1868. 8vo, pp. viii, 75, [3] (including table of contents); including musical notations, and seven full-page engravings and four engraved tail-piece vignettes; with discrete tear repairs at upper fore-edge of half-title and to pp. 9-10, and a further neat paper restoration at lower margin of pp. 43-44; lightly foxed throughout with some occasional spotting and soiling, foxing a little more prominent to half-title and final leaf; in recent blue marbled boards, with some minor wear to extremities; a good copy. Rare first edition of this attractively illustrated gymnastics manual for young children, the work of the leading French educationalist Marie-Pape-Carpentier (1815-1878) who was instrumental in the development of the public nursery school system in France.
The work begins with a preface outlining her general philosophy: ‘the child who plays is better and learns more than the child who is bored’. She encourages the practice of playful gymnastic games suitable for young children, and punctuated by songs, both of which they should be able to understand and perform easily, such as marches, circles, and skipping. The work then describes seven games: ‘The Good Housewife’, ‘The Wheat Game’, ‘The Good Gardener’, ‘The Little Workers’, ‘The Little Chimney Sweep’, ‘The Silkworm’, and ‘The Alone Girl’. Each is illustrated with a large full-page composition by Emile Bayard, Hercule Catenacci and Edmond Morin, and is structured around song scores.
Salles d'asile came to prominence in the early 19th century. Initially charitable institutions catering for the young children (from the ages of two to six) of poor working mothers, they were formally organised by the state in 1837. Often poorly funded, their remit was the subject of some debate, with opinion divided as to whether their purpose was to provide rudimentary education, or rather to merely provide a type of day care to keep poor children off the streets so that their parents (especially mothers) could work.
Pape-Carpentier had been appointed director of the main salle d’asile in Le Mans in 1842, and in 1846 published Conseils sur la direction des salles d’asile, which not only won a prize from the Académie Française, but attracted the attention of the philanthropist Mme Jules Mallet, a prominent figure on the largely female commission overseeing the salles d’asile. Mallet had long hoped to create a school to train nursery school teachers, and in 1847 persuaded her nephew, the education minister Baron Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy, that Carpantier should head the teacher-training school. The fall of the July Monarchy in February 1848 initially threatened Carpantier's direction of this fledgling institution, but thanks to interventions on her behalf by both Mme Mallet and the famous chansonnier Pierre-Jean de Béranger, with the new education minister, Hippolyte Carnot, in 1848 Carpantier was named director of the official école normale maternelle. At the same time she became the member of a Parisian education commission, a testimony to both her expertise and acceptability to the new republican leaders. It was at this time that Carnot renamed the salles d'asile to écoles maternelles, also removing them from the category of ‘charitable establishments’, now deemed inappropriate for an educational institution. Although Carnot hoped that economic progress would one day make mothers's work outside the home unnecessary, he, like Carpantier, recognized the unavoidable necessity of work for many poor women.
‘[Marie Pape-Carpantier] is one of those women unjustly forgotten even though she played a fundamental role in education. [...] In her first educational work - she would write around twenty, as well as books for children - she revealed ‘the secret of good teachers’. It was so successful that she was appointed director of the École normale maternelle created by the Revolution of 1848. She fought to ensure that the school for very young children was more than a day-care: material improvement of the classroom, importance of object lessons, awakening, gymnastics. Her books won various prizes, including that of the Académie française, influenced the policy of the Minister of Public Instruction Victor Duruy and caught the attention of Victor Hugo. Marie Pape-Carpantier also strove to defend the status of women: she was the first woman to speak at the Sorbonne. [...] Considered by her opponents as a free thinker, she was finally dismissed in 1874’. (online translation of Colette Cosnier, Marie Pape Carpantier: de l école maternelle à l école des filles, Paris, L'Harmattan, 1993).