Abstract
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
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Notes
As Manon Pignot points out in her own study of children in the occupied areas, the noises of the invasion stand out in children’s accounts and are a prelude to four years of continual exposure to mechanised warfare. Manon Pignot (2012) Allons enfants de la patrie: Génération grande guerre (Paris: Seuil) 50.
Marc Bloch (1957) L’étrange défaite (Paris: Michel);
Julian Jackson (2001) France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford University Press) 113.
Jean-Jacques Becker (1977) 1914: Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre (Paris, Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques) 590.
Henry Rousso describes the mourning after the First World War as ‘usual and traditional’ while France after the Second World War experienced ‘crises of memory’. Henry Rousso (1991) The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) 15. Likewise, Julian Jackson compares the ‘dispersed and fragmented’ memory of the Second World War to a memory of the First preserved in the ‘single memorials’ at the core of communities. Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 605. Sarah Farmer points out that whereas ‘one unnamed soldier’s body under the Arc de Triomphe officially represented all the dead of the Great War, the Council of Ministers chose fifteen named bodies to represent the war of 1939–1945’.
Sarah Farmer (1999) Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley: University of California Press) 7.
Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, 6; Richard Vinen (2007) The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) 374.
Annette Becker (1998) Oubliés des la grande guerre: Humanitaire et culture de guerre, 1914–1918: Populations occupées, déportés civils, prisonniers de guerre (Paris: Éditions Noêsis) 14.
Annette Becker (2010) Les cicatrices rouges, 14–18: France et Belgique occupies (Paris: Fayard);
Philippe Nivet (2011) La France occupée, 1914–1918 (Paris: Armand Colin);
James E. Connolly (2012) ‘Encountering Germans: The Experience of Occupation in the Nord, 1914–1918’, PhD thesis (King’s College London).
Wartime propaganda assigned children specific roles as victims of war, but also as witnesses and guardians of memory, and these roles appear frequently in students’ essays. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (1993) La guerre des enfants, 1914–1918: Essai d’histoire culturelle (Paris: A. Colin) 16, 85.
Although the term ‘accommodation’ comes from Burrin’s study of the Second World War, I use it here as it expresses the ambiguity that the more charged ‘collaboration’ cannot. Philippe Burrin (1995), La France à l’heure allemande, 1940–1944 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil).
Daniel L. Schacter (2000) The Seven Sins of Memory (How the Mind Forgets and Remembers) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin) 9.
Daniel L. Schacter (1995) ‘Memory Distortion: History and Current Status’, in D. Schacter (ed.) Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) 3.
Maurice Halbwachs (1992) On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis Coser (University of Chicago Press) 38.
Schacter, Seven Sins of Memory, 134. The debate is still open in the field of forensic interviews over the extent to which children alter their memories, but what is clear is that if interviewers ask children ‘suggestive’ questions, then they are likely to change their memories in an attempt to please their interviewers. Such research underlies the challenges of using children as historical sources. While we shouldn’t discount children as witnesses, they are likely to respond to external cues in recounting their memories. Robyn Fivush, Carole Peterson and April Schwarzmueller (2000), ‘Questions and Answers: The Credibility of Child Witnesses in the Context of Specific Questioning Techniques’, in Mitchell Eisen, Jodi Quas and Gail Goodman (eds) Memory and Suggestibility in the Forensic Interview (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) 350.
See Nicholas Stargardt (2005) Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (London: Jonathan Cape); Pignot, Allons enfants.
For child soldiers, see Manon Pignot (ed.) (2012) L’enfant soldat, XIXe–XXe siècle: Une approche critique (Paris: Colin).
Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Christophie Prochasson (2008) introduction to Sortir de la Grande Guerre: Le monde et l’après-1918 (Paris: Tallandier) 15.
Hugh Clout (1996) After the Ruins: Restoring the Countryside of Northern France after the Great War (University of Exeter Press) 45.
Philippe Nivet (2004) Les réfugiés français de la Grande Guerre (1914–1920) (Paris: Institut de Stratégie Comparée; Economica).
Paul Lapie (1920) Pédagogie française (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan) 102–7.
For a thorough study of wartime propaganda aimed at children both inside and outside the classroom, please refer to Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (1993) La guerre des enfants, 1914–1918: Essai d’histoire culturelle (Paris: A. Colin).
Hubert Tison (1993) ‘La mémoire de la guerre 14–18 dans les manuels scolaires français d’histoire (1920–1990)’, in Jean-Jacques Becker et al. (eds) Guerre et cultures, 1914–1918 (Paris: Armand Colin) 296.
Mona Siegel (2004) The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914–1940 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press) 73.
Maurice Halbwachs (1975) Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: La Haye, Mouton) 154.
Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (1999) ‘Setting the Framework’, in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Siven (eds) War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press) 14.
Bruno Cabanes (2004) La victoire endeuillée: La sortie de guerre des soldats français, 1918–1920 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil) 428.
With the exception of one student whose essay wrote of a sister being taken away by Germans, these children did not include scenes of sexual violence in spite of the fact that rape was ‘an integral part’ of the Allied story of atrocities. John Horne and Alan Kramer (2001) German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press) 197.
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Sachs, M. (2014). War through the Eyes of the Child: Children Remember the German Occupation of Northern France, 1914–18. In: Broch, L., Carrol, A. (eds) France in an Era of Global War, 1914–1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137443502_2
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