Architecture, Medicalization, and the Aesthetics of Hygiene at the Écoles maternelles

This article examines the focus on hygiene, medical surveillance, and physical regeneration in late 19^th and early 20^th century French nursery schools (écoles maternelles) and its impact on their architecture. Administrators had originally charged maternelles with providing education and motherly care to young children. But bureaucratic anxieties about physical degeneration and disease among French schoolchildren led to new practices focused on the body, which ultimately led to changes in the schools' architectural program and aesthetics. Supposedly at stake was nothing less than the biological, political, and economic future of France.