Les Lumières de la jeunesse: les réécritures pour le jeune public auxviii^eet au début duxix^esiècle. Sous la direction de Ugo Dionne et Michel Fournier

This collection of essays on early youth and children’s literature highlights Enlightenment-era and early nineteenth-century rewritings of scholarly, philosophical, and scientific texts and ideas, for children and young people. The focus in this volume is on the rewriting of sophisticated texts and ideas, whether ancient or modern, for a young public in France and French North America. Many of the texts studied are re-imaginings of key texts of the Enlightenment, such as noted pedagogue and children’s author Félicité de Genlis’s borrowings from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, here commented by Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval. Some of the other studies consider adaptations of authors of the previous century, such as the French moralist Jean de La Bruyère, that were intended for young people. As editors Ugo Dionne and Michel Fournier remind us (pp. 3–4), the true audience of littérature de jeunesse were often the parents or tutors who selected books for young people; likewise, the topics of books purchased often reveal more about the preoccupations of pedagogues than of their protégés. Censorship played a role in the process; so, too, did the shaping of knowledge and traditions in line with the preferences of young people and the ideological leaning of adults. Even classical authors like Plutarch and Cicero were rewritten, excerpted, translated, shortened, censored, or simplified, for pedagogical purposes, in ways that illustrate eighteenth-century concerns with learning and psychological development, specifically moral improvement and the cultivation of the reasoning mind. One recurring theme is the persistent attention in eighteenth-century French culture to vocabulary and ideas that young audiences would find comprehensible, due to writers’ belief in young people’s natural capacity for self-directed or minimally directed learning. Littérature de jeunesse often did the work of annotating, explaining, or introducing other texts, ideas, or concepts that students would not necessarily understand or find compelling in their original form, namely, Newtonian physics, political philosophy, or classical Latin literature. Rather than bending these complex ideas to simpler national frameworks, the contributors to the present volume focus, for the most part, on the spread of foreign ideas and texts through French versions, such as the cultural translation of contemporary works like Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote and the vulgarization of foreign scientific ideas through French-language pedagogical texts. In highlighting the international and intercultural in eighteenth-century French pedagogical literature, these readings provide a new view on Enlightenment culture. This volume’s interpretations of littérature de jeunesse centre borrowing, form, and intertextuality, rather than reason, individuality, or the development of rational capacities; this approach underscores the dependency of Enlightenment pedagogy on classical examples such as Cicero and on international currents of eighteenth-century thought in both scientific and literary movements. Further, the volume offers up the notion of ‘Lumières de la jeunesse’, indicated in the title and developed throughout, as a mode of pedagogical textual production on Enlightenment themes and methods in texts for young people, even when the authors and the texts are not necessarily philosophes or pro-philosophical themselves (see p. 6). The aforementioned chapter on Mme de Genlis’s rewritings and Joël Castonguay-Bélanger’s chapter on Newton for children particularly share in this tendency to see vulgarization, or the spreading of ideas to a wider public, as part of an Enlightenment project that needs to be understood anew in light of broader participation, including of young people and teachers, in the creation and circulation of knowledge, both pro- and anti-Enlightenment. As this volume convincingly demonstrates, the French Enlightenment aspired to be for the many, including children and the young.