Au Revoir les Enfants: Wartime Evacuation and the Politics of Childhood in France and Britain, 1939–45

Abstract

Few people in France today remember the wartime evacuation of children from Paris. But in 1938–40, the evacuation of urban schoolchildren and other ‘useless mouths’ from likely targets of bombing was central to French plans for the ‘passive defence’ of the civilian population. Moreover, the size and duration of such large-scale child migration schemes increased after the defeat and Occupation, as (allied) bombing raids over industrial cities like Ivry-sur-Seine or Boulogne-Billancourt put their children at risk once again. Why did an event so important in British memories of the Second World War leave so little trace in public memories of the war in France? This article explores the public debates around wartime evacuation respectively in Britain and in France and the convictions about relationships between families, children and the state that underpinned them’ For these debates suggest two very different ways of understanding the nature and needs of children in mid twentieth-century Europe and the relationship of those needs to understandings of children's present or future citizenship.