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Louis Pergaud’s novel – La guerre des boutons (War of the buttons) – offers a painting of childhood. One often concludes from the vividness of this narrative to a denunciation of the weight of traditional mores on education. This is certainly a modern novel. I will show that if Pergaud’s concern about childhood’s exposition to the war waged by adults is truly modern, he also proposes an anti-modern representation of it. His pessimism about the separation of the worlds of adults and of children, and his vision of a childhood haunted by the evil of wars, are as much opposed to the promises of progress of modernity as to those of education: they form the anti-modern features of a modern critique of modernity.