ABSTRACT
In the second half of the eighteenth century, both libertine and moralizing subjects enjoyed a marked—and equal—increase in popularity. The charming adulteresses and soubrettes who abound in the scenes were not banished from the stalls and shops of printsellers by pictures of happy mothers and beloved wives. The competing views of individual happiness that the two kinds of scenes present had at least one thing in common: directly or indirectly, they both opposed the conventional eighteenth-century marriage that at best ignored individual needs and at worst frustrated them. The new ideal of the family also challenged popular notions of children and child-rearing. The modern view of infancy and early childhood as attractive and important stages of life is an Enlightenment discovery that was still new in the eighteenth century. French philosophers, doctors and educators of the eighteenth century advanced concepts of child care and education that radically reversed common notions and practices.
