The revolutionary boy at the barricades was memorably envisioned in Eugene Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables (1862). Over the course of the nineteenth century, images of the Paris urchin entered the collective social imaginary as cultural and psychic sites of memory, whether in avant-garde or more conventional visual culture. Visual and literary paradigms of the mythical gamin de Paris were born of recurring political revolutions (1830, 1832, 1848, 1871) and of masculine, bourgeois identity constructions that responded to continuing struggles over visions and fantasies of nationhood. With the destabilization of traditional, patriarchal family models, the diminishing of the father's symbolic role, and the intensification of the brotherly urchin's psychosexual relationship with the allegorical motherland, what had initially been socially marginal eventually became symbolically central in classed and gendered inventions and repeated re-inventions of "fraternity," "people," and "nation." Within a fundamentally split conception of "the people," the bohemian boy insurrectionary, an embodiment of freedom, was transformed by ongoing discourses of power and reform, of victimization and agency, into a capitalist entrepreneur, schoolboy, colonizer, and budding military defender of the fatherland. A contested figure of the city became a contradictory emblem of the nation.

The representation of children in modern European visual culture has often been marginalized by Art History as sentimental and trivial. For this reason the subject of childhood in relation to art and its production has largely been ignored. Confronting this dismissal, this unique collection of essays raises new and unexpected issues about the formation of childhood identity in the nineteenth century and makes a significant contribution to the development of inter-disciplinary studies within this area. Through a range of stimulating and insightful case studies, the book charts the development of the Romantic ideal of childhood, starting with Rousseau's Emile, and attends to its visual, social and psychological transformations during the historical period from which Freud's psychoanalytic theories eventually emerged. Foremost scholars such as Anne Higonnet, Carol Mavor, Susan Casteras and Linda A. Pollock uncover the means by which children became an important conduit for prevailing social anxieties and demonstrate that the apparently 'timeless' images of them that proliferated at the time should be understood as complex cultural documents. Over 50 illustrations enhance this rich and fascinating volume.

The representation of children in modern European visual culture has often been marginalized by Art History as sentimental and trivial. For this reason the subject of childhood in relation to art and its production has largely been ignored. Confronting this dismissal, this unique collection of essays raises new and unexpected issues about the formation of childhood identity in the nineteenth century and makes a significant contribution to the development of inter-disciplinary studies within this area. Through a range of stimulating and insightful case studies, the book charts the development of the Romantic ideal of childhood, starting with Rousseau's Emile, and attends to its visual, social and psychological transformations during the historical period from which Freud's psychoanalytic theories eventually emerged. Foremost scholars such as Anne Higonnet, Carol Mavor, Susan Casteras and Linda A. Pollock uncover the means by which children became an important conduit for prevailing social anxieties and demonstrate that the apparently 'timeless' images of them that proliferated at the time should be understood as complex cultural documents. Over 50 illustrations enhance this rich and fascinating volume.

The revolutionary boy at the barricades was memorably envisioned in Eugene Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables (1862). Over the course of the nineteenth century, images of the Paris urchin entered the collective social imaginary as cultural and psychic sites of memory, whether in avant-garde or more conventional visual culture. Visual and literary paradigms of the mythical gamin de Paris were born of recurring political revolutions (1830, 1832, 1848, 1871) and of masculine, bourgeois identity constructions that responded to continuing struggles over visions and fantasies of nationhood. With the destabilization of traditional, patriarchal family models, the diminishing of the father's symbolic role, and the intensification of the brotherly urchin's psychosexual relationship with the allegorical motherland, what had initially been socially marginal eventually became symbolically central in classed and gendered inventions and repeated re-inventions of "fraternity," "people," and "nation." Within a fundamentally split conception of "the people," the bohemian boy insurrectionary, an embodiment of freedom, was transformed by ongoing discourses of power and reform, of victimization and agency, into a capitalist entrepreneur, schoolboy, colonizer, and budding military defender of the fatherland. A contested figure of the city became a contradictory emblem of the nation.