L'Invention du jeune enfant au XIXe siecle: De la salle d'asile a l'ecole maternelle (review)

A sophisticated study providing insights into the history of childhood, schooling, philanthropy, and educational administration, this important volume treats the early history of French nursery schools. Known officially as salles d’asile (literally, rooms of asylum) until the Third Republic renamed them écoles maternelles, these institutions for children ages two to six reflected a nineteenth-century evolution in thinking about the mental faculties of younger children. Previously many pedagogues and religious leaders had believed that schooling could not be effective before the “age of reason,” around age seven. At the same time, these schools were originally shelters for the younger children of working-class mothers driven by necessity to seek employment outside the home. The private sector, rather than the state, launched salles d’asile, and founders were motivated by genuinely humanitarian impulses.

Like Catherine Duprat—whose massive study (Usage et pratiques de la philanthropie: Pauvreté, action social et lien social à Paris, au cours du premier XIXe siècle, 1996–97) traces French philanthropists’ concerns and activities from the 1780s, through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes, to the constitutional monarchies ending in 1848—Luc emphasizes the impact of private initiatives on the formulation of government policies. Begun in Paris during the late 1820s and emulated in other cities and towns, nursery schools owed much to charitable benefactors like Emilie Mallet (wife of a Protestant banker) and Jean-Denys Cochin (also mayor of a Paris working-class district on the Left bank). An older historiography often considered Cochin the founder of salles d’asile, but Luc convincingly demonstrates that Mallet and her women associates merit that title. Luc’s use of the Mallet family’s private papers also provides numerous insights into the cooperative efforts of men and women in some, if not all, philanthropic arenas. He thereby shows women’s involvement in, rather than exclusion from, a kind of public sphere. Once a committee of Parisian women launched the first salle d’asile, they and Cochin sent Madame Eugénie Millet to England to study that country’s “infant schools.” Male relatives on the Paris Conseil des hospices, which oversaw hospitals and orphanages, helped obtain city funding and secured Millet’s appointment as the city’s first salaried inspectress of nursery schools.

The more familiar theme of women’s exclusion from the public sphere—in this case, from control of salles d’asile—began to emerge under the July Monarchy, but women nonetheless retained several roles. Education ministers Francois Guizot and Jean Pelet de la Lozère included nursery schools in several decrees, and the royal ordinance of 22 December 1837, framed by minister Achille de Salvandy, was their veritable “charter,” just as the 1833 Guizot law was so dubbed for primary education. Salvandy, Mallet’s nephew by marriage, preserved a place for women in the “maternal” oversight of nursery schools, for women continued as unpaid volunteer school inspectresses and served on committees certifying nursery school teachers. These teachers were mostly women and, after an 1855 decree, only women. Salvandy also created a central advisory commission for salles d’asile that was unique among ministerial commissions because women were a large majority of its members and Madame Mallet a driving force on it. Yet she and other women would have preferred less state intrusion into an institution that they originally saw as their turf.

The theme of schools as agencies of social control has often been linked to nineteenth-century educational policy, by both Marxists and disciples of Michel Foucault. Luc argues, however, that concern about the welfare of poor young children originally loomed much larger in the thinking of nursery schools’ founders, and he does not see goals of social control intruding prominently before the mid-1840s. By then, another change in the sponsorship and running of salles d’asile had also occurred. Catholic leaders, originally suspicious of nursery schools as Protestant creations, now supported nuns’ enlarged role...