author
M. (Arnaud) Berquin
1747–1791
An early pioneer of children’s literature in France, this writer became best known for L’Ami des enfants, a collection of moral and domestic tales that traveled widely beyond its first audience. His stories helped shape the kind of instructive reading many young readers encountered in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
2 Audiobooks
The Looking-Glass for the Mind; or, Intellectual Mirror
by M. (Arnaud) Berquin
The Blossoms of Morality Intended for the Amusement and Instruction of Young Ladies and Gentlemen
by M. (Arnaud) Berquin, R. (Richard) Johnson
About the author
Born in Bordeaux in September 1747, Arnaud Berquin became a French poet, journalist, and writer whose name is most closely linked with literature for children. He died on December 21, 1791, but in his short life he produced work that remained popular well into the nineteenth century.
Berquin is especially remembered for L’Ami des enfants (published in 1782–1783). The book gathered short stories and scenes from everyday family life, written to entertain while also teaching manners, feeling, and behavior. That mixture of warmth and instruction made the work influential in the history of children’s reading, even if later critics sometimes found it overly moralizing.
His writing also reached readers outside France through translation, especially in English. For listeners interested in older children’s books, Berquin offers a glimpse of a time when stories for the young were expected not only to delight, but to guide.