The Evacuation of Children inside Wartime France

Abstract

This article explores the evacuation of children from the Paris region to the rural Creuse département, prompted by problems with the capital's food supply and increasingly heavy Allied air raids from 1943. It combines archival material and oral narratives, using the case studies of two individuals (Françoise and Christian) to suggest first, a latent archival bias towards extremes of positive and negative experience, and second, the ways oral history narratives can provide nuance and texture to how we understand the past, replicating more faithfully the equivocal nature of everyday life. After an outline of the historical context of evacuation, three aspects of the evacuee-host experience are considered: the decision to accept an evacuee, the material conditions in which the child was accommodated, and the longer-term relationships forged through evacuation. It is both an analysis of some of the historical dimensions of children's evacuation and a methodological exploration of oral and written data.