ABSTRACT
Predecessors for the gamin de Paris during the Great Revolution could be found in scenes of boys marching like soldiers, playing at being republican men, as well as in the margins of visual representations of revolutionary activities of "the people", or sometimes more centrally in depictions of revolutionary drummer boys in the thick of battle, notably the Napoleonic battle at Arcole. Collective memory images of revolutionary boys would jostle and inflect those of the later gamins de Paris in the continuing transformation of such notions as "fraternity", "nation", and "people" in the French social imaginary. The Great Revolution, like its subsequent iterations in the nineteenth century, would attempt to find an interface between ideals of the educated boy and the street boy as emblem of "the people". The Convention voted a decree establishing state primary schools, even as children read revolutionary manuals and catechisms to teach them about republican virtues.
