The little children of the Luxembourg

The Little Children of the Luxembourg is a personal book by Herbert Adams Gibbons, originally published in 1916 during the early years of the First World War. Gibbons, who lived from 1880 to 1934, was an American journalist and historian who had been living and working in Paris during the war years and who produced several books drawing on his observations of life in the French capital during the conflict.

The Luxembourg of the title refers to the Jardin du Luxembourg, the famous large public garden in the sixth arrondissement of Paris that had long served as one of the principal recreational spaces for Parisian families and particularly for parents bringing their children to play in the gardens. The book is essentially a sustained observation of the daily life of the Luxembourg gardens during the early years of the war, with particular attention to the children whose play and routines were continuing in the gardens even as the broader French nation was engaged in the most destructive war in its history.

Gibbons uses the Luxembourg setting as the framework for a series of meditations on French family life, the effects of the war on children and on the home front more generally, the substantial role that the public gardens played in Parisian social life, and the various small dramas and moments of beauty that an attentive observer could find in the daily life of the gardens. The book combines the immediate observational quality of journalism with the more reflective quality of personal essay, in a form that allowed Gibbons to communicate to American readers what life in wartime Paris was actually like at the level of ordinary daily experience.

The book is one of several similar personal observational books that Gibbons produced during his years in France, and it belongs to a substantial body of American writing about wartime Europe that was being produced for the American audience during the years when the United States itself was still neutral but was watching the European conflict with increasing concern. American writers like Edith Wharton and Mildred Aldrich were producing similar work from various other vantage points in France during the same period.

The book is short and reads as a single sitting or two. For readers interested in American writing about wartime Paris and in the broader American observational literature of the First World War period, this is a useful primary document. It pairs naturally with Gibbons’s other writings on the war and on France.