Spanish Refugee Children in France, 1939: An Insight into Their Experiences, Opinions and Culture

Abstract

Following the lead of recent scholarship enhancing the importance of studying children's experiences on the basis of children's sources, this paper seeks to tackle the issue of children's agency in the case of Spanish Civil War refugee children in France in 1939. Instead of taking for granted that the best characterization for their experiences of war and exile is always that of ‘victim’ and ‘trauma’, I would like to examine if, how and when they were able to adapt to their situation and act on it. In other words, the problem I wish to address is: To what extent should Spanish refugee children be considered as passive victims in the face of the dramatic events which disrupted their lives, or as aware and partly autonomous historical agents? Here, I will reflect on this question with one specific source: the journal Niños españoles. Periódico semanal para los niños españoles refugiados, a weekly publication made of texts written by Spanish refugee children in France from May to July 1939.

Notes

¹Jean-Noël Luc, ‘Un Demi-siècle de recherches françaises sur l'histoire contemporaine de l'enfance au XX^e siècle’, paper given at the conference ‘Miradas sobre la Infancia, Mirada del Niño en España (1920–1975)’, organized by the Cátedra Telémaco (Fundación SM/UCM), the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, the Université Paris III La Sorbonne Nouvelle, and the Casa de Velázquez, in Madrid on 20–21 September 2010.

²Manon Pignot magnificently took up this challenge in her pioneer study of children's experiences during the First World War: Manon Pignot, Allons enfants de la patrie. Génération Grande Guerre (Paris: Seuil, 2011).

³Declaration of the Rights of the Child, General Assembly Resolution 1386. Available on the United Nations webpage at <http://www.undemocracy.com/A-RES-1386(XIV)>.

⁴Convention on the Rights of the Child, General Assembly resolution 44/25 of 20 November 1989. Available on the United Nations webpage at <http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm>.

⁵Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, La Guerre des enfants: 1914–1918 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2004 [1^st ed. 1993]), 12–13.

⁶About imagined violence inflicted on children and how it came to symbolize the enemy's barbarity and inhumanity, see John Horne, ‘Les Mains coupées: “atrocités allemandes” et opinion française en 1914’, in Guerre et cultures, ed. Jean-Jacques Becker, Jay Winter, Gerd Krumeich, Annette Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (Paris: Armand Colin, 1994), 133–46.

⁷Psychoanalytic discourses are especially pervasive when it comes to children suffering in times of war. However, as Tara Zahra has shown, this did not become common until after 1945. Indeed, child psychology historically developed from expert observations made on displaced children during World War II. During the Spanish Civil War, which is the focus of this article, war-related violence, food shortage, displacement and family separation were seen as a threat to children's physical lives and family relations rather than mental health. See Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II (Cambridge. MA/London: Harvard U. P., 2011), and Laura Lee Downs, ‘Les Évacuations d'enfants en France et en Grande-Bretagne (1939–1940)’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 66:2 (2011), 413–48.

⁸This specific point gave rise to much discussion at the conference ‘Agonía Republicana—Living the Death of an Era’ (where this paper was first read) after the presentation of Julián Daniel Gutiérrez Albilla, ‘Documenting Republicans: Trauma, Memory and Testimony in Recent Spanish Non-Fiction Films’.

⁹Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children's Lives under the Nazis (New York: Vintage Books, 2007 [1^st ed. 2005]), 11.

¹⁰See for example the contributions in Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'Histoire, Special Issue Enfances en guerre, ed. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, 89 (2006) and L'Enfant-soldat XIX ^e –XXI ^e siècle, ed. Manon Pignot (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012).

¹¹ Niños Españoles. Periódico Semanal para los Niños Españoles Refugiados, 1–5 (May–July 1939) (hereafter Niños Españoles). These five issues can be found at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. To our knowledge, they have never yet been used as material for research.

¹²See Célestin Freinet, L’Éducation du travail (Cannes: Éditions Ophrys, 1948).

¹³The pupils of the Freinet school of Vence gave a beautifully decorated and bound volume of the 1937–1938 issues of their weekly journal Pionniers to Maurice Thorez, the leader of the French Communist Party. This volume is now held at the Municipal Archives of the city of Ivry-sur-Seine.

¹⁴In October 1937, at the First Congress of Sociology of Childhood, Freinet made a speech in which he appealed to his colleagues in these terms: ‘transformons l’école en une société d'enfants par l'imprimerie à l’école’. See Célestin Freinet, ‘Un pas décisif’, L’Éducateur Prolétarien. Revue Mensuelle (hereafter L’Éducateur Prolétarien), 13:1 (1 October 1937), 1.

¹⁵Célestin Freinet, ‘Pour l’éducation des enfants espagnols dans les camps de réfugiés’, L’Éducateur Prolétarien, 14:13 (31 March 1939), 312.

¹⁶According to L’Éducateur Prolétarien, a hundred copies of the second issue of Niños Españoles were printed. See Célestin Freinet, ‘Notre deuxième grande souscription de l’École Freinet’, L’Éducateur Prolétarien, 14:16 (15 May 1939), second cover page.

¹⁷Élise Freinet, L’École Freinet. Réserve d'enfants (Paris: Maspero, 1974), 10–11.

¹⁸Elise Freinet's retrospective account of life at the Freinet school of Vence, as well as Freinet pedagogy in general, are very much imbued with Rousseauist notions of the nature of the child. For an analysis of the influence and application of such notions in interwar pedagogy, see Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932, Studies in the History of Education Series (New York/London: Routledge Falmer, 2001), in particular Part 4: ‘The Nature of Childhood’, 63–87.

¹⁹Fred Braunier, ‘Les Enfants espagnols sous les bombes’, L’École Libératrice. Organe Hebdomadaire du Syndicat National des Institutrices et Instituteurs Publics de France et des Colonies, 10:17 (28 January 1939), 264. Fred Braunier was Alfred Brauner's pen name at the time.

²⁰Ramón Cluet, ‘Un bombardeo en Barcelona’, Niños Españoles, 2 (15 June 1939). I have chosen not to correct grammar or spelling mistakes when quoting children's writings.

²¹Alfred Brauner, Ces enfants ont vécu la guerre … (Paris: Éditions Sociales Françaises, 1946), 64.

²²Alejandro Martin and Amedeo Gomez, ‘Recuerdos de España a Francia’, Niños Españoles, 1 (undated).

²³For example, Verónica Sierra Blas, Palabras huérfanas: los niños y la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Taurus, 2009), Chapter 5: ‘Escritura, dibujo y terapia’, 95–123.

²⁴Manon Pignot and Roland Beller, La Guerre des crayons: quand les petits Parisiens dessinaient la grande guerre (Paris: Parigramme, 2004), 6.

²⁵See Rose Duroux, Luca Gaboardi and Guy Baudon, Lo que yo he visto de la guerra. Los dibujos infantiles de la Colección Brauner 1937–1938, Exhibition Catalogue (Guadalajara: Diputación Provincial de Guadalajara, 2006), 18. See also Yannick Ripa, ‘Naissance du dessin de guerre. Les Époux Brauner et les enfants de la guerre civile espagnole’, in Enfances en guerre, ed. Audoin-Rouzeau, 29–46 (p. 32).

²⁶Fred Braunier, ‘La Guerre d'Espagne dans les dessins d'enfants’, L’École Libératrice. Organe Hebdomadaire du Syndicat National des Institutrices et Instituteurs Publics de France et des Colonies, 10:17 (28 January 1939), 348. Only in much later works, in the 1980s and 1990s, would Brauner revisit these Spanish children's drawings with a more psychological lens. See Rose Duroux and Célia Keren, ‘Retours sur dessins. Fred/Alfred Brauner, 1938, 1946, 1976, 1991’, paper given at the conference ‘Enfances en Guerre. Témoignages d'Enfants sur la Guerre’, organized at UNESCO, Paris, on 7–9 December 2011; proceedings to be published by Georg, collection ‘L’Équinoxe’ in 2013.

²⁷Alejandro Martin and Amedeo Gomez, ‘Recuerdos de España a Francia’, Niños Españoles, 1 (undated); Mercedes, ‘Recuerdo de España’, Niños Españoles, 4 (7 July 1939); Bernardo Rios, ‘Mi salida de España’, Niños Españoles, 5 (22 July 1939).

²⁸‘Uno de nuestros recuerdos’, Niños Españoles, 1 (undated).

³¹‘Adivinanzas’, Niños Españoles, 1 (undated).

²⁹‘El agua de hierro, sacado de “Cuentos vivos” (Apeles Mestres)’, Niños Españoles, 4 (7 July 1939). This book was first edited in 1882 in Barcelona, and has been republished several times during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

³⁰Francisco Bermejo, ‘Cuento de la mariposita’, Niños Españoles, 1 (undated).

³²Collective passport issued by the Minister of Interior, 3 January 1939. Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares, Spain, (09), 017.012 Box 51/22124.

³³Brauner, Ces enfants ont vécu la guerre …, 35–36.

³⁴Samuel Dominguez, ‘Andanzas de dos muchachos. Cuento’, Niños Españoles, 1 (undated).

³⁶‘Carta de Adolfo’, Niños Españoles, 1 (undated).

³⁵Paco Rosello, ‘El fascismo asesino’, Niños Españoles, 3 (25 June 1939).

³⁷See Denis Peschanski, La France des camps: l'internement, 1938–1946 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002); Bartolomé Bennassar, La Guerre d'Espagne et ses lendemains (Paris: Perrin, 2006 [1^st ed. 2004]), 414–18.