“Mijo Beccaria, founder of “Pomme d’Api”, revolutionized childhood in the 1960s”

Mijo Beccaria (née Denoix de Saint-Marc), who died on October 3, is rightly presented as the creator of Apple of Api. We are in 1966 (1). In the post-conciliar years, the Assumptionist fathers sought to transform the Maison de la Bonne Presse, and notably recruited activists from the Catholic Action movements.

Mijo Beccaria, when asked about her diplomas, answers: “I am a JEC graduate” (2). Mijo Beccaria, her husband Yves, and also Anne-Marie de Besombes (née Lanternier, her father was one of the first French disciples of Maria Montessori) offer Apple of Api and the others, Okapi (1971), The Beautiful Stories of Pomme d’Api (1972), I like to read (1977), Astrapi (1978), etc.

An educational turning point

It is not only a page in the history of “Youth” publishing which is beginning to be written with the progressive success of all these magazines, it is also one of the markers of a great rupture in conceptions of education.

We are more accustomed, to emphasize the change in the relationship between parents and child, to refer to Françoise Dolto. The France Inter broadcasts, “When the child appears”, in 1976-1978, in fact spread the ideas of attention and centering on the child. With Dolto, the relationship passes above all through language. With Mijo Beccaria, the child has the right to discover who he is, through experiments that were previously coded as “stupidity”. The example of this educational turning point is the appearance, in Apple of Api from 1975, from “Mimi Cracra” by Agnès Rosenstiehl: this rebellious little girl wants above all to experience her environment for herself, the sensations felt helping to make her grow (3).

In 2017, Mijo Beccaria published, with drawings by Nicole Claveloux, Brunette and Rose absolutely unbearable! (The arenas). Afterwards, this book summarizes what happened fifty years earlier: the criticism of obedient children subjected to “good” education, and of their parents who believe they know what is good for their daughter or son. Negative words – “insolent, disobedient, intrepid, curious, impudent, enterprising, insufferable” – designating Brune and Rose and written on the dust jacket of the book change sign.

Trust children

Brune and Rose have left the castle and their parents; they discover the outside world by overcoming challenges. We are far from the secular or religious morality of Monsieur Seguin’s Goat (Alphonse Daudet, 1866) where the child had above all to obey the authorities, and wait until he was very old to have the right to be autonomous. Brune and Rose’s parents draw the conclusion: “You have to trust the children. »

We perceive this childhood revolution in an ideal-typical form in a story published in Apple of Api (and reprinted by Éditions du Centurion, 1974) by Marie Tenaille and Pascale Claude-Lafontaine. Its title demonstrates the two conceptions whose title indicates the new program: The More than Perfect family and the Imperfect family.

Two families live next door, the first follows the precepts of “good” education, table manners and silence must be respected. Parents are educators-correctors. The second is messy, the family land lets everyone express themselves. The father and mother are development coaches. At the end, the children from the first grade leave the neat garden paths to go to their neighbors’ houses, the atmosphere is warm.

The child, author of his life

During this period there is a translation from an education centered on the learning of moral norms to an education more attentive to psychological norms. The Maison de la Bonne Presse participated in this translation by transforming itself into Bayard Presse in 1969. The two religious pages, entitled “The Gospel”, will disappear from Pomme d’Api at the beginning of 1970, Mi-Jo Beccaria favorable to this development then became editor-in-chief of the magazine. This will create some turmoil during the sale of newspapers after mass (still a normal method of distribution, even if Apple of Api quickly relies on numerous subscriptions).

The options of Apple of Api do not strictly follow an “educational line” (in the sense of a political or ideological line), we can see this by noting the differences between “Little Brown Bear” (first appearance in 1975) and “Mimi Cracra” (in 1976). However, they are based on a common base: helping parents create an environment favorable to child development. Following the Montessori method, children can act more freely than before while doing so in a prepared framework, and whose two dimensions, aesthetic (4) and practical (“doing things”), count a lot.

The importance of the educational framework perhaps differentiates this education from another, more libertarian, current, of which Free Children of Summerhill (Alexander Neill, 1970, French translation) is the symbol. In the project of Mijo Beccaria (and Bayard jeunesse), freedom is valued if it allows the child’s access to his autonomy, if it allows him to become the author of his life.