Fathers, Families and the State in France, 1914–1945 (review)

Questions about motherhood, familialism and the State have received considerable attention from historians of twentieth-century France. The work of scholars such as Susan Pedersen and Miranda Pollard, for example, has taught us much about the relationship between pro-natalism, maternalism and the development of the welfare State, and about the centrality of motherhood to the politics of Vichy. The aim of Kristen Stromberg Childers's book is to turn our attention to the question of how fatherhood fits into this picture. In some ways this enterprise of 'putting men back into gender history' is problematic. Parts of the argument are conducted as if symmetry might be expected between the cases of men and women, and as if the types of arguments made by gender historians about women can be automatically applied to men. This seems at odds with obvious inequalities that inevitably come to light in the course of the discussion. None the less the book does offer some insights. Although the first two chapters consider the legal basis of father-State relations under the Third Republic and the representation of fathers in public discourse between the wars, the main focus of the book is the Vichy period. The first of three chapters on this period discusses the place of 'the family' in the National Revolution, highlighting the familialization of relations between the State and its citizens under Petain's paternal authority. While these findings are fairly predictable, the analysis of representations of fatherhood is pushed further in Chapter 4, which contains some of the most interesting material in the book. Stromberg Childers argues that 'Vichy administrators struggled with increasing manifestations of doubt and uncertainty about the importance of fatherhood, even as they ardently proclaimed official projects for its rehabilitation' (p. 114). This is particularly clear in the discussion of POWs and men who went to work in Germany. Prisoners were held up on the one hand as a potential source of renewal of the French elite, and, on the other, as outsiders, symbols of defeat and humiliation. Similarly, as propaganda urged fathers to protect their families and their countries by working in Germany, Stromberg Childers points to the tensions between this and the assertion of the moral role of the père de famille in enacting the National Revolution in homes throughout the land. A further tension emerges in the final chapter, which focuses on social policy and shows how fathers came into view in this context primarily as figures whose inadequate performance of their duties necessitated the intervention of the State. Stromberg Childers concludes that: 'Beneath the public adulation of the père de famille under Vichy was an undercurrent of serious doubt that eventually washed away the edifice of paternal authority in social legislation' (p. 192). Through its discussion of these issues, the book provides a valuable complement to the existing literature on gender, family and the State in modern France.