Between 1914 and 1921, the Fatherless Children of France Society (FCFS) asked Americans to “adopt,” or sponsor, more than 300,000 French children whose fathers died during World War I. In the same period, the Committee Franco-American for the Protection of the Children of the Frontier (CFAPCF) established a network of twenty-nine so-called colonies to shelter French and Belgian children from war zones. Capitalizing on the generosity of Americans who believed that supporting a French child in need was a moral and patriotic duty, these and other Franco-American voluntary organizations succeeded in providing care for war-affected children. Their generosity would become part of the French national narrative and forge enduring ties between France and the United States in the postwar era.

In America’s French Orphans, Emmanuel Destenay brings together political, diplomatic, and cultural history to provide an engaging and deeply researched account of the largely unstudied Franco-American humanitarian organizations created during this period to help France’s youngest war victims. Drawing on extensive sources gleaned from archives across the United States, as well as French national, regional, and church archives, Destenay documents the efforts of binational voluntary agencies that went against the early twentieth-century understanding of humanitarian aid as a politically neutral endeavor, instead providing Americans with a vehicle through which to express their solidarity with France and desire for Germany’s defeat in the war.

In chapter one, Destenay documents the founding of the CFAPCF and the crucial role of French nuns and American women in rescuing and caring for children from the war zones. Chapter two discusses how the FCFS strategically engaged Americans of all classes and ages in caring for French orphans, most notably through the creation of a Junior Committee to mobilize young people. In chapter three, Destenay considers the principled and pragmatic motives behind humanitarian actors’ disease eradication work and preventive care to avoid tuberculosis and influenza. Nestled somewhat unexpectedly in this chapter is a discussion of the racial politics of humanitarian support for fatherless French children, in which Destenay highlights the importance of whiteness to U.S. support for French children, as well as African American critiques of World War I and the humanitarian mobilizations taking place at the time. This important topic could have been even further developed and would ideally have been integrated into the book’s overall argument. Chapter four explores the transatlantic relationships between French orphans and their U.S. sponsors, paying close attention to how they were mediated by the processes of letter writing and translation. In it, Destenay speaks poignantly to how letters from U.S. sponsors both provided hope and comfort to French orphans but also made them feel pressured to demonstrate they were deserving of aid by making their American godparents proud. This especially insightful chapter further explores the question of who wrote the letters exchanged between children and their sponsors – as Destenay observes, in many cases, they were drafted or translated by female volunteers whose commitment to reinforcing bonds between the United States and France likely influenced their content.

In a short chapter five, Destenay briefly discusses the processes of peace, remobilization, and memorialization in post-armistice France, including the gradual closure of CFAPCF colonies and the return of children to their home communities, as well as a highly successful FCFS campaign that found sponsors for a final cohort of fatherless French children before the conclusion of the organization’s activities. Destenay provides examples of U.S. families who continued to support their orphans and provide scholarships for their higher education into the late 1920s, and he describes touching acts of memorialization by French communities, including cases where fatherless children cared for the graves of U.S. servicemembers killed in action whose relatives were unable to travel to France to visit their graves. This chapter would have benefited from a deeper discussion of how the cessation of sponsorship stipends impacted the many fatherless children and mothers who, it appears, lost U.S. financial support after the end of the war. It nonetheless offers a thoughtful exploration of the moral and affective significance that both Americans and French attributed to U.S. support for fatherless French children. Finally, chapter six highlights the emergence of new organizations, including the American Committee for Devastated France (ACDF) and the American and French Children’s League (AFCL), which took over the work of responding to children’s needs and combating child mortality during the period of French rebuilding. Although it is not mentioned in the introduction, the work of these postwar organizations is nonetheless an important part of this book’s story.

Destenay offers a critical reexamination of early twentieth-century U.S. humanitarianism, convincingly arguing that Franco-American voluntary agencies galvanized U.S. support for the French cause during a time of official neutrality by framing child sponsorship as an opportunity to make “a political statement about sympathy for France” (14). Equally important, the book provides compelling microanalyses of the grassroots activism of American boys and girls who, as members of the FCFS’s Junior Committee, played a crucial role in providing relief to fatherless French children. Active a year before the founding of the more studied Junior Red Cross, members of the FCFS’s Junior Committee performed both practical and symbolic labor in support of their French peers, participating in school and church community fundraising activities, donating their own pennies, and inspiring adults to do the same. In doing so, Destenay argues, these children played a key role in changing the United States’ isolationist stance and mobilizing their nation to support France.

At the center of this book is “a core message: children matter” (5). While Destenay is not the first to make this argument – he appropriately recognizes Brian Rouleau’s call for children to be reframed as actors within the history of U.S. foreign relations – America’s French Orphans offers a substantive challenge to the depictions of children as victims, entirely dependent on adult protection, that have been so central to both twentieth-century child-saving discourses and the nationalist narratives of modern states.Footnote ¹ Through this emphasis on children as purposeful agents, rather than simply recipients, of humanitarian aid, Destenay provides us with a rich and deeply moving story, grounded in the voices and perspectives of its child protagonists, about a critical moment in the history of American humanitarianism, the history of U.S.-French relations, and the broader history of childhood.