The individual bequests and municipal funds which went to the support of poor schools in France also had this same dual purpose: to Christianize and to tame the children of the poor. The 10,000 livres donated by Mademoiselle de Meysen for the establishment of a school in Avignon "to teach reading and writing to the poor girls of this city and to raise them in the fear of God" was typical of a pious benefaction of the late decades of the seventeenth and early decades of the eighteenth century. According to one historian of French charity schools, "to claim that the cathechizing of abandoned children was the motive for the creation of popular schools by municipal poor committees would be to mistake the consequence for the cause, because another end, more immediate than the eternal salvation of the child, preoccupied administrators and benefactors: that is, to preserve the petite jeunesse (tender youth) from the dangers of idleness by finding an occupation appropriate to their years. There was also the matter of clearing the streets of Paris, Marseilles, Lyon, or Rouen of the little urchins who bothered the bourgeois.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 25)