S tephen A. T oth . Mettray

Stephen A. Toth follows Mettray, a private agricultural penal colony for wayward boys, from its opening in 1840 to its closure in 1937. Its founder, Frédéric Demetz, aimed to rescue untended urchins from city streets and juveniles convicted of crimes from adult jails. By installing them in the countryside and enforcing a strict regimen of work and moral instruction, he expected to transform the colons into law-abiding, hardworking citizens. His contemporaries heralded Mettray as an enlightened corrective to the corrosive effects of urban poverty. But the admiration faded during the Third Republic as the colony lost state patronage and public support. Toth’s account of Mettray’s downward drift gives an ironic twist to the subtitle of the book. The departmental archives of the Indre-et-Loire received Mettray’s records in 2001 and opened them without restriction in 2005, enabling Toth to study the colony’s operation and fate from the inside out. He also...

Admiration · Art · Economic history · Institution · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Subtitle · French Historical and Cultural Studies · French Urban and Social Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law