Youth, Literacy and Social Emancipation in Third Republic France : The ‘Crime de Jully’

Abstract

Cet article analyse la réaction sociale au "Crime de Jully", une affaire d'assassinats multiples commis dans la France rurale en 1909-1910 par deux vachers adolescents d'origine suisse. Alphabétisés et ambitieux, ces garçons prétendirent avoir été conduits au meurtre par leurs lectures. Pour la société française de leur époque, Richard Joseph Jacquiard et Joseph Vienny représentaient des personnalités marginales et dangereuses, en tant que criminels, adolescents (ni enfants, ni adultes), et travailleurs éduqués. Bien qu'ils n'eussent pas été élevés ou éduqués en France, la réaction s'inscrivit dans le cadre d'un débat national concernant les effets de l'instruction laïque et obligatoire qui avait débuté plusieurs décennies auparavant. Comme le montre cet article, en exigeant que tous les enfants allassent à l'école primaire, les autorités républicaines affrontaient un dilemme fondamental : comment éduquer la jeunesse sans déstabiliser l'ordre social. This article analyses the social response to the 'Crime de Jully,' a multiple murder case committed in rural France in 1909-1910 by two Swiss adolescent cowherds. Literate and ambitious, the boys claimed that they had been driven to murder because of their reading habits. Richard Joseph Jacquiard and Joseph Vienny represented dangerous liminal figures for contemporary French society : as criminals, adolescents (neither children nor adults), and as educated workers. Although the boys had not been educated or raised in France, the response was framed within a decades-long national debate over the effects of compulsory, secular education. As this article explores, in requiring all children to attend primary school republican authorities faced a fundamental dilemma : how to educate young people while not destabilizing the existing social order. i n early june 1910, an eager audience packed into the Auxerre assizes court to witness the sensational trial of seventeen-year-old Richard joseph jacquiard 1 Briony Neilson received her Phd in history from the university of Sydney in 2012. her thesis, entitled The Age of Morality : Youth, Criminal Responsibility and Juvenile Justice Reform in Third Republic France, 1877-1912, explored ideas about age, regeneration, and criminality in third Republic france, especially in relation to judicial practice and emerging ideas about childhood and adolescence as distinct stages of moral development. her current research examines social responses to popular literacy in france in the nineteenth century, particularly in the context of a widening of the political franchise.