The Development of Leisure and the Transformation of Working-Class Adolescence, Paris 1830–1940

Abstract

The evolution of the pastimes of Parisian working-class youth between 1830 and 1940 reveals the interconnection between the rise of modern leisure and the development of modern adolesence. Two striking images halfway between literature and sociology, the gamin and the apache, illuminate the transformation of working-class adolescence from social and spatial exclusion during the 1830s to exclusivity by the 1900s. By the Belle Epoque, working-class adolescents had articulated their own subculture through the abundant and varied diversions of “the city of light”: dance halls, cafés, cinemas, sports, and newspapers. The growing sense of exclusivity among working-class adolescents, however, undermined a wider sense of class consciousness. Working-class youth, especially after 1900, increasingly identified more with leisure and youth than with work and class. In general, the workplace ceased to be a site where expression and creativity could be exercised and instead became an instrument, a means to an end: the wage.