Figure 1.--These children look like boys to us, especially the child at the left and right. Note the belt on the boy at the left. Smocks were sometimes worn with belts. We are unsure if these children are wearing dresses or smocks. Notice one is done in the sailor style. |
Note that none of the children wear traditional school smocks. Neither the boys or girls appear to be weaing smocks. We see none of the plain black smocksthat we associate with French school children at this time. None of the boys or girls appear to be wearing them. Here there appear to be some exceptions. We note one older boy and several younger children who we think are boys wearing what may be smocks. Here we are uncertain at this time. Hopefully as we add to our French archive we will be able to better understand how the childen here are dressed.
We at first thought that none of the older children, both the boys and girls, were wearing smocks. We are unsure, but there may be one exception, the older boy in the image on the previous page at the upper right. A reader points out that he seems to be wearing a light-colored smock (figure 1). He may well be correct. Many French smocks at the time were black or dark blue. There were also, however, some grey smocks. Presumably this is a grey smock. We have seen many French schools where virtually all of the children wear smocks, so it seems a little unusual to see only one boy (especially the oldest boy, and not the girl wearing a smock. We are not sure why the children here are not wearing smocks. Perhaps smocks were not widespread at this time, but they were introduced by the new French Republic in the 1870s and we thought they were widely worn. Perhaps they were not very common in rural schools. We know smocks were very common in rural schools by the 1920s, but we are less sure about the 1900s. Perhaps the children dressed especially for the portrait or took their smocks off for the photograph. Here we just are not sure and hope our French readers will have some insights to add.
Several of the younger children look go be wearing dresses. Some of them appear to be boys. We wonder how French mothers would have described these garments. Would they have called them dresses or smocks. Notice that two of the younger children wear belts with their dresses, giving them a smock look (figure 1). We suspect that both are boys. One of these is done with sailor styling, but with plaid material. The same may be the case for the boy in the dark smock or dress with the frills seen here (figure 1).
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