Hapless innocence and precocious perversity in the courtroom melodrama: Representations of the child criminal in a Paris legal journal, 1830-1848

An analysis of the reports on the trials of child criminals that appeared in the French legal journal, La Gazette des Tribunaux, in the years between 1830 and 1848 reveals the emergence of a distinctive construction of childhood marked both by an insistence on the natural innocence of ''true'' children and by consternation in the face of the ''precociously perverse'' juvenile delinquent. After two generations of revolution and war French journalists shared with other cultural arbiters a common commitment to the reestablishment of a stable moral order through the reification of a stark opposition between good and evil-a project Peter Brooks has linked to the ''melodramatic imagination'' of early-nineteenth-century Romanticism. In this context, the innocent child sewed as a symbolic guarantor of good in a world threatened by evil, whereas the perverse child appeared as an anomaly whose very existence threatened to disrupt the social order.