Childhood in the Promised Land Working Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880 1960

Downs, Laura Lee

ISBN 10: 0822329441 / ISBN 13: 9780822329442

Published by Duke Univ Pr, 2002

About this Item

411 pages. 9.00x6.00x1.00 inches. In Stock.

Seller Inventory # x-0822329441

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Childhood in the Promised Land Working Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880 1960
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822329441
• ISBN 13: 9780822329442
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Brand New
• Weight: 0.79 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

Childhood in the Promised Land is the first history of France's colonies de vacances, a vast network of summer camps created for working-class children. The colonies originated as a late-nineteenth-century charitable institution, providing rural retreats intended to restore the fragile health of poor urban children. Participation grew steadily throughout the first half of the twentieth century, "trickling up" by the late 1940s to embrace middle-class youth as well.

At the heart of the study lie the municipal colonies de vacances, organized by the working-class cities of the Paris red belt. Located in remote villages or along the more inexpensive stretches of the Atlantic coast, the municipal colonies gathered their young clientele into variously structured "child villages," within which they were to live out particular, ideal visions of the collective life of children throughout the long summer holiday. Focusing on the creation of and participation in these summer camps, Laura Lee Downs presents surprising insights into the location and significance of childhood in French working-class cities and, ultimately, within the development of modern France.

Drawing on a rich array of historical sources, including dossiers and records of municipal colonies discovered in remote town halls of the Paris suburbs, newspaper accounts, and interviews with adults who participated in the colonies as children, Downs reveals how diverse groups—including local Socialist and Communist leaders and Catholic seminarians—seized the opportunity to shape the minds and bodies of working-class youth. Childhood in the Promised Land shows how, in creating the summer camps, these various groups combined pedagogical theories, religious convictions, political ideologies, and theories about the relationship between the countryside and children's physical and cognitive development. At the same time, the book sheds light on classic questions of social control, highlighting the active role of the children in shaping their experiences.

About the Author

Laura Lee Downs is Directeur d'Etudes at the Centre de Recherches Historiques of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is the author of Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metalworking Industries, 1914–1939.