France in an Era of Global War, 1914-1945

Occupation, Politics, Empire and Entanglements

A. Carrol, L. Broch, A. Carrol, L. Broch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349495368, 9781137443489
• eBook ISBN: 9781137443502
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

In France in an Era of Global War, scholars re-examine experiences of French politics, occupation, empire and entanglements with the Anglophone world between 1914 and 1945. In doing so, they question the long-standing myths and assumptions which continue to surround this period, and offer new avenues of enquiry.

Part I

Experiencing Occupation

1

War through the Eyes of the Child: Children Remember the German Occupation of Northern France, 1914–18

Miranda Sachs

Six years is a long time for a child to remember. And yet, when Marie Madeline Petillon was asked in 1920 to relate her most dramatic memory from the war she had just lived through, she chose to write about the moment when the Germans first arrived in her village. Even though she was only five and a half at the time, it had been so startling and terrifying that she could still recall the fear she had felt. One night as she lay in bed, ‘they came knocking at my window. I was scared and started screaming’.¹ As a child, she saw the soldiers in simple terms, as an undefined threat menacing her home. Marie Madeline undoubtedly chose this memory for its dramatic potential – after all, the juxtaposition of the young girl and the unknown danger outside her window is striking – but she probably also selected it for its significance in her story of the war. The Germans knocking at her window ushered in four years in which she and the rest of the civilians in the north of France would have to suffer under German rule.²

The summer of 1914 marked a turning point in French history, a moment when the country entered into an industrialised total war. Just as the défaite étrange of 1940 (to borrow Marc Bloch’s phrase) laid the foundations for the conditions of and reactions to the occupation during the Second World War, so too did the opening of hostilities of 1914 set the tone for the nature of the war in 1914–18.³ Unlike the tumultuous spring of 1940, however, the summer of 1914 has long been considered a moment of cohesion when French men responded in mass to the call to mobilise and women came together to bring in the harvest. Faced with the crisis of war, the French came together as a nation.⁴ Parties from across the political spectrum were able to put aside their differences to form a union sacrée, or sacred union. In a similar vein, historians often juxtapose the postwar memory of the First World War with the more charged memory of the Second.⁵ Whereas the occupation of 1940–44 resulted in what Henry Rousso describes as a Franco–French war and a memory of war that is still divisive, the memory of the First World War is generally described as more ‘unifying’.⁶

But this version of the postwar memory of the First World War minimises the regional differences that date back to the summer of 1914 and the German invasion of northern France.⁷ Recent work by Annette Becker, Philippe Nivet and James Connolly (among others) has brought new attention to the distinct way in which northerners in the occupied regions experienced the war.⁸ Their work also adds nuance to our understanding of the experience of occupation and provides a framework for studying the occupation of the First World War as a distinct part of the history of the two world wars.⁹

The summer of 1914 takes on renewed significance for histories of the war in the occupied regions, as the German invasion of northern France violently and dramatically transformed the mostly rural and fairly tranquil region into the setting for a modern war and a gruelling occupation. The invasion introduced northerners to the conditions they would live under for the next four years: control by a military government, the shame of living under German rule, and the sights and sounds of industrial warfare. Studying northerners’ postwar memories of the invasion provides a point of entry to consider the specificity of their experience of the war and the challenges of memory formation for the once occupied region.

This chapter will examine the invasion of the north from the point of view of its youngest generation. Indeed, as northerners and also as young people, these children belonged to two groups whose memories of the war diverged from the national narrative and memory of the war. As a result, their voices were often obscured. To access the children’s experiences, this chapter draws on the essays students wrote in response to an enquête, or survey, that the Académie de Lille, the administrative body in charge of education in the north, sent out in 1920. Although most of the children whose essays appear in this chapter were young at the time of the invasion, their essays provide a vivid picture of how the invasion introduced fear, violence and uncertainty into the lives of the children, their families and their communities. The emotions children felt during these first encounters with the invaders were so strong and palpable that they resonate in the accounts written six years later. As Manon Pignot has pointed out, the invasion was the moment the war first became real for many children and continued to determine their relationship to the war for the duration of the conflict.¹⁰

In this chapter, the children’s essays are not only used in an attempt to understand what it meant to be a child in the context of the invasion, but also to explore the complexities of how children perceived, formed memories of and recalled this event. Children can be very impressionable, and in analysing children’s portrayals of the invasion one must pay particular attention to the factors that mediated children’s experiences of the war, and their influence on how children recorded their memories. This analysis helps to illuminate the context in which young northerners found themselves in the summer of 1914 as well as in the spring of 1920 when they wrote their responses. The invasion was a crucial turning point in the history of the war in the north as well as in their own lives, and the students recognised its importance alongside the value of their own testimonies in crafting their essays. Even as they presented their experiences, children fit them into familiar frameworks, casting themselves as either victims of war or as guardians of the French memory.¹¹ By describing the scenes of violence they witnessed in 1914 and the realisation of their own vulnerability, students were aware that they were participating in the formation of a postwar memory for the formerly occupied regions of the north and for the country as a whole.

The first part of this chapter examines the factors in children’s lives that shaped their perceptions of the invasion. It focuses on the potential aims of the enquête. The second part considers the aspects of the children’s environments that affected or distorted memory formation. Finally, the chapter looks at how the children presented their memories of the invasion. It consists of a close reading of a series of student essays in order to provide examples of children’s experiences of the invasion, and uses those examples to tease out how people or propaganda present in children’s lives influenced how they formed memories of and recounted their first encounters with war. Although the essays selected for this chapter describe the invasion of 1914, they were a product of, and probably contributed to, the particular narrative of the memory of the war in the north that developed after the war. Factors such as their schools or families continually shaped how children saw and remembered the events of the war. And it was thanks to these factors that the children who wrote these essays were aware of the significance of their testimonies.

The enquête

The sources used for this study come from an enquête collected in April and May of 1920 by the recteur of the Académie de Lille.¹² In the bulletins for the Académie, the recteur requested that instructors fill out a survey with a set of specific questions about the occupation. The instructors were responsible for providing a historical record of the war and of the relationship of the German occupiers to the school system for their particular commune. Instructors were also requested to include orders from German officers who had been stationed in their towns and letters from poilus (French soldiers), who had either taught at or been students at their schools. Finally, the enquête asked instructors to send in students’ responses to the prompt, ‘State simply and with sincerity what you remember of the war and give an account of the most moving or dramatic incident which you either participated in or witnessed.’ The responses from students and teachers alike were to be collected for the Exposition Internationale de Lille in 1920 and would ultimately be placed in the bibliothèque de la guerre, a special collection devoted to documenting the war. The Académie received responses from 946 communes across the Ardennes, the Aisne, the Nord, the Pas-de-Calais, and the Somme – the five closest departments to the Belgian border, and through which the Western Front had criss-crossed. Of these 946 responses, 340 came from students. This chapter draws exclusively on these student responses.¹³ Furthermore, although the archive includes responses from the regions that were occupied by the Allies, this chapter only discusses children in German-occupied regions.

The responses to the survey described the unique characteristics of the occupation, while simultaneously trying to use these stories of suffering to erase northern France’s separation from the rest of the country. Even by 1920, when the survey was collected, northerners were still continuously confronted with tangible reminders of the hardships of the occupation. By facing these memories they were trying to reimagine their place in France, and to shake off the rumours of being boches du Nord, those who had supposedly cooperated with German occupiers.¹⁴ Indeed, just as in the Second World War, occupation had led to some forms of ‘accommodation’ to the German occupiers.¹⁵ Given that only the occupied regions had to grapple with this legacy during the First World War, it made their relationship to the rest of the country ambiguous, if not strained.

While their teachers were responsible for chronicling the events of the war for their communes, students provided a more general perspective on how the war affected civilian populations. Since they were in state-run classrooms, young people were the most accessible section of the population for the government to solicit if they wanted testimony of the direct impact of the war on civilian homes and families. The structure of the question, however, suggests that the Académie de Lille had a more specific purpose for polling students. If the recteur had only wanted to collect narratives of civilian life, he probably would have asked students simply to record their observations. In suggesting that students draw on their feelings, the survey encouraged children to write about their subjective impressions of the war. Given that the enquête was intended as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Experiencing Occupation
• Part II: The Reconfiguration of the Politics of Left and Right
• Part III: The New Politics of Empire
• Part IV: Entanglements with the Anglophone World
• Epilogue: A Historiographical Overview
• Select Bibliography
• Index