Contingent Minorities: What The Great War Meant For The Migrant Youth Of The Plaine-Saint-Denis

A century after the Great War, only a handful of historical studies have attempted to understand what the European children's experience of that period was actually like. Even fewer have addressed the case of migrant youths. This paper contributes to remedying this historiographical deficit by engaging in a close analysis of the changes in which minors took part in the Plaine-Saint-Denis, an almost entirely migrant-populated, working-class suburb of Paris, between 1914 and 1919. It proposes that the sociocultural criteria through which the Plaine's youngest residents identified themselves and others were subject to significant reconfigurations over the course of the conflict. In particular, structural novelties affecting at once ethnicity, race, and gender seem to have contributed, by interacting with an age parameter that was not less culturally contingent, to a displacement of cognitive boundaries of, and about, minors.