Les «chouchous» des professeurs? Orphelins de guerre et pupilles de la Nation dans les mondes scolaires britanniques et français

Abstract

At the end of the First World War, war orphans, alongside veterans, populated secondary schools in Britain and France. Any child who lost their father during the hostilities or as a result of his injuries was considered a war orphan. There were approximately 1,100,000 orphans in France and 350,000 in Great Britain. However, France was unique in creating a new status, giving rise to a new 144 category of pupils: the pupille de la nation. I will examine how the arrival of this new type of pupil, marked by the grief of war, disrupted the school system, and how this differed between Great Britain and France. What role and place did they obtain in the school system? Did they become the ‘chouchous’ described by Albert Camus during the long post-war period? I will first examine what it meant to be a war orphan in the schools of the 1920s, then analyse the possible reconfigurations that their existence may have produced in school relationships.