Victor of Aveyron

Victor of Aveyron is a wild Enfant, which would have been born towards 1790 in the Aveyron.

The January 8th 1800, a naked child, arched, with the hair hirsutes, is flushed out by three hunters. He flees, leaves wood and takes refuge in the house of the Vidal dyer, with Saint-Sernin-on-Rancid. He does not speak and not made disordered gestures. He is sent three days later to Saint-Africa then with Rodez.

It is a certain Bonnaterre abbot who recovers it and takes it along to the central School. The minister Lucien Bonaparte claims his transfer to Paris. It thus arrives in the capital the August 6th 1800. Here it is delivered to the curiosity of crowd and the scientists. All kinds of the assumptions, even absurdest, were formulated about it. In particular it will never be known if its backwardness were due to its insulation or if a preliminary mental handicap had led to its abandonment towards the two years age.

In 1801, Victor is entrusted to the doctor Jean Itard. Nobody believes in his social rehabilitation, but Jean Itard harnesses himself with the task. He will publish a report the same year and a report in 1806 on his work with Victor of Aveyron. During did five years, it work with this child with his social rehabilitation, but regarded as a personal failure its incapacity - or its refusal? - with speaking.

Victor is entrusted to a certain Mrs Guerin who looks after it during 17 years, of 1811 to her death in 1828, in a house of the Feuillantine dead end. In 1970, François Truffaut takes as a starting point the history to carry out a film, the wild Child

Lucien Malson publishes the writings of Doctor Itard who sought to humanize the boy. He notices the difficulties which he had to make find with the child a sensitivity, feelings, a faculty of reasoning, but especially to learn how to him to communicate. Itard wonders finally if it would not have had better to be left in the forest. Malson will declare “ the man with the birth is only one hope ”.

a statue dedicated to " Victor, the wild child of Aveyron" , was set up with St Sernin on Rance. It is the work of the sculptor Remi Coudrain. .

See too

Document

Jean Itard, Memory and Rapport on Victor of Aveyron (1801 and 1806)
Presentation and comments of the text of Dr. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard “Memory and Report/ratio on Victor of Aveyron”
Thierry Gineste, Victor of Aveyron: Last wild child, first insane child , 2004,
Victor off Aveyron and other feral children At FeralChildren.com
The 2 supplements off texts Itard' S Mémoir one Victor of Aveyron
R. Shattuck (1980). The Forbidden Experiment: the Story off the Wild Servant boy off Aveyron . New York: International Kodansha.
Site of the sculptor Remi Coudrain, author of the statue of the wild child

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