ARIÈS, PHILIPPE

(1914–1984)

Philippe Ariès was born in Blois, in the Loire Valley of France, to an old Bordeaux family. He studied history and geography at the Sorbonne but did not graduate. During the pre-war years, Ariès haunted the rightist-monarchist circles of the Action Française. In 1941 he became an instructor at the École des Cadres of La Chapelle-Saint-Serval, which had just been created near Paris by the Vichy government, and in 1943 he was appointed head of the Center of Documentation of the Research Institute on Citrus Fruits. His most important book, Histoire des populations françaises et de leurs attitudes devant la vie, was published in 1948 (2nd edition, 1971). It did not provoke any reaction from academic historians, but immediately attracted the attention of demographers. From 1950 to 1975, Ariès directed a series at Plon Editions and contributed regularly to the royalist Nation française from 1955 to 1966. His second major publication, L'Enfant et la vie familialesous l'Ancien Régime (1960), translated as Centuriesof Childhood, was a bestseller among scholarly books in the United States. He was invited to lecture in the United States, and he found financial support for his research there. Ariès's other major books, Essai sur l'histoire de la mort en Occident (1975) and L'Hommedevant la mort (1977), earned him recognition at last as a prophet in his own country. He was elected Director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1978, and was called to contribute to the official anthology of the "new history." When he died in 1984, shortly after the death of his wife and lifelong collaborator, he was no longer an isolated pioneer, but one of the founders of demographic history and the unquestioned master of the history of mentalities.

Although he characterized himself as a "Sunday" historian, Ariès was by no means an occasional researcher but an authentic "everyday" scholar. Paralleling the triumphant socioeconomic history launched by the Annales school, he was the herald of a new cultural history, documenting the attitudes of people in their daily existence toward life, love, and death. Demography was the key that allowed him to unlock the secrets of the private domain, and the family was the privileged axis of his history of mentalities. Ariès showed that childhood, adolescence, and the indissoluble marriage were relatively recent concepts. Following Adolphe Landry (1934), he argued that the pursuit of pleasure and happiness, added to the growing rationalization of behavior, had led to the deliberate strategy of couples to separate sexuality from procreation, opening the way to birth control and to a general liberation of sexual mores. This development coincided, too, with a changing conception of death–for Ariès, the topic where the "collective unconscious" could best manifest itself. To describe how the "tamed Death" of the Middle Ages was transformed into the "forbidden Death" of the present day, Ariès and his wife made extensive and imaginative use of iconography.

Ariès did not escape some critics who reproached this "banana seller" for the lack of representativeness of his assertions, the deficiency of his quantitative measures, and his neglect of the role played by the State. But during the 1970s and 1980s, the "new history"–that is, cultural history–prevailed over the socioeconomic history of the 1950s and 1960s (even if there was, after Ariès, a risk of fragmentation of this learning). As the chronicler of everyday life in that "world we have lost," according to Peter Laslett's book, Ariès had rightly perceived many of the symptoms of future change. But he could hardly have foreseen the scope of the upheaval that the mores in Western societies were experiencing even within one or two decades of his own passing.

See also: Culture and Population; Family: History; Historical Demography; Second Demographic Transition.

bibliography

selected works by philippe ariÈs

Ariès, Philippe. 1960. L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime, Paris: Plon. Translated as Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, 1962. New York: Vintage Books.

——. 1971. Histoire des populations françaises et de leurs attitudes devant la vie de depuis le XVIIIe siècle, 2nd edition. Paris: SELF.

——. 1975. Essai sur l'histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen-Age à nos jours. Paris: Seuil. Translated as Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, 1974. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

——. 1977. L'Homme devant la mort. Paris: Seuil. Translated as The Hour of Our Death, 1981. New York: Knopf.

——. 1980. "Two successive motivations for the declining birth rate in the West." Population and Development Review 6(4): 645–650.

——. 1983. Images de l'homme devant la mort. Paris: Seuil. Translated as Images of Man and Death, 1985. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ariès, Philippe, ed. 1986. Le Temps de l'histoire (1954). Paris, Seuil.

——. 1980. Un Historien du dimanche. Paris: Seuil.

Ariès, Philippe, and Georges Duby, eds. 1991. A History of Private Life. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

selected works about philippe ariÈs

Gros, Guillaume. 2002. Philippe Ariès (1914–1984). Un traditionaliste non-conformiste: de l'Action Française à l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Paris: Institut d'Études Politiques.

Hutton, Patrick M. 2002. "Philippe Ariès and the Secrets of the History of Mentalities." Historical Reflections/Reflexions historiques 28(1): 1–19.

Landry, Adolphe. 1982 [1934]. La révolution démographique: Études et essais sur les problèmes de la population. Paris: Institut national d'études démographiques.

Laslett, Peter. 1984. The World We Have Lost, 3rd edition. New York: Scribner.

Jacqueline Hecht