50

Community toilets are rarely studied by historians, sociologists or literary scholars: because defecation is abject, taboo and unspeakable, these places must also be hidden, kept away and hushed up. And the imperative of silence was particularly prevalent in the 19th century, a century of propriety if ever there was one. However, a new principle was coming to challenge the existing rules: hygiene, making it particularly urgent to consider latrines in schools. First of all, this consideration required an institutional framework: latrines were the subject of growing attention from legislators and architects anxious to make the most of the instructions issued by hygienists. But there is another moral issue at stake here, as there is a great deal of mistrust of a space that is by definition secluded and therefore conducive to the most morally reprehensible acts. Finally, we might ask what happened to school latrines in nineteenth-century literature, and what kind of reservations there were about them.