ABSTRACT
Despite the popularity of the works of Mme Le Prince de Beaumont, Mme d’Epinay, and Mme de Genlis, it is Arnaud Berquin (1747-1791) who is most oen credited with being the real pioneer of children’s literature in France.1 Certainly he can be credited with a number of innovations. His L’Ami des enfans was the rst work for young readers sold by subscription and published in regular instalments, appearing on the rst of every month between January 1782 and December 1783. As its simple title-unencumbered with a long subtitle emphasising a didactic agenda-suggests, it was aimed specically at the child reader under the age of eleven and dispensed with a pedagogical framework, consisting instead of a collection of short stories and playlets of which children are the protagonists. Rather than endorsing and reecting a strictly controlled reading environment and mediating the narratives through an adult authority gure, L’Ami des enfans provided reading material for children of both sexes to collect and read on their own. Moreover, it sought both to address itself directly to them and to maintain a level of discourse appropriate to their level of linguistic experience and expertise. Berquin’s contemporary and admirer, Jean Nicolas Bouilly, himself an author of children’s books, claims in his ‘Notice sur Berquin’ to the 1852 edition of L’Ami des enfants that each issue was awaited ‘avec impatience dans l’humble foyer du simple artisan, comme dans le palais du roi’ and indeed the rst edition was emblazoned with the coat of arms of Marie-Antoinette.2 Both L’Ami des enfans and its sequel, L’Ami des adolescens, a similar collection of stories for older children, two issues of which appeared every month in 1784-85, were
instant best-sellers and continued to be both recommended by adults and loved by children for many decades. Such was its impact that Berquin won the Académie Française’s Prix de l’utilité in 1784 and the collection of the stories in book form (1784) ran into nearly 250 editions throughout the nineteenth century.3
