A Child in the State of Nature

Mitchell Abidor reviews the reprint edition of Roger Shattuck’s “The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron.”

By Mitchell AbidorAugust 19, 2025

• History

• Cultural Studies

IN 1800, THE YEAR the story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron begins, France had long since moved beyond the most radical phase of its revolution. The king and queen had been guillotined, a republic had been established, and time had restarted, with a new calendar, dating the year one as 1792, already in use. The two most revolutionary groups, the Jacobins and the sans-culottes had been marginalized, their leaders guillotined, and the Directory, a moderate response to the revolutionary reign of Maximilien de Robespierre and his allies, had been replaced by a military dictatorship led by Napoleon Bonaparte. Even so, elements of the revolutionary phase lingered still in the minds of some of those formed by the events of the previous decade. The desire to properly understand and improve humanity still lived.

When a feral boy wandered into the French village of Saint-Sernin in the Aveyron region of the south of France on January 9, 1800—or, more properly, on the republican date of 19 Nivôse of the year eight—he would soon be caught up in that drive, that desire to understand humanity more deeply. Chance would see to it that this nameless, mysterious figure would encounter one of the more inquiring minds of his time, the physician Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard. “L’enfant sauvage d’Aveyron”—the Wild (or Savage) Child of Aveyron—would become the subject of what scholar Roger Shattuck called “the forbidden experiment,” in his insightful and well-written 1980 book of that title, newly reissued by NYRB Classics. The child would become, in essence, the guinea pig in an attempt to settle the question of the relative roles of nature and nurture in human development. Do we have innate abilities and qualities that determine who we are and what we will be, or are we a tabula rasa upon which life and experience leave their imprints and modify us?

The child at the center of this story had made brief appearances in another village about 120 kilometers from Saint-Sernin in 1798 and 1799, the last time six months prior to his arrival in Saint-Sernin. The wild child was captured digging for vegetables in the garden of a tanner. An early report by a local official set the tone for the standard vision of the child: “When I spoke to him, it didn’t take long to discover that he was mute. Soon after that, when I noticed that he made no response to various questions I put to him, in both a loud and a soft voice, I decided that he must be deaf.” Time would show that was not the case, though the boy was certainly mute. But his failure to demonstrate understanding of the spoken word, to verbally respond or properly imitate what he heard, which barely improved over the course of his remaining years, placed him in important ways in the position of a deaf mute.

A local priest and naturalist, Pierre-Joseph Bonnaterre, was the most serious student of the child’s early days, and wrote a thorough report on the child’s experiences in the village. Bonnaterre noted his distaste for clothing and his suspicion of all food save for potatoes. An effort was made to locate the child’s parents. Estimates were made that he was about 12 years old, and that he had spent half that life in the wild. L’enfant sauvage spent eight months in Saint-Sernin, including time in an orphanage, where he made little progress in socialization or ability to communicate. Food was his primary concern, as if he was still living in the forest, fighting for survival. Bonnaterre raised the matter of the child’s intelligence or lack of same, concluding that “we are obliged to say that, in every case not concerned with his natural needs or satisfying his appetite, one can perceive in him only animal behavior.” At the end of this first period, in Shattuck’s words, the child was “less domesticated than a dog or a horse, yet unmistakably human.”

The case had come to the attention of the Abbé Sicard, a member of the Society of Observers of Man and the director of l’Institut national des sourds-muets—the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes—in Paris, the most cutting-edge institution for deaf mutes in the world. L’enfant sauvage d’Aveyron was about to enter the history of the study of mankind. Sicard arranged for the child to be transferred to his institute, and he was duly sent to Paris on August 8, 1800. In Shattuck’s words, the boy, during the trip, “paid attention only to his own comfort,” and “when […] the stagecoach drove into Paris, he didn’t even seem to see the swarming streets and magnificent buildings that dazzled most country folk.”

The boy was placed in the care of a 25-year-old surgeon, Itard, who would spend more than five years working with him daily. This boy, this human tabula rasa, would, it was hoped, provide an answer to several questions. The “savage,” as he was commonly called, was, as Shattuck puts it, “a human being who had lapsed back into the animal condition,” and so “he should embody man in the state of nature.” Such a being was, for writers of the time, found only in distant climes, the noble savage of fictions set in the Americas, such as Paul et Virginie (1788). The “Wild Child of Aveyron” was native to France, an experimental subject providentially provided to the savants of a country that, perhaps above all others, was fascinated by the subject of humanity’s natural state. It was, after all, the priest and philosopher Condillac who had conjectured that, as Shattuck summarizes, “we are born without innate faculties or ideas. Sensory perceptions, Condillac believed, mold both mind and character.”

The question was not a new one. Herodotus wrote of the Egyptian ruler of the seventh century BCE who had isolated two children in order to discover what language they would naturally speak. Other rulers had carried out the same experiment, at times with implausible results, as in the case of the 16th-century Scottish king whose experimental subject allegedly began to speak Hebrew. These experiments, if they truly occurred, were based on the inhumane premise that it was acceptable to remove children from their parents and society in order to learn some larger fact about humankind. With the Wild Child of Aveyron, such isolation was an established fact. The goal would be to learn from his isolation what he naturally was and what he was capable of becoming.

The surgeon harbored the notion that the child, whom he soon named Victor (because of the child’s special attention when the “o” vowel sound was used in his presence), was an embodiment of the possibilities outlined by Condillac, capable of fully developing all his senses and capacities. Itard erred, but he was wrong for all the right reasons.     

Itard focused on attempting to imbue the child with speech. Victor, it turned out, was able to make certain sounds and poorly imitate others. It is clear that he was not deaf because he imitated the housekeeper’s preferred imprecation “oh dieu,” which he mispronounced “oh diie.” But he was never able to properly pronounce even the few words he was claimed to have said, nor could he generalize from the little he did comprehend. Just as Helen Keller learned of the relation between things and their name with the word “water,” Victor connected “lait” and actual milk. But as Itard wrote in one of his reports (the main source for our knowledge of the forbidden experiment), “it was when he actually received some milk that he said the word lait. A few times he said it beforehand; and a few times afterwards, but always without any apparent purpose, without grasping its meaning.” It was all empty imitation.

Itard devised clever experiments, such as placing objects beneath the words that signified them. After many attempts, Victor was able to properly place the items beneath the words, but it was soon realized that he had done little more than memorize their prior positioning. A period of rapid progress would be followed by developmental stasis.

The efforts were strenuous, and Victor expressed his discontent wordlessly. Itard had a housekeeper, Madame Guérin, whose company Victor unquestionably preferred to that of the doctor. Itard represented work as something that frustrated the child, when in fact he may have been frustrated with Itard. In an attempt to test Victor’s moral understanding, Itard once punished the child after he correctly carried out an assigned task, which duly confused and enraged him. Noticing that Victor seemed frightened of heights, he even dangled the boy from a parapet. When Itard finally abandoned the project as a lost cause, it was with Madame Guérin that Victor would live out his days. In 1806, he was a tamer young man, but he never proved the point Itard had set out to prove—that we are infinitely improvable.

All those who have written about the Wild Child—and their numbers are legion, from the psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss—have speculated about the proper diagnosis for Victor. Itard acted on the assumption that whatever Victor’s lacks might be, they were a product of his time in the forest. That he was totally lacking in native intelligence—that he was, in the language of his time, an “idiot”—was inconceivable. If he were, how could he have survived for years in the forest unassisted? He had somehow managed to find food, protect himself, and keep himself sufficiently warm during winter, for an estimated six years. He was, in Itard’s original vision, simply a human stripped down to the bare essentials, a scaffolding upon which anything could be built. This is an essential part of the story, for if Victor was in possession of all his faculties, mental and physical, then the fact that he did not substantially advance put paid to the possibility that humanity could be remolded and infinitely improved.

What was the cause of Victor’s inability to progress? Was he autistic? Developmentally handicapped? Schizophrenic? Was he abandoned in the first place because he showed signs of such maladies? Was his inability to speak organic or was it the result of the slit across his throat that was found upon his capture, which might well have severed his vocal cords? Shattuck dismisses this latter possibility. The slash was superficial, and had it been deep enough to reach his vocal cords, it’s inconceivable that he would have survived such an untreated wound in the forest. Which doesn’t mean that whoever abandoned him didn’t attempt to kill him, just that the wound in the end was not sufficiently profound to turn him mute.

Shattuck reproaches Itard for failing to persist in attempts to establish Victor’s provenance. By all estimates, he had spent six years in a savage state, which means he likely spent his first six years in society. He was not a foundling, abandoned at birth on the steps of a church. Yet his background was never established. Speculation is, of course, not diagnosis. The optimism of Itard’s course of treatment refused the medicalization of Victor’s deficits. It was the spirit of the times, the desire to prove a philosophical point, an admirable one at that, that led to the possible refutation of that very same point.

Criticism of Itard’s effort to change Victor focuses on a fatal flaw in the doctor’s educational methods. The principal ones, put forth by Shattuck and even more forcefully by Harlan Lane in his earlier study of the case The Wild Boy of Aveyron (1976), were the twin errors of isolating Victor from other children in the Institute for Deaf-Mutes and the imposition of speech on the mute child. As Shattuck wrote, “Even though the boy lived at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes, […] he apparently was not encouraged to play with boys and girls of his age.” He thus lacked the stimulation such interactions would have provided. Instead, “Itard almost placed the Wild Boy in a new, looser form of isolation. The root cause of his backwardness was not completely removed.” Ironically, the little savage lived “like a little prince”—he “had a tutor and a governess, whereas what he probably needed most was to work and play with other children.” Whether Victor’s isolation was the “root cause” of Victor’s inability to intellectually thrive remains, as Shattuck shows, an open question. But it is certainly the case that only free play might have allowed him to gain—or regain—all the elements of a full social life, not least language.

And then there’s the second major error of Itard’s methods—“the excessive stress he laid on training Victor to speak.” Shattuck assigns blame to Itard for not building on the few sounds Victor was able to make. But the stringing-together of sounds is not speech, and nothing indicates that Victor was ever going to speak. Was his problem organic? Was it induced by isolation? Language is a social matter, learned through contact with other language users. Itard had a ready supply of language users at hand, but to quote Shattuck, he “never tried to find out if Victor could learn to sign, to use the language that was being used all around him and for which he had a natural propensity.” This would have been a natural fit, for Victor used what Shattuck calls an “action language,” his own rudimentary sign system. But Itard, we are told, felt a great prejudice against signing, and he was far from alone in this bias. “Sign was the language of the ‘dumb’—an association Itard wanted to avoid,” Shattuck writes.

As writers including Harlan Lane and Oliver Sacks have demonstrated with great passion, signing is a language in as full a sense as any spoken tongue. Its relation to the way the brain functions is exactly that of spoken language. Itard, in this case, acted like so many benefactors of the deaf who instead harmed them by forcing them into the mold of the hearing world. Itard would repent this mistake over the course of his lengthy career.

But we should be wary of judging Itard too harshly by engaging in the sort of presentism that tinges the critiques I have outlined. Itard thought in the terms of the age in which he lived. As the French philosopher Lucien Malson wrote in his 1964 volume Les Enfants sauvages, the child suffered from “the impossibility of being six years old again,” unable to be “miraculously cured of the intellectual sclerosis and […] the long and painful trauma owed to prolonged isolation.” As a savant of Itard’s own time wrote, after reading the doctor’s report on his experiment, “We must, in the first place, consider his departure point as well as the point at which he has arrived, for this young man, in order to be correctly judged, should only be compared to himself.” The fault lay not in Itard’s methods but in Victor’s circumstances. Though we can doubt the perfectibility of mankind, that conclusion is not proven by the case of Victor, who was a poor experimental subject. What the case does prove, in Malson’s words, is that “man, as man, before education is nothing but a simple possibility; that is, even less than a hope.”