French Boys and Girls in the Great War: Gender and the History of Children’s Experiences, 1914–1918

Abstract

Working on childhood requires the historian to interrogate the use of gender as a tool for analysing the characteristics of children’s wartime experiences.1 It makes more sense to use the plural ‘children’ than the generic term ‘childhood’, since the first corresponds more closely to the diversity of the issue. However, this chapter will not merely juxtapose individual stories. The nature of the sources presented here, including diaries, letters, and drawings as well as secondary sources such as oral testimonies, involves a very intimate level and a micro-historical perspective — ‘au ras du sol’ as Jacques Revel has called it.2 This allows us to constitute a corpus of personal sources in which various dimensions become apparent, in particular in terms of expressions of gender. Even in sources that at first appearance seem to be rather disparate, we can recognize specific patterns such as similar representations and a consistent imagery. This ‘cultural flow’ stresses that all these children belong to the same generation. Transposing the mentioned personal sources can shed light on the ‘singular normal’ (the ‘normal unusual’) of wartime childhood.3KeywordsOccupied TerritoryPersonal SourceExercise BookOral TestimonyHome FrontThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.