La Maternelle
Cover illustrated by Steinlen.
The second laureate of the prize was awarded for a naturalist novel, in the tradition of Zola, devoted to the world of schooling among the working classes. With meticulous realism, Frapié depicts the social hardship and daily humiliations of an assistant teacher in a Parisian nursery school.
La Maternelle is a novel of observation, carried by a social vein that appealed to the Goncourt jury, no doubt eager both to honor the realist tradition inherited from the nineteenth century and to give the prize a social orientation, at a time marked by the Dreyfus Affair and by debates over the republican school system.
Copy from the first thousand, with the corresponding statement on the cover.
From the “Prix Goncourt” library of Gérard Pouguet, with bookplate.