Wartime Rupture and Reconfiguration in French Family Life: Experience and Legacy (2024)

Abstract

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That’s it. A rupture like that, you think about it all your life. You don’t think about it every day, you’re not saying to yourself, ‘Oh, yes, in those days …’, all of that, but all your life you think about it. You never forget. Memories aren’t rubbed out. They stay, they remain engraved, your key memories.1

Jacques (born October 1938), recorded 16 June 2017 in Yvelines.

After the dust had settled, how had the Second World War changed lives? For those children not directly affected by aggression, combat or persecution, what was the impact of the Second World War on life trajectories? In this article the examination of a number of subjective memory stories of former French child evacuees and refugees brings into view the consequences of various kinds of family rupture and reconfiguration. These intensely personal stories show first that the meanings attached to the past can exist entirely outside the structures of ‘collective memory’, and second, that war was the catalyst for change here, not the Vichy government. Military combat and state collaboration are present in the background; but as most people’s lives are played out primarily on the smaller domestic stage, these stories reflect clearly the pressing preoccupations of daily, lived realities as families struggled to manage the practical and psychological changes which war projected into their homes from afar.

War creates massive social upheaval in various ways: through major population displacement, food and supply problems, and through ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ family separation. It unpicks familiar and established patterns of social relations, and restitches them differently. This article deals with the separation of families through the evacuation of urban children to the French countryside because of air-raid danger and food shortage. It argues that the experience of the Second World War was profound, even among those who did not experience persecution or aggression directly. Furthermore, it seeks to complicate understandings of family separation as a wholly negative experience for children in war, without compromising sensitivity to the nuances of individual difference. Finally, it will show that the legacy of war experience is evident in unusual and meaningful commemorative actions situated well below national and communal levels, which go largely unacknowledged.

Listening to voices hitherto omitted from the historical record sheds light on the wider social impact of war, and also helps to account for some of the tensions which exist in national and collective memory in France.2 For those who were never bombed, terrorized, persecuted or bereaved, the period 1940–44 has a very different set of meanings. The commemoration and revisiting of such traumatic events is necessary. But for those lucky enough to have avoided these horrors, yet whose lives were altered by war in other, less evident ways, such commemorations might seem to belong to another war, another country, another people, another era. My research seeks to include more and different kinds of stories to build a picture of war and its aftermath which outlines not just what is clear, terrible and clearly terrible, but what is more ambiguous both in impact and meaning.

Family separation is one of the most widespread consequences of war, particularly war which targets civilian populations. There is some historical scholarship about it, but in limited forms; such research is bolstered by larger bodies of work in psychology, and indeed, other disciplines beyond.3 Scholars have typically looked at two varieties of family break-up in war. The first is the impact of absent men, whether as service personnel, as prisoners-of-war or as returning husbands and fathers at the end of conflict.4 The second is the evacuation of children away from biological families. This measure to protect vulnerable parts of the civilian population developed with the advent of air war, and is most commonly associated with the Second World War.5 Across the world, governments instigated schemes to move children away from danger, protecting both young lives and future human resources. The national contexts appearing most commonly in Anglophone writing are the British evacuation of 1939 and during the Blitz, and the Finnish evacuation of around 50,000 children to Sweden. Other work exists on Norway, Germany, Japan, Russia, and, pre-dating the Second World War, on Basque children.6 Until now there has been little interest in French children’s evacuation. As Downs comments, it has no place in French collective memory of the Second World War.7 My research demonstrates, however, not just the scale of this displacement of the French child population, but also its lasting legacy down the years.

British work often considers the relationship between evacuation and the birth of the welfare state, and its place in the popular memory of a nation united in stoic self-sacrifice to defeat Hitler, even down to the youngest child.8 A more global impact of the British evacuation came through the fruitful medical grounds it provided for experiment and observation.9 Child psychologists and psychoanalysts used what they learnt to develop attachment theory, which looms large over pathological and therapeutic work today, as well as policy development in social work and education.10 In the twenty-first century, researchers are studying former evacuees to understand the long-term mental health outcomes for childhood family separation, and the impacts on education and social mobility.11 Earlier psychological study was largely negative about the damage done by severing mother-child bonds – and indeed, contemporary analysts still utilize this work to promote ‘the integrity of the family’ as a core recommendation in policymaking for children in war.12 However some recent research suggests more nuanced outcomes, including better educational achievement for children placed in higher-status foster homes, and retrospective self-understandings which valued evacuation as a time of positive growth, exploration and challenge.13 Others propose that it is not the fact of separation which generated trauma and stress, maladaptive attachment patterns or later psychopathologies, but the poor quality of care before, during or after evacuation, the presence of abuse before, during or after evacuation, the experience of bombing before or after evacuation, and the child’s age at the time the family separation occurred.14

Any act of prospecting for oral history interviewees is likely to generate some anomalous responses. My call for interviewees went out in local press and radio in the Creuse, the rural department in central France to which the first convoys of children from the Paris suburbs were sent following the second Allied air-raid on Renault’s Boulogne-Billancourt factories on 4 April 1943.15 I asked for the memories of those evacuated from the Paris suburbs to the Creuse and placed in foster families, or those whose families housed the evacuees. To date, I have interviewed twenty people as a result, some in the Creuse, some in Paris.16 Along with child evacuees and their hosts, respondents included a refugee from the civilian exodus of 1940, children sent to live with extended family, the husband and daughter of a former child evacuee, a man who as a young teacher accompanied Parisian evacuees to the Haute-Saône département, and a Jewish boy who found refuge in the Creuse. I chose not to discard anomalous responses, seeing them instead as part of a web of knowledge woven around events in the past. In what follows, I draw on the cases of five individuals all of which tell us something about wartime family separation, child displacement and memory; as such, it is not an article just about evacuation. These should be seen as telling – not as representative or typical – cases. They seek not to prove or disprove a hypothesis, but instead help us learn about the impacts of war inside families.17 I will briefly introduce the five individuals here, before moving on to analyse first, the ruptures to family life which pre-dated the children’s journeys to the Creuse; second, the ways in which separation and family reconfiguration were experienced as both loss and gain, and finally, the foundational nature of these events for identity-construction not just in the past, but over time.

Four of the five interviewees whose stories are used in this article were children evacuated from the Parisian suburbs to the Creuse from 1943 in response to heavy Allied air raids.18 Evacuees, known as petit* réfugiés (little refugees), typically arrived in convoys by train, accompanied by their primary school teachers. They went to reception departments designated by the German military authorities – of which the Creuse was but one19 – where their care and wellbeing was supervised by the Prefecture.20 Local people volunteered to house them. My archival research revealed evidence both of positive integration and improved health, and of mistreatment, abuse and delinquency.21 Length of stay varied from a few months to several years. The fifth interviewee, Jean-Pierre, was nearly four years old when he arrived in the Creuse during the civilian exodus of 1940, when millions took to the roads fleeing the German invasion.22 His mother exhausted herself taking him and his baby brother as far as the hamlet of Malleret-Boussac, where they were lodged for a few months before leaving again.23 Of the others, only-child Jacques stayed with a couple in Saint-Dizier-Leyrenne until 1947, when he was nine; he does not know precisely when he arrived there. Christian was five when he was evacuated from Paris in spring 1943 and taken in by a well-off farming family in Issoudun-Létrieix. Roger journeyed from Paris to the Creuse in spring 1944 aged ten, ending up near to Saint-Priest-la-Feuille where he remained for a couple of years.24 The only woman considered here, Simone, arrived in Saint-Marc-à-Loubaud at the age of eight, also in spring 1944;25 I was invited by Simone’s daughter Yolande and Simone’s widower Eugène to speak to them about her experiences, Simone having passed away several years ago.26 Both Yolande and Roger also sent me auto/biographical writings about these evacuation experiences, and Jacques, Christian and Roger showed me numerous photographs. All were interviewed in their own houses except for Jean-Pierre, whom I interviewed in the house of Denis, the now-octogenarian son of the farmers who had taken Jean-Pierre’s family in in 1940.

RUPTURE: INITIAL SEPARATIONS AS A RESULT OF WAR

Before finding themselves in the Creuse, each of these five children was already living with forms of family separation. Later, when they left the Creuse, further disturbance to newly-formed bonds of care and affection occurred. The first point, then, is that these are stories of ruptures and reconfigurations: plural. Such domestic upheavals were major parts of the child experience of the Second World War in France, elsewhere, and in war more generally. Here, I treat them as both personal and historical phenomena which shed light on the impacts of war over time, which do not show up as pathological, but which nonetheless structure identity development and life trajectory; deeply personal, they hook into a broader generational, national and even transnational war-child experience.

What kinds of family separation had children experienced prior to their arrival in the Creuse? Christian told me that he was the third of four brothers; the two elder boys had been evacuated to North Africa, and the youngest stayed with their mother in Paris. The family lived in a small flat in Paris, where the boys had shared a bedroom. The family strategy of child protection appeared to be unplanned, responding to the opportunities which became available at different moments. What is clear is that when Christian was evacuated, it was on his own, and that the brothers did not share a common wartime experience. Another interviewee, Roger, almost forgot to mention a detail of his family circ*mstances: ‘Wait a second’, he said, ‘I’ve forgotten to tell you – my father was taken prisoner of war’. This oversight is perhaps not surprising. Describing his father’s job in the years before war broke out, Roger told me: ‘He was practically never at home’, and went on: ‘My dad, he was someone from outside [the family]’. After his father’s release in 194327 the family moved from the suburbs into central Paris, where Roger had some difficulties at school which exacerbated his stammer. In Roger’s account, this backdrop of anxieties at school, rather than the threat of bombing, was what prompted him to ask his parents to have him evacuated when the opportunity arose. In neither Roger’s nor Christian’s account were these earlier separations foregrounded; they nonetheless suggest that even children who experienced their evacuation very positively were living with family set-ups reconfigured by the war before they left.

For the other three children whose cases I am considering here, the separations which preceded their evacuations were more disruptive. Like Roger, Jean-Pierre and Jacques both had fathers who were mobilized in 1939 and fought in the Battle for France in May 1940. In Jean-Pierre’s case, it was during this period of spousal separation that his mother took the decision – like so many others – to flee their village in Normandy and travel south, fearing the advance of the German army. Two separations are very clear here: from the man who might have contributed to the making of a decision which Jean-Pierre’s mother later always saw as the wrong decision and for which she blamed herself; and from the place, Normandy, to which the family, father included, returned in autumn 1940. Normandy was Jean-Pierre’s native region but not one which he held in high regard. Jacques’s father had volunteered to join the French Army in 1939. Married a few years previously to a young bride of seventeen, and with a baby son, he was killed in action in May 1940. According to Jacques’s understanding of events, his mother was furious at her husband ‘for having volunteered, for having left us, for getting himself killed’. Jacques believes he was sent to the Creuse while she rebuilt her life. So war left Jacques not only fatherless but, it seemed, banished. Finally, Simone’s widower Eugène and their daughter Yolande recounted to me her difficult life in Paris. Yolande said ‘the family had disintegrated’, Simone’s parents being separated. Her mother worked long hours at a factory, and after school her three children ‘were living in the streets’. They scrabbled around for scrap metal to sell, begged and bartered for food; young Simone was often dumped by her older brothers at the cinema in front of films too old and too frightening for her. This family lived habitually in a state of disorder and instability but not without love and affection.

SEPARATION AND RECONFIGURATION AS BOTH LOSS AND GAIN

Thus none of the five children was living in a tidily configured family unit at the point when they were evacuated. Following stays of different lengths, all but Simone returned to their region of origin. Yet for each child, the move to the Creuse engendered a definitive reconfiguration of their socio-spatial sense of belonging. This reconfiguration was not simply one of loss, rupture or distress, although all were present; in fact, in some stories these moments were lived and remembered as affective gain, as adventure and freedom, and as a positive enlargement of the child’s world.28 So while family separation and reconfiguration may form the cornerstones of children’s lives in war, these are not always, or not always wholly, negative experiences.

For Roger and Christian, the move to the Creuse as child evacuees was experienced overwhelmingly as gain, notwithstanding some early distress at finding themselves in unknown surroundings. Christian spoke of being the last child remaining after all the others had been selected; he said a little boy like him was seen as a drain on farmers’ resources and more sturdy children were chosen first. He attracted the sympathy of the village mayor’s wife, however, and the family took him in. He said: ‘So I wasn’t too sad. You know, all of that – , the separation from my parents and everything, I don’t remember that. Because often, I hear people say “Can you imagine, for a child – !” No, you get used to it quickly! … And everything went very well there, I was spoiled, cosseted’. He explicitly denied any negative impact of separation, in part to emphasize his own successful adaptation, and in response to the clear quality of care he received. For Roger too, the separation from his parents mingled in memory with the excitement of a voyage into the unknown with his friends:

When I left, there was lots of noise, my mates – , I loved my parents, though, of course! But – , I only started to cry when I actually arrived in the village. Ah, that’s it, over, the adventure, it’s not funny anymore. But until then, I’d not shed a tear for the whole journey [acting the sad child],‘Oh, Mum, Oh Dad, I won’t see you!’ No, no! I was going on an adventure!

Quickly finding his feet in a new household where the children were already grown up, this lively ten-year-old was welcomed and settled into the rhythms of country life, learning the local dialect (the patois) and customs and revelling in the fact that for him – and he delighted in the contrariness of his statement – this period of war and occupation was a period of freedom.

The Creuse was not only the place of generous people: it was the place of generous land too. One of Roger’s first memories in Saint-Priest-la-Feuille was of

a cauldron, big like that, beautiful and shiny, and inside there was the brenade29 for the little Parisiens, that is, potatoes, in crème fraiche, with organic veal, if you please – the blanquette de veau, there you are!

On another occasion he said ‘I have a good memory, of coming here, of eating white bread with crème fraiche and with lard; it’s good, lard spread on bread, you know!’ Christian too recounted the bountiful nature of provisions on the farm:

We had good fromage blanc, with cream, and sugar, and even jam on top. They made cakes, apple tarts – that was the cake we always had there – and lovely chicken with good mashed potatoes, with buttery sauce, and everything.

Neither spoke particularly of hunger prior to arriving in the Creuse, but both described it as a land of plenty, a far cry from the make-do cooking and unobtainable rations in urban areas. Both were keen to contrast their story of abundance to the more commonly-told one of turnips, Jerusalem artichokes and hunger cramps.30 Roger noted an added bonus of having escaped a teacher at school in Paris who had stigmatized him for his stammer. Both men’s narratives dwelt upon the newfound freedoms of fields and forests, the enriching relationships built with local people and, particularly with animals, whether friendly dogs or cows in the pastures. In Christian’s case, his expanded social world took on a more formal character. He said:

I hadn’t been baptized. And the people who took me in agreed to become my godmother and my godfather. So I was baptized at Issoudun, and I became indirectly part of the family after that, you see … And after I went back to Colombes, every year afterwards, in the summer holidays, I came back to the Creuse to spend two and a half months on the farm.

Roger too returned for his holidays for many years to come. Both Roger and Christian told their evacuation stories with evident delight, using an active, creative kind of nostalgia which has kept them recounting and reliving these moments down the years.

For Simone, Jean-Pierre and Jacques, there was also gain in the new relations they forged, but these were remembered in more emotionally complex narratives. Separation, adaptation and return were intertwined with feelings of loss, shame and regret. Like Christian, Simone experienced a semi-formalization of her adoptive relationship: a frightened eight-year-old, she too was first shunned for her feebleness but eventually taken in by Louise, an unmarried woman in her forties. Louise lived with her elderly mother in the large house built by her father, whose death had plunged the women into genteel poverty. At the end of the war, Simone remained with Louise in Saint-Marc-à-Loubaud, although she was never formally adopted and still saw her biological mother. Simone’s daughter Yolande described herself as lucky to have had ‘three grandmothers’, including Louise. Simone lived a calmer life in Saint-Marc, with sufficient if not ample food and a steady education, although she struggled to forge an affectionate relationship with Louise. However, Eugène and Yolande insisted emphatically on her affective integration into the village: even if her relations with Louise were distant, the villagers took her to their hearts. Yolande remarked

she was adopted, emotionally, by everyone … this little girl, she had good friends, she was – , she had really good friends, and everyone here loved her. [With other children] she’d go and fetch the milk in the evenings, she’d look after the cows with Édith …, and over there, there was Pierre and Milou, who treated her like their little sister.

The village became her extended family. While she was not forced to choose between Paris and the Creuse, it seemed that these familial structures existed in tension with each other, rather than lying happily side-by-side, as in Christian’s case. Yolande explained:

Even though she was adopted by the neighbours … when people asked her if she was from here, she’d say ‘Oh, no no, no, I’m not from round here. I’m from the city … I’m Parisian’.

Her daughter and husband saw the legacy of this rupture in her identity, in her character, interpersonal relations and even her health.

Although my interview with Jean-Pierre took place in the presence of Denis, whose parents opened their doors to the refugee family in 1940, the Creuse as a place pervaded the interview (rather than any individuals), along with an overwhelming sense of attachment to the Creuse and what it represented to him: food, safety, care – that which his native Normandy could not provide. Everything flowed from a feeling of generosity, Jean-Pierre distilling human values into the place. What still moved him to tears was, as he said, ‘the spontaneity: “Come in, come in, we’ll manage, we’ll sort things out, it’ll be alright.” We had nothing. My Mum had nothing’. He continued, his voice choking, ‘She stopped somewhere where people wanted to take her in. That’s the magnificent act’. This act was followed by others: a neighbour breastfed Jean-Pierre’s baby brother, his exhausted mother unable to lactate after days on the roads. And, for Jean-Pierre, the most powerful symbol of all: ‘They saved our lives! … There was fresh bread.’ He gestured, in the kitchen where we sat, to loaves of imaginary bread, stored up high near the ceiling to keep them from the rats. He re-lived the moment, raising invisible morsels to his mouth: ‘It’s just been cooked. I’m hungry. It’s fresh bread. It’s extraordinary – my whole life!’ He mimed eating it. ‘And when – , every time I eat the bread…’ His voice trailed off as he struggled to control this powerful embodied memory, life-giving and life-saving. Denis’s family, who were otherwise complete strangers, also wrote a letter asserting their need for an agricultural mechanic on their farm: a vital letter which released Jean-Pierre’s father from the French army and returned him to his family: a further life given back. These powerful gestures which tumbled from Jean-Pierre’s memory in a highly-charged narrative were later contrasted with what awaited the family back in Normandy. There, Jean-Pierre said, poor housewives were forbidden from collecting the stray ears of wheat left on the ground after threshing, which would otherwise be left to rot. Having helped his mother one day furtively to gather these up, for months afterwards he feared that that the police were coming for him. Such were the different attitudes he sought to underscore in his story: from the stuff of life freely given in the Creuse, to the selfish, pointless restrictions further north. His quest to repay the Creuse formed a lasting legacy across the later years of his life.

So while Simone’s attachment to the new place was lived in tension, and Jean-Pierre’s was embodied in the bread, for Jacques there was something less tangible about his time spent in the Creuse. It appears not as a physical entity, but more as a ‘half-way-place … midway between space and time’.31 It existed for him only in the ‘pictorial past’,32 as flashes of sensory experience – the rapid skinning of a rabbit, sparks flying from a blacksmith’s anvil, a snuff-sniffing old lady – and fluid, fleeting feelings of warmth and security which would be pulled apart by his mother’s arrival to take him back to Paris. Describing the couple who took him in, often just referred to as ‘ces gens-là’ (‘those people there’), Jacques said that she was a housewife who kept rabbits and chickens, and he was a carpenter who made all kinds of things in his workshop; impressed, Jacques wanted to become a carpenter too – an idea his mother later scorned. He had left for the Creuse in 1940 or 1941, he thought, quite soon after his father’s death, at the age of two or three, and did not return to Paris until 1947 now aged nine; the village of Saint-Dizier was the first home in his memory. When I asked him what he called monsieur and madame, he replied wonderingly, ‘I must have called them papa and maman’. He described the house in Saint-Dizier, saying ‘for me, that was my house where I lived. I learnt to read and write there. I went to school in clogs, you know. At the time we went in clogs, there weren’t any shoes, we went in clogs’. He showed me a photo album with nine snapshots of a little boy on a scooter, holding a rabbit, with monsieur and madame, posing with a wooden toy rifle, saying:

And for me, this period, I’ve written it on there for my son, ‘My childhood in the Creuse … Happy memory’. Yes, for me, these are happy memories. It was the war, we walked in clogs … but for me it was a happy period, a happy childhood.

All of that was to change. One day ‘a lady’ arrived –

… a lady. Who came to the Creuse, who took me, who said ‘It’s over, we’re going home. I’m your mother’. Fine. Very good. But for me, my mother, it wasn’t her. It was – those people there. Fine. So I went back to Paris. She had a little greengrocer’s shop … and there, when I arrived, I saw a man, and she said ‘Right, this will be your father’. I saw two children: ‘these are your brothers’. And just like that, tac, it’s over.

He described the disorientation of his new life, at school where his country accent was mocked – ‘Ah, where am I? Where am I?’ – and told of the lasting impact:

In my child’s mind, I never accepted it. I lived, I went to school, I played with my brothers, but somewhere, somewhere, I always thought of those people there. Always. Always. I always thought of them.

In Jacques’s mind, despite the earlier separation from his mother, the worst rupture was the one which took him back to Paris after the war ended. Although he never witnessed conflict or violence, war was stitched into the fabric of his childhood, sculpting the shape of his reconfigured family and underpinning the loss of the one he longed for.

LEGACIES

By listening to stories of lives affected by the war, we learn something of the legacy of children’s war experience which operates beneath the national and communal level. Sources contemporary to past events cannot reveal the future; but these retrospective narratives illustrate how individuals trace the impact of past events forwards across their lives, and account for their significance in unusual ways. Julian Jackson has written that the Occupation reshaped the map of France on numerous levels.33 These stories of mobility and displacement continue that reshaping into the postwar, as affective and embodied socio-spatial links to a place previously unknown are embedded into individuals’ lives. It is a significant and emotionally charged place, constructed from ‘imageries of past and present’,34 which layer events, experiences and memories onto and through the ‘in-between’ times, and onto and into present activities and feelings. Each interviewee demonstrated a powerful sense of belonging to the Creuse, which was generated in childhood, and continued in different ways into the present. These attachments were carried as emotional loads, some of which appeared quite burdensome. Remembering is the only way into the time-world of the past, and the interviewees exhibited a range of attitudes towards ‘going back’ in memory. The place-world, on the other hand, can be accessed physically; again, the narratives show a variety of engagements with ‘going back’ to the places of the past. In each case, wartime displacement to the Creuse is a foundational life-event, imbued with meaning, particularly in relation to future life paths and aspects of identity.

Roger and Christian, again, had easier relationships with this part of their pasts. For neither Roger nor Christian was there any problem in ‘going back’, in place or in time. Both men dwelt joyously in their memories, and highlighted the same feature. Roger said that this was ‘a period of freedom like never before’, and Christian too emphasized ‘the freedom, the freedom to run in the fields’. This sense of freedom manifested in their relationship with the past too: neither appeared to be weighed down by any negative emotional load connected with the experience, and both controlled freely and decisively their future connections with the place-world and the time-world of the wartime Creuse. The interviews with both men were conducted in their second homes in the Creuse, which they have owned for many years. Christian told me:

I always wanted to come back. When I got married, I introduced my wife to these people [his godparents], who completely adopted her too, they loved her very much, and after retiring I said to my godfather ‘you need to find me a house in the Creuse, I’m going to buy a house’.

Christian bought the house in 1979; his wife moved there definitively in 1984, while he keeps one foot in Paris, staying with their son and going to the Creuse at weekends. He was comfortable revisiting the time-world of the past: his wife and granddaughter laughingly rolled their eyes and retreated to the kitchen at the beginning of the interview: here were stories they had heard many times before. Christian showed me a scrapbook of photos, maps and other ephemera, annotated with the speech-bubbles of colourful cartoon animals, which he had compiled to share his past with his grandchildren. I asked him whether he felt Parisian or Creusois and he told me ‘a bit of both’. He had no difficulty inhabiting both identities. Roger too had bought a house – like Christian, not in the very place he had been evacuated to: near enough to have contact with people (like his old friend Marcel, present in the interview) and far enough not to live wholly in the past. Roger too lives partly in Paris. He is in the process of writing his memoirs from the time: comical, affectionate and full of detail, he sends these to the village website to share on their history pages. The ruptures and reconfigurations of the past had resolved themselves with positive outcomes, no conflicts of identity had arisen, and indeed, both men cherished and shared their memories of people and places of this past. Wartime displacement was nonetheless a foundational event – as these continuous returns in place and time attest – but across these life trajectories, it played out in constructive and fulfilling ways.

For Simone, however, this connection to the Creuse existed as a heavy emotional load, which her relatives Eugène and Yolande believed she carried for her whole life, to the detriment of her health. She suffered from a chronic heart condition, and Yolande put forward her opinion that ‘if she had cardiac problems, of course, right from the start she had been storing a lot of things up’: linking childhood anxieties and adult illness causally in this way may have no medical grounding, but acted as a process of sense-making for her daughter. Simone’s sense of belonging existed in tension, as a ‘place conflict’35 between Saint-Marc-à-Loubaud with her foster mother Louise, and her biological family in Paris. Although unable to resolve this conflict, she could exert control over ‘going back’ in memory: this, she refused – and violently. Yolande stated: ‘She didn’t like to evoke this past. She didn’t like photographs. She burnt all her photos. So whenever we could, we’d hide photos from her, because she couldn’t stand evoking – ’. Eugène drew three faded, dog-eared snapshots of a young couple holding hands from his wallet, saying sorrowfully ‘It was for myself that I hid these from her’. ‘She always had that wound’, continued Yolande. ‘She never evoked the past. She’d say ‘It’s the past, let’s not speak of it. It’s passed.’ Later, after her first stay in hospital for her heart, she burnt all of her clothes from the time before, and she forced Eugène to buy a new car, rupturing very physically her link with a pre-hospital self. The shame of her poverty which made her silence her Parisian past had created a pattern of behaviour, according to her relatives, across her life. After the couple married, Eugène was offered a job 160 kilometres away in Moulins, but she refused to leave Louise (who had since got married). She said ‘No, no, because they took me in here, I can’t leave them’. ‘Her life was here’, added Yolande. Both husband and daughter said ‘She felt indebted to them’. Yolande said ‘She had this gratitude. If she had escaped poverty, it was thanks to that woman’. Eugène added: ‘She felt she owed them – . If someone gave her something, she had to repay them. She had to give something in return’. They both described how this characteristic structured her adult life. While it is, perhaps in part, that helpfulness towards others which made her so appreciated in the village, Simone’s affective world had been sculpted by her childhood experiences: ‘she didn’t like to get too attached, so she didn’t get hurt, to protect herself’. So while Simone’s future happiness, her love and her family, were shaped by the evacuation experience, this was not without costs, which her daughter and husband saw as psychological and physiological.

For Jean-Pierre too, the emotional load was one of gratitude, which manifested in a far more celebratory way than it did for Simone. Yet there was also a silencing, which Jean-Pierre himself acted decisively to break. Describing the civilian exodus of 1940, he said:

Mum was ashamed to have left. So we never spoke of those times. Because people said ‘it’s your own fault [your house was pillaged], you were scared, you left’ … All that ruin for nothing. So she was completely blocked on it. In the family, we could never really speak of it. Mum wanted to completely forget … She said ‘don’t speak to me about that’. But it kept turning over in my mind.

Years later, with his brother, he journeyed to the Creuse and made contact with Denis’s family, renewing a bond of friendship which would last thereafter; he showed me photos of their respective children playing together. But he only tried to go back with his mother after seeing a refugee on television during the Iraq war, holding a toddler by the hand and with a baby in her arms. Now, he went back with his mother to break the silence. Again showing me photographs, he said triumphantly: ‘We came. We came back. There! Mum’s return!’ The photographs, from the early 2000s, showed an elderly woman greeted with smiles and flowers. Like Roger and Christian, he bought a property in the Creuse, a few doors down from Denis. But Jean-Pierre’s sense of gratitude far eclipsed the personal. He said: ‘I came back with this idea to help the Creuse. I wanted to give something to the Creuse. I have tried to give back to the Creuse.’ In Jean-Pierre’s mind, this moment had been formative. He attributed to it his pacifism (he was a conscientious objector during the Algerian war) and his itchy feet (he has moved constantly in life). His relationship to the Creuse was ‘fuelled by sentiments of inclusion, belonging, and connectedness to the past’; it held him in its grip, and indeed reached something of a ‘sacramental proportion’.36 Yet his attempts were thwarted: while Jean-Pierre wanted to give back to the Creuse, the Creuse – as an entity – rejected his advances. Having made his career in marketing, he took a worked-through set of ideas to ‘emphasize the welcome of the Creuse’ – ‘the generous Creuse’ – to the regional marketing board, but was rebuffed. He invented a tricycle with an innovative suspension system – which he later sold commercially – to offer the department to help combat rural isolation, but was again given the cold shoulder. He said with exasperation, showing me newspaper accounts of his work, ‘After that I couldn’t anymore. Read that, you’ll see! I wanted to give back. I said, they saved my life – , voilà’. Jean-Pierre had to content himself with going back with his mother and renewing his friendships; his burden of gratitude, though, remained unshed.

In Jacques’s case, his experience of evacuation had created a legacy of puzzlement and maybe even resentment into the present. As with Jean-Pierre, the mother played an active role in silencing the past, bound up as it was with her first husband’s death in 1940. Jacques repeated that she had always spoken of him angrily, saying ‘it’s your fault that he left us, that he abandoned us, that he got himself killed’: Jacques seemed to be implicated in this, punished, perhaps, by being sent away and later silenced. When he returned to Paris in 1947, he was forbidden to speak of the Creuse. When the grown-up son of the couple who had fostered him in Saint-Dizier came to visit him, ‘my mother showed him the door: “Get out!”’ The emotional load that Jacques bore from this time was clear in his sense of longing for ‘those people there’ – people in a place. But it also showed in his attempt to understand his mother’s actions. He emphasized the symbolic violence of her actions, but hinted too at what her silence concealed:

‘Your father, he left us, he joined up, he was killed.’ Full stop. Full stop. Full stop. Full stop. … How did she meet him ? Why did – ? That’s all. Nothing. Never. Never. Never. There you are. Never, never.

With no information from his mother – he expressed astonishment at finding the photographs of himself in Saint-Dizier among her belongings – he struggled to make sense of what happened. He speculated on whether his mother’s seeming lack of affection may have been what propelled him to success in his career: ‘if I’d had my mum and dad, perhaps I wouldn’t be here today [gesturing to his fine house in the Paris suburbs]. You never know’. Jacques had never returned to the Creuse in person, although he said that he looked at it on Google Maps, where he recognized the church and the village green. In memory, though, it remained a constant presence (he ‘always thought’ of ‘those people there’). He showed me the genealogical research he had been doing, not only into his mother’s life – to understand more about why she acted as she did – but also into the couple who had taken him in. This had brought him, perhaps, a greater sense of composure about his mother. He said ‘afterwards I could say, yes, I understand, she was alone, young, without much money’. War had ruptured and reconfigured his family, but his sense of belonging, whether to people or to place, remained upset by this experience, and as such, he kept some distance from his own past, investigating it at arm’s length, trying to understand and explain rather than rectify.

* * *

Family separation was a common experience in Second World War France, and one which was not always experienced negatively, depending on circ*mstance. Family structures were reconfigured with relatives, with non-biological families, and again with biological families in response to the events of war. In some cases, the separation from foster families could be destructive. This was mitigated in cases where positive links were maintained, but created lasting disturbances when connections were severed and silenced. Separation and displacement were experienced as loss and gain, sometimes as both simultaneously. Christian and Roger gained a second family and another place to call home; Simone gained better living conditions; Jean-Pierre saw life-giving and life-saving; Jacques remembered affection. But for Simone, Jean-Pierre and Jacques there were also unsatisfactory elements which prevented composure, whether conflicts of belonging, Jean-Pierre’s unsatisfied gratitude, or Jacques’s feelings towards his mother. For their significance, these cases rely less on factual data and more on strength of feeling. As Mark Salber Philips notes, ‘by enlarging our sympathies we cultivate our own humanity':37 we will understand both past and present better if we are more receptive to the emotional power within states of mind.38

We cannot use five individuals’ narratives to generalize about national experience. But these stories nonetheless reveal something valuable about the experience of the Second World War in France among a part of the population rarely studied but comprising a large generational cohort – that is, the non-persecuted child population. What they suggest has wider implications, especially given the recent calls for historians to find new ways of looking into the French wartime past beyond the limits of a ‘paralysing doxa’ – Pierre Laborie refers here to the dominant historiographical framework of Vichy, resistance and collaboration.39 While this by no means equates to the stifling of research into these critical phenomena, it does open some space for building a fuller picture of France’s ‘dark years’.

The first of these wider implications takes the form of a challenge to the way in which the period is typically recounted. Vichy and the Germans are absent presences in all of the narratives: the 1940 Armistice and collaboration of the Vichy government drew the Allies’ bombs to French territory, and the levies of French food and raw materials by the Germans created dire shortages; these events triggered evacuation, reception departments dictated by the Occupying authorities. Fathers were killed in battle or held prisoner in Germany, or sometimes returned through Pierre Laval’s Relève scheme.40 But neither Vichy nor the Germans are characters in these stories. Headline news is rarely headline in private lives: it is the backdrop of life, perhaps the catalyst for change, but it is in the foreground that meaningful action occurs. Thus the impact of war lies as much in the realm of everyday life, in all its mundane, emotional and heterogeneous dimensions, as in the worlds of territorial dispute, diplomatic relations, military engagement and high and local politics. The second implication concerns memory and commemoration. These oral narratives show clearly that the legacies of the French wartime past are highly variable and, in most cases, unknown and probably unknowable. Evidently, there is a legacy of guilt and shame for silent complicity and active persecution; and a legacy of pride and heroism for both passive resistance and committed combat; and indeed, these are the two legacies so often debated, promoted, celebrated and deplored across collective acts of cultural commemoration and restitution. But there are also legacies of repeated family separation and reconfiguration in unusual ways, of identities shaped by war and displacement, and of multiple acts of commemoration and sense-making around personal memories, people and places.

The writing of this article was made possible through the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Care for the Future/Labex Passés dans le présent joint funding initiative as part of project AH/N504579/1: ‘Disrupted histories, recovered pasts: a cross-disciplinary analysis and cross-case synthesis of oral histories and history in post-conflict and postcolonial contexts’, as well as the generous support of the School of Music, Humanities and Media at the University of Huddersfield. It was finished during my time as a research fellow at the Collegium de Lyon. I thank Sian Sullivan, Wendy Michallat, Wendy Webster and the editorial team of History Workshop Journal for their advice on earlier versions. Very many thanks to all of those who agreed to talk with me about their wartime experiences, and to Philippe Béria, Henri Buc and Françoise Bédoussac.

Lindsey Dodd is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Her monograph French Children Under the Allied Bombs (MUP) was published in 2016, and she coedited a collection, Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of War (Bloomsbury), which appeared in 2018. In 2018–19 she was a Research Fellow at the Collegium de Lyon. She has a longstanding interest in and commitment to the theory and practice of oral history, and her research to date takes in children in war, the emotions of history, and France during the Second World War.

1

Lindsey Dodd, interview with Jacques (born October 1938), 16 June 2017 in Yvelines. Interviewees gave permission for full names to be used; I have chosen to omit surnames.

2

French scholarship on the period of the Second World War in France is vast. Work on memory of the period is dominated by Pierre Nora’s ‘collective memory’/cultural-memory tradition (itself following a Halbwachsian ‘social frameworks of memory’ line) which problematizes – and pathologizes – memorial practices on the national scale. For a cultural perspective, see the very influential Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (1987), transl. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge MA and London, 1991; for a more political take see Olivier Wieviorka, La Mémoire désunie. Le souvenir politique des années sombres, de la Libération à nos jours, Paris, 2010 or Sébastien Ledoux, Le Devoir de mémoire: une formule et son histoire, Paris, 2016. For critiques of a perceived competition of memory between victims, see the philosopher Jean-Michel Chaumont’s La Concurrence des victimes. Génocide, identité, reconnaissance, Paris, 1997, or the collection of historical essays La Concurrance des passés: Usages politiques du passé dans la France contemporaine, ed. Maryline Crivello, Patrick Garcia and Nicolas Offenstadt, Aix-en-Provence, 2006. Oral history has a chequered history in France especially in relation to the Second World War: see Laurent Douzou, ‘From Oral History to a So-called “Ideology of Testimony”, Autopsy of a Step Backwards’, Words and Silences, 2015: https://www.ioha.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/98-374-1-PB.pdf. It was used extensively in early studies of the Resistance – for which documentary evidence is understandably limited. Concerns over veracity in the 1980s and 1990s pushed oral sources aside (see Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘History, Heroism, and Narrative Desire: the “Aubrac Affair” and National Memory of the French Resistance’, South Central Review 21: 1, pp. 54–81), although archives continued to collect adults’ resistance narratives. The French wartime theme for which oral histories have been collected – by historians, filmmakers and archivists, and which does include children – is the Jewish experience of persecution, deportation, trauma and bereavement. Eyewitnesses nonetheless have come under fire from the traditional historical establishment for their subjective positioning as individuals and as part of a specific ‘community’ (see for instance Henry Rousso, Face au passé: Essais sur la mémoire contemporaine, Paris, 2016).

3

For example Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II, Cambridge MA, 2011. Work outside history includes Melinda J. Waugh, Ian Robbins, Stephen Davies and Janet Feigenbaum, ‘The Long-term Impact of War Experiences and Evacuation on People who were Children during World War Two’, Aging and Mental Health 11: 2, 2007, pp. 168–74; James S. M. Rusby and Fiona Tasker, ‘Childhood Temporary Separation: Long-term Effects of the British Evacuation of Children during World War 2 on Older Adults’ Attachment Styles’, Attachment and Human Development 10: 2, 2008, pp. 207–21; Torsten Santavirta, ‘How Large are the Effects from Temporary Changes in Family Environment: Evidence from a Child-Evacuation Program during World War II’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 4: 3, 2012, pp. 28–42.

4

For example William M. Tuttle, ’Daddy’s Gone to War’: the Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children, Oxford, 1993; Sarah Fishman, We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940–1945, New Haven CT, 1991; Julie Summers, Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War, New York and London, 2009.

5

See Lindsey Dodd, French Children under the Allied Bombs, 1940–45: an Oral History, Manchester, 2016. On evacuation in Britain see John Welshman, Churchill’s Children: the Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain, Oxford, 2010 or Martin Parsons, I’ll Take that One: Dispelling the Myths of Civilian Evacuation 1939–45, Peterborough, 1998. On Finland see Aura Korppi-Tommola, ‘War and Children in Finland during the Second World War, Paedagogica Historica 44: 4, 2008, pp. 445–55; Ann Nehlin, ‘Building Bridges of Trust: Child Transports from Finland to Sweden during the Second World War’, War and Society 36: 2, 2017, pp. 133–53.

6

See Jost Hermand, A Hitler Youth in Poland: the Nazis’ Program for Evacuating Children During World War II (transl. Margot Bettauer Dembo), Evanston IL, 1997; Adrian W. Moore, ‘From Individual Child to War Youth: the Construction of Collective Experience among Evacuated Japanese Children during World War II’, Japanese Studies 36: 3, 2016, pp. 339–60; Hywel Davies, Fleeing Franco: How Wales Gave Shelter to Refugee Basque Children During the Spanish Civil War, Cardiff, 2011. There is a rich historiography on the Kindertransport: for seventeen wide-ranging articles on the topic, see The Kindertransport to Britain, 1938/39: New Perspectives: Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 13, 2012, ed. Andrea Hammel and Bea Lewkovitcz.

7

Laura Lee Downs, ‘“Au Revoir les Enfants”: Wartime Evacuation and the Politics of Childhood in France and Britain, 1939–45’, History Workshop Journal 82, autumn 2016, pp. 121–50, p. 124.

8

John Welshman, ‘Evacuation and Social Policy: Myth and Reality’, Twentieth-Century British History 9: 1, 1998, pp. 28–53; Jose Harris, ‘War and Social History: Britain and the Home Front during the Second World War’, Contemporary European History 1:1, 1992, pp. 17–35.

9

See Michal Shapira, The War Inside: Child Psychoanalysis and the Democratic Self in Britain, 1930–1960, Cambridge, 2013.

10

See Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, Young Children in Wartime, London, 1942; Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, Infants Without Families, London, 1944; Frank Bodman, ‘War Conditions and the Mental Health of the Child’, British Medical Journal, 4 Oct. 1941, pp. 486–8; Edward Glover, ‘Notes on the Psychological Effects of War Conditions on the Civilian Population’, part iii, ‘The “Blitz” – 1940–41’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 23, 1942, pp. 2–37.

11

Santavirta, ‘How Large are the Effects from Temporary Changes in Family Environment?’; Rusby and Tasker, ‘Childhood Temporary Separation’; Waugh, Robbins, Davies and Feigenbaum, ‘The Long-Term Impact of War Experiences and Evacuation’; Diane Foster, Stephen Davies and Howard Steele, ‘The Evacuation of British Children during World War II: a Preliminary Investigation into the Long-term Psychological Effects’, Aging and Mental Health 7: 5, 2003, pp. 398–408.

12

Derek Silove writes that ‘maintaining the integrity of the family should be a cornerstone of policies to protect children in war zones’: Silove, ‘Should Children be Evacuated during Times of War?’, British Medical Journal, 5 Jan. 2015: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g7824 (unpaginated).

13

James S. M. Rusby and Fiona Tasker, ‘Long-term Effects of the British Evacuation of Children during World War 2 on their Adult Mental Health’, Aging and Mental Health 13: 3, 2009, pp. 391–404, 400, 402.

14

Rusby and Tasker, ‘Long-term Effects of the British Evacuation’, pp. 400–1.

15

The Royal Air Force had bombed French military targets being exploited by the German occupiers since 1940. The first industrial target was the Renault factories in the Parisian suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt in March 1942. These factories were again bombed by the United States Army Air Forces on 4 April 1943. Dodd, French Children under the Allied Bombs, takes Boulogne-Billancourt as a case study; see also Lindsey Dodd and Andrew Knapp, ‘“How many Frenchmen did you Kill?” Allied Bombing Policy towards France (1940–1945)’, French History 22: 4, 2008, pp. 469–92; Andrew Knapp, Les Français sous les bombes alliés, Paris, 2014.

16

Interviews were conducted between June 2016 and March 2018. I used a semi-structured interview technique, outlining my main areas of interest, but permitting interviewees to develop their own narratives in ways meaningful to them. The interview technique is conversational, non-intrusive and variable.

17

Bent Flyvbjerg, ‘Five Misunderstandings about Case-study Research’, Qualitative Inquiry 12: 2, 2006, pp. 219–45.

18

See Dodd, French Children under the Allied Bombs, chap. 8, for more on the ad hoc nature of evacuation in wartime France. The evacuations after April 1943 were the most co-ordinated effort to remove children from the capital.

19

Other designated departments for the Paris region were: Haute-Saône, Yonne, Allier, Saône-et-Loire, Doubs and Jura. See Prefect of the Seine to Mayors of the Seine, Planned evacuation measures, 15 April 1943: Archives municipales de Boulogne-Billancourt [AMBB], 6H18.

20

The Prefecture is the administrative office of each département. In the Creuse, a departmental association – the Oeuvre des Petit* Réfugiés – was established in response to interministerial circulars of 2 April 1943 and 11 August 1943 and the decree of 17 July 1943 to manage the child evacuation. See Prefectorial decree establishing the Oeuvre des Petit* Réfugiés, 1 Sept. 1943: Archives départementales de la Creuse [ADC], 288 W 42.

21

See Lindsey Dodd, ‘Urban Lives, Rural Lives and Children’s Evacuation’, in Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime, ed. Lindsey Dodd and David Lees, London, 2018, pp. 123–39. On the archival bias inherent in this material, see Lindsey Dodd, ‘Children’s Evacuation inside Wartime France’, Nottingham French Studies, forthcoming 2020.

22

See Hanna Diamond, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940, Oxford, 2008.

23

Lindsey Dodd, interview with Jean-Pierre (born September 1936), 4 July 2017 in the Creuse.

24

Lindsey Dodd, interview with Christian (born November 1937), 7 July 2017, in the Creuse. Interview with Roger (born August 1933), 6 July 2017 in the Creuse.

25

More men than women responded to the advertisem*nt calling for interviewees.

26

Lindsey Dodd, interview with Yolande and Eugène, 5 July 2017 in the Creuse. Simone was born in August 1937.

27

The Relève scheme, negotiated by Prime Minister Pierre Laval, promised that for every three skilled French workers who volunteered to work in Germany, one French prisoner-of-war would be released. Roger believes his father was released via the Relève. The overall failure of the Relève resulted in a forced labour draft, the Service de Travail Obligatoire, from February 1943.

28

This supports the results found by Rusby and Tasker, ‘Long-term Effects of the British Evacuation’. In ‘“The Child’s Past in the Adult’s Present”: the Trauma of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–4’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 96: 5, 2017, pp. 1,305–1,333, Marina Gulina uses ideas of ‘post-traumatic growth’ and ‘creative responses’ after traumatic experiences: pp. 1,325, 1,329, 1,330.

29

In the patois of the Creuse, brenade means a kind of pigswill (also ‘brenado’ or ‘brein’ – see Louis Queyrat, Parler de la Creuse: le Patois de la Région de Chavanat, Guéret, 1927, p. 52). Roger’s use of the word is ironic and humorous, given the good quality of the food the children were fed. He peppered his talk with patois; Christian and Jacques also remarked upon the patois they had picked up: a sign of integration and belonging.

30

See chapters by Matthieu Devigne, Isabelle von Bueltzingsloewen, Jean-Pierre Le Crom and Shannon L. Fogg, in Vichy France and Everyday Life, ed. Dodd and Lees, for further analysis of food and shortages in relation to, respectively, school meals, strategies for feeding a family, and the roles in food supply of the Secours national and the American Quakers.

31

Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen, ‘The Mobilities of Forced Displacement: Commemorating Karelian Evacuation in Finland’, Social and Cultural Geographies 10: 5, 2009, pp. 545–63, 551.

32

Bertram D. Lewin, The Image and the Past, New York, 1968, p. 10, cited in Gulina, ‘“The Child’s Past in the Adult’s Present”’, p. 1,327.

33

Julian Jackson, France: the Dark Years, 1940–1944, Oxford, 2001, pp. 246–50.

34

Kuusisto-Arponen, ‘The Mobilities of Forced Displacement’, p. 547.

35

Kuusisto-Arponen, ‘The Mobilities of Forced Displacement’, p. 549.

36

Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, Albuquerque, 1996, pp. 15–16, 148.

37

Mark Salber Phillips, ‘On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life’, History Workshop Journal 65: 1, 2008, p. 54.

38

Michael Roper, ‘The Unconscious Work of History’, Cultural and Social History 11: 2, 2014, pp. 169–94, 173.

39

Laurent Douzou and Pierre Laborie, ‘Le rôle des historiens dans la transmission de la mémoire des comportements collectifs’, in Images des comportements sous l’Occupation: Mémoires, transmission, idées reçues, ed. Jacqueline Sainclivier, Jean-Marie Guillon and Pierre Laborie, Rennes, 2016, pp. 151–60, 157.

40

See Roper, ‘The Unconscious Work of History’, n. 38.

© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal.