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The Battle for Children: World War II, Youth Crime, and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth Century France (review)
- The Journal of Military History
- Society for Military History
- Volume 67, Number 2, April 2003
- pp. 607-608
- 10.1353/jmh.2003.0119
- Review
- Additional Information
The Journal of Military History 67.2 (2003) 607-608
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The Battle for Children: World War II, Youth Crime, and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth Century France. By Sarah Fishman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-674-00755-7. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xi, 303. $49.95.
Sarah Fishman's The Battle for Children focuses on child crime and how the French defined juvenile delinquency and tried to deal with it during World War II, when France suffered German occupation and the imprisonment of more than a million and a half of its soldiers, taken during the 1940 military campaign. In a gendered argument assuming that male heads of household were needed to enforce discipline on children, French juvenile justice professionals during and after the war generally attributed an Occupation era spike in juvenile delinquency cases to the absence of prisoner of war fathers. Fishman counters this argument by showing how Vichy policies, such as food rationing and the rounding up of French workers for labor in Germany, enlarged areas of criminal activity (p. 56). Meticulously sampling and studying the juvenile cases, she establishes that most of them involved theft (p. 82), a rational reaction to economic hardship caused by the war and Occupation, with little causal relationship to absent fathers (pp. 46, 104, and 163). Her book is a reminder of how "science" is often generated with bureaucratic bias, fad-like behavior, and "analytical sloppiness" (p. 143).
Noting that except in cases involving communism or resistance, the Germans intervened minimally in juvenile cases, Fishman highlights French continuities before, during, and after Vichy, as a major juvenile delinquency reform of 1942 was maintained largely intact after 1944, despite claims that all Vichy legislation was null and void (pp. 6-7 and 165). As she points out, authoritarian governments can pursue "progressive" policies, exemplified in much of the Vichy juvenile justice reform. The theoretical approaches and personnel of the Vichy juvenile justice establishment continued a twentieth- century French trend away from punishment in favor of the medicalization of juvenile crime, meaning that despite government lip service to family values, the bureaucracy supported an ever increasing state intrusiveness in family life (p. 144).
There are some minor quibbles. The title might more closely reflect the book's focus on World War II France. The relevance of the lengthy discussion of the contemporary American system at the book's end is unclear. Repeated identifications of, for example, Olga Spitzer and Pierre Cecaldi, could be edited. In minor chronological errors, the Chantiers de la jeunesse is called Georges Lamirand's "main accomplishment" (p. 63) but he was put in charge of youth affairs only after the Chantiers had been created. Louis Darquier de Pellepoix became leader of the Commissariat général aux questions juives only after the Jewish scouts had been disbanded (p. 66). Finally, the discussion (p. 52) of why many prominent French political figures accepted the June 1940 armistice rather than follow de Gaulle into exile should include their conviction that Germany had won the war. Minor quibbles aside, this is a thought-provoking book that [End Page 607] should be read by anyone interested in World War II France or the evolution of youth justice systems.
Bertram M. Gordon
Mills College
Oakland, California
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