The European Studies Council Modern Europe Colloquium presents
Hannah Stamler, postgraduate research associate, Princeton University:
“The Last Kid: French Childhood, Culture, and Media in the Shadow of Depopulation (1900–1940).”
The final decades of Third Republic France were marked not only by falling birthrates and the attendant rise of pronatalism. The period was also a moment of enormous innovation in the realms of children’s material culture and domestic visual media. Joining the history of French biopolitics to the history of childhood, this talk asks how children’s things and pictures took on new meaning in the shadow of so-called depopulation, and in turn, how the course of 20th-century French population politics was shaped by modern ideals of child consumption and aesthetics. Who were “the children” to whom French society committed itself in the early 1900s? The talk will illuminate how items like toys and family snapshots arbitrated crucial questions of national identity, family welfare, and citizenship in the French 20th century.