His book Histoire des populationsfran çaises (1948), inquired into the secrets of family life, where he discovered what he claimed was a "hidden revolution" in the mores of conjugal life during the early modern era, made manifest in the widening use of contraceptive practices among well-born married couples, the key element of a cluster of medical and cultural "techniques of life" that encouraged calculation and planning in family life. He embarked on his research in historical demography to challenge such notions. While initially sympathetic with the proposals of Vichy's leaders for the family's rehabilitation, he disputed their claims about its moral decline and their fears about the biological decay of the French population.
But history was his passion, and he led a parallel life as a researcher and independent scholar in a new kind of cultural history.Īri ès's ideas about the history of childhood and family were inspired by the public debate under Vichy about the crisis of the French family. During the war years, he taught briefly at a Vichy-sponsored training college, then accepted a post as director of a documentation center for international commerce in tropical fruit, where he worked for most of his adult life. During the late 1930s, he was also a journalist for the student newspaper of the royalist Action fran çaise and was active in allied right-wing intellectual circles, notably the Cercle Fustel de Coulanges, through which he became acquainted with Daniel Hal évy and other old-fashioned men of letters. Born into a middle-class professional family with Catholic religious convictions and sentimental attachments to the traditions of old France, Ari ès earned his licence in history and geography at the University of Grenoble and his dipl ôme d' études sup érieures at the University of Paris ( Sorbonne) in 1936 with a thesis on the judicial nobility of Paris in the sixteenth century. The French historical demographer and pioneering historian of collective mentalities Philippe Ari ès is best known for his L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien R égime (1960, published in English in 1962 as Centuries of Childhood ), the seminal study that launched historical scholarship on childhood and family life in the Western world.
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