Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes that Art history's frequent overlooking of the significance of the revolutionary street urchin, not to mention Eugène Delacroix's boyish comrade on the left of the picture, calls for an intervention. After a brief examination of predecessors of the gamin in boy heroes and shifting family paradigms of the Great Revolution, an overview of the urchin's place in nineteenth-century social history identifies an evolving dialectic between issues of child labor and education. The archetypal figure of the gamin de Paris as political agent is subsequently positioned in relation to fundamental principles of the post-Revolutionary French social imaginary, including most significantly 'fraternity', 'nation', and 'people'. The book aims to historicize and destabilize a frequently universalized and formulaic masculine stereotype in the national imaginary so as to trace patterns of repetition and transformation in the construction of a bourgeois myth.