However, faced with this world of faithful and complicated objects, the child can only identify himself as owner, as user, never as creator he does not invent the world, he uses it: there are, prepared for him, actions without adventure, without wonder, without joy. This is meant to prepare the little girl for the causality of house-keeping, to ‘condition’ her to her future role as mother. There exist, for instance, dolls which urinate they have an oesophagus, one gives them a bottle, they wet their nappies soon, no doubt, milk will turn to water in their stomachs. It is not so much, in fact, the imitation which is the sign of an abdication, as its literalness: French toys are like a Jivaro head, in which one recognizes, shrunken to the size of an apple, the wrinkles and hair of an adult. Toys here reveal the list of all the things the adult does not find unusual: war, bureaucracy, ugliness, Martians, etc. The fact that French toys literally prefigure the world of adult functions obviously cannot but prepare the child to accept them all, by constituting for him, even before he can think about it, the alibi of a Nature which has at all times created soldiers, postmen and Vespas.
As for the others, French toys always mean something, and this something is always entirely socialized, constituted by the myths or the techniques of modern adult life: the Army, Broadcasting, the Post Office, Medicine (miniature instrument-cases, operating theaters for dolls), School, Hair-Styling (driers for permanent-waving), the Air Force (Parachutists), Transport (trains, Citroens, Vedettes, Vespas, petrol-stations), Science (Martian toys). Invented forms are very rare: a few sets of blocks, which appeal to the spirit of do-it-yourself, are the only ones which offer dynamic forms.
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