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As part of a CNRS research residency at the National Museum of the History of Immigration (2024–2025), I had access, on both sides of the Alps, to a diverse range of archival collections¹—a personal diary, private correspondence and correspondence from municipal, prefectural, and consular authorities, civil registry documents, authorizations to leave the country with a designated escort (atti di obbligo), and medical certificates.

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The value of these rare personal writings produced by (or on behalf of) Italian children and young people employed in French glassworks at the turn of the 20th century is twofold. Some of these “spoken” letters were addressed to illiterate mothers—which is why they ended up in the hands of the village mayor, where they could be read but could also trigger correspondence with the relevant consulate in Paris or Lyon. These letters in fact contributed to the repatriation of their “authors,” as part of a process driven by the young Italian nation-state, eager to polish its international image, as well as by the first organizations with a secular and reformist orientation (Società Umanitaria) or a Catholic and philanthropic orientation (Opera Bonomelli) working to support migrants in France. Reading between the lines of these quiet written gestures, on a small sheet of graph paper, also reveals a committed subject who is not completely subject to the factory system, the family order, or the labor broker who places them in the factories. These children’s letters embody a nascent agency that must be situated through the power of their testimony—in and of itself and in relation to their resources—before considering a dialogue with other forms of self-expression in the collections of the National Museum of the History of Immigration (MNHI).

Childhood: A Political Concern in France and Italy

2 For the French, as well as for most Italian institutional figures who contributed (...)

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Hailing from a part of the Mezzogiorno that appears fluid, even indefinable,² to anyone interested in the region, these young people from Caserta and Molise were leaving lands where the Italian unification of 1861 coincided with a profound agrarian crisis, the decline of Apennine transhumance, and the gradual disappearance of felt and paper production. They traveled up the peninsula (by boat, train, partly on foot), often traveling from Naples to Genoa and crossing the French-Italian border via Turin-Modane, before finding employment in glassworks in the Paris region, the Lyon region, and the Puy-de-Dôme, among others, between 1890 and 1914.

3 Christian Topalov (ed.), Laboratoires du nouveau siècle. La nébuleuse réformatrice et ses réseaux (...)

4 Michaël P. Hanagan, “Organization of Labor and Labor Activism: Glassworkers and Metalworkers (...)

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This chronological period partially overlaps with the timeframe identified by Christian Topalov (1880–1914)³ to understand the emergence of a reformist dynamic, in relation to a social and political context in which the issue of “depopulation” was a major concern for the French state following the 1871 defeat against Prussia, which had become Germany. Members of Parliament, doctors, and public health experts of the Third Republic thus came together to draft laws and health and social policies aimed at strengthening the nation’s youth—in the sense of “ensuring the survival” of children, supporting their growth both medically and morally, and regulating the relationship between education, training, and work. It was in this context that the glass industry sought to reorganize itself in the face of two concurrent challenges: on the one hand, the impact of the French phylloxera crisis (1866–1890) on the demand for bottles; on the other, the transformation of the legal framework governing child labor. In 1882, primary education became compulsory in France, putting an end to the “half-day” school system, established in 1874 to provide evening classes for young factory workers starting at 4:00 p.m. Thus, throughout the period from 1841 to 1892, several laws gradually prohibited the employment of minors under the age of 13, limited the daily workday, and banned abusive punishment of minors. This policy also led to a reorganization of industrial production, further affecting the interests of master glassmakers, who viewed these forms of child protection as obstacles to their children’s apprenticeship contracts, which in turn sparked strikes.⁴ On the other side of the Alps, between 1877 and 1911, legal reforms were aimed sometimes at addressing the problem of illiteracy— which remained significant after the capture of Rome in 1870, and at other times to regulate night work by children and women. The innovations of this period also shaped legal and medical age thresholds in Italy: for example, the Berti Law (1886) set the age at which night work was prohibited at 9 years. Between protection and regulation, between responsibility and the capacity to act, childhood became a concern shared by the political and religious elites of the young nation-state.

5 On April 15, 1878, the subprefect of Sora wrote to the prefect of Caserta to denounce a case of child trafficking (...)

6 In Italy, the provisions prohibiting the employment of minors in itinerant trades date back (...)

7 Fabrice Langrognet, “Exploitation or public service? The import-export trade of underage glasswork (...)

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On both sides of the Alps, childhood constitutes both a target population for biopolitical measures and subjects of law who challenge previous practices.⁵ Fabrice Langrognet has highlighted the structural continuities between successive networks of child importers—from itinerant trades⁶ —to which one should add the case of young models for Parisian artists⁷—and glass workshops, where the young workers in question perform unskilled, dangerous labor without access to long-term training, while being exposed to numerous forms of violence and disease.

8 Maria Rosa Protasi, *I fanciulli nell’emigrazione italiana, Una storia minore 1861–1920*, Isernia, Co (...)

9 The term “trafficking” is used in the French press; see, in particular, “La traite des gosses: not (...)

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This is why, far beyond the statuette sellers and street musicians, the arrival in France of children from the Mezzogiorno working in glassworks would eventually, as early as 1897–1898, prompt the international press, Italian consulates, and numerous philanthropists to question the need to shield some of these young workers from the harmful influences of poor education and irresponsible adults.⁸ The debate did not so much concern those among them who came from stable family backgrounds and were employed—often below the legal working age—in the same workshop as their fathers, using forged certificates. The young Italians at the heart of this publication, which focuses on children at risk, are primarily those who were bound by a contract of placement with a padrone—himself a migrant. He serves as their landlord, interpreter, and exploiter. He organized their journey from the village and took a substantial share of their wages, within a system of exploitation for which contemporary French and Italian observers tended to prefer the term “trafficking” to that of “smuggling.”⁹ These young boys worked as porters or errand boys—collecting glass blobs, carrying molten glass —in an industry still based on mouth-blowing, where their agility and docility constituted a valuable economic resource. After the French law of 1892 prohibiting children under the age of 13 from working in factories, the use of foreign child labor made it possible to keep production costs down —before mechanization took hold at the end of World War I.

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Between 1897 and 1913, these children were the subject of much discussion and writing, giving rise to a substantial body of literature: Italian consular reports (Paulucci di Calboli, Perrod, Scelsi); surveys in the villages of the children involved (Ugo Cafiero); a report commissioned by the glassmakers’ trade association; journalistic reports (notably by the Bonneff brothers in *L’Humanité*, 1912); a reformist political economy article co-authored by the future President of the Italian Republic (Einaudi); accounts of rescue operations organized within the framework of social Catholicism (through the Opera Bonomelli, but adapted according to the experiences of Schiaparelli and Sommi Picenardi); parliamentary debates on both sides of the Alps; and, finally, the reflections of a committed educator, Beatrice Berio, highlighting a triangular relationship of exploitation orchestrated by adults: the suppliers and the parents of these children, but also the managers and owners of the glassworks. These sources vary in richness, but with a few exceptions, they share a common thread: they speak about the children, not with them. The aim is to take seriously a different kind of material altogether: the rare personal writings—letters, transcriptions of children’s words—that Italian children and young people produced or had produced on their behalf in this context of early exploitation.

The Emotional Economy of Two Letters Addressed to Mothers/Mayors (1895)

10 Written in a local dialect with which I am familiar, these letters have already been transcribed by Maria (...)

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Among the most valuable documents in the municipal archives of Alvito, a rural town in southern Lazio affected by this trafficking, two letters stand out for their biographical richness and their sub-political dimension: those by Bernardo Antonellis and Antonio Persichetti. They were written in 1895, a few months before their actual repatriation in early 1896.¹⁰ These letters were addressed to their illiterate mothers, which is why they ultimately passed through the village mayor’s office—where an employee must have read the contents to the family—ensuring their preservation to this day. They were dictated—or co-written—by a scribe who shared their local dialect, which immediately raises the question of written mediation and its effects on the children’s voices.

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“Dear Mother, I don’t have time to write to you to tell you everything I have to say. Please send me [the money for] the return trip because there are a lot of lice here, so, dear Mother, I beg you to please find a way to get [the money for] the trip—it’s sixty lire. I’m exhausted from crying every day because here we leave at 4:30 [in the morning] and don’t get back until midnight. So please send me [the money for] the trip. Write back to me; otherwise, I don’t want to hear anymore that you can’t write because I’m crying. And if Caterina [mother of two other boys held captive by human traffickers: Antonio and Giacomo Persichetti] can’t send money to her son, you can send the money just for me. I won’t write to you anymore because I don’t have time; you can talk about it in person with Fiorellino [Loreto Fiorellini, a boy who worked in a glassworks in Lyon] to find out what we’re going through. Your Bernart.” (Letter from Bernardo Antonellis to his mother, 1895. Translation by the author).

“Dear Mother, I am writing these two pages to let you know that I am in excellent health, and I hope to hear from you as well. Dear Mom, you’re already upset because I’m asking you for money, but if you don’t send me the money because my brother is crying all the time—you see, that’s just how it is—so if you don’t send us [the money for] the trip, it means you’re all happy and don’t care about us, and we’re suffering here because we’re working in hell./ Realize that here, people fall in the factory once, twice, or three times—you see, if you don’t send me [the money for] the trip, there’s no point in replying again because we’re going to throw ourselves into the water [of a river], and you’ll never hear from us again./ Dear Mother, send me [the money for] the trip and find a way to send me [the money for] the trip because we’ve reached our limit and we’re being mistreated, but I beg you to send me sixty lire; otherwise, when I come back, they’ll throw you out the window. And remember to send me [the money for] the trip; otherwise, I’m no longer your son. In the meantime, I send you my regards—my brother Giacomino cries nonstop, and we’re more miserable than Gioppo Fenizio’s son. I send you my regards, dear Mom—I’m your son. Antonio. P.S.: And if you don’t send me [the money for the trip], don’t write back to me. ” (Letter from Antonio Persichetti to his mother, 1895. Translated by the author).

11 William M. Reddy, *The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions*, Cambridge, Ca (...)

12 Clara Lecadet, “Letters from the Camps: UNHCR and the Voices of Refugees,” in *Mondes et Migrations*, no. (...)

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Both letters share a similar formal structure: addressed to the mother without using the formal “vous,” and describing harsh living conditions. The one-page letter signed “Bernarto” includes several references to the problem of lice, the long and grueling work hours, and the lack of sleep. These are accompanied by a child’s testimonial account (“just ask Fiorellino”), who has already been repatriated. In contrast, Antonio’s letter spans two pages. After an initial polite salutation (which suggests the involvement of an adult skilled in this practice and familiar with the local dialect), he emphasizes his suffering and the crying of his younger brother who is accompanying him, before reiterating his request for a sum of money to enable him to return home. The emotional tones of these letters, however, differ significantly. Bernardo Antonellis’s letter is built around an emotional ultimatum: “Do not send me a letter in response to mine if you cannot arrange for my return.” The threat is explicit: the mother’s silence in her reply will be interpreted as abandonment. The child dictating the letter—or the person writing on his behalf—manipulates the emotional bond to compel the adult to act, turning the logic of the epistolary exchange against the adult’s own dependence. This letter mobilizes an “emotional economy” in Reddy’s sense:¹¹ the expression of feelings here is not merely a description of an inner state; it is an act aimed at transforming social reality. Antonio Persichetti’s letter, for its part, frames the demand in terms of a filial rupture: “Do not consider me your son anymore if you are unable to get me out of this hell.” The reversal is radical: it is the child who suspends the filial bond, who threatens to commit suicide and disown the mother if she fails to fulfill her protective role. These two approaches—the suspension of emotional exchange in Bernardo’s case, and the severing of the filial bond in Antonio’s—reveal an emerging agency that cannot be reduced to victimhood: these children do not beg; they demand, and in doing so, raise the question of maternal affection. Read word for word, these two letters reveal consistent rhetorical devices. The first is the description of the place of exploitation as “hell”—a term that belongs both to the religious register and to the sensory experience of the heat from the furnaces. The second is the description of their weakened bodies, formulated with a precision that resists the usual softening of the text by the literate intermediary who puts the children’s request into words. Like the letters sent to Geneva by refugees living in camps, as analyzed by Clara Lecadet,¹² these lines reveal the actors’ ability to take a step back from their circumstances while articulating a shared demand.

The Heuristic and Political Value of the Letters: Agency in Context

13 Luc Boltanski, *Suffering at a Distance: Humanitarian Morality, Media, and Politics*, Paris, Métailié, (...)

14 Miranda Fricker, *Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing*, Oxford, Oxford University Pr (...)

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The dual value—heuristic and political—of the letters by Antonellis and Persichetti stems precisely from the fact that they call into question the two documentary systems under examination. These letters are not “pure” sources ” sources: they were dictated, passed through intermediaries, and filtered by the municipal office. But mediation operates differently here than in the form letters of the padroni: there, the filter aims to erase suffering; here, it aims to make it audible and mobilizable. My hypothesis is that the dialect-speaking writer who helps Bernardo and Antonio formulate their request does not speak on their behalf, but rather translates into a letter what these children want their mother to hear. From a heuristic perspective, these letters provide insight into psychosocial dynamics that studies of adults do not document: the child’s awareness of his own legal minority (“siamo piccoli”), the implementation of a communication strategy constrained by the padroni’s control over correspondence, and the mobilization of an affective register that reverses the logic of dependency. They also document the mechanics of repatriation: a letter addressed to the mother, having passed through the mayor’s office, forwarded to the subprefect and then to the consul general, can indeed trigger consular intervention and a return to the village. This is demonstrated by the stories of Bernardo, Antonio, and his younger brother, who were repatriated a few months after the letters were sent, along with three other children from Alvito who were held captive by two recruiters (Donato D’Agostino and Pietro Virgilio). Politically, these letters served as evidence in the discourse of outrage that led to the first legislative measures to protect migrant children. They fueled a “politics of pity”¹³ in which suffering must be made visible and attributable to become the basis for a call for reform. But their value extends beyond this instrumental role: when read through the lens of epistemic injustice,14 these letters reveal that the child glassblower is not merely a suffering subject—he is a subject possessing “testimonial credibility,” the exercise of which the adults around him have repeatedly contested or confiscated.

15 See Fabrice Langrognet, *Voisins de passage…*, op. cit.

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However, we must be careful not to overinterpret these children’s agency. Several of them, once they reached adulthood, did not necessarily break with the values underpinning this trafficking¹⁵ and might in turn become *padroni*, recruiters, or intermediaries. Others acquired academic skills that opened up different paths for them. Some served and died in World War I as sergeants—having gone through the experience of working in the glassworks as children, then on the front lines as adults—while others chose to desert. Bernardo Antonellis’s letter does not represent the beginning of a linear path to emancipation: it is a moment in a life that continues, but whose other chapters often remain invisible in the archives.

Dealing with Anachronism: A Contribution to the MNHI’s Portfolio of Self-Writings

16 Hélène Leroy, Hélène Valance, “Forms of Anachronism,” in Perspective, No. 2, 2025, pp. 13–22.

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Reading the letters of Antonellis and Persichetti in 2026 involves a deliberate anachronistic act, as understood by Hélène Leroy and Hélène Valance.¹⁶ They distinguish three forms of anachronism: disciplinary, methodological, and historical. My approach here falls under the latter two, namely the use of categories forged in hindsight—“epistemic injustice,” “emotional economy,” “constrained agency”—while attempting not to project meaning onto documents that did not originally carry it. This brings to light resonances that the era in which these letters were written could not yet articulate. Anachronism here is the very condition for the legibility of the sources, not a distortion that needs to be corrected.

17 See Fabrice Grognet, “Becoming French and Remaining Russian: The Journey of Nicolas and Adèle Vorontzo (...)

18 See Élisabeth Jolys-Shimells and Hédia Yelles-Chaouche, “‘We will find a path, or we will create one (...)

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This sociohistorical study engages directly with the portfolios from the journal *Mondes & Migrations* and the forms of self-narrative by migrant minors included in the *Société* collection of the National Museum of the History of Immigration. Whether it is Adèle Vorontzoff’s notebook (1920–1924)¹⁷, Mohamad Shahab Rassouli’s school essays (Boulogne-sur-Mer, 2011)¹⁸, or the drawing of the Libyan detention camp produced by a passenger on the Aquarius. These pieces share a common purpose with the letters from the children of glassmakers: to inscribe within the written space a presence that the experience of migration tends to erase. What sets them apart is equally significant: the letters from Bernardo Antonellis and Antonio Persichetti are documents of immediate survival, addressed to an illiterate mother to prompt a return. Rassouli’s school essays are documents produced within an institutional framework that had already incorporated a certain concept of child protection. The gap between these two documentary regimes—the urgency of the suffering body and the scholastic framing of the subject—is not merely chronological. It points to a profound transformation in the conditions under which migrant children have been able to—and continue to—express themselves.

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In its acquisition policy, the MNHI collection has chosen to prioritize “internal objects” —writings produced by the migrants themselves—rather than “external images” produced about them. This institutional choice echoes, a century later, the difference between the form-letter dictated by the padrone and the letter written for oneself. Between preserving a record of what the child endured and a record of what the child tried to say (and do), museum practice draws a distinction. The letters of Bernardo Antonellis and Antonio Persichetti belong to the second category: they are valuable for what they accomplished—facilitating the repatriation of six children a few months before the spring of 1896—and for what they continue to accomplish, every time a reader agrees to read them word for word.

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