Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century French Children's Literature: The Example of La Bibliothèque Rose

In a memorable scene from the Countess de Ségur's popular children's novel Les Petites Filles Modèles [The Model Little Girls] (1858), the young protagonists enthusiastically gather furniture and a wagonload of food to help an impoverished mother and child. Their sensitivity and generosity model sentimental values that the author clearly wishes to promote in child readers. But the technique of doing good remains to be taught; when a laughing servant tells them to take back most of the food, because it would only spoil, she demonstrates the need to do charity in a rational and pragmatic manner. Such lessons of philanthropy, with their dual appeal to emotion and reason, figured prominently in children's literature of the nineteenth century in France. This study of the Bibliothèque Rose Illustrée [Illustrated Pink Library] examines how an audience of predominantly middle-and upper-class children was taught to see and to respond to the poor and through this to understand their own identity in terms of class and gender roles.

Acts of private charity were common and important in nineteenth-century France. Socialist and utopian thinkers of the 1830s and 1840s had advocated radical restructurings of society to erase inequalities and to provide justice, not charity. Yet government officials, moral economists, and Catholic leaders countered the call for political and economic reform with arguments that the patterns of private life were the root causes of poverty and its accompanying social disorder (Lynch 11-12). Social Catholicism, as typified by the foundation of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in the 1830s, preached the application of Christian benevolence in the form of material and moral assistance to the marginalized through private intervention in personal lives. Such outreach was promoted not only to relieve the poor for humanitarian and egalitarian reasons but in hopes that demonstrations of solidarity might ensure stability in a country that had seen violent class warfare and continued interclass tensions. The ideal of society as "the harmonious integration of various social groups into a transcendent whole" (Maza 228-29) formed an essential base of French thought and influenced the education of children, as recognition of moral responsibility and commitment to others were articulated as important goals for their development. Catholicism in particular stressed the role of mothers in the formation of benevolent children, for women were seen to possess sensitive and suffering natures that could empathize with those in need, and their centrality in the domestic realm enabled them to actively do charitable work and to model it to the next generation. One unidentified mother left a memorandum detailing how she would accomplish the goal of teaching charity to her children through discussion and action: "A coffer will be placed in the children's chapel, so that they can dispose of their own alms of their own free will, alone without witnesses. The small sums collected in this coffer will be given to a poor person in the neighborhood, possibly in the form of bread or clothing" (Hellerstein et al. 249).¹

But not all observers were confident in the adequacy of parents to raise children with appropriate values; in an "approbation" prefatory to Ségur's Evangile d'une Grand'mère [A Grandmother's Gospel] (1866), Cardinal Donnet wrote: "well-intentioned parents don't know the path to follow to form Christians in the home and see themselves condemned to trust to others" (v).² Writers for children (the vast majority of them women) were among the "others" entrusted to teach children private values and public actions appropriate to their age, gender, and class. From their stories and novels for children, it seems clear that upper-class women, perhaps to emphasize their own significance, embraced the mission to counter the competitive market values of industrialization with a view of society as a "collection of families" where women and children were central (Smith 160).³

The middle-class and aristocratic writers analyzed in this study painted visions of social reconciliation based on the mutual dependence of the social orders, what the...