During the Spanish Civil War, thousands of children were evacuated to France, before being repatriated to their country now in the hands of the Francoists. This little-known episode is part of a transnational history of humanitarian mobilizations.
In his memoirs, the trade unionist Georges Minazzi (1922-1991), son of an Italian mason who entered the Peugeot apprenticeship school in Sochaux in 1935 when he was thirteen, says he went to see “ curious “, the arrival of small Spanish children, the first victims of the war, at the municipal home of Audincourt: “ Shaved heads, worried looks, this is the image that remains for me of these uprooted children, separated from their parents, victims of fascism. »
The roots of a project
It is to these children of the Spanish Civil War, voluntarily sheltered abroad, that Célia Keren’s fascinating work is dedicated, The Cause of Children. If, on the Spanish side, the memory of those we call “ los war boys » (the children of war) has been the subject of a reappropriation since the 1990s, while being relayed by a historiography attentive to the fate of children sent to USSR during the civil war, nothing was the case on the other side of the Pyrenees.
This book therefore fills a gap: it sheds light on the paths followed in France by these children evacuated from their country, then repatriated to Franco’s Spain. By its subject, the work also resonates with recent work on the Retired of 1939, which highlighted the place occupied by women, but also by children among the Spanish exiles.
Following a ternary division attentive to chronology, The Cause of Children firstly apprehends the trial and error which led to the project of “ exodus of children “. This appeared from the start of the conflict triggered by the coup d’état against the Spanish Republic of July 18, 1936, being initially fueled by communist initiatives.
Inspired by precedents of exoduses of children organized during strikes – a practice born at the beginning of the XXe century, which aimed to help striking parents to “ hold “, while extending union solidarity in space – this project also had its roots in the numerous experiences of evacuations of children known during the First World War.
In its aftermath, thousands of German, Austrian and Hungarian children were sent abroad, as part of summer camps located in former Entente countries, to promote a return to peace – another precedent that Célia Keren invokes to better explain the genesis of the organized exodus of Spanish children. More than the PCFthis is the CGTreunified in March 1936, which became its spearhead in France.
Thanks to the Committee for Welcoming Children from Spain (CAEE) created in November of that same year, the evacuated children were first placed in predominantly working-class families – French, but also Spanish immigrants to France. From March 1937 another competing mode of reception emerged: that of collective colonies.
Such hesitation must be reinscribed in the long history of the care of isolated children, since we were already observing such groping between individual and collective placement in France after the Franco-Prussian War, where philanthropists encouraged the departure of small city dwellers from the cities on vacation for “ regenerate “.
A transnational operation
It is not just a matter of studying French traditions, since the second part of Célia Keren’s work plunges us into the contradictions of a transnational policy in which the Spanish government, although in dire straits, also had its say.
The historian recounts the action of Federica Montseny, an anarchist who became the short-lived Minister of Health and Social Assistance between November 1936 and May 1937, then of the communist Jesús Hernández, Minister of Public Education, who took control of the evacuations of children by giving them a completely different inflection.
Célia Keren also shows how Juan Comas, kingpin of the Spanish Delegation for Evacuated Children, orchestrated a “ transnationalization » actors, involving Swedish, Dutch and Czechoslovakian committees in the care of young Spaniards.
From this story, the parents and the children themselves are not absent. The first saw evacuations as a way to protect their children from the disasters of war, but also to give them a more secure future – boys being systematically privileged from this point of view. Demonstrating a real capacity for action, some Spanish adolescents sought to force their departure or, on the contrary, to escape exile abroad perceived as an uprooting.
The role of Catholics
The third part explains the springs of a “ counter-mobilization » humanitarian: from the efforts led by the Spanish and French left to evacuate children threatened by the Spanish War, we move on to the study of those provided by French Catholics to recover this cause. Without achieving the success that the CGT in such an enterprise, French bishops, relayed by the Society of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, also tried to shelter Spanish children, mainly in France and Belgium, by targeting the young inhabitants of Bilbao after the fall of the city into the hands of the nationals in June 1937.
This choice was not due to chance, since the Basque Country was the most devout region of Spain. By agreeing to ally with the Popular Front in July 1936, the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), built at the end of the XIXe century around counter-revolutionary ideas, had nevertheless given priority to its commitment to the autonomy of the Basque Country – granted in October 1936 by the government of Largo Caballero – over its Catholic identity. Or an alliance considered unnatural by the Church.
In practice, the several hundred children from Bilbao taken care of in France by Catholic organizations were poorly received, being quickly assimilated to seeds of “ red “, except for their welcome in the French Basque Country where, contrary to what the Catholic hierarchy wanted, they were given education favorable to the ideas of the Basque Nationalist Party.
From August 1937, the Holy See supported the promotion of repatriations to Spain, to which the Minister of the Interior Marx Dormoy, considering himself responsible for the children welcomed on French soil, vigorously opposed. The fall of the Popular Front, the crisis of the French workers’ movement and, finally, the collapse of the Spanish Republic in January 1939 nevertheless got the better of such firmness.
A history of humanitarian mobilizations
Through the reconstruction of the nebula which sought to “ save the children » Spanish by evacuating them and placing them abroad, Célia Keren manages to sketch portraits of actors and actresses who give flesh to this story, whether they are ambassadors, trade unionists, feminists, teachers or bishops. She retraces, thanks to her in-depth knowledge of extremely diverse archival funds, the committed journeys of these men and women who were concerned about the fate of these “ poor kids », to use a term then very present in the campaigns led by the CGT in favor of this minor cause.
In addition to the ease of the historian, who circulates through different, even fundamentally opposed, worlds, while restoring their complexity – the Catholic hierarchy is far from having had a homogeneous and clear-cut position – it is also her constant play with borders which makes her book a truly “work”. transnational “. This word here is not just programmatic.
The connections between France, which adopted under the Popular Front the policy of “ non-intervention », and Spain, in all the complexity of its history split during the war, are highlighted through an investigation which is based on administrative and associative archives, epistolary correspondence, reports of visits.
This story is transnational, as several countries and authorities played an active role in saving children from the war – 15,000 were placed in France, 5,000 in Great Britain, 3,000 in USSR. This work leads the reader to navigate the maze of multiple committees formed to take care of Spanish children in Spain and abroad – whose numerous acronyms, although explained in a final index, sometimes make one dizzy.
If Célia Keren brings to life this little-known episode of humanitarian mobilizations during the Spanish Civil War, we would have liked to know more about the concrete conditions of the journey and the trans-Pyrenean routes followed by the evacuated children. The question of links – interrupted or maintained beyond the civil war ? – that they maintained with French society also undoubtedly calls for another investigation. Likewise, as an extension of this study, the memory left in France by these little evacuees, these “ shaved heads victims of fascism », to use the words of Georges Minazzi, would undoubtedly deserve to be explored.
The work ends with the painful question of the repatriation of children evacuated to France to the Franco regime: a return which leads us to question, in comparison, the memory left in Spain by this French experience of war boysat a time when the laws of historical and democratic memory invite us to rethink the “ past that does not pass » of the Spanish War.