of childhood itself was taken into account in the cult of its eccentricities in Les
aventures de Jean-Paul Choppart (1934) by René-Louis Desnoyers (1802–1868), a
version of which had appeared in Le Journal des enfants in 1832 (Caradec 1977:119).
This magazine, like Le Journal des Jeunes Personnes, edited by Julie Gouraud,
corresponded to a desire to develop reading formulated in the Guizot law of 1833 on
primary education.
Following the 1860 amnesty, the same ideas led Pierre-Jules Hetzel (who had set up
the Nouveau Magasin des Enfants in 1843, and who was also a politician exiled by
Napoleon III after the 1851 coup d’Etat), launched Le Magasin d’Education et de
Recreation in 1864. This periodical set out to further the aims of science, and Jean
Macé, who founded the Ligue de l’Enseignement, was responsible for the educative
section. It was here that Jules Verne (1828–1905) published most of his writings and
here too that The Little Weakling (1868) and Letters from My Mill (1869) by Alphonse
Daudet, L’art d’être grand-père by Victor Hugo, Hetzel’s adaptations (published under
the pseudonym of P.J.Stahl) of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Marco Woyzog’s
Maroussia, and other stories appeared. The project of exploring the realities of
contemporary France proposed to Hector Malot in 1869 led to nothing in the short term,
but Sans Famille [Nobody’s Boy] by this author was published in 1878, and Bruno’s Le
Tour de France de deux enfants in 1886. This female educationalist, author of Cours de
Morale et d’Instruction Civique and other works, incarnates the republican spirit which
was expressed in the Jules Ferry laws on the obligatory and secular nature of the
French school. Le Tour de France de deux enfants, which was to appear in 300 editions
within thirty years, drew the lessons of patriotism following the French defeat after the
1870 war against the Germans and was intended to stimulate national sentiments (as
did Selma Lagerlöf’s account of Nils Olgersson’s wonderful travels through Sweden,
published in 1907).
A sign of the educational project of Hetzel was Verne’s ambition to write ‘the science
novel’, to make use of the changes in the contemporary world and to invent the fiction of
the future. The writer used new hypotheses: navigation of submarines in Twenty
Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), propeller propulsion in The Clippers of the
Clouds (1886), astronautics in From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and so on. However,
his fictional writings appeal initially because they are in advance of their time and allow
the reader to experience the adventures of modern discoveries in ‘extraordinary
voyages’: Five Weeks in a Balloon published in 1862, was the first of a series of initiation
and training stories in which information and entertainment are evenly balanced. In
over forty novels, the whole social and political history of a period is considered with its
international conflicts (Floating Island, 1896) and its utopias (L’éternel Adam, 1910).
The work of Sophie, Countess de Ségur (1799–1874), daughter of the governor
Rostopchin who faced Napoleon at Moscow, had as much success amongst girls as
Verne did among boys. It shows the other side of the ideology of the period: in the
conflict which opposed secular morality epitomised in the republican school and religious
morality. Her novels, written like lives of the saints, were inspired by the conservative
militantism which led the author to publish Livre de messe des petits enfants (1857) and
A Life of Christ for Children as told by a Grand-Mother (1859). Les petites filles modèles
(1857) may seem to be highly moralistic, since the aim was to produce docile children
714 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE