Children in decolonisation: forced migrations and individual construction (France – 1945-1980) – EN-MIG

EN-MIG's main methodological choice is to propose a story based on the deferred words of the children and young people concerned, including the stories they themselves produce as they grow older. The aim is to tell a story ‘at ground level’, or more precisely, a story from the perspective of the main protagonists of this story. To do this, great importance will be attached to their voices, their words, whether expressed in childhood or deferred to adulthood. Similarly, children's ability to understand the migrations they have experienced presupposes mobilising the notion of the agentivity of children and young people, i.e. - beyond their expression - their ability to be active agents in their own lives, to control and regulate their actions, and also to make sense of the social world in which they evolve through a system of representations specific to childhood. The child migrations in question were organised and carried out by those involved in the name of a moral duty, an injunction to act in order to ‘save the children’. This raises questions about the notion of the best interests of the child. Children need to be seen as actors, not as passive, dependent or incomplete beings; as fully-fledged members of society, for what they were as children in the past, not just for what they have become today.

Children's words, but more generally children's point of view and feelings about their environment, their well-being or malaise, are the keys to understanding that historians must activate in order to better understand the realities they experience. This desire to restore the voice, agentivity and evolving place of children in society requires work to identify, collect and make available the available archives, which are fragile and often considered to be “minor” archives. As well as identifying the sources available, this approach involves creating a database listing all the accounts, published testimonies and audio-visual evidence produced by the people affected by these displacements, as well as self-records and ego-archives such as notebooks, diaries, drawings and photographs. The chosen approach will inevitably lead to interaction between the historians and the actors/witnesses in a collaborative methodology. The creation of oral sources will be governed by authorisations for use, a common methodology and legal and technical procedures (recording equipment and formats), in order to guarantee the usability and durability of the data created and the rights of the witnesses.

The major results obtained by the EN-MIG project are as follows:

1 - The holding of a CNRS Thematic School entitled ‘Nommer, (se) nommer, être nomm.e: enfance, genre, identité et pouvoir’, June 2022, St-Pierre d'Oléron, France.

2 - The production of new knowledge on the forced displacement of children in the context of decolonisation, in particular :

* An entirely unpublished monograph by Yves Denéchère Enfants eurasiens d'Indochine aux vents de la décolonisation (Peter Lang, 2024). www.peterlang.com/document/1434246

* Several articles have been published in national or international peer-reviewed journals (French Politics Culture and Society, Annales de démographie historique, Revue d'histoire de l'enfance irrégulière, Relations Internationales, etc.) See the list of publications exported from HAL.

* A collective work will bring together the main results of EN-MIG, published by Presses universitaires de Rennes in 2026.

3 - The EN-MIG research notebook (on Hypotheses) enmig.hypotheses.org has been regularly updated, in particular with posts monitoring the cross-writing method (between researchers and people concerned) implemented with Eurasians in 2023.

4 - Relations with the associations or groups of people concerned (adults today who have experienced forced travel as children) have been at the heart of the methods developed by EN-MIG. Research advances have been presented to them on several occasions, collaborative work has been carried out, feedback on the programme's productions has been sought and, after analysis, will be published in the book to be published by Presses universitaires de Rennes in 2026.

5 - The promotion aspect of the EN-MIG project has been particularly developed, as indicated in the detailed proposal.

* Story Maps were produced. EN-MIG's ambition was to place the voice of the people concerned and their stories at the heart of its methodology, as is also demonstrated by the cross-writing project with historians. But life trajectories take place in time and space. The narrative around these trajectories also unfolds in these two dimensions. Story maps - interactive devices that allow a story to be told in stages via a map - make it possible to convey these two dimensions and spatialise the narrative. They have had other advantages, not least of which is that they provide a space for collaboration and transactions between the people involved.

* A DocuBD album is currently being finalised: it consists of 10 life stories accompanied by explanatory content. The album will be published in spring 2026 by Editions Petit à Petit.

- The EN-MIG project led to the IUF (Institut Universitaire de France) project by Raphaëlle Branche (senior class of 2025) entitled ‘Being born and becoming “children of harkis”: a political filiation?’.

Focusing on the children of former French army auxiliaries who sought refuge in France after 1962, this research will examine the links between public policies and individual and family identities. It will trace the history of the reception of these families and the policies specifically targeting children. It will explore the construction and evolution of a veritable lobby at the very heart of the State. Finally, far from the most visible manifestations of the “children of the Harkis” in the public arena, it will draw on an ethnographic study focusing on several adelphies to understand how these children have seized upon these policies and, beyond that, what place they have given to their filiation in their social, family and political identities.

- Yves Denéchère's participation in the project "Trajectories = translation, travels and trajectories of children's rights between Europe and Africa. A sociolegal study of juvenile justice and child protection regulation between Belgium and the Congo (1885-2025)', funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). The aim of this interdisciplinary research project is to study the changes and developments in regulations relating to children's rights that have taken place over more than 100 years between two countries on two different continents: Belgium and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), whose histories are linked by a colonial relationship (coloniser and colonised). This will enable comparisons to be drawn between the care given to children from the colonies at the end of the Belgian, French and Dutch empires.

- The mestizo question has been a key element of the project. It has given rise to publications and the participation of Violaine Tisseau and Yves Denéchère in a working group entitled Métis et Empires. A collective work is in progress on the subject of métissages, with international comparisons: children of the Belgian Congo in Belgium; children of the Dutch East Indies in the Netherlands.

The EN-MIG project focuses on the forced migrations of children from different parts of the collapsing French colonial empire, first and foremost in Indochina, Algeria, Madagascar, but also Africa and areas that had been decolonised without achieving independence (like the overseas territories). This project takes into account the great diversity of these migrations, of which many were presented as "repatriations". Children were displaced with their families or parents, only with their siblings, or even alone and unaccompanied. The obligation to migrate originated with the French government and/or other actors more or less working with its support. Some groups of children were taken into the care of organisations, some were hosted in suitable centres or preexisting structures, and still others were placed in host families or even put up for adoption in France.
EN-MIG aims to understand the individual motivations for integration into the host society among the children and young people who had been uprooted during a moment of crisis. To do this, it historically analyses the effects of postcolonial biopolitics on the personal growth of the child victims of forced migration. Using the preparatory work of three partner research laboratories (TEMOS at the Université d’Angers, ISP at the Université Paris-Nanterre, IMAf at the Aix-Marseille Université), the hypothesis underpinning this research is that the personal growth of child victims of forced migration resulted from connections between the relationships to surroundings and environment (such as policies of racialisation, organisation of care, and the location and type of accomodations), relationships with other people (such as families, parents, siblings, and religious or secular educators) and relationship to identity (such as race, gender, country of origin, climate and food, language and culture, name changes, or a family which remained in the home country). The three main research themes are: 1. The postcolonial nature of the displacements of mixed-race children. 2. Family relationships under the strain of forced migration under decolonisation. 3. Integration and subjective construction of displaced children. A transversal theme will focus on name changes (renaming) as a subjective process of reconstructing the displaced children. Thus, EN-MIG is situated at the junctions of several research fields that have already been widely studied separately (youth and empire-building, children and war, and migrations), but would need more extensive study of how they intersect.
EN-MIG's main methodological choice is to propose a history based on the firsthand accounts of the children and young people directly concerned, as well as the accounts produced as they got older. It is a matter of doing history that is close to the ground, or more precisely history at the level of children, who are the main protagonists of this story. In order to do this, great importance will be accorded to their voices and stories, whether told during childhood or later during adulthood. This priority entails collaborative interactions between researchers and actors/witnesses: interviews, participatory observation, writing workshops, and photographs. Indeed, those directly concerned have high expectations in historical knowledge in order to understand what they were forced to undergo. Placing their personal life experiences in the larger historical context helps them to better understand their own history. Apart from academic publications, the results of this research will be displayed in various ways (such as videos, virtual exhibitions, and school sessions). EN-MIG will also help to enrich and deepen understanding of current migrations of children, accompanied or not.