ABSTRACT
In the social imaginary, the gamin de Paris as political agent became an unstable emblem of the fraternity of "the people" even as he was an orphaned child of the nation. The bourgeois family became consolidated as a normative social ideal that progressively embraced a new interest in child psychology. Yet the embodiment of masculinity in political terms continued to shift from fathers to sons and to ideals of fraternity rather than paternity. As constructed in the social imaginary, the repeated, cyclical revolutionary conflict between fathers and sons and the overcoming of the former by the latter was grounded in the republican idea that paternity was linked vertically to hierarchy and discipline, whereas fraternity led horizontally to equality and cooperation. The gamin de Paris can be read in the nineteenth-century social imaginary as an initially marginal figure of both "the people" and "the nation", a figure who paradoxically later served a more transnational function of representing French dominance in colonialism.
