His story gave rise to a famous film: The Wild Child of François Truffaut (1970). Victor de l'Aveyron is a young boy, discovered in a wood near the village of Lacaune in 1797, completely naked, not knowing how to read, speak, or stand up straight. Tuesday in Hondelatte tells , the reporter narrates his amazing story.
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Discovery. A noise runs in the winter of 1797, in the village of Lacaune. Locals saw a child, completely wild, in the woods. He is naked, hangs with the animals and feeds on acorns and leaves. The weeks pass and the rumor is redoubled, to the point of becoming an information. So what should you do? Leave it where it is, or capture it? In the summer of 1799, the decision was made: a handful of volunteers went into the woods to capture him. We find him in a thicket, naked and dirty, growling, on all fours and hunched, unable to stand. The boy is forced back to the village. Locked in a barn, it quickly becomes a kind of attraction. We come from all the surrounding villages to see it. Finally entrusted to a widow of the village, he manages to escape and returns to the woods.
After this first contact with civilization, the "wild boy" will be less fearful. Since he fled the widow's home, he is no longer hiding completely. From time to time, we see him coming to claim potatoes from the peasants. One morning, he introduces himself to a dyer's shop in a village in Aveyron. The authorities are prevented, the story goes back to Paris where Lucien Bonaparte, then Minister of the Interior, decides to repatriate the child in the capital. From then on, the life of the one nicknamed "the wild child" will switch.
The arrival in Paris. In Paris, it is first exhibited and shown to crowds who are in a hurry to see this strange boy of about ten years who growls and does not stand up. But quickly, it is entrusted to a doctor: Dr. Philippe Pinel, a spawn of the time. He practices on the child a whole battery of tests. The health professional tries methods used by deaf mutes to express themselves. Despite the will of the doctor, nothing helps. The child does not know how to open a door, does not know how to stand on a chair and he only utters one sound: "o". For Dr. Pinel, this child is stupid by birth, he did not become silly, and that is probably why he was abandoned in the woods.
The four years with Dr. Itard. Another doctor wants to examine the child: Jean Itard. His challenge? To educate the child to make a man, he wants to demonstrate that one becomes civilized by learning. He re-baptizes the child and calls him Victor. In turn, Dr. Itard is conducting a battery of tests. For the doctor, Victor has an essential problem: sensitivity. He does not react to a shot, but jumps as soon as a nut is broken behind him. Jean Itard then begins to teach him the heat, it tickles to react, it drops drops of water in his bath to see his reaction, etc.
Jean Itard is making real progress with Victor. He even manages to make him pronounce the word "milk". But Victor does not speak, can not read. He knows how to get a knife when he is shown a knife drawing, but nothing is instinctive. After four years entirely devoted to the young boy, Jean Itard writes a last report, 80 pages, then moves on to something else. Victor will end his days with a governess, who has followed him for all his years alongside doctors. He died in Paris in 1828, without knowing how to speak, nor to read, nor to write.
Many specialists, a posteriori and while the medicine has progressed, have studied the case of Victor of Aveyron. With hindsight, they believe that Victor was probably subject to a form of autism, or a psychosis of childhood. Nothing proves, indeed, that he grew up for years in the woods. When it was discovered in 1797, it may have been abandoned only for a few days. A mystery forever.