| Children
are one of the more surprising groups to be lumped into the category
of the dangerous classes. Children are generally thought of as
innocent and too young to be criminals. The bourgeoisie, however,
saw the urchins that inhabited the streets of Paris as dangerous
people. "Gangs of children, gangs of thieves," the
saying went. In 1830 the average life expectancy of a worker's
child was two years. This statistic goes a long way to explain
the phenomenon of the Paris gamin; those children who survived
parental neglect and the urban death rate had already proved
themselves remarkably flexible and sturdy. The bourgeois notion
of "les gamins" was countered by Victor Hugo in Les
Misérables. Hugo payed tribute to the Parisian gamin
in his creation of Gavroche. |
This image is of a street
arab pictured in a reproduction of the famous painting Liberty
Leading the People
|
