What Is the Use of a Book without Pictures?

"What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?" asks Alice in Wonderland. In her original, probing, and meticulous book Les abécédaires français illustrés du XIXe siècle, Ségolène Le Men takes up Alice's query, which she cites. She investigates the foundations of nineteenth-century French children's literacy and discovers there not only conversations but also pictures.

Le Men's own alphabet book is based on an impressive collection of some 765 nineteenth-century examples from the Bibliothèque Nationale. Le Men analyzes her sources with exemplary rigor. Though occasionally she lapses into unnecessary charts and categorizations riddled with confusing ambiguities and exceptions, she almost always maintains her sense of the overall project and its cultural context. Indeed, Abécédaires français helps us see its subject in a completely new way precisely because it situates its material in relation to broad social and epistemological issues.

The book is divided into three parts, each of which incisively addresses a different issue. Part 1, "The Conditions of Educational Practice," studies the material conditions of literacy. Who produced alphabet books? How were they distributed, and to whom? Who was taught to read, and by whom? By giving attention to such factors as the invention of lithography in 1796, Le Men immediately situates her subject in the real world of individuals, institutions, technology, economics, and government policy. Learning to read, Le Men begins by showing us, happens partly as a function of historically and culturally specific circumstances. She reminds us to take into account such phenomena as the new nineteenth-century inclusion of a child's first lessons among maternal duties, which encouraged mothers to use alphabet books. This gender factor was exploited by another nineteenth-century French phenomenon, the entrepreneurial publisher eager to expand his markets by promoting alphabet books.

But Le Men—whose background, like the books she studies, is of an "intersemiotic type" (146)—goes on in Part 2, "Reading's Technical Apprenticeship," to show exactly how the alphabet book inculcates literacy. The most methodologically innovative passages of Abécédaires français analyze not only the pedagogies of the written word and the image but the relation between the two. The very belief in a radical difference between the meanings and effects produced by images as opposed to words gave rise to the nineteenth-century French alphabet book and ensured its cultural coherence.

According to these books the image preceded the word. The image belonged to the playful consciousness of the small child, whereas the word marked the child's entry into the realm of reason. Prior to the nineteenth century, Le Men explains, reading was unrelentingly taught through Cartesian "analytical" methods, based entirely on rationality and memorization. The introduction, then, of images into alphabets both signaled and produced a "synthetic" method of learning based on association and a mutual reinforcement of play and reason.

Proponents of the new method claimed of images that "this kind of thing exerts a powerful attraction over children: nothing captures their gaze nor rivets their attention more rapidly than this first gaze of the mind that fecundates our intellectual qualities" (145). The new synthetic method had its adamant detractors, however, chiefly among religious orders whose control over French primary education was being eroded by exactly those forces that enthusiastically adopted the new method: republican schoolteachers or administrators whose triumph finally came under Jules Ferry in the late 1870s and early 1880s.

Le Men traces the genealogy of the synthetic method as a pedagogic attitude back through Kant, Rousseau, and Locke. More unusual is the genealogy she provides us of belief in the semiotic efficacy of the image. The great precedent, model of all future illustrated alphabet books, was Comenius's 1658 Orbis Pictus. Comenius asserted that the power of the image resided in its ability to signify the whole and to convey its meaning to the senses: "The foundation of all this consists in well...