ABSTRACT
In the second half of the twentieth century, books for young readers in the Western world were inevitably aected by the changing values and realities of contemporary life. Aer the postwar period of reconstruction, France had prospered economically and culturally in the late 1950s and 1960s, and, as elsewhere, the baby boom generated a cult of youth and the beginnings of an unprecedented youth culture in music, fashion, and lm heavily inuenced by British and American imports that has continued to escalate.1 Television was beginning to have a signicant, and in the eyes of some, unwelcome, inuence on the nature and purveyance of culture.2 But young people were also increasingly faced with the consequences of wide-ranging social changes-notably, the breakdown in traditional family structures, the ‘sexual revolution’, the eects of increased consumerism, and the uncertainties of a world overshadowed by nuclear threat. Along with new ideas, freedoms, and opportunities came new concerns and new existential dilemmas.
