this time of a uniform worldwide culture imposed in a positive fashion by the 1989
Declaration of Children’s Rights and, more dubiously, by contemporary co-publications
and co-productions?
This article cannot, therefore, ignore publishing conditions; it must be remembered
that the number of titles published in France in the children’s sector has increased
steadily to reach 4,850 in 1988; in the same year, 31,000 titles were published in the
general sector, compared to 55,000 in Great Britain, 24,200 in Italy, and 38,000 in
Spain (Bouvaist 1990:71). Half of the new titles in the children’s sector consist of
translations or adaptations mainly from English-speaking countries: for example, in
1988, Bouvaist identified 355 titles in this category compared to fifty-five from German
and thirteen from Italian or Japanese (30). Is this a sign of cultural domination or of
openness? Will French creativity be marginalised by its publishing system, which is too
rigidly bound to literature and school? Will television and the new computerised media
result in a world crisis of book reading, which will be overtaken by films and video
cassettes? These questions are intended to justify my approach to this presentation of
our literary archipelago: I shall concentrate on contemporary work after considering the
classics.
Training the Mind, Education in Language: Story-Telling to ChildrenI shall briefly discuss the centuries prior to the reign of Louis XIV, during which
children’s literature developed simultaneously with growing awareness of childhood
(Ariès 1960). Before this, children’s culture was identified with an oral culture and
religious instruction: saws, stories and tales belonged to this tradition, whereas
almanacs, holy pictures, tales of chivalry, The Roman de Renart, the Chronicles of
Gargantua and the Lives of the Saints made up the main aspects of the culture of the
chapbooks, which were read aloud in families and which complemented the practice of
rhetoric, Latin texts and Aesop’s fables in the schools.
In fact, children’s literature in France was born (noting the prelude of the La Fontaine
Fables written for the Dauphin in 1668) with the publication of Histoires ou Contes du
temps passé by Charles Perrault in 1697, when a centralised state, unifying linguistic
practices had come into being. On the one hand, Perrault’s work was close to and
almost an extension of popular literature and as such was exposed to the sarcastic
criticism of literary circles. In Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française of 1694, prefaced
by Charles Perrault himself, fairy tales are described as ‘ridiculous fables, such as those
which old people tell to amuse children’.
This marginalisation of the fairy tale, banished to old age and childhood, was part of
an approach which was adopted by educators for centuries. From 1696, the second
version of the treatise Instructions for the Education of a Daughter by Fénelon left no
doubt about the definition of the tale as a horizon of expectation for young readers and a
model for writing for authors. The prelate, tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, wrote:
Children passionately love ridiculous tales; we can see them every day transported
with joy or weeping tears at the tale of the adventures recounted to them; do not710 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE