and ideal Catholics. This would be to fail to take into account the imagination of a
novelist, who portrays her own childhood and who appeals through her descriptions of
‘transgressions and pranks’ rather than of well-behaved children, as shown by the
heroine of Les Malheures de Sophie (1864) (which was translated into English as The
Misfortunes of Sophie by Edgar Skinner as late as 1936). English readers responded to a
spirit of adventure in the adaptations of François le Bossu (1863) [The Little Hunchback
(1884)] and of the Mémoires d’un âne (1860) [The Ups and Downs of a Donkey’s Life
(1891)]. However, the most celebrated propagator of the ideas of Rousseau in the
nineteenth century was George Sand in Contes d’une Grand-Mère first published in the
Revue des Deux Mondes in the 1870s and then in a single volume in 1879 which
achieved worldwide celebrity.
The Two Images of FranceThe twentieth century is marked by the changes which have followed the world wars.
The first change occurred in the 1930s. Culture was rooted in rural France, which
responded to the Rabelaisian spirit of La guerre des boutons (1912) by Louis Pergaud
(1882–1919), to Le Grand Meaulnes [The Wanderer] (1913) by Alain-Fournier (1886–
1914) and to the satirical vision of farm animals in Gédéon (1923) by Benjamin Rabier
(1864–1939). In the 1930s, this world was expanded by the use François Faucher (1898–
1967) (who set up L’Atelier du Père Castor in 1931) made of the theories of ‘New
Education’ inspired by Frantisek Bakulé, Havranek, Claparède, Piaget, and of Russian
art in the Rozhankovsky collections (Parmegiani, 1989:262). Similarly, Paul Hazard’s
reading of international children’s literature in Les Livres, les Enfants et les Hommes
(1932) opened new vistas. Lewis Carroll’s Alice thus inspired Fattypuffs et Thinifers by
André Maurois and Jean Bruller (1930), whereas Jean de Brunhoff’s Histoire de Babar
(1931) revealed a mythical Africa, as did Blaise Cendrars’s Petits contes nègres pour les
enfants des Blancs (1928).
However, rural France was still haunting the Catholic periodical La Semaine de
Suzette (1905–1960), which was famous for the adventures of Bécassine, a caricature
Breton female character invented in 1905 by Caumery and drawn by Pinchon as a
cartoon strip. It also made a return in the equally famous cartoon strip drawn by René
Goscinny and André Uderzo, Asterix le Gaulois (1961). This spirit was present in L’lle
rose (1930), Les lunettes du lion (1932), and Bridinette (1930), tales by Charles Vidrac,
who wrote for the Primary School Teachers’ Union; in the novel by Henri Bosco, L’âne
Culotte (1937); in Marcel Aymè’s The Wonderful Farm (1950); in Colette Vivier’s La
maison des petits bonheurs (1938) and in Robert Desnos’s Trente chantefables pour
enfants sages (1944); and after the war in Le Pays où l’on n’arrive jamais (1955) by
André Dhotel and in Le Château de ma mère by Marcel Pagnol (1958), in which the
authors sang the praises of their home regions of the Ardennes and Provence.
The years following the Second World War were characterised by the more socially
militant attitude of Amitié publications, which published the novels of René Guillot, who
in 1964 became the only French writer to be awarded the Andersen prize (Au pays des
bêtes sauvages, 1948). Guillot knows how to develop fine plots and real suspense. He
has been stimulated by African landscapes and people to some of his best writing, such
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