Figure 1.--This CDV portrait was taken in St.-Jean D'Angely, a medieval abbey town in southwest Frnce on the French pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. The boy is unidentified and wears a classic Zouave outfit with a turban. He a holds a long rifle with planted bayonet in his hand. He looks to be about 10 years old. The deler thinks it is a pontifical Papal Zouave outfit, although we are not sure what the destinguish features are. The outfit looks to more like a fashionable Paris outfit than ht a boy night wear in a small abbey town, unless there is some unknown connection to the abbey. He also dates the portrait to the 1880s. It looks more like the 1860s to us, butbwe are unsure. The studio is C.H. Neumnn in St. Jean D'Angein. The CDV inclues the abreviation Ch-ts Inf-re.

One might expect that Zouave outfits would have been most popular in France. After all it was a French military style which appeared from France's North African colonies. We have, however not yet found a lot of French Zouave images. Our archive of French images, however, is not large enough to substantiate this, especially 19th century images. We have found one 19th century CDV portrait from a noted abbey town of an uidentified French boy wearing a Zouave outfit with turban-looking headwear. It looks to date from the 1860s. This tells us that French boys did wear these outfits, but not how prevalent they were. We just do not have enough images to make any asessment at this time. The small number of images we have found might just reflect our small French archive. We do note commercial post cards from the early-20th century showing French boys wearing Zouave uniforms. These commercial cards unlike the 19th century studio portrait are not, however, a good indicator of actual usage. A reader writes, "I thought the Zouave outfit was very interesting. I almost want to say the boy was dressed for a costume party which was very popular with the upper class. I notice that the pants have a front fly which I doubt more authentic outfits would. The spats and putties over the spats are interesting because I suspect a mother or some other adult helped him into the costume." These fancy outfits were worn as costumes by the upper class, but we also notice them as being worn as a boys dressed up suit. This was most commonly the case for younger boys. We are not sure about the conventions here.