Philippe Ariès' Centuries of Childhood: Discussion and Critique

Oct 21, 2011
Sharon Brookshaw

Centuries of Childhood - Marine Connan

While Centuries of Childhood is the most famous book on the history of childhood, it is also the most criticised.

In the history of childhood, one book stands pre-eminent – Philippe Ariès’ L’Enfant et la Vie Familiale sous l’Ancient Régime (1960), which was translated into English as Centuries of Childhood (1962). There were other, essentially antiquarian, texts in existence prior to this – such as The English Child in the Eighteenth Century by Bayne-Powell (1939) – but none of these were quite so influential. Ariès’ seminal work was the text that launched the debate on the history of childhood; despite being some fifty years old, it is still the benchmark against which other publications measure themselves.

Contents of Centuries of Childhood

Ariès is most famous for his statement that “in medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist” (Ariès 1962: 125). This was not to say that children were mistreated in the Middle Ages, but simply that there was no concept of childhood in any way that would be recognised by modern society; what was missing was any sentiment de l’enfance, any “awareness of the particular nature of childhood…which distinguishes the child from the adult” (ibid: 125).

The central thesis of Centuries of Childhood is that attitudes towards children were progressive, and evolved over time with economic change and social advancement, until childhood, as a concept and an accepted part of family life, came into being in the seventeenth century. Childhood was therefore “discovered” in the early modern period, with both family and school keeping children out of adult society, it being recognised that “the child was not ready for life and that he had to be subjected to…a sort of quarantine before he was allowed to join the adults” (ibid: 396).

Ariès investigated changes in concepts of age, the portrayal of children in art, the history of games, education and children’s dress, using mostly French sources, and concluded that by the seventeenth century, France had developed two new concepts of childhood. In the first of these, children were seen as amusing little creatures to be coddled, while the second, the moralist view, stressed that children were fragile beings of God needing adult protection. While Ariès did go on to briefly consider later history, it has been suggested that he “stopped short of the moment when a secular ideology of childhood began to be elaborated in the eighteenth century, and that it is versions of this…that have had the most influence on thinking about childhood over the past two centuries” (Cunningham 1996: 30).

Criticisms of Centuries of Childhood

Centuries of Childhood has had mixed fortunes; while it is important to acknowledge the profound significance of Ariès’ contribution, both in recognising childhood as a social construction rather than a biological given and in founding the history of childhood as a serious field of study, it has been widely criticised.

The assertion that the medieval world was ignorant of childhood has undergone considerable attack from other writers. Crawford (1999) goes further than this to argue for an earlier concept of childhood in the Anglo-Saxon period, using linguistic evidence – the words cildhad (childhood), waepcild (“weapon child” or boy), wifcild (“weaving child” or girl) and geogo? (youth) all appear in the Anglo-Saxon language. What may be even more significant is the fact that the language also had words reflecting the behaviour of children, such as cildisc (childish) and umborwesende (being a child), and describing their material culture, as with cildcradol (child's cot). However, while Crawford accepts this as proof of the concept of childhood in medieval society, it may be more accurate to state this as evidence of a concept amongst the literate classes and not necessarily throughout society.

The rest of Ariès’ work has not been without critique. It has been argued that Centuries of Childhood misinterpreted iconographic evidence and omitted illustrations of the artworks referred to in the text; that Ariès deliberately looked for change while ignoring continuity; that generalisations were made from mainly French sources to the rest of European society, and that he used loose and overly simplistic evidence. Ariès has also been dismissed as an “amateur weekend historian” (Heywood 2001: 12).

The Black Legend of Childhood

Ariès’ work did not immediately achieve recognition. However, when an increased interest in social history began in the late 1960s, Centuries of Childhood stood out as the only significant modern book in its field. In the 1970s, a group of writings emerged that suggested the history of childhood was above all a history of progress, with children being mistreated in the past – establishing what became known as the “black legend” of childhood.

The three major works of this school of thought were The History of Childhood (De Mause 1974), The Making of the Modern Family (Shorter 1975) and The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (Stone 1977). De Mause was the strongest proponent of the “black legend” view, going so far as to state, “the history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of childcare, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorised and sexually abused” (1974: 1).

This trio of books were often linked to Centuries of Childhood because of the common ground they were subsequently alleged to share, as all four believed that there had been major changes over time in the attitudes to and treatment of children. There were differences in the evaluation and explanation for these changes, though: while Ariès and Stone put them in the seventeenth century, De Mause and Shorter placed them in the eighteenth century; De Mause used psychogenic theory as explanation, Shorter saw the changing family and the driving force of capitalism as central, while Stone looked at parent-child relations, for example.