Criança e infância na obra de Philippe Ariès e nos clássicos da História Social da Classe Operária: em busca das crianças invisíveis – as crianças proletárias

Abstract

In this article we reveal the place that proletarian children played in representations of the concepts of child and childhood from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries in Europe. The pioneer in researching these themes was Philippe Ariès. However, in his seminal work Social history of the child and the family (2015) we did not find any reference to the children of the working class. However, the proletarian child had a predominant social presence in the work of the authors of the Social History of the Working Class, who deal with the industrial revolution and the consolidation of capitalist social formation. It is a historical and documentary research, based on a Marxist interpretation of history. The article concludes that Ariès (2015) representations of children and childhood were based on children from the ruling classes of the time (nobility and aristocracy). These representations of the children of the wealthier classes were quite different and distant from the effervescent social life and limited material life of the rest of the children - the proletarian children, who were cowardly exploited by capitalism in the fields, factories, potteries and coal mines.