“In the turmoil, there were no child models.” For historian Manon Pignot, the words of Maurice Rajsfus who, in 1995, recounted in a book his years as a Jewish teenager under the Occupation, constitute a powerful entry point to the problem of young people facing conflicts. This theme is today at the heart of the work Children at war, war on childhood (ed. Anamosa) and the exhibition of the same name presented at La Contemporaine, the museum-library of Nanterre, which preserves the largest collection dedicated to the conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries. Alongside Anne Tournieroux, Manon Pignot questions the modes of participation and perception of the war by children, from 1914 to the present day, by juxtaposing two points of view, “from above” and “from a child’s height “. Photographs, archival documents and children’s productions (letters, drawings, diaries, school work, etc.) shed light on a subject which is not without paradoxes.
From propaganda to exploitation
Children have always been confronted with war. But, from the First World War, the configuration of combat changed: cities could be bombed without a specific military aim, with civilians, including children, becoming targets in their own right. Another specificity of the 20th century: far from being kept aside, the younger generations are encouraged to participate in the war effort, ideologically when they receive and relay the propaganda intended for them, but also materially when they are asks, for example, to devote their free time to quests for the benefit of the soldiers.
He is surrounded by pioneers in the Artek camp, Crimea, 1979, photograph distributed by the Novosti press agency.
/ © Coll. Contemporary, France-URSS Association collection, FU_129_01
During the Second World War, children, depending on their country of origin, were the stakes in a fight for freedom or the recipients of totalitarian projects, excessive indoctrination, cult of personality and militarization in support. School, toys, the press and children’s literature then act as relays. “Until recent conflicts, this patriotic mobilization systematically included children as targets of its speeches,” underlines Manon Pignot. Youth organizations also remain a powerful vector of exploitation that favors the extraction of adolescents from the family environment: Ballilla Italians, Hitlerjugend Germanic, Komsomol Soviets and, closer to us, Bassidji Iranians or Cubs of the Caliphate, of the Islamic State.
Between suffering and emancipation
Another crucial question: how can we understand the suffering of children in the face of the violence of war? At the beginning of the 20th century, it was only considered from a material perspective. The youngest suffer from hunger, cold, physical pain, even injuries. It was only in the 1940s, as child psychiatry took off, that the psychological aspect was taken into account. Since the 1950s, the figure of the child victim has been highlighted by humanitarian organizations, to the point of standardizing the status. However, the commissioners point out, “there is a great diversity of childhood experiences of conflicts, depending on social class, geography or gender”. In fact, experiences will be very different if, in the France of 1942, we live in the countryside without the massive food deprivation of the cities, if we are Jewish and experience persecution, whether or not we suffer the loss of a father or brother.
Here, it is as much about showing children as victims as as full-fledged actors in History, because the sources show us that war can also be thought of in terms of emancipation, opportunities and capacity for action. War, child’s play? “Contrary to a still stubborn preconceived idea, war at the level of children is never a game,” says Anne Tournieroux. However, it is possible to play, even to have fun, in sometimes extremely difficult conditions.” It is a particularity specific to childhood, this capacity to be able to combine increased vulnerability due to conflict and playful empowerment unthinkable for adults.
Two children walk past an overturned tank in a ruined village, Ammerschwihr (France), 1944-1945, photograph by Thérèse Bonney.
/ © Coll. La Contemporaine / The Regents of the University of California, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
Trauma of all kinds
World wars, civil wars, wars of decolonization, genocides… Whatever the conflicts, many children’s productions reflect the violence of a daily life made up of bombings, flames, rubble. Others illustrate even more terrible forms of suffering, such as the loss of a limb hit by a shell, or the rape of a mother or sister.
Forced displacements, consubstantial with contemporary wars, also constitute a significant trauma: the death marches of tens of thousands of Armenian children in the mid-1910s, or, more recently, the kidnappings by the Russians of little Ukrainians, orphans or in care. to social assistance for children, as part of an enterprise of radical Russification. Ukraine, Gaza… The issue of children in the turmoil of conflicts is constantly caught up in the news.
Practical information:
Children at war, war on childhood? From 1914 to the present day, an exhibition from November 20, 2024 to March 15, 2025, La Contemporaine, 184 cours Nicole Dreyfus in Nanterre.