before a child could leave his or her room. Though the rooms were adequately furnished with beds and cupboards, the stone walls and floors, along with large draughty windows, made the rooms cold. Two children were assigned the task of installing and removing tapestries that hung on the walls to provide extra warmth at night. Usually the oldest or most senior child in the room was assigned the role of room inspector. Before children could leave, they had to verify with the room inspector that they had performed their chores. Once approved, children either headed to the cafeteria to help with the preparation of bread or went directly to the church for morning prayers, to recite the Catechism, or to sit silently in contemplation as they waited for mass to begin at 7h00. Girls and boys who were responsible for food preparation and delivery were required to work both before and after mass on preparing breakfast. Excused at 7h30, thirty minutes early from mass, these children helped to cut

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bread into the appropriate rations and place them at the long dining tables. At 8h00 or 8h30, depending on the season and the length of the mass, children arrived in the cafeteria for breakfast. Although the rules called for “relative quiet and contemplation” during this meal, as was common practice in monasteries and convents, this rule was rarely upheld according to many schoolmasters. At 9h00 school began. Those who were learning how to read, write, and count went to their classrooms and those learning a vocational trade went to either the classroom or to a workshop on the ground floor run by a maître de métier. At this point in the day, the schedule changed according to sex and educational program. The change in schedule for boys and girls underlines early modern gendered identities, with boys and girls learning different skills based on their sex. Boys in vocational training or preapprenticeships worked alongside their maître from 9h00 until 18h00 when dinner was served. These vocational boys were given one break for lunch, between 11h00 and noon depending on the maître’s preference. Boys who were in school were provided more breaks and additional recreational time. For these children still in traditional school, class occurred in three blocks: from 9h00 to 11h00, from 14h00 to 15h30, and from 16h00 to 18h00. During the breaks, boys either chanted with the priest, played in the courtyard, performed various chores, or were given lunch and snacks. Everyone ate together at 18h00 in the cafeteria after the priest blessed the meal and recited prayers. After dinner, usually around 18h30, all the boys were sent to study the Catechism with the priest until 20h00 when they performed their nightly chores. For boys in vocation, this meant ensuring that workshops were clean, their projects were completed for the day, and they were locked and secured. The day ended at 21h00 when boys were in their rooms, preparing for bed.47 Religious instruction dominated the girls’ schedules more so than that of the boys, illustrating the gendered association of religious devotion with women. One of the major responsibilities of the young women was to remain examples of piety and morality, so it is little surprise that their schedules were dominated by religious devotion and reflection. Similar to boys, girls were divided into groups according to whether or not they were in preapprenticeship or school. Those in preapprenticeship programs worked between 9h00 and noon when lunch was served. At 12h30, these girls were instructed to pray for thirty minutes before returning to their positions at 13h00, where

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they worked for an hour before being sent to Catechism lessons at 14h00. After the Catechism, girls either returned to their preapprenticeship position, especially if they were working on a textile such as lace or silk, or they conducted various chores in the hospital, notably cleaning. On occasion, girls were also required to go to Enfants Trouvés after the Catechism lesson where they helped take care of the smaller children, prepare meals, or teach the Catechism to younger girls. At 17h00, girls were again required to pray, chant, and repeat the Catechism before preparing dinner, which was served at 18h00. After dinner, girls had recreational time available to them, which was usually used to perfect sewing, perform other chores, or to read. All girls were required to be in bed by 20h30.48 Sundays were, of course, reserved for religious instruction, with Catechism lessons given to those who were performing poorly. Children who had demonstrated an excellent proficiency in the Catechism, prayers, and Catholic tenets were often sent on Sunday afternoons to Saint Esprit, Hôpital-Général, and Enfants Trouvés where they taught these religious lessons to other children. Although religious instruction was important, especially for girls, in reality it took second priority to the role of work. Administrators explained that “since the training of children is of the utmost importance,” schedules were flexible at the vocational level. If a child needed to skip prayers, chores, or return to work after dinner, they were allowed to do so. The flexibility in schedule according to work, along with the way that work and chores dominated the schedules, underlines the educative role of this institution as a vocational site for children.49 The schedules illustrate how children might have spent their time at the hospital-orphanage. Since documentation from children is sparse, examining schedules is one way that we can begin to piece together childhood experience in the early modern era. Children’s days were fairly structured, with work dominating their lives. Children studied or worked long hours with few breaks for rest. Aside from their schedules, the records also hold much information on aspects pertaining to children’s dress, hygiene, and diet in the hospitalorphanage, suggesting that enfants de l’état were well dressed, clean, and relatively well fed in comparison to most Parisian poor children. Relatively little is known about poor children’s dress in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although, the records from La Trinité, Enfants Trouvés, and Saint Esprit include details that indicate appropriate attire for children.

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When children entered public care for the first time at one of the hospitalorphanages, they were stripped of their clothing and a surgeon or doctor inspected the children for medical illness, lice, pestilence, as well as deformities. If the child was particularly dirty, the doctor or surgeon helped to wash the child, either with a damp rag or by bathing the child in a tub of cold water. Once clean, the child was given a new trousseau, or wardrobe. Although a child could keep the belongings they had brought to the hospital-orphanage, they were required to wear a uniform. To help identify children when in public or during religious processions at mass, La Trinité children wore blue.50 Although the uniform helped keep vermin and lice at bay, it also created a sense of community, fostered subservience to the hospital-orphanage, and delineated the students from the rest of Parisian society. The uniform at La Trinité was designed with work in mind. Boys were given a wool jacket with long sleeves that could easily be rolled up to perform tasks, two over shirts with long sleeves that could also be rolled up, a vest to layer over the shirt during the winter months, a pair of long pants, a pair of short pants, stockings, a hat, and two nightgowns. All of these garments, with the exception of the shirts, were dyed in different shades of blue. When boys turned sixteen or when they entered apprenticeships, they were provided with clothing specific to their jobs, such as aprons, gloves, or additional jackets. Girls were also provided with clothing appropriate to work in various hues of blue, including two short-sleeved dresses, two long-sleeved shirts to layer under the dresses, a bonnet, a long jacket, stockings, and two night gowns. These outfits allowed “boys and girls to move freely and without danger of injury or discomfort.”51 Although both male and female trousseaux called for leather shoes and boots, there was almost always a problem in procuring enough shoes for the entire hospital population. Therefore, starting in 1697, boys and girls not yet at the vocational stage of education were not provided shoes. This allowed the hospital-orphanage to provide shoes to children learning vocations. Although this brought great concern over the possibility of children “contracting illness, especially dysentery,” the children who worked took priority in having shoes while the other remained barefoot. By the 1740s, administrators had enough donations of shoes from cobblers to provide each child with one pair of shoes.52 Children in preapprenticeships who were learning how to refine textiles, dye cloth, and sew made the uniforms. This cut down on the cost required to

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produce the uniforms and also presented a learning opportunity for the students. Child production did not mean poor quality uniforms, though. In fact, the administrators insisted that the uniforms were made from “good quality materials that merchants donated to the hospital like linen, cotton, and wool that could provide adequate warmth” and could last at least two years.53 Once sewn, the clothing was carefully inspected and approved by a maître for quality and consistency. Although all children had to wear hues of blue at La Trinité, the maîtresse de linge, or head laundress, reported that children often stitched their name into their clothes or affixed various pieces of ribbon, embroidered cloth, or even small pieces of lace to their clothing. In response, the headmaster of La Trinité suggested in 1762 that this was a way that children could communicate their interests and personalities. As long as the “amendments to the clothing were not obscene, gaudy, or dangerous,” the children were allowed to make alterations and additions as they saw fit.54 This brief exchange between the laundress and headmaster indicates that children were aware that their dress could communicate aspects of their personality. Given that many of these children were working as preapprentices in the lace, silk, or textile trades, it is unsurprising that many of them were able to find scrap pieces of fabric and thread to affix to their uniforms. Adorning their clothes was also a way that children could reintegrate back into Parisian society. During the late eighteenth century, a consumer revolution swept across early modern Europe that encouraged people of all socioeconomic levels, including children, to express social, religious, and political ideas through dress.55 Though the children were somewhat marginalized in their status as orphans, they were still able to participate in a larger cultural phenomenon. The concern over clothing also raises the issue of hygiene in the hospitalorphanages. In 1737, Louis XV wrote that “the health of enfants de l’état should be of the utmost importance to hospital administrators as these children are the future of the kingdom.”56 Although the late nineteenth century is usually considered a period of innovation for modern hygiene, many of the same practices also occurred in the eighteenth century. Every two weeks on a Monday, children had to bring their bed sheets, one of their nightgowns, one shirt, and stockings to the laundress to be washed. The laundresses, along with forty girls who were learning how to launder clothing, would wash, dry, and return the

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clothing by Friday. The laundresses and girls inspected the clothing for rips, tears, or excessive sullying, replacing the garments when necessary. Laundering the bed linens and clothing regularly helped to avoid outbreaks of lice and diseases that could easily be transferred in a large facility of children. To further avoid pestilence, after delivering their laundry, children were required to wash their faces, hands, feet, bottoms, and genitals with a damp cloth. Only once every three months did children have to wash their entire bodies and hair under the supervision of a doctor, surgeon, or hospital administrator. This was usually done in the medical wing of the hospital, with four or five children of the same sex bathing simultaneously. Attention to the cleanliness of clothes and bodies was important to the hospital so that children were not “perceived as idle and indigent,” since society thought of the dishonourable poor as unclean. Enfants de l’état were not left to rot but instead were raised to be clean children, capable of hard work and loyalty. Furthermore, these children were surprisingly well fed in comparison to noninstitutionalized early modern children. A significant part of the budget each year, sometimes up to 30 per cent, was for wheat, flour, bread, vegetables, and cuts of meat to feed children up to four times a day. Each hospitalorphanage had a contract with at least one baker, butcher, wine merchant, and grocer. They not only supplied food to the hospital-orphanage but also regularly taught children their various trades in preapprenticeship programs. Children ate meat twice daily, “a true mark of social privilege,”57 setting these children apart from other Parisian children of the lower sorts. Poor families were rarely able to afford cuts of meat, instead subsisting on a type of vegetable stew and bread. Therefore, these children would have been some of the best fed children of the lower sorts in early modern Paris. The idea to feed children meat began in the sixteenth century with children fed meat once a week on a Monday or Tuesday. But by the seventeenth century, La Trinité served a cut of meat twice daily. Although ideas about nutrition and diet were just developing during this period, the head cook and headmaster at La Trinité insisted that good nutrition “helped children perform better at work, to grow, and to stave off illness.”58 In addition to beef, the cook at La Trinité often prepared different types of fowl (chicken, duck, and pigeon), lamb, and even goat. In 1729, the head cook at La Trinité was asked to “review the most important meals” with the hospital administrators during a meeting regarding the budget. In the cook’s testimony,

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he reported that the meal he most “frequently made that was also the best” was a roasted meat stew. First, the cook roasted either beef or veal over an open fire. Then, taking the bones, he created a broth to which he added lentils, oil, nuts, prunes, carrots, potatoes, and finally the meat itself. Simmering overnight, this roasted meat stew could be served for both lunch and dinner. The cook’s testimony also revealed a list of the foods in La Trinité’s pantry, which included eggs, cheese, lentils, beans, potatoes, peas, spinach, carrots, fish, and chicken.59 Bread still formed a large portion of the children’s diet, with children consuming at least four ounces of bread at every meal.60 Bread hardly constituted the basis of their diet, though. As evidenced by the cook’s testimony to the administrators, the children ate a variety of vegetables and meat, which greatly contrasted from the typical poor child’s diet of a vegetable soup. The attention given to clothing, hygiene, and nutrition emphasizes that the care of these children was paramount. Preserving and fostering their health was a main priority of the hospital-orphanage. Healthy and well-fed children were prepared to work the long days their schedules demanded, with at least six hours a day devoted to labour and vocational training.

l e a r n in g at l a t r i n i t é La Trinité’s school règlemens were similar to the eighteenth-century Lyonnais règlemens, with few departures from how to best teach reading, writing, and mathematics to children for “applications to the arts and trades.”61 However, La Trinité organized its students differently from the Lyonnais charity schools. Instead of dividing children into bandes, or classes, according to their previous knowledge and abilities, age played a larger role in organizing children into groups at the hospital-orphanage, with those under ten constituting one group; those between ten and eleven another; and those over the age of twelve another. No diagnostic tests were given to children to test their abilities. Children entered into the age group, either well prepared or far behind their peers. Within these age groups, children were then divided among gendered lines, with a group for girls and a group for boys. This insistence on separating the sexes reflected the monarchy’s obsession with separate-sex classrooms and schools for Lyonnais children. Due to a lack of space in the hospital-orphanage, though, boys and girls were rarely completely separated from one another.

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Furthermore, the maîtres for each age group taught both boys and girls, often teaching a group lesson and then focusing in on gender-specific lessons. For example, in one of the only remaining lessons from La Trinité, for the eldest age group, the maître reported that he had students practice multiplication. While girls were required to memorize different times tables, boys practiced using multiplication in different business components, such as calculating a difference in measurement.62 So even though the general lesson would have been the same, there were ways in which the maîtres made the lessons more gender specific. The règlemens indicate that the “advanced students,” meaning those with knowledge in the subject, were “required to help other children who demonstrated ignorance or difficulty with the subject.”63 Conducting a large lecture and then assigning children various lessons, the teacher or teachers would circulate the room, checking on individual students’ progress. With as many as sixty students in one group, this was a large task. In order to facilitate learning, the more advanced children had to act as teachers to the less advanced children. This provided children the opportunity to both demonstrate a mastery of skill over reading, writing, and arithmetic as well as to learn how to work, collaborate with, and teach others in groups – a good skill to know when they entered apprenticeship. Little evidence remains to provide details of the identities and backgrounds of schoolmasters and mistresses let alone what they taught and assigned in their classrooms. It is nearly impossible to determine if the education in the classrooms deviated from the règlemens or if the educational guidelines were strictly followed. Based on remarks from apprenticeship masters who contracted former enfants de l’état, regardless of whether or not the educational model was followed, the education resulted in “particularly well prepared” apprentices who were “skilled in reading and mathematics.”64 Just as Lyonnais charity schoolchildren did, enfants de l’état also served as teachers to the wider community and as agents of the Catholic Reformation. “Students who had received communion, mastered the Catechism, knew all the prayers, and could adequately teach others about reading the Bible” were required to assist parish priests and schoolmasters in the distribution of alms to the poor at Hôtel Dieu at least once per month.65 The children, dressed in their blue garments to distinguish them as enfants de l’état, handed out food and clothing to those in need. These same children were also required to help

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teach Catechism lessons to those who had requested it from a parish priest, often at the Saint Sulpice church. With the assistance of these children acting as teachers to the wider poor community, adults and children alike, more people learned the Catechism, prayers, and even received assistance in reading and writing.66 In addition to spreading knowledge among the masses, these enfants de l’état also served as visible models of good Catholics for others, especially poor children, to emulate. Although the participation of enfants de l’état in the dissemination of knowledge and Catholic tenets was much more coerced than that of Lyonnais charity schoolchildren, the enfants still acted as active agents of the Catholic Reformation in their community. The participation of enfants de l’état in the wider Parisian community, acting as agents of the Catholic Reformation and as examples of good behaviour, strongly challenges Foucault’s assumptions that children were “confined.” Although their daily lives were heavily structured – as evidenced by their schedules – and they were visibly marginalized through their dress, the idea that the children were “confined” is a misunderstanding of the purpose and goals of the hospital-orphanage. The children were not hidden from view but rather were active in the community as teachers and workers. Enfants de l’état, dressed in their blue uniforms, were also regularly paraded on the streets during feasts to raise money for the institution. Far from being hidden from the public’s view, enfants de l’état were models of the state and displayed their community’s commitment to public care and assistance.

children at wor k The participation of enfants de l’état in the preapprenticeship program at La Trinité’s minimanufacture also counters the idea of “confinement.” The goal of the preapprenticeship program was to provide enfants de l’état with trade skills and to create networks with guild members through whom children could find suitable apprenticeships or employment. La Trinité was not to be a permanent home for enfants de l’état but rather a transitional one in which children perfected their crafts, made connections, and ultimately left the facility to integrate into Parisian society. Vocational education at La Trinité was highly structured thanks to the intervention of the guilds in the organization, direction, and staff. The guilds’

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participation in creating preapprenticeship vocational training programs defies the idea that these children were “confined” and marginalized. Since the guilds saw it as their “duty to regulate the world of work for” public welfare, enfants de l’état were commodities to the guilds as future apprentices and journeymen. Since corporations dominated the place of work in early modern Paris, a “masterless man” threatened the social hierarchy.67 Training children to be skilled workers without a clear sense of how these children would be employed in guilds or integrated into society was a point of concern for the guild officers. As Steven Kaplan has observed, “apprenticeship was at the heart of corporatist’s conception of work and hierarchy.”68 As much as apprenticeship was an introduction to the secrets and mysteries of the trade, it was also a form of moral and political socialization, teaching young men (and in limited contexts young women) about their position in and subordination to their master, their guild, the municipality, and finally to the Crown. While guilds welcomed the opportunity to gain better skilled apprentices by way of La Trinité, they also recognized the danger unincorporated workers could have to the guild system and the social order. With this fear in mind, guild officers worked with hospital administrators to ensure the enfants de l’état at La Trinité were trained in such a manner as to uphold the guild hierarchical order. Starting in 1551, before the hospital-orphanage was officially a state-sponsored institution, La Trinité invited masters from various Parisian guilds to set up workshops and ateliers at the hospital for a small fee in exchange for using children as temporary workers and quasi apprentices. This practice expanded throughout the sixteenth century. By 1652 guilds allowed maîtres des métiers who had workshops at La Trinité to officially accept two or more apprentices as long as one was a pupil at La Trinité. These maîtres received a centrally located atelier for a discounted rent, free labour in the form of enfants de l’état learning vocational skills, and could make the children they worked with at the hospital their apprentices. But it was not until the 1680s when La Trinité reorganized its educational program that the guilds became active directors in this process. Starting in 1685, La Trinité invited at least one or two officials from every guild to discuss the development of vocational education with the hospitalorphanage administrators, schoolmasters, and municipal authorities at a grand assembly meeting. Here, the administrators, municipal authorities,

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schoolmasters, and guild officers discussed the goals in providing an education to enfants de l’état. Although training was different for every profession, on the whole, these men agreed that educating children for at least two years in reading, writing, counting, and in professing the Catechism was a “necessary component of education.” As evidenced by this statement, the guild officers thought of traditional education as forming the basis for vocational training. At these yearly meetings, hospital-orphanage administrators, schoolmasters, guild officers, and municipal authorities decided how many maîtres ouvriers were needed in each profession. This was often determined by the size of the guild as well as the strength of the profession. Most guilds asked for six maîtres ouvriers, meaning that in total there would be over 700 maîtres ouvriers working with La Trinité children. But the atelier space allowed for, at most, 200 maîtres ouvriers at one time, with many sharing workshops. If an applicant passed a work and home visit similar to the ones Lyonnais schoolmasters conducted and was subsequently approved for admission, he was asked to pay an entry fee. The hospital administrators justified this fee as a type of “lease for the atelier” that would help pay for the “financial needs of the hospital.” The fee varied according to profession, with the cheapest entry fee at 150 livres per year for plumassiers, or feather makers. Most professions paid anywhere between 400 and 600 livres with the average fee being 475 livres per year. The most expensive entry fee was reserved for those working with gold, silver, and other metals, at 3,000 livres per year. Further evidence of the role the patronage system played in this process was the fact that most of these entry fees were supplemented or paid in full by guilds themselves. In many ways, the maître ouvrier became a conduit through which the guild could inculcate children with ideas about the guild and skills pertaining to the trade. It was also another way that the guild made itself essential to the hospital, becoming an active participant in social reform geared towards children.69 To the guilds, the enfants de l’état occupied a special place in their hierarchical organization. Outside of discussing apprentices, children are an often forgotten part of guild organization. Children of masters or journeymen were often educated at petites écoles and either worked with their fathers or another family member as they learned vocational skills for a year before being apprenticed. Enfants de l’état learned similarly but at the hospital-orphanage instead of at a petite école or with their family. Clare Crowston has brought attention to the development of preapprenticeship programs that guilds spon-

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sored at the end of the eighteenth century. La Trinité’s vocational program can be considered a part of that preapprenticeship training, though for a select subset of guild children. If an enfant de l’état performed and worked well with the maître ouvrier then the guild made it a priority to find that child an apprenticeship, either with the maître ouvrier himself (if he could apprentice children) or with another apprentice in the same guild. These enfants de l’état were distinguished from regular, “unskilled” children and joined master’s children in a special echelon of guild organization that nearly guaranteed an apprenticeship. Although few of these children would rise to the level of maître themselves, as this was a position usually retained for nonorphaned, legitimate children, they would be able to be, at the very least, journeymen for the rest of their lives, kept under the protection and guidance of a master. After paying an entry fee, the maître ouvrier signed a contract with La Trinité for up to three years that guaranteed him atelier space, at least one preapprentice, and cleaning of his atelier every week by enfants de l’état. In return, the maître ouvrier promised to “teach children in the skills and mysteries of the trade [with] the goal of preparing the children for [future] apprenticeships.” Children were assigned to maîtres ouvriers depending on a number of different criteria, including the child’s age, their personal preference, their family’s background, and the maître ouvrier’s preference for the child.70 Children played an active role in the selection of their maître ouvrier. Most children became preapprentices at either twelve or thirteen years old when they could prove “adequate competency in reading, writing, arithmetic, and the Catechism.” Children had to also go through their first communion before they were allowed to become a preapprentice. Therefore, it was very rare to see children before the age of eleven entering into vocational training. Although the term “enfants” is used throughout the records to refer to children of all ages, preapprenticeship could be considered the start of adolescence. These children were deemed capable of performing tasks and had entered into a new religious stage of life. Though apprenticeship itself was still a few years away for these children, this time was a transitional period, with the young adolescent become more independent. The preapprenticeship was less sheltered and fostered the movement from childhood to young adulthood. Children were often assigned chores on the basis of their family’s background (if known) or on the child’s preference. If a child had a mother who was a laundress, for instance, often that girl would work with the laundress to

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clean, wash, and press the clothes. Similarly, if a boy had a father who had been a cook he would have been assigned to kitchen duty, assisting the cook with various meal preparations. However, those students who had been trouvés were often asked their preference from a list of available chores including gardening, doing repairs on the building and facility, and being altar boys and girls. These chores often made them aware of the types of skills they were interested in pursuing, allowing children to have some say in their preapprenticeship training. For example, Michel du Purrel, then thirteen, explained that he wanted to train as a carpenter because he enjoyed woodworking when he assisted with furniture and other repairs around the hospital. Taking his preference into consideration, along with the demand for carpenters in 1758, he was assigned to one of the maîtres charpentiers. But sometimes the child was not assigned to the preapprenticeship training they requested. This was the case with twelve-year-old Annette Forez who had requested training as a seamstress; she was assigned to the vocational training program in lace because of a high demand for lace workers in 1751. Children were able to voice their opinions, though these preferences were not always fulfilled. In the available records from the late eighteenth century, only about 20 per cent of the students were placed in the preapprenticeship program of their choice. Instead, administrators had to make sure that there was room for every student to receive vocational training, even if it was a field the child did not initially want to pursue.71 The relationships between maîtres ouvriers and preapprentices were not always amicable, perhaps as a result of not being placed in a line of work that the child desired. Children were often insubordinate to the maître ouvrier’s demands, creating friction between the two. For example, in 1737 Paul Gurette, a button maker, reported that his preapprentice Charles Louis Juvenille regularly refused to perform certain tasks. Charles Louis’s defense to both the maître and the hospital-orphanage administrator was that he did not enjoy the trade of button making and wished to be a butcher instead. As there were no positions available with the butcher, Charles Louis was forced to remain with Gurette. Unsurprisingly a year later, Gurette recommended that Charles Louis be released from the vocational program to become a simple wage labourer. Since the goal of La Trinité was to create skilled workers that could be placed into apprenticeships instead of creating wage labourers, Charles Louis

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was instead transferred to a mason’s program where he had to “carry large stones” all day. The records indicate that Charles Louis completed his education at La Trinité the following year but failed to find a suitable apprenticeship. He ultimately found employment working on a building project in the Saint Etienne parish.72 For La Trinité, this may have seemed somewhat of a failure. Charles Louis was still employed, but he constituted a small minority of children who were not placed in apprenticeships. Inversely, children occasionally complained about their maître ouvrier. In April 1743, for example, Vincent Berthe complained to the administrators that his maître ceinturier François Reloux did not show up to the atelier for days at a time, leaving Vincent to finish projects alone. Vincent complained that he was “learning nothing of importance” doing these projects. Reloux was reprimanded, but four months later in August 1743 Vincent again complained about Reloux’s habitual absence, leading to his dismissal. Reloux was replaced quickly with another ceinturier who took Vincent under his wing.73 The preapprenticeship system could not work without the cooperation and participation of both maîtres ouvriers and children. A mutually beneficial relationship was established between the two parties, with maîtres ouvriers receiving an atelier and an assistant in the form of a preapprentice. In their roles, children assisted with various craft skills necessary to particular trades. Girls were not excluded from this process. As Clare Crowston and Daryl Hafter have shown, there were a small number of guilds open to both sexes and a few were exclusively for women in eighteenth century Paris.74 Couturières, lingères, bouquetières, filassières-chanvrières, and sage-femmes were all guilds open exclusively to women, but only lingères, sage-femmes, and filassières-chanvrières had maîtresses ouvrières at La Trinité. The maîtresse lingère was easily the most prolific maître or maîtresse, with as many as forty girls working with her on a daily basis. Most of the young girls who worked with the maîtresse de linge skipped apprenticeship and were immediately incorporated in the guild, becoming laundresses as soon as they finished their education at age seventeen.75 Girls were also placed with maîtres in related fields, such as embroidery, cord making, textile refining, and dyeing. Although girls could be placed into official apprenticeships as midwives, lace makers, and laundresses, the majority were conscripted to work for various tapestry houses, including the state-run Les Gobelins. This type of informal apprenticeship

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was considered an allouage, or a loaning of the girls to the manufacturing house. Though the girls remained under the authority of La Trinité, they were housed and worked off-site. Apprenticeship and allouage were, in effect, different forms of foster care for the enfants de l’état. Not yet ready to live on their own, these adolescents were transferred to the care of a maître or maîtresse who allowed them to live in their household, paid for their clothing, food, and medical care, and continued to refine their craft skills. La Trinité paid maîtres only eighteen livres for this service, an amount that had to cover the costs associated with registering an apprenticeship contract. They also provided children with a new set of clothing, not dyed blue, and shoes. As was standard practice in apprenticeships, all other financial responsibilities became that of the master. Tracing children from their placement in public care to their completion of apprenticeship is incredibly difficult. Since the public assistance records are scattered across multiple archives in Paris and many of the records were destroyed in fires or floods, it is impossible to calculate exactly how many enfants de l’état were successful in obtaining and completing an apprenticeship. Of the nearly 6,000 names from enrolment records over the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, only fifty-three children can be traced to adulthood. One of these young men, Pierre Louis DuBois, was a model enfant de l’état who fulfilled the goals of La Trinité, showcasing the ideal trajectory both inside public care and outside the hospital-orphanage. From the Saint Nicolas des Champs parish in Paris, Pierre was orphaned at the age of nine. His father, François, had been a boulanger but died in 1757. Pierre’s mother, Marie, became ill in 1759 and sought medical attention at Hôtel Dieu where she later died, leaving Pierre an orphan. Having no extended family to care for him, Pierre, along with his two younger siblings, was placed under the care of Enfants Trouvés. Demonstrating the high rate of child mortality, Pierre was the only one of his siblings to survive. His sister, aged four, was sent to a wet nurse in St Cyr and did not return, presumably dying. His younger brother, aged seven, joined him at Enfants Trouvés but died within two months of their residence in the hospital-orphanage, likely from the flu. Pierre was transferred to La Trinité in 1762 when space became available for new children. During his time at Enfants Trouvés, Pierre learned “the Catechism, how to recite the alphabet, and how to count,” but he lacked an ability to read, write, or perform arithmetic.76 Therefore, he entered La Tri-

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nité’s school for two years where he perfected his reading, writing, and mathematical abilities. Since Pierre’s father had been a boulanger, Pierre was assigned chores in the hospital that dealt with the procurement, baking, and distribution of bread. Every morning before morning prayers, Pierre had to either assist in the baking of bread or, on mornings when the bread was delivered, in the organization of the bread. But, according to the transfer records, Pierre indicated that he was not interested in becoming a boulanger as his father had been. The schoolmaster who interviewed Pierre recorded that Pierre could “barely remember his father working as a boulanger” and, instead, was interested in “working with tissues or cloth of some sort.”77 Given that during that year the hospitalorphanage had six boulangers, each with three to four preapprentices, there likely was not space for Pierre as a boulanger regardless. But, taking Pierre’s preference into consideration, the schoolmaster had Pierre meet with three different maîtres ouvriers: Jean Grandin, a tailleur pour hommes; Nicolas Barbier, a passementier; and Alexandre de la Place, a bonnetier. It is unclear from the records what form this meeting took, whether it was a simple greeting and conversation or if Pierre worked alongside each maître ouvrier for a day. No official rule or practice seems to have been followed, with other children simply meeting the maîtres ouvriers and others working with them for some time. Regardless, Nicolas Barbier, a passementier, officially accepted Pierre as his preapprentice. Pierre joined two other students at Barbier’s atelier.78 Pierre’s daily life shifted from one occupied by school lessons to one dominated by learning the trade of embroidery and ornamentation. Using silk, lace, wool, and even, on occasion, gold threads, passementiers embroidered and provided ornamentation to various textiles. The craft require excellent cutting, sewing, and dying skills. After working with Pierre for two years, in 1766, Barbier asked to have Pierre be registered as his official apprentice.79 This meant that Pierre would leave La Trinité and all legal, financial, and social responsibilities were transferred to Barbier. As an apprentice, Pierre would continue to work with Barbier in his atelier and, occasionally, would go to Barbier’s other workshop in the Saint Simphorien parish to work. After working with Barbier for five years, in 1771, Pierre completed his apprenticeship contract. He immediately joined the passementier guild and was made a journeyman, employed at a silk shop owned by Michel Maurice, a close friend of Nicolas Barbier.80 From the records,81 it appears that Pierre remained a journeyman

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for the rest of his life, never ascending to maître status, but he was gainfully employed, a member of a Parisian guild, and married Elisabeth du Courtenay in 1778. Pierre DuBois’s trajectory through public care, to an official apprenticeship, to finally gaining employment as a journeyman in the passementier guild was the ideal path that La Trinité, the state, and the guilds hoped to achieve by providing a vocational education to children. Unfortunately, it is difficult to determine just how many children were able to achieve this kind of success since the archival records are incomplete. What can be calculated, with some degree of certainty, though, is the number of children who were transferred to apprenticeships, to allouages, or to different forms of work. Between 1672 and 1791, at least 5,129 children were transferred out of La Trinité’s care to either an apprenticeship, an allouage, or to a different form of employment, such as a domestique. In the eighteenth century alone, 3,878 children were transferred to the care of apprentices. Included in that number were 752 girls who were placed in female apprenticeship positions. Given that every year Paris registered an average of 1,800 apprentices, enfants de l’état accounted for a small fraction of the apprenticed population. But 3,878 children accounted for nearly 75 per cent of all children the hospital cared for, meaning that the rate of apprenticeship placement was high. An additional 839 other children, mostly girls, were released in allouages to various textile manufacturers and other producers. The remaining 412 children failed to find an apprenticeship or an allouage and had to find employment elsewhere. For girls, the path was most certainly a role as a domestique. Considering that La Trinité was obstinately against the enrolment of the children of domestiques in its institution, it is interesting that they would have encouraged young girls to become domestiques. Without other options, though, a role as a domestic servant was superior to that of a beggar or a prostitute. For boys, the path was less clear, although many of the young men appear to have become manual labourers. With only 8 per cent of the enfants de l’état not achieving ideal placement as an apprentice or allouage, La Trinité was rather successful in meeting its objectives in placing students in apprenticeships. La Trinité’s success demonstrates how the French state and the Parisian community invested in and used children for specific political and economic purposes. Parisian enfants de l’état supplied the city with a new generation

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of skilled apprentices, workers, journeymen, and labourers that could bolster Paris’ economy. At the same time, these enfants de l’état equipped the French state with loyal subject-workers. These subject-workers could implement various social, economic, and political reforms from the bottom up. But, it required the state to negotiate, cooperate, and work with the Parisian hospital system, guilds, parents, and children themselves. Even though few records exist from enfants de l’état, if they were ever created, the daily lives of these children, as well as examples of their agency, can be deciphered from the extensive institutional documentation from La Trinité and Hôpital Général. Many similarities exist between the ways in which Parisian enfants de l’état and other early modern poor children, such as Parisian and Lyonnais charity schoolchildren, were educated, trained, and experienced daily life, demonstrating a general pattern of investment in poor children’s education during this period. Enfants de l’état, though highly subjugated due to their positions as children of the state, were still able to demonstrate agency in the face of institutional pressures. These children’s participation in, feedback to, and even resistance to educational programs demonstrate how children were important actors in the process of state building, colonization, and growing the early modern economy. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the number of teenagers and young adults who depended on state social services rose throughout Paris. Thinking creatively about how to combat the rising number of teenagers and young adults who depended on state services, as well as how to populate the colonies abroad, Parisian hospitals joined forces with the French state as well as the Mississippi Company in the early eighteenth century, sending enfants de l’état abroad to North American colonies. Transporting teens to the colonies ensured that a French population could be entrenched in the western hemisphere.

5 Trafficking in Children: Pronatalism and Population in North America

 In 1733, Marie-Madeleine Chevrainville died in Sorel, just outside of Montréal in New France, at the age of eighty-five. Marie-Madeleine had lived an unusual life. At thirteen, she and her older sister Claude moved into La Salpêtrière in Paris after the death of her parents. Only a few weeks after settling into the hospital-orphanage in 1663, Marie-Madeleine was rounded up with at least thirty-five other female wards of the state, put onto a cart headed for one of France’s Atlantic port cities, and then set sail for the banks of the St Lawrence River. Marie-Madeleine was among the first filles du roi, or King’s Daughters, to arrive in the New World. Far from Louis XIV’s actual daughters, these girls, ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-six, were forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean under royal decree to serve as suitable wives for the increasing number of Frenchmen building the North American colony. Provided with modest dowries, ranging in size from fifty to 300 livres, all the girls on Marie-Madeleine’s ship found husbands within months of arriving in Québec. Marie-Madeleine was among the first of the girls to marry. According to her marriage contract, notarized on 22 October 1663, Marie-Madeleine married twenty-three-year-old Joseph-Isaac Lamy, a Québec leather tanner, who received her state-sponsored dowry of 300 livres. Extant baptismal records reveal that Marie-Madeleine and Joseph-Isaac wasted no time starting their family, having four children by 1670 and birthing another five over the course of Marie-Madeleine’s life. Tracing her family lineage through baptismal records, she was a grandmother to more than forty children and possibly a great-

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grandmother to another seventy-three children. Through continual pregnancies and child rearing, Marie-Madeleine and the nearly 800 other filles du roi are often celebrated in modern society as the “mothers of Canada,” as they helped to exponentially grow New France’s French population in the seventeenth century.1 Marie-Madeline’s fertility and her resulting large French family tree would have pleased Louis XIV and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister of finance and secretary of the navy. Both were dissatisfied with the lack of population growth as well as the inability of Jesuit missionaries and French habitants2 to create large, permanent settlements on par with those of English North America by the early 1660s. Writing to Jean Talon, New France’s intendant,3 Colbert stated, “considerable augmentation in the size of the colony is the principle objective of his Majesty.”4 Colbert understood this mission as both increasing French migration to North America as well as escalating French births abroad. Seeing the immediate impact that filles du roi like Marie-Madeline Chevrainville had on the birthrate in New France, Colbert implemented a pronatalist strategy that forced the migration of enfants de l’état across the Atlantic Ocean. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French state, in cooperation with the Hôpital Générale de Paris, other municipalities, as well as the Mississippi Company, treated wards of state as commodities that could be transferred at will. Whether in Canada or Louisiana, French youths supplied pronatalist programs with the necessary colonists to build a French presence abroad. The seventeenth-century filles du roi program inspired eighteenth-century colonial strategies that moved young men, especially convicts, and young women (many of whom were prostitutes) to Louisiana. French imperialists sought to socially engineer the population of their North American colonies through the trafficking of children and youths. Though pronatalism has been framed as a modern concept, scholars like Leslie Tuttle have demonstrated that many of the same concerns that lead contemporary countries to enact pronatalist policies also existed in the old regime.5 In countries with “flagging birth rates and an aging population,” incentives such as subsidized childcare are meant to increase reproduction.6 Similarly, in early modern France, couples with large families could receive tax write offs. Therefore, this chapter defines pronatalist policies as political manoeuvrings that sought to “serve a large and vibrant population in” the early modern period.7 The pronatalist agendas attached to the filles du roi program

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and the forced migration of child forçats went beyond a simple increase in body count. These pronatalist agendas tried to achieve particular political and social ends. The goals were to create a plethora of nonmixed-race subjects in the New World. At the same time, these pronatalist policies helped to reduce the stress put on state-sponsored poor relief institutions in continental France. These pronatalist policies inherently depended upon the trafficking of young men and women across the Atlantic. Though trafficking is usually described in relationship to the history of slavery,8 these trafficked youths were neither bought nor sold. They retained more bodily autonomy and legal status than enslaved individuals. Historians and scholars, including Glenn Conrad, Carl Brasseaux, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Marcia Zug, and Cécil Vidal, have considered the importance of these forced migration policies to the success and failures of France’s Atlantic empire.9 But, the focus on child trafficking, in particular, is an important distinction that this chapter illuminates. Even though these individuals were legally distinct from slaves, as wards of the state and convicts, few had the ability to resist deportation. They were moved, either by force or coercion, from their homes in continental France to North American colonies, often in the hope that they would perform needed manual labour and build a French society abroad. This chapter, then, adds to the long history of child trafficking in the early modern Atlantic.10

the e dicts o f 1 6 6 6 an d 167 0 Pronatalism was not a uniquely colonial project. Instead, pronatalism was a major effort in continental France as well. Built on the idea that “there could never be too many people, too many subjects, as there is neither wealth nor power but that which comes from men,” early modern pronatalist agendas presented opportunities for the French state and local communities to extend their power and earning potential through the creation of more subjects.11 From its conception, pronatalism was remarkably simple: incentivize early marriage and reward large families. The first official pronatalist decree in 1666 was the Edict on Marriage that remunerated those who married early and reared large families. The edict pledged that if couples married before the age of twenty, the husband would be tax exempt until twenty-five. The edict also promised pères de famille, meaning the taxable householder, who had ten to

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eleven living and legitimate children, exempt status from acting as a tax collector in the parish, from having to pay civic guard duties and fees, or from billeting royal soldiers. Furthermore, those pères de familles with twelve or more living and legitimate children were also exempt from all taxation indefinitely. Noble families could also receive a 1,000 livres pension for such large families. Through the Edict on Marriage, Louis XIV sought to discourage late marriage and reduce celibacy. Leslie Tuttle’s Conceiving the Old Regime: Pronatalism and the Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern France provides a clear analysis of the 1666 Edict on Marriage, arguing that it was an important turning point for the politics of pronatalism. As the first official codification of pronatalist policy, the edict sought to reward reproduction in marriage and demonstrates a desire to want to control the early modern family. But, as Tuttle demonstrates, this was just a prescriptive guide. It does not necessarily mean that the edict was strictly followed or enforced in France. People still engaged in “deliberate family limitation” by deciding to marry late or practicing other forms of birth control. Despite this tension between ideology and practice, the state continued to attempt to control procreation to reshape French families and transform the nature of the French state.12 Regardless of its real or imagined impact, in 1670, the Crown released a new pronatalist policy specifically aimed at New France and inspired by the Edict on Marriage. This arrêt de conseil awarded fathers of ten or more living, legitimate children in New France with 300 livres and those with twelve or more with 400 livres. The ruling also made a special provision for women, promising girls who married by the age of sixteen a gift of twenty livres on their wedding day. Additionally, large families would be recognized in some capacity in their parishes for their cooperation in helping conceive the French empire, usually by not having to act as a tax collector or arbitrator in civil issues.13 Unlike the 1666 edict, the 1670 New France arrêt was punitive in nature. Although men who married before twenty were promised a pension, men who refused to marry by age twenty would be fined and barred from fishing, hunting, and trading with Native groups. To further punish these bachelors, they also incurred much larger taxation rates than their married counterparts. Fathers who postponed or failed to encourage their daughters to marry by age sixteen or their sons by age twenty were subject to extreme fines upwards of 100 livres.14 It is unclear from the records if any fathers were ever fined for this

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offense, perhaps suggesting this was merely a fear tactic instead of a strictly mandated law.15 Since these punitive measures were only present in the 1670 colonial pronatalist missive, it seems that the desire to extend the population abroad through incentivized reproduction was stronger in the colonial context than at home. The actual impact of the arrêt, though, is hard to judge because of the source records. Looking solely at New France’s census records, the population grew exponentially from 1663 to 1680. Almost 10,000 people lived in all of New France in 1680 compared to the meagre 2,500 in 1663. In fact, until the mideighteenth century, the population continued to double over every generation. Looking at the increase in these numbers alone might indicate that the missive worked to encourage large families and early marriage. The rise in population, however, might not have been a result of incredible state intervention in reproduction but rather as “the encounter of preindustrial European demographic patterns with New World economic conditions.”16 In other words, New France’s population rose because of a better diet that made women more fertile, because there were fewer epidemics resulting in a lower infant death rate, and because a shortage of women made early marriage, and therefore an increase in the number of childbearing years, an endemic necessity.

filles du roi: vessels of reproduct i on While the 1670 arrêt itself may not have been solely responsible for the demographic shift, the role the French state played in population growth is still important to consider. In addition to incentivizing marriage and family, the state orchestrated marriages by supplying young women to New France in the 1660s and 1670s. The state decided to send French people, especially adolescent female wards of the state, abroad. Filles du roi played significant roles in family construction in New France. Thanks to Yves Landry’s Orphelines en France, Pionnières au Canada: Les Filles du roi au XVIIe siècle,17 which published the migration, marriage, and baptismal records of every fille du roi, much can be analyzed about these young women.18 It is apparent that filles du roi were pawns in the state’s plan to build its population abroad. Sent as girls to the New World, they would transition to adulthood once married on

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Canadian soil. These women would then birth and raise the next generation of French colonists. As such, the filles du roi were understood as key vessels of French reproduction. From 1663 to 1673, the French Crown, in cooperation with Hôpital Général,19 sent 761 young women to New France, where they were expected to marry and give birth to as many children as possible. These filles du roi, all “of marriageable age” between thirteen and twenty-six, were typically orphans or abandoned children who had been raised in one of Paris’s hospital-orphanages. Most of these young women were unemployed or failed domestiques and had returned to one of the Paris’s hospitals for poor relief. Wanting to remove the stress put on the hospitals as well as to shelter these girls from potential prostitution and poverty and to avoid the burden of more abandoned children, the state sent these girls to New France to become habitants.20 Although the Hôpital Général claimed that the girls volunteered to move to New France, according to the records, this was a coerced process. The Hôpital Général identified potential filles du roi when the girls came to the hospital for assistance or when they aged out of orphanages. Normally in “good health, without issue, and without a sordid past,” these girls were offered two options for their future. Hospital administrators claimed that Paris’s hospitals were too crowded to house the girls and explained that the girl could either choose to leave Paris for another French town with a royal hospital, like Marseilles or Dijon, or could choose to go to New France. Moving to another city came with virtually no support other than a vague promise of institutional care once the girl arrived there. But, the administrators promised girls who moved to New France a new wardrobe, a dowry, and a husband. Since the offer to move to another city in continental France was barely a step above banishment, most girls chose, albeit rather unwillingly, to go to the New World. If a girl refused either option, the hospital decided for her, always sending her to New France. In fact, from the transcript records more than half of the girls sent to New France in 1670 had refused either option and were forcibly transported essentially as convicts.21 At first glance, the forced migration of these girls seems to give some credibly to Michel Foucault’s idea of the “Great Confinement.” Sent away to another continent, these girls were no longer able to beg on the street, erasing them from the Parisian landscape and also from Parisians’ pocketbooks. But, all of the initial filles du roi were deemed to be “moral” girls. While pronatalism

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certainly reduced the stress on individual Parisian hospital-orphanages, the goal was not to remove these girls from society but rather to implant a new, moral society in Canada. Trafficking supposedly immoral young women like prostitutes, syphilitics, or unwed mothers (as would happen later in the eighteenth century) would have had the potential to simply spread immorality across the Atlantic. New France’s next generation of children were to be moral subjects because they came from and were raised by moral mothers. This assumption highlights an early modern belief that morality – or more precisely immorality – was an inherited characteristic. Since French women were in high demand among male habitants, finding a husband was not particularly difficult for these girls when they arrived in Canada. To make sure the girls found husbands, though, they came with a sizeable dowry, averaging 180 livres per girl to further incentivize men. This dowry was supplemented by an additional fifty livres the king paid to husbands on their wedding day. Although dowries were standard in France, few of these girls had the family connections or resources of their own that would have provided such a sum. According to the records, most of these young women were nineteen years old when they arrived in New France.22 The girls quickly moved into the interior of the territory to one of the three major cities or posts: Québec, Montréal, and Trois Rivières. Within three months of arriving in New France, 98 per cent of filles du roi were married. Some were even married in the first week of arriving in Canada, demonstrating the high demand for wives as well as the difficulties of living as a single woman in a new land. For example, eighteenyear-old Marie Lamy arrived in Québec on 8 June 1671 from one of Paris’s hospital-orphanages where she had lived since the age of eleven. Furnished with a 400 livres dowry from the king, on 15 June 1671 she and François Chevrefils, a twenty-six year old from Saint Ours, signed a marriage contract. Over the course of their short marriage, which ended with François’s death in 1678, they had four children. Marie quickly remarried, this time to a judge, Jean Duval, one month after the death of her first husband and went on to have an additional five children. Marie Lamy definitely had one of the shortest courtships, but for first and second marriages short courtships became commonplace.23 Despite the speed at which most filles du roi married, it was not fast enough for Jean Talon and other colonial administrators. In 1671, he ordered that all single French male colonists should marry within fifteen days of the girls’ ar-

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rival. This took the edict of 1670 a step further, disallowing any single bachelors to exist when the state was shipping in French women for them to marry. Although this new ordinance was a way to ensure that a Crown-backed program was successful, it also spoke to a larger racial concern among the French administrators. Particularly preoccupied with what they saw as a “scandalous concubinage with young female savages,” colonial authorities felt that filles du roi helped to provide a “racial reorientation.” Instead of intermarrying with Native women and potentially “going savage” as a result, French colonial men could marry white French women. The filles du roi provided the kind of brides that colonial administers deemed acceptable to the formation of a French population abroad.24 In addition to marrying quickly, most filles du roi were mothers very soon after arriving in Canada. According to baptismal records, about 75 per cent of filles du roi were pregnant with (what was likely) their first child upon signing a marriage contract. Madeleine Tisserand, for instance, married Pierre Parenteau in September 1673 after arriving in Montréal two months earlier in the summer. Her first child was born seven months later in April 1673, indicating she was likely pregnant when they signed the marriage contract.25 Similarly, Anne Thomas from Paris married Claude Jodoin, a carpenter, in March 1666 and gave birth to their first child just five months later in August 1666.26 Pregnancy at the time of marriage was not uncommon in continental France, but the length of time between courtship, marriage, and child was considerably less in New France. For the 2 per cent of girls who remained unmarried after the first three months of arriving in Canada, almost all were married within the first year of their arrival. Out of the 761 filles du roi, only two never married after arriving in New France. This demonstrates the overwhelming demand for French women as well as the societal pressure to organize the colony into familial units. It also suggests how difficult it was for women to remain single in a developing city. Since these girls were rather young when they arrived, more than half of the filles du roi married men who were at least ten years their senior. On average, men were thirty-four years old when they married a fille du roi who was usually just shy of twenty years old at marriage. Due to this difference in age, 78 per cent of the filles du roi outlived their first husbands and remarried at least once. Widowhood appears to have been an extremely rare permanent

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category for women in New France, with only twenty-seven filles du roi not remarrying after the death of their first husband. Indeed, most filles du roi remarried within thirteen months of their husband’s death. In fact, 237 women who were in their late thirties or early forties when their second husbands died remarried for a third time. One fille du roi, Marie Hatanville, even married for a fourth time in 1686 after a series of three short marriages in Québec.27 Only thirteen filles du roi had children with their third husbands, demonstrating the fall in fertility rates as women entered their forties. This rate of remarriage likely indicates how difficult it was for single people, whether male or female, to make a living in the frontier. Both men and women in continental France tended to remarry out of economic necessity, and given the more difficult economic realities of New France, this was likely the case for habitants as well. Examining the filles du roi’s marriage patterns demonstrates that New France’s social topography was a collection of large, blended families. These Crown-sponsored girls created the type of large French families that the 1670 arrêt wanted. According to baptismal and census records, the filles du roi bore 4,438 children in New France, considerably adding to the colony’s population. These filles gave birth to an average of six children throughout their lives, with one fille, Catherine Ducharme, even giving birth to a total of eighteen children between two husbands. Although Ducharme’s birth rate was unusually high, 155 filles, or 20.3 per cent, had families with at least ten children, making their husbands eligible for the 1670 arrêt incentives. Contemporaries like Marie de l’Incarnation, founder of the Ursulines in New France, remarked that Canadian families had a “superabundance” of children, confirming Talon’s note to Colbert that “French women are pregnant every year” in Canada.28 But this impressive fertility among habitants is less surprising when their age at marriage is considered. Most habitants women married earlier in life compared to women in continental France, who wed around age twenty-six. Although women in New France would have been toiling the land and fields just as hard as continental French peasants, habitants’s earlier age at marriage meant that they might conceive children earlier, have perhaps less complicated pregnancies, and, finally, had more childbearing years ahead of them. With this number of children, the filles du roi helped to significantly grow New France’s population and legitimized the Crown’s pronatalist policies. The state knew that by supplying young women to the frontier,

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it would help grow the French population abroad, expanding French presence in the New World. The case of the fille du roi not only highlights how France sought to use enfants de l’état in a colonial context, but it also further calls into question the age constraints of what constituted “childhood” in early modern France. As previous chapters demonstrate, the age of majority was set at twenty-five but, as a legal category, majority was restricted solely to men. Despite the fact that some of these women would have been over the age of twenty-five when they were sent to New France, their position as a “child” was based upon their unmarried status, making them “filles,” or girls. For women then, childhood was conditional on one’s status as a wife. This dependent status aligns with the practice of coverture as well. Since these girls were orphans, the hospital and, ultimately, the French king held coverture over these girls until they were married. Providing these girls with dowries, the king acted in a patriarchal capacity and transferred his authority to the husbands. It was at this point that a girl went from being a daughter to a wife, and as a result, from a child to an adult. Consequently, the actual numerical age of these girls, and more widely all women, mattered less than their status as wives when determining if these females were girls or women. In 1673 filles du roi stopped being transported en masse to the colonies. It is unclear why mass migration ceased, but the Hôpital Général’s records hint at financial difficulties in securing adequate dowries for all women.29 Despite slowing down the forced migration of young women across the Atlantic, the practice continued after 1673 but on a smaller, individual basis with a yearly average of only forty young women sent to New France. With filles du roi, the French state invested in children twice. First, the state sought to immediately settle the colonies with female children they coerced into migration. Their relatively young age at marriage meant they had plenty of fertile years, promising many French births abroad. Then, these girls became women upon marriage and reproduced their own children on North American soil who were the future of French interests abroad. In this way, filles du roi served as vessels of French reproduction. As a strategic program of colonization, the state, in cooperation with the Hôpital Générale, orchestrated, paid for, and incentivized the transportation and marriage of these young women. To the Crown, the filles du roi were a

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commodity that could be moved from Paris to New France in order to fill the demographic need abroad and reduce the stress put on Parisian and other municipal hospitals. Although their fertility may have been an endemic reality of life in colonial France, there is no doubt that these young women helped to build the French population abroad. Leaving France as children and shortly becoming women through marriage after arriving, the filles du roi are a notable example of how the French Crown trafficked youths to populate the colonies.

t r afficking in louisiana From the filles du roi program, colonial administrators and other stakeholders learned the advantages of sending French wards of the state abroad. Those tasked with transforming Louisiana and the Caribbean colonies, like Ministre de la Marine Louis Phélypeaux (sometimes referred to as Pontchartrain) and John Law, head of the Mississippi Company, took inspiration from the success of the filles du roi program. They implemented a series of highly systematized trafficking schemes in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Seized from state institutions like hospitals, orphanages, and even correctional houses, minors were forcibly shipped to the southern colonies in a bid to populate and grow French colonial society. Some of this child trafficking was done on small, individual bases. For example, in 1695 the Parlement de Paris and administrators at the Hôpital Générale faced a difficult year in providing enough space and food to properly care for the female residents living in their facilities. As a way to reduce the financial obligations the city faced and to assist the French state in its pronatalist colonial agenda, hospital administrators and members of Parlement devised a plan. Under their own authority, they sent one hundred young women to Saint Domingue in the Caribbean so that “Frenchmen are not obliged to take negresses as wives.” This, of course, illuminated the racist sentiments omnipresent in France at the time regarding marriage and family with nonwhite individuals. It also demonstrated how the hospital administrators and municipal leaders understood these young women as commodities. Most of these girls were no older than nineteen and suspected filles débauchées (debauched girls or prostitutes), with no other means of support.30 Transferred to Saint

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Domingue, likely against their will, these girls, much like the filles du roi in Canada, provided the French men in Saint Domingue with French females to marry and babies to carry. This small-scale trafficking extended to young men as well. For instance, in 1697 Louis Phélypeaux, the navy minister, commanded that in order to reduce the capacity of a St Malo correctional house a group of garçons would be sent to the Caribbean. Phélypeaux not only saw this as a way to free up space in the correctional facility but also as a way to populate the struggling Antilles. Despite protests from the governor and intendant of the Antilles, the young men were sent to the islands at the end of the year.31 They were put to work cultivating the land and building infrastructure.32 Similarly, the president of Bordeaux’s Parlement arranged to have young vagabonds and “young, idle, lazy men” transported to the American colonies in 1701. The idea was to remove the homeless from public care and punish those unwilling to work. These forced migrants would stand as a warning to those who were tempted to live a life of idleness, especially young men. Though framed as a “recruitment” process, the Bordeaux Parlement allowed its agents to convince young men through any means possible, “including violence,” to move.33 These three examples of trafficking present a Foucauldian view of the state and local communities’ control over individuals. It is hard to argue that these colonial stakeholders understood their actions as anything but authoritative. In Paris, faced with overwhelming financial burden, hospitals and the city required wards of the state to move to a sparsely populated colony. In St Malo, they forcibly removed young men from prisons to till the harsh lands of the Antilles. In Bordeaux, the Parlement sought to improve the city’s workforce and social behaviour through the trafficking of young men to the American islands. Forced migration in these cases served as threatening reminders to uphold the status quo, as creative solutions to lessening financial obligations of poor relief institutions, and as answers to a pressing French problem of how to populate her overseas colonies. The “dire need” to populate France’s southern colonies with French subjects was addressed in 1699 when the inspector general of the navy, Louis-Hyacinthe Plomier, Sieur de la Boulaye, conducted a year-long mission d’inspection of Guyane, Louisiana, Saint Domingue, and the Antilles. Having previously visited Québec and Montréal in 1697, de la Boulaye noted that the French

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Canadian population was “continually growing year by year,” helping to expand French power abroad. However, the problem in the southern colonies was that the “Indians, slaves, and the few [French] colonists” that lived there were “anything but attached” to France. De la Boulaye attributed this to a number of different factors, including the lack of reliable communication networks; the growing importance of sugar and, therefore, slavery; and, finally, simply to the lack of a sizeable French population. De la Boulaye recommended that the Crown “find a way to populate these colonies immediately with French subjects as ha[d] been done in Canada” in order to ensure that France could hold onto its territorial claims.34 Though Louis XIV remained committed to only officially sanctioning the forced migration of “moral” individuals like the filles du roi to Louisiana and the Caribbean, de la Boulaye’s recommendation resonated strongly with local judges, municipal leaders, hospital administrators, and even colonial officials who found ways to continue to circumvent state policies. But, with Louis XIV’s death in 1715 a shift occurred not only in leadership but in colonial strategy. The Regent, Philippe II, duc d’Orléans, “prescribed the deportation of people to Louisiana who had been condemned.”35 This new policy of émigration forcée, or forced emigration, saw thousands of French convicts sent to Louisiana and the Caribbean with the assistance of local judges, municipal leaders, hospital administrators, and the French state. Through the Mississippi Company,36 France’s official colonial strategy became an experiment in “social engineering”37 that relied heavily upon the migration of forçats, or forced exiles, and convict labourers. The Mississippi Company had promised to deliver 6,000 French colonists and 3,000 enslaved African labourers by the 1730s as part of its royal charter. Despite placing numerous advertisements in Paris, Marseilles, La Rochelle, and Lyon that promised fertile land, quick riches, and a better life, few people voluntarily migrated to Louisiana. Faced with the possibility of not meeting their population quota, the company, with the help of Paris’s police and hospitals, began a system of colonization by coercion and abduction in the early eighteenth century.38 Although forçats are generally described as adult, convicted thieves, smugglers, tax evaders, or other criminals, examining the ship logs and transfer records from Paris’s hospitals and prisons demonstrates that many forçats were actually poor boys, forcibly shipped to the colony to populate New Orleans and the rest of the Louisiana colony.

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In January 1719, the Regent issued an edict that allowed Parisian hospitals, including Bicêtre, La Pitié, Hôpital Général, and Enfants Trouvés, to transfer the care of “any person deemed fit” to the Mississippi Company for emigration. Specifically, Philippe d’Orléans mentioned convicts, debtors, habitual vagabonds, and enfants de l’état, or orphans and foundlings. The royal edict explained that transferring these people to the care of the company would create a sizeable population of French subjects abroad and also reduce the number of people dependent on public services in the capital city. Over the next four years, Parisian hospitals transferred 4,038 people to the care of the company. Although the majority of these people were adult vagabonds and convicts, especially salt and tobacco smugglers, 1,129 were adolescents between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five. Few of these children were convicts, but instead lived in one of Paris’s hospitals, relying on poor relief services because of their inability to find suitable jobs or apprenticeships. According to administrators at Hôpital Général, these boys were thought to be “ideal subjects for Louisiana” because of their “tenacity for living and surviving in harsh conditions,” referencing their often-difficult childhood in the Parisian hospital-orphanage system. The Mississippi Company was interested in children because their young age meant the enterprise was provided with long-term employees who would be able to “toil in the soil for years to come, building” the city, the port, and the population.39 Furthermore, with the immigration of young people to Louisiana, the company knew that they would soon see the first generation of colonists born on Louisianan soil, making a self-sustaining population. In this way, Mississippi adopted the seventeenthcentury pronatalist agenda that had been encouraged in New France, continuing similar policies in Louisiana with the immigration of boys. But, unlike the concerns over morality, the forced migration of people to Louisiana in the 1720s did not concentrate on finding only moral subjects to emigrate. Little information is given about the boys’ backgrounds other than that they were living at one of Paris’s hospitals at the time of their forced migration.40 Unfortunately, the Hôpital Général’s transfer records for this group of boys are in a state of disrepair, making it impossible to know how these boys came to live in one of Paris’s hospitals.41 Company census records, however, indicate that none of the children had been convicted of a crime.42 Since the company had originally not wanted to accept convicts “for fear that it would ruin the reputation of the colony,”43 and therefore their commercial ambitions, their

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efforts to import boys to Louisiana demonstrates how they did not envision their colony as a refuge for those of ill repute. Instead, the company hoped that these boys “could avoid the temptation of the forçats” and help to “build a better community that fostered French subjecthood and trade”44 in the Louisiana region. Few of the adult forçats, many of whom were already in poor health, survived the journey to Louisiana. Once in the colony, even fewer survived the initial three months. According to Raguet, Louisiana’s attorney general, only sixty-four of the original 321 convicts, or 19 per cent, transported to Louisiana survived. But adolescents had a higher survival rate, with 78 per cent surviving the voyage and their first several months in New Orleans. Learning of the higher survival rate of children in comparison to the forçats, the company focused its efforts in the late summer of 1719 in obtaining additional children from Paris’s hospitals instead of adult convicts.45 During the fall of 1719 with the backing of the French Crown through royal edicts, lettres patents, and money, as well as with the assistance of administrators at Hôpital Général, John Law, the head of the Mississippi Company, orchestrated the transfer of 497 boys and girls to Louisiana. Law socially engineered the population of Louisiana, receiving “an equal amount of boys and girls” from the hospitals to insure that there “would not be an over population of males” in the colonies.46 Ideally, Law wanted these children to marry before they left for Louisiana, ensuring that “families could flourish” in the new territory. On 18 September 1719, Law arranged for the mass marriage of 184 young couples in the church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs in Paris. These couples, all at least sixteen years of age but no older than twenty, had met the previous day47 in the church’s priory, where “the poor girls chose their husbands from a large number of boys.” After the mass ceremony, the couples were shackled together, “the husband with his wife,” and marched out of the city on foot, escorted by twenty royal archers to La Rochelle. On the overland journey and the voyage across the Atlantic, more than half of the women and nearly a quarter of the men perished. Therefore, when these couples arrived in Louisiana many remarried.48 Since marriage was considered a social marker of adulthood for boys and girls, it is possible that Law’s strategy to migrate couples was not solely about the transplantation of families to Louisiana. Although these adolescents were certainly old enough to legally marry, most were far younger than most new-

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lywed Parisians and Frenchmen who married in their late twenties. By forcing these adolescents to marry, in a way, Law and the company thrust them into adulthood. Transferring adults, most of whom were married, might create less concern among Parisian society than the forced migration of people who were technically still viewed as children or minors. Law could thereby avoid trafficking in children. Instead, he and the company could use the rhetoric that they were providing families an opportunity – even if that opportunity was forced – to build a life in the colonies. With the high mortality rate among transported young females, the company realized that it still had an overabundance of males. Borrowing directly from Colbert’s filles du roi plan, Law arranged for any girl who moved to the Louisiana colony to receive a dowry of 100 livres, payable to her husband on her wedding day. Law hoped, just as Colbert had with the filles du roi in Canada, that these dowries would incentivize early marriage to French girls, which would result in large families along the Gulf South frontier. The Mississippi Company wasted no time advertising in Paris, Marseilles, Rouen, and La Rochelle. But, to the dismay of the hospitals, only a handful of girls volunteered. The Mississippi Company realized that they would have to force girls to move to Louisiana.49 In the summer of 1719 the Mississippi Company asked the Hôpital Général directors and the superior at La Salpêtrière for possible colonists. Essential would be the girls’ ability to survive a long ship journey and the tenacity to thrive in a vastly different environment. La Salpêtrière supplied more than 200 names, mostly from the maison de correction, or La Force, that housed prostitutes. Over the next two years, 258 young women ranging in ages from fourteen to forty, were sent to Louisiana. These girls would become known as filles à la cassette, or casket girls.50 Though they furnished Louisiana, especially Biloxi and New Orleans, with marriageable women, many struggled to adjust. Because of many of the girls’ history with prostitution, they were also branded with suspicion, even in a rowdy colonial town like New Orleans. Though some married and managed to have an impact on the census in the 1720s, these trafficked girls were not considered as successful as the filles du roi. Part of this, too, was a result of the girls’ rebellious natures. Unlike the filles du roi, who acquiesced to the authority of the Crown at the end of the seventeenth century, these girls did not go quietly or easily to Louisiana. Girls rebelled against the company, inciting several riots. In November 1719, for

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example, 150 girls sent from Paris to La Rochelle were about to board the duc de Noailles when they rioted and attempted to escape. The girls threw themselves on their guards, ripping out the guards’ hair, biting, scratching, and even gauging out a guard’s eyes. Although a dozen of the “stronger girls” were able to escape during the pandemonium, another six girls were shot and killed during the riot. The remaining girls, fearful for their lives, boarded the ship to Mississippi. For many of these girls, the voyage was a death sentence. Only sixty-nine of the girls who boarded duc de Noailles survived the trip.51 Another riot, this time involving both boys and girls, occurred in January 1720, when about fifty boys and girls were preparing to leave Hôpital des Enfants Trouvés for La Rochelle. Just as the guards were beginning to load them onto the ship, twenty boys and eighteen girls attacked two archers and four company guards, seizing the keys to the shackles that bound the boys and the keys to the carts that carried the girls. In total, forty-eight boys and girls escaped and avoided being sent to Louisiana. By March 1720, two more riots broke out among people being transported to La Rochelle or immediately before embarkation, with 127 children out of 210 escaping.52 With rumours of rampant disease, harsh living conditions, hostile natives, and high mortality rates in Louisiana, many boys and girls likely viewed their forced migration as a death sentence. During the riots, boys and girls, who were supposed to be agents of the state, demonstrated their agency against a state authority, acting in defiance of the Crown’s wishes. Frustrated by the rebellious nature of the children, the Mississippi Company pleaded to municipal authorities to assist them in “rounding up children from the streets” who they suspected were runaway migrants. In both La Rochelle and Paris, police forces began to use “brigades of guards, water carriers, blackguards, and more roguish gentlemen” as bounty hunters, called bandouliers du Mississippi, to arrest and detain children suspected of being runaway migrants. For each person arrested, the bandouliers received a bounty between ten and twenty livres. Without much oversight, bandouliers began to arrest children from peasant families in villages around Paris, La Rochelle, and even Orléans, claiming that these children “had to be runaways because they could not prove otherwise.”53 The burden of proof for bandouliers and the Mississippi Company was reduced to a child’s inability to prove they were not a runaway. Without proper documentation, like a baptismal record, which no child carried, bandouliers arrested any child they viewed as an easy target.

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Figure 5.1 Young women and men were often rounded up in carts and transported forcibly to hospitals and other sites of social care.

In March 1719 bandouliers arrested 119 children within the confines of Paris alone. It is unlikely that all of these children were runways. Instead, most of these children, like Etienne Caper, a fifteen-year-old apprentice, were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. According to Etienne, two bandouliers seized him and his friend Jean on their way home from a tavern. Neither of the boys were runaways, nor had they been to a Parisian hospital, but the bandouliers shackled them anyway and forced them to Hôpital Général. Hearing Etienne’s screams, several of his neighbours, including the parish curé followed the bandouliers and the boys to Hôpital Général where the neighbours and curé were able to negotiate the boys’ release.54 For most arrested children, no effort was made to locate the child on the previous ship registers. Rather, almost immediately, the company transported the children to La Rochelle

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where they waited to board a ship. The company regularly practiced colonization by abduction as they seized children off the streets of Paris, La Rochelle, and Orléans and forced them to become settlers in the frontier. The Parisian poor quickly reacted to these child abductions, attacking bandouliers in the street. On 2 March 1720, in the place du grève, nearly 300 members of Paris’s poor swarmed a group of fifteen bandouliers who had arrested four adult vagabonds, six prostitutes, and twelve children in a single day. Although the poor had little problem with the arrest of the vagabonds and prostitutes, the people loudly condemned the arrest of the children, claiming that this was “simple kidnapping” and that the bandouliers were “shipping children to their deaths.” As the mob grew angrier, the bounty hunters tried to escape, but their efforts to flee the scene resulted in violence, with seven of the bandouliers murdered and the remaining eight severely injured. By the summer of 1720, seventeen bounty hunters were murdered in Paris and another three were murdered in La Rochelle. Seeing the chaos that bandouliers and the company caused among the menu peuple, in August the king put a stop to bounty hunting, outlawing their practices in 1722.55 Although the company continued to receive children from Parisian hospitals until 1732, after bandouliers were outlawed, the Mississippi Company no longer made attempts to recover or replace runaways. The practice of forced migration through abduction halted. Furthermore, the company’s actions became much more furtive. Previously, the company staged elaborate parades from Hôpital Général to the city’s walls that showcased their migrants. These parades served as a warning to vagrants and criminals that their lives could end up with a forced deportation to the Mississippi, but the image the boys and girls presented was much more complex. Often, they dressed the children in fanciful attire, putting ribbons in their hair and adorning them with various flags, suggesting this migration was a celebratory event. But, while adorned in festive clothes and accessories, the same boys and girls were shackled just like the forçat convicts. These curious images only fuelled the Parisian mobs’ anger towards the company. Therefore, after bandouliers were outlawed, the company stopped the public parade. The forçats were transported through the streets of Paris late at night in order to avoid public demonstration instead.56 Despite these changes in practice, by 1732 the Mississippi Company had successfully transported 1,129 children to the Louisiana territories, most of whom settled in New Orleans.

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Both in New France and Louisiana, the French state used children to grow its North American empire. Initially under Colbert’s direction and carried on by each subsequent colonial authority, pronatalist agendas were adopted to simultaneously address the excessive number of Parisian enfants de l’état and the lack of French subjects abroad. Filles du roi, casket girls, and the Mississippi Company boys were examples of how children, in the loose definition of what this meant, could be trafficked in the service of the early French empire. The French state literally sought to build their power, economy, and empire on the backs of children, especially enfants de l’état. As the next chapter will demonstrate, populating the colonies with enfants de l’état was not enough to ensure French loyalty and subservience throughout its nascent empire. Many of the enfants de l’état as well as their children rebelled against French authorities, developing their own identities, customs, beliefs, and allegiances. But, the response in the empire remained the same as in continental France – inculcate children, use them as agents of social reform to change society from the inside out, and demand loyalty to the French Crown.

6 Children of the Empire: Cruxes of Imperial Strategy

 In the preamble to a 1698 plan to establish a “school of the Orient” that would educate French children in the customs, beliefs, and languages of the “eastern Orient,” including Siam, China, and India, administrators wrote, As the smallest and most fragile subjects, we often overlook the immense capability of children to grow, learn, cooperate, and thrive in environments different from our own. Since children are still in the flowering of life, they are not jaded by adult experience that can chip away at one’s soul, leaving them without the ability to negotiate. Instead, children’s tremendous capacity for life must be harnessed and fostered for the larger benefit of our society.1 Writing this, administrators at the Paris Society of Foreign Missions acknowledged that children possessed unique abilities to act as linguistic, economic, cultural, and political liaisons between France and the wider early modern world. More generally, the statement reflected a pervasive thought among local communities, the Catholic Church, and the French state at the turn of eighteenth century: children were more suited to, if not more capable of, education than adults. As such, they offered much to the ancien régime’s colonizing agendas that sought to instil French power across the globe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the previous chapter argued, the migration of French youths to colonial territories across North America helped

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to grow the population of these regions. But, that was only one piece of the imperial puzzle that Colbert and later colonial leaders instituted. The other, perhaps more difficult, initiative was to build the power of and loyalty to the French state above all else in their new territories. Children offered both promise as well as concern in these regards. Understanding youth as a key period of intellectual development, colonial administrators, most of whom had been born and raised in continental France, feared that colonial youths might lose their “Frenchness.” If they did, these youths might adapt to Native customs or create their own unique ways of life. Either would result in a loss of loyalty to the French Crown. To address this, Colbert and successive colonial administrators turned their attention towards developing educational institutions for youths that would instil a sense of French subjecthood while also serving global state-building initiatives. Since children were, as the 1698 preamble makes clear, predisposed to education, inculcation programs could bring the next generation of French colonists under the fold of Crown authority and loyalty. In doing so, programs of “Frenchification” that had long been focused on trying to “civilize” Native populations throughout North America and the Caribbean began to shift focus to reestablishing French identity in French subjects by the 1680s.2 At the centre of these new Frenchification programs were colonial children. Colonial North American children were only part of France’s imperial efforts, though. At the same time that Colbert and Louis XIV had their eyes on the western horizon, they equally held ambitions to expand, in the manner of the Dutch and the Portuguese, eastward across the Mediterranean to the Levant, India, and Asia. The success of rooting a French empire abroad necessitated youths to act as cultural, economic, and political brokers. Known as jeunes de langues, or language youths,3 young French men from the ages of eight to twenty were enlisted as cultural, economic, and linguistic ambassadors. They assisted in the expansion of French political and trade alliances in the Ottoman Empire and Siam during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Language youths could build loyalty to the French Crown through education and their political positions but they also could infiltrate foreign societies as nonthreatening agents due to their age. This chapter examines French children in North America, the Ottoman Empire, and Siam to argue that France staked a considerable amount of colonial ambition on the backs of children. Whereas filles du roi and forçats

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provided an immediate and continued population through family building, these colonial children and the educational programs they were a part of provided the means for state building and economic expansion across the early modern globe. In French North America, young men, and occasionally young women, were the focus of educational and vocational programs meant to produce loyal French subject-workers. Similar to the Lyonnais charity schools, these educational institutions addressed both local and imperial needs for skilled labourers to build the colonies’ infrastructure. In this way, the economy of Canada and Louisiana could also be bolstered. But, these schools, much as they did in Lyon and Paris, could also encourage social organization along hierarchical labour divisions that mirrored social structures on the European continent. The children sent to the Ottoman Empire and Siam would learn foreign customs and languages while acting as ambassadors and brokers for cultural, political, and economic exchange. In France’s colonies, territories, and trading posts, children had to adapt to lives that were vastly different in experience from those in continental France. French children created hybrid identities in both the East and the West that often disregarded the rules and regulations the French state proposed. They oftentimes had to if they wanted to survive and thrive in their new locations. Whereas educational institutions in North America were meant to correct and combat the loss of French identity among petits habitants, educational programs in the East instigated and perpetuated a hybridity in French adolescent identity. These educational institutions and the French children they served became cruxes of imperial French strategy in order to build France’s political, cultural, and economic power abroad. It is especially important to highlight and acknowledge the gendered dynamic explored in this chapter. Although some schooling in Canada and Louisiana was aimed at girls, the majority of these programs catered to young men. Particularly in the case of jeunes de langues, France’s colonial strategies were highly gendered. The Eastern front of imperialism required skilled diplomacy and merchant negotiations, which were considered strictly male endeavours. In fact, most of the jeunes de langues existed in a predominately male space, punctuated by military, merchant, and religious activities. Though diplomats could be and oftentimes employed women, as Ashley Bruckbauer has illustrated, much of France’s interactions in Siam and the Ottoman Empire were malecentric.4 This was not a coincidence. Young women were the vessels of

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colonial reproduction, sent abroad to populate colonies with a new generation of French subjects. But, since France’s Eastern ambitions were to build economic and political alliances and not necessarily settler colonies, women were not initially needed.5 Boys, though, could physically build the infrastructure and alliances that were essential to these imperial goals. French colonial historiography has grown immensely in the past forty years, providing rich and diverse perspectives on the growth of the early modern French empire.6 Rarely, though, do colonial studies consider the Atlantic and Caribbean contexts along with that of the Middle East, Africa, India, and Asia.7 However, as Laurie Wood has argued, there was a “bi-oceanic understanding of France’s early modern empire” that saw the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean as well as the land between as part of a conscious whole.8 This chapter makes an intervention into this historiographical realm by considering the parallel and overlapping ambitions, contexts, and strategies to build the early modern empire across both the Atlantic Ocean and the wider Eastern hemisphere.

frenchificat ion of french colonial yo uth In her memoirs, Marie de l’Incarnation, founder of the Ursuline Order in New France commented on the rising detachment from French identity that many colonists displayed in 1670. She lamented, “a Frenchman becomes savage sooner than a savage becomes French.”9 Echoing these concerns in 1685 the newly appointed governor of New France, Denonville, remarked in a report to the minister of the navy that instead of acting as models of emulation for Native populations, French colonial youths “adapted to Indian ways.”10 These complaints highlighted the growing concern among colonial leaders that, despite increasing numbers of French colonists over the previous decade, the intensity and prevalence of French identity was in danger of being drastically mutated or even lost among North American colonists. If the French North American population continued to adopt Native ways of life, then French political and economic power abroad would be severely diminished. Starting in the 1680s, North American French schooling shifted gears from focusing solely on Native children to also concentrating on the education of North American-born French children. The purpose of this

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change was to try to inculcate these children with the “proper civility of a Frenchman.”11 As a joint project between the Crown and local colonial communities, new programs of education aimed to provide every French child living in the colonies, regardless of socio-economic status, with a free education in reading, writing, counting, mathematics, and trade skills. Much like the educational programs at écoles de charité in Lyon and Paris, North American education emphasized vocational skills. While religious instruction was dispensed to colonial children, the goal was not ecclesiastic in nature. Instead, it was to provide children with the “necessary skills to gain their lives.”12 Although a child’s daily existence in the colonies differed from their continental counterparts, the purpose of providing an education to children remained the same, whether in metropolitan France or in one of the North American colonies – to create loyal, industrious Catholic subjects who could contribute to the political and economic growth of the nascent French empire. To the French imperial strategy, children were essential not only in number but also as individual subjects. The same methods employed in Lyonnais charity schools and Parisian hospital-orphanages spread across the Atlantic during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Just as Démia’s règlemens were disseminated to other French cities to address local concerns, colonial educators also relied on Démia and his schools for a model of emulation and inspiration. In fact, Démia’s La Méthode pour faire les Écoles, a pedagogical guide originally written in 1681 and published en masse posthumously in 1690, was found in the inventories of forty schools in New France, demonstrating its wide dissemination across the French empire as well as its influence on seventeenth-century pedagogy. Finding this guide in so many colonial schools’ inventories suggests that, despite being considered on the periphery of the French empire, colonial society was at least partially connected to and aware of social and cultural developments in the métropole. Roger Magnuson’s Education in New France describes the education of French habitant children, considering the establishment of elementary schools, a Jesuit boys’ school, and several trade schools alongside a widespread French evangelization campaign.13 This section builds upon Magnuson’s interventions to demonstrate further how notions of childhood and education spread across the Atlantic Ocean from continental France. Many of the same pedagogical techniques and methods were employed in New France as were used in Lyon

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and Paris where they had the same goals of state building and social reform. Aside from Magnuson, colonial historiography has discussed education primarily in regards to Native education, especially efforts at Frenchification. As Sophie White has explained, Frenchification policies were a “confluence of secular and religious factors” that combined both “Catholic missionary goals” as well as “the development of French nationalism.” Frenchification policies were built around the premise that Indigenous groups possessed the “potential for transmutation (and ‘improvement’),” according to European standards.14 It would just take the transition and assimilation of Indigenous peoples into subjects of the king. But, as James Axtell has discussed, this policy essentially forced Natives “to commit cultural suicide … to cease [being] Indian.”15 As such, the French Crown was “faced with the failure” of not achieving “largescale lasting changes among indigenous populations.”16 In fact, over the course of the seventeenth century, the French Catholic Church as well as the French Crown had to grapple with the hypocrisy of “extoll[ing] the cultural malleability of Indians while expressing concern for their possibly inherent difference.”17 By the late seventeenth century, the Frenchification experiment seemed a failure.18 Although Frenchification was particularly pursued with Native children, the program was extended in the 1680s as a way to target a different audience – French colonial children. By discussing colonial education only as an attempt to “Frenchify” Native groups, this flattens the complex system of colonial education in place and being developed during the 1680s. The new educational programs were extensions of the civilizing program but with a focus on French children. Incorporating an examination of the system of education and French North American-born children recognizes that both the Crown and local authorities attempted to mould all children – whether those born to French families in North America or Native children – into ideal French subjects capable of reading and writing French, performing mathematics, reciting the Catechism, swearing fidelity to the French Crown, and adding to the French economy. It was not until 1685, two years after Colbert’s death, that a colonial official questioned the utility of focusing so ardently only on Native education. After arriving in Canada, the newly appointed governor, Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville, conducted a survey of Québec, Montréal, and Trois Rivières, paying special attention to the “condition of the population, French and Indian alike.” In his report, Denonville noted, “the Indians ha[d] acquired only that

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which is evil and vicious in us,” referencing numerous reports of drunkenness amongst Native populations on the outskirts of the cities. Furthermore, Denonville recounted “nearly 600 Frenchmen ha[d] taken to living in the woods.” These coureurs des bois (wood runners)19 had “easily adapted to Indian life [and] spread all of the vice and immorality of Frenchmen to the Indians.” In concluding his report, the new governor recommended that the policy of cohabitation and increased contact with Natives cease in favour of a reservation system “so that Indians might properly be supervised and protected from the pernicious influences of the French fur and brandy traders.”20 Although Denonville’s concern for the Native populations may have been genuine, his reserve plan was also likely intended to preserve French society in Canada. Without access to Native populations, French men and women would be less likely to learn Native customs and trade as the coureurs des bois had. After suggesting the establishment of a reservation system, in 1686 Denonville urged the king to supply money to New France for “the establishment of schools for the French habitants” so that these children “could become truly French in appearance and spirit.”21 Denonville found it more than troubling that North American-born French children were not conforming to French standards of appearance and behaviour. The governor’s reports in 1685 and 1686 began the transition from concentrating on Indigenous populations to French children, with the state and local authorities taking an increased interest in the education and rearing of French children abroad. Although the Crown still received some requests, like that in 1703 from Detroit’s intendant or in 1728 from an Ursuline teacher in New Orléans, for the establishment of “savage schools,”22 by 1700, the program of Frenchification focused not only on Native children but also on children born to French families in North America. Adding support to this transition was a revised notion of childhood in the French Atlantic. French colonial children, especially the sons and daughters of labourers and craftsmen, were characterized as “well-nigh incorrigible, rebellious in behaviour and disrespectful towards their parents who could hardly control them.”23 Colonial administrators remarked repeatedly that French parents living on the frontier gave their children “great liberties” not afforded in continental France. This generated conflict within colonial families, with parents unable to “restrain [their] children as soon as [the children] can shoulder a gun.”24 According to an exclamatory memorandum Denonville wrote in 1687,

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fathers “dared not make [their children] angry for the children would run to the woods and never return.”25 Here, Denonville was referring to the coureurs des bois who left mainstream colonial society to live among the Native populations of New France. In fact, the coureurs des bois in 1680 had attacked a French fort in Illinois, stole goods, and left graffiti on the ruins with the phrase, “We are all savages.”26 Certainly, Denonville’s worries were somewhat justified. The governor intended his report to not only speak about the potential loss of loyal French subjects but to serve as a metaphor for France’s colonial holdings. The French colonies had to be brought under strict and authoritative French control, lest they lose the territory and the people living there. This image of the recalcitrant colonial child was not a singularly Canadian child, though. By the early eighteenth century, this same notion of childhood existed in Louisiana. The intendant reported in 1714 that French children in Louisiana “developed a hard and ferocious character in the manner of the savages” due to the “lack of an education that [could] correct their character.”27 Both Canadian and Louisianan children acted in a subversive manner to the authority of their parents, presenting a threat to social stability. If children could not accept the power and authority of their own fathers, then it was unlikely that these same children would consent to the authority of the French king. The rhetoric that Raudot used to describe education as “correct[ing] their character” also demonstrates how French society understood the benefits of education. The use of the word “correct” (réprimander) adds a punitive sentiment to education. In many ways, education was (and continues to be) a form of social discipline. School was an opportunity to mould children’s characters to ideal societal standards. Although the state played a prescriptive role in the education of French North American children, local communities in Canada and Louisiana orchestrated much of the pedagogical reorganization. The French-born bureaucrats, merchants, and priests who governed Québec, Montréal, and New Orleans shared the state’s concerns over a languishing French identity among North American-born children. At the same time, these local authorities responded to an increase in immorality, vice, and rising unemployment among the poor populations just as metropolitan French cities had. As the French North American population grew and cities began to become more urban in character, intendants received more complaints about the poor’s debauched behaviour.

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Working together, the governors, intendants, bishops, wealthy merchants, community members, and religious orders in Canada and Louisiana established a total of forty-seven schools for French children in North America by 1763. Of these forty-seven institutions, twenty-four were charity schools, providing a free education to students. Jesuits, Ursulines, and Recollets established another twenty-three schools that were tuition-based primary schools and served the children of French bureaucrats, wealthy merchants, and army officers. By the outbreak of the French Revolution, nearly forty more requests for the monetary support or land necessary to establish a school in this model also came from Guadeloupe, Saint Domingue, and Martinique in the Caribbean.28 In areas where populations were slowly increasing and loyalty to the French kingdom was needed, schools were a central part of state building. The tuition primary schools that religious orders ran prepared students for occupations as lawyers, bureaucrats, doctors, and priests, with students often leaving New France for Paris to complete their education at a university or seminary.29 The concern over the incorrigible nature of children in the New World, however, did not necessarily include these elite children. Instead, the free schools became sites of social reproduction for the working poor. Children of labourers, tradesmen, and sailors were the intended targets of the educational program. Those children, who were supposedly recalcitrant, had to be civilized through education in order to come under the fold of French authority. The goal in North America was to create a French society abroad that closely mirrored that of continental France. In order to create French childsubjects abroad, free schools had to focus on correcting children’s rhetoric and speech. This involved teaching children how to write and count as well as acquiring other skills necessary for occupation. The ideal child was not simply a subject but a worker-subject. Unlike in metropolitan France, little attention was given to the religious instruction at free schools. Although the règlemens of the école charitable in Québec and the école de charité in New Orleans mention creating “good Catholics” and providing Catechism lessons to students, institutional records demonstrate that little attention was paid to religious education.30 This is primarily the result of the schools’ organizational structure. The Catholic Church and priests helped to establish these schools, giving funds and soliciting donations from their parishes. Few religious men and women were teachers in free schools. Instead, Jesuits, Recollets, and Ursulines were busy teaching at

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tuition primary schools or at “Indian schools.”31 Without priests to act as schoolmasters, skilled laymen filled the need for teachers. In fact, after 1700 most schoolmasters in Canada and Louisiana were laymen. Religious instruction, especially Catechism lessons, was outsourced to parish priests when there was time. Lay schoolmasters became the norm in North America, but it was not a particularly lucrative career. Even though the records do not indicate schoolmasters’ salaries, the fact that the majority of these teachers held other jobs is an indication that the position was not an economically sustainable one. Instead, being a schoolmaster appeared to be a second job for most teachers in post-1700 French North America. Most of these laymen were highly skilled members of society, passing on their expertise to students. Charles Couet, a schoolmaster in Québec in 1736, for example, arrived in New France ten years earlier as a soldier. Upon the completion of his service, he settled in Québec and opened a wig shop. In the 1730s, Couet decided to supplement his income by becoming a schoolmaster at the École Charitable de Québec. Couet taught “reading and writing” to the younger students as well as wig production to the older students.32 Similarly, Jean-Baptiste Tétu, born in Trois-Rivières to a fille de roi, became a schoolmaster after he “struggled to find business” as a notary in 1723.33 Many notaries served as schoolmasters, likely due to their adeptness in composing and drafting various legal and business contracts.34 Likewise, in New Orleans, Jacques Barthélemy Richard ran a small free school for his parish adjacent to his notary office from 1748 to 1751. Richard taught boys and girls how to read, write, and count. According to apprenticeship contracts, at least two of the boys who studied with Richard went on to become his apprentice, learning the notarial trade.35 Schoolmasters and mistresses were also artisans. Françoise Rouillé, for instance, was a dressmaker in New Orleans in 1748 and also a schoolmistress to twenty-two girls between the ages of seven and fourteen. At the small boutique that her family owned, Rouillé made “women’s dresses, hats, and other accessories from fine textiles like silk and lace.” Having been educated at the Ursuline girls’ school, Rouillé was highly literate and numerate. Along with another schoolmistress and three schoolmasters, Rouillé taught girls how to read, count, and sew.36 Similarly, Jacques Thoumelet was a carpenter who worked at a charity school in Montréal from 1698 to 1710.37 The employment of lay schoolmasters and mistresses supports the assertion that these schools

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meant to instil French identity through labour. Children were created to be worker-subjects, adding to the economy of New France in productive ways as skilled labourers. This is further supported when examining surviving règlemens, schoolmaster’s reports, and institutional records like account books and enrolment lists. Much of the curriculum followed the Lyonnais model. For example, a Québécois schoolmaster’s report in 1728 indicates that he required students to read fables and stories that taught “about the glory of the monarchy and France,” much like what was practiced in Lyon.38 Reading these stories would have asserted that the child’s role was dependent on and answerable to the king. By assigning these tales, the schoolmasters were complicit in the state’s efforts to spread French identity and assert monarchical authority over the supposedly unruly colonists. Young minds were taught to conceive of themselves not as independent entities on the periphery of a kingdom but as direct subjects of the king. These exercises also show how, regardless of regional context, authority to the monarchy and internalization of one’s status as a subject was paramount to a child’s education. Although the regional context dictated the extent to which children either easily identified with this status or pushed back against it, the method by which this identity as a subject was communicated and inculcated was consistent across the early modern French globe. Like in Lyon and Paris, vocational education was the cornerstone of North American education and served two main purposes. First, since Canadian and Louisianan society had to be built from scratch, a variety of workers with different skills were essential. Without skilled workers, the French North American infrastructure and economy would have stalled. But, aside from simply building the colonies, educating children in trades made sure that a child entered a hierarchal social model. Learning a particular trade, becoming an apprentice, and, finally, joining a guild would cement a child’s place in the hierarchical French society that was organized according to various associations in families, guilds, and the larger kingdom. Vocational skills appear to have been taught as the final stage of a child’s education. Since many of the schoolmasters and mistresses were laymen and women trained in particular skills, many of these teachers were able to pass on their trade skills to the students. For example, at the École Charitable de

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Montréal one of the schoolmasters was also a brickmaker and bricklayer. According to a report to New France’s intendant in 1698, the schoolmaster trained a group of about twenty-four boys in the art of brickmaking and laying. The children even occasionally worked on site with the teacher at various construction projects, applying their skills to a real world setting that greatly benefitted the community. Much like in Lyon and Paris, for trades that lacked a salaried teacher, écoles had to contract tradesmen to temporarily teach particular skills. For example, the école charitable in New Orleans employed well over 200 different craftsmen and women who taught masonry, carpentry, joinery, blacksmithing, other metalwork, tailoring, tanning, lacemaking, wig making, and scaling, on a temporary basis. Just as in metropolitan France, apprenticeship was largely restricted to boys. Girls, though, appear to have entered into informal apprenticeships, sometimes as seamstresses or laundresses. Jeannette de Tours, a girl aged about seventeen, became a couturière en formation in Montréal in 1701 at the shop of Monsieur Rioux. This inclusion of “en formation,” or “in training,” indicated that de Tours was not yet a full seamstress. Instead, she was learning how to sew and tailor garments.39 More frequently than informal apprenticeships, girls became domestic servants known as domestiques. In New France and Louisiana, wealthy merchants and bureaucrats employed domestiques in their households to perform a variety of tasks. As a maid of sorts, the domestique attended to household chores, cooking, or could otherwise help family members. Like indentured servants, these women were contracted for a set period of time, usually between three and five years, and received payment at the end of their service. Since it appears vocational education at écoles prepared girls in a variety of different trades, these girls were well suited for careers as domestiques. Vocational training was another way to teach obedience to the state and to local authorities. First, a vocational education would ensure that the colonial population had skilled workers, which was paramount to a growing society. Second, training in crafts and trades like blacksmithing or carpentry, normally associated with guild organizations, would cement a child’s adherence to a hierarchical social organization. This also mirrored continental France’s social structure. Although colonies and colonial experience would undoubtedly differ from that of homeland France, the French state wanted its colonies to

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parallel French society as much as possible. For centuries, hierarchical organization around industry that demanded subservience and training had worked well to centralize power and authority, or so the French state thought. What the authorities did not anticipate, however, was that guilds would not take root in the frontier soil as they had in metropolitan France. Although loose collectives of craftsmen and merchants existed in Montréal and New Orleans that fixed prices, steadied competition, and provided clear guidelines on quality and production, these collectives hardly formed the highly stratified guild organization that existed in Europe. Therefore, while vocational education was intended to make children more French through labour, the success of this initiative is questionable. A more thorough examination of apprenticeship and domestique contracts may reveal additional information about vocational training. Tracing children in metropolitan France to adulthood presents its own challenges, but tracing French North American children proves even more difficult because of the paucity of sources, the lack of a well-defined bureaucracy, and the spreading of documents across multiple archives in multiple countries. French colonial free education focused on teaching children to act and organize as the French did in the métropole, civilizing them in many ways like the Jesuits had tried to do with the Natives. Essential to the free educational program was the teaching of vocational skills. If children learned trades they would be more likely to create a colonial world that mirrored continental France’s emphasis on guild and labour hierarchies. As much as being a Catholic was important to the idea of French subjecthood abroad, so was the role of being a worker. These French North American-born children were to identify as Catholic subject-workers, understanding their subservience to God, the Church, the King, and to their local communities as labourers and workers. Though the colonial records are filled with continued complaints regarding the potential loss of French identity in Canada and Louisiana, the educational policies were meant to ameliorate these concerns. As the eighteenth century progressed, Canadians and Louisianans continued to live on the periphery, but their children were constantly taught to imagine themselves as important French subjects. When much of New France was lost after the Seven Years’ war, these same colonists struggled to accept new imperial identities. Perhaps inculcation had been more effective than colonial authorities initially thought.

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jeunes de l angues in the ot toman empire At the same time that Colbert and Louis XIV had their eyes on the western horizon, they held equal ambitions to expand eastward across the Mediterranean to the Levant, India, and Southeast Asia. But, Colbert and Louis XIV had to rely on the cooperation and expertise of French merchants from Marseilles who already had trade networks and relationships with the Turks, Ottomans, Safavids, and others. In dealing specifically with the Ottoman Empire, the French Crown had to follow the lead of Marseillais merchants who employed drogmans (translators)40 as economic, political, and cultural ambassadors. In particular, the French Crown co-opted the Marseillais practice of sending French children to the Ottoman Empire to learn Turkish, Arabic, and other Levantine languages. France could capitalize on the Marseilles merchants’ extensive trade networks while simultaneously bringing the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce and their children under the fold of absolutist state authority. To facilitate better French trade networks, Colbert and the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce entered into a joint educational venture that sent young men abroad to train as French adolescent drogmans. These youths could act as cultural, economic, and political ambassadors and brokers with the Ottoman Empire. Eventually, in the early eighteenth century, a formal school was established in Paris that provided the boys with a rudimentary education in Levantine languages before they were sent abroad. Though the purpose of this school was to create culturally sensitive and linguistically talented adolescents who could bridge the cultural barriers between the French and the Ottomans, the French Crown, much as in North America, worried about the increasing cultural hybridity adolescent drogmans exhibited. French children in the nascent Eastern empire, provide a clear view of how children served imperial ambitions, whether in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire, or the Indian Ocean. From the sixteenth century, with the signing of the Capitulations de l’Empire Ottoman41 between François I and Suleiman the Magnificent in 1536, French traders, especially Marseillais merchants, benefited greatly from unprecedented access to the Échelles du Levant.42 During the early modern period, Marseillais merchants built expansive trade networks in the Ottoman Empire that accounted for nearly 98 per cent of all of France’s imported luxury

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goods, including silk, textiles, spices, and even coffee.43 Nicknamed La Porte de l’Orient, Marseilles owed its success to the merchants’ understanding and respect for the local language, customs, and beliefs in the Ottoman Empire. Essential to every Marseillais merchant was a drogman. The most successful merchants employed at least four translators who spoke Turkish, Armenian, Greek, or Arabic in order to facilitate deals with Ottoman brokers and merchants. But even smaller, less lucrative traders employed at least two translators, demonstrating their essential role in the process of trade. In the mid-sixteenth century, during the first years of exchange between these Marseillais merchants and the Ottoman Empire, most French traders hired men on-site in Smyrna, Constantinople, Sidon, or Chios to act as translators. Drogmans were highly educated, capable of speaking, reading, and writing Turkish, Armenian, Arabic, or Persian as well as a variety of European languages. With such vast linguistic knowledge, most of these men were at least forty years old.44 Although some drogmans acted as independent contractors of sorts, soliciting customers at major ports and markets, many were related to Ottoman merchants and received their customers through that connection. As such, the drogman became an essential part of the trade network. Drogmans, though, were not a uniquely French–Ottoman practice. The Turks had used drogmans themselves in business dealings with Ottomans from other ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. While this was a common practice within the Ottoman Empire itself, highlighting how diverse and vast the empire was, the Venetians were some of the first Europeans to trade with the Ottoman Empire and employ the service of drogmans. Known as dragomanno Venetian traders created a highly bureaucratic system of translators and interpreters around the Mediterranean and Levant.45 By the time the French arrived in the Échelles du Levant, translators-for-hire were a fixture in the Ottoman marketplace. In the early years of trade between Marseilles and the Ottoman Empire, drogmans rarely came to France with the merchants. Instead, the drogmans remained in the Ottoman Empire and acted as an intermediary between the French and Ottoman merchants, translating documents received from or sent to the French. When the French merchant came to the Levant, the drogman accompanied the French merchant, acting as a translator and cultural guide. Eventually, as trade began to pick up in the 1560s, merchants started to hire

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Ottoman drogmans to live in Marseilles and to translate daily communications. Since drogmans were mostly middle-aged and had family connections in the Ottoman Empire, it was often hard for French merchants to convince a drogman to leave his home and family for a position in Marseilles. Furthermore, since many of the drogmans were related to the Ottoman merchants, the French worried that the translators negotiated not in the French merchant’s favour but rather in their own family’s favour. To remedy these concerns, by the 1630s many Marseillais merchants were sending their own teenage sons, associates’ sons, or godsons to Constantinople46 or Smyrna to learn the language and customs. These French drogmans would make sure to negotiate in the French’s favour and would ultimately be a better investment since these boys had more years of work ahead of them. The boys often lived with the Ottoman trading partner’s family and received private tutoring in Turkish, Arabic, or Greek depending on where the trader resided. Sending a child abroad to live with and learn from a foreign family demonstrated a commitment and investment in the future of the partners’ trade relationship. Using sons and other male family members as cultural and economic brokers was a common practice with many early modern traders around the globe. Renaissance merchants, for instance, often sent their sons and brothers to other cities and states in order to forge new alliances and trade networks. Similarly, African merchants from Annamoaboe on the Gold Coast sent their sons to Europe to receive an education and to foster relationships with European contacts.47 Even within the same empire, sons often served as cultural links to the homeland. For example, sons of British Caribbeans were sent back to mainland Britain for an education that would make them more metropolitan and, therefore, more British.48 These boys often served as the cultural link between métropole and colony for the families, forging alliances across vast spaces. But, early modern merchants did not rely exclusively on kinship networks for cultural brokers. Merchants could also employ complete strangers as cultural and economic brokers as long as they shared similar interests and goals.49 The most important aspect of creating networks seems to have been the physical presence of a representative – kin or not. Face-to-face interaction forged trusting relationships. Perhaps due to the arduous nature of global

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travel in the early modern period, these representatives were frequently young men. By the 1640s, global merchants’ use of young brokers was a wellentrenched practice. With such well-established connections and access to the Levant and Mediterranean, Marseilles became of intense interest to both Louis XIV and Colbert by the 1660s. As Junko Takeda has illustrated, the Crown’s goal in the 1670s was to “render this port [of Marseilles] into the most famous in the entire Mediterranean Sea.” To compete with Dutch, English, Venetian, and Ottoman traders, Colbert felt it was “necessary for us to wage continuous economic warfare against all foreign commercial cities” from the safety of Marseilles.50 But establishing complete monarchical control over Marseilles was a hard endeavour. The ancient city, along with the larger Provençal region, had enjoyed considerable political autonomy since unification with King Louis XI in 1486. Ruled by nobles and merchants, Marseilles had largely been left to make its own decisions about local politics and international commerce. But, this was antithetical to Louis XIV and Colbert’s absolutist state-building agenda. In April 1669, Colbert made a preliminary step to try to win favour with the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce and to bring them under monarchical control. He declared the port of Marseilles to be a duty-free port, essentially providing Marseilles with a “monopoly over France’s Levantine trade.”51 This edict eliminated all taxes that foreign merchants used to have to pay upon entry into the port. The goal was to attract more international commerce, grow domestic trading at the port of Marseilles, and, certainly, build loyalty between Colbert and the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce. While this move certainly helped to make the port of Marseilles more popular with merchants from “the Levant, the North Sea, the German states, Switzerland, Piedmont, the New World, Guinea, and the Indies,” all sailing to the city on the sea for trade, the chambre de commerce did not bow to Colbert’s, and by extension Louis XIV’s, power the way he intended. Instead, the chambre de commerce complained that a lack of taxes would mean the burden to maintain the port and social services would fall heavily into the laps of the elite.52 Suspicious of the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce’s reaction to this edict, Colbert sought to extend Louis XIV’s power in other ways, all of which related to commerce. First, Colbert required that all trading ships originating from Marseilles would sail with the protection of a Royal Navy escort. When many refused this protection, Colbert accused Marseillais merchants of engaging in

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counterfeiting and smuggling, and he ordered the seizure and search of ships nearly every month. Realizing that tensions would always exist between the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce and the Crown, Colbert quickly pivoted his strategy to concentrate on the supervision of Marseilles merchants abroad and the building of loyalty to the Crown in the Marseilles youth. Noting how Marseilles merchants’ built personal connections with Ottoman merchants by sending family members abroad at an early age, Colbert hatched a plan that would again use state-sponsored children to build the French empire across the Mediterranean, Middle East, and parts of Asia. Citing the many “complaints French merchants who do business in Constantinople and Smyrna have against translators who abuse their roles and destroy commerce,” Colbert mandated that all merchant assemblies employ only Frenchmen as translators.53 Though this was becoming more common by the late 1660s, the edict suddenly made it so that Marseilles merchants could no longer choose who to hire as a translator. The edict required that every trading merchant and government official would have to be nominated by the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce and essentially approved by Colbert. By taking away this seemingly small choice, Colbert asserted dominance over Marseilles merchants and the financial interests of French subjects abroad. Immediately, Colbert suggested the establishment, in cooperation with the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce, of an educational program on the model of the Venetian school for giovani della lingua, or language children. To build their political and economic alliances with the Ottoman Turks, the Venetian Senate sent young citizens to Constantinople to learn “in the language of the traders along with their discipline of trade” beginning in 1551.54 With massive success in obtaining loyal, fluent, and lifelong Venetian interpreters, the giovani della lingua school provided a model for Colbert to emulate. On 18 November 1669, Colbert announced that “in order to ensure the future loyalty of our drogmans and interpreters, every three years, six boys from the ages of nine to ten will be sent to Constantinople or Smyrna to learn the languages of the regions and prepare for their careers as interpreters.” These boys became known as jeunes de langues, or language youths. The jeunes would learn “on the job,” working for French consulates in political positions, interacting with Ottoman traders, and living with Capuchin monks.55 Though quite young at only nine or ten years old, these boys would have to demonstrate that they knew how to properly read French as well as Latin. Even though there

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would be no correspondence or communication in Latin, it was necessary for the boys to be able to read dictionaries and grammar manuals that were translated from Turkish into Latin. Such requirements meant that all of these boys were from the merchant elite and nobility, previously educated by private tutors as well as in tuition-based schools. This was consistent, too, with Marseilles practices before Colbert’s edict. Although the 1669 edict might first appear to be a local practice that was adopted for a national purpose, Colbert was clever with how he embedded control over these boys, building deeper loyalty to the Crown than to the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce. First, Colbert required that the jeunes de langues join the program on their own volition. This insistence on voluntary participation had the potential to make the boys feel like they had autonomy over their own lives and were part of a larger team.56 By volunteering they might be less likely to rebel against the program, teachers, consuls, and administrators in charge. But, the extent to which any child has the ability to fully choose to participate in this type of program is debatable. Although the extant source material does not specifically address the issue of children’s choice, it is likely that at least some of these boys were persuaded, if not forced, into serving as jeunes de langues by parents or other family members eager to build connections in the Ottoman Empire and benefit from Colbert’s plan. As previous chapters have demonstrated, children’s “choice” is often understood as heavily coerced because of existing familial and societal power structures. Second, with a simple edict, Colbert was able to take a position that was formerly filled through ad-hoc processes, either on-site in the Ottoman Empire or through familial connections, and turn it into an “exalted occupation for king and public.”57 By elevating the position of a drogman to one that had to be nominated, approved, and specially educated, Colbert was further bringing the position under the purview of colonial administrators. Through focusing so intently on children, too, Colbert knew that ideas about the glory of the monarchy could be inculcated from a young age, setting the jeunes de langues up to be lifelong supporters of the French Crown. The cost it took to educate these boys was significant, though. To mitigate the Crown’s financial liability in this colonization scheme, Colbert demanded that the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce foot the bill. The finance minister used the April 1669 edict that gave Marseilles a duty-free port along with a monopoly on Levantine trade as justification for this financial obligation.

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The Marseilles Chambre de Commerce was ordered to pay 300 livres per student per year to the Capuchin monks who housed the boys in Constantinople.58 At first, the chamber of commerce refused to pay this sum, partially because these young men would be housed at a monastery in Constantinople and not in the city centre near markets where they could learn commercial practices. In fact, until 1681, the Capuchin monks regularly complained that the chamber of commerce “refused to pay its instalments or sent them tardily.” But, by the 1690s, the chamber of commerce was beginning to see a return on their investment, with jeunes de langues laying considerable inroads with trading partners.59 The six available jeunes de langue positions filled quickly. By 25 May 1670, only six months after the official edict was released, the first shipment of jeunes de langues arrived in Constantinople. In 1671, 1672, and 1673 additional youths arrived in cohorts of six. After these initial shipments, jeunes de langues were sent out according to the every-three-years model Colbert had mandated. By 1700, more than seventy jeunes de langues had been successfully educated in the program. By the outbreak of the French Revolution, the program had educated more than 300 jeunes de langues. Though a relatively small number of children in proportion to the French population, their roles as youth cultural, political, and economic brokers are important to recognize. From the limited source material available about these first several years, it appears that the Capuchin monks of Constantinople struggled to educate and take care of the jeunes de langues. The most common complaint found in the Capuchin’s records from jeunes de langues was a lack of clear supervision and purpose while at the monastery. A tension seemed to exist between the monks’ desires to persuade young men to take “a life of the cloth” and their state-mandated role to provide food, shelter, and religious and language instruction for the jeunes de langues. The jeunes de langues were required to attend Capuchin religious services that were open to the community and assist on certain missionary activities. They could serve as good examples of Catholic children to the masses, convincing locals of the superiority of French culture and the Catholic religion, at least according to the Capuchin and French mission. But, Colbert’s decision to house the boys at the Capuchin monastery did not necessarily stem from a desire to spread Catholicism. Though it was an added benefit that these French children could act as good Catholics for emulation as “imperial subjecthood increasingly came to imply certain religious

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bonds,”60 it was certainly not the main reason to house the boys there. With less than twenty monks, the Capuchins of Constantinople had plenty of space for the boys. High on a hill on the edge of town, the Capuchin monastery was also a relatively safe place for foreigners. Many merchants, some of whom were directly involved with the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce, stayed at the Capuchin compound during their trips. This provided the boys with an opportunity to act as drogmans. Additionally, fearing that teenage boys would be “lured by the temptations of immorality in Constantinople,” the austere setting of the monastery would keep the boys moral.61 Finally, since the Capuchins were supposed to be educated and fluent in Turkish, Colbert and the jeunes de langues administrators felt assured that the monks could assist with grammar lessons to further the boys’ education. The education that the first jeunes de langues received abroad was limited in scope and very ad-hoc. The Capuchins conducted occasional lessons in French, Latin, Greek, Italian, and some Turkish. As none of the monks spoke Persian or Arabic, the boys did not learn these regional languages for longdistance trade. Even with Colbert’s logical reasoning in placing the boys with the Capuchins, the monks seemed an unwise choice in practice. Since these men had lived noncommercial lives, few understood Turkish outside of religious contexts. As a result, the first cohort of jeunes de langues spent a considerable amount of time translating catechisms from Latin into Turkish. Antoine Galland, a French orientalist travelling through Constantinople at the time, remarked in his journal that because of the lack of a proper linguistic education, “some of the boys were so chastised for speaking such poor Turkish in public” that they “ran away and hid” with locals during religious processions.62 To better address this issue, in 1697 the chambre de commerce began to pay for a Turkish teacher, or hodja, as well as his servant. The teacher came to the Capuchin monastery to teach proper Turkish grammar and translation to advance the boys’ fluency. The majority of these lessons likely happened orally, with boys practicing their conversation skills and providing spoken translations. By the mid-eighteenth century boys had started to learn the art of Turkish and Arabic calligraphy from the hodja, but it was still a difficult subject for the French boys to master.63 Despite Colbert’s death 1683, the jeunes de langues program continued under the joint authority of the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce and the

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minister of the navy. In 1700, noting the success of French children in acting as translators and cultural brokers, the French Crown decided to expand the program. Instead of sending more French children to the Ottoman Empire, though, the Crown suggested establishing a chambre des Arméniens at the Jesuit’s Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Here, twelve bourses, or scholarships, were made available for Christian children from the Ottoman Empire. These children would, like the French jeunes de langues, travel abroad in order to learn languages and customs, except, the children, labelled “Armenian” regardless of their ethnicity, would be learning French and European trade customs. They would also live in the capital city, Paris, not in the major Mediterranean port city of Marseilles. Placing them in Paris was an important decision. Not only was the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand able to easily house and educate the Armenian jeunes de langues with the proper scholars, but it also put the children in a central place. Instead of living with wealthy Marseillais merchants or noblemen who might form personal loyalties with the children, and by extension the children’s families in the east, in Paris these boys were put under direct royal authority. They could be inculcated not in the regional power of the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce but, instead, in the glory of the French king. Eventually, these young men were to “return to their homeland [and] serv[e] as religious missionaries or state interpreters” and advocate for the French. The results of this program appear to have been lackluster, though. The program was reorganized several times over the eighteenth-century and it was ultimately abandoned in favour of the original French jeunes de langues. The logic behind opening an “Armenian chamber,” however, provides some insight into France’s early modern orientalism. Although colonial administrators worried about French jeunes de langues “going native” in the Ottoman Empire, they could not imagine their own children returning home to advocate on behalf of the Ottomans. The superiority that French colonial administrators believed French culture and Catholicism possessed would be too strong to have their own children fully defect or actively work against them in trade and politics. This type of hypocrisy is omnipresent in the French colonial documents from the period, providing more evident of how France “othered” non-European cultures. Much to the shock of many jeunes de langues families and French administrators, though, French children had a much more nuanced interpretation

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of Ottoman culture. Many of the French jeunes de langues had to adapt and create hybrid transimperial identities that melded their French background with Ottoman practices. The jeunes de langues wardrobe is a perfect illustration of this hybrid identity. Combining elements from French soldiers’ uniforms as well as the traditional Turkish garb of drogmans, the approved costume of jeunes de langues melded two cultures together. French soldiers sent to the Ottoman Empire had a strict uniform that they had to wear that consisted of a royal- or sky-blue jacket with gold buttons and stripes, cinched royal- or sky-blue trousers, a royal- or sky-blue vest with gold buttons, a white ruffled and cuffed shirt, black or brown leather shoes, and a royal- or sky-blue hat with the necessary military marks. Since the jeunes de langues were not soldiers, they were not required to wear this outfit, though they were given one. Wearing it might have created problems for the children in the marketplace or other public areas where the uniform could have negative connotations, making negotiations hostile or confusing with traders. Drogmans typically wore large silken pants with embellished belts, tunics, short vests, and a signature turban or fez. Many of the boys melded the two: some would wear large, long tunics over their French style pants or shorter French-style shirts with the larger Turkish pants and cinched vests. Regardless, the boys almost always wore a fez that signalled to others that they were a translator. Adopting local elements of fashion demonstrated how these children were constructing new identities for themselves in the East. Although they wanted to retain elements of their French appearance, they did not want to appear as complete foreigners or outsiders. By melding local styles with their French wear, the boys were able to blend in somewhat and appear less threatening or foreign.64 Their new hybrid fashions likely represented changes in their own sense of identity. Living abroad and interacting with other merchants would have had a great impact on the children’s sense of self. Much like the Parisian enfants de l’état who sewed textile scraps and other ornamentations onto their uniforms to demonstrate their personalities, jeunes de langues embraced fashion as a way to express themselves. Jeunes de langues wanted to both retain part of their French style while also adopting some local customs. The jeunes were, in short, adapting to a life abroad, creating hybrid identities as French drogmans in the Ottoman Empire. The amount of choice the jeunes de langues had in their physical appearance, too, is important. Their choices of dress may seem small or trivial in

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the grand scheme of colonization, but based on their experiences with Ottoman society, dress could easily make or break trade alliances, networks, or individual deals. The boys were recognized by way of their physical appearance as the experts in these social exchanges. The boys were provided the autonomy to make decisions regarding their clothing that worked for their particular circumstances. Not all officials appreciated that jeunes de langues were building hybrid identities for themselves, however. It struck at the core of French colonial authorities’ fears that French subjects might choose to abandon loyalty to the Crown. In fact, upon observing some of the jeunes de langues the ambassador in Smyrna in 1719 proclaimed that they were closer to Turks than the Turks were to Frenchmen. Although it could have been viewed as a positive that students were adapting to local customs, to a French colonial administrator it was a serious threat to the loss of French superiority abroad. In response to the diplomat’s complaint regarding a loss of French identity, the Regent for Louis XV, Philippe II duc d’Orléans, decided to make some substantial changes to the jeunes de langues program. These changes, coming fifty-one years after the first cohort of jeunes de langue arrived in Constantinople, were made largely without input from the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce. As the previous chapter demonstrated, the Regent knew how to use various companies and state-entities, like the Mississippi Company, to his advantage in order to achieve colonial goals. With the reorganization of the jeunes de langues program, though, the Regent was interested in strengthening the Crown’s direct control over the boys, not helping to strengthen regional identity and loyalty. Therefore, on 20 July 1721 the Regent declared that “instead of immediately sending boys to Constantinople and other Échelles du Levant” to learn languages, they would be “instructed at the Jesuit college in Paris.” Here, the boys would learn “oriental languages,” especially Turkish and Arabic. If they finished their education at the Parisian school, they would then be able to “apply their studies” in person in Constantinople in preparation for their roles as “interpreters and diplomats.”65 The Regent’s decree promised at least 600 livres yearly for the schoolmaster of the new Écoles des Jeunes de Langues at the Jesuit Collège de Louis-leGrand. Under the advice of his own interpreter, Jean-Baptiste de Fiennes, a former jeune de langues himself, the Regent hired Le sieur Barout, a thirtyyear-old native of Syria who knew “French, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Latin, Ita-

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lian, and English,” as schoolmaster. Fiennes would serve as the Regent’s inspector over the school, providing reports and feedback on the progress of the new institute.66 With this new decree, the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce became virtually absent in the program’s decision making process. Although the chambre de commerce still provided some limited monetary funds, l’École des Jeunes de Langues was considered a thoroughly royal institution. Not only was the program largely funded through royal coffers starting in 1721, the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce was not consulted on changes to the structure of the new school. Additionally, potential jeunes de langues could come from any region of France, not just Marseilles or Provence. In this way, the Regent and his administrators managed to fully co-opt what had once been a locally sponsored program into a tool of royal authority and power. Along with the new two-tiered system at l’École des Jeunes de Langues67 came a revision in admission criteria. The Crown had scholarships to fund ten to twelve boys “at least eight years of age who were nominated by their families.” The emphasis on volunteerism that had underlined Colbert’s plan was replaced with a system of familial networking. Potential jeunes de langues could help families network politically and commercially at home and across wide spaces. As a coveted position similar to a religious or military assignment, noble families were particularly keen to nominate their children. With a royally sponsored office for their child, a family might rise in noble rankings and prestige. For certain families their children offered potential financial and political security if they secured a position. Additionally, while the majority of jeunes de langues still came from Marseilles, the program was open to children in other French cities and regions. As long as the applicant had “successfully completed an education in the French and Latin letters,” he could be nominated for admission. With a larger applicant pool, the demographics of the jeunes de langues slightly changed, especially in regards to age. Although the new admission policies still kept the minimum age for entry at eight years old, many of the boys were quite a bit older than this. Many had completed their education at various schools throughout Paris and Marseilles and were ready to move onto university or professional training. By the mid-eighteenth century, most boys were at least twelve years old, which corresponded to the typical age of university admission and early apprenticeship in Paris and Marseilles. This program in

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translation, interpretation, and cultural mediation became understood as a type of professionalization for some and apprenticeship for others. For at least six months, students learned how to speak Turkish, Arabic, and Persian while also translating documents from those languages into both French and Arabic. Those that survived the initial education at the Jesuit college were then transported to the Ottoman Empire. The journey to Anatolia could take place either by boat or by land. If by sea, it would take a few weeks, with the boys taking an overland route to Marseilles and then setting sail across the Mediterranean. The Marseilles Chambre de Commerce paid for the passage of these children on various merchant boats. If by land, the students first loaded onto large carts, similar to what the Mississippi Company used to transport forçats to Louisiana (though without the shackles). The carts followed an overland path to another familiar city, Lyon. There the boys joined Lyonnais merchant caravans, often on their way to trade silks in Venice or Constantinople. The boys travelled through the major trading centres of Northern Italy and around the coast of the Mediterranean before travelling through modern-day Bulgaria and arriving at the Bosporus. Both journeys served not only a practical purpose but also a pedagogical one. Through the journey, the boys met traders, saw different marketplaces, and began to practice their skills. Once the boys arrived in Constantinople, they were immediately sent to live at the Capuchin monastery. Unlike the earlier cohorts who were taught by the Capuchins, these eighteenth-century jeunes de langues had plenty of hodjas and merchants hired to help them perfect their language skills. One of the first tasks that the boys undertook was the collection and translation of rare, exotic manuscripts. The Ministre de la Marine Phélypeaux recognized that the jeunes de langues provided an excellent source of labour to enrich the King’s library with translations of works of poetry, fiction, and treatises on law and science from around the Mediterranean. In 1723 the ministre tasked the jeunes de langues with “translating manuscripts from Turkish into French for the King.” Reflecting on this decision in 1730, Phélypeaux remarked that the exercise allowed the jeunes de langues “to apply their knowledge, perfecting their skills” while benefiting the King’s library.”68 In fact, these manuscripts were some of the first to be translated between French, Turkish, and Arabic. Annie Berthier has catalogued the hundreds of manuscripts jeunes de langues worked on in Constantinople, highlighting the manuscript’s diverse subject matter.69 There were

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plenty of documents that “lend themselves to academic study,” including history, literature, and diplomacy, but there were also manuscripts on poetry and fashion that would be collectors’ items for the King’s holdings. These translations, though not always perfect, provide us small glimpses into the youths’ experiences. Almost all jeunes de langues signed their names on their translations, though some were more willing to divulge their full names than others. Perhaps this was a testament to the quality they thought their translations held. But, as Frédéric Hitzel has shown, there are signs of adolescent playfulness in the documents. For instance, in Livre de phrases turques et françoises, which served as a kind of conversational primer for French and Turkish merchants, there are plenty of doodles, silly markings, sketches, and songs written in French and Italian. Like most teenagers, some of the songs and poems suggested the young men’s bawdy natures. In fact, one of the reasons the jeunes de langues were housed again with the Capuchins was to monitor the boys’ behaviour. As the boys entered their late teens and early twenties, the more accustomed they became to the taverns and cafés of Constantinople. One young man even joked that he “had a dozen phrases I can recite to the prettiest ladies in Constantinople,” but “my nose is stuck in Turkish books until dinner,” suggesting that he would rather be fraternizing with local ladies instead of studying Turkish translations.70 These musings and drawings are small reminders of the lives the young men had in the past. As transimperial subjects, they had to bridge huge cultural divides. Not only their own livelihoods but that of their families relied upon it. So, too, did the future of their homeland. Over the course of its life, the program saw just over 300 jeunes de langues, not all of who made it to Constantinople. Despite these small numbers, it was effective for French trade, state building, and education. The French Crown for nearly 120 years staked much of their hopes for continued economic expansion on the skills of these young translators. Marseilles merchants knew how to better negotiate with their trade partners because of their French translators, leading to continued prosperity. The French state, too, sagely employed former jeunes de langues as translators, assistants to ambassadors, and other diplomats throughout the young empire. In doing so, the boys were brought under the fold of monarchical authority, representing France in the Ottoman marketplace, the Sultan’s palace, or even at home in France.

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After the Jesuits were expelled from France in 1762, l’École des Jeunes de Langues was subsumed into the university system in Paris. At the same time that the Crown was intensely focused on the Seven Years’ War (and then the colonial fallout from losing the conflict), the program started to decline. As funding dried up, the University of Paris decided to shutter the first tier of education in France, instead sending all the jeunes de langues to Constantinople directly as had been done with the first cohort of language youths. By the time the Revolution broke out, the program had stopped sending jeunes de langues. It was not until 1795 (Year III of the Revolution) that discussion of the program began again. At a hearing of the National Convention, led by the Committee of Public Instruction, calls were made for the “establishment of a public school designated to teach oriental languages for the advancement of commerce and politics.”71 The Republic understood that the advancement of foreign trade and political alliances would depend upon good translators and well qualified diplomats. Education in this realm, therefore, was necessary. Throughout the nineteenth century, this school and program would see its growth from a small program into an elite institution for the study of oriental languages. Today, the school has transformed into a teaching and cultural centre, the institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (inalco). The historiography surrounding drogmans and jeunes de langues in France is primarily situated in French-, Italian-, and Turkish-language sources. Scholars like Frédéric Hitzel, Henri Dehérain, and Annie Berthier have shown how these children advanced “turquerie” in France during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.72 In the early 1990s, in particular, studies on these transimperial programs were plentiful, with several academic conferences, journals, and museum exhibits demonstrating their impact on the study of France’s presence in the Middle East and Asia in the early modern period. Hitzel, Dehérain, and Berthier’s works provide much knowledge about these understudied programs but skew more towards cultural and intellectual history than to social history. More research needs to be undertaken on the extant source material related to these programs in order to understand the experience of the actors involved. Many memoirs and journals exist for jeunes de langues in the nineteenth century, but, as this section demonstrates, the voices of early modern children are more difficult to locate. The records for the jeunes de langue, strewn across many archival collections –

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from the diplomatic collections at the Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, to the colonial documents at the Archives Nationales de Paris and Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, and in the fonds of the Bibliothèque Nationale – deserve further investigation to better understand these youths’ experiences of the past. There is no denying, though, that the experiences they had were unlike those of most French children in the early modern period. Though other children carried the economic and political reputations of their families, the jeunes de langues represented the future of France’s commercial empire in the Ottoman Empire.

subversive in siam Just as jeunes de langues served the French Crown and merchants’ interests, French stakeholders in Siam hoped that adolescent boys could serve similar functions there. In cooperation with the Paris Society of Foreign Missions, at the turn of the eighteenth century the French Crown proposed the establishment of l’École de l’Orient where boys could learn Siamese customs73 in Siam. At the same time, the adolescents would teach Siamese children about France, the French language, and French customs in the hope that those children could negotiate more favourable trade and political alliances with the Siamese kingdom. Given the increasingly xenophobic climate in Siam, the French Crown felt that children could best communicate, negotiate, and broker trade deals without appearing hostile or threatening. Following the Siamese revolution of 1688, in which King Phetracha deposed and replaced the French ally King Narai, the French lost considerable trade and political influence in the Ayutthaya Kingdom. Although most merchants and French military envoys were dismissed from Siam, the Paris Society of Foreign Missions was allowed to remain at their Seminaire de Saint Joseph in the capitol city. As a result, between 1690 and 1720, the Paris Society of Foreign Missions became less a missionary organization and more a political and economic tool to reopen French trade with the Siamese. Even though he allowed the Foreign Missions to stay in Siam, Phetracha’s military monitored the French’s activities closely. In collaboration with Louis XIV and the French East India Company, the Foreign Missions believed that the only way to reopen French–Siamese relations was to convince Phetracha

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that France did not wish to conquer the kingdom, even though, at times, it seemed as if France did. The French would do so by “demonstrating respect for the kingdom, culture, and people of Ayutthaya.”74 Most importantly, France wanted to maintain lucrative trade networks with Siamese merchants. The least threatening and most subversive way to do this was through the use of children. Therefore, in 1698, the Paris Society of Foreign Missions crafted a proposal to establish a “school of the Orient” based on the model of the jeunes de langues program in Constantinople. By bringing French children to Ayutthaya to learn the language, culture, and beliefs of the Siamese kingdom, the Foreign Missions hoped that this would demonstrate to Phetracha that the French kingdom “did not wish to dominate or conquer Siam” but, rather, that the French wished to “work and trade in peace with them.”75 Although this was the official statement presented to Phetracha, the l’École de l’Orient was intended not only to teach French children about the language and culture of Siam but also to disseminate information about France’s “glorious trade, customs, and beliefs” among Siamese children. The purpose of the school was not to educate would-be priests but instead to create “children capable of assisting merchants, ambassadors, and missionaries alike in their work in Siam.” Since children were “less threatening than adults” to foreign populations, they were the “ideal translators, ambassadors, and missionaries” for French interests in Asia and the Levant.76 Through the interactions of French children and Siamese children, the Foreign Missions believed that the “next generation of the Kingdom of Siam would be favourable to the French.”77 Similar to the methods used in North America and the Ottoman Empire, French children would learn Siam’s culture, language, and beliefs in order to subversively “civilize” the future bureaucracy. The 1698 proposal raises several important interpretive issues regarding why children were the ideal candidates to act as cultural brokers between France and Siam. Most importantly, the proposal stated that because children “are still in the flowering of life, they still have an imagination, a passion for life that is lost on adults [who are] jaded by life’s experience.” Children’s enthusiasm for education would be more sincere than that of adults and therefore more likely to be successful. Furthermore, children’s “memories are sharper and more flexible … [so their] education in languages, cultures, customs and religions [is] easier than [that of adults,] who struggle to reconcile their beliefs

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with [those of] the Orient where understanding and cooperation is most needed.”78 Early modern pedagogy, much like contemporary pedagogy, understood that the ideal age to start learning a second language was between twelve and fifteen years.79 Children’s malleability and inclination for learning made them better suited for the position of cultural broker. Having learned from the jeunes de langues program that children are capable of creating hybrid identities to broker economic, political, and cultural exchange, the Foreign Missions felt children were ideal candidates for ensuring France’s reconciliation with Siam. Despite sharing a similar premise, the Foreign Missions’s École de l’Orient differed from l’École des Jeunes de langues in student composition. Unlike the jeunes de langues, who primarily hailed from the merchant elite and the nobility of Marseilles, the children educated at l’École de l’Orient were largely poor Parisian children. This was a strategic choice for two reasons. First, with such strained relationships with Siam and the mounting financial problems of the French East India Company, few noble and wealthy families wanted to entrust their children to the Foreign Missions. Recruitment from these groups would be incredibly difficult. Second, the Foreign Missions explained that poor children would be less likely to threaten Phetracha. Children of merchants, military men, or royal bureaucrats may have appeared too aggressive to the isolationist king. Fearing this, the Foreign Missions would select children from Parisian charity schools and hospital-orphanage schools. To be selected for admission, the child had to be a “boy no younger than ten years of age, and no older than fourteen.” He had to “demonstrate complete and full competency in vernacular reading and writing as well as the basics of mathematics.” Since it was often difficult for poor children to have obtained this type of comprehensive education by age ten, most of the boys recruited were about thirteen years old. Rather surprisingly, given the nature of the Foreign Missions, the prerequisites do not list a religious requirement.80 Perhaps it was assumed that these boys were both Catholic and capable of reciting the Catechism by age ten and after completing an education. Or, perhaps, this silence underlines the realization that these boys were not intended to act as missionaries abroad. In any event, the omission is curious for the period. Much like jeunes de langues, these children and their families had to be prepared for the fact that the boys were not only embarking on a long journey that they may never return from, hinting at the high mortality rate of European

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merchants and travellers in Southeast Asia, but also that they were entering “indefinitely [to] the service of the King.” With this statement, the Paris Society of Foreign Missions essentially agreed to become tools of colonization for the French King as well as religious evangelizers. This dual-pronged approach to missionaries was important for Louis XIV as he centralized power, even over the French church. Once students were accepted by the school, they moved into the Paris Foreign Missions Society’s compound. Located on the rue du Bac in the modern day seventh arrondissement of Paris, this compound was new at the end of the seventeenth century and provided the boys with early modern luxury accommodations. Missionaries who had previously lived in Ayutthaya taught the boys the Siamese language and Siamese customs for a minimum of one year. Boys also learned how to “best instruct other children in the French language,” highlighting their role as future teachers to Asian children. Once the boys had “reached intellectual maturity with the language and customs of Siam,” they would be transported to Ayutthaya. According to the Foreign Missions, it was “essential that upon arrival the French children should make Siamese friends.”81 Not only was this a helpful strategy that other missionaries had employed in order to build trust with indigenous communities, it also underscored the unique ability of children to learn, convince, and influence through play. As children, these missionaries would be viewed with less suspicion than adults. Phetracha’s government regularly surveilled foreigners, especially missionaries, in Ayutthaya. Children playing with other children, making friends, would be viewed as a rather innocuous activity. That was a large benefit of having children act not only as teachers of the French language to indigenous children but of French customs and Catholic traditions as well. They could easily share information about these foreign beliefs with Siamese natives without alarming the local officials. The Society of Foreign Missions in Paris, along with the East India Company, had a plan set for l’École de l’Orient at the turn of the eighteenth century. French youths would make friends with Siamese youths, learning Thai as well as more about their culture, practices, and beliefs, in order to make inroads where adults simply could not. The missionaries and the East India Company could use this information to conduct savvy negotiations with Phetracha and his government. Through circumspect subversion, children would help the French Crown establish itself in Southeast Asia. At least, that was the plan.

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In 1703, before l’École de l’Orient could send its first shipment of youths to Siam, Phetracha died. His son Sanphet VIII initially allowed the Paris Society of Foreign Missions to continue their work in Siam, but he was hostile and suspicious of French intentions. Though the French tried to work with Sanphet for several years, the school did not send children to Siam en masse. The few missionaries who went recorded extreme difficulty in making any meaningful connections with the Siamese community, despite employing young missionaries in the hope of seeming less threatening. The French ambition to inculcate the next generation of Siamese bureaucrats with French customs and cultural beliefs through the use of French children simply failed before it could really begin. Starting in the 1700s and lasting well through the eighteenth century, the French came under intense persecution from Burmese invaders and from the Siamese themselves. The Paris Society of Foreign Missions moved to Pondicherry in 1720, where French interests in Southeast Asia were much more grounded, and a French school for youths was opened there. Despite the ultimate failure of the program in Siam, l’École de l’Orient is another example of how the French state placed its imperial ambitions and interests on the shoulders of its youngest subjects. The educational programs in North America, the Ottoman Empire, and Siam demonstrate how children served important roles as agents of the early modern French state, advancing French imperialism while also demonstrating their own agency by creating new categories of identity. Although colonization is often discussed in terms of the territorial gains or political directions of imperial powers, individuals navigated and altered the process. Colonial children, whether in North America, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Levant, or in Southeast Asia not only populated the territories but had important impacts on the trajectory of French power and relations in each area. Having created cross-cultural identities in North America that drew on Native ways of life, French North American-born children were increasingly removed from French identity and culture. Educational institutions were established to reinforce Frenchness among the young population of Nouvelle France and Louisiana. Correcting children’s supposedly unruly Native behaviour was of the utmost priority to colonial officials. Though the French had amassed a large territorial empire and populated it with children, the state understood that they had to ideologically colonize not only Native peoples,

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but also their own North American-born subjects, especially children, as they built power and secured loyalty in the New World. In France’s early modern eastern empire, territory was not as important as fostering commercial and political alliances with the already powerful empires that existed in the Mediterranean, Levant, and Southeast Asia. Educational institutions provided the opportunity for the French state to send French children to the Ottoman Empire and Siam in order to learn the language, customs, and beliefs of these regions. These adolescents could serve as cultural brokers, mitigating differences between the French and the Easterners to build strong relationships. But, just as French children in North America were influenced by Native society, Ottoman culture changed French adolescents. The French educational institutions in the East, though intended to subversively extend French power abroad, resulted in trans imperial adolescent subjects. Though these children were essential to the brokering of French economic and political alliances, their hybrid identities were still considered worrisome to French officials who were anxious about the weakening of Frenchness among these children. The ideological and commercial colonization of the East resulted in increased exchanges not only from France to the Ottomans and Siamese but also from the Ottomans and Siamese to the French. Although children were, and still are, often considered the most subservient members of society, early modern French children sent to North America and the East carried an incredible responsibility to build French interests abroad. The French Crown staked its political and economic interests and hopes on the backs of French teenagers. Children of the empire were, therefore, able to wield an enormous amount of influence in households, in French society at large, and in the greater early modern world.

6 Epilogue: A Revolution in Childhood

 On the first Sunday of October in 1789, Lyonnais schoolmasters assembled to discuss the increasing number of students who were not gaining employment through Lyon’s La Grande Fabrique. Since the late 1770s, Louis XVI made several orders for Lyonnais silks and textiles as he refurnished the royal apartments at Versailles, Rambouillet, Saint-Cloud, and Compiègne. These orders had increased the demand for labour, with many former charity schoolchildren employed as full-time silk workers after completing their education at charity schools. But, schoolmasters noted that for the past few years, charity schoolchildren were not gaining employment as easily. Recognizing that the silk industry was in sharp decline due to unseasonably cold winters and less abundant Italian silkworm harvests, the schoolmasters worried about the future of their students. The meeting notes do not offer much insight into what action they hoped to take, only that they were anxious about the current state of unemployment in Lyon.1 The bureau decided to table the issue until their next assembly when they would further discuss the developments of La Grande Fabrique. It is unclear if that meeting ever transpired, though, as the bureau’s meeting notes seem to end there.2 There was no indication in these final meeting minutes that a revolution was about to shake France’s monarchical foundations. The date, though, does seem to correspond to the 2 November 1789 National Assembly decree that demanded all church-held possessions be handed over to the state. Although the account books of some schools continued to

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show donations until 1793, most of the schools’ records abruptly end between October 1789 and September 1790. Even though these institutions had long maintained their separation from the Church, with the secularization of France many of the schools, most of which relied on parish donations, were unable to continue offering services to the poor, at least in any official capacity. Parisian écoles gratuites similarly ceased operations during the first years of the Revolution as authority was transferred from the Catholic Church to the French state. Although the Parisian hospital system remained operational, La Trinité’s vocational education program fell into financial disarray in the mid1790s, with most maîtres pulling out of the institution. Despite the apparent closure of these schools, children, and more importantly their education, became a major point of discussion for every revolutionary government from the National Assembly to the National Convention. Once again, children and youths were at the centre of major state-building projects. Revolutionaries recognized the success of charity schools, hospitalorphanages, and foreign schools in the eighteenth century. Republicans, in particular, supported the establishment of a nationally standardized, and perhaps compulsory, school system. Concerned with avoiding the mistakes of Athens or Rome before them, French revolutionaries did not want to have the revolution die out over the next generation. Instead, inculcation in primary and secondary schools would ensure that republicans’ sons, daughters, grandsons, and granddaughters would hold the same Enlightenment values in high regard, eliminating monarchical tyranny in government and establishing a true meritocracy. Most famously, philosopher and politician Nicolas de Condorcet wrote about universal education as the basis for the longevity of the republic. According to Condorcet, progress was dependent upon opening education to all members of society. Without public education, society would decay and regress into more conservative models of governance.3 For many like Condorcet, inculcation seemed to provide the answer to how to guarantee a future generation of like-minded, perhaps even more progressive, revolutionaries. Drawing on the Roman republican glory, the most virtuous of French citizens were those who took an interest in the success of the republic. A young citizen’s devotion was to be expressed publicly through unwavering patriotism and reverence for the revolutionaries, young citizens also had to display strong leadership skills, congeniality with their peers, a desire to be a life-long learner

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by promising to learn the latest political developments, and engage in continual debate regarding the proper organization of representative government. In 1793, the National Convention established le Comité de l’Instruction Publique (Committee of Public Instruction) to overhaul France’s education system to teach these skills and traits. In more than 1,000 published debates and plans, the Committee of Public Instruction provided justification for state- and community-sponsored inculcation. Echoing the Lyonnais règlemens as well as other eighteenth-century pedagogical guides, proponents argued that youths were particularly malleable and impressionable. Through inculcation, youths could easily be moulded into the types of citizens that society deemed appropriate. Since children’s “souls [were] still free from prejudice and bias,” it would be “easy to form a race of citizens [who were] free, great, and virtuous,” the Committee of Public Instruction declared. Education was the tool to ensure that the next generation of French citizens would be “the glory of France.”4 Embedded within these speeches, treatises, and plans was evidence of the success of the seventeenthand eighteenth-century charity schools at curbing immorality and creating industrious workers. Advocates for revolutionary inculcation saw the powerful impact systematized inculcation could have on French nation building. Despite drawing on the success of the Lyonnais schools, which were localized, community-driven institutions, the very establishment of the Committee of Public Instruction demonstrates a shift in educational collaboration. Whereas the children themselves were stakeholders in the Lyonnais projects, helping to guide the trajectory of educational reform, the Committee of Public Instruction did not experiment and revise pedagogical standards with children’s input. Youths wrote to the Committee of Public Instruction many times, wanting their voices and opinions on schooling to be heard. In an era where equality and freedom of speech was emphasized, it is hardly surprising to see youths advocating for themselves. For example, on 13 April 1795, Parisian students wrote to the Committee of Public Instruction to advocate for better instruction in “beaux arts.” According to the students, other subjects like reading and math were prioritized over artistic subjects like drawing, sculpture, and painting. Consequently, many students who were “lovers of art” felt “abandoned” by their schools. The Committee of Public Instruction read the report but appears to not have followed up in any meaningful way.5

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Through examining published educational treatises, the Committee of Public Instruction created a standardized curriculum that it felt would inculcate citizenship. This plan was imposed upon children with little-to-no input from students. As a formula for educators and students to follow, regardless of local circumstances or individual desires, this plan was far more rigid than early seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pedagogical guides. Paradoxically, revolutionaries took power away from schoolchildren that the ancien régime had provided. Instead of cocreators, students were mere receptacles of knowledge. This tightening of top-down power in education demonstrates that despite the overwhelmingly patriarchal society the ancien régime demanded, students may actually have been awarded more egalitarian roles in prerevolutionary France.6 The Committee of Public Instruction eventually proposed a two-step educational program to spread revolutionary ideals. First, primary schools would provide a rudimentary education to every child. Secondary schools, known as écoles centrales, would then allow the “most promising” students to continue their education. Much of the plans for primary education were lifted directly from the Lyonnais règlemens, adopting similar pedagogical methods to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic to any “girl or boy under the age of twelve years but older than six.”7 However, unlike écoles de charité, the primary schools would not teach vocational skills. Students who “were of that particular social status and mental station”8 would continue on to formal apprenticeships, where they would receive these skills. This was a clear break from Enlightenment primary education. Vocational skills were not viewed as classroom subjects or worthy of intense study by all members of society. Only formal academic endeavours would be taught in primary schools, shifting the focus of these schools from the children of the lower and middling sorts to those of the upper sectors of society. In denying children of the poor this type of education, revolutionary France again appears less progressive than its previous monarchical state. The Constitution of Year III (1795), strongly supported by the Committee of Public Instruction, required the establishment of at least one secondary school, known as an école centrale, in every department for male children between the ages of twelve and sixteen who had excelled at primary school. In these secondary schools, education was standardized across the republic, with an Enlightened curriculum that supported civic morality. Subjects included

Figure 7.1 Classical images were often imbued with cultural meaning during the Revolution. In this case, France gives reason to its citizens and nurtures citizens as children.

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natural history, Latin, Greek, mathematics, physics, chemistry, art, grammar, history, and law.9 Despite the fact that these subjects do not immediately seem to tie to one’s moral repute, administrators and the committee emphasized that every discipline was essential to creating a well-rounded citizen. Grammar was essential to communicate with others, art to express oneself, science to discover the laws of nature, and law to uphold republicanism. Although this two-step educational system outlawed private tutors, religious schools, and other private education in favour of public schools, it still greatly privileged children from the upper echelons of society. By creating primary schools, the Committee of Public Instruction believed that they could create a meritocracy. Every young citizen would be provided with an equal education, allowing for the brightest and most qualified to continue onto école centrales. But, as the entry fee at écoles centrales indicated, secondary schools catered to the sons of the middling and upper echelons of society.10 Children of notaries, lawyers, professional politicians, and commercial magnates were the primary écoles centrales students. As the direct descendants of the Revolution, it was thought, these young men would become the politicians, lawyers, and bureaucrats who ensure the Revolution’s legacy. Therefore, the idea of creating a society based upon merit (and not privilege) through inculcation was a revolutionary hope that was not attained. Taking cue from the charity schools and hospital-orphanages before them, every école centrale also had a public-facing purpose. With a public library, a garden, a laboratory for scientific research, and a cabinet d’histoire naturelle, the école centrale could serve as a type of community space in which children and adults could learn side-by-side. Taken verbatim from the Parisian and Lyonnais règlemens, students would provide reading and writing lessons once a month to those in the public who requested them. In these ways, education could flow outwards from the classroom, with students acting as conduits of inculcation. Furthermore, the école centrale was the focal point of the annual Youth Festival and its prix de moralité competition. At the Youth Festival, the public gathered outside of their department’s école centrale to extol the joys of being a child in a free republic without the shackles of subjecthood and oppression.11 School administrators then handed out morality prizes. Most of these prizes, such as the grammar prize, the mathematics prize, the physics prize, and the

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drawing prize were awarded to the most outstanding students in the class. Incentivizing students with public awards and a celebratory day of feasting for their educational and civic achievements could help educators more easily mould children into the types of exemplary citizens that were needed in this next unpredictable phase of the Revolution. By performing well in their classes, students fulfilled their moral requirement. They were becoming model citizens who could serve their republic well in the future. After the awards were handed out, school administrators usually delivered a speech or two about the importance of patriotism and liberty. Administrators used this as an opportunity not only to further inculcate students but also to reach the larger public. At the École Centrale de l’Eure in 1799, the administrators followed the awards presentation with a tree-planting ceremony. Dubbed “The Tree of Liberty,” it adorned the entrance to the school as a “symbol of strength and courage” against the “horrors of oppression.” Much like how a tree had to be nurtured in order to grow, so did citizens’ senses of patriotism and virtue. But, once they had blossomed, both the citizen and the tree would be “glorious examples of the blessed Republic.” The administrator ended his tree-planting speech to a chant of “vive la république,” which according to the scribe, was shouted for twenty minutes with “much happiness and delight.”12 This ceremony reminded students, their families, and the community-at-large that citizenship and patriotism had to be continually nurtured from infancy to old age. The écoles centrales were exclusively male spaces. Only boys were admitted to these institutions. Girls were barred from this second tier of state-sponsored education. Numerous debates about the role of female education fill the Committee of Public Instruction’s records, with opinions varying widely on the applicability and necessity of female education. Despite these varying opinions, women did receive revolutionary educations. In particular, municipalities and départements took the lead in establishing separate institutions for girls and young women. For example, the town of Blois founded the Maison d’Éducation pour les Jeunes Desmoiselles early in the Revolution, likely in 1790. Under the guidance of Madame and Monsieur Arnauld, the schoolmistress and headmaster, the school taught young women from “the most tender age to fourteen years old.” Girls learned reading, writing, geography, history, arithmetic, art (including needlework and drawing), as well as planetary systems.13 These subjects taught practical skills like accounting and needlework that girls could use

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in their family businesses and households as well as how to engage with important printed debates about citizenship and the philosophy of government. Perhaps most importantly, these subjects prepared young women for what pedagogues considered their most important task: motherhood. Since they were the first “to teach men,” women had to receive a proper education themselves. This was the only way young women could raise the next generation of loyal French citizens. Similar to early America’s concept of “republican motherhood,”14 France saw female education as essential to ensure patriotism was taught at home and at school. Much like écoles centrales, female schools also conferred morality prizes. These were awarded in eight categories: eloquence, drawing, reading, writing, geography, needlework, arithmetic, and history. The addition of needlework as a morality prize is important, as it highlights the French Republic’s understanding of women’s roles in society. Needlework was necessary as a practical skill for women to sew for her family or in large textile houses. Like painting was to young men, it was an acceptable outlet for female art. With the dexterity needed for needlework, this was considered one of the most feminine of practices, whether as labour or artistic expression. Aside from needlework, most of the morality prize subjects were similar to those awarded at écoles centrales. The Committee of Public Instruction, as well as individual municipalities, saw these subjects and the morality prizes as essential to inculcating ideas of republicanism, representation, and the glory of the French state to young men and women. Whether through the yearly Youth Festival, male morality prizes, or debates surrounding female education, schoolmasters and French statesmen expressed their anxieties over the longevity of the republic when they discussed inculcation. Although a systematic education system, sponsored both by the French state as well as individual municipalities was a start, revolutionaries worried that it might not be enough to sustain the revolution over a generation. In speeches and printed treatises, politicians and pedagogues anxiously wondered if young men and women would have to take up arms in the near future to defend France from foreign as well as domestic threats. These real – and imagined – threats meant that children had to be prepared to follow in the footsteps of their parents. For example, Citizen Champagne, the director of the National Institute of Equality, gave a speech at the May 1798 Youth Festival in Paris to students at

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the école centrale, their parents, and other Parisians that explained how prix de moralité did much more than honour students’ achievements in school. They also honoured the sacrifices the previous generation made to make this type of government a reality. Having just come out of the tumultuous years of The Terror, Champagne acknowledged the Revolution was in a precarious place. There was a palpable anxiety that the achievements the revolutionaries of 1789 fought for might be forgotten and replaced with despotism. Using Enlightenment language that emphasized the themes of slavery and oppression, Champagne reminded the pupils that their “fathers received this homeland when she was still degenerate, when she was still enslaved; they set her free.” It was only through “passion, glory, and, of course fear” that their fathers had overthrown the “master’s yoke.” But within this triumphal narrative, Champagne explained that the Revolution was not over. He explained that it was the students’ “greatest task” to give the next generation “a bigger and more illustrious homeland” that would “flourish under [the students’] talents, morality, and virtue.” Champagne wanted students to recognize the important role that education played in their own lives and in the continued success of the French Revolution.15 Champagne’s speech foreshadowed the French Revolution’s fate. The republic would shortly be replaced with the empire but not because of a lack of republican sentiment and inculcation. Though primary and secondary schools would not have the same enrolment numbers that they had in the eighteenth century until about 1810 (when Napoleon proposed universal education), the continued emphasis put on education as a way to enact social change and state building remained important. The historical continuity of seeing inculcated, or coerced, children as capable of expressing agency and enacting change in society-at-large was not something invented in the nineteenth century. The revolutionaries – and then Napoleon – continued to inculcate and coerce children, and in doing so, they saw children as capable of expressing agency and enacting change. When traced back, these educational innovations came from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Lyon and Paris and had wide application to France’s overseas territories. Whether as a way to strengthen ideas about subjecthood, citizenship, morality, or labour, inculcation was a powerful tool for early modern and revolutionary France. Charles Démia and Lyon’s Bureau des Écoles had a profound impact not only on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pedagogy but also on the cen-

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trality of children to programs of social change. For Lyon, écoles de charité answered a local problem of how to create skilled workers in the growing and demanding textile industry as well as how to reduce immorality among the poor. But, school administrators, benefactors, and municipal authorities were not the sole actors in this process. Creating an educational program that stressed the attainment of vocational skills in tandem with the traditional subjects of reading, writing, and mathematics was an entirely experimental operation that depended upon children exercising agency and authority. Children were indispensable to the development of Démia’s règlemens and, therefore, to the course of Lyonnais social reform. Without children and parents’ participation in écoles de charité, the règlemens may not have succeeded in bringing about a change in Lyon’s character and productivity by the eighteenth century. Foreign merchants, royal intendants, and the king himself took note of the impressive progress Lyon had made through the vocational inculcation of students. By the turn of the eighteenth century, almost every major French city had a charity or free school that had adapted the règlemens and the Lyonnais model. Furthermore, the charity schools and charity schoolchildren inspired the creation of vocational educational programs in other institutions like hospital-orphanages. The success of using children as agents of social change in Lyon and Paris also inspired the French state to employ children in its efforts to colonize both the West and the East. Serving as colonial inhabitants and political, social, and cultural brokers, early modern children were crucial agents of French imperialization. Children and their experiences were essential to the growth of local communities’ economies, to the Catholic Reformation, to the French state at home, and to the expansion of the French empire in North America and the East. Weaving together ideas about subjecthood, French identity, work, commerce, state formation, global colonization, and Catholic morality, these institutions acknowledged the importance of childhood as a formative period of development. Whether in the colonies, in the metropolitan workshops, in the Church, in the streets, in the home, or during the Revolution, children were cruxes to early modern French reform. Children’s lived experiences – their participation in educational and reform programs – changed the course of social reform, state building, and even imperial ambitions.

Notes

i n t ro d u c t i o n 1 In early modern France, “the poor” were delineated into two categories: “honourable” poor and “idle” poor. Those of the “honourable,” or “working,” poor were usually employed or seeking employment but for various reasons were unable to provide for themselves or their families. The “idle” poor were beggars, vagrants, and mendicants. For more on the categorization and perception of the poor in the long eighteenth century see Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 2 Lyon’s Aumône Générale, created in 1533, was the city’s main public assistance office. A cooperation between the city’s clergy, confraternities, parishes, and wealthy residents, the Hôtel Dieu administered the Aumône Générale and was a municipal entity. The Aumône Générale dispensed charitable donations including money, bread, and clothing to the city’s poor residents. Lyon referred to this office as the Aumône Générale until 1934 when the new name, “Assistance Publique à Lyon,” was adopted, underlining the secular nature of public assistance programs in the twentieth century. 3 The Bureau des Écoles was the governing body of Lyon’s charity schools. “Livre des Comptes de la Communauté de Saint Charles,” Archives Départementales du Rhône (hereafter adr) 5D 7. 4 Philibert’s father was likely conscripted to fight in what is now considered the Nine Years’ War or the War of the Grand Alliance that was fought primarily on France’s German borders. 5 “Registre des transfers,” Bibliothèque Nationale de France (hereafter bn) Joly de Fleury 1242, fol. 138.

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6 “Transferts,” Archives de l’Assistance Publique, Hôpitaux de Paris (hereafter aphp), Hôpital Général, Liasse 149. 7 “La situation à l’école des jeunes de langues,” 20 août 1687, Archives Nationales (hereafter an) AE B I 380. 8 Charles Démia, “Remonstrances faites à messieurs,” adr 5D 9, fol. 65. 9 Colin Heywood, Growing Up in France: From the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Colin Heywood, Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France: Work, Health and Education among the Classes Populaires (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Heywood argues that autobiography is a key genre for historians to understand youth experience in the past. For early modernists and even scholars of modern France who focus on nonelite subjects, this is a hard, if not impossible, source base to find. 10 Peter Stearns, “Challenges in the History of Childhood,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 35–42. 11 Matthew Gerber, Bastards: Politics, Family, and Law in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 12 Feminist as well as subaltern histories provide myriad examples of how to approach source evidence in different ways to recover the experiences and voices of marginalized historical actors. See the pioneering works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?: Speculations on Widow Sacrifice,” Wedge 7/8 (Winter/Spring 1985): 120–30; and Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 773–97. The field of enslaved women’s experiences, in particular, has embraced this methodological approach of reading against the grain as well as “interpreting silences” in the archival record. For two excellent models, see Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Wendy Warren, “‘The Cause of her Grief ’: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England,” The Journal of American History 93, no. 4 (March 2007): 1031–49. 13 Mary Jo Maynes, “Age as a Category of Historical Analysis: History, Agency, and Narratives of Childhood,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 114–24, 116. 14 Mona Gleason, “Avoiding the agency trap: caveats for historians of children, youth, and education,” History of Education 45, no. 4 (2016): 446–59. 15 Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill, nc: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 16 For examples of women navigating patriarchy and grassroots resistance against patriarchy see Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics

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of Household Authority in Early Modern France (University Park, pa: Penn State University Press, 1998); Clare H. Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France (Raleigh, nc: Duke University Press, 2001); Amy Erickson, “Coverture and Capitalism,” History Workshop Journal 59 (Spring 2005): 1–16; and Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2003). The use of the term “agency” is hotly contested among scholars. In the realm of childhood and youth studies, the “agency ideal” has caused discussions about whether or not children could freely express themselves in the past, the role of false power binaries between children and adults, as well as how we approach silences in the archive. See, for instance, Mona Gleason, “Avoiding the Agency Trap,” History of Education 45, no. 4 (2016): 446–59; Johanna Sköld and Ingrid Söderlind, “Agentic Subjects and Objects of Political Propaganda: Swedish Media Representations of Children in the Mobilization for Supporting Finland During World War II,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 11, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 27–46; Allison James, “Giving Voice to Children’s Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials,” American Anthropologist 109, no. 2 (2007): 261–72; David Lancy, “Unmasking Children’s Agency,” AnthropoChildren 2 (2012): 1–20. These debates over the use of “agency” exist in feminist history and gender history, as well. See, for example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999); and Judith Butler, “Performative Agency,” Journal of Cultural Economy 3, Issue 2 (2010): 147–61. For critiques of Butler’s use of “agency,” see Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2005); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2003); and Stephanie Clare, “Agency, Signification, and Temporality,” Hypatia 24, No. 4 (Fall 2009): 50–62. One of the largest historiographical arenas to examine children’s agency is juvenile delinquency. Stephen Toth, for example, points to the important ways that children were able to express agency and bodily autonomy as prisoners in Mettray. See Stephen Toth, Mettray: A History of France’s Most Venerated Carceral Institution (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2019). For a foundational text on youth delinquency, especially in times of poltical crisis and war, see Sarah Fishman, The Battle for Children: World War II, Youth Crime, and Juevnile Justice in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2002). Gleason, “Avoiding the Agency Trap,” 448. Historians of childhood youth and family have labelled Philippe Ariès’ controversial argument the “Ariès thesis.” To explore his argument, see Philippe Ariès,

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Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962). 21 See Mark Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat: The Education of Court Nobility, 1580–1715 (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1990); Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1976); Davis Bitton, The French Nobility in Crisis, 1560–1640 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969); L.W.B. Brockliss, French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Marie-Madeleine Compère and Dominique Julia, Les collèges français, 16e–18e siècles, vol. 1. (Paris: I.N.R.P. and C.N.R.S., 1984); François de Dainville, L’Éducation des Jésuites (Paris: Minuit, 1978); Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For eighteenth-century education see, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley, ed. Peter D. Jimack (London: Everyman, 1993); Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (New York: Penguin, 1984); Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1830s (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994); Donald N. Baker and Patrick Harrigan, The Making of Frenchmen: Current Directions in the History of Education in France, 1679–1979 (Waterloo, on: Historical Reflections Press, 1980); Jennifer J. Popiel, Rousseau’s Daughters: Domesticity, Education, and Autonomy in Modern France (Hanover, NH: New Hampshire University Press, 2008); R.R. Palmer, The Improvement of Humanity: Education and the French Revolution (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1985); Jean Bloch, Rousseauism and Education in Eighteenth-Century France, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 325 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995); C.A. Ottevanger, “From Subject to Citizen: The Evolution of French Educational Theory in the Eighteenth Century,” Transactions of the 7th International Congress on the Enlightenment, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 264 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1989); Adrian O’Connor, In Pursuit of Politics: Education and Revolution in EighteenthCentury France, Studies in Modern French and Francophone History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 22 See, for example, R.D. Anderson, “New Light on French Secondary Education in the Nineteenth Century,” Social History 7, No. 2 (1982): 147–65; Sarah Curtis, Educating the Faithful: Religion, Society, and Schooling in Nineteenth-Century France (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000); Sarah Curtis, “Religious Schooling in Nineteenth-Century France,” History of Education Quarterly 39, No. 1 (1999): 51–72. 23 Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the

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German Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990); Jean-Pierre Gutton, La société et les pauvres: l’exemple de la généralité de Lyon (1534–1789) (Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1971). Karen Carter, Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France (Notre Dame, in: Notre Dame University Press, 2011). Carter, Creating Catholics, 4. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964). On a revised Great Confinement, see Kathryn Norberg, Rich and Poor in Grenoble, 1600–1814 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Related to the rise of a new Great Confinement, see historiography on the rise of poor relief such as Gutton, La Société et les Pauvres; Olwen H. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974); Cissie Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity in Aix-en-Provence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Colin Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpellier Region, 1740–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity. Through studying Parisian apprentices, Crowston has argued that working poor families understood children’s education as a two-step process. First, a child learned reading, writing, math, and religion. Then, when a child achieved sufficient knowledge in these areas, he or she moved on to apprenticeship or informal vocational education. See Clare Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Crowston, “Women, Gender, and Guilds in Early Modern Europe: An Overview of Recent Research,” International Review of Social History 53 (December 2008): 19–44; Crowston, “From School to Workshop: Pre-Training and Apprenticeship in Old Regime France,” in Learning on the Shop Floor, eds. Bert de Munck, Hugo Soly and Steven L. Kaplan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); Crowston, “An Industrious Revolution in Late Seventeenth-Century Paris: New Vocational Training for Adolescent Girls and the Creation of Female Labor Markets,” in Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in Modern European History, eds. Mary Jo Maynes, Birgitte Søland and Christina Benninghaus (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005); Crowston, “L’apprentissage hors des corporations. Les formations professionnelles alternatives á Paris sous l’Ancien régime,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences

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Sociales 60, no. 2 (2005): 409–42; Crowston, “Du corps des couturières à l’Union de l’Aiguille: les continuités imaginaires d’un corporatisme au féminin, 1675–1895,” in La France malade du corporatisme? eds., Steven L. Kaplan and Philippe Minard (Paris: Belin, 2004). Beik’s provincial revisionism influenced other scholars including James Collins, Classes, Estates, and Order in Early Modern Brittany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Sarah Hanley, “The Jurisprudence of the Arrêts: Marital Union, Civil Society and State Formation in France, 1550–1650,” Law and History Review 20 (2003); and Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Gerber, Bastards; Julie Hardwick, Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of Daily Life in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor, mi: University of Michigan Press, 2006). Hardwick, Family Business. Leslie Tuttle, Conceiving the Old Regime: Pronatalism and the Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); André Burguière, “L’Etat monarchqiue et la famille (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle),” Annales 56 (2001): 313–35. See Junko Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Ashley Bruckbauer, “Dangerous Liaisons: Ambassadors and Embassies in French Art, 1661–1789” (PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019); E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Eric Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). J. Doherty and M. Hughes, Child Development: Theory into Practice (Essex: Harlow Publishers, 2009), 8. Leslie Paris, “Through the Looking Glass: Age, Stages, and Historical Analysis,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (Winter, 2008): 106– 13, 107. Ibid. Steven Mintz, “Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 91–4, 91. Jean Nicot, Thresor de la langue Francoyse tant ancienne que modern (Paris: Chez David Douceur, 1606) s.v. “enfant.” Ibid., s.v. “jeune.”

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40 Le dictionnaire de l’Academie Françoise (Paris, 1762), s.v. “enfant,” s.v. “jeune.” 41 For an expanded discussion of the growing importance of legal categories according to age across the early modern and modern globe, see the April 2020 American Historical Review’s roundtable. “Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (April 2020): 371–486. In particular, for an early modern perspective on the legality of minority in a colonial context, see Bianca Premo, “Meticulous Imprecision: Calculating Age in Colonial Spanish American Law,” American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (April 2020): 396–406. 42 Antoine Furetière, Le dictionnaire universel (The Hague: Arnout et Reinier Leers, 1694) III: s.v. “minorité.” 43 Since most young men would have finished their education and training in the early years of their twenties, perhaps this gave more power to twenty-five as the chosen age of majority. Christopher Corley, “Parental Authority, Legal Practice, and State Building in Early Modern France” (PhD dissertation, Purdue University, 2001), 300. 44 “Liste des garçons arretez en Bicetre,” bn Joly de Fleury 1309. See also, Julia M. Gossard, “Breaking A Child’s Will: Eighteenth-Century Parisian Juvenile Detention Centers,” French Historical Studies 42, no. 2 (April 2019): 239–59. 45 “Liste des donateurs de Saint Etienne,” adr 5D 17. 46 Furetière, Le dictionnaire universel, s.v. “apprentis.” 47 Nicot, Thresor, s.v. “garçon.” 48 Most famously, Salic law was used to bar women from ruling France alone, but for women of the lower and middling sorts it denied them the ability to own land. 49 The only time a woman could be referred to as a “femme” without marrying was in 1787 when the dictionary added a note that “any unmarried, old woman without issue who has been in the continual service of another woman for many years who can be called a femme de chambre” or a woman in waiting. This is the only time that a hint of age played in the distinction between girl and woman in the French lexicon. 50 Maynes, Søland, and Benninghaus, “Introduction,” in Secret Gardens, 3. 51 During the Enlightenment period, philosophes including Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot encouraged different attitudes towards sex and sexuality, emphasizing corporeal pleasure over issues of morality and sin. Erotica became a bestselling consumer good as well as a tool for political resistance and critique. See Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (New York: Routledge, 1992); Robert

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Darnton, The Forbidden Best Sellers of the French Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996). For discussions of early modern pregnancy before marriage, see Julie Hardwick, “Sex and the (seventeenth-century city): a research note towards a long history of leisure,” Leisure Studies 27, no. 4, 459–66, and Laura Gowing, “Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past & Present 152, no. 1 (August 1997), 87-115. What constitutes “sex” is called into question with these definitions as well. As Julie Hardwick has explored, a variety of sexual acts would take place in public as part of youth courting culture. In Lyon, it was not uncommon to see oral sex, for instance, taking place on the banks of the river or in other public places. Since sex was colloquially thought of as coitus, these actions were considered socially acceptable. See, for instance, Hardwick, “Sex and the (seventeenth-century) City: A research note towards a long history of leisure.” As well as Hardwick, Sex in an Old Regime City: Young People, Intimacy, and Work in France, 1660–1789 (Oxford University Press, 2020). Démia, “Remonstrances faites à messieurs Les Prevost des Marchans, Echevins & Principaux Habitans de la Ville de Lyon pour l’etablissement des Écoles des Pauvres,” 1674, adr 5D 7, fol 121. Early modern European historians often use the term “lower sorts” to refer to what might be referenced in the modern era as the poor classes in a given society. Since early modernists try to avoid the use of the term “class” to identify people, as a class-based society was not firmly implanted yet in the social and cultural consciousness, the lower sorts is frequently employed to describe the popular classes that might include the indigently poor, the working poor, as well as simply the nonelite agrarian society. The term lower sorts also evokes an understanding that these people were not part of the ruling groups of society and were not noble. I chose to use hospital-orphanage instead of hospice or hospital. In early modern France, these hospitals were either referred to as hôpital or hospice, but the translation to “hospital” or “hospice” may lead to confusion regarding the purpose of the institution. The use of the term hospital-orphanage therefore serves two objectives. First, it helps mitigate the confusion caused by the modern lexicon of “hospital” or “hospice,” emphasizing that these institutions were not just places where the sick were cared for but also served as poor houses and orphanages. Second, some historians have simply referred to them as “foundling hospitals” which misrepresents the type of children that were cared for and educated in these institutions. Both orphans and foundlings were housed in these facilities.

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ch a p ter o n e 1 “Dossier de l’Hôtel de Ville,” in Inventaire Général des Titres et Papiers des Écoles des Pauvres à Lyon,” (Hereafter “Inventaire Général) adr 5D 1, fol. 67. 2 Charles Démia, “Remonstrances faites à messieurs Les Prevost des Marchans, Echevins, & Principaux Habitans de la Ville de Lyon touchant la nécessité et utilité des Écoles Chrétiennes pour l’instruction des Enfans Pauvres,” 1668, adr 5D 7, fol. 65. 3 Although the Frères des Écoles Chretiennes, led by Jean Baptiste de la Salle, were in the process of forming in Paris around the same time, these poor schools were the result of religious organizations leading reform, not necessarily the entire Parisian community. Additionally, Jean-Baptiste de la Salle likely incorporated some of Démia’s educational methods after becoming acquainted with a mutual friend of the two, Nicolas Roland, in the 1670s. See Sarah Curtis, Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (DeKalb, IL: Norther Illinois University Press, 2000), note 7, 183. 4 For these Catholic Reformation studies on the populous, see Sara Beam, Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2007); and Marc Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 5 For a Lyonnais example, see Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789 (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1984). 6 See Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); JeanPierre Gutton, “Dévots et petites écoles: l’exemple du Lyonnais” Marseille 88: 9–14; Jean-Pierre Gutton, La société et les pauvres: l’exemple de la généralité de Lyon (1534–1789) (Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1971); Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990). 7 Maurice Garden has written extensively about Lyon’s early modern history. See, Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Société d’éditions “Les Belles Lettres,” 1986). Natalie Zemon Davis has also brought attention to the history of Lyon, including it in the famed Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975). Sarah Curtis also provided much background on the early years of Lyon’s schooling system with her investigation of nineteenth-century religious educational insitutions in Lyon and the Rhône region in Educating the Faithful.

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8 This translates to “outside the Church there is no salvation.” Extra ecclesiam nulla salus was used by the Ligue to justify their desire to bar Calvinists from practicing Protestantism in France. 9 Despite the Ligue’s presence, Lyon still had a sizable Protestant population. A large number of the foreign-born bankers and traders in Lyon came from the German provinces in the sixteenth century and with them they brought Protestantism. As Natalie Zemon Davis has shown, a number of print workers in Lyon during the sixteenth century were Protestant. In fact, in 1572 when news arrived from Paris of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Ligue advocated a similar massacre take place in Lyon that resulted in the death of several hundred Protestants and Protestant sympathizers. See Natalie Zemon Davis, “Poor Relief, Humanism, and Heresy: The Case of Lyon,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 5 (1968): 217–75, 255. 10 A large French language historiography exists that looks at the development of Lyon under the ancien régime, paying particular attention to the role of Lyon’s rise as a financial hub on the population and society. See Françoise Bayard, Lyon sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Perrin 1999); Maurice Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1975); Richard Gascon, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe siècle: Lyon et ses marchands (environs de 1520environs de 1580) (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1971); Gutton, La Société et les Pauvres. 11 Hoffman, Church and Community, 9. 12 Natalie Zemon Davis, “Protestantism and the Printing Workers of Lyons: A Study in the Problem of Religion and Social Class During the Reformation,” PhD dissertation, 1959, University of Michigan, 34. 13 Daryl M. Hafter presents a vivid image of Lyon’s urban hierarchical structure, noting the power that guilds, especially La Grande Fabrique de Lyon, had over both commercial laws and social structure. See Daryl M. Hafter, Women at Work in Preindustrial France (University Park, pa: Penn State University Press, 2007). 14 Ibid., 45. 15 Hoffman, Church and Community, 10. 16 All three archbishops of the seventeenth century were from the Villeroy family, therefore in order to avoid confusion, Camille de Neufville de Villeroy will be referred to as “Neufville” in the rest of this chapter. 17 Davis, “Poor Relief, Humanism, and Heresy,” 58 18 Two excellent biographies on Charles Démia exist that recount his life as an orphan raised by his aunt and uncle in Lyon. He eventually went to seminary and worked in Paris’s Saint Sulpice parish. See Roger Gilbert, Charles Démia 1637– 1689: Fondateur Lyonnais des Petites Écoles des Pauvres (Lyon: Éditions E Robert, 1989) and Gabriel Compayré, Charles Démia et les origins de l’Enseignement primaire à Lyon (Paris: Librairie Paul Delaplane, 1905).

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19 adr 5D 20. 20 In early modern France, “the poor” were delineated into two categories: “honourable” poor and “idle” poor. Those of the “honourable,” or “working” poor were usually employed or sought employment but for various reasons were unable to provide for themselves or their families. The “idle” poor were beggars, vagrants, and mendicants. 21 adr 5D 7. 22 Démia, Règlemens, 1681, Archives Municipales de Lyon (hereafter aml) 3GG 150, fol. 8. 23 Ibid., fol. 6. 24 John Bossy, “The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe,” Past and Present 47, no. 1 (1970): 67. 25 adr 5D 20. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 “Bureau de l’École, Inventaire Général,” adr 5D 1. 29 “Procès-Verbaux des assemblées et des deliberations des directeurs et des recteurs formant le Bureau des Petites Écoles des Pauvres,” adr 5D 5. 30 Davis, “Poor Relief, Humanism, and Heresy,” 59. 31 Camille Dreyfus, ed., La grande encyclopédie : inventaire raisonné des sciences, des lettres et des arts, vol 25 (Paris: Lamirault, 1902): 1025. 32 Démia, “Remonstrances faites à messieurs Les Prevost des Marchans, Echevins & Principaux Habitans de la Ville de Lyon touchant la nécessité et utilité des Écoles Chrétiennes pour l’instruction des Enfans Pauvres,” 1668, adr 5D 7, fol 60. 33 Démia, “Remonstrances faites à messieurs Les Prevost des Marchands, Eschevins, et Principaux habitans de la Ville de Lyon,” 1669, adr 5D 5. 34 See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964) 35 Démia, “Remonstrances faites à messieurs Les Prevost des Marchands, Eschevins, et Principaux habitans de la Ville de Lyon,” 1669, adr 5D 5. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 “Règlemens de Saint Charles,” 1679, adr 5D 8, fol. 27. 39 Démia, “Remonstrances faites à messieurs,” 1668, adr 5D 7, fol 65. 40 “Réponse de Prévost des Marchans et Échevins,” 16 mars 1669, adr 5D 1. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Donation records, September 1670; 14 September 1670; November 1670; 12 December 1672; 14 October 1672, adr 5D 1.

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“Dénoumbrement des enfants,” aml E 1914: Administration de l’Hôtel Dieu. “Dossier de l’Hôtel de Ville,” adr 5D 1. Donation records 7 January 1671, adr 5D 1. Letter signed by Louis XIV and Le Tellier addressed “Aux Maîtres des Écoles et au Bureau de Saint Charles,” 1679, adr 5D 6. “Livre des Comptes de l’argent recue pour la grosse dépense des Ecclesiastiques de la Communauté de Saint Charles,” 1678–1679, adr 5D 7. Andre Latreille, Histoire de Lyon et du Lyonnais (Paris: Edouard Privat, 1975), 215. décembre 1734 – Philliberte de Chastillon, adr 5D 1. juin 1744 – Nicolas de Chastillon, adr 5D 1. septembre 1760 – Camot, adr 5D 1. See adr 5D 5 and adr 5D 3, in particular. Du premier dimanche de mars, 1705, adr 5D 5. Du premier dimanche de décembre, 1712, adr 5D 5. “Inventaire Général,” adr 5D 1. “Lettres respectives de Monseigner L’archevêque et du Bureau des Écoles en juillet 1764,” adr 5D 12. Ibid. “Livre des Comptes” 1678–1679, adr 5D 7. “Inventaire Général,” adr 5D 5. “Visite Generale” in “Règlemens aux maîtres,” adr 5D 9, fol. 23. Ibid. “Livre des Comptes,” 1678–1679, adr 5D 7. Ibid. “Inventaire Général,” adr 5D 1. Démia, “Avis au Lecteur: Visite Generale des Parens,” in Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150. “Inventaire Général,” adr 5D 1. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. “Registre des écoles,” adr 5D 3. ch a p ter t wo

1 A tondeur was a technical and Lyonnais term used to describe someone who refined textiles of impurities by cutting and shaving off frayed strings with specially designed sheers and by removing pieces of debris like leaves, sticks, or dirt. A tondeur de soye worked specifically with silk.

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2 Jean Claude Anjou can be found in the Saint Pierre school’s registers in 1698 and 1699. adr 5D 7; Information about what would have happened during the entry interview was detailed in “Avis aux Maîtres,” adr 5D 9. 3 “ L’Assemblé du Bureau,” septembre 1700, adr 5D 9. 4 “L’Assemblé du Bureau,” novembre 1701, adr 5D 9. 5 “Livre des apprentis,” aml hh 597. 6 Roger Chartier, Marie-Madeleine Compère, and Dominique Julia, L’Éducation en France du XVIe au XVIIe Siècle (Paris: Société d’Édition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1976); Karen Carter, Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France (Notre Dame, in: Notre Dame University Press, 2011). 7 Sarah Curtis, Educating the Faithful: Religion, Society, and Schooling in Nineteenth-Century France (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000); Jean-Pierre Gutton, La société et les pauvres en Europe, XVIe-XVIIIe siecles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974); Andre Latrielle, Histoire de lyon et du Lyonnais (Paris: Edouard Privat, 1975). 8 L.W.B. Brockliss, French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Walter Ruegg, A History of the University in Europe: Universities in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 9 Mark Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat: The Education of the Court Nobility, 1580–1715 (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1990); Barbara Whitehead, Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe: A History 1500–1800 (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1999); Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2009). 10 Nicholas Orme, “For Richer, For Poorer? Free Education in England,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 169–87; Chartier, Compère, and Julia, L’Éducation en France du XVIe au XVIIe Siècle. 11 See Christopher Carlsmith, A Renaissance Education: Schooling in Bergamo and the Venetian Republic, 1500–1650 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010); Robert Black, “Italian Renaissance Education: Changing Perspectives and Continuing Controversies,” The Journal of the History of Ideas 52, 2 (April–June 1991): 315–34; Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions) (New York: Brill Academic Publisher, 2000). 12 Clare H. Crowston, “L’apprentissage hors des corporations: Les formations professionelles alternatives à Paris sous l’Ancien régime,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 6, 2 (2005): 412. 13 Démia, “Remonstrances faites à messieurs Les Prevost des Marchans,” 1674, adr 5D 7, fol 121.

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14 “Du première dimanche de juin 1675,” adr 5D 3. 15 Démia, “Remonstrances faites à messieurs Les Prevost des Marchans,” 1674, adr 5D 7, fol 121. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 “Lettre des Prévost des Marchans et Echevins à Messire Charles Démia,” 1674, aml 3GG 150. 20 Démia, Règlemens des Écoles des Pauvres à Lyon, 1670, adr 5D 9, fol. 22. 21 Démia, Règlemens pour les écoles de la Ville et Diocese de Lyon, 1681, aml 3GG 150, fol. 6. 22 A wide historiography on the history of elite pedagogy exists both in relationship to the role of the university and to secondary education. See Brockliss, French Higher Education; Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters; Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat; Ruegg, A History of the University in Europe; Whitehead, Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe. 23 Carter, Creating Catholics, 18. 24 adr 5D 5; adr 5D 9. 25 “Projet de Mémoire,” 1766, adr 5D 12. 26 Démia, Règlemens pour les écoles de la Ville et Diocese de Lyon, 1681, aml 3GG 150. 27 This happened more often in the late seventeenth century when it appears a greater number of first generation Lyonnais children attended the school. If the parents were foreign born, as many were, it was also noted in the seventeenth-century records. 28 Démia, “L’Entrée des Ecoles,” in Règlemens pour les écoles de la Ville et Diocese de Lyon, 1681, aml 3GG 150. 29 Démia, “Les Bandes,” in Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150. 30 1697–1706 was chosen as a parameter because the most complete class lists are available from this time period in the “Livre des Comptes de la Communauté de Saint Charles,” in adr 5D 7. Originally an account book to keep track of expenses and donations at the Saint Charles school, a schoolmaster, most likely headmaster Bigod who also served as the treasurer of the bureau, began using it as both a personal journal and a place to record the names of every schoolchild. 31 Enrolment information for this paragraph and the next was calculated using class lists, bureau meeting notes, records from the charity schools, and visite général notes. See adr 5D 7 for class lists; adr 5D 5 for Bureau meeting notes; adr 5D 8, adr 5D11 for charity school records; and adr 5D 20, adr 5D 22, and adr 5D 25 for visite général notes.

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32 “L’assemblé des Maîtres des Ecoles,” 27 aôut 1681, adr 5D 8, fol. 282. 33 “Concernant le prejudice et les sexes dans les écoles,” 1715, aml 3GG 150, fol. 4. 34 See Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1976). 35 “Concernant le prejudice et les sexes dans les écoles,” aml 3GG 150, fol. 34. 36 Démia, Règlemens pour les écoles de la Ville et Diocese de Lyon, 1681, aml 3GG 150, fol. 6. 37 “Livre des Comptes,” 1678–1679, adr 5D 7. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 “L’école de Saint Charles,” adr 5D 8. 41 “L’assemblé des Maîtres des Ecoles,” 18 septembre 1681, adr 5D 8. 42 “L’école de La Charité et ses règlemens depuis 1643,” adr 5D 24, fols. 189-239. 43 “L’assemblé des Maîtres des Ecoles,” 18 septembre 1681, adr 5D 8. 44 The Hôpital de la Charité was established in the 1640s when the Hôtel Dieu could no longer house long-term patients with chronic diseases, mendicants, and abandoned children. The Hôtel Dieu was then reserved for short-term stays, whereas La Charité became the home for long-term patients and orphaned and abandoned children who returned at the age of seven from wet nurses in the countryside. 45 “L’assemblé des Maîtres des Ecoles,” 18 septembre 1681, adr 5D 8; “Projet de Mémoire,” adr 5D 12. 46 “Livre des Comptes” 1678–1679, adr 5D7. 47 Unlike modern schools, there was no official “first day” of school. Students could begin school at any time during the year. This meant that the six-month period was individual to each student. 48 Démia, Règlemens pour les écoles de la Ville et Diocese de Lyon, No. XXXI, 1681, aml 3GG 150. 49 Démia, Règlemens des Écoles des Pauvres à Lyon, 1670, adr 5D 9, fol. 37. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., fol. 38. 52 Ibid., fol. 27. 53 Ibid. 54 “Du premier dimanche de mai 1678,” adr 5D 5. 55 Ibid. 56 “Du premier dimanche de mars 1678,” adr 5D 5. 57 “Du premier dimanche de mai 1678,” adr 5D 5. 58 Démia, Règlemens pour les écoles de la Ville et Diocese de Lyon, 1681, aml 3GG 150, fol. 29.

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59 “Du premier dimanche de mai 1678,” adr 5D 5. 60 In 1676, Démia mentioned that four students of nouvelles catholiques were enrolled at the Saint George school in order to receive a Catholic education. This is the only mention in any of the records of nouvelles catholiques. adr 5D 5, “Notes de l’Assemblée.” 61 Démia, “Chapitre III: Méthode d’enseigner” in Règlemens, 1679, adr 5D 9, fol. 27. 62 “Visite des Ecoles – 19eme mai 1688,” adr 5D 20. 63 “Visite de l’Ecole des Pauvres Filles de Saint Paul – 14 mai 1688,” adr 5D 20. 64 Démia mentions phonetics in his 1677 handwritten règlemens but he never mentions an issue about correct pronunciation because of bad accents. 65 Démia, “Chapitre III,” in Règlemens, 1679, adr 5D 9, fol. 28. 66 For a discussion of how phonetics may have differed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century orthography according to gender, see Dena Goodman, “L’ortografe des dames: Gender and Language in the Old Regime,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 191–223. It does not appear that orthography differed according to gendered lines in charity schools. 67 Démia, “Chapitre III” in Règlemens, 1679, adr 5D 9, fol. 29. 68 Démia, “Chapitre III,” in Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150, fol. 43. 69 “Visite de l’école de Saint Paul,” adr 5D 20. 70 Démia, “Chapitre III,” in Règlemens, 1679, adr 5D 9, fol. 30. 71 Démia, “Chapitre III,” in Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150, fol. 46. 72 Démia, “Chapitre III,” in Règlemens, 1679, adr 5D 9, fol. 32. 73 Visits at the Saint Michel, Saint Paul, Saint Nizier, and Saint George schools indicate that math was not being taught. See adr 5D 20. 74 “Visite de l’Ecole des Pauvres Filles de Saint Paul – 14 mai 1688,” “Visite de l’Ecole de Saint Michel,” and “Visite de l’Ecole de Saint Paul,” adr 5D 20. 75 Démia, “Chapitre III,” in Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150, fol. 46. 76 Ibid., fol. 48. 77 Ibid., fol. 52. 78 Carter, Creating Catholics, 37. 79 Ibid., 35. 80 Démia, Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150. 81 “Livre des Comptes,” 1678–1679, adr 5D 7, fol. 38. 82 Ibid., fol. 42. 83 Coincidently, many abandoned children were left on his shop’s doorstep in the seventeenth-century according to the Hôtel Dieu’s records. adr 5D 5. 84 Roulet, adr 5D 5 various meeting notes, janvier 1677–mars 1685; Gros – “Le premier avril 1692,” adr 5D 5; Vallel – “Le livre des comptes,” adr 5D 7. fol. 143. 85 “Le premier dimanche d’aout 1705,” adr 5D 5.

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86 87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94 95

“Le project de l’Hôtel Dieu,” adr 5D 5. “Livre des Comptes,” 1678–1679, adr 5D 7, fol. 44. See Motley, Becoming A French Aristocrat for elite curriculum. Démia, “Chapitre III,” in Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150. “Filles placées en apprentissage ou comme domestiques,” adr HCL CH G064, 1701–1724. “Livre des Apprentis,” aml hh 597. These individuals were traced through several apprenticeship lists kept by the La Grande Fabrique de Lyon, See, aml hh 595 to aml hh 609. See also hh 610 to hh 622 for list of “marchans.” aml hh 611. aml hh 611. Démia, “Remonstrances faites à messieurs Les Prevost des Marchans,” 1674, adr 5D 7, fol 121. ch a p ter t h re e

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

“Visite Générale,” aml 3GG 150. Démia, Règlemens des Écoles des Pauvres à Lyon, 1670, adr 5D 9, fol. 42. Démia, Règlemens, adr 5D 9, fol. 37. “Du première dimanche de juin 1676,” adr 5D 5. “Visite Général,” adr 5D 20. Démia, Règlemens, 1670, adr 5D 9, fol. 38. Ibid., fol. 39. Ibid., fol. 41. Ibid., fol. 38. Ibid., fol. 35. This idea of learning indirectly or in the presence of someone learning was borrowed from elite pedagogical practices at the time. Instead of hiring separate tutors for their daughters, if a noble family had a tutor for their sons often the eldest daughter would be in the room, listening to the tutor and to her brothers recite information back to the tutor. Though the girl did not actively engage in pedagogical exercises herself, many parents felt that this provided her with a basic education before going to a convent school or another female school where she would learn how to read and write at more advanced levels. See Mark Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat: The Education of the Court Nobility, 1580–1715 (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1990) 12 Démia, “Chapitre III,” in Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150. 13 “Du premier dimanche de mars 1687,” adr 5D 5. 14 Démia, “Chapitre III,” in Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150.

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15 For more information on family reading and literacy see, R.A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe (London: Pearson, 2002); Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). 16 “Du premier dimanche de mars 1708,” adr 5D 5. 17 Ibid. 18 Démia, “Avis au Lecteur: Visite Generale des Parens” in Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150. 19 Ibid. 20 “Visite Generale” in “Règlemens aux maîtres,” adr 5D9, No. 18, fol. 22. 21 These elite perceptions were the basis for much nineteenth- and twentiethcentury educational historiography that paints plebeian society as inept, uneducated, and illiterate. Relying only on elite, proscriptive, authoritative texts, earlier historians missed that these negative statements and descriptions were not necessarily representative of the poor’s actual abilities. 22 See adr 5D 22; adr 5D 24. 23 septembre 1734, adr 5D 8. 24 Démia, “Avis au Lecteur: Visite Generale des Parens” in Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150. 25 “Visite Generale” in “Règlemens aux maîtres,” adr 5D9, fol. 22. 26 Démia, “Avis au Lecteur: Visite Generale des Parens” in Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150. 27 janvier 1690, adr 5D5. 28 Patriarchal equilibrium is defined as “women’s status in relationship to men, which despite many changes to women’s experiences over past centuries has remained remarkably unchanged.” See Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 29 “Visite Generale” in “Règlemens aux maîtres,” adr 5D9, No. 18, fol. 22. 30 Démia, “Avis au Lecteur: Visite Generale des Parens” in Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150. 31 Ibid. 32 Much of this section is included in Julia M. Gossard, “Tattletales: Childhood & Authority in Eighteenth-Century France,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 10, no. 2 (2017): 169–87. Thank you to The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth and Johns Hopkins University Press for allowing the inclusion of this evidence. 33 “Du premier dimanche de avril 1698,” adr 5D 5. 34 I use the terms “child-police” and “child-police force” to emphasize that these

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35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42

43

44 45 46 47

48 49 50

51

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children, much like the early police of eighteenth-century France, were meant to observe, report, and reprimand immoral or illegal activity. I do not mean to suggest that they were a formal force of children roaming the streets writing citations. Instead, their surveillance was more inconspicuous and, because of the patriarchal power structure of families and societies, more unexpected. Démia, “Règlemens,” 5D 9, Archives Départementales du Rhône (adr), fol. 65. Démia, “Chapitre III,” in Règlemens, 1681, aml 3GG 150, fol. 46. Ibid., fol. 38. This entry noted that boys had repeatedly complained about these same issues on several occasions to the schoolmaster. “Du premier dimance de fevrier 1692,” adr 5D 3. Julie Hardwick, “Sex and the (seventeenth-century) City: A Research Note towards a Long History of Leisure,” Leisure Studies 27, no. 4 (2009): 459–66, 463. “Du premier dimanche de mars 1704,” adr 5D 3. “Du premier dimanche d’aout 1757,” adr 5D 3. Although this is the first official instance of the report, we cannot rule out that children may have told their schoolmasters and mistresses of other transgressions previous to this. They may not have been officially recorded in the schools’ administration records. Children were regularly beaten in early modern Europe. This would not have seemed out of the ordinary. See Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1983). “Du premier dimanche d’octobre 1701,” adr 5D 3. “La famille de Joseph Mascon,” bn Joly de Fleury 1309. “Du premier dimanche de fevrier 1721,” adr 5D 5. The family was subject to surveillance from the Church during confessional or from neighbours down the street. However, surveillance was not coming from inside the family unit. This is most often discussed in literature pertaining to domestic abuse. See Julie Hardwick, “Early Modern Perspectives on the Long History of Domestic Violence: The Case of Seventeenth-Century France,” The Journal of Modern History 78, no. 1 (March 2006): 1–36. “L’Inventaire Générales des Enfants,” 1691–1788, adr 5D 25. “Antoinette de Fil,” aphp La Trinité, liasse 50; “Du premier dimance de juillet 1722,” adr 5D 5. For information on familial lettres de cachets, see Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, Le Désordre des Familles: Lettres de cachet des Archives de la Bastille (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). Meeting Notes from April 1680 in “Inventaire Général des Titres et Papiers des Écoles des Pauvres à Lyon,” adr 5D 1.

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52 adr 5D 1. 53 Démia, Règlemens pour les écoles de la Ville et Diocese de Lyon, 1707, aml 3GG 150, fol. 347. 54 See Roger Chartier, Marie-Madeleine Compère, and Dominique Julia, L’Éducation en France du XVIe au XVIIe Siècle (Paris: Société d’Édition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1976); Karen Carter, Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France (Notre Dame, in: Notre Dame University Press, 2011). 55 François-André Isambert, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, depuis l’an 420 jusqu’à la Révolution de 1789 (Paris: Belin-Le-Prieur, 1821) XX, 317. 56 Mentioned in the previous two chapters, La Compagnie du Saint Sacrement was a Catholic confraternity group that had chapters throughout France. In Lyon, both laymen and religious leaders were members committed to extending Catholic charity and social reform. While this group provided much needed poor relief in many of France’s urban environments, it was also a way that government leaders, merchants, and the Church could instil social change in poor society as they saw fit. See, Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789 (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1984). 57 “Du première dimanche de juillet 1678,” adr 5D 3. 58 James Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans & Their World in Dijon, 1550–1650 (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1988), 265. 59 “Du première dimanche de juillet 1678,” adr 5D 3. 60 “Du premier dimanche de fevrier 1696,” adr 5D 5. 61 “Du premier dimanche de mai 1681,” adr 5D 5. 62 Mark Konnet, “The Revived Catholic League in Champagne,” in Mark Konnert, ed, Local Politics in the Fench Wars of Religion: The Towns of Champgne, the Duc de Guise, and the Catholic League 1560-95 (New York: Ashgate, 2006), 187-209. 63 Antoine Guérin, L’histoire de la région Champagne (Paris: Gallimard, 1901). 64 “Du première dimanche de septembre 1681,” adr 5D 3. 65 Ibid. 66 “Du première février 1686,” adr 5D 3. 67 “Reims, État des hopitaux,” bn Joly de Fleury 1267, fol. 44 68 “Du première dimanche de mars 1689,” adr 5D 3. 69 “Du première dimanche de juin 1691; Du première dimanche de septembre 1693; Du première dimanche de mars 1694; Du première dimanche d’avril 1696; Du première dimanche de décembre 1699; Du première dimanche d’avril 1701,” adr 5D 3. 70 “Du première dimanche de décembre 1702,” adr 5D 3. 71 “Du première dimanche d’avril 1710,” adr 5D 3. 72 “Du première dimanche de mars 1689,” adr 5D 3.

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73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85

86 87 88 89 90

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“Du première dimanche d’octobre 1691,” adr 5D 3. “Visite des écoles,” adr 5D 25. “Du premier dimanche de novembre 1704,” adr 5D 5. Archives Nationales de France (hereafter an) L 715; L 716; L 745. “Du première dimanche de septembre 1679,” adr 5D 3. “Assemblé 1 mai 1678,” adr 5D 5. an L 716. an L 716 and an L 639. an L 645. an L 635. Much like “lower sorts,” the “middling sorts” is a commonly used term to describe what modern readers might think of as “the middle class.” This group, though usually not of noble heritage and title, often formed a type of local and industrial authority. Many shopkeepers, factory owners, lawyers, and local lower-level magistrates were part of this group. Over the course of the early modern period as wealth became an important social marker, members of the upper middling sorts grew significantly in power and influence. The “lower middling sorts” were masters in their profession, shop owners, or people with steady but not particularly lucrative employment. Often, guild membership delineated a break between the lower sorts and the middling sorts, with the lower sorts often serving as the yeoman and daily workers. There was, though, significant a grey area between the lower sorts and the lower middling sorts throughout the early modern period. an L 635; L 716; L 639. Clare H. Crowston, “From School to Workshop: Pre-Training and Apprenticeship in Old Regime France,” in Learning on the Shop Floor, eds. Bert de Munck, Soly, and Kaplan (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007); Crowston, “L’apprentissage hors des corporations.” an L 716. an L 639. Ibid. Ibid. bn Joly de Fleury 1267. ch a p ter f o u r

1 Hereafter l’Hôpital de la Trinité will be referred to simply as “La Trinité.” 2 “Règlemens pour l’admission des enfants,” bn Joly de Fleury 1247, fol. 3–4. 3 “Memoire sur l’établissement de l’Hôpital des Enfants Trouvés,” bn Joly de Fleury 1237.

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4 The Mercure de France was a literary gazette that informed elite society about court events, new pieces in literature, musical performances, and charitable projects. 5 Charles Arrault, Abrégé historique de l’établissement de l’hôpital des Enfants Trouvés (Paris: Thiboust, 1746). 6 Please see the introduction again for an overview of this methodology. 7 Colin Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the poor in the Montpellier Region, 1740–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 61. 8 See Jacques René Tenon, Mémoires sur les hôpitaux de Paris, Paris (1788). 9 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 1989), 35. 10 Ibid., 54. 11 Ibid., 47. 12 Tenon, Mémoires sur les hôpitaux de Paris, 17. 13 A very large historiography has developed around Foucault’s thesis of the Great Confinement related to the history of the poor, prisons, and socialized care. The following is a small sample of this vast historiography: Kathryn Norberg, Rich and Poor in Grenoble, 1600–1814 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Olwen H. Hufton, The Poor of EighteenthCentury France, 1750–1789 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974); Cissie Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity in Aix-en-Provence (Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Colin Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpellier Region, 1740–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Julia M. Gossard, “Breaking a Child’s Will: Eighteenth-Century Parisian Juvenile Detention Centers,” French Historical Studies 42, no. 2 (April 2019): 239–59; Alan Williams, The Police of Paris: 1718–1789 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). 14 For more discussion of the classification and codification of legitimacy and illegitimacy, see Matthew Gerber, Bastards: Politics, Family, & Law in Early Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 15 Isabelle Robin-Romero, Les orphelins de Paris: Enfants et assistance aux XVIeXVIIIe siècles (Paris: Presses l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007), 14. 16 Most commonly, parents cited an upcoming move to another city to find a better job or unexpected unemployment as the reason for abandonment, promising to return when the situation was resolved. Despite this promise, few parents ever returned. 17 For an example of these types of tokens, see Julie Hardwick, “Parenting in Hard Times: Child Abandonment in Early Modern Europe,” Not Even Past, posted 7 January 2014, https://notevenpast.org/parenting-in-hard-times-child-

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18

19 20 21

22 23

24 25 26 27 28

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abandonment-in-early-modern-europe-2/. For examples of these kinds of tokens in the London Foundling Hospital, see John Styles, Threads of Feeling: The London Foundling Hospital’s Textile Tokens, 1740–1770 (London: The Foundling Museum, 2010). Exposure d’enfant was considered infanticide if the child was clandestinely abandoned. When children were abandoned in a public space, this was not necessarily considered an act of infanticide, unless there was serious neglect on the part of the parent, such as leaving the child in the cold during the winter, failing to cloth the child, leaving the child in a potentially dangerous place like the bank of a river, or if there were clear signs of physical trauma to the child. However, because it was often impossible to identify the parent(s) of the abandoned child unless the parent was caught during the act or a witness came forward, exposure d’enfant was not a well-documented crime. See Kristin Elizabeth Gager, Blood Ties and Fictive Tales: Adoption and Family Life in Early Modern France (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1996), 115. Gerber, Bastards, 9. “Registre des enfants éxposés et trouvés de l’Hôpital,” bn Joly de Fleury 1239. According to Gager, adoption laws varied from region to region, with adoption occurring less in the north and west than in the southern-most regions thanks to differences in regional inheritance legal codification and practice. Gager, Blood Ties and Fictive Tales, 107. Ibid., 79. Wet nursing is an example of a legal (and common) fostering process. Most children who were under the age of seven were sent to wet nurses in the countryside. There, children were cared for and raised by the wet nurse and her family who were being paid for their services. Historians have argued that this practice, conducted by hospitals as well as individuals, represented a type of infanticide since there was such a high rate of child mortality during wet nursing. Although it may well have been either a conscious or unconscious form of infanticide, wet nursing was also one of the main ways in which the hospitals engaged in a system of foster care. Families of the wet nurses fostered these children for several years, reducing the stress put on the institutions. See “Chapter Four: Parisian Charity Hospices and the Care of Orphans and Foundlings” in Blood Ties and Fictive Tales, 105–23. bn ms. 11778, fol. 53. bn ms. 11778, fols. 61, 60. “Conditions Requises aux Enfants qui son admis pour entrer à l’hôpital de La Trinité,” bn Joly de Fleury 1240. bn ms. 11778, fol. 53. “Extrait du Registre 186 du reigne de Charles VII,” bn Joly de Fleury 1228.

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29 See Jean Pierre Gutton “A l’aube du XVIIe siècle: Idées nouvelles sur les pauvres,” Cahiers d’histoire 10 (1965): 93; Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance, 95–6; Cissie Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity in Aix-en-Provence, 1640–1789, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), ix. 30 “Extrait du Registre 186 du reigne de Charles VII,” bn Joly de Fleury 1228. 31 “Extrait des Règlemens pour l’entrée des Enfants à l’Hôpital de La Trinité,” bn Joly de Fleury 1240. 32 “Conditions requises aux Enfants qui son admis pour entrer à l’hôpital de La Trinité,” bn Joly de Fleury 1240. 33 “Extrait des Règlemens pour l’entrée des Enfants à l’Hôpital de La Trinité,” bn Joly de Fleury 1240. 34 This hospital-orphanage was divided between two locations – the Maison de la Couche and a house in the faubourg Saint Antoine. Neither had permanent residents as children were either on their way to wet nurses or to another charitable institution, making the Enfants Trouvés a holding facility of sorts. Infants, toddlers, and children under the age of six were usually housed at the Maison de la Couche on the rue Neuve-Notre-Dame next to the Hôtel Dieu. Here, these children were registered, medically assessed, and then transferred to the care of a wet nurse in the countryside. Most children resided at the Maison for no more than one month and, therefore, the facility itself was quite small with only about one hundred beds available. During times of crisis, such as famine or plague, if there were more than one hundred children in the system, the oldest trouvés had to stay with the infirm and sick at the adjacent Hôtel Dieu before relocating to the countryside with a wet nurse. Enfants Trouvés’ second house was located in the far east of the city in the faubourg Saint Antoine and housed children either too old to be sent to wet nurses or those who had returned from wet nurses, usually at age seven. The records indicate faubourg Saint Antoine usually housed about 200 children at any given time, with only about ten to fifteen returning from wet nurses each year, indicating the high mortality rate during wet nursing. Once children had reached nine years old, they were sent either to Saint Esprit or La Trinité as determined by their status. 35 During years where La Trinité was already at a high capacity, some children stayed at Enfants Trouvés until they were up to twelve years of age. 36 This twelve-year span was chosen because of the completeness of the records. Unfortunately, enrolment records do not exist for every year of La Trinité’s existence, only allowing a small sample of the population. 37 All of these petitions come from the eighteenth century, with the majority coming after 1740. However, this is likely due to the frequent fires in the nineteenth century at l’Hôpital-Général that housed these documents. From all the

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extant règlemens and other administrative documents, it seems more than likely that parents petitioned in the seventeenth century as well, but these documents just did not survive the fires. “Règlements pour l’admission des enfants: pièces à l’appui des demandes d’admission, notamment lettres de recommandation,” bn Joly de Fleury 1247, fol. 43–4. “Des demandes d’admission,” bn Joly de Fleury 1249, fol. 42. Ibid., fol. 101. Ibid., fol. 122. Ibid., fol. 137. Ibid., fol. 136. From the available enrolment records, the hospital-orphanage enrolled a total of 203 children per year. An average of 120 of those children came from Enfants Trouvés, ten from Saint Esprit, and seventy-three from petitions for enrolment. Therefore, 60 per cent of the hospital-orphanage’s population had dubious legitimate status. “Lettre de M. Tilière à la Confrérie du Saint-Sacrement,” bn Joly de Fleury 1249, fol 31. “Mémoire ou l’exposé actuel de l’hôpital,” bn Joly de Fleury 1233, fol. 31. “Les employs du temps de La Trinité (1737),” bn Joly de Fleury 1237, fol. 24–8. Ibid., fol. 26–9. Ibid., fol. 31. Other hospital-orphanages also wore colours to easily identify the children. For example, Saint Esprit children wore violet, and Enfants Trouvés wore red. bn Joly de Fleury 1249. Ibid. Ibid. “Maitresse de linge,” bn Joly de Fleury 1249. Individuals were buying a larger diversity of goods and in rapid fashion. Scholars of the consumer revolution argue that this is part of the rise of fashion and individualism. Consumer goods, especially textiles, allowed men and women to assert a personal identity via dress. In both their choices as consumers as well as their expression via fashion, individualism rose. Scholars of the eighteenth-century British world, in particular, have covered the rise of the consumer revolution. See, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of EighteenthCentury England (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1982); Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (New York: Clerendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1990); Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993); T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Eighteenth-century France has also developed a rich study of consumer culture, especially by way of fashion studies. See Philippe Perrot, Les dessus et les dessous de la bourgeoisie, une histoire du vêtement au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1981); Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien régime, transl. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Clare H. Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2013). “Au sujet de l’état de l’Hôpital de la Sainte Trinité,” bn Joly de Fleury 1247. Robin-Romero, Les orphelins, 161. État de la dépense pour nourriture, 1729, bn Joly de Fleury 1277, fol. 177. “Estat du Revenu de l’hospital deLa Trinité par chacune année,” bn ms. fr. 18 606, fol. 284–5. Early modern French society believed that if you ate meat without bread you would not be able to properly digest the meat, leading to constipation and potentially death. See Robin-Romero, Les orphelins, 162. Règlemens, bn Joly de Fleury 1246. Ibid. Ibid. “Registre des transfers,” bn Joly de Fleury 1242, fol. 23; fol. 144; fol. 189. “Les services des enfants,” bn Joly de Fleury 1239. Ibid. Steven Kaplan and Cynthia Koepp, eds., Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Clare H. Crowston, “From School to Workshop: Pre-Training and Apprenticeship in Old Regime France,” in Learning on the Shop Floor, eds., Steven Kaplan, Bert de Munck, and Hugo Soly (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); James Farr, The Work of France: Labor and Culture in Early Modern Times, 1350–1800 (Lanham, md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). Steven Kaplan, “Reconsidering Apprenticeship: Afterthoughts,” in Learning on the Shop Floor: Historical Perspectives on Apprenticeship, 204. bn Joly de Fleury 1249; Joly de Fleury 1287. bn Joly de Fleury 1248. Ibid. bn Joly de Fleury 1249. “Août 1743” bn Joly de Fleury 1251. See Daryl Hafter, Women at Work in Preindustrial France (University Park, pa:

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Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Clare H. Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (Raleigh, nc: Duke University Press, 2001). bn Joly de Fleury 1249. “Registre des enfants 1762,” aphp Enfants Trouvés, Liasse 8. “Transferts, 1762” aphp La Trinité, Liasse 3. Ibid. “Des apprentis,” aphp Hôpital Général, Liasse 120. Ibid. “Baptêmes et marriages de paroisse de Saint Etienne du Mont, 1778,” an L 650; “L’Aumone Général,” aphp Hôpital Général Liasses 4–17. ch a p ter f ive

1 Marie Madeleine Chevranville can be found in Yves Landry, Orphelines en France, Pionnières au Canada: Les Fille du roi au XVIIe siècle (Ottawa: Leméac, 1992) as well as in marriage, baptism, and death records in Sorel and Montréal de Notre Dame parish records, 1670–1717, Drouin Records Collection (drc hereafter). 2 Habitants is the name given to French settlers in New France. In the earliest years of colonization, almost all of these habitants were farmers and agricultural workers. Over time, though, the title came to mean any French colonist living in New France, regardless of their participation in agriculture. See Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2001), 365. 3 Much like those throughout France, the colonial intendant was a royal administrator who reported on the finances, politics, and civil administration of a particular region to the French Crown. In New France, the intendant had overlapping jurisdiction with the governor general. See Taylor, American Colonies, 373. 4 Colbert à Talon, 2 février 1665, Rapport de l’Archiviste de la Province de Québec (hereafter rapq) 1930–1931, 39. 5 See Leslie Tuttle, Conceiving the Old Régime: Pronatalism and the Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 6 Ibid., 5. 7 Ibid., 7. 8 The history of slavery and enslavement is extremely vast and an attempt to list all pertinent studies would be insufficient. Instead of a comprehensive list, please see these works that provide rich insight into the history of slavery, childhood, youth, and family in the vast early modern world: Daina Berry and

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Leslie Harris, eds., Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas (Athens, ga: University of Georgia Press, 2018); Anna Mae Duanne, Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (Athens, ga: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Jennifer Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (Philadelphia, pa: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Laurie Wood, Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2020). 9 See Glenn Conrad, “Emigration Forcée: A French Attempt to Populate Louisiana, 1716–1720,” Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society 4 (1979): 57–66; Carl A. Brasseaux, “The Image of Louisiana and the Failure of Voluntary French Emigration, 1683–1731,” Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society 4 (1979): 47–56; Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Marcia A. Zug, Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Cécil Vidal, Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (Williamsburg, VA and Chapel Hill, nc: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 10 Not all of the minors sent to North America can be classified as “convicts” but much of the available historiography is organized around the idea of convict labour. For an overarching historiographical discussion of convict labour in history, see Christian G. De Vito and Alex Lichtenstein, “Writing a Global History of Convict Labor,” in Global Histories of Work, eds. Andreas Eckert, Sidney Chalhoub, Mahua Sarkar, Dmitri van den Bersselaar, Christian G. De Vito (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016). As discussed in this chapter, too, not all those sent as technical convicts thought of themselves in this way. Instead, the line between indentured servitude and forced convict migration was often a hazy one. Clare Anderson has demonstrated this for the Indian Ocean in Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). The historiography on child trafficking in the British Atlantic is particularly rich, connecting it to the rise of slavery. See, for example, Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2009); Abbot Emerson Smith, “Kidnapping and White Servitude,” in Childhood in America, eds. Paula S. Fass and Mary Anne Mason (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Hilary M. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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11 Jean Bodin, Les Six livres de la République 5:7 as quoted in Jean-Claude Perrot, Une histoire intellectuelle de l’économie politique, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, 1992), 547. 12 See Tuttle, Conceiving the Old Régime. 13 For the full text of the 1670 edict see Edits, ordonnances royaux, declarations et arrêts du conseil d’état du roi concernant le Canada (Quebec: E.R. Frechette, 1854), 67–8. 14 Ibid., 68. 15 Tuttle, Conceiving the Old Régime, 99. 16 Allan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 23. See also Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique Français (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), 233–7; Tuttle, Conceiving the Old Régime, 100. 17 Landry, Orphelines en France. 18 A small historiography exists on filles du roi with much conflicting data and details. I have drawn most of my research from Yves Landry and the parish records available from Canadian parishes. I need to acknowledge the work of two undergraduate students at Utah State University, Arie French and Zion Steiner, who helped me build several large databases on the filles du roi and forced migration across the Atlantic to assist in this chapter’s analysis. Other studies on these girls include Silvo Dumas, Les filles du roi en Nouvelle France (Québec: Société historique de Québec, 1972); Gustave Lanctot, Filles de joie ou filles du roi (Montréal: Les Éditions Chantecler, 1952); Marie-Louise Baudoin and Jeannine Sévigny, Les premières et les filles du roi à Ville-Marie (Montréal: Maison Saint-Gabriel, 1996); Guillaume Aubert, “‘The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” The William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 3 (July 2004): 439–78; Zug, Buying a Bride. Interestingly, too, the filles du roi have been the subject of several quasi-historical works along with several books of historical fiction. See Susan McNelley, Hélène’s World: Hélène Desportes of Seventeenth-Century Québéc (New York: Etta Heritage Press, 2013); Jan Noel, Along a River: The First French-Canadian Women (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 19 This does not mean that all filles du roi came directly from l’Hôpital Général as this was merely the main bureaucratic administration. These girls, most of who were current or former enfants de l’état came from a variety of hospitals including La Trinité. But, the administrators at l’Hôpital Général had to approve their transfer. 20 “Transferts,” aphp Hôpital Général, Liasses 148–210. 21 Ibid., 148; 149. 22 I calculated the following statistics regarding filles du roi using the records published in Landry, Orphelines en France.

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23 Marriage, baptism, and death records for Marie Lamy, Sorel and Montréal de Notre Dame parish records, 1670–1717, drc. 24 Aubert, “‘The Blood of France,’” 455–6; Greer, The People of New France, 17. 25 Interestingly, Madeleine Tisserand appears to have had a marriage contract annulled on 9 September 1673 with Jean Amaury only to sign a marriage contract with Pierre Parenteau on 12 September 1673. Marriage and baptism records for Madeleine Tisserand, Sorel and Notre Dame de Québec, 1673–1711, drc. 26 Marriage contract for Anne Thomas, Notre Dame de Montréal, 3 March 1666, drc. Baptismal record for Claude Jaudoin, mother Anne Thomas, Notre Dame de Montréal, 1 January 1667, drc. 27 Marriage contracts for Marie Hatanville, Québec and Sillery parishes, 1669– 1686, drc. 28 “Observations faites par Talon sur l’estat presenté à Monseigneur Colbert,” 1669 rapq I, 103–7. 29 Guillaume Aubert suggested that the crown spent at least 410,000 livres on these girls’ dowries and transportation to New France, and in 2016 Marcia Zug estimated that would be equivalent to 6.4 million US dollars. See Aubert, “‘The Blood of France,’” 454 and Zug, Buying a Bride, 35. 30 Charles Frostin, “Du peuplement penal de l’Amérique aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: hesitations et contradictions du pouvoir royal en matière de déportataion,” Annales de Bretagne et des payes de l’Ouest (Anjou, Maine, Touraine) 85 (1978): 67–94; 76. 31 6 février 1697, an col B 18. 32 In the nineteenth century, penal colonies will develop in France’s island colonies, with young men being sent to work the land. See Stephen A. Toth, Beyond Papillon: A History of the French Overseas Penal Colonies, 1854–1952 (Lincoln, NE: The University of Nebraska Press, 2006). 33 5 janvier 1701, an col B 24, fol. 3. 34 “Mission d’inspection de Monsieur de la Boulaye,” 1699–1700, an col B1 139. 35 Virginia Gould, “Bienville’s Brides: Virgins or Prostitutes? 1719–1721,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 59, No. 4 (Fall 2018): 398. 36 The Mississippi Company was a royally sanctioned joint-stock trading company tasked with not only selling land in the Louisiana colony but also building its population. Under the leadership of Scottish financier John Law, the Mississippi Company was issued a royal charter in 1717 that provided it with a trade monopoly. I’ve chosen to use the name “The Mississippi Company” though it was also called the Compagnie des Indes and the Compagnie d’Occident (Company of the West). For more information on the role of the Missis-

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sippi Company in the building of Louisiana and France’s greater Caribbean empire, see Vidal, Caribbean New Orleans, 52. Shannon Lee Dawdy uses this phrase to refer to the construction of Louisiana’s, especially New Orleans’s, population, society, and culture in the eighteenth century. Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire, 141. Brasseaux, “The Image of Louisiana and the Failure of Voluntary French Emigration,” 48. “Les enfants de la compagnie,” aphp, Hôpital Général, Liasse 248. This information is collected from the “Recensements de la Louisiane” in 1721, 1723, 1726 in an G 464; 465. A series of fires and floods ravaged l’Hôpital Général in the nineteenth century, leaving many of its liasses in a state of complete disrepair at the aphp and an. “Les enfants de la compagnie,” aphp Hôpital Général, Liasse 248. “Au peuplade des colonies,” bn ms. fr. 11769. Ibid. Raguet à conseil, 1720, an C13 A 5. James D. Hardy Jr, “The Transportation of Convicts to Colonial Louisiana,” Louisiana History 7 (1966): 207–20. Instead of assigning marital spouses, the company let boys and girls pick each other, but this resulted in mass pandemonium in the church priory. Several fights broke out among both girls and boys who were unhappy with their choices. Although the mass marriage ceremony remained calm, the previous day was full of chaos and rebellion. Jean Buvat, Journal de la Régence, tome I (Paris: H. Plon, 1863), 386. Marcel Giraud, Histoire de la Louisiane Française, Volume III, L’époque de John Law (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), 256–76. Folklore around casket girls has existed since their arrival in New Orleans. Rumours swirled throughout the eighteenth century that these women were possibly vampires, housed in the Ursuline convent in order to keep them from society. Similarly, as Virginia Gould has argued, they were also mired with rumours of indecency, debauchery, and other questionable behaviour. The lore of casket girls still holds a prominent place in New Orleans festival culture. See Virginia Gould, “Bienville’s Brides: Virgins or Prostitutes? 1719–1721,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 59, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 389–408. Buvat, Journal de la Régence, I, 422. Ibid., 424. “Les bandouliers,” bn ms. français, 11978.

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54 “Etienne Caper,” aphp, Hôpital Général Liasse 153. 55 Hardy, “The Transportation of Convicts to Colonial Louisiana,” 215–16. 56 Ibid., 217. ch a p ter s i x 1 “Projet pour l’établissement d’école des enfants,” 1698, an MIC K 1374 Chine. 2 Much of the sixteenth-century French imperialist endeavours were undertaken by Jesuit missionaries tasked with transforming “Indians into French subjects of the king: not only Catholic but also linguistically, culturally, and legally French.” Many of these programs were built upon false ideas of French cultural superiority that justified Jesuit programs of evangelization and wider inculcation of indigenous groups. Of course, many of these policies were born out of “racist” or “protoracist” ideas about indigenous populations. For nuanced discussions of “Frenchification” and these policies, see Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012): 5–8; Saliha Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Sara Melzer, “The Underside of France’s Civilizing Mission: Assimilationist Politics in ‘New France,’” Biblio 17, 131 (2001): 151–64; Cornelius Jaenen, “Frenchification and Evangelization of Amerindians in Seventeenth-Century New France,” ccha Study Sessions 35 (1968): 57–71. 3 Jeunes de langues were originally referred to as enfants de langues in the 1670s but by the turn of the eighteenth century, jeunes de langues was the more popular name. This might have been due also to a shift in the median age of boys enlisted as language youths. Originally enfants de langue were on the younger side, eight to thirteen years mostly but, by the eighteenth century, the median age was raised to adolescence with most language youths being in their mid-teens to twenty years old. This shift from child to adolescent may have been apparent in this change in lexicon as well. See, Henri Dehérain, “Jeunes de Langue et interprètes français en Orient au XVIIIe siècle,” in Yeni Anadolu, Anatolia Moderna, (1991), 323–35. Sometimes jeunes de langues is translated as “language apprentices” instead of “language youths.” I prefer language youths as “apprenticeship” does not quite describe the schooling and programs youths went through. These boys were also not of the social class that would normally have held a traditional apprenticeship, so to avoid confusion about their class and the type of training they were involved in, I’ve chosen to use “language youths.” 4 Ashley Bruckbauer, “Dangerous Liaisons: Ambassadors and Embassies in

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French Art, 1661–1789,” (PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019). There is certainly more work that needs to be done, too, on the perception of women’s safety in these regions, especially in regards to marrying or being seduced by non-Christians. The concerns presented in racist and purposefully exaggerated travel narratives influenced perceptions of these regions and the gendered dynamics of these programs. Ina Baghdiantz McCabe does an excellent job of explaining French understandings and creations of orientalism during this period. See Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008). With such a growth on topics in the French Atlantic and wider world, an attempt to list them all would be futile here. However, the following are a few notable works that provide us a wider understanding of the first French empire: Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution (Chapel Hill, nc: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Jennifer Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill, nc: Omohundro Institute of Early American history and the University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Danna Agmon, A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2017). There are exceptions to this, especially in biographies of colonial administrators like Colbert, in histories of larger trading companies, and in studies linking Africa with the French Caribbean. For instance, see Charles Woosley Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964); Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor, mi: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company, 1635–1834 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925); Pernille Røge, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, 1750–1802 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Laurie M. Wood, Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 2. Les Ursulines de Québec depuis leur établissement, I:209. Denonville à ministre, 13 novembre 1685, an C11 A, 7: 45. Colbert à Talon, 5 avril 1666, rapq, I, 72. Charles Démia, La Méthode pour faire les Écoles (1681). Roger Magnuson, Education in New France (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992).

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14 White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians, 6. 15 James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Context of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 330. 16 White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians, 7. 17 Guillaume Aubert, “‘The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, No. 3 (2004): 439–78, 475 as quoted in White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians, 7. 18 For more on Frenchification policies see James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Axtell, The Invasion Within; Saliha Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy,” American Historical Review 110, 2 (2005): 322–49; Saliha Belmessous, “Être français en Nouvelle-France: Identité française et identitité colonial aux dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles,” French Historical Studies 27, 3 (2004): 507–40. 19 Translates to “wood runners.” These were typically younger men who would actively trade with and live among native groups despite the illegality of doing so in New France. Used somewhat as a pejorative to describe the French habitants who took to living in the woods among native populations, often adopting their practices, appearances, and cultures. See Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2001), 378. 20 Denonville à ministre, 13 septembre 1685, an C11 A 7. 21 Denonville à Monsieur le Roy, 12 janvier 1686, an col C11 A 7. 22 For Detroit’s intendant see Cadillac à ministre, 31 août 1703, an col C11 A 20, 67; For New Orleans Ursuline see Lettre à Monsieur, mars 1728, an col C13 A 6 (Louisiane). 23 Magnuson, Education in New France, 75. 24 Denonville à Monsieur le Roy, 12 janvier 1686, an col C11 A 7. 25 Denonville à minister, 1 avril 1687, an col C11 A 7. 26 Taylor, American Colonies, 379. 27 “Memoire sur la conduite des Français dans la Louisiane,” an C13 A 3, 389. 28 See for example anom col E 318, anom col E 384BIS, anom col E 53. 29 Roger Magnuson has extensively studied the primary schools, demonstrating that the religious orders established schools that operated on the same model of those in metropolitan France. 30 “Règlemens de l’École Charitable de Québec,” an col C13 A 20; “École de Charité règlemens,” an col C13 A 12. 31 The use of the term “Indian” here is a translation of les écoles indiens, the collective name given to schools that enrolled Native children. 32 “Au sujet de l’école,” an col C11 A 22.

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33 “Greffe de Jean-Baptiste de Tétu, 1725,” Archives Nationales du Québec (anq). 34 Roger Magnuson provides a list of schoolmasters who also served as notaries in footnote 44 Education in New France, 197. 35 an col C13 A 17. 36 Ibid. 37 an col C13 A 20. 38 Ibid. 39 “De M. Rioux, 1701,” an col C13 A 13. 40 Drogman comes from the Aramaic word terdjüman, which was passed into the Hebrew language, then Arabic and into Turkish as tarjuman for “translator.” The Italians translated the word as dragomanno, which then became drogman and sometimes truchement for “translator” in French by the sixteenth century. See McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France, 128; Frédéric Hitzel, “Les Jeunes de Langue de Pera-Les-Constantinople,” Dix-Huitieme Siecle 28 (1996): 57–70. 41 The Capitulations of the Ottoman Empire were protections granted to mostly European (Christian) nations during the early modern period that allowed Europeans to trade and reside in the Ottoman Empire. Europeans were largely exempt from local prosecution, taxes, and certain local laws. It was intended to help encourage trade around the Ottoman Empire. It eventually led to the Franco–Ottoman (sometimes called the Franco–Turkish) alliance signed between the sultan of the Ottoman Empire Suleiman the Magnificent and the Valois King Francois I. This alliance created strong diplomatic, military, and trade relationships between the two states for more than two centuries. It was also noteworthy as the first alliance between a Christian and Muslim state. See McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France. 42 A term used to describe the towns and ports of the Ottoman Empire where French traders and merchants had special privileges. Although “échelles” translates to “scales” the use of the term here instead comes from the Turkish word “iskele” (scaffolding) that refers the piers at the port that were built with a specific type of scaffolding and stakes. This term underlines the importance of maritime trade to the French empire. 43 McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France, 47. 44 Antoine Gautier and Marie de Testa, Drogmans, Diplomates, et Ressortissants Européens auprès de la Porte Ottomane (Istanbul: Les Éditions isis, 2013), 31. 45 E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 14. 46 The choice to use Constantinople here instead of Istanbul comes from both the primary source documents as well as Michele Longino’s French Travel Writing in the Ottoman Empire: Marseilles to Constantinople (New York: Routledge,

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2015). Longino demonstrates that most Europeans, especially French travel writers, used the name Constantinople instead of Istanbul, despite the Ottomans using the latter. To be consistent with the usage in primary sources from a French perspective, I’ve chosen to use this name. Randy Sparks, Where the Negros are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2014). Sarah M.S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2012). Colbert to Rouillé, 21 September 1679, Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert, 2: 706 as quoted in Junko Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 20. Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 31. For a discussion of how various tax reforms would hurt the economy of Marseilles while encouraging international commerce, see ibid., 33. “Mémoires et documents,” Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (hereafter amae) Turquie, 1668–1671. Francesa Lucchetta, “La Scuola dei ‘Giovani di lingua’ Venetian nei secoli XVIe XVII,” Quademi di Studi Arabi 7, no. 9 (1989): 19–40, 19. 18 novembre 1669, Lettres instructions, et mémoires de Colbert, 2: 517. Frédéric Hitzel, “L’école des jeunes de langues d’Istanbul, un modèle d’apprentissage des langues orientales,” in Langues et Langages du Commerce en Métiterranée et en Europe à l’époque moderne, eds. Gilbert Buti, Michèle Janin-Thivos, and Olivier Raveaux (Aix-en-Provence: Presses de l’Université de Provence, 2013), 23–31, 26. Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 38. Takeda explains that the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce used the cottimo, or an additional tax that Marseilles merchants levied on subjects in the city after the 1669 repeal of merchant duties, to pay the cost of educating these boys. Therefore, despite the fact that the Marseilles merchants no longer had a duty, the subjects of Marseilles were still paying taxes for commercial activity, including the education of interpreters. Ibid., 38. Ibid. Rothman, Brokering Empire, 12 “Mémoires et documents,” amae Turquie, 1668–1671. Hitzel, “L’école des jeunes de langues d’Istanbul,” 31. Ibid., 29.

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64 August Boppe, “Les anciens uniformes du ministre des Affaires étrangères (1768–1882),” Revue d’histoire diplomatique XV (1901): 399–416. 65 Jean Buvat, Journal de la Régence, tome II (Paris: H. Plon, 1863), 267. 66 Ibid., 268. 67 In extant documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this institution carries several different names (sometimes in the same document). To avoid confusion with l’École de l’Orient in the next section, I’ve chosen to refer to this institution as l’École des Jeunes de Lanuges. However, it is also referred to as l’École de l’Orient as well as simply by the Jesuit collège’s name “Louisle-Grand à Paris.” 68 Annie Berthier, “Turquerie ou Turcologie? L’Effort de Traduction des jeunes de Langues Au XVIIe Siècle,” Istanbul et les langues orientales: actes du colloque organisé par l’ifea e l’inalco à l’occasion du bicentenaire de l’École des langues orientales (1997): 283–318, 284. 69 See ibid. 70 Hitzel, “Les Jeunes d Langue de Péra-Les-Constantinople,” 57–70, 69. 71 Ibid., 57. 72 Henri Dehérain, “Jeunes de Langues et interprètes française en Orient au XVIIIe siècle,” Anatolia moderna. Yeni Anadolu 1 (1991): 323–35. 73 “Siam” is modern-day Thailand. I’ve chosen to use “Siam” and “Siamese” instead of Thai and Thailand here to represent the eighteenth-century documents. 74 Journal du Seminaire de Saint Joseph, 1698, Archives de la Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris (Hereafter mep) 014: Siam. 75 “Projet pour l’établissement d’école des enfants,” 1698, an mic k 1374 Chine. 76 Ibid. 77 “Rélations de Siam,” 1699, mep 012: Siam. 78 “Projet pour l’établissement d’école des enfants,” 1698, an mic k 1374 Chine. 79 This age range is ideal for the quickest, most enduring, and least challenging attainment of fluency in a second language. See S. Marinova-Todd, “Three Misconceptions about Age and L2 Learning,” tesol Quarterly 34/1 (2001). 80 “L’École de l’Orient,” 1699, mep 012: Siam. 81 Journal de Seminaire, 1701–1702, mep 018: Siam. epilo gue 1 A 1788 survey conducted by Lyon’s consulate that showed 63 per cent of Lyon’s looms (likely 14,777) were idle in the winter of 1788 as a result of bad silkworm harvests. Over the next decade, a massive exodus of workers occurred, resulting in Lyon’s population declining by nearly half to 88,000 residents. See, Daryl

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7 8 9 10

11

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Hafter, Women at Work in Preindustrial France (University Park, pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 275. “Du premier dimanche d’octobre 1789,” adr 5D 5. Antoine Nicolas de Caritat de Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progress de l’esprit humain (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 81, 86. “Exercice Public de la Maison d’Éducation de Blois,” an D/XXXVIII/1. “Les étudiants de Beaux-Arts,” an D/XXXVIII/1. For a larger discussion on how the French Revolution may have actually lessened agency, autonomy, and understandings of “the self ” compared to the ancien régime, see Dror Warhman, Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Cultural in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). “Projet de décret sur les écoles primaires,” The Newberry Library (hereafter nl) frc 20631. Ibid. “Prospectus des cours de l’école centrale du département de Lyonn,” nl frc 10156. There were a few scholarships or “free positions” open to poor children but only a handful at every school. “Sur l’organisation des Ecoles primaires,” nl frc 12541. As Mona Ozouf has argued, festivals in revolutionary France served a socializing purpose. The frequent parades and public displays allowed revolutionaries to essentially create a new world, imbuing new cultural symbols with power and meaning. Festivals, then, were one way to inculcate new ideas about the changing world. See Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1991). “Pour la confirmation de l’établissement d’une école centrale,” nl frc 24139. “Planetary systems” was a type of science class, aimed at explaining the “mysteries of nature” to young women. The class demonstrates the impact of science on education during the Enlightenment as well as the de-Christianization of France. In this class, students learned through the use of armillary spheres to study seasonal changes, the rotation of the Earth, and other natural phenomenon. They supplemented their theoretical learning with nature walks during which they charted the movement of the sun, stars, moon, and even clouds onto the earth. Instead of looking towards Biblical sources to explain the natural world, these classes emphasized that women should study the patterns present in nature. To further emphasize the gendered nature of this class, young women did not engage deeply in the study of physics or chemistry in this class. Most of the content was more abstract and focused on very basic ideas. “Exercise Public de la Maison d’Éducation de Blois,” an D/XXXVIII/1.

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14 According to Linda Kerber, women’s political role in the early American republic was to serve as a “Republican Mother.” Educated to read and write, women were to instruct their sons on the importance of republicanism and the virtues associated with it. They were to emphasize their son’s responsibilities as a citizen to vote and be active in local, state, and federal government. See Linda Kerber, “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment – An American Perspective,” American Quarterly 28, 2 (1978). 15 “Distribution des Prix de Moralité,” nl frc 3529.

Index

abandoned children, 19, 24, 151; in Lyon, 32, 33, 225n44; in Lyonnais charity schools, 59–61; in Paris, 109–10; protections under the state, 112; care for, 115; legal classifications, 115–18, 233n18. See also enfants de l’état adoption, 118, 233n21 age: as a category of historical analysis, 7–10, 217n41; of childhood, 14; gendered divisions, 15–16; legal categories; 16–19; limits for school enrolment (Lyon), 53–6; knowledge of age, 55; limits for Paris hospitalorphanages, 119; La Trinité’s organization around, 134–5; Edict of 1666 and 1670, 149–51; marriageable, 151, 154–5; as nonthreatening, 167; for jeunes de langues, 190–1; ideal language acquisition, 196, 247n79 agency: of children and youth, 9–10; in Lyon charity schools, 47–51; as expressed in choice, 95–7, 184; of enfants de l’état, 122–4, 145; of filles du roi, 162; jeunes de langues, 184, 188–9, 198; in the French revolution, 248n6 allouage, 142–4 alphabet, 61–3, 81 Anjou, Jean Claude, 44–7, 54, 61, 71, 74, 76 Antilles, 157 apprentice 41, 42, 45, 61, 91, 139, 143, 163, 175 apprenticeship, 4, 42, 45–49, 121, 126, 135,

215n28; as a key part of education, 12, 135– 8; legal definition of 16; typical age of 45; quasi-apprenticeships, 71–4, 136–45; preapprenticehips, 138–41; differences with allouage, 142. See also allouage Atlantic: as a category of analysis, 148, 168–9; bi-oceanic understanding, 169 Arnauld, Antoine, 82, 99, 206 Aumône Générale de Lyon, 3, 23–4, 46, 75, 211n2 Axtell, James, 171 Baiselat, Françoise, 4 bandes, 46, as class organization in Lyon, 53– 4; typical size of, 56; movement through, 61; religious instruction in, 70–1; vocational training 73–5; learning outside the classroom 80–3 bandouliers du Mississippi, 162–4 Bennett, Judith, 85 Berthier, Annie, 193 Besset, Jean, 35 Bigot, Nicolas, 66, 68 de la Boulaye, Sieur de Louis-Hyacinthe Plomier, 157–8 Brasseaux, Carl, 148 Bureau des Écoles (Lyon), 3, 25, 46, 53, 90, 99, 208; establishment of, 32–3; as a temp agency, 38; support of curriculum, 46–75; interactions with other towns, 100–5

252 Buvet, François, 90–1 Buvet, Jean, 90–1 Cachet, Marie, 35 Camot, Louise, 38 Capitulations of the Ottoman Empire, 179, 245n41 Carter, Karen, 11, 48 Catechism, 31, 45, 47, 86, 92, 98, 101–102, 122, 171, 196; reform through, 12–13, 31–3; lessons 51–5, 63–6, 70–1, 104–8, 129–31; children teaching to others 80–1, 135–6; in Québec, 174 Catholic Church, 112 as a stakeholder in reform in Lyon, 24, 39, 79; influence, 80; as a stakeholder in Paris, 109, 115; care of foundlings, 115; evangelization efforts, 166, 170, 242n2. See also Catholic Reformation Catholic Reformation: impulse of charitable giving, 11–12; spread of through schools and schoolchildren, 11, 25, 79–81, 105, 135–6; 209; studies of 25 Châlons-en-Champagne, 100–2 chambre des Arméniens, 187 charity schools (écoles de charité), 3, 5, 24: in Lyon, 29, 32–6; fundraising for in Lyon, 30–3, 37; parents’ participation in, 39–43; curriculum of, 48–75; established on Lyonnais model, 97–104; in Paris, 104–10; in Rouen, 47, 104, 110; in Troyes, 98, 100–2 Chartier, Roger, 47, 49 Chastillon, Philliberte de, 38 Chevrainville, Marie-Madeleine, 146–7 Chevrefils, François, 152 chiffres de finance, 69–70, 83, 108 child police, 87–90, 96, 228n34 childhood: as a category for historical analysis, 5–10; sources about, 7–8; as a formative period of development, 5–11, 77, 209; study of, 6–11; in New France, 155–6, 172–4. See also age China, 166 citizenship, 203, 206–7, 208 Clairambault, Paul, 4–5 Claudel, Marie, 35 class lists, 42, 49, 53, 58, 74, 84, 86 clothing: as personal identity, 132, 188; hy-

INDEX bridity of cultures, 187–9; as uniform, 130–2 coeducation: in Lyon, 56–8; in La Trinité, 134–5 Couet, Charles, 175 coureurs des bois, 172–3 Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 13, 20, 167; and filles du roi, 147–56; and the Marseilles Chambre de Commerce, 179–85; and jeunes de langues, 179–90 Collins, James, 12, 114 Committee of Public Instruction (Comité de l’Instruction Publique), 202–5, 207 Compagnie du Saint Sacrement, 105, 127 Condorcet, Nicolas, 201 Conrad, Glenn, 148 Constantinople (Istanbul), 5, 180, 181; and jeunes de langues, 183–95 consumer revolution, 132 Crowston, Clare, 9, 12, 49, 107, 138, 141 curriculum: in Lyon charity schools, 12, 46– 51; child-centric in Lyon charity schools, 53–74; mathematical in Lyon charity schools, 68–71; vocational curriculum in Lyon charity schools, 71–4; in Dijon, 100; in Saint Etienne, 103; in Paris charity schools, 105–8; in Québec, 176–8; vocational training in New France, 177–9; in La Trinité, 134–6; of work, 136–8; language acquisition, 179–88. See also apprenticeship; règlemens Curtis, Sarah, 48 Dawdy, Shannon Lee, 148 David, George, 75 Dehérain, Henri, 193 Démia, Charles: as directuer des écoles, 50– 99; early plans for Lyonnais reform, 30–2; as a fundraiser, 32–7; belief in vocational training, 40; writing the curriculum of Lyon’s charity schools, 46, 50–1; influence in New France, 170. See also Règlemens Denonville, Jacques-René de Brisay de, 169, 171–4 diet. See nutrition Dijon, 52, 99, 100, 110, 116, 151 diplomats, 6, 168, 189, 192, 193

INDEX

dowry, 4, 36, 146; of filles du roi, 151–3, 161–2 drogmans, 179–83; 186–8, 193 Ducharme, Catherine, 154 Dufresne, Jacques, 75 Dupont, Pernette, 89 Du Marché, Georges, 89 du Tour, Pencot, 35 duc d’Orléans, Philippe II (Regent), 158–9, 189–90 Dulaine, Marcel, 3 Duval, Jean, 152 education: history of and historiography, 10–12, 48–52; history of informal education, 49–50; language acquisition, 168–9, 179–82. See also curriculum École des Jeunes de Langues, 193, 194. See also jeunes de langues École du Travail de Lyon, 38 écoles centrales, 203–6; entry fees of, 205 Edict of 1666 on Marriage, 148–50 Edict of 1670 on Marriage, 148–50 ego-documents, 7 empathic inference, 8 enfants de l’état, 4, 19–20, 112; classifying 112– 20; state’s responsibility to 112–20; as commodities, 122; lives of, 127–30; education of 134–6; preapprenticeships, 136–45; forced emigration of, 147, 155, 165 enfants trouvés. See abandoned children Erickson, Amy, 9 family size in New France, 154 female education: controversy in Lyon, 56–8; gendered roles, 57, 130; in La Trinité, 129– 31; and apprenticeship, 144; in the Revolution 206–8 femme: definition of, 15, 17 fertility, 147, 154–5 fille: definition of, 14, 15, 17 filles à la cassette, 161 filles débauchées. See prostitutes filles du roi (king’s daughters), 4, 13, 146–7; forced emigration, 146–50; characteristics of, 150–6; age at marriage, 152; average number of children, 154 forçats, 13, 148, 158, 160, 164, 191

253 forced emigration, 158–60, 164 forced marriage: by John Law, 160–2 Foucault, Michel, 12, 33, 114, 136, 157; revision of, 232n13. See also Great Confinement foundlings, 110, 119; perceptions of, 112. See also abandoned children French East India Company, 194, 196 Frenchification, 167; of French youth, 169– 72; of Native youth, 172, 242n2, 244n18 Frenchness, 167, 198 Gaillard, Jean, 75 Galland, Antoine, 186 garçon: definition of, 16 Gerber, Matthew, 7 Gleason, Mona, 9 Gonthier, Grand vicaire de la compagnie du Saint Sacrement, 99 Goodman, Dena, 48 Gowing, Laura, 9 Great Confinement, 33, 114–15, 136, 151, 215n27 Guadeloupe, 174 guilds, 12, 58, 96, 102, 109, 110, 112; in Paris, 137–41; female-only, 141–2 Gutton, Jean-Pierre, 11, 48 habitants, 147, 151, 152, 154, 168, 172 Hafter, Daryl, 141, 220n13 Hardwick, Julie, 9, 13, 89, 212n16, 218n53 Hatanville, Marie, 154 Hitzel, Frédéric, 192–3 Hoffman, Philip, 25 Hôpital de Bicêtre, 159 Hôpital Générale de Fontenay-le-Comte, 117 Hôpital de la Charité (Lyon), 24, 60, 75, 117 Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, 146 Hôpital de la Trinité (Paris), 3–4, 115; entry fee, 121; admission requirements, 118–25; administration of, 121–2; life in, 127–34; learning in 134–45; manufactures, 122 Hôpital des Enfants Trouvés, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, 126, 130, 142, 234n34; forced emigration from, 159, 162 Hôpital du Saint Esprit, 118–19 hospital-orphanage, 3–8, 20, 109–10, 111–12, 146, 151, 152, 159, 170, 196, 201, 205, 209;

254 definition of, 218n56; organization of, 116– 19. See also Hôpital de la Trinité Hôtel Dieu de Lyon, 23, 24, 29, 40, 46, 59–60; schoolchildren giving alms at, 80, 81, 135; renovation of, 59–60, 71, 72; orphans, 59– 60; as center of poor relief, 75. See also: Aumône Générale de Lyon Hôtel Dieu de Paris, 142, 234n34: financial stress, 120 Hôtel de Ville de Lyon, 22–3, 29; as a stakeholder in Lyon’s social reform, 30–5; as an authority, 93 idleness: fear of, 32–3; perceptions of, 133; reasons for forcible migration, 157 illegitimacy, 7, 18; definition of, 116; and immorality, 119–20. See also legitimacy immorality, 5, 206, 209: association with the poor, 19, 23, 44, 117; desire to eliminate, 23, 35, 100–2; fear of, 37, 53; gendered assumptions, 119, 129; as an inherited characteristic, 152, 172; temptations from, 186. See also morality de l’Incarnation, Marie, 154–5, 169 India, 166, 167, 169, 179 Italy, 25, 191; pedagogy, 49 jeune: definition of, 14–15 jeunes de langues, 167; as colonial strategy, 168; in the Ottoman Empire, 179–94; Colbert’s program, 183; selection of, 184–6; agency, 184; educational program, 186–90; concerns of “going native,” 187; hybrid identities, 188–91 Jodoin, Claude, 153 Jones, Colin B., 114 Kaplan, Steven, 137 Kerber, Linda, 207 Lamy, Joseph-Isaac, 146 Lamy, Marie, 152 Landry, Yves, 150 language acquisition, 179–87, 247n79 La Rochelle, 4, 158; as a port for forced emigration, 159–64 La Trinité. See Hôpital de la Trinité

INDEX Latin, 51, 67; as necessary for jeunes de langues, 183–8 Latrielle, Andre, 48 Law, John, 156, 160–1 legitimacy: definition of, 116–18; at La Trinité, 120–1, 126, 128. See also illegitimacy Levant, 4, 13, 167, 179, 180, 182, 189, 195, 198, 199 Ligue (The Catholic Ligue): Lyon as a stronghold, 28–9; Troyes as a stronghold, 100 literacy, 11, 47, 57, 78, 81; in Lyon, 62–8; and orthography, 63, 67; family reading to teach, 82 Louis XIV, 13, 20, 26, 57; lettres patents for Lyon’s écoles de charité, 36; Edict of 1670, 19; 1698 Mandate, 98, 109; and enfants de l’état, 112; filles du roi, 146–7, 158; death, 158; imperial ambitions, 167–6, 179, 182, 194 Louisiana, 5, 20, 147, 198; trafficking in, 156– 68; revised notion of childhood in, 173; education in, 173–80 lower sorts, 30, 34, 36, 99: in Lyon, 19, 24, 36, 50, 76, 77, 83, 96; in Paris, 133 Lyon: as an economic hub, 25–6; social hierarchy, 28–31; population, 29; as resistant to royal authority, 26–9; during the Revolution, 200–2 Magnuson, Roger, 170–1 majority, age of, 16 maison de correction, 161 Mandate on Schoolmasters of 1698, 98 Manis, Jean, 35 Marseilles, 104, 110, 116, 151, 158, 161; and jeunes de langues, 179–94 Martinique, 174 mathematics, 68, 83; counting, 69, 82. See also chiffres de finance Maynes, Mary Jo, 8 menu people. See lower sorts methodology, 6–10 Meyzonne, Jean François Barrieu, 34, 35 minority, age of, 16 Mississippi Company, 145, 147, 156, 189, 191, 240n36; forcible emigration of youth, 158– 64; bandouliers, 162–5

INDEX

Montréal, 58, 146, 152, 157, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177, 178 morality, 5, 78, 88, 123; Catholic, 5, 52; of the poor, 23; improvement of, 25, 35, 52, 96, 108, 113; of orphans, 116; gendered assumptions, 129, 217n51; as an inherited, 152, 172; and forced migration, 159. See also morality prizes morality prizes, 205–8 Morel, Antoine, 125 Morel, Jean, 3 Motley, Mark, 48 National Assembly, 76, 200–1 National Convention, 193, 201–2 nationalism, 79, 87, 171 New Catholics, 63 Neufville, Camille de Neufville de Villeroy, Archbishop of Lyon, 23; goals as archbishop, 30–2; as a stakeholder for charity schools, 77, 97, 109 New France: as colonial expansion, 4, 165; and filles du roi, 146–56; new understandings of childhood, 169; education in, 170, 172–8 New Orleans, 52, 158, 161, 164, 172–5, 177, 178 Norberg, Kathryn, 12, 114 nutrition, 133–4 orphan, 4, 24; in Lyon, 59–60, 101; in Paris, see enfants de l’état Ottoman Empire, 4–6, 13, 167, 168; jeunes de langues program, 179–94; languages of, 184 Parenteau, Pierre, 153 parents: parental authority, 17, 94, 125–7 participation in reform, 40–3; incentives for participation in reform, 126–7 abandonment of children, 110–12 Paris: early charity schools, 47, 52; focus on orphans, 57, 110–20; social reform in, 104– 14, 145; overcrowding, 151, 156; jeunes de langues, 187–90 Paris Society of Foreign Missions, 166, 194– 200 Parlement de Paris, 120, 156, 166 patriarchy: operations of, 7, 9, 79; in defini-

255 tions of age, 14; social and familial organization, 17, 96, 203; contested nature of, 90, 109; kingly authority, 155 patriarchal equilibrium, 85, 228n28 petitions for admission: in Lyon, 39–42; at La Trinité, 123–5 Phélypeaux, Louis, Comte de Pontchartrain, 156, 157, 191 phonetics, 63, 66–7, 81. See also pronunciation power: dynamics of children and youth, 6–8, 14, 203; rejecting binary, 8–9; as multidirectional; 8–10, 47; children’s expression of power, 10, 95, 173; colonial, 13, 20, 158, 166, 168; dependent on age, 15, 16; Louis XIV and absolutism, 36–7, 112, 114, 115, 182, 197; Catholic Church, 37; through surveillance, 88, 96; paternalism, 94. See also patriarchy Premo, Bianca, 8 prix de moralité. See morality prizes pronatalism, 147–65 pronunciation, 66–7. See also phonetics prostitutes, 12, 114, 161, 164; or casket girls, 147, 152, 156; forced emigration, 156, 164 Québec, 4, 5, 146, 152, 154, 157, 171, 173, 174, 175 Ratio Studiorum, 51 religious instruction, 11, 48, 52, 105, 129, 170, 174, 175; children as teachers of, 79–81. See also Catechism and curriculum règlemens de la Trinité, 120–1, 127, 134–6 Règlemens des écoles charitable de Lyon, 41, 202–3; experimental nature of, 45–7; drafting with children, 50–70; Catholic influence, 79–80; expectations for family members, 83; surveillance code of, 88, 90; adoption of throughout France, 97–105; in Paris, 105, 107–9; in New France, 170 règlemens de l’école pour des pauvres enfants de Saint Sulpice, 106–7 reproduction: as a marker of age, 17; filles du roi as vessels of, 150–69 republican motherhood, 207 Richard, Jacques Barthélemy, 175 Rigault, Claude, 22

256 Rossignoud, Jacques, 86 Rouen: early charity schools, 47, 104; establishment of charity schools on Lyonnais model, 110, 116; and Mississippi Company, 161 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 11 runaways, 162 Saint Charles charity school (Lyon), 31, 34–6, 40–3, 57, 60, 68 Saint Domingue, 156–7, 174 Saint Etienne (village), 39, 94, 103 Saint Pierre charity school (Lyon), 31, 34–6, 44–6, 71–2, 75 Saint Paul charity school (Lyon), 29, 35–8, 57, 66, 68, 71, 75, 81, 83, 106 Saint George charity school (Lyon), 31, 50, 57, 59, 63, 72, 74, 82, 88 St Malo, 157 School of the Orient, 166, 195 schoolmasters and schoolmistresses: records of, 7–10, 50, 53; authority of, 40, 47, 86; participation in social reform, 46; aversion to mathematics, 68; backgrounds as artisans, 175–7; during the revolution, 200–1 Siam, 6, 13, 20, 166–8, 194 Smyrna, 180, 181, 183 social engineering, 147, 158, 160, 241n37 songs: as a pedagogical tool, 63 subjecthood, 12, 46, 160, 167: youthful identity, 5–6; lessons about, 73–5; as a worker, 46, 174. See also Frenchification surveillance, 6, 54, 86 88–95 Talon, Jean, 147, 152 Takeda, Junko, 13, 182

INDEX Terret, Philibert, 3–4 Tétu, Jean-Baptiste, 175 Thomas, Anne, 153 Tisserand, Madeleine, 153 trafficking, 146–65; difference between slavery, 148 translators. See drogmans Trent, Edict of (1563), 32 Trois Rivières, 152, 171, 175 Troyes, 100–2 Tuttle, Leslie, 13 147, 149 university: historiography on, 48; preparation for, 73, 174, 190, 193 Vachot, Pierre, 74 Venice (Venetian), 183, 191 Vidal, Cécil, 148 visite générale (home visits), 40–2 vocational training: as donor incentive in Lyon, 37–9, 46, 50; in La Trinité, 136–45; importance of 71–4. See also curriculum wards of the state. See enfants de l’état White, Sophie, 171 Whitehead, Barbara, 48 widowhood, 153–4 Wood, Laurie, 169 youth: study of, 6–10; difference with childhood, 15; key period of intellectual development, 167; identity, 168. See also childhood Youth Festival, 205–7 Zug, Marcia, 148