Inspiring admiration without to imitation: a contituent paradox of child soldiers as characters in french children's literature During World War I

Abstract

During World War I, French children’s literature regularly proposed fictional or pseudo factual stories about child soldiers, which were developed during the on-going conflict. Theirs authors frequently sought to awaken their readers’ admiration of these heroes while discouraging them to act in the same way. The status of the child soldier, however, had ceased to exist by 1884. These stories thus settled into proposing a narrative and argumentative form that sought to achieve this paradoxical objective, justified by both ideological and commercial reasons.
Keywords : admiration, child soldiers, children’s literature, imitation, World War I.