Girls of fire

The judicial archive necessarily offers a view from above. The child and the worker, the woman and the people are bent under words that do not belong to them. How can we get rid of these violent speeches against these girls, of this hatred of women that transpires from juvenile justice? Véronique Blanchard succeeds by setting a preliminary scene: daily and material life in Paris at the end of the Second World War.

Theories of the environment

In the very first sociological documentaries produced by theORTFunder the guidance of sociologist Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe, in 1958, we are led into the daily lives of working-class families: miners from the North, skilled workers in the Paris region, a family of teachers in Boulogne-Billancourt. In one of them, the camera is set up in one of the cobbled courtyards of the rue du Moulin de la Pointe, in the XIII^e district. In the center of the courtyard, the communal toilets, the only toilet (what a nice word) for fifteen families, about 60 people, including children. We climb the rickety stairs, enter a single room that serves as kitchen, bedroom and living room, with only a coal stove for a working-class family of four for all the equipment. Opposite, a two-room apartment opens up, a luxury: the additional room serves as a dormitory for the girls and boys of the household of five. Water? Jug in hand, the children go and get it on the landing. To sleep? The lady of the house shows us how to unfold the sofa in the evening, after the meal – made of wheat semolina – so that the whole family can lie down on it, head to toe and feet resting on chairs.

It is to this poor Paris that Véronique Blanchard takes us. Into these overcrowded and unsanitary dwellings between the districts of Belleville and Ménilmontant, Bastille and Nation, Mouffetard and Glacière, Batignolles and Champerret, where poor workers, laborers, sub-proletarians and their large families live in the 1950s and 1960s. The struggle for places here is first and foremost the struggle to have one’s place in the only bed. Wardrobe, sideboard, double bed: these are “all the properties” of poor workers very precisely described by the social surveys of the Paris court explored by the author. It is in the heart of these working-class and poor suburbs that the majority of the “bad girls” discovered in these hundreds of files of minors sleeping in the archives of the Seine juvenile court live. To escape these courtships, the girls take refuge, some with friends, some with young workers, some in abandoned barracks, some in a cellar, some in a wood. It is in this movement that they will quickly be designated as thieves, vicious and vagabonds. Because juvenile justice claims to “relieve poverty”, because it needs “legal reasons” to take protective measures: a whole language is invented. New pathologies sprout like mushrooms. A look is generated on the girls’ bellies in order to find weakness there, Véronique Blanchard tells us.

If the sources are mainly judicial sources, the author does not in any way make a history of juvenile justice, nor of the deviance of young people or of foster homes. She constructs an arrangement of discourses coming from the press, individual files, works by specialists in psychiatry, and statements by judges, installed in this landscape of working-class poverty. It is on this cutting plane that the girls are offered to justice. Children of poor workers? The fathers are mechanics, bakers or masons, market gardeners or electricians while the mothers are bottle washers, packers, wire drawers and employed in many part-time jobs. Despite these jobs, they remain poor (not miserable!) due to the lack of decent housing, the lack of heating. From then on, in the absence of “space of one’s own”, childhood is propelled outside, always onto the street.

Let’s not be mistaken: there is no “deviance of minors”, but children from large families playing on the walls of the post-war period. From the archives of these 460 files of minors is extracted this movement: boys and girls seek to get away from their stifling family and neighborhood. And, reciprocally, families seek to keep these children away. A teenage girl placed, just for a few years, is that not a godsend? A boy with an aunt in the provinces, a girl with cousins ​​or in a juvenile justice home, why not? Because more than half of the housing in Paris in the 1950s is unsanitary, cramped and without heating, few working-class families have anything other than this place of “overcrowding”. The alternative is simple: it will be marriage or placement. However, the mother has spotted little Serge in the courtyard of the Moulin de la Pointe, a young worker who is good in every way. But he is already promised in marriage! Too late! There is still – if his daughter works – the furnished hotel or the chance of a shelter for young workers. In any case, there is no place, neither for her nor for him. A placement with an employer, finding “a good placement” in a home job, finding him a place with food and lodging: that is the key word and a chance after the war. Failing that – and if things do not go well – it will be a placement in a home of the Good Shepherd. Or a placement by the courts, placements that are massive, early, long and often painful for the girls.

Slums and infamy

The author’s skill is to have been able to make this socio-economic-behavioral arrangement appear under the numerous reports of justice transcribed and analyzed in the book. It is from these “empty purses” that we must read the mechanism of expulsion of the boys and girls from the courtyard. Because it is in the furnished and the Parisian slum that the gaze of the social worker plunges in order to justify her placement. The money of the household does not allow her to brood over her children, they must leave.

We could stop there. But that is not enough. A simple slum, a shanty town, or unsanitary conditions alone cannot justify placement. There must be infamy. There must be abjection. There must be dishonor to the family. This will be the search by social workers and the juvenile justice system for deviant behavior produced by “this pathogenic environment.” The theories of the “environment” are gaining strength, Blanchard tells us. This family environment “with five in bed” produces unbearable scenes, we read in the reports, especially since the brothers and sisters are from a previous marriage of the father. Unions, breakups, and reconstitutions are described by youth experts as dangers. The proletarians are incapable of educating children properly, that is well known.

Being born into a poor family is in itself a factor that transforms a “good girl” into a “bad girl”. It is on this soil that the medico-social concepts of the time grow, speeches on instability, family dissociation, lack of affection or authority. By dint of looking for the drama, we find it! The social investigation will open the doors to love affairs, boy-girl relationships, meeting places. A good dose of frivolous behavior, inconsistency and nocturnal gestures will facilitate placement! Because their daughter hangs around anywhere, father or mother will ask for a measure of “paternal correction” from the judge who will order a three-month placement in an observation center. The investigation in the community will take place. It will not be difficult to have “the neighborhood” testify about friendly relationships between girls at school, apprenticeship or factory. And, more precisely, on “these male acquaintances”: young Citroën workers, sometimes students, better still “North Africans” from Barbès. Behavior files flourish: from the petty thief to the vagabond runaway, from the vicious to the pre-prostitute. “Requests for extension of observation” lead to three months at the observation center. Three months later, it is common for the young girl to still be there.

Shedding light on sexualities

By following numerous excerpts from files, Véronique Blanchard sheds light on something that goes beyond the scholarly view of the poor classes, something that is reproached to fathers and mothers and that will also be put on the backs of their daughters: “So many kids!” the judge is indignant. “And they live in glue” – that is to say in a couple, but without being married! And to mock the sexuality of fathers and mothers of large families. But what are they doing having more than four children? The family order is undone by these unruly bodies.

How to act on the bodies of these fiery girls? How to thwart the threatening power of the female sex? How to overcome this uncontrollable pleasure worked on by Michel Foucault? “Power is exposed in the body itself,” he emphasizes. Judge, social worker and investigator will never stop extracting events linked to women’s sex and the honor of families. Isn’t it “the easiest catch”? Isn’t it putting within reach the debauched, the flirt or the skirt lifted for a moment? The working-class woman has been worrying for so long. She is all the more worrying if she is neither married, nor a mother, nor engaged, nor “at home”, nor clean, nor in good health, nor polite, nor modest, nor a renowned cook, nor a model saint, nor well-groomed… The girl as a point of resistance. The girl who must be caught “at fault”. This time we have her, “the slut”. This time we have a solid case, a “dangerous situation” in these relationships which throw the “good girl” into the arms of boys, the source of all dangers.

Véronique Blanchard’s book is a portrait of the guilty woman. To her right is already the great ordeal of illegal abortion. To her left is that of rape, which is never written in black and white, and yet surfaces under the beautiful euphemism of “abduction by seduction”. “Irregular family”, “illegitimate union”, “guilty woman”, woman whose abortion is refused, raped woman, all the discourses are wrapped around the belly of those who cause disorder. It is because they walk for a long time in public space that these girls are at the center of the judicial gaze, suddenly becoming gendered, sexualized, sexually disturbing, to the point that one can wonder if they did not come to exist “in justice” only by the simple fact of having resisted this gaze.

At the end of the reading, a question suddenly appears. 1960-2019: these women are around 75-80 years old. Collecting their words today, revisiting these archives with them – as the documentary filmmaker Sophie Bredier does in Secret Maternity – wouldn’t that be taking this story a step further? Joining written archives and oral archives. We mustn’t wait for that.