Abstract
Children have been participants in, witnesses to, and victims of many of the pivotal events in French history. Artistic representations of these moments of crisis—Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People or Ladj Ly’s 2019 film, Les Misérables, come to mind—highlight children’s multifaceted engagement. But too often historians overlook children in writing about war or revolution. In the last decades, French historians of childhood have uncovered these stories and carved out a distinct subfield. The July 2020 issue of Nottingham French Studies, which is the result of a 2018 study day at the University of Nottingham, is an important step in cementing this subfield. The issue, which focuses on historical moments of upheaval, makes a resounding case for the value of studying children. Each of the authors nuances and complicates a moment in French history through their focus on childhood.
Colin Heywood begins the issue by providing an overview of the field. Heywood, who has been studying French children for over three decades, interrogates three poles within the historiography of French childhood—infant welfare, education, and moments of revolution or strife. In spite of an expansive historiography, he observes that textbooks on French or European history make relatively few mentions of children. As the subsequent contributions make clear, the time is ripe for revision.
While most of the contributions concern the twentieth century, Siân Reynolds’ article plunges us into the heart of the Revolution. She focuses on the offspring of prominent Girondins, many of whose fathers died during the Terror. Piecing together the fragmented historical record, she traces the trajectories of these children over the course of the nineteenth century. As she demonstrates, many recovered from the Revolution thanks to familial networks on which they could rely. They inherited their fathers’ dislike of the Bourbons and went on to contribute to the revolutions of the nineteenth century. The piece provides an unusual approach to studying the legacies of the French Revolution; however, I was left wondering how exceptional these Girondin offspring were. Reynolds is working on a comprehensive project on revolutionary offspring that promises to address this question.
Fabrice Virgili and Danièle Voldman’s account of Louise and Paul Grappe is captivating. Drawing on their full-length book about the couple, the article tells of the story of a World War I deserter who lived as a woman for almost a decade to escape punishment. The couple’s story ended in tragedy, as Paul became abusive once he resumed dressing as a man. Louise ultimately shot him in self-defense and then lost their infant son to illness shortly thereafter. Virgili and Voldman’s fortuitous archival discovery inspired a book, a film, and two plays. In their essay, Virgili and Voldman consider the role of children and childhood in this family drama, suggesting that the birth of the couple’s son precipitated their tragic rupture.
Turning to World War II, Lindsay Dodd merges archives with oral histories to study the evacuation of French children to the Creuse. As Dodd points out, the written record mostly includes the triumphs or failures of the program. In contrast, the oral histories capture its more quotidian and mundane aspects. We often think of children in World War II as victims, but Dodd shows that some children were simply living their lives. Of the authors in this special issue, Dodd spends the most time investigating the experiences of individual children. Given the challenges of finding sources produced by children in traditional archives, this article, as well as her book-length project on children in France during World War II, will hopefully inspire other historians of childhood to use oral history.
Children did not only move within France during World War II. Chelsea Sambells and K. H. Adler examine programs to move children across borders during and after the war. Sambells looks at Swiss humanitarianism efforts with regard to children. As a neutral country, the Swiss were able to operate a scheme to evacuate children from Vichy France and then after 1941, from occupied France and Belgium, and provision them for short spans of time. Swiss public opinion managed to convince those running the programs to include a small number of Jewish children; however, the Swiss chose not to use this complex infrastructure to provide more permanent refuge for Jewish children in France. Sambells focuses on a particular exchange in the summer of 1942 between Pierre Laval—the French official notorious for his role in deporting Jewish children—and the Swiss Ambassador to France. She shows that the ambassador refused to accept Jewish children as refugees into Switzerland, thereby condemning many of them. Her piece suggests that the Swiss valued preserving their veneer of neutrality over protecting these vulnerable youngsters. Adler’s piece focuses on the postwar period. She explores the French military’s efforts to create colonies de vacances, (summer camps), in the French zone of occupation in the German Federal Republic. Various religious and political groups had operated the colonies as far back as the 1880s, but Adler emphasizes that these postwar summer camps were not simply for children’s welfare. The military brought French children to occupied West Germany as a way of asserting their rule and simultaneously stoking patriotism among French youths. That the military went to great lengths to transport and provision these young diplomat/occupiers demonstrates their importance to the French occupation project.
All three of the articles about World War II and its aftermath introduce episodes that are outside the traditional narrative. By including children, these authors complicate how we think of Swiss neutrality and the tactics of the French military after the war. They demonstrate the significance of children in state-building projects or international diplomacy. The articles also provide a snapshot on childhood at midcentury. By World War II, young children were recognized as requiring care and protection. Through the articles, we see that this protection operated at multiple levels. Individual host families, particular branches of the French government, and transnational aid organizations all worked to rescue children because of their particular vulnerabilities. But, as Sambells’ article highlights, not all children were treated with the same care.
The final two contributions cover the less violent, but also tumultuous period of the 1960s and their aftermath. Sophie Heywood examines second-wave feminist books for children. Her particular interest is the authors of these works and how they grappled with competing ideas about socializing girls. Focusing particularly on the work of Adela Turin, she provides vivid descriptions of gender-bending pink elephants and subversive mermaids. These books presented two visions of feminism—one in which all gender differences could disappear and another where female characters needed to form their own all-feminine, anti-capitalist societies. Richard Bates’ contribution suggests a correction to the history of autism treatment in France. He emphasizes that until recently, the French treated autism with psychoanalysis. This method placed undue responsibility for children’s autism on parents, particularly mothers. He traces the history of this treatment to the work of two female psychoanalysts, Maud Mannoni and Françoise Dolto. Their influence helps to explain the staying power of psychoanalysis as treatment in France long after other countries had turned to alternative methods.
In their focus on female authors and psychoanalysists, these two contributions shed light on an important turning point in female expertise. Many of the authors in this volume are attentive to gendered variations within childhood, but Heywood and Bates also consider the gendered aspect of child care. While women worked as teachers, social workers, and labor inspectors from the nineteenth century, they were mostly anonymous. In contrast, Turin and Dolto viewed themselves as experts with regard to raising children and gained renown for their work.
Despite the exciting diversity of this volume’s research, work on race and imperialism are notable omissions. The contributions only cover children within metropolitan France and with the exception of one mixed-race evacuee, all the children we encounter are white. Children on multiple continents lived under French rule during the period this volume covers. Youngsters outside of metropolitan France experienced their share of war and revolution, not to mention conquest and exploitation. An article or two on children under imperial rule or on postcolonial immigration would have been a welcome addition to the collection.
By highlighting just how diverse and rewarding history of childhood can be, the authors make a clear case for including children within French history. But I would have liked to see them articulate their contributions to the history of childhood more emphatically. As Heywood points out in his introduction, children have been disempowered over the course of the last two centuries. And yet, many of these essays provide instances where adults endowed children with political value. At a moment when children’s health is very present in our own political discourse, what can the unequal treatment of children in World War II tell us about the limits of childhood? As these authors’ pieces make manifest, the history of childhood in France has much to offer historians studying children in a range of national contexts.
Each of the contributions succeeds in being both rich and concise. Historians writing the history of children and childhood often need to construct their own archives or employ unconventional readings of archival material. The volume serves as a model for the diverse ways to do this effectively. The authors in this issue engage with many important recent themes and methodologies in the history of childhood including human rights, sexuality, disability studies, oral history, and occupation histories. Many of them are charting exciting new directions within childhood studies, demonstrating just how important the study of childhood is to scholars of France and beyond.