• Click Book Manuscript Plan for a plan of my book manuscript in preparation.
• Click Articles in Progress for a list of articles in preparation.

 

 Book Manuscript Plan: “Coercing Children”

“Coercing Children: State-Building and Social Reform in the 18^th-Century French World” reveals that children were capable of participating in or rebelling against authoritative state, local, and religious initiatives across the burgeoning eighteenth-century French empire. Children were not merely passive subjects upon which authority was exercised. Instead, social reform was contingent on children’s compliance and defiance as they passed through educational programs in charity schools, hospital-orphanages, and colonial schools. I use “childhood” as a central category for historical analysis to demonstrate that social reform was not a strictly top-down process that the state mandated. As a series of regional case studies, the chapters link major French cities to the peripheries of the eighteenth-century world while examining childhood experience. Many of the programs that encouraged children to be major stakeholders in social reform started in France’s second city, Lyon, and spread to Paris, North America, the Levant, and Southeast Asia.  Whether in the metropole, the colonies, or the wider eighteenth-century world, French children negotiated, shared, and played an active role in social reform, state-building, commerce, and imperialization with adults and with each other.

“Coercing Children” joins the nascent but growing field of childhood studies that considers children as exceptional actors in the historical process, focusing on youth experience.  My manuscript both provides an important interpretation about the role of children in eighteenth-century social reform and state-building and also contributes a methodological framework for examining children as historical actors. “Coercing Children” benefits from the voices of “ordinary” children – those whose families were from the working poor who constituted the majority of early modern France’s population.  With these narratives, my manuscript provides unprecedented access to youth experience in eighteenth-century France. A number of these children’s documents detail their experiences in the colonies and nascent eastern empire, demonstrating the broader global experiences of childhood.  Although these kinds of sources are common in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, few early modern historians have incorporated non-elite children’s ego-documents into their studies. Additionally, my manuscript draws on a number of prescriptive sources, such as school regulations, schoolmasters’ reports, and bureaucratic documents, that I have read against the grain to uncover children’s experiences.

Much like how Joan Scott and Louise Tilly both famously considered the role of gender and family as categories for historical analysis, “Coercing Children” examines why childhood is a useful analytical lens.  I focus on how our understanding of power relationships can be greatly enriched by studying children. Although we often think of the state, church, and family as dominant powers that coerce, or impose power on subjects, including children, when children and their experiences are more carefully considered, a clear dyad between compliance and defiance is presented.  Children can be coerced, but they are equally capable of coercing fellow children and adults alike. Methodologically, much of gender history’s consideration of power relationships enhance our understanding of how children might have complied with authority or defied against various civil, religious, and familial authorities.  Far from Philippe Ariès’s notorious image of children as passive receptacles of knowledge, early modern youths were actors in the historical process.

My manuscript is a revised version of my dissertation.  During revision, I focused on and strengthened three key parts of my argument: the meaning of childhood; the role of gender to childhood experience; and the emergence of the French global empire. First, any discussion of early modern childhood needs to be contextualized and theory-based.  This involves breaking down the etiology of the use of “childhood” and “children” in the early modern French world.  The French used the terms “enfants” (children) and “jeunes” (youths) interchangeably to refer to people between the ages of 7 and 25. But, from the available literature it is clear that people implied differences between children of different ages despite using only two words to describe this wide range of ages.  The manuscript explicates that these “children” were what modern society considers “adolescents” or “youths.” Contextualizing the category of “childhood” in early modern France helps to elucidate experiences at certain ages, considering whether or not numeric age was necessarily tied to specific expectations.

Gender often further defined age-specific expectations. Understanding how gender relates to childhood experience is extremely important as expectations on boys and girls differed.  More significantly, boys and girls experienced life differently.  Therefore, after carefully interrogating my sources for gendered difference, I built the category of childhood gender from the bottom-up in my manuscript. I argue that the French state was much more concerned about the assignment of gendered identities and actions than local communities were.  The state insisted that children were segregated in schools according to sex. However, co-education in the same classroom existed in French communities, both urban and rural, into to the nineteenth century.  Additionally, I analyze how gendered identities were communicated to children and how children internalized those ideas.   Interrogating documents with gender as a central concern also helps develop arguments about children’s sexuality, especially as they transitioned from adolescents to procreative adults.  This is epitomized through the experience of filles de roi.  These girls were sent to North America to marry French men, birth French babies, and build the French population abroad.

Furthering this global framework, I argue that though local communities initiated, implemented, and sustained children’s social reform, there were similar global French practices. My manuscript considers the ways in which French children in Canada, Louisiana, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Levant, and in Southeast Asia not only populated the territories, but had important impacts on the trajectory of French power relations in each area.  French historiography has been predominately concerned with the Atlantic, but social reform programs using children also existed in the developing eastern empire. Much of the colonization of the Ottoman Empire and Asia was not a territorial colonization, but rather an attempt to colonize the commercial and ideological realms, often by using children as intermediaries. Children served important roles as trans-imperial subjects of the early modern French state.  Youths brokered political, cultural, and economic alliances with foreign populations in Siam, the Safavid Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Cochinchina.  While acting as agents of the state and advancing French imperialism, children also created new categories of identity, becoming hybrid, trans-imperial subjects.  In looking at these children’s experiences abroad, it is important to consider not only their impact on foreign societies, but also foreign societies’ impact on the children. Socializing with foreigners, many of whom were non-Christian, also raises questions about the interaction of faiths during this period. Expanding the French global framework is a crucial intervention to the historiographies of the early French empire and childhood.

 

Articles in Progress

• “Breaking a Child’s Will: Eighteenth-Century Parisian Juvenile Detention Centers,” under review at French Historical Studies
  • Abstract: On April 20, 1684, Louis XIV declared that any Parisian child, male or female, of the honorable poor under the age of 25 who mistreated their parents by refusing to work, by engaging in libertine activities, or by becoming prostitutes would be subject to imprisonment at either the Bicêtre or Salpêtrière hospitals in newly constructed “maisons de correction” or juvenile detention centers. This article argues that detention centers targeted rebellious youths from a select subsection of Paris’s lower sorts, including trained and artisanal backgrounds, in order to re-educate and rehabilitate them. As part of eighteenth-century experiments in socialized care, the juvenile detention centers and the families that petitioned them sought to reestablish patriarchal control, both in the household and in the larger community, through rigorous physical punishment and intense vocational training.
• “Little Republicans: Youth Inculcation in Revolutionary France” – article in preparation using the Newberry Library’s French Revolution Pamphlet Collection
• “Casket Girls: Vampires or Mothers of French Louisiana?” – article in research phase with undergraduate research assistant, sponsored by CHaSS Faculty-Student Summer Mentorship Program
• “The Early Modern Penis Vagina” – blog post for Notches’ Archives of Desire series
• “Mapping the Early Modern World” – blog post for AHA’s Teaching with #DigHist

Second Project: A Revolution in Childhood: Youth Inculcation and Experience in Revolutionary France

This manuscript project will examine the history of youth experience and inculcation from 1789 to 1815. This project draws heavily on the archives of the Comité de l’Instruction Publique and other revolutionary committees that discussed the importance of education and inculcation as “keys” to the continued success of the early French Republic. A Revolution in Childhood will build on Coercing Children to consider this pivotal period in the history of childhood and youth.

Third Project: Infanticide in Early Modern France

Information forthcoming

Ongoing Project – “Imperial Children: Colonizing the East”

I will examine French, colonial, and Asian children’s highly active roles in social reform in a global context from 1650 to 1900. Working in tandem with one another, the French crown and the Catholic Church began a series of missions to Persia, Siam, Pondicherry, and China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hoping to expand their influence in the east both politically and religiously, these state-sponsored missionaries from the Missions Etrangères de Paris kept very detailed records in French about their experiences abroad. Every year missionaries sent these documents back to Paris where they were archived and remain in the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris. Furthermore, the crown kept detailed records about their initiatives in the east through the use of missionaries.

The monarchy, the Church, and colonial society understood that children, whether French or indigenous, could serve in a variety of functions that would benefit the expansion and stability of the French presence in the Near East and Asia. Orphaned children were often conscripted into the royal armies or they were put on merchant vessels, serving as lookouts and deckhands. The Missions Etrangères and the state sponsored a seminary in the eighteenth century that sought to educate French boys between the ages of 12 and 16 to be agents of colonization by teaching them how to teach other children, most importantly, Asian children. In this way, French children would act as teachers to other children. Those Asian children receiving the education could then help initiate and stabilize French connections in their homelands.

The historiography of French colonization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Near East and Asia remains underdeveloped, especially in relationship to social history. Although existing studies investigate missions, such as the 1680s missions to Siam, they overlook the importance that children had to imperial strategy. “Imperial Children” will bring attention to the role of French and Asian children in the development of political, economic, and cultural alliances.