Ryan R.

Marr

Sociology (Philippe Aries Essay)

Prof. Chambers

Philippe Aries, known today as the authority on the subject of

how death is interpreted in western cultures, was born in Blois, France

on July 21, 1914. Aries’ politically active upbringing in his home

country makes it a mystery as to why Aries went on to study such

things as death in western societies. During his earlier years in France,

Aries contributed greatly to La Nation Francaise, a right wing

nationalist weekly. He also was closely associated with the similar

Action Francaise weekly paper. In these times, he was regarded as a

“right-wing anarchist” (Hutton, 14). Despite his political leanings, Aries

didn’t discriminate when it came to cooperation with left wing western

historian Michel Foucault, who assisted him in his study of childhood

development, which was a subject Aries would soon become renowned

in (Evans, 90).

Aries was relatively unknown in the field of sociology, until his

release of his book, Centuries of Childhood translated from its original

French in 1962. His study in his first publication was about the place in

society that was assigned to children in medieval Europe. Aries

presented the alternate view in Centuries that children were treated

differently than adults in developing Europe not simply because

children were biologically at a different stage, but because of the social

class system they lived in and (as Aries argued) were often stripped of

childhood freedoms (Hutton, 47). Indeed, Aries’ first work proved to be

historical and controversial. It was the first modern book on the

subject on the history of childhood and became a major reference point

for Aries’ successors.

While many historians and sociologists were quoting Aries from

Centuries, just as many were criticizing his controversial take on the

subject. Aries in the book claimed in page 125 that “in medieval

society, the idea of childhood did not exist” (Hutton, 55). Aries’

findings about childhood history was that the acceptance of childhood

was progressive as society developed. He also found that the

acceptance of childhood as a concept and a part of family life found its

place in the 1600’s, through economic and social advancement

(Hutton, 60). Aries, through his work on the history of childhood, has

shown that before our progressive economic and social advancement

away from feudalism in the middle ages, children were not recognized

as progressing through any development stages in life. Children in

these times were rather treated as miniature adults, often dressed up

in adult styles of dress to conform to social statuses and to display the

high social class of their parents. Aries has taken criticism for the

statements and findings in his first work, but as testimony to the

impact of his findings, he is regarded as one of the premier sociologists

and historians on childhood, and Centuries of Childhood made Aries’

name known as a medieval historian.

Following his first published work, Aries moved into the field of

death, and how it was viewed in western civilization. It is clear that

Aries can be best described as a symbolic interactionist with the study

of death. His entry into this subject of study was marked with two

important books: Western attitudes towards death, published in 1974,

and In the Hour of our Death, published in 1977 (Porter, 83). The

former was basically a primer on the subject, and his entry into the

topic, and had its origins as part of a lecture series while at Johns

Hopkins University (Aries 1974). The Hour of our Death is the more

famous and most in depth of the two, and Aries used this book to

demonstrate how the importance of symbolism (casks, urns,

purgatory) in western culture related to the socialization of death

(Porter, 83). In this work on death Aries discovered that, as western

civilization was in its earlier days, “death was tame and individuals

yielded as if to sleep” (Porter, 83). Aries also found that primitive

societies were more in line with early Christian teachings about how to

approach death, and he found societies that held this belief thought of

death with less sorrow. The course of the book traced Aries’ five ‘main

attitudes’ approach that showed a decline in the positive relationship

between Europeans and death (Porter, 83). Aries work showed that a

strong religious connection with death in Europe and the perennial

religious promise of an afterlife actually helped ease the suffering of

the survivors of a lost loved one. One negative form of relationship

between death and the people that Aries examined was presented by

John Donne (a champion of what Europe called ‘New Humanism’) who

was noted to proclaim in his writings: “Death, thou shalt die!” (Porter,

84). Donne was studied by Aries and was shown to be a great example

of how the view of death had changed in Europe, from being a simple

‘release’ to now a mortal enemy.

In the Hour of our Death was instrumental in showing how these

polar opposite acceptances of death emerged in society and how

despised death has become with all its negatively viewed symbols. At

one point in the book, Aries describes how death became almost an

unwelcome part of society; Lutherans and Catholics alike in the 1750’s

began to protest against the mere existence of graveyards near

churches and cities- trying to eliminate the symbols of death from

public view (Aries 1981). He even opined that, in the modern time, we

are ‘robbing death of dignity’ with the beaurocracy of hospitalization

and an unending desire to deny death completely by the end of the

1700’s (Aries 1981). We are now known (in modern society) to be

fearful or even unwelcome of such markers of death such as caskets,

gravesites, and funerals. It is how we each socialize with these

symbols that makes the ultimate difference in individual life, but as a

whole, society has shown to be less accepting of death as a necessary

and required part of the life process.

Philippe Aries died on February 8, 1984 in Paris, but time has

shown that his research on the infamous subject of death has lived on

in triumph as one of the most world renown studies into the subject,

along with his first ‘break out’ work on childhood. It is essential to

understand that Aries’ study into how we view death is also a macro

level study on society as well; how we view death is almost as

important as death itself, and this was something Aries managed to

show when investigating societies’ ever evolving viewpoint on death.

As Aries’ research has shown, there seems to be an unending desire to

silence talk and hide the symbolism of death in modern times. This

shows the evolution of our socialization toward this dark subject. While

we cannot figure out exactly why societies have accepted death more

easily in ancient times, we do know that death has become more

unwelcome as we have grown away from religion and faith in our time,

and this is how one can interpret the conclusion of Philippe Aries’ work.