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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Laura-Lee Downs, Children in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2002).
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| IN THE INTRODUCTION to Childhood in the Promised Land, Laura-Lee Downs offers to "deepen our understanding of the meanings of childhood in contemporary urban culture." (12) The book fulfills this initial promise by exploring the rich history of the colonies de vacances in France from the end of the 19th century through the 1950s. This first, in-depth, historical study of the colonies explores the summertime worlds, "rural collectives," and "toy republics" that adults across the political spectrum in France have created for children for over a century. According to Downs, a network of diverse colonies developed out of a broad range of movements in France: Protestant charity and republican school programs, "Catholic defense" against state and societal secularization, as well as Socialist and Communist initiatives inspired by "leftist ruralism" and the desire to build a utopian future by encouraging the healthy political and social development of working-class children. |
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Childhood in the Promised Land traces the emergence of the colonies from their earliest incarnations as charitable and public-health initiatives designed to "repair the bodies" and "restore the souls" of working-class children. Beginning in the 1880s, first Protestant charitable organizations, then republican projects to extend children's educational experience into the summer months (colonies scolaires), shared the conviction that the future health of the French nation depended on the well-being of its working-class children. Encouraged by anxieties about depopulation and living conditions in an increasingly urban and industrial France, early colonies stressed hygiene as their central project. Transplanting poor, urban children to the French countryside for several weeks of fresh air and healthy activity, the colonie experience could effect both individual and national rejuvenation by saving society's most fragile members from various forms of physical and moral "pollution." According to Downs, while the hygienic emphasis would never disappear altogether, the pedagogic possibilities of the colonies became more of a focus for organizers into the 20th century. Regardless of the confessional and/or political motivations behind each distinct colonie, the twin concerns of hygiene and pedagogy formed a kind of double helix at the core of these urban-rural experiments throughout their history. |
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Towards the end of the 19th century, Catholic colonies developed out of an existing system of apprenticeships for working-class youth known as patronages. The Catholic colonie functioned as "one key to maintaining a positive Catholic presence in the lives of children and their families" (90) who were otherwise "vulnerable" to the increasingly secular distractions of the republican school and working-class culture. Articulating their mission in deliberate "opposition to the narrowly intellectual and overly materialist mass education of the public schools," (86) Catholic colonie organizers developed play-based models and practices that placed the child at the center of the learning process. In doing so, they functioned as some of "the first architects of a full-blown pedagogy of child leisure in France." (108) Indeed, Catholic innovation and programs helped with the gradual spread of child-centered, "active" methods and practices to later colonies and extra-curricular activities for children in France, including the growth of the scouting movement. Emphasizing the progressiveness of Catholic colonie pedagogy, Downs disrupts assumptions made all too often by historians of the "modern" period: that secularization happened all at once, and that the Church's role in "modern" societies in the west has been, always and necessarily, "reactionary." |
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Having traced the history of pre-World War I colonies in France, Downs focuses on examples of colonies developed by two working-class municipalities on the outskirts of Paris during the interwar years: the Socialist "garden city" of Suresnes and Communist Ivry-sur-Seine. One of the strengths of this book is to show how political difference did not obstruct the sharing and borrowing of pedagogic models and strategies between different groups, "even as they competed for the same children" (5). Another is the way in which Downs' comparative study traces strategic and practical differences within the Left, differences between Socialist and Communist versions of the colonie. In Suresnes, an entire network of social assistance and public education linked the colonie to municipal plans to improve housing, education, and medical treatment. The colonie was an important part of an overall project of social engineering managed by a growing group of "experts": social workers, doctors and educators. In the case of Communist Ivry-sur-Seine, the colonie functioned itself as a model of a future utopian society. The Communist colonie created an imagined political community of children in which games and exercises prepared participants for a political future they would bring about. Involving children in the colonie also functioned as an important way of connecting working-class families to the mission of the municipality's Communist political leadership. |
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Throughout the book, Downs raises important questions about how historians analyze vectors of power in discussions of class and politics. Decrying "the well-fed ... vantage point of the late-twentieth century" that might easily reduce the public health projects of earlier generations to the machinations of bourgeois and state authorities, Downs defends these efforts as responses to a "genuine crisis" (37) in industrializing France. Downs' discussion of the "participatory urbanism" developed in Suresnes also takes on the perception of the working-class family as the pure "victim" of state interference and bourgeois intervention. In both Suresnes and Ivry-sur-Seine, colonies developed as part of municipal, working-class political and social agendas. Later in the 20th century, Downs argues, the development of colonies for middle-class children was part of a "trickle-up" movement from working-class and local strategies to practices adopted more generally by the growing welfare state in France. Finally, Downs rejects what she refers to as "the jaundiced eye of Foucauldian suspicion" (7) that might read the colonies as expressions of state, Church, or other forms of "discipline." Downs insists that the colonies' history cannot be read in terms of "indoctrination" because of the fundamental complexity of the play-centered pedagogic models that came to dominate them. In their emphasis on freedom and children's natural "capacity for moral reasoning," colonies "across the political spectrum" functioned as crucial testing and training grounds for a "modern," Western citizenship predicated on "the development of an autonomous moral and political agency in adult life." (236) |
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Indeed, the "Foucauldian" functions in Downs' analysis as a kind of short form for a number of possible critiques of the colonies. While I think Downs suggests a viable alternative to any cynical judgment of the colonies' "dark purposes" (37) I wonder if a more developed Foucauldian reading of the phenomena treated in the book would necessarily take the simplistic analytic form she anticipates and rejects in defense of complexity. It would also be interesting to explore further how children participated in and responded to the models and practices used to organize their own childhoods. Downs includes excerpts from children's journals and adult recollections of colonie participants that invite more discussion of how children may have imagined, experienced and helped to create the varied social and political "promised lands" intended to encourage their growth and development. In the interpretive questions it raises, and in its insistence on the possibilities of working-class agency and social change, Children in the Promised Land is a provocative and hopeful book. |
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Roxanne Panchasi
Simon Fraser University |
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