Paris (AFP)
The censorship exercised since the early nineteenth century readings for children, novels to illustrated, has never stopped but often changed sides with very different reasons: an exciting exhibition shows at the National Library of France.
"No one, since it is about reading children, can say that there is nothing to say" and "censorship is not necessarily where we think it is," says AFP Marine Planche, curator of this exhibition hung along the alley Julien-Cain, adjoining the Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand.
This hanging, which aligns 120 publications - posters, comic pages, book covers, articles - has the merit of having shown the vivacity, the passion and the complexity of opinions.
"Do not let them read, polemics and children's books", until December 1, starts with the book of 1904 of Abbot Bethlehem (1869-1940) "Novels to read and novels to proscribe".
For Catholic families, it will be republished many times and sold to hundreds of thousands of copies, in France, Belgium and to Quebec. The book will be the main inspirer of the law of July 16, 1949 which still frames the publications for the youth thanks to a commission of surveillance.
Violence on the one hand, and body and sexuality on the other, are the two topics on which censorship will be constantly on guard, the commissioner said. Until recently, when books like "Tango has two dads" that evoke the homoparentality, have been controversial in the context of gay marriage and the Manif for all.
According to its members and according to the subjects and the times (May 68, before, after), this commission will be more or less flexible.
Comics, especially foreign ones, were often censored, when they were considered vulgar, "demoralizing", "indigent", even "satanic" when they evoked the magic. Comics, especially American, were sentenced as violent, considered responsible for juvenile delinquency.
Sometimes an image had to be removed from a board, even in the very educational and wise "Max and Lili". Recently "Little Red Riding Hood", considered sexist, was removed from a library in Barcelona.
During the war and before, censorship had increased on works whose authors were Jewish.
After the war, says the historian Jean-Yves Mollier, "believers or non-believers coming out of the Resistance shared the same moral principles". The wife of Aragon, Elsa Triolet, pronounced in 1949 a very virulent speech on the necessary protection of the youth.
For pediatrician Françoise Dolto, the priority was to "protect" children: "Written and chosen by adults, children's literature escapes the judgment of its young consumers.These are at the mercy of + children's books + presumed harmless, even educational. "
For Librarian Geneviève Patte, a specialist in these questions, "the danger is much more in what is false, cumbersome and boring than in what is too strong in its truth.Do not fear too quickly to traumatize the children".
© 2019 AFP