Victor of Aveyron (ca. 1790–1828)

French “feral child”

Victor is perhaps the best known and most important of the long list of so-called feral children. Often referred to as “the wild boy of Aveyron,” Victor is forever associated with the name of his teacher, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard (who also gave Victor his name). For an entire generation of French intellectuals, Victor represented a chance to study what could not ethically be created: a “noble savage” raised in a state of nature uncontaminated by human culture. What could such a child show about the essence of human nature, human capacity? In what some have called the “forbidden experiment,” Itard and Victor (and a caretaker, Madame Guerin) spent five intensive years together testing the empiricist notion that the human mind was a blank slate, dependent on the sensory experiences to develop all knowledge and socialization.

Victor was first brought to Paris in 1800 after being captured by townspeople in the region of Aveyron in the south of France. After an initial swirl of public attention and excitement, however, the French alieniste Philippe Pinel pronounced his diagnosis that Victor was not the suspected noble savage, normal in faculty but uncontaminated by human society. Pinel declared the child to be an incurable idiot, unimprovable in any way. It was Itard, however, who persisted, obtaining permission to work intensively with Victor, carefully exploring just how much the child could learn and approach normal development.

Itard's account of this five-year experiment, documenting Victor's progress in language, behavior, and other functional skills, is often regarded as one of the earliest attempts at systematic instruction of children with intellectual disabilities. Reminders of the many devices and techniques created by Itard for use in Victor's instruction can still be seen in such settings as Montessori classrooms and in the precise language of behavioral observations.

By 1805, Itard concluded that Victor did, in fact, have unalterable limitations to what he could learn, and Itard abandoned his efforts to document Victor's education. Itard went on to work for several more decades in the education of deaf children. Victor spent [Page 1603]his remaining days with his devoted caretaker, Madame Guerin, living an apparently quiet life. Victor died in 1828 of unknown causes.