Day Nurseries in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: The Challenge of the Transnational Approach

The aim of this article is to present the French model of day nurseries – known as Crèches – their evolution, and their transfer to some European countries, from their beginnings until the end of the nineteen thirties. This article is divided into four parts. The introduction presents the peculiarities of the methodological approach chosen here, which combines a comparative and transnational methodology demonstrating the heuristic challenge for the study of a relatively recent institution with regard to school history. The second part presents the French model of the Crèche and its evolution in France as a medical-pedagogical institution. The third and fourth parts deal with the transfer of the model to two countries, Italy and Russia, which despite their very different political and social contexts, were among the first European countries to transpose the French model, because of the seriousness of the phenomenon of abandonment and the problem of infant mortality. Key words: History of early education; crèche; childcare; France, Italy, Russia; Trasnationalism; XIX–XX century.