A Child in the State of Nature Mitchell Abidor reviews the reprint edition of Roger Shattuck’s “The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron.” By Mitchell Abidor August 19, 2025 History
Cultural Studies
The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Averyon by Roger Shattuck . NYRB Classics , 2025. 256 pages.
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IN 1800, THE YEAR the story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron begins, France had long since moved beyond the most radical phase of its revolution. The king and queen had been guillotined, a republic had been established, and time had restarted, with a new calendar, dating the year one as 1792, already in use. The two most revolutionary groups, the Jacobins and the sans-culottes had been marginalized, their leaders guillotined, and the Directory, a moderate response to the revolutionary reign of Maximilien de Robespierre and his allies, had been replaced by a military dictatorship led by Napoleon Bonaparte. Even so, elements of the revolutionary phase lingered still in the minds of some of those formed by the events of the previous decade. The desire to properly understand and improve humanity still lived.
When a feral boy wandered into the French village of Saint-Sernin in the Aveyron region of the south of France on January 9, 1800—or, more properly, on the republican date of 19 Nivôse of the year eight—he would soon be caught up in that drive, that desire to understand humanity more deeply. Chance would see to it that this nameless, mysterious figure would encounter one of the more inquiring minds of his time, the physician Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard. “L’enfant sauvage d’Aveyron”—the Wild (or Savage) Child of Aveyron—would become the subject of what scholar Roger Shattuck called “the forbidden experiment,” in his insightful and well-written 1980 book of that title, newly reissued by NYRB Classics. The child would become, in essence, the guinea pig in an attempt to settle the question of the relative roles of nature and nurture in human development. Do we have innate abilities and qualities that determine who we are and what we will be, or are we a tabula rasa upon which life and experience leave their imprints and modify us?
The child at the center of this story had made brief appearances in another village about 120 kilometers from Saint-Sernin in 1798 and 1799, the last time six months prior to his arrival in Saint-Sernin. The wild child was captured digging for vegetables in the garden of a tanner. An early report by a local official set the tone for the standard vision of the child: “When I spoke to him, it didn’t take long to discover that he was mute. Soon after that, when I noticed that he made no response to various questions I put to him, in both a loud and a soft voice, I decided that he must be deaf.” Time would show that was not the case, though the boy was certainly mute. But his failure to demonstrate understanding of the spoken word, to verbally respond or properly imitate what he heard, which barely improved over the course of his remaining years, placed him in important ways in the position of a deaf mute.
A local priest and naturalist, Pierre-Joseph Bonnaterre, was the most serious student of the child’s early days, and wrote a thorough report on the child’s experiences in the village. Bonnaterre noted his distaste for clothing and his suspicion of all food save for potatoes. An effort was made to locate the child’s parents. Estimates were made that he was about 12 years old, and that he had spent half that life in the wild. L’enfant sauvage spent eight months in Saint-Sernin, including time in an orphanage, where he made little progress in socialization or ability to communicate. Food was his primary concern, as if he was still living in the forest, fighting for survival. Bonnaterre raised the matter of the child’s intelligence or lack of same, concluding that “we are obliged to say that, in every case not concerned with his natural needs or satisfying his appetite, one can perceive in him only animal behavior.” At the end of this first period, in Shattuck’s words, the child was “less domesticated than a dog or a horse, yet unmistakably human.”
The case had come to the attention of the Abbé Sicard, a member of the Society of Observers of Man and the director of l’Institut national des sourds-muets—the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes—in Paris, the most cutting-edge institution for deaf mutes in the world. L’enfant sauvage d’Aveyron was about to enter the history of the study of mankind. Sicard arranged for the child to be transferred to his institute, and he was duly sent to Paris on August 8, 1800. In Shattuck’s words, the boy, during the trip, “paid attention only to his own comfort,” and “when […] the stagecoach drove into Paris, he didn’t even seem to see the swarming streets and magnificent buildings that dazzled most country folk.”
The boy was placed in the care of a 25-year-old surgeon, Itard, who would spend more than five years working with him daily. This boy, this human tabula rasa, would, it was hoped, provide an answer to several questions. The “savage,” as he was commonly called, was, as Shattuck puts it, “a human being who had lapsed back into the animal condition,” and so “he should embody man in the state of nature.” Such a being was, for writers of the time, found only in distant climes, the noble savage of fictions set in the Americas, such as Paul et Virginie (1788). The “Wild Child of Aveyron” was native to France, an experimental subject providentially provided to the savants of a country that, perhaps above all others, was fascinated by the subject of humanity’s natural state. It was, after all, the priest and philosopher Condillac who had conjectured that, as Shattuck summarizes, “we are born without innate faculties or ideas. Sensory perceptions, Condillac believed, mold both mind and character.”
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