La Folle des Pyrénées

< Isolated children >

M A Memmie LeBlanc

Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron

L'Enfant Sauvage

Victor of Aveyron is perhaps the best-known feral child, made famous through Truffaut's film L'Enfant Sauvage. Victor is considered by many to be the first documented case of autism.

Found in the forest

Victor was first sighted wandering in the woods near Saint Sernin sur Rance, in southern France, at the end of the 18th century. He was captured but subsequently escaped, and wasn't retaken until January 1800 when he emerged from the woods. Aged about 12, he couldn't speak and bore a number of scars, suggesting he'd been in the wild for some time.

Why he was called Victor

Victor was given his name after the leading character in the play Victor, ou l'enfant de la forêt, the oddly prescient melodramatic play — indeed, the first fully developed melodrama — by René Guilbert de Pixérécourt, written in 1797/8, first produced in 1798 and published in 1803, and itself based on a book with the same name written by François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil in 1796.

Who was Victor?

Recent research into local and national archives in France suggests that Victor was probably abandoned by his family. There are suggestions that there was a child living in the area who could not speak.

Human or animal?

Victor's discovery coincided with the age of Enlightenment, when debate raged about what exactly separated humans from animals, and he was thus ideal experimental fodder for the scientists, just as Genie was so many years later. Victor eventually ended up with Itard, who wanted to teach him to speak and generally civilise him, but Itard made little progress.

What became of Victor?

Victor, the wild boy of Averyon, died at the age of 40 at an annexe of the Paris Institution des Sourds-Muets at 4 Impasse des Feuillantines where he lived with Mme Guérin.

Read the full story of Victor online

There are many books about Victor, among which the most important are Itard's own major works, Mémoir sur les Premiers Développements de Victor de l'Aveyron (1801), and Rapport sur les Nouveaux Développements de Victor de l'Aveyron (1806), both here on this site (in French). English translations of both these works appear in Wolf Children and the Problems of Human Nature.

Further reading suggestions

Newton's book Savage Girls and Wild Boys has an extensive chapter devoted to Victor, and to Itard's attempts to teach Victor to communicate via a variety of different means.

Other books to feature Victor of Aveyron include The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of The Wild Boy of Aveyron and The Wild Boy of Aveyron.

A fictionalised account of Victor of Aveyron

For somewhat lighter reading, try Jill Dawson's Wild Boy — a fictionalised account, bringing to life Itard's tale through the introduction of human emotion.

Further online reading

You can read Nancy Yousef's Savage or Solitary?: The Wild Child and Rousseau's Man of Nature on this site. There's also a section on Victor in Douthwaite's article Homo ferus: Between Monster and Model.