Child of the People and Child of the Fatherland in Nineteenth-Century French Social History

Historian Jacques Donzelot, among others, has given a Foucauldian reading to the sociopolitical and psychic developments, which began with the Great Revolution's invention of masculine "children of the fatherland". As capitalism discovered in bourgeois children and their parents a ready-made consumer class, state protection and the surveillance provided by its various institutions incrementally diminished the patriarchal power of fathers over their children. Donzelot argues that nineteenth-century child welfare reforms effectively replaced the father's authority with other politically mediated forms of control. Under the circumstances, transformations of the gamin de Paris in the social imaginary interfaced with parallel shifts in constructions of "the people" and the "the nation". Legal reforms in labor, education, and social welfare slowly began to extend an ideal of childhood as a protected state from the middle to the poorer classes, who were nonetheless increasingly given a separate designation as "the people".