Wesleyan University

The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Aris

Author(s): Adrian Wilson
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Feb., 1980), pp. 132-153
Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University
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THE INFANCY OF THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD:

AN APPRAISAL OF PHILIPPE ARIES

ADRIAN WILSON

Few works have exerted a greater influence upon British and American
social historians than Philippe Aries's L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous
l'ancien regime. "Sensitive and encompassing,"2 of "undisputed" importance,3 "erudite, imaginative, and inventive," this book has, in Lawrence
Stone's words, "had a dazzling success" and has been for more than a decade
"the primum mobile of the study of family history."4 Known mainly in its
English translation, Centuries of Childhood, which appeared within two years
of the French original, Aries's work has even received the enthusiastic attention of a feminist and the qualified praise of a leading historical demographer.5
While Aries himself has moved on to explore the themes of contraception and
attitudes to death, Centuries of Childhood continues to appear at the head of
undergraduate reading-lists, seemingly assured of a commanding place in the
historiography of the family.
1. Philippe Aries, L'Enfant et la vie familiale

sous l'ancien regime (Paris, 1960,

1973, 1975). Only the 1975 paperback edition is in print; references here are to this
edition, cited as L'Enfant. The new Preface from the 1973 edition is reprinted in this
version, but the illustrations have been removed and the middle section of the book
drastically abridged.
2. Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin (Cambridge, 1970), 9.

3. Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris
in Sixteenth-CenturyFrance," Past and Present 50 (1971), 56 n. 42.
4. Lawrence Stone, "The Massacre of the Innocents," New York Review of Books
Vol. xxi, no. 18 (14 Nov. 1974), 27.
5. Shulamith Firestone,

The Dialectic

of Sex, The Case for Feminist Revolution

(London, 1971); Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London, 1971), 260. Robert
Baldick's translation, Centuries of Childhood (London, 1962) is cited here as Centuries; it has been reprinted twice (New York, 1965; Harmondsworth, 1973). In the
latter, Penguin edition, not only are the illustrations omitted, but the footnotes have
also been suppressed. This English version is not reliable, for a number of reasons.
Baldick translates sentiment by "idea" and "concept," retaining only one aspect of its
meaning, despite the fact that Aries never uses notion or idee as equivalents (see note
13 below). Nourrice, which has a direct equivalent in "nurse," is anachronistically
rendered throughout as "nanny."Several poems are suppressed entirely (L'Enfant, 38f,
72, 129, 181f, 254f, 273); quotations are shortened (L'Enfant, 180; Centuries, 130);
and at times the text itself is inexplicably edited (L'Enfant, 296; Centuries, 396). I
conclude that this is not a scholarly translation.

ADRIAN WILSON

133

Yet Aries is not without his critics, perhaps the most trenchant of whom
has been Lawrence Stone, who concludes that the book "is now recognized
to be badly flawed in both its methodology and its conclusions."6 Natalie
Zemon Davis finds "a lack of clarity in its description and analysis of youth
and the nuclear family, sometimes based on inadequate evidence and other
times drawing wrong inferences from [the] evidence," while Elizabeth Wirth
Marvick makes essentially the same point in relation to one particular source
Heroard's Journal - which she has subjected to an independent investigation. And Lloyd deMause, self-appointed prophet of the "collective psychohistory" school, asserts that of Aries's "two main arguments" one is "so fuzzy
that it is surprising that so many historians have recently picked it up," while
the other "runs counter to all the evidence."7
The combination of these contradictory sets of responses suggests that
social historians have yet to come to terms with Aries's work. The present
article seeks to redress this, presenting a critical assessment of L'Enfant
which will also, it is hoped, go some way towards explaining the confusion it
has engendered. Because of that confusion,8 it seems appropriate to begin by
summarizing Aries's argument and outlining the general contours of his
approach.

The structure of Aries's argument falls into two "phases" (as we shall call
them), often interwoven in the text, imperfectly separated chronologically,
but conceptually distinct and furnishing the framework which links the different thematic sections and chapters of L'Enfant. The first phase consists of
the demonstration that there was an historical period in which, for a given
theme, modern attitudes or practices cannot be detected, and when instead
there subsisted a different pattern, more or less incompatible with the modern
one: this "old" pattern is defined precisely through a contrast with its modern
6. Stone, 28.
7. Davis, loc. cit.; Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, "The Character of Louis XIII: The
Role of his Physician," Journal of ItiterdisciplinaryHistory 4 (1974), 351 ff.; Lloyd
de Mause, "The Evolution of Childhood," in The History of Childhood, ed. L. de
Mause (New York, 1974), 5f.
8. This confusion exists not merely between different historians, but in individual
responses. Thus Stone's account misconstrues Aries's central thesis of the "discovery of
childhood," by neglecting the definition of the modern sentiment de l'enfance

(Centuries,

128) which is quoted below. Stone also asks of the book: "Is its causal hypothesis
valid?"-failing to notice the fact, which is also a problem, that causality plays very
little part in Aries's argument. De Mause grossly oversimplifies Aries's argument, and
completely elides his discussion of education. For other instances of confusion, over
the themes of education, social class, and Aries's value-judgments, see notes 17, 18,
and 24 below. Aries himself avows that he understands the book better now (1973)
than when he wrote it: see L'Enfant, 5.

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THE INFANCY OF THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD: ARIES

replacement - and vice versa.9 In the second phase Aries traces the process
of transition by which the old pattern gave way to the new. Thus the first
phase applies to "our old traditional societies" and especially to the Middle
Ages; the second relates to the process of transition from "traditional" to
"industrial" society.10 A value-judgment, curiously concealed within much of
the text, is tied to this structure: Aries prefers the ways of life disclosed in the
first phase to those of today. In the three parts into which the book is divided,
the argument treats in turn the child, the school, and the family.
Part I ("Le Sentiment de l'Enfance") suggests that in "traditional" French
society, there was no "awareness of the particular nature of children, that
particular nature which distinguishes the child from the adult, even the young
adult";" this is evidenced in turn through terminology, art, dress, games, and
attitudes to sexuality. Aries suggests that because of this generalized lack of
awareness, children participated fully in adult life, once they were past the
stage of infancy (lasting to the age of seven) in which they were "too fragile"
to do so. During infancy itself, the child "did not count," because the prevailing levels of mortality meant that he was likely to disappear; little affection or interest could be inspired by a being whose hold on life was so
tenuous. On the other hand, Aries tells us that during these first years the
newborn child lived under "the constant solicitude of his mother, his nurse
or his cradle-rocker."'2
The second phase involves the tracing, for each of these themes, of the
emergence of more modern attitudes to children; in each case the seventeenth
century emerges as the period of most rapid or decisive change. In summarizing these developments, Aries defines "two sentiments of childhood." The
first, mignotage ("coddling"), represented the blossoming into explicit expression of an affectionate amusement which "must always" have been felt
by "mothers, nurses and cradle-rockers." This was a female attitude, most
evident in the seventeenth century, and "even better known to us by the critical reactions it provoked" among certain men at this time.13 The second
sentiment, shown by "the moralist and pedagogues of the seventeenth century," was more serious, showing psychological interest and moral solicitude.
Childhood was here regarded variously as a state of weakness and imperfection, and as one of innocence and grace; in either case, what mattered was
the development of Reason, and this was to be based upon an understanding
9. Centuries, 9.

10. L'Enfant, 5-7.

11. Centuries, 128.
12. Ibid., 50, 61, 65f, 71, 90f, 100-103, 128, 411.
13. Ibid., 129-133, 46-49; see also 329. "Sentiment" as Aries uses it is not easily
translated into English, for it carries both "conceptual" and "sentimental" connotations. "Awareness of childhood" and "sense of family" are perhaps the least clumsy
renditions of sentiment de l'enfance and sentiment famnilial. I prefer to retain the French

terms and have usually avoided translating them here.

ADRIAN WILSON

135

of children's natures: "the texts of the late sixteenth century and of the
seventeenth century are full of comments on child psychology."114 Although
this more serious, essentially modern approach arose, unlike mignotage,
"from a source outside the family," none the less "this sentiment in its turn
passed into family life."''5The culmination of this development was the union
in the eighteenth century of "these two elements in the family, together with
a new element: concern about hygiene and physical health." By the latter
half of that century, "the child has taken a central place in the family . . .
everything to do with children and family life has become a matter worthy of
attention."'l6

Parts II and III, dealing with school life and with the family, exhibit the
same structure and chronology (the seventeenth century again being critical)
and will be summarized more briefly. In the school, the first phase is provided by the medieval class, in which the curriculum was not graded by difficulty, students of all ages mingled together, and discipline was minimal or
unknown. A similar mingling, described as "sociability," characterizes the
first phase of Ariess's account of the family: in medieval society men lived
not in private but in public. Once again the second phase, which in these
sections, as in Part I, takes up far more of the text than the first, shows the
emergence of modern ways - the age-stratified and disciplined school; the
family turned inwards upon itself - from this very different pattern.'7
This massive enterprise is subject to three general limitations, which are not
surprising in view of the great length of its time-span and of the originality
of its argument. First, Aries relies upon printed and pictorial evidence:
almost all the few manuscript sources used are taken from printed versions
or from antiquarian compilations. Secondly, the developments he describes
are not explained, nor are they related satisfactorily to other historical
14. Ibid., 131, 132.
15. Ibid., 132f. How this "passed into" family life Aries does not consider.
16. Ibid., 133.
17. Ibid., Part Two (especially Chapter 1) and Part Three (especially Conclusion).
For a more extended summary of the book, embracing all three sections, see David
Hunt, Parents and Children in History: The Psychology of Family Life in Early Modern
France (New York, 1970), 32-37. Although the "extension of school education" was
"the essential event" in the history of the family (Centuries, 369), the status of Part
Two of Aries's book has undergone a curious decline. Absent from the title, it is
relegated to a footnote in Aries's own appraisal, the 1973 Preface (L'Enfant, 27);
and in the 1975 paperback version it has been cut down from over 200 to some 30
pages. A relative silence has also greeted this section, though David Hunt and Lawrence
Stone have taken its themes seriously. Both these authors point out that Aries's attempt
to reconcile the school and the family (Centuries, 369f) strains credulity (Hunt, 41;
Stone, 27). See also the critical remarks of Irene Q. Brown, "Philippe Aries on Education and Society in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-CenturyFrance," History of Education Quarterly (Fall 1967), 357-368.

136

THE INFANCY OF THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD: ARIES

themes.'8 Thirdly, there is a pervasive chronological vagueness, compounded

by the thematic structure of the work, so that a given point in time (for
example, the beginning of the seventeenth century) can variously be located
as early, late, or in-between in the unfolding of the story.
Finally, we may note that Aries consciously writes from what has been
called a "present-minded" point of view.19 As we have seen, comparison of
the past with the present constitutes the first phase of the argument, the
second being the construction of an historical bridge between the two. This
present-mindedness, to which we shall return, is open and unashamed; indeed, Aries has argued that no other historiography is of interest or even
possible to write.20 And the force of such an approach has seldom been displayed more impressively than in Centuries of Childhood. The seemingly
immutable forms of private and domestic life were dissolved into historical
fluidity: the present, when contrasted with the past, acquired a novelty that
was as unexpected as it was refreshing. Aries' book had, at a stroke, historicized the family.
With the awakening of interest in the "history of the family," Centuries
of Childhood was enthusiastically taken up by historians in England and
America who needed an interpretative framework within which to situate
their newly burgeoning researches. Furthermore, the book had few serious
rivals. The much-awaited Children in English Society proved disappointing
18. Thus there is no connection with demographic change (Centuries, 39f, 43); the
significance of "christianization"is stated but never argued or developed (43); the
bourgeoisie is held to have been the site of the new attitudes (331, 336, 370f, 392f,
413f), but this is never explained and is somewhat inconsistently held (61, 398, 404,
406); and the scattered remarks about "technical progress" (L'Enfant, 267) or the
need for a "minimal space" (ibid., 291) provide us with no more than parenthetical
suggestions as to why the "sentiment familial" should have triumphed over medieval
ways. For the demographic picture with which Aries operates, see his earlier Histoire
des populations frangaises (Paris, 1948, 1971, 1976). This work, discussed briefly by
Hunt (42f), adumbrated the project of L'Enfant, and its original Introduction constitutes an important statement of Aries's approach; it is hereafter cited as Populations
(references are to the 1976 edition). This text also illuminates the theme of social class
in L'Enfant. Lawrence Stone's criticism, that Aries pays "too little attention . . . to
the particular class which is being dealt with" (27), is pre-empted by Aries's argument
that the modern sentiment familial originated in the middle class and then "extended
more and more to other social strata" (Centuries, 404). The problem is rather that Aries
imported into L'Enfant the argument about the lower classes he had developed in Populations (335-338), supplementing this with the thinnest of evidence for ancien regime
periods (Centuries, 131). The implications of this procedure are discussed in fn. 25
below.
19. See J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (London, 1961); Herbert Butterfield,
The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931). According to Arthur Marwick,
The Nature of History (London, 1970), 95, the term "present-minded"was first used
by R. L. Schuyler, "Some Historical Idols," Political Science Quarterly 47 (1932).
20. Populations, Introduction, passim; for an outline of his stated position, see note
56 below. See also the 1976 "Advertissement"(ibid., 3f), which implicitly endorses the
approach;and the opening paragraphof Centuries, cited in note 9 above.

ADRIAN

WILSON

137

both in its narrow range of sources and in its unimaginative frame of reference;2' while Aries's most serious competitor, Peter Laslett, was tackling
less ambitious problems in The World We Have Lost. The space which
Aries had entered was that of the personal, interior life of the family in the
past; the framework within which this was interpreted was one of historical
development, of evolution; and both these features of his book made it particularly attractive to those scholars who were seeking to construct a "history of the family" in qualitative, human terms. For several years it was upon
Centuries of Childhood that everyone had to rely, not only for an interpretation of the new subject, but also for much of the evidence upon which any
such interpretation would be based; for the work presented a veritable feast
of material, from its illustrations of the family in art to its detailed exposition
of manuals of etiquette. Finally the vastness of its chronological scope and
the flexibility of its interpretative framework enabled the book to serve as a
reference-point for studies situated almost anywhere within the Western
European past.
It is this hegemony over interpretation long exercised by Centuries of
Childhood which both necessitates and makes possible a critical assessment
of the book. The various detailed studies which we shall be citing in this
essay provide ample testimony to the stimulating influence of Aries's pioneering work - even though all these investigations have produced findings
which fit poorly, if at all, with Aries's suggestions as to their particular time
and place. Their authors, meanwhile, have refrained from tackling the argument of Centuries of Childhood as a whole; and the result has been that
many historians continue to be held in thrall by its framework. In criticizing
that framework, and the methods on which it is based, we shall be making
a plea for more rigorous attention to the conceptual foundations of such a
field as the history of the family.
I shall concentrate upon Part I of L'Enfant, though reference will also be
made to the other two sections of the book. I shall begin by examining the
"first phase" of Aries's argument, particularly its logic, but also raising the
central issue of method. That issue will then be tackled directly in the context of the second "phase." The method thus disclosed will be related, finally,
both to the logical problems and to the present-mindedness of Aries's work,
in an attempt to develop some wider historiographical arguments.
II

The modern sentiment de l'enfance, as Aries defines it, "is not to be confused
with affection for children: it corresponds to an awareness of the particular
21. Ivy Pinchbeck and MargaretHewitt, Children in English Society, 2 vols. (London,
1969, 1973).

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THE INFANCY OF THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD: ARIES

nature of childhood."22 However, two further aspects emerge from Aries's

account, giving this sentiment a more complex character. In the first place,
despite the disclaimer just quoted, the modern sentiment does include a
greater interest in the child, as compared with the traditional attitudes which
it has replaced.23 Secondly, the "awareness of the particular nature of childhood" is not, so to speak, unbiased; instead, it carries an exaggerated emphasis on the innocence of children. To this extent it is as much a construct as a knowledge, particularly as Aries is concerned to rescue from
modern censure the immodesty (impudeur) towards children which, he tells
us, preceded the cult of innocence.
It is easy enough to reconcile the former aspect - a greater interest in
children - with Aries's definition: one would expect that increasing interest
would lead to better understanding, to an "awareness of the particular nature
of childhood." But how do these things relate to the dichotomy between "immodesty" and "innocence"? Aries offers no clue why the child who does not
excite interest or correct understanding should be treated with immodesty,
nor (the corollary) why a correct understanding and greater interest should
stress the innocence of children. All that these things have in common, it
would seem, is their historical coincidence: immodesty goes with ignorance
and indifference, innocence with awareness and interest. When it is stated
in this way, Aries's argument emerges as having two paradoxical aspects. In
the first place, despite his own preference for "traditional" ways, he appears
to endorse the modern sentiment de l'enfance, to share in modern values.24
Secondly, it emerges that Aries has - despite all appearances - scarcely
subjected the traditional attitudes to any analysis. He records the absence
of the modern sentiment, but does not tell us how children actually were perceived; he records, too, the immodesty which seems so strange to our eyes,
yet does not explain how this related to anything else. Even "immodesty"
thereby emerges as an absence - the absence of the "innocent" dimension
of the modern sentiment.
These two problems are interconnected. It is precisely because Aries fails
to disclose the nature of medieval attitudes towards the child that he seems
22. Centuries, 128.

23. This is implicit in the argument that for medieval adults, the child under seven
"did not count" (Centuries, 128), and throughout the summary of the child in art
(Part One, Ch. 2). It becomes explicit in Aries's discussions of the seventeenth-century
moralists and of General de Martange's correspondence (Ceitunries, 132, 133), and in
restatements in Part Three (353, 363f). On "immodesty versus innocence," see Cellturies, Part One, Ch. 5. The complexity of the sentiment de l'enfance is noted by Peter
Burke, in a paper delivered at the 1972 Ruskin College History Workshop and now to
be published as "The Sense of Childhood: Discovery or Development?" in a forthcoming volume edited by Raphael Samuel. I am grateful to Peter Burke for making
available, in 1973, an interim version of this paper.
24. See Hunt, 40, 44; I experienced the same difficulty as Hunt records.

ADRIAN WILSON

139

to support the modern approach. For he has no alternative to set against the
modern sentiment; and the latter must therefore emerge as an objective
knowledge, as a correct understanding of "the particular nature of childhood."
We thus arrive, in a preliminary way, at an important methodological
corollary of Aries's present-mindedness. What he has done is to search, in
medieval and especially early-modern materials, for modern attitudes to the
child; his finding is that these attitudes are absent, and it is this absence which
he records. This is the case even when (as with "immodesty") the absence
takes the form of a negation.25
But is there anything but an absence to discover? Is not Aries correct to
infer "ignorance" and "indifference"towards the child? There is in fact ample
evidence that he is not correct, that beneath these absences there lurks some
presence which he has not disclosed. We may instance the problems with
"immodesty" just discussed; the recent findings of Le Roy Ladurie, indicating peasant bereavement at the deaths of children; the suggestions of McLaughlin as to the presence of children in medieval documents; and the
paradox that the same infant who "did not count" nevertheless lived under
"the constant solicitude of his mother, his nurse or his cradle-rocker."26
We shall return to this surprising limitation of the first phase of Aries's
argument concerning the child under seven. Next, however, we consider his
thesis about the older child: that after about seven, the child was assimilated
both in perceptions and in practice to the world of adults.27
The principal evidence on which this argument is based is fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century iconography. The relevant passages are worth quoting in
full:
The great thing remained . . . until the seventeenthcentury . . . the representation of outdoor, public life. This very general impression,which strikes the his25. Thus the chapter on this theme begins, referring to Heroard's Journal, with the
statement that "Nothing will give us a better idea of the complete absence of the modern
awarenessof childhood in the last years of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century" (L'Enfant, 141, my translation, emphasis added; cf. Centuries, 100).
For further indications of Aries's failure to investigate the content of medieval attitudes,
see note 49 below. It is within the rubric of absences that we must place Aries's argument as to the nature of the poor or peasant attitudes to childhood and the family (see
note 18 above). Because the sources he has used do not record such attitudes, at least
until the seventeenth century, he infers the absence of the attitudes themselves. But one
may ask how the illiterate would record their ideas and feelings; how the poor would
commission works of art. The limited documentation which can serve as evidence here
has been found to refute Aries's imputation of "indifference:"see note 45 below.
26. Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 d 1324 (Paris,
1975), Ch. 13, especially 306-309, 312, 316; Mary Martin McLaughlin, "Survivors and
Surrogates: Children and Parents from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries" in Tie
History of Childhood, ed. L. de Mause (New York, 1974), Ch. 3, 102 and passim;
L'Enfanit,177.
27. On the transitionitself, see note 43 below.

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THE INFANCY OF THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD: ARIES

torian from his first contact with iconographicdocuments, correspondsno doubt

to a profound reality. The life of old, until the seventeenthcentury, was lived in
public.
These subject paintings were not as a rule devoted to the exclusive portrayal of
childhood, but in a great many cases there were children among the characters
depicted, both principal and secondary. And this suggests [that] . . . children
mingled with adults in everyday life, and any gatheringfor the purpose of work,
relaxation or play brought together both children and adults....28
The interpretation here rests on the assumption that art reproduces directly
the ways of life of the time. If art is devoted to crowd scenes, life was "lived
in public"; and if the child was part of these crowd scenes, then "children
mingled with adults in everyday life." But this is to neglect the possibility of
any ambiguity in such representations; it is to see them as unconstrained
reproductions, as objective documentation instead of the subjective and determinate artifacts which in fact they were.
A simple instance will suggest the difficulties inherent in such an approach.
Aries's own account suggests that these very crowd scenes were not to be
found until the fifteenth century; yet he takes them as representative of life
in a much earlier period (the tenth and eleventh centuries, if we are to take
the earliest definition of his starting-point).29 Now the reason that Aries is
forced to make this leap is that the nature of art in the Middle Ages does not
allow him to make inferences about everyday life. Subject painting did not
then exist; "collective life" is not to be found in illuminations. But what this
means is that the nature of art is not an historical constant; it is subject instead to influences independent of its subject-matter.30And this being so, the
best that can be established by the methods Aries has employed is a prima
facie case. Such inferences cannot be elevated above this very tentative status
except by means of independent evidence: either evidence concerning the nature of art, or evidence bearing upon the subject matter under discussion.
Aries does not attempt the former; what does he have to say at the latter
level?
The main independent evidence for the mingling of children (after the
age of seven) in adult life is furnished in Aries's interpretation by apprenticeship. In order to approach this theme, it is necessary to outline the manifold
contribution which apprenticeship makes to his argument. First, although he
tends to discuss them in separate contexts, Aries insists that "apprentices"
and "servants" lived under "but slight variations on a basic idea - that of
service.8'31 Secondly, it was as an apprentice or servant that the child was
28. L'Enfant, 308f and 59 (cf. Centuries, 405 and 37).
29. Centuries, 34.

30. If these influences are not independent of the subject-matter,then Aries's inferences become still more problematical.
31. Centuries, 366.

ADRIAN WILSON

141

"plunged . . . into the world of adults."32Thirdly, Aries implies very strongly

(though without ever quite stating) that apprenticeship was universal.33
Fourthly, this apprenticeship served as an education: an education by participation or by example.34
What, then, of the content of this apprenticeship? First, because it constituted education-by-participation, apprenticeship made impossible that "segregation" by age which the school was to impose as a defining characteristic of
modern civilization.35 Secondly, speaking in fact of "service," Aries emphasizes the "existential bond" between master and servant and upholds the value
of the institution as a system of human community.36 Thirdly (again in the
context of servants), discipline was an essential component of service, either
in the form of "scoldings" or as physical "chastisement."37
Three serious problems are raised by this picture of "service" or apprenticeship. In the first place, there can be little doubt that Aries idealizes the
institution of service, and that this constitutes not merely paternalism (Hunt's
criticism) ,38 but, more seriously, interpretative naivete. His discussion is
couched solely in terms of the master's point of view, and correspondingly
is based upon published precepts.39This, of course, is the ideology of service;
other evidence could have been used to indicate that in practice things could
work out very differently.40The significant point is that Aries has elided, or
rather not noticed, this difficulty.
Secondly, and relatedly, Aries manages to underplay the contribution made
by discipline to the apprenticeship system. The significance of this elision is
not merely that it threatens his idealization of ancien regime conditions, but
that it places in a wholly different light another aspect of his argument: his
interpretation of the later spread of corporal punishment in the schools.41
32. Ibid., 193.
33. Ibid., 365f, 367, 368. Macfarlane, Appendix B, discusses the extent of service
for the seventeenth century, using the 1599 Ealing and 1695 Kirkby Lonsdale listings.
His conclusion (209) is that "approximately 2/3 of the males and 3/4 of the female
children" left home in this way after puberty in Ealing, and that Kirkby Lonsdale
"shows the same pattern" (210). This issue has now been treated in detail by Richard
Wall, "The Age at Leaving Home," Journal of Family History 3 (1978), 181-202, who
stresses the variability of entry into service not only over time and place but also from
child to child in a single parish at any particularpoint in time.
34. Centuries,367; 192f, 368; 291.
35. Ibid., 38, 238ff.
36. Ibid., 396, 397.
37. Ibid., 396f, 259.
38. Hunt, 153f. This passage does not refer directly to Aries; but see also 42-45.
39. See Centuries,396f.
40. Thus for the eighteenth century, reference to court records enabled Dorothy
George to paint a grim picture of the lives of poor apprentices: London Life in the
EighteenthCentur-y(London, 1965), 276f and especially 224-235.
41. Centuries, Part Two, Ch. 5. Aries's view that early medieval schools lacked the
discipline which he finds in the fifteenth century (252-255) is not shared by all writers.

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THE INFANCY OF THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD: ARIES

Although he makes passing concessions to the problem we are raising, Aries

seeks in fact to present the growth of scholastic education, in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, as imposing on the child a new and degrading disciplinary system. Yet since it was, on his own account, precisely children who
were servants and apprentices, it would seem rather that the change from
apprenticeship to scholastic education merely transferred such discipline to
the new educational site: that the birch followed the child into the school.
Aries avoids noticing this by means of two devices: (a) when treating this
as a form of education he uses "apprenticeship" rather than service, whereas
his discussion of discipline (other than scholastic) refers to servants rather
than to apprentices; and (b) he underplays discipline in one context (service)
and stresses it in the other (scholastic life), where indeed it is allotted an
entire chapter. When this imbalance is redressed, the "mingling" of children
with adults takes on a different character: the relationship becomes a structured one.
Thirdly, the same point emerges from the carefully researched criticism
of Natalie Zemon Davis and Steven R. Smith.42While it may well be true that
children were thrown together with adults in traditional France far more than
in the modern world with its universal, age-structured education, this did not
exclude social differentiation into groups structured by age and playing specific functions. It is, in short, only in iconography that the "mingling" of the
ages can take on the diffuse and innocent character Aries ascribes to it.
But what this reveals is that the transition at the age of seven marked, not
the end of childhood, but the entry into a new stage of childhood.43 And this
makes nonsense of Aries's fundamental argument, that traditional French society lacked an "awareness of the particular nature of childhood." What that
society "lacked" was our awareness; but this is not the same as saying that it

See T. L. Jarman, Landmarks in tile History of Education (London, 1951), 70; Nicholas
Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London, 1973), 127ff.
42. Davis, loc. cit. and passim; Steven R. Smith, "The London Apprentices as

Seventeenth-CenturyAdolescents," Past and Present 61 (1973), 149-161, and "Religion

and the Conception of Youth in Seventeenth-CenturyEngland," History of Childhood
Quarterly 2 (1975), 493-516.

43. Aries writes of Louis XIII: "After 1608 this kind of joke [i.e., the sexual games
played by adults with the infant Louis] disappeared: he had become a little man attaining the fateful age of seven - and at this age had to be taught decency in language
and behaviour." (Centuries, 102). It is at least as plausible, however, to infer from the
need "to be taught" that Louis was still a child: and the fallacy into which Aries has
fallen becomes evident when he turns to Gerson's De confessione mollicei. For that
text, dating from the fifteenth century, dealt with children "between ten and twelve
years of age" (106), to whom it applied precisely the chastity to which Louis became
subjected at this older stage of childhood. Quite apart from the remarkablechronological
liberty which Aries displays here, his counterposition of Gerson against Henri's court
is simply inept: there is no contradictionbetween the two!

ADRIAN

WILSON

143

had no such awareness,44 and we have now seen that even Aries's own evidence enables us to demonstrate that such an awareness was present. This
brings us to two conclusions.
First, Aries's finding with respect to the older child shares the character of
his conclusion vis-A-vis the child under seven, that what he has discovered
is simply an absence. For the older child, what is absent is the modern system
of age-segregated school education. Secondly, a closer examination reveals
again that this absence conceals a presence: the presence, in the form of the
apprenticeship system, of a different way of managing relations between the
ages.
By now it should be evident that the confusion surrounding L'Enfant is
only to be expected, for the very basis of its argument - the "first phase" of
Aries's thesis - is riddled with logical flaws. In order to explain this curious
fact we must turn to the deeper level of Aries's methods. We shall do so primarily with reference to the "second phase," thus extending at the same time
the substantive critique of his findings.
III

It is convenient to begin by considering the first sentiment of childhood: mignotage. This nuance of Aries's argument is of particular interest because it is
unusual in two ways: first, in representing the only concession Aries makes
to female attitudes to children; and secondly, in constituting a transitional
entity, bridging the old and the new attitudes. It is appropriate, then, to examine carefully Aries's means of assigning it this position:
To begin with, the attitudewas held by women, women whose task it was to look
after children- mothers and nurses. In the sixteenth-centuryedition of Le Grand
Proprietairewe are told about the nurse: "She rejoices when the child is happy,
and feels sorry for the child when he is ill; she picks him up when he falls, she
binds him when he tosses about, and she washes and cleans him when he is
dirty.
Children'slittle antics must always have seemed touching to mothers, nurses and
cradle-rockers,but their reactionsformed part of the huge domain of unexpressed
feelings. Henceforth they would no longer hesitate to recognize the pleasure they
got from watchingchildren'santics and "coddling"them. . ..45
There are two difficulties with Aries's inferences here. In the first place,
Le Grand Proprietaire was in fact "a thirteenth-century Latin compilation."40
44. See the articles of Davis and Smith, cited in fn. 42 above, which make the same
point.
45. Centuries, 129, 130; L'Enfant, 179, 180. For confirmation of the criticism which
follows, see Le Roy Ladurie, 311, n. 1.
46. Centuries,

19. Aries's scholarship in respect of this text has been criticized by

Davis (61, n. 63; cf. L'Enfanit, 42f, 35). On the use of such sources as evidence for

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THE INFANCY OF THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD: ARIES

Thus, the "transitional" mignotage can be detected at least as early as the

thirteenth century, or in other words in the very period which supposedly
showed mere "indifference" to the child. It may be that the passage on the
nurse was actually added in the sixteenth century; but this Aries does not
even pause to ask. All that has happened, so far as his text informs us, is
that "it was thought fit to translate it into French and to give it a wider circulation by means of printing."47 In other words, inignotage does not necessarily appear in the sixteenth century; it merely enters the universe of printed
sources.
This brings us to the second problem with mignotage. Aries says himself
that the attitude "must always have been" felt by women; what does he make
of this? He finds that mignotage "formed part of the huge domain of unexpressed feelings" - that is, it is not to be detected in (printed) sources. From
this he makes the covert inference that these women "hesitated to express"
this feeling. Yet there is no evidence of hesitation; the structure of inference
here is not tested, has not been designed to be tested, nor could it be tested
within those fragments and chunks of evidence which Aries has selected from
the sources. It is far more plausible to infer that the entry of mignotage into
accessible source-materials reflects, not a change in attitudes or in willingness to "recognize" those attitudes, but rather a change in the nature of the
available evidence - in this case, nothing more complex than the development of printing. If we are looking for mignotage in printed sources, the Middle Ages will indeed "hesitate to recognize" it!
In his claims concerning mignotage, then, Aries has confused the content
of the sources with the attitudes of the time: he has sought to read the attitudes in the sources themselves, eliding the veritable universe of questions
concerning the nature of those sources. It is as if the sources personified the
period: all we have to do is to listen to the voice of the evidence, or as Aries
himself puts it, to "glance through"48such a text as Le Grand Proprietaire.
In order to develop more fully the nature and limitations of this method, we
turn now to the principal pillar on which the book is founded: Ari-es'sinterpretation of the iconographic evidence for the "discovery of childhood."49
At first sight, this aspect of Aries's argument seems overwhelming, seems
bound to be true. From the miniature adults of early medieval art, through
medieval attitudes, see John Burrow, "The Mediaeval Compendium," Times Literary
Supplement (21 May 1976), 615.
47. Centuries, 19.
48. Idem.
49. Ibid., Part One, Ch. 2, passim. The same problems which we have seen with
mignotage appear with the other transitional attitude advanced by Aries: that which
stressed the weakness of children. This he regards as new in the seventeenth century
(Ibid., 112, discussing a text of 1642) or in the fifteenth century (253); yet it is per-

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145

the putt and child portraits of the Renaissance, to the realistic renditions of
such seventeenth-century painters as Le Nain, the Western iconography of
the child appears to display with massive force nothing less, and little more,
than the "discovery of childhood."
Yet even at this level, one finds a disquieting feature in the presentation:
an indifference to the subtleties of the development. True, Aries takes us
with all the thoroughness of a patient guide through the various avenues of
putto, Infant Jesus, and effigy of the dead child, to the child portrait itself.
But he does not pause to inquire why it should have been that the process
followed these particular routes - or how the different strands were related
one to another. Rather, the development appears in his text as an inevitable
progression, in which the route is of minor interest, the destination everything.
Not only this, but we may notice too that Aries disdains to consider the
immediate context of the developments he describes. That context was, in a
word, the Renaissance: the rediscovery of the culture of antiquity by the
scholars of Western Europe. And this has two problematic implications for
Aries's argument. In the first place, the artistic "discovery of childhood" proceeded, not by direct study of children, but through the imitation of Greek
and especially Roman works of sculpture and painting50- which renders
the development more nuanced, to say the least, than Aries suggests. Secondly, the "discovery of childhood" was but part of a universe of such developments, which can be summed up as the overarching "discovery of Nature"
(in the field of the observed, of the portrayed), or as the "discovery of realism" (in terms of the mode of artistic expression). Childhood, then, was discovered" by artists not in isolation, but as part of a widespread cultural
change in which, it could be said, the representation of children was merely
swept along. And this places Aries's interpretation in an altogether different
light. For the change he has discovered - the growth of realism in the portrayal of the child - can be explained without reference to the mentalites
in which he is interested. It is not the attitudes of people at large, but the
forms and features of art, which changed.
These considerations suggest that the use of iconographic material in L'Enfectly evident in poems, dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which Aries
himself quotes in a different context (22). A careful reading of his text (112, 253)
suggests that Aries is half-conscious of the fact that the only change he has found is an
increase in the provision of evidence. It is of interest to inquire why, for all this, Aries
failed to notice this implication of the earlier poems. The answer would seem to be
that these were quoted purely in order to illustrate the separate point, that "age" was
a fixed mental category in the Middle Ages; the content ascribed to each of the different
"ages of life" was, in this context, irrelevant. This pertains to the problem of "absences."
50. For this point I am indebted to Erika Langmuir. I am grateful, too, to Timothy
Ashplant, Claudine Majzels, Daphne Nash, and Evelyn Silber for discussing with me
the problemsposed by the interpretationof iconographicevidence.

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THE INFANCY OF THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD: ARIES

fant may suffer from the same weakness which we have repeatedly seen in
Aries's handling of his evidence. Let us therefore devote a little attention to
the way in which he has marshalled this, the central and most copious body
of evidence in the work.
What is lacking in the exposition is any analysis of the iconographic evidence. Instead of a rigorous and comparative breakdown of the content and
form of the various iconographies, what we are given is repetitive presentations of the raw material: the great bulk of the chapter is taken up with descriptions and summaries of the pictures themselves. The evidence is not analyzed: it is reproduced. Still less is there anything, beyond the most cursory
glances, by way of an examination of the social processes by which this
evidence was created. Medieval illuminations and seventeenth-century portraits are alike treated as unmediated representations of the perceptual categories of their periods: the artist paints just what everyone sees. This is the
same procedure which, as we have already noted, Aries used to establish
from genre painting the "mingling of the ages." In both cases, art presents
us with a simple and unambiguous record, whether of reality or of perceptions. Consequently, the historian's work consists simply of the judicious reproduction of the art, together with the direct interpolation of a running
commentary which eliminates any slight ambiguities in this, the historical
record. The very structure of Aries's argument, in so far as it rests upon
iconographic evidence, is carried along by the works of art themselves: the
history is presented as if it were inscribed in the sources.
It is thus that the Renaissance context, the imitation of classical art, fails
to enter Aries's text: for the early child portrayals carry no visible sign of
these things. But precisely because the evidence is (for Aries) unambiguous,
these are irrelevant considerations; all that the historian has to do is to present the evidence - or rather that portion of the evidence which contains
the history.
No wonder, similarly, that Aries should not attempt to discover any coherence among the different strands which contributed to this development.
His method allows us only to pass, as it were, from surface to surface through
the different iconographies; whatever connection may have existed between
them in their actual historical context cannot be disclosed, because this lies
at a deeper level. As far as Aries is concerned, the necessary coherence derives from the present: what the putto shares with the Infant Jesus, the effigy
of the dead child with the Hellenistic Eros, is that they all point - or seem
to point - away from miniature-adult representation and towards the present,
towards the "photographs of children of all ages in our family albums."'51
If we now return to our previous criticisms, it will become clear that this
approach is not confined to the iconographic material: that for Aries, history
51. Centuries, 34.

ADRIAN WILSON

147

in general is inscribed in the sources, and the work of the historian consists
in its extraction therefrom. Our conclusion, as to mignotage (where Aries's
substantive argument can be falsified using his own evidence), was that "the
content of the sources" had been confused with "the attitudes of the time."
But since those attitudes represent, in this sphere as in most, his very object
of study, it can be seen that the method which is at fault is precisely that
under discussion: the simple extraction of the history from the sources. And
the same problem lies at the root of his failure to disclose the content of the
"traditional" attitude to the child, discussed in the previous section. For we
saw that that attitude was portrayed by Aries as an absence; and the reason
for this is that there is indeed an absence in the sources, namely, the absence
of direct affirmations of the modern attitude to children. The disclosing of
underlying presences, which we have attempted only in principle, could only
proceed by moving to a different level: by looking beyond such mere appearances as the mingling of children with adults in sixteenth-century paintings.
Before we pursue this further, it may be noted that this way of proceeding
on Aries's part renders his work peculiarly opaque to criticism. Reinterpretation is disarmed in advance by his own naivete, by the seeming innocence
with which he reproduces chunks of evidence vast or small. Just as, for him,
the history exists in the sources, requiring only to be extracted, so, vice-versa,
his argument - for it is an argument, an interpretation - is carried along
by the pieces of evidence he has stitched together. Any attempt at criticism
seems paradoxical and wilful: it appears as a criticism of the evidence itself.
It is thus that there inheres so much plausibility in the results of an historical
method which, I have been arguing, is utterly unsound.
Iv

We have seen that Aries bases his work on a "present-minded" approach.

This present-mindedness has a deeper consequence which helps to account
for the limitations of his method, namely a way of reading the evidence that
is best described as present-centered.52
"Present-centeredness" means, not the focusing upon the present which is
described by "present-mindedness," but rather the condition of viewing the
a direct analogy
past exclusively from the point of view of the present -in
with "geocentric," the pre-Copernican view of the universe. That is to say,
Aries does not merely look at the evidence "with one eye on the present"
(Butterfield's formulation of the Whig form of present-mindedness)53; more
52. 1 owe this concept to Timothy Ashplant (personal communication, 1975); the
argumentdeveloped here draws upon a collaborative study of historical epistemology on
which Ashplant and I are engaged.
53. Butterfield, 21, 30. The distinction made here, between present-mindednessand

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THE INFANCY OF THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD: ARIES

than this, as a necessary corollary, he approaches it with both eyes in the

present. In his reading of the evidence, as in that of any present-minded historian, all is filtered through the categories of the present;54 anything that
does not fit into these categories either fails to appear in his work, or enters
it (in the reproduced evidence) unnoticed by Aries.55
It is appropriate to challenge at this point the relativist position (of which
Aries espouses an extreme version)56 that the historian must be the prisoner
of his time; that present-centeredness is therefore inescapable; that "every
generation rewrites history." We may first recall the eminent support57 for
the claim that these difficulties are in fact capable of being met, and that
superseding them is precisely what is required of, and defines, the professional

present-centeredness,surfaces in this work (25, 26). But having introduced the point of
view of the present as the basis of "the whig principle" (26), Butterfield returns to his
favored formulation, "the principle of direct reference to the present" (idemn.), only
twice more touching (31, 69) upon the present-centerednesswhich, it is argued here, is
of more consequence.
54. On the importance of perceptual "categories" or "sets," see Quentin Skinner,
"Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 8 (1969),
6f and passim; and Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago,
1962, 1970), Ch. 5. For a very helpful exposition of the basis of this "priority of paradigms" (Kuhn's phrase), see Raymond Williams, The Lonzg Revolution (London, 1965),
Ch. 1.
55. It should be added that "the categories of the present" refers to Aries's own
categories: in other words these categories are personal and idiosyncraticas well as being
time-bound and of contemporary origin. No two historians would write the same book;
at the same time, the very success of Centuries of Childhood indicates that there is a
fit between Aries's categories and those of a wide public.
56. Aries wrote in 1946 that any subject of historical research, "however slight it
may appear, takes possession of our curiosity if its knowledge allows us to measure
the distance which separates the consciousness characteristicof the men of the past from
our contemporary consciousness. . . . So the study (science) of the past, as it has
defined its methods in the last thirty years, must always refer to the sense of belonging
to History which characterizesmodern man. . . . This reciprocity of History as knowledge, and History lived as consciousness consciencece, renders null and void certain
traditions of classical historiography. First of all, the appeal to objectivity. . .. The
historian belongs to his time: this is his strength, not his weakness. Hence he cannot
call himself objective without maiming himself. It suffices for him to be honest, which
is a different thing. Again, can he lay claim to exhaustiveness? The fear of not being
complete crushes the effort of intelligence more than it sustains it. It does not allow one
to follow with the necessary speed the direction of research, the curve of an evolution;
it limits too closely the historical field. [Thus, in historical interpretation] there must
remain a hypothetical element, as the historian's concern to respond to the historical
stirrings (inquietude) of his time. . . . Finally, the sense of solidarity with History
forbids the technician of History to remain content with a narrow specialization in
time . . ." (Populations,

12f, my translation, emphasis in original).

See also note 62

below.
57. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946) and An Autobiography
(Oxford, 1939); J. H. Hexter, Doing History (London, 1971); G. R. Elton, The Practice
of History (London, 1969); Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding."

ADRIAN WILSON

149

historian. Secondly, the very criticisms of Aries's inferences which have been
put forward here demonstrate that present-centeredness can be overcome; the
committed relativist would have to show that these criticisms are themselves
anachronistic. Thirdly, the sophistry employed in the "every generation rewrites history" argument will be evident if we consider a scientific discipline
such as physics. For there is no doubt that every generation rewrites its
physics; but few would infer from this that the discipline of physics is subject
to the kind of relativism imputed by some thinkers to history. The crucial
point is that there are rewritings and rewritings, and that the significance of
each rewriting must be assessed independently. Thus Aries's own work is a
rewriting of the history of the family, a vigorous attack on the conservative
notion that the family has undergone a long decline;58 but this rewriting did
not transform the basis of the subject, for Aries himself uses primitive methods of research. One could say, borrowing Althusser's phrase, that Aries did
not bring about an "epistemological break." By contrast, the rewriting being
proposed here, which is of course under way in a plethora of dissertations
and in occasional published work, will effect just such a break, a "Copernican
revolution"59in the historical study of the family.
But how is such a revolution brought about? A brief consideration of this
question will help to draw together the various themes which have so far
emerged.
The problem faced by the historian is that history, his object-of-knowledge,
exists at a definite remove from the surviving evidence from which, nevertheless, he must infer that history. And the processes by which this evidence
was generated are themselves unknown - necessarily so at the outset of
research. Now we do not know either how far to trust the evidence, or in
what sense to take it, until we know something of the nature of these
processes. But how can we pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps? The
answer lies at two levels.
First, it is possible in principle to achieve this because the biases and eccentricities in the evidence-generating process will always have left their traces.
To use a favored60 and apt analogy, the "perfect crime" of misleading61 the
historian probably cannot be committed, provided that the historian is alert
to the problem and is looking for the clues. This brings us to the practical,
second level of our answer: that in order to exploit these clues, the historian
must perforce subject the evidence to analysis, an analysis designed pre58. See Hunt, Ch. 2.
59. Collingwood, Idea of History, 236, 240; Autobiographly, 79, n. 1; Louis Althusser,

Reading Capital, transl. Ben Brewster (London, 1970), 149-155, 309f, 323f.
60. See Collingwood, Idea of History, 266-282.
61. "Misleading"not, of course, deliberately by any agent, but structurally, by the
exigencies in the provision of evidence: such as the bias in all documentary sources
againstinclusion of the poorer classes of society.
62. Aries is explicitly against such research: discussing "doctoral theses, works of

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THE INFANCY OF THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD: ARIES

cisely to bring these clues into prominence and to infer from them the
processes which gave rise to this particular evidence. The basis of such analysis is always a pattern of expectations which constitutes a theory - usually
an implicit theory - of the nature of the evidence-generating process. The
object of the analysis is the elucidation of some relevant segment of that
process.
Now in order to undertake such analysis, one has to shed the questions
and categories with which one began. This is familiar enough to historians
as the desired result of "steeping oneself in the evidence," but the nature of
the process may now be clarified. What has happened, in moving from one's
initial questions to the kind of analysis just described, is that one's object of
investigation has changed: the new object, an interim but indispensable object,
is the nature of the evidence.63
If we return to Aries with these points in mind, it becomes evident that
his present-centeredness constrains him to adopt the method we have disclosed. For the transformation of questions just described implies the transcending of the present-centered point of view.4 If that viewpoint is maintained, no such transformation is possible; the history must inevitably be
seen as residing in the sources themselves; and the historian's work then
becomes that of selective extraction, what Collingwood called "scissors-andpaste."65

It will now be apparent that the other limitations of L'Enfant are explicable in the light of this methodological structure.
First, we can understand why the book is so riddled with logical flaws, or

erudition," the reading of which he finds "painful"because of "an impression of indifference which requires an extra effort of attention," he has written: "And for all this,
what an enormous capital of work and research has been laid out! In pure loss? No,
for this mass of laborious dissertations constitutes an inexhaustible source. It becomes
even entrancing,if one eliminates the author and scholar to constitute the raw document.
But then, it would have been more valuable to gather the texts, publish the documents
or even the archival catalogues: only, not to sterilize History." (Populations. I If; compare note 56 above). For Aries's account of his own working attitude to the "raw
documents," see L'Enfant, 5.

63. For the history of ideas, what this involves has been discussed (along with much
else and under a different rubric) by Quentin Skinner. "Meaning and Understanding."
A different example, bearing directly upon Aries's work, is furnished by Marvick's
excellent discussion ("The Character of Louis XIII") of Heroard's Journal. The inappropriatenessof her reference to the Heisenberg principle (349) should not be allowed
to obscure her observation that the Journal provides evidence not merely about Louis
but also about Heroard. and thus about itself.
64. That such a transcendence is possible, pace the relativists, will appear from a
consideration of the physical sciences. Even though geocentricity is the natural result
of our objective position as visual observers, it was overcome. Many of the classical
"paradigmshifts" in the history of science involve an equivalent depassement.
65. Collingwood, Autobiographly, Ch. 8; Idea of History, 257-281.

ADRIAN

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151

as Flandrin puts it, with "certain divergences" about which Aries "seems
scarcely to be troubled."" For these correspond to the features of the evidence which have found their way into the text despite the fact that they
contradict other phases of the argument; and a twofold necessity forces such
contradictions to reach the printed page. On the one hand, Aries's presentcenteredness obscures from him the "divergences," the ambiguities and
subtleties, in the evidence; while on the other hand, his scissors-and-paste
method requires him to reproduce that evidence, either in summary or in
directly-quoted form, thereby enabling us to see the things he has overlooked.
Equally intelligible as an outcome of Aries's method is his tendency to see
in medieval society only the absence of modern attitudes. For the question
he addresses to the evidence, in the first phase of his argument, is not such
as to allow the concrete nature of the real attitudes to enter his consciousness.
And the posing of more appropriate questions would require him to look
beneath the surface of the evidence, to inquire into the mediated character
of that evidence, in short to transcend the scissors-and-paste method to which
he is avowedly67wedded.
Finally, these considerations account for the conception of the historical
process which animates L'Enjant: a conception distinguished by inevitability
and chronological continuity. These features arise from Aries's presentmindedness, but are properly explicable only in the light of the deeper features
of his method which we have sought to define. Because it is in terms of the
present that the past is defined, all that can appear in Aries's account of historical change are elements of that present.68 Though the very evidence
Aries reproduces points to the existence of other dimensions, within which
and only within which that evidence could be rendered intelligible, nevertheless Ariess'sown argument grades everything upon a single continuum extending, so to speak, simply from zero to unity. The result is that the story cannot
but appear as continuous and inevitable; for everything has its place on the
66. J.-L. Flandrin, "Enfance et Societe" (a review of L'Enfant which is perhaps the
most perceptive response the book has received), Annales ESC 19 (1964), 327: "Si les
convergences sont generalement bien marquees par l'auteur, il semble peu se soucier de
certaines divergences."On the existence of logical difficulties as the outcome of specific
methodological shortcomings, see Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding;"Pierre Vilar,
"MarxistHistory, a History in the Making: Dialogue with Althusser,"New Left Review
80 (1973), 85f; and J. H. Hexter, "The Burden of Proof," Times Literary Supplement
(24 Oct 1975). It is no coincidence that Hexter's critique of Christopher Hill uses the
same phrase as Le Roy Ladurie employs with respect to Aries: "le fardeau de la
preuve" (309).

67. See notes 56 and 62 above.

68. Thus (a) we have seen that even when he appears to be reconstructing a past
distinct from the present, a closer study reveals his construct to be that of an absenceof-the-present.And (b) his minimal concessions to the possibility of genuine transitional
entities- namely weakness (note 49 above) and inignotage - turn out to be precisely
elements of the present (see Centuries, 112, 133).

1.52

THE INFANCY OF THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD: ARIES

continuum (from 0 to 1), and that continuum has inscribed within it the
all-encompassing destination of the present.69
We are suggesting, then, that Aries argument is not merely false, but
falsely conceived. But what of the evidence reproduced so copiously in his
work? What is its status? Can it serve as the basis, not merely for the demolition of Aries's thesis, but for the construction of a new interpretation? The
answer is no, and for an important reason.
The mistake that can easily be made at this point is to imagine that the
evidence Aries presents us is "innocent." The appearance that this is so
arises from the fact that that evidence is reproduced so naively from the
sources - in contrast to a work of professional historical scholarship, in
which the evidence has been subjected to a complex analysis. But just because
the labor of such analysis has not been performed by Aries, it by no means
follows that the evidence we read in his pages has the same status as original
evidence we consult for ourselves. For the evidence in L'Enfant has been
subjected to a specific human labor: the labor of selection, of extraction.
For all the "divergences," the logical problems, the methodological catastrophes in L'Enfant which can be discerned from that evidence, nevertheless
it presents an argument: Aries speaks to us, as it were, using the voice of
Gerson, of Heroard, of Jacqueline Pascal. We deceive ourselves if we imagine
that, in reading their words in Aries's book, we are reading Gerson (et al.)
tout court. For this reason no attempt has been made here to reintegrate
Aries's data into an alternative synthesis; such an attempt would be doomed
to failure. Those data, even when stripped bare of Aries's misinterpretations,
contain his argument - for it has been put into them. It will only be when
scholarly monographs accumulate - when, for instance, family correspondence and parish registers have alike been passed through the mill of historians' minds - that a new synthesis will be valuable. It may be ventured
that the results will be very different indeed from the claims which animate
Aries's work.
We may conclude by remarking that Aries's book, in its very weaknesses,
is singularly in keeping with its pioneering status. For what L'Enfant incarnates, with its own naive honesty, is the very essence of the first stage of the
historical investigation of a new field. It is thus that an epistemological theory

69. Aries's chronological vagueness and explanatory weakness represent simply the
visible outcomes of this conception. It is the implicit image of the continuity of historical
change which both requires and legitimates such concepts as "ahead of time" and "last
traces" (Centuries, 108, 78; cf. Davis, 56 n. 42), and which permits Aries to "leap," in
his own words, "across the centuries" (Populations, 14). And it is the structure of
inevitability which strips from his enterprise the possibility of explanation-so that
when, for instance, he assigns the new attitudes to the bourgeoisie, he is merely reaffirmingthat same inevitability (Centuries, 413f).

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written down by Collingwood in the 1930's is powerfully relevant;70 for it

would seem that truths hard-won by some historians then are having to be
re-learned in social history today. It is, in this connection, not surprising that
Aries is not a professional but an amateur, a "weekend historian" as he is
said to have described himself;71 for his methods are indeed those of the
amateur as distinct from the professional. It becomes intelligible, too, that
much of L'Enfant reads curiously like an historian's notebook -that
often
Aries is "thinking aloud" onto the printed page.72 For in terms of the argument developed here, a present-centered approach, with its corollary of
scissors-and-paste methods, is as natural to history as the geocentric view of
the universe is natural to cosmology. Accordingly, even the professional
historian must start from something like the position which Aries lays before
us in print - though unlike Aries, he will not end there.
This should remind us that it was not Aries himself but recent historiographical fashion that brought Centuries of Childhood to the prominence
which has occasioned the detailed critique advanced in this essay. Our eagerness to broach a new field of inquiry made us impatient for a framework
within which to encompass that field; and Aries's book appeared as a readymade solution. The naivete with which it was taken up by sociologists and
psychologists is perhaps not surprising, but historians should have been more
cautious. That they were not may be attributed, at least in part, to the reticence with which questions of method are commonly approached in this
discipline.
Clare Hall
Cambridge
70. Space has not permitted the more extended discussion of Collingwood's historical
epistemology which I feel is appropriate. Suffice it here to note that the case of Aries
suggests that Collingwood's concept of "scissors-and-paste"history has a wider relevance
than to the "testimonial"history for which Collingwood developed the idea, and that
the connection between "scissors-and-paste"methods and the present-centeredapproach,
which Collingwood does not develop, requires a more extended treatment than has been
put forward here.
71. Psychology Today (Nov. 1975), 47. On professional versus amateur history, see
Elton, 29-36. Aries's confinement to printed sources, which can be regarded as another
characteristic of "first-stage"historiography, is perhaps a result of his amateur status.
72. For example, his speculative digressions (Centuries, 19f), his interpolations into
quoted passages (52f), and the constant weaving into the text of what are in fact
extendedfootnotes (55).