of its kind, it is very possible that it was not unique. This move between the status of public employee and private volunteer allowed the juvenile probation Officers and the Juvenile Judge – but also probably other public agents – the flexibility necessary in order to overcome bureaucratic obstacles and fundraising limitations in their efforts to fulfil the requirements of their public posts. At the same time, their initiative offered them the chance to gain visibility and distinction for their work in social provision, both public and private.

## Conclusion

These examples can be multiplied. There were more ways over the years by which public agents became engaged in voluntary action in the field of social provision. The dramatic political and social transformations characterizing the period under consideration and beyond left their marks, changing the forms that the interaction between private and public agents through voluntary associations in the field of social provision took in twentieth-century Greece.

Such is the case, for instance, of the Patriotic Foundation for the Protection of the Child (Πατριωτικό Ιδρυμα Προστασίας του Παιδιού – Patriotiko Idryma Prostasias tou Paidiou), founded in 1914 as a typical women's philanthropic association that in the interwar period underwent a series of transformations of its character and status, very much the product of political changes, and ended by the post-war period as the Patriotic Foundation of Social Provision (Πατριωτικό Ιδρυμα Κοινωνικής Πρόνοιας – Patriotiko Idryma Koinonikis Pronoias), a legal entity governed by public law. Women constituted the majority of its active volunteers throughout the period. They worked together with physicians, nurses and other experts on issues of maternal and child health, most of them public employees.⁵¹

However, by the end of the period under investigation, we discern more often the opposite movement: members of voluntary associations irrespective of their professional status – some undoubtedly civil servants – urging authorities to get engaged in the specific field of social protection in which they specialized. Such is, for example, the case of the Pan-Hellenic Union of Parents and Guardians of Unadjusted Children (Πανελλήνια Ένωσις Γονέων και Κηδεμόνων Απροσαρμόστων Παίδων – Panellinia Enossis Goneon kai Kidemonon Aprosarmoston Paidon, henceforth Pan-Hellenic Union), an association created in 1950 by parents of children with what was then called ‘mental retardation’. In their search for solutions to their problems, its members contributed to the gradual transformation of ‘mental retardation’ from a private, family problem to a public, social and political issue, in the name of the human rights of their children.⁵² It seems that with the re-establishment of democracy after 1974 and the modernization of social welfare, the production of collective action in the field of social provision that characterized the previous period gave place to a variety of collective initiatives from below, competing for public recognition of their special plight.
In these cases and many others, state officials, civil servants or public employees together with private volunteers, men and women of various specializations and expertise, undertook in different historical moments a wide range of concerted initiatives. Together, they formed the successive administrative boards of the many voluntary associations of this period dedicated to the good of others that were constantly reproduced and multiplied. Their actions changed and forged professional, gender and class identities, at the same time expanding the very field of social protection. The specific ways in which public and private actors acting together replaced, produced, invoked, at times resisted or interconnected with state institutions went far beyond clientism, the dominant explanatory model of Greek political relations.⁵³ At the same time, they refute the repeated laments about the supposedly weak civil society in this country.⁵⁴ They also testify that, as recent research in respect to other countries shows, these examples are not particularly Greek nor are they the result of an ‘inadequate’ state. They rather

testify to the social proximity of philanthropic and governmental circles and the multiple roles of individual actors, who not infrequently hold posts in different fields and institutions, in state, civil society and the private realm, while being engaged in networks that span different milieux and interest groups.⁵⁵

Finally, they show how problematic is the dominant dichotomous conceptualization of ‘civil society’ as the opposite of the ‘state’ and indicate that it would be fruitful to study the mode of production of collective action in the field of social provision in its varied historical forms.⁵⁶

## Notes

1. P. Thane, ‘The Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture 2011. The “Big Society” and the “Creative tension or crowding out?’, *Twentieth Century British History*, 23, 3 (2012), 408–429.

2. J. McKay, N. Crowson, and J.-F. Mouhot, *The Politics of Expertise: How NGOs shaped modern Britain* (Oxford, 2013); M. Hilton, and J. McKay (eds), *The Ages of Voluntarism. How we got to the Big Society* (Oxford, 2011); S. Matter, M. Ruoss, and B. Studer (eds), ‘Philanthropy and the welfare state’, special issue of *Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften/Austrian Journal of Historical Studies*, 26, 3 (2015), 179–183; A. Kidd, ‘Civil society or the state? Recent approaches to the history of voluntary welfare’, *Journal of Historical Sociology*, 15, 3 (2002), 328–342; A. Iriye, *Global Community. The role of international organizations in the making of the contemporary world* (Berkeley, CA, 2002); C. Topalov (ed), *Laboratoires du Nouveau Siècle. La nébuleuse réformatrice et ses réseaux en France, 1880–1914* (Paris, 1999); idem, ‘Langage de la réforme et déni du politique. Le débat entre assistance publique et bienfaisance privée, 1889–1903’, *Genèses. Sciences Sociales et Histoire*, 23 (1996), 30–52; G. Finlayson, ‘A moving frontier: Voluntarism and the state in British social welfare 1911–1949’, *Twentieth Century British History*, 2 (1992), 183–206.
3 B. Harris, and P. Bridgen, ‘Introduction. The “mixed economy of welfare” and the historiography of welfare provision’, in B. Harris, and P. Bridgen (eds), *Charity and Mutual Aid in Europe and North America since 1800* (London, 2007), 1–18; J. Lewis, ‘The voluntary sector in the mixed economy of welfare’, in D. Gladstone (ed), *Before Beveridge: Welfare before the welfare state* (London, 1999); S. Matter, M. Ruoss, B. Studer, ‘Introduction’, in Matter, Ruoss, Studer (eds), ‘Philanthropy and the welfare state’, *op. cit.*, 5–14.

4 K. Bradley, ‘Juvenile delinquency, the juvenile courts and the settlement movement 1908–1950: Basil Henriques and Toynbee Hall’, *Twentieth Century British History*, 19, 2 (2008), 133–155; E. Avdela, and D. Vassiliadou, ‘“Sauver l’enfant dévoyé”: La Société pour la protection des mineurs d’Athènes après la guerre’, *Revue d’Histoire de l’Enfance ‘Irrégulière’*, 18 (2016), 299–317; V. Theodorou, ‘La Fondation patriotique pour la protection de l’enfant en Grèce’, *Revue d’Histoire de la Protection Sociale*, 11, 1 (2018), 72–91. Also ‘The co-constitution of public and private actors (I): Building the field of social protection in the 19th and 20th centuries’ and ‘The co-constitution of public and private actors (II): Building the transnational field of welfare in the 19th and 20th centuries’, sessions organized by C. Keren, F. Giomi, and M. Labbé at the European Social Science History Conference, Belfast, 6 April 2018.

5 E. Avdela, H. Exertzoglou, and C. Lyrintzis (eds), *Μορφές δημόσιας κοινωνικότητας στην Ελλάδα του 20ού αιώνα* [Forms of Public Sociality in Twentieth-century Greece] (Rethymno, 2015) (http://www public-sociality. uoc.gr/index_en.html) (accessed 29 April 2019).

6 Ν. Mouzelis, and G. Pagoulatos, ‘Κοινωνία πολιτών και ιδιότητα του πολίτη στη μεταπολεμική Ελλάδα’ [Civil society and citizenship in postwar Greece], *Ελληνική Επιθεώρηση Πολιτικής Επιστήμης* [Greek Review of Political Science], 32 (2008), 239–264; D. A. Sotiropoulos, *Η κορυφή του πελατειακού κράτους* [The Peak of the Clientelist State] (Athens, 2001).

7 F. Giomi, and S. Petrungaro, ‘Voluntary associations, state and gender in interwar Yugoslavia. An introduction’, *European Review of History: Revue Européenne D’histoire*, 26, 1 (2019), 3.

8 D. Fassin, *Humanitarian Reason. A moral history of the present* (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London, 2012), 3 and passim.

9 The term is used here in its first descriptive sense. V. Amit with S. Anderson, V. Caputo, J. Postill, D. Reed-Danahay, and G. Vargas-Cetina, ‘Introduction: Thinking through sociality: The importance of mid-level concepts’, in V. Amit (ed), *Thinking through Sociality: An anthropological interrogation of key concepts* (Oxford and New York, 2015).

10 T. W. Gallant, *Modern Greece: From the war of independence to the present* (London and New York, 2016); R. Clogg, *A Concise History of Greece* (Cambridge, 1999/2013); and C. Chatzioissif (ed), *Ιστορία της Ελλάδας τον 20ο αιώνα* [History of Greece in the Twentieth Century], v. 1–4 (Athens, 1999–2009).

11 G. Kokkinakis, ‘Πρόνοια και φιλανθρωπία στην Ελλάδα τον 19 αιώνα’ [Provision and philanthropy in Greece in the nineteenth century], in C. Dikaios (ed), *Ιστορία Κοινωνικής Πολιτικής* [History of Social Policy] (Athens, 2011); M. Korassidou, *Οι Άλιοι των Αθηνών και οι θεραπευτές τους: Φτώχεια και φιλανθρωπία στην ελληνική πρωτεύουσα τον 19 αιώνα* [The Wretched of Athens and Their Healers: Poverty and philanthropy in the Greek capital in the nineteenth century] (Athens, 1995); A. Bakalaki, ‘Η συμπαράσταση στους φτωχούς ως διαπαιδαγώγηση και θεραπεία’ [Support to the poor as education and treatment], in K. Rozakou, and E. Gara (eds), *Ελληνικά παράδοξα. Πατρωνία, κοινωνία πολιτών και βία* [Greek Paradoxes. Patronage, civil society and violence] (Athens, 2013), 284–285.
12 Law 281/1914 'On associations', *Εφημερίς της Κυβερνήσεως* [Government Gazette], 171 (1914), 893–899.

13 Dikaios (ed), *Ιστορία Κοινωνικής Πολιτικής*, op. cit.; V. Theodorou, and D. Karakatsani, *Strengthening Young Bodies, Building the Nation. A social history of children's health and welfare in Greece (1890–1940)* (Budapest and New York, 2019).

14 Criticisms of philanthropy as ineffective and hierarchical were recurrent from the nineteenth century, and they remain so today. A. Bakalaki, 'On the ambiguities of altruism and the domestication of emotions', *Histoire*, 8 (2008), 83–93; idem, 'Η συμπαράσταση στους φτωχούς', op. cit.; K. Rozakou, Από 'αγάπη' και 'αλληλεγγύη': Θεολοντική εργασία με πρόσφυγες στηνΑθήνα του πρώιμου 21ου αιώνα [From 'Love' and 'Solidarity': Voluntary work with refugees in Athens in the early twenty-first century] (Athens, 2018).

15 Ε. Avdela, 'Εισαγωγή: Συλλογική δράση και παραγωγή δημόσιας κοινωνικότητας στην Ελλάδα του εικοστού αιώνα' [Introduction: Collective action and the production of public sociality in twentieth century Greece], in Avdela, Exertzoglou, and Lyrintzis (eds), *Μορφές δημόσιας κοινωνικότητας*, op. cit. Cf. Also L. L. Downs, "'And so we transform a people': Women's social action and the reconfiguration of politics on the Right in France, 1934–1947', *Past and Present*, 225, 1 (2014), 187–225; J. Lewis 'The voluntary sector in the mixed economy of welfare', op. cit.; Harris and Bridgen, 'Introduction', op. cit.

16 See her obituary in *Νέα Εποχή* [New Era], 6 September 1959; also Avdela and Vassiliadou, "'Sauver l'enfant dévoyé'", op. cit.

17 See references in note 10. Also M. Llewellyn Smith, *Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor 1919–1922* (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999); and E. Kontogiorgi, *Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia: The rural settlement of refugees 1922–1930* (Oxford, 2006).

18 Ε. Avdela, 'Νέοι εν κινδύνω'. Επιτήρηση, αναμόρφωση και δικαιοσύνη ανήλικων μετά τον πόλεμο [‘Youth in Danger’. Surveillance, reformation and juvenile justice after the war] (Athens, 2013).

19 Avdela, 'Νέοι εν κινδύνω', op. cit., 113–123.

20 Ε. Ν. Guinopoulou, 'Για την προστασία κρατουμένων γυναικών και ανηλίκων' [For the protection of imprisoned women and minors], *Ο Αγώνας της Γυναίκας* [The Struggle of Woman], B, 16 (1925), 12.

21 Α. Riganakos, *Περί της ανάγκης της ιδρύσεως παιδικών δικαστηρίων* [On the Necessity of Founding Children's Courts] (Athens, 1927).

22 Ε.Ν. Guinopoulou, 'Γύρω από την προστασία της γυναίκας και του παιδιού' [On the protection of woman and child], *Ο Αγώνας της Γυναίκας*, B, 18 (1925), 16; A. Papadimitriou, *Τα παιδικά δικαστήρια* [Children's Courts] (Athens, 1927).

23 General State Archives, *Archives of the Department of Cyclades. Archive of the Court of First Instance of Syros, Statutes: Protection of Imprisoned women and minors, Ermoupoli 1925, manuscript in Greek*.

24 Γενική Εταιρεία προς Προστασίαν της Παιδικής και Εφηβικής Ηλικίας, *Καταστατικόν* [General Society for the Protection of Childhood and Adolescence, Statute] (Athens, 1924). The Society published the journal *Το Παιδί* [The Child]. V. Theodorou, and D. Karakatsani, *Υγεινής παραγγέλματα. Ιατρική επίβλεψη και κοινωνική πρόνοια για το παιδί τις πρώτες δεκαετίες του 20ού αιώνα* [Hygiene Orders. Medical supervision and social provision for the child during the first decades of the 20th century] (Athens, 2010); Theodorou, 'La Fondation patriotique', op. cit. For the creation of the UISE, J. Droux, 'L'internationalisation de la protection de l'enfance', op. cit.

25 Theodorou, 'La Fondation patriotique', op. cit.

26 C. Loukos, 'Η πείνα στην Κατοχή. Δημογραφικές και κοινωνικές διαστάσεις' [The famine during the Occupation. Demographic and social dimensions], in C. Chatziiossif (ed), *Ιστορία της Ελλάδας του 20ού αιώνα*, v. C2: Β' Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος–Κατοχή–Αντίσταση 1941–1945 [WWII War–Occupation–Resistance
1941–1945] (Athens, 2007), esp. 220–223; M. Mazower, *Inside Hitler's Greece: The experience of Occupation, 1941–44* (London, 2001), Citing B. Helger, *Ravitaillement de la Grèce pendant l'Occupation 1941–44 et pendant les Premiers Cinq Mois après la Libération* (Athens, 1949), 625, according to whom Greece lost from famine during the Occupation, 300,000 of its population. Also V. Hionidou, *Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941–1944* (Cambridge, 2006).

27 A. S. Waldén, *From Lapland to the Acropolis. The European itinerary of a Swede in the 20th century* (Malmö, 2016); V. Hionidou, *Famine and Death, op. cit.; idem*, 'Famine in occupied Greece: Causes and consequences', in R. Clogg (ed), *Bearing Gifts to Greeks: Humanitarian aid to Greece in the 1940s* (London, 2008); A. Laiou-Thomadakis, 'The politics of hunger: Economic aid to Greece, 1943–1945', *Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora*, 7 (1980), 27–42.

28 Database on Voluntary Associations, research project 'Forms of public sociality in 20th-century urban Greece: Associations, networks of social intervention and collective subjectivities', University of Crete (2012–2015), http://www.public-sociality.uoc.gr/en/Associations.html (accessed 29 April 2019).

29 *Ibid.* Respectively: *Ταμείον Κοινωνικής Αντιλήψεως Περιφερείας 5ου Αστυνομικού Τμήματος Αθηνών* (Tameion Koinonikis Antilipseos Perifereias 5ου Astynomikou Tsimatos Athinon); *Σωματείον Κοινωνικής Προνοίας και Αντιλήψεως Περιφερείας ΙΔ' Αστυνομικού Τμήματος Αθηνών Αμπελοκήπων* (Somateion Koinonikis Pronoias kai Antilipseos Peirfereias 14ου Astynomikou Tsimatos Athninon Ampelokipon); *Αδελφότης Κοινωνικής Αντιλήψεως και Προνοίας (ΑΚΑΠ) Περιφερείας 7ου Αστυνομικού Τμήματος Αθηνών (Συνοικίες Κυνέλης, Αγίας Ζώνης)* (Adelfotis Koinonikis Antilipseos kai Pronoias (AKAP) Perifereias 7ου Astynomikou Tsimatos Athinon (Synoikies Kypselis, Agias Zonis)); *Κοινωνική Αντίληψις Περιφερείας Η' Αστυνομ. Τμήματος Αθηνών* (Koinoniki Antilipsis Perifereias 8ου Astynomikou Tsimatos Athinon).

30 Statutes in *ibid*.

31 On the Red Cross in Greece during the 1940s, see V. Hionidou, *Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, op. cit.*; T. Vervenioti, *Αναπαραστάσεις της ιστορίας*. Η δεκαετία του 1940 μέσα από τα αρχεία του Διεθνούς Ερυθρού Σταυρού [Representations of History. The 1940s seen from the archives of the International Red Cross] (Athens, 2009). On the NOCS see V.N. Makrides, 'The Greek Orthodox Church and social welfare during the Second World War', in Clogg (ed), *Bearing Gifts to Greeks, op. cit.*; M. Zacharakis, 'Η συμβολή της ορθόδοξης εκκλησίας στην Ελλάδα όσον αφορά το επισιτιστικό ζήτημα κατά την Γερμανική Κατοχή – Ο ρόλος και η δράση του Εθνικού Οργανισμού Χριστιανικής Αλληλεγγύης (ΕΟΧΑ)'* [The Contribution of the Church in Greece in Respect to the Food Issue during the German Occupation – the role and action of the National Organization of Christian Solidarity] (Masters’ thesis, Patras, 2017).

32 Respectively: *Ταμείον Περιτάλψεως Καλλιθέας* (Tameion Perithalpseos Kallitheas); *Ταμείον Περιτάλψεως Απόρων Αιγαλέω* (Tameion Perithalpseos Aporon Aigaleo); *Ταμείον Περιτάλψεως Κοινωνικής Αντιλήψεως Χαλανδρίον* (Tameion Perithalpseos Koinonikis Antilipseos Chalandriou); *Ταμείον Περιτάλψεως Βύρωνος* (Tameion Perithalpseos Vyrinos). Database on Voluntary Associations, *op. cit*.

33 See the letter by the Treasury of Social Provision of the District of the fifth Police Department of Athens to the Ministry of Social Provision in 19 July 1942, requesting that they were granted a deserted building where, in collaboration with the local bureau of the NOCS, they would create a communal laundry. Library of the University of Crete, *Archive of the Ministry of National Provision, Closed Collections*, file 11, P, 1942, 14/B, 25000–50000, 3, 'Treasury of Social Provision – NOCS'.

34 G. Margaritis, *Προαγγελία θυελλωδών ανέμων... Ο πόλεμος στην Αλβανία και η πρώτη περίοδος της Κατοχής* [Proclamation of Stormy Winds... The war in Albania and the first period of the Occupation] (Athens, 2009), 239–265.
35 M. Charalampidis, *Η εμπειρία της Κατοχής και της Αντίστασης στην Αθήνα* [The Experience of Occupation and Resistance in Athens] (Athens, 2012), 100–103, 210–214; V. Hionidou, ‘Relief and politics in occupied Greece, 1941–1944’, *Journal of Contemporary History*, 48/4 (2013), 761–783; H. Fleischer, *Στέμμα και σβάστικα. Η Ελλάδα της Κατοχής και της Αντίστασης, 1941–1944* [Crown and Swastika. Greece in the occupation and the resistance, 1941–1944] (Athens, 1995), 11–13; Mazower, *op. cit.*; Hionidou, *Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, op. cit.*

36 Α. Stratakis, ‘Κοινωνική πολιτική στην Ελλάδα κατά τη δεκαετία του 1940: Η κοινωνική πρόνοια και το Υπουργείο Εθνικής / Κοινωνικής Προνοίας* [Social Policy in Greece during the 1940s: state provision and the Ministry of National/Social Provision] (Masters’ thesis, Rethymno, 2003); Charalampidis, *Η εμπειρία της Κατοχής, op. cit.*, 210–214; K. Anastasiadis, responsible for the popular common meals for the district Harokopou – Kallithea, oral testimony in ‘The Chronicle of National Resistance’, episode 4: ‘The great famine’, National Radio and Television Station (ERT) 1985, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzZJUNXP-R1&index=4&list=PLD4A8sYoLfVdj7-ZZnhEh772HQ_jcxvXL (accessed 29 April 2019). I thank Dimitra Lambropoulou for the citation.

37 Margaritis, *Προαγγελία θυελλωδών ανέμων, op. cit.*, 352.

38 Archive of Care for Minors in Moral Danger the Good Shepherd (henceforth Good Shepherd), file 1: Minutes of the Foundation of the Association, 10.1.1966, in my possession; n. 242 judgment of the Court of First Instance of Thessaloniki, 19.1.1966; published 21.1.1966; for the rename: Minutes of the Foundation of an Association, 14.5.1969.

39 Court of First Instance of Thessaloniki, *Archive of the Court of First Instance of Thessaloniki*, Status 1966, article 2, 1.

40 *Ibid.*, 2–14.

41 Good Shepherd, file 2/f, Correspondence: Letter to the Society for the Protection of Minors of Thessaloniki, 7.11.1975, unsigned manuscript; also file 2/b: newspaper clipping, 4.2.1969.

42 See here above ('Inciting'). For the SPM of Athens, Avdela and Vassiliadou, 'Sauver l'enfant dévoyé', *op. cit.*

43 Avdela, 'Between voluntary workers and public servants', *op. cit.*

44 E. Avdela, "'Corrupting and uncontrollable activities': Moral panic about youth in post-Civil-War Greece", *Journal of Contemporary History*, 43, 1 (2008), 25–44 and *idem*, 'Νέοι εν κινδύνω', *op. cit.*, 146–147, 170.

45 Interview with AZ, 25 May 2006; Avdela, 'Νέοι εν κινδύνω', *op. cit.*

46 Good Shepherd, file 1.

47 Good Shepherd, file 2, passim; especially, 2/D and E: Correspondence, and 2/F: Report of Mitsa Nikolaou, Head of the Administrative Council of the Shelter to the Juvenile Judge of Thessaloniki and to the Administrative Council of the Association Care for Minors in Moral Danger the Good Shepherd, 2.12.1975, manuscript.

48 Interview with Mitsa Nikolaou, 24 May 2006; Avdela, 'Between voluntary workers and public servants', *op. cit.*

49 Good Shepherd, file 2/D and E: Correspondence, and file 3, where the repeated efforts to make ends meet and the constant refusals of funding are clearly documented.

50 Good Shepherd, file 2/F: Correspondence with the SPM of Thessaloniki [1975–1979], passim.

51 Theodorou, 'La Fondation patriotique', *op. cit.* Also K.G. Tziaras, 'Τα λαϊκά στρώματα στη Θεσσαλονίκη του μεσοπολέμου (1922–1940): κοινωνική και πολιτική διάσταση της φτώχειας' [The popular classes of interwar Thessaloniki (1922–1940): Social and political dimension of poverty] (D.Phil, Thessaloniki, 2017).
52 D. Kritsotaki, 'Turning private concerns into public issues: Mental retardation and the parents' movement in post-war Greece, c. 1950–80', *Journal of Social History*, 49, 4 (2016), 982–998; also Avdela and Vassiliadou, 'Sauver l'enfant dévoyé', *op. cit.*

53 Ε. Papataxiarchis, 'Εισαγωγή: Πολιτική και αγροτικός σχηματισμός στη νεοελληνική κοινωνία' [Introduction: Politics and agricultural formation in modern Greek society], in M. Komninou, and E. Papataxiarchis (eds), Κοινότητα, κοινωνία και ιδεολογία. Ο Κωνσταντίνος Καραβίδας και η προβληματική των κοινωνικών επιστημών [Community, Society and Ideology. Konstantinos Karavidas and the reasoning of social sciences] (Athens, 1990); D.A. Sotiropoulos, 'Πελατειακές σχέσεις και νέες μορφές πολιτικής συμμετοχής: μια δύσκολη συμβίωση' [Clientelist relations and new forms of political participation: A difficult cohabitation], in Rozakou and Gkara (eds), *Ελληνικά παράδοξα*, *op. cit.*, 145–172, and *idem*, *Η κορυφή του πελατειακού κράτους*, *op. cit.*

54 Mouzelis and Pagoulatos, 'Κοινωνία πολιτών', *op. cit.*; K. Rozakou, 'Κοινωνικότητα και “κοινωνία αλληλεγγύης” στην περίπτωση ενός εθελοντικού σωματείου' [Sociality and 'solidary society' in the case of a voluntary association], *Ελληνική Επιθεώρηση Πολιτικής Επιστήμης* [Greek Review of Political Science], 32 (2008), 95–120; C. Lyrintzis, and E. Papataxiarchis, '(Ανα)θεωρήσεις του πολιτικού. Συγκλίσεις και αποκλίσεις στην ανθρωπολογία και την πολιτική επιστήμη' [(Re)considerations of the political. Convergences and divergences in anthropology and political sciences], in Rozakou and Gkara (eds), *Ελληνικά παράδοξα*, *op. cit.*, 93–94.

55 Matter, Ruoss and Studer, 'Introduction', *op. cit.*, 2.

56 Giomi and Petrungaro, 'Voluntary associations, state and gender', *op. cit.*, 3.

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# 6 From international aid to state policy

The cross-border trajectory of the Spanish child evacuation scheme, 1936–1939

Célia Keren

## Introduction

On 20 and 21 November 1937, an international conference for aid to Spanish children was convened in Paris – a year and four months since the July 1936 military coup had developed into a civil war in Spain. The war pitted the Republican state, governed by a Popular Front coalition, against a right-wing military junta led by General Francisco Franco. The military aid received by the latter from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy soon brought the war onto the international scene and generated a worldwide wave of left-wing solidarity with the Spanish Republic. The November 1937 conference for aid to Spanish children was one of the numerous manifestations of this global movement. It was attended by 200 delegates, representing aid committees and left-wing organizations from 21 countries as well as a 20-strong Spanish Republican delegation. For two days, humanitarian workers, political activists and Spanish government officials discussed how to save the children of Republican Spain.¹

For the conference, the Spanish Ministry of Education had prepared 10,000 copies of a 30-page booklet laying out its policy on homes for child evacuees (referred to as ‘colonies’).² Indeed, since the Francoist army’s siege of Madrid in late October 1936, tens of thousands of children had been evacuated from the war zones to the safer eastern provinces.³ In late November 1936, groups of children started being sent abroad, first to Belgium, then France, followed by the USSR, Mexico, Great Britain and Denmark. Published in both French and English, the booklet *Children’s Colonies* was written purely for foreign consumption. Featuring photographs of happy, healthy Spanish children brushing their teeth, performing morning gymnastics or ‘having classes out of doors’ on sunny days, it contributed to one of the chief goals of the Spanish Ministry of Education at the November 1937 conference: to elicit additional financial support from foreign aid committees for its children’s colonies programme.⁴

The booklet was less about painting children’s colonies in glowing terms, however, than about making the Ministry’s policy on the matter clear to
the attendees, especially foreign aid committees. The document's foreword enumerated the official bodies responsible for the children's colonies. This was followed by a full translation of the ministerial order of 24 August 1937, providing for the creation of the National Council for Evacuated Children (Consejo nacional de la infancia evacuada, CNIE). According to this text, the CNIE was entirely in charge of 'the organisation, direction, scholastic curriculum and material support of all institutions for evacuated children in Spain as well as abroad'.⁵ The next 25 pages of the booklet thus detailed the 'administrative and pedagogical regulations ... dictated' by the CNIE, from menus, schedules and activities to costs and accounting rules.⁶

If, in November 1937, the Ministry of Education presented these colonies for evacuated children as a well-thought-out, rationalized and centralized public policy, this had not always been the case. In Spain, non-governmental bodies, both Spanish and foreign, had been instrumental in ensuring the evacuation of children from Madrid. The role of foreign activist groups, especially the French, was even more crucial in the transfer of Spanish children out of Spain. It was only after they had campaigned for months for Spanish children to be sent to France that the Spanish Republican government followed up on the idea. A private French Reception Committee for Spanish Children then ran the scheme with a high degree of autonomy, selecting host families for the children in France and setting up and operating children's homes through its own network, all with its own personnel and, perhaps most importantly, its own funds. The task of converting a project of this kind into a national, state-run policy was anything but straightforward, and certainly did not happen overnight or without conflict.

This chapter will thus seek to illuminate the process by which the evacuation of Spanish children abroad, specifically to France, transformed from a foreign, humanitarian relief programme into national public policy in Spain. By identifying the actors of this process, their motivations and their means, and the consequences of these changes for the orientation of the programme itself, my intention is not only to uncover a rather neglected aspect of the history of child evacuations during the Spanish Civil War.⁷ I also hope to contribute to a growing body of research on the role of private humanitarian action in the development of state welfare policies in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, if interactions between public and private actors, whether collaborative or competitive, have often led to the emergence of new fields of social protection generally speaking, in the context of humanitarian intervention, this productive process takes on a very specific aspect.⁸

The transformation of a humanitarian scheme into state public policy was not unheard-of in interwar Europe, especially in the field of child welfare. In fact, it was typical of American humanitarian imperialism in Europe after the First World War. In her groundbreaking study of the American Red Cross (ARC), Julia Irwin showed that American humanitarians came to Europe in 1919 with a sense of mission not only to heal the suffering of war-torn
societies but also to ‘rehabilitate’ them.⁹ Persuaded that distributing food and medical supplies would not solve Europe’s problems in the long run, they sought to introduce more effective – in other words, American – institutions and practices. This mix of benevolence, paternalism and imperialism was not unique to the ARC. Historians have argued that Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration (ARA) effectively ‘shaped’ the newly independent Polish state in the early 1920s.¹⁰ The ARA European Children’s Fund advised central governments on governance structures, promoting, for example, the creation of ‘national “child-welfare commission(s)”’, modelled on the United States Child Welfare Bureau in the Department of Labour’.¹¹

The Spanish child evacuation scheme becomes all the more interesting when we situate it within this larger historiography of humanitarian state-building because, in this specific case, the transformation of a foreign aid programme into public policy was not driven by an imperialist sense of mission. As I have argued elsewhere, the French activists who first advocated sending Spanish children to France did not come to war-torn Spain convinced of the superiority of their methods and bent on forcing these upon the Spanish government.¹² They were not interested in reforming Spanish institutions. Their ambition was to aid, not ‘rehabilitate’ Republican Spain. And yet, while French activists did not behave like the ARC or ARA, it seems at first sight that their intervention had a similar effect: it led to the creation, within the Spanish state, of new child welfare public policies. The aim of this chapter is to elucidate this apparent paradox. In the absence of a deliberate, imperialist attempt to ‘shape’ Spanish child welfare institutions on the part of foreign activists, why and how was the child evacuation scheme transformed into a public policy of the Spanish Republican state? Who was the motor behind this transformation and under what conditions was it achieved? And what consequences did this have on the direction and content of the programme itself?

This chapter retraces the transformation of the Spanish child evacuation scheme in four sections. The first section examines initial attempts to bring Spanish children to France and connects this to a long-standing tradition of workers' solidarity without the state. The second section, which deals with the actual launch of the child evacuations to France, describes how, even if this project was immediately claimed by a state actor in Spain – the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare – it was still run on an ad hoc, public/private basis, with a low level of institutionalization. The third section describes the centralization and bureaucratization of the scheme under the Ministry of Education during the summer of 1937, emphasizing the ideological nationalist underpinnings of this process and the previous administrative and pedagogical experiences from which it drew. Yet, as the fourth section will show, this transformation was both contested, and incomplete. At the end of the day, there was an aporia at the heart of the Spanish government's ambition: it was trying to run a national, state policy outside of Spanish borders, but it remained dependent upon the support of foreign, private aid committees.
## The children's exodus: workers' solidarity without the state

Almost as soon as the war broke out, private activist groups based outside of Spain began campaigning for Spanish Republican children to be sent abroad. Though the earliest projects did not come to fruition, their relevance for this study is twofold. First, their consideration indicates that this idea was embedded in a long-standing, transnational custom of left-wing solidarity beyond state welfare. Second, their failure underlines the fact that, when they implied crossing national borders, such initiatives were rarely possible without the consent of the national authorities.

On 3 August 1936, two weeks after the war began, a proposal to place Spanish child victims of the war with French host families was put forward by a small, newly created Communist-controlled organization in France: The National Association for the Support of Children (Association nationale du soutien de l'enfance, ANSE).¹³ This proposal quickly became one of the top four priorities of the Popular Front's Solidarity Commission for the Aid of the Spanish People, whose role was to coordinate all initiatives in solidarity with the Spanish Republic coming from the parties, unions and associations that had adhered to the French Popular Front movement.¹⁴ The ANSE rapidly created a committee to centralize offers from volunteer host families, who were by then already coming forward in large numbers.¹⁵ On 14 August, a French delegation left Paris for Spain. Made up of two Communist and two Socialist local officials from the Paris region, and headed by ANSE secretary-general Michel Onof, their aim was to liaise with Spanish organizations and, hopefully, come back with a first group of children to be cared for in France.¹⁶ On their way to Spain, they secured transitory lodgings for 500 Spanish children in a summer camp in Perpignan near the border. In less than a month, the ANSE had thus laid the groundwork for the transfer of hundreds of Spanish children to France.

If the ANSE was able to act so swiftly, it was because this was not the first time they had arranged this kind of child transport. Admittedly, the ANSE had been founded barely eight months earlier, in December 1935. In reality, however, it was the heir of the much older Secours ouvrier international (SOI), the French section of the Workers' International Relief created in 1921 in Berlin.¹⁷ In late 1935, after it was disbanded by the Comintern, the SOI became the ANSE, with the same figures – Communists Michel Onof and Alice Duchêne – at its head.¹⁸

As it turns out, the 'children's exodus' was a privileged course of action for the SOI, and one that Michel Onof and Alice Duchêne had already organized many times. This expression had been used since the beginning of the twentieth century in left-wing circles to refer to the temporary displacement of the children of striking workers during long strikes and their placement with other working-class families.¹⁹ The practice was taken up by the Workers' International Relief after 1920 and extended to cases of political persecution.
Only in 1934 and 1935, the SOI organized about half a dozen ‘children’s exoduses’, for example, bringing children of left-wing activists from the Saar to France, when this region under League of Nations Mandate joined Nazi Germany by plebiscite.²⁰

On 5 September 1936, however, the French delegation returned from Spain to Paris empty-handed. The Spanish Republican authorities had turned down their offer and refused to allow Spanish children to leave the country. ANSE secretary-general Michel Onof reported that the children were already at the centre of such attention that their transfer to France proved unnecessary. Every day, he was told during his stay in Madrid, a new day nursery or children’s home was opened.²¹ He was given the grand tour of the Fifth Regiment Home by left socialist and Red Aid activist Margarita Nelken, who described it as a ‘model children’s home’.²² Though there may be other reasons for the project’s failure at that juncture, it does indeed seem that the idea of sending children abroad contradicted the impetus that was developing at that time in Republican Spain, and especially in Madrid, towards reforming child welfare and education *within Spain*.

It is unclear, however, *which* Spanish authorities rejected the August 1936 children's exodus project. At first sight, this type of decision would have fallen within the purview of the government, but in the early days of the revolution, in Madrid, the real power lay with working-class organizations, which had both formed militias to fight the rebels and seized control of economic, social and cultural institutions. Much has been written in Spanish Civil War scholarship on the sudden collapse of the state in the summer of 1936 and the proliferation in its place of a wealth of local committees run by left-wing political parties and trade unions. But what has most caught the attention of historians is how those committees seized and exercised the monopoly of legitimate violence lost by the state both on the frontlines and behind them.²³ However, child welfare and education also occupied an important place within the social transformation projects of Spanish revolutionaries. The weakening of the state and the church, previously the principal actors of the field, opened a window of opportunity for left-wing activists to finally implement their childcare and education projects on a large scale. The government's only role in this was to facilitate or sanction their initiatives after the fact. In this sense, in education as in many other matters, the public/ private divide was blurred. Tellingly, in the account he gave to ANSE supporters upon returning from Madrid, Michel Onof did not once mention the state authorities. He explained that, at first, 'A deliberation by the National Committee of the Frente Popular concluded in favour of the children's exodus' but that, 'after new discussions with Pasionaria, Margarita Nelken and Victoria Kent from the Communist, Socialist and Left Republican Parties, we had to face the facts and give up on our projects for the time being'.²⁴ Thus, according to ANSE sources, decision-making in Republican Spain at that time lay with political figures (especially women, who were always associated with care activities) and with a Popular Front committee in which
all left-wing parties and unions were represented; that is, not with the official centre-left government of José Giral.

## An ad hoc, public-private transnational child welfare scheme

In mid-November 1936, another child evacuation scheme was presented, this time to the official Spanish government. The latter immediately accepted and became fully involved in the programme. As this section shows, however, state intervention did not translate into a fully fledged public policy. Though the newly appointed Minister of Health and Social Welfare included the overseeing of child evacuations abroad into her efforts to expand the limited scope of her Ministry, this remained an ad hoc project, implemented through partnerships with French private actors, with little to no bureaucracy or administrative follow-up.

In late October 1936, a series of discussions took place in Paris between the leaderships of three organizations: The French trade union centre (Confédération générale du travail, CGT), the French Human Rights League (Ligue des droits de l'homme, LDH) and its Spanish counterpart (Liga española de derechos humanos, LEDH). The latter's three top officials, Luis Rodríguez Guerra, Amós Sabrás and Alberto Lumbreras, had travelled to Paris to discuss ideas to aid Republican Spain. It was they who suggested setting up a scheme dedicated to hosting Spanish children in France. Of course, the French leaderships of the CGT and LDH were well aware of the ANSE's three-month-long efforts to launch a similar scheme, but they decided to pilot the project themselves.

As I have shown elsewhere, this move from the LDH and CGT was mostly aimed at tackling domestic political issues.25 The policy of non-intervention, by which the French government had put an embargo on all arms sales and shipments to either side of the Spanish Civil War, was arousing increasing conflicts within the ranks of the CGT, and the non-Communist left more generally. Some sectors of the left approved of it, believing it was the only way to avoid escalation into a global war, while others condemned it as a betrayal of antifascist solidarity. In this context, the CGT leadership were looking for a consensual way of helping Republican Spain. They were also looking for a way to mobilize further the French non-Communist left, so as to offset the growing Communist hold on the Aid Spain movement in France. Because child aid could appear as both a pro-Republican and a humanitarian, neutral endeavour and could not possibly drag France into an international conflict, it became the perfect cause through which to achieve those goals. This explains for the most part why, when the Reception Committee for Spanish Children (Comité d'accueil aux enfants d'Espagne, CAEE) was officially launched in Paris on 7 November 1936 at a small meeting at the CGT headquarters, only delegates from non-Communist left-wing and labour organizations attended. Only two of them had any knowledge in child
welfare and education, a representative of the teachers' union and the head of the cooperative movement's child welfare organization. This Committee was thus created and populated, not by child relief professionals with firm ideas on how to aid children and families but instead by left-wing and labour activists. The joint presidency of the CAEE was entrusted to the founding president of the LDH, Victor Basch, and the secretary-general of the CGT, Léon Jouhaux – two of the most prominent leaders of the French left. As for executive responsibilities within the CAEE, CGT deputy secretary Georges Buisson was appointed Secretary-General of the CAEE, and CGT treasurer Félix Dupont took on the same function at the CAEE.

A few days after the CAEE's creation, its co-president Victor Basch took advantage of Spanish Foreign Minister Julio Álvarez del Vayo's invitation to tour Spain for ten days to advocate for the CAEE's project. By this time, the Spanish government, under the new prime minister Francisco Largo Caballero, a left socialist and trade union leader, had already made some progress in its long-term effort to take back state powers from the committees who had ruled Republican Spain since the summer.26 It took Basch only a few hours to secure Largo Caballero's consent. The Spanish press, in a dispatch dated 12 November 1936, announced that 30,000 children would soon be welcomed in France.27 No doubt, Basch's rapid success had to do with the crisis sparked by the Francoist attack on Madrid. After a string of Republican defeats earlier that month, many believed that the besieged capital would fall within a matter of days. On 6 November 1936, the government left Madrid and relocated to Valencia on the East Coast. The atmosphere in Republican Spain, and within government and activist circles, was thus very different from that which Michel Onof and his comrades had encountered three months earlier: the only priority was the military defence of the city. Now was not the time to open 'model' children's homes. Civilians, and especially children, had to be urgently evacuated from Madrid. In this context, as Basch summarily explained it upon his return to France, Francisco Largo Caballero's consent was prompted by his 'failure to consider that there was no organization able to care for and feed the children' in Catalonia and on the East Coast of Spain, where they were being evacuated en masse.28

Soon after the CAEE's offer was accepted, the responsibility for the program on the Spanish side was claimed by the freshly appointed Minister of Health and Social Welfare: anarchist high-profile writer and activist Federica Montseny. Her wish to run the child evacuations fit into her wider efforts to flesh out her ministerial portfolio and build a public social welfare system. Her entry into government on 4 November 1936, along with three other (male) leaders from the National Confederation of Labour trade union centre (Confederación nacional del trabajo, CNT), had been decided by Francisco Largo Caballero to broaden his coalition and strengthen popular support for his government. In order to make room for the four new members of government, some portfolios had to be split in two, and others were put together 'with bits and pieces'.29 This was the case for Health. Montseny suspected that
the objective of this reshuffle ‘was to allow the CNT to enter government and, within the government, do as little as possible’. Unwilling to conform to this state of affairs, within two weeks, she had had her portfolio extended to ‘Social Welfare’ (*Asistencia Social*). What this covered in practice was yet to be ‘delineated’, but in principle it included ‘what until now fell under *official, private and public charity*’ as well as ‘those activities of social welfare that are currently overseen by other ministries’.³⁰ This statement of principle was quickly given substance with a series of decrees. One disbanded and requisitioned the possessions of all private charitable institutions.³¹ Another snatched maternal and child protection from the remit of the Ministry of Justice’s High Council for the Protection of Minors (*Consejo Superior de Protección de Menores*).³² A third dissolved the National Committee on Refugees (*Comité nacional de refugiados*).³³ Piece by piece, Federica Montseny unwaveringly appropriated from various entities what would eventually form a coherent perimeter of state intervention, with an emphasis on child welfare and assistance for refugees. All these new missions were entrusted to the newly created National Council for Social Welfare.

Coming from an anarchist ideologist, such commitment to defending her Ministry’s authority, and more generally state power, may come as a surprise. Until then, Federica Montseny had been a staunch defender of the CNT’s ‘purist’ antistate revolutionary doctrine.³⁴ Yet, early in the war, a section within the CNT leadership expressed its support for maintaining the lawful Republican state – and what’s more, a desire to collaborate with it. From the beginning, Montseny was part of that small but increasingly influential group.³⁵ When she finally joined the government in November 1936, she pursued a ‘reformist’ agenda that, she claimed, ‘other capitalist countries had already achieved’ and that consisted in ‘destroying private charity’ in order to create a public system of ‘social welfare’.³⁶

Though Montseny’s claim that capitalist countries had ‘destroyed private charity’ was an overstatement, as the introduction to this book makes clear, the idea that Spain was lagging behind in terms of public welfare had been pervasive since the end of the nineteenth century and has remained shared among many historians until now.³⁷ However, other studies have qualified this cliché and shown that Spanish reforms in the field of welfare were, in fact, in tune with those adopted in most other Western countries, precisely because, since the 1880s, Spanish reformists had been looking to countries such as France, Belgium or Switzerland, among others, for models.³⁸ For this reason, by 1936, the Spanish state was already intervening in a number of social issues, including child welfare.³⁹ Despite her anarchist creed, Montseny shared with other European and Spanish reformists the belief that transferring private charity to the state was the way to go. In this sense, she not only participated in Francisco Largo Caballero’s efforts to reassert government control and recover management from local grassroots powers, she also expanded the reach of the state to fields it did not cover before the war.
However, if child transports abroad had become a matter of state inter-
vention, they did not at this time become a fully fledged public policy. First
of all, they were not regulated by legislation or even official Ministry rules
but by a contractual agreement negotiated with the CAEE. On 19 December
1936, Under-Secretary Mercedes Maestre travelled to Paris to meet with
CAEE leaders at the CGT headquarters, where the CAEE was based.⁴⁰ The
result of the talks was a nine-point document written in French that covered
both the transports and the children's stay in France.⁴¹ For example, children
were supposed to travel in groups of 100 with two teachers and one cook.
They were first to stay in a transit camp for observation, before being placed
with French families. More importantly, for the argument of this chapter,
according to Article 7, the CAEE was 'responsible for all matters and [would]
bear all costs related to the children as soon as they arrive[d] on French soil'.

This means that once the Spanish government had conveyed the children
to the border, it was up to the CAEE, not the Spanish administration, to carry
out the bulk of the work: opening and running transit camps for the initial
reception of the children, recruiting foster families, transporting the children
around France, following up on their living conditions and schooling, inves-
tigating into complaints, relocating the children when necessary, etc. This
also means that the CAEE bore a large proportion of the costs of the scheme.
At the end of Federica Montseny's tenure, its total expenses amounted to
1,650,000 francs, which were covered by a French national collection.⁴² Of
course, in Spain, conveying thousands of children to the border, which often
included housing and feeding them on the way, was not cheap. Moreover,
the Ministry also had to pay the salaries and expenses for some staff based in
France. Still, the CAEE's bill was much higher than the Ministry's.

If the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare was indeed responsible for
bringing the children to the border, it *oversaw* more than it actually *organized*
the transports. Admittedly, parents wishing to send children to France could
register them at the Ministry's headquarters in Valencia.⁴³ But there were no
instructions for the families who lived elsewhere because the newly created
Social Welfare Ministry actually had no reach outside of Valencia.⁴⁴ And
whatever the official gazette said, a number of child welfare institutions con-
tinued to be run by other public and private institutions. Federica Montseny
thus had to rely on other organizations to register children and assemble
and then convey them at least as far as Valencia. In Madrid, she mostly col-
laborated with the city's Defence Council who, in turn, worked with other
local, political organizations. At the national level, the High Council for the
Protection of Minors, who oversaw the network of orphanages and reform
schools in Spain, organized four child transports to France from February
to April 1937. In March 1937, Montseny also 'gladly authorized' the auton-
omous Basque government to send over 400 children from Bilbao to France
under the care of the CAEE.⁴⁵

Because most of the work was not actually carried out by the services
of the Ministry, the child transport scheme did not generate the dedicated
administration and bureaucracy that usually go with the implementation of public policies. Though the Ministry's offices in Valencia supposedly held an information card for each child sent to France and received updated cards when the children left the transit camps for their permanent placement, it seems that no one was using this material to follow up on the children or produce statistics. Federica Montseny always turned to her team in Paris when she needed to know the location of a specific child or when she wanted data on the geographical distribution of the children in France.

In fact, the only Ministry officials who worked full time on running the Spanish children abroad programme were based in Paris. However, their status was ambiguous. On the one hand, they were ministry civil servants and together they formed the official Ministry's Delegation for Social Welfare in Paris. On the other hand, they were full members of the CAEE and, though they had an address at the consulate, they 'lived daily with the French Committee'.⁴⁶ Moreover, three of the four men forming the Delegation were none other than the three LEDH officials whose visit to France had been at the origins of the whole scheme, independently from any governmental representation. For this reason, their involvement in the organisation of the evacuations and their comradeship with the CAEE went far beyond their recent appointments as Ministry of Health and Social Welfare delegates.

There was however a shift towards increased administrative formalism and greater state intervention from March 1937. For example, the Ministry started requesting updated statistics on the children living in France and enquired about the exact functions and salaries of the Paris delegation staff.⁴⁷ Moreover, while the head of the delegation, Amós Sabrás, had been reporting directly either to the Minister herself or the Councillor for Social Welfare until March 1937, from that point onwards the delegation was placed under the responsibility of the Central Office for Evacuation and Refugee Relief (*Oficina Central de Evacuación y Asistencia a Refugiados*), created in late February.⁴⁸

The measure that had the most impact, however, was the decision to stop placing Spanish children with foster families and to group them instead in children's colonies. Though it is unclear whether Montseny herself or other members of the government were behind this shift, it was her responsibility to impose it on the CAEE.⁴⁹ This new policy was costly and stressful for the CAEE, which was then faced with the task and costs of setting up and running the new colonies. Moreover, they may have disagreed on the very substance of this decision. At the November 1937 international conference for aid to Spanish children, and in a context of open conflict between the CAEE and the Spanish government, as we will see in the next section, the co-president of the CAEE, Victor Basch, vocally defended the benefits of family placement compared to collective life in children's colonies.⁵⁰ Yet, there are no traces of such a conflict between the Ministry and the CAEE on this issue when it was first brought up in March 1937. At the time, the CAEE quietly gave in to the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare's demands, even though
they may have disagreed with them, and they immediately started looking for premises and funding for setting up colonies.⁵¹ This may be because they accepted the Spanish government's preeminence when it came to dealing with Spanish children.⁵² But it was also, no doubt, because the CAEE was run by left-wing activists and not by educationalists or child welfare professionals. They may have had their own ideas on how to best accommodate the Spanish children in France, but this was not a deal-breaker for them.

Federica Montseny's tenure abruptly ended on 17 May 1937, collateral damage in the aftermath of the Barcelona May Days. It is impossible to know how the child evacuations abroad would have evolved under her leadership, though there are signs that they would have been increasingly controlled from Valencia and run as a regular public policy. The installation of a new government in May 1937 and the reassignment of portfolios after the anarchist ministers' departure greatly accelerated this process and substantially changed the nature of the child evacuation scheme.

**Building a state public policy: the nationalist turn of child evacuations**

On 17 May 1937, right socialist Juan Negrín formed a new cabinet. Now under the responsibility of the Minister of Education, Communist Jesús Hernández, the matter of child evacuations became fully integrated into the policy apparatus of his Ministry. This move was driven by a nationalist sentiment that Spanish children belonged to Spain. What made it possible, however, was the fact that within the Ministry, there was a pre-existing bureaucratic apparatus dedicated to the education of Spanish children abroad and expert pedagogical knowledge on children's colonies.

Hernández became Minister of Education on 4 September 1936, but he only turned to the child evacuations several months later. On 25 February 1937, he created a new body, the Central Delegation for Colonies (*Delegación central de colonias escolares*), charged with caring for school-aged children who had been evacuated 'within Republican Spain'.⁵³ Theoretically, this specification guaranteed against his Ministry encroaching on Federica Montseny's turf; in practice, however, after its creation, the Central Delegation for Colonies immediately began planning child evacuations abroad.⁵⁴ Still, until May 1937, the transports it organized to the USSR, Mexico and France were overseen by the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare.⁵⁵ When in May 1937, CNT ministers were ousted from cabinet, Federica Montseny's Ministry was cut in two, with Health being attached to Education and Social Welfare to Labour. Despite the fact that child evacuations had previously been connected to Social Welfare and not Health, Hernández took advantage of this opportunity to obtain a new 'delimitation of functions' between the two ministries.⁵⁶ A presidential decree of 28 June 1937 gave him 'exclusive authority' over all child welfare activities and institutions previously under Federica Montseny's charge.
Under the Ministry of Education – an administration much older and stronger than the short-lived Ministry of Health and Social Welfare had been – a fully fledged public policy was soon built around child evacuations abroad. First of all, the latter were now regulated by a series of decrees and orders published in the official gazette during the summer of 1937.⁵⁷ Contrary to what had happened in late 1936, when Under-Secretary Mercedes Maestre had met with the CAEE in Paris to fine-tune the organization of the transports, at no point were any foreign aid committees consulted about these legislative and regulatory changes. Second, there was now a substantial administration that dealt with child evacuees living both in Spain and abroad, and it was fully integrated within the hierarchical structure of the Ministry. The National Council for Evacuated Children (CNIE) replaced the earlier, slimmer Central Delegation for Colonies.⁵⁸ In Paris, the CNIE was represented by the Spanish Delegation for Evacuated Children (*Delegación española para la Infancia Evacuada*, DEIE).⁵⁹ Contrary to the Delegation for Social Welfare headed by Amós Sabrás, this was not a Spanish outpost nested within the CAEE. The DEIE had its own headquarters in the eighth district of Paris and was staffed with seasoned Ministry of Education civil servants charged with implementing the Ministry’s policy abroad. By April 1938, seven Ministry officials were working in the central Paris offices, and 86 headteachers, teachers, nurses and cooks were working in 40 colonies throughout France.⁶⁰

Within this new legal and administrative framework, the DEIE became the 'sole' body responsible for everything connected to the installation, organization, education and inspection of groups of Spanish children staying abroad, regardless of the organism that may have intervened in their evacuation, or contributed to their support'.⁶¹ This represented a fundamental shift from the previous philosophy of the evacuations: Hernández had not only taken over Federica Montseny's former responsibilities but he was also claiming those of the CAEE and of any other private child aid committee whether Spanish or foreign. In this new configuration, the different private, foreign structures working with child refugees were placed under the DEIE.

The first head of the DEIE, Juan Comas, was intent on exercising the full range of his powers. His very first act on taking up his duties in late August 1937 was to send '[Spanish DEIE] civil servants under his authority' to the new CAEE transit camp that had been set up in a suburb of Paris. From among the thousands of child evacuees that had arrived from Santander in the previous weeks and who were awaiting permanent placement, Comas' envoys were supposed to select a number of children to be sent to colonies in Belgium and the USSR.⁶² But to Comas' indignant surprise, the French director of the transit camp refused to recognize the DEIE's authority and said he only answered to the CAEE. The following day, Comas himself was refused access to the camp, even though he carried an official letter from the Spanish Ambassador. Comas deemed this situation 'unacceptable'. On 3 September 1937, he met for the first time with CAEE secretary-general Georges Buisson and summed up their talks in a 12-point document. It stipulated that the
CAEE should ‘acknowledge the DEIE as the sole official organism in charge’ of the child evacuation scheme, that the DEIE should be free ‘to visit at any time… all children’s colonies in France, regardless of the organization supporting them’, and had the ‘right to intervene’ in their daily schedule, study plans and collective organization (including menus, staff, etc.), which in any case had to be approved beforehand and could be freely amended by the DEIE.⁶³ The remaining provisions went along the same lines. The document claimed that, forthwith, everything the CAEE did was under the control of the DEIE.

No doubt, these efforts to further centralize the child evacuation policy had to do with the wider political evolution of Republican Spain and the rebuilding of the Spanish state after its virtual collapse in the summer of 1936. They echoed the push for centralizing power in government that was characteristic of Juan Negrín’s term after May 1937.⁶⁴ As Spanish Civil War historians have shown, the Spanish Communist Party had been at the forefront of this push since the fall of 1936, and it is clear that it valued hierarchy and obedience much more than did the decentralized and horizontal CNT.⁶⁵ It is therefore tempting to interpret the centralization of the child evacuation policy as a result of the transfer of responsibility from Anarchist Federica Montseny to Communist Jesús Hernández. Though this change may have played a part, the importance of political labels is difficult to assess and should not be overstated here for at least three reasons. First of all, there is a strong, misleading tendency in Spanish Civil War history to ‘essentialize’ political groups and use ‘political acronyms to explain what the actors of the drama thought and did’.⁶⁶ Second, after the Ministry of Education was once more assigned to a CNT Minister, Segundo Blanco, in April 1938, the centralization policy was in fact reinforced, and previous legislation and guidelines remained in force.⁶⁷ Finally, no Spanish or French source connects the centralization policy implemented under Hernández with his Communist affiliations.

What the sources do underline, however, is that the Ministry of Education’s policy was fuelled by a nationalist view of children as key to the future and salvation of Spain. The representation of children as the future of the nation was not limited to Spain; in fact, it was pervasive across Europe, North America and East Asia at the time.⁶⁸ This new vision of the national value of children usually entailed two kinds of policies. First, in Spain as elsewhere, social reformers, physicians and eugenicists developed medical and social policies against child mortality and morbidity in order to ‘reinvigorate the race’, as emphasized by the High Council for the Protection of Minors in 1922.⁶⁹ Second, governments and educationalists were also careful to cultivate children’s national loyalties, mainly through school programs, curricular and extracurricular activities, military training and children’s literature.⁷⁰ In Spanish political and pedagogical thought, the idea that education was both the cause of the nation’s failures and the principal tool for its ‘regeneration’ had grown deep roots since Spain’s defeat in the 1898 war against the United States and the loss of Spain’s last colonies.
Evacuations were a double-edged initiative in this regard. On the one hand, they were intended to save (at least some) Spanish children from the hardships of war, thus safeguarding the biological future of Spain. Yet, on the other hand, many Spanish officials feared that the children would integrate too well in their new national environment and thus be lost to Spain. As an Education Ministry official would recall in August 1938, ‘in early 1937, [it was feared that] the departure of children to foreign countries could amount to their denationalization’.⁷¹ These fears echoed those voiced about earlier displacements of children caused by war. In the early 1920s, white Russian émigré organizations in Constantinople feared that the thousands of children forced to leave the motherland were losing ‘their native language and cultural identity’.⁷² They considered those children as ‘true Russia’, ‘the most precious of our national property’, and believed that the only way to safeguard this treasure was to educate these refugee children in special Russian schools.⁷³ Similar concerns and solutions were developed regarding child survivors of the Armenian genocide in the same years.⁷⁴ After the Second World War, with hundreds of thousands of children living as refugees across Europe, and thousands more having been forcibly ‘Germanized’, fears about the denationalization of European children became global, as Tara Zahra has shown.⁷⁵ However, in all these cases, international organizations, states, nationalist activists and humanitarians were trying to *repair* the damage created by forced and often violent child displacements. The Spanish case is different, in that the evacuations were planned by the Republican state itself. Spanish officials thus had the opportunity to try to *prevent* denationalization from happening at all.

The Spanish government developed two countermeasures to ward off the denationalization of Spanish children. The first was to claim Spain's natural guardianship over them. This is the rationale behind the legislation passed during the summer of 1937 and behind the DEIE's mission statement. And indeed, in his dealings with the CAEE, the delegate Juan Comas often emphasized this. For example, the fact that he, 'a delegate of the [Spanish] Government', was denied access to the CAEE transit camp was deemed 'unacceptable in a Spanish children's colony, regardless of the organization that supports it'.⁷⁶ Two weeks later, he was infuriated that the CAEE seemed to 'deny Spain the right to dispose of its children'.⁷⁷ To Juan Comas, whatever the CAEE and the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare may have negotiated in the fall of 1936, Spain as a nation, and as a state (which he represented), was the primary guardian of Spanish children abroad.

The second counter-measure to the feared denationalization of child evacuees involved replacing the individual placement of Spanish children with French foster families – the initial solution – with their collective placement in colonies under the care of Spanish civil servant teachers, or failing this, their placement with Spanish immigrant families. The objective was that the Spanish children living in France would remain as much as possible in a Spanish environment. In fact, this decision pre-dated the Ministry of
Education takeover of child evacuations; as mentioned above, in mid-March 1937, Federica Montseny had already begun enforcing it, underlining that this new placement method was a government decision from higher up. The government decree granting the Ministry of Education full responsibility over Spanish child evacuees further specified that:

> children evacuated abroad... should all receive, as much as possible, education and instruction under the direction of Spanish school teachers so that... they do not lose what unites them to Spanish culture nor, above all, their native tongue.⁷⁸

According to the Ministry of Education, 'anything less would mean the abandonment by the Government of the Republic of its inescapable duty to keep the culture, language and history of the fatherland alive in those who represent the generation of the future'.⁷⁹

The Education Ministry regulations as regards child evacuees in the summer of 1937 underline the fact that even for the most advanced, republican, and even Communist educationalists, the 'culture, history and language of the fatherland' were still the main building blocks of Spanish identity.⁸⁰ Since 1931, the Second Republic had officially promoted a more 'civic' and less 'ethnic' brand of nationalism, which sought to make Spain a 'community of democratic citizens' who valued the rule of law, freedom and equality.⁸¹ It is possible that, on the ground, such 'civic' nationalism was actually taught by Spanish schoolteachers appointed to colonies in France, but this does not appear in the legal texts and official instructions. Because the children were living abroad and ran the risk of being denationalized, emphasis was placed on the most basic and crucial elements of national identity.

This nationalist turn of the child evacuation policy was facilitated by the heritage of previous schooling policies on Spanish child immigrants, which had aimed to 'prevent them from losing their connection to their country of origin'.⁸² Since the early 1920s, the Foreign Ministry, through its Council for Cultural Relations (Junta de Relaciones Culturales), had been trying to open Spanish schools abroad in areas with a large Spanish immigrant population such as Toulouse, Bordeaux and Oran. Eventually, in 1932, the Council negotiated the creation of 21 Spanish after-school classes in metropolitan France and Algeria and 15 more in 1933. Instructors were recruited from among Spanish public schoolteachers through a competitive examination organized by the Ministry of Education. They taught Spanish language, history, geography and civic education. They were also required to celebrate important national holidays, 'become the propagandists of their country and of the Republican regime' and, in short, 'foster the national sentiment in the children of Spanish emigrants'.⁸³ When the DEIE was created in August 1937, it built on, and merged with, the Council – and indeed, the latter had been officially dissolved by the end of the year.⁸⁴

The DEIE, far from being created ex nihilo, thus took over the Council for Cultural Relations' pedagogical goals and its staff. At the DEIE Paris
headquarters, all workers were public schoolteachers formerly employed by the Council.⁸⁵ For example, Alejandro Tarragó, appointed in 1932 to teach in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers, became Comas’ right-hand man, while Juan Alonso Coll, appointed in 1933 to Pau in the South-West, became responsible for the census and statistical surveys of child evacuees.⁸⁶ The best example by far, however, was Comas himself. In parallel with his functions as provincial inspector for Segovia, he was recruited in 1933 by the Council for Cultural Relations to inspect Spanish classes and schools abroad every year.⁸⁷ Significantly, within the first three weeks of his appointment as DEIE, he left Paris for a two-day ‘inspection tour’ of Spanish children’s colonies in France.⁸⁸ Comas went about his tasks at the DEIE, acting as a school inspector – inspecting, evaluating and correcting.

The Ministry’s new policy towards child evacuees, and especially the new focus on collective housing, also benefited from the pedagogical expertise of Ministry officials. Spanish educationalists participated actively in international debates about summer camps and other welfare institutions for working-class children. As in other countries, summer camps were initially a philanthropic initiative with mostly health-related objectives for poor children from the cities. However, whereas Swiss or French summer camps were first organized by Catholic or Protestant charities at the end of the nineteenth century, in Spain, they were always promoted by educationalists and seen as a complement to schooling. Significantly, they were called ‘school holiday camps’ (*colonias escolares de vacaciones*). From the 1910s, the Ministry of Education was increasingly involved in financing, developing and regulating them.⁸⁹ The DEIE inherited both this tradition of state intervention in the operation of children’s colonies and the long-standing involvement of Spanish schoolteachers and educationalists in the matter. For example, Comas himself had co-authored a booklet on *Children’s Cantines and Colonies* in 1935. The same guidelines he advocated then could be found again, two years later, in the booklet *Children’s Colonies* published by the CNIE for the Paris Aid Conference.⁹⁰ One example demonstrates the extent to which Comas leant on his pre-existing educational baggage in the execution of his duties as delegate for evacuated children. When he was finally allowed into the CAEE transit camp, he noted that ‘three different meals were served there: one for Spanish children and adults, one for the French staff and one for the French management team’. CNIE guidelines, he remarked, insisted that the same menus be served to children and adults alike, with differences only in quantities.⁹¹ In his 1935 booklet, he had made the exact same recommendation. Even when it came to the finer details, Education Ministry officials relied on pre-existing beliefs and attitudes when dealing with the wartime child transports.

## A thwarted transformation: the challenges and costs of running a state policy

By the fall of 1937, by all appearances, the Spanish child evacuations abroad had fully transformed into a national public policy, designed within the
Ministry of Education and dutifully carried out by its civil servants on the ground. However, this transformation was contested from the start and would never be fully achieved.

First of all, the Ministry of Education's claim to be the sole official body responsible for evacuated children was challenged by other Spanish government officials. Amós Sabrás, the Social Welfare delegate, refused to abandon his post. After the government reshuffle of May 1937, he remained in France, now under the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, and collaborated with the CAEE and Basque government delegates to assist with the massive arrival of evacuated children from Bilbao. With the support of Labour Minister Jaime Aguadé, he successfully argued that the Ministry of Education was only responsible for school-aged children living in collective housing. In contrast, Social Welfare, which he represented, was still responsible for children under 8 and above 14 years old as well as children individually placed with families – who still represented, and would remain, the majority of Spanish child evacuees in France.⁹² The relationship between the two delegates was notoriously acrimonious, as they constantly competed to place children either in collective colonies or with French foster parents. What's more, the Basque government was dealing with child evacuations from Bilbao in an increasingly autonomous manner, developing a network of colonies where children of Basque nationalists could receive a Basque (and Catholic) education. When, upon his arrival in France, Comas asked the head of the Basque Department of Culture, Jesús María Leizaola, to hand over to him the list of teaching staff in Basque children's colonies in France, the latter simply answered that he 'disagreed with the decree giving [Comas] the power to ask what he was asking, since in his opinion this would lessen the powers granted to the Basque Country by the Statute [of Autonomy]'.⁹³ The Education Ministry's push for centralization failed, even within the Spanish context.

Second, the CAEE, which had until then been the Spanish government's principal partner in France, also protested the Ministry of Education's centralization policy. As I have argued elsewhere, the real deal-breaker for the CAEE was not the substance of the Education Ministry's decisions regarding Spanish children in France, but the fact that they sought to take them unilaterally, without any consultation or negotiation mechanism with the CAEE.⁹⁴ After weeks of mounting tension, the CAEE purely and simply refused the DEIE's claim to be 'the sole official organism in charge' of child evacuees in France.⁹⁵ Ironically, they turned the Ministry of Education's argument back on it, agreeing that the centralization of powers was indeed necessary, but should lie with them. Moreover, given that all Spanish children previously entrusted to their care were now placed, the CAEE's collaboration in the event of new transports was suspended, unless satisfying terms of agreement could be found.⁹⁶

The setbacks encountered by the Ministry of Education's delegate in France had two major consequences. First, child evacuations abroad were indeed interrupted from late September 1937. They would only resume in June
1938, when a new Minister of Education, Segundo Blanco, and a new team at the CNIE deemed that the advantages of life abroad, in countries where foodstuffs and other necessary items were not missing as badly as in Republican Spain, now far outweighed the 'risks of denationalization' to which the children were exposed when sent beyond the government's reach.⁹⁷ Second, as regards those thousands of children who were already living in France, and despite the repeated support of Minister Hernández himself, Comas had no real choice but to implicitly accept the CAEE's terms.⁹⁸ This amounted to an admission that, in practice, the new Spanish legislation adopted during the summer of 1937 could not be fully implemented on the ground.

The third, and last, element that thwarted the realization of the Ministry of Education's policy was money. Running colonies in France was extremely costly – too costly, as it turned out, to move the thousands of children living with foster families and place them in collective settings or to open a colony for every incoming group, especially if children were to continue to arrive as they had been each month by the hundreds, and sometimes thousands since January 1937. In order to cover these costs, Comas' initial strategy had been to diversify the colonies' sources of funding. In many countries, aid committees for Spanish children had been formed, but had been unable to convince their governments to open their borders to Spanish child evacuees. The DEIE thus encouraged them to finance children's colonies elsewhere, especially in Spain and in France. As soon as he arrived in France, Comas strove to arrange meetings with Swedish, Dutch and Czechoslovakian child relief committees, which he prioritized over CAEE meetings.⁹⁹ By 21 September 1937, he had come to an agreement with the Swedish committee to provide for the opening of three children's homes around Paris, where 170 school-aged children could be housed.¹⁰⁰ By April 1938, according to Juan Comas' successor – who was no other than his wife, Regina Lago, and the former head of the education section of the CNIE – the Swedish committee had become the sponsor of the largest group of children living in colonies in France (except of course, for the CAEE), supporting 350 children distributed across nine different colonies in the South-West and around Paris.¹⁰¹

Sponsorship from foreign aid committees was far from enough, however. Initially, the Spanish government had pledged to cover expenses if foreign funds were lacking; this was stated in the ministerial order creating the DEIE and that is what Comas was told when he was appointed. On 15 October 1937, he was promised a credit of 200,000 francs and asked for a further 4 million, but they never came, despite his desperate and repeated pleas.¹⁰² In November 1937, funds were lacking to the point that he could not pay the shipping costs for sending 50 Spanish schoolbooks to one of the CAEE colonies.¹⁰³ In the end, there was simply no money to implement the public policy envisioned by the Ministry. As the Spanish Deputy-Ambassador reluctantly recognized in June 1938, 'Our wish would be to keep all the children under our direct care and custody, but that is impossible, for lack of funds'.¹⁰⁴
Conclusion

Initially conceived as a solidarity project organized between activists of the French and Spanish left without the need for state intervention, within a year, child evacuations had become a centralized public policy, designed in ministerial offices and implemented by seasoned civil servants. In this particular case, this transformation was not imposed by foreign aid providers, simply because the CAEE was not an organization specialized in child aid but rather an offshoot of the French left and labour movement. Its members may have had an opinion on how best to care for the Spanish children in France, and they may have, at times, disagreed with Spanish officials on the issue, but their goal was not to reform Spanish child welfare institutions. In this context, three elements played a key role in turning child evacuations into public policy. First of all, Spanish state officials wanted to reinforce and modernize Spanish child welfare and educational institutions. Second, the fear that Spanish children might lose what connected them to the 'fatherland' — their language, culture and history — was very present within state and educationalist circles. This explains their desire to centralize all decision-making within the government regarding child evacuees and to place the children in collective settings that could constitute pockets of Spanishness abroad. Third, this project could not have been achieved had Spanish officials not been able to begin from a pre-existing foundation. Far from simply appropriating the CAEE's aid scheme, they built upon their own previous experiences in running school holiday camps and pre-existing policies designed to preserve a sense of national identity in the children of Spanish migrant workers.

The transformation of child evacuations abroad into public policy may be read, less as an example of humanitarian imperialism, as one chapter in the wider history of the reconstruction of the Spanish Republican state during the civil war. In the end, the government's attempt to nationalize the child transport relief scheme was a partial failure. No doubt, it suffered from the persistent weaknesses of the Republican state at war — a lack of political consensus within government and competition from autonomous, local and regional powers. However, there were also intrinsic weaknesses to the project; as it turned out, international aid could not be turned into state policy without the necessary funds.

This case study also points to a question that may not have been sufficiently explored by historians who research the imperialist component of humanitarian interventions, namely, the agency of recipient countries in these interactions, and the ways in which they appropriate international aid programs and adapt them to suit their needs. Undoubtedly, after the First World War, American humanitarianists seeking to rehabilitate Europe deliberately engaged in humanitarian state-building, hoping to transfer American expertise and institutions across the Atlantic. However, European national authorities may well have actively participated in this transfer. What's more, they may have done so, paradoxically, to further the nationalist agenda of modernizing and consolidating their states.
## Notes

1 La Contemporaine Library, University of Nanterre, *Archives of the French human rights league*, F Δ Rés. 798/62, folder 4, 'Conférence internationale pour l'aide aux enfants et aux réfugiés espagnols. Rapport de la Commission des Mandats' (Paris, 1937).

2 Archivo General de la Administración (subsequently AGA), *Educación*, 31/1347, Invoices from the printing house La Coopérative in Paris. Five thousand copies of the French edition and 5,000 copies of the English edition were ordered on 10 November 1937.

3 C. Keren, ‘Sur les routes. Exilés et réfugiés de la guerre d’Espagne’, in J. Canal and V. Duclert (eds), *La Guerre d’Espagne: Un conflit qui a façonné l’Europe* (Paris, 2016); S. Sheridan Breakwell, “‘Knowing how to be a mother’”: Parenting, emotion and evacuation propaganda during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), in C. Siebrecht, and H. Barron (eds), *Parenting and the State in Britain and Europe, c. 1870–1950. Raising the nation* (Basingstoke, 2017); J. Aróstegui Sánchez, and J.A. Martínez, *La Junta de Defensa de Madrid: Noviembre 1936-abril 1937* (Madrid, 1984), 171–188.

4 National Council for Evacuated Children, *Children's Colonies* (Spanish Republic. Ministry of Public Education, Paris, 1937).

5 *Ibid.*, 1.

6 *Ibid.*, ‘Foreword’.

7 In Spain, the 1936–1939 child evacuations abroad were ‘rediscovered’ in the mid-1980s, in the context of the 50th anniversary of the Civil War. The incentive for historical research into this subject came from activist groups of former child evacuees, spurred by the more general ‘recovery of historical memory’ movement of the 1990s and 2000s. The resulting body of historical work has concentrated much more on the experiences and memories of the children themselves (often using oral testimony) than on the political history of the adult activists and officials who initiated and ran the evacuations. See, among others, J.J. Alonso Carballés, *1937: los niños Vascos Evacuados a Francia y Bélgica: historia y memoria de un éxodo infantil, 1936–1940* (Bilbao, 1998); A. Alted Vigil, R. González Martell, and M.J. Millán (eds), *El exilio de los Niños* (Madrid, 2003); V. Sierra Blas, *Palabras Huérfanas: los niños y la Guerra Civil* (Madrid, 2009); S. Castillo, *Mis Años en la Escuela Soviética: El discurso autobiográfico de los niños españoles en la URSS* (Madrid, 2009); I. Colomina Limonero, *Dos Patrias, Tres Mil Destinos: vida y exilio de los niños de la guerra de España refugiados en la Unión Soviética* (Madrid, 2010); A. Pozo-Gutierrez, ‘Here, Look After Him’: *Voices of Basque evacuee children of the Spanish Civil War* (Southampton, 2012). The political aspects of the evacuations have mostly been studied in the case of Britain and France: T. Buchanan, ‘The role of the British labour movement in the origins and work of the Basque Children’s Committee, 1937–9’, *European History Quarterly*, 18, 2 (1988), 155–174; A. Bell, *Only for Three Months. The Basque children in exile* (Norwich, 1996).

8 On the productive interaction between public and private actors in the field of social protection, see the introduction to this book.

9 J. Irwin, *Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a nation's humanitarian awakening* (New York, 2013).

10 D. Rodogno, F. Piana, and S. Gautier, ‘Shaping Poland: Relief and rehabilitation programmes undertaken by foreign organizations, 1918–1922’, in D. Rodogno, B. Struck, and J. Vogel (eds), *Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, networks and issues from the 1840s to the 1930s* (New York, 2014).

11 *Ibid.*, 267.

12 C. Keren, ‘When the CGT did humanitarian work: Spanish children evacuated to France (1936–1939)’, *Le Mouvement Social*, 264, 3 (2018). Available on Cairn
international. https://www.cairn-int.info/abstract-E_LMS_264_0015--when-the-cgt-did-humanitarian-work.htm?contenu=article (accessed 28 October 2021); C. Keren, ‘Négocier l’aide humanitaire: Les évacuations d’enfants espagnols vers la France pendant la guerre civile (1936–1939)’, *Revue d’Histoire de l’Enfance ‘Ir-régulière’*, 15 (2013), 167–183.

13 ANSE Central Committee, ‘Il faut épargner aux enfants d’Espagne les conséquences de la Guerre civile’, *Tribune de l’Enfance. Organe mensuel de l’As-sociation nationale de soutien de l’enfance* (subsequently *Tribune de l’Enfance*), 1, 7 (July–August 1936), 1.

14 ‘Vite le deuxième million!’, *L’Humanité. Organe central du Parti Communiste (SIFIC)* (subsequently *L’Humanité*), 13761 (20 August 1936), 7.

15 ‘Il faut assurer le gîte et la nourriture aux petits enfants d’Espagne! Constituez partout des comités locaux d’hébergement!’, *L’Humanité*, 13763 (22 August 1936), 7.

16 M. Onof, ‘Mes impressions de délégation’, *Tribune de l’Enfance*, 1, 8 (1936), 4.

17 For an introduction to the Workers’ International Relief: K. Braskén, ‘In pursuit of global solidarity? The Workers’ International Relief, Willi Münzenberg and the Comintern, 1921–1935’, *CoWoPa – Comintern Working Paper*, 27 (Åbo, 2013).

18 L. Mercier, ‘Le Secours ouvrier international en France’, in J. Gotovitch, and A. Morelli (eds), *Les Solidarités Internationales: histoire et perspectives* (Bruxelles, 2003), 47. Both SOI/ANSE leaders feature in the now online biographical dictionary *Maitron en Ligne: dictionnaire biographique, mouvement ouvrier, mouvement social*, at https://maitron.fr/ (accessed 1 September 2020).

19 M. Leroy, *La Coutume Ouvrière: Syndicats, bourses du travail, fédérations professionnelles, coopératives, doctrines et institutions* (Paris, 1913), 680–684.

20 M. Onof, ‘Avant le plébiscite en Sarre. L’action du SOI’, *La Solidarité Ouvrière. Organe mensuel du Secours ouvrier international*, 2 (January 1935), 1; and 3 (February 1935), 1.

21 Onof, ‘Mes impressions’, op. cit.

22 M. Nelken, *Niños de Hoy, hombres de Mañana* (Madrid, 1937).

23 H. Graham, *The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939* (Cambridge, 2002), 79–131; J.L. Ledesma Vera, ‘Una retaguardia al rojo: las violencias en la zona republicana’, in F. Espinosa Maestre (ed), *Violencia Roja y Azul: España, 1936–1950* (Barcelona, 2010).

24 Onof, ‘Mes impressions’, op. cit. ‘Frente popular’ appears in Spanish in the original French text.

25 Keren, ‘When the CGT did humanitarian work’, op. cit.

26 J. Aróstegui, *Largo Caballero: el tesón y la quimera* (Barcelona, 2013), 515–544.

27 Febus Agency dispatch, ‘Francia se propone recoger a treinta mil niños españoles’, *ABC. Diario republicano de izquierdas*, Madrid edition (subsequently *ABC de Madrid*) (13 November 1936), 12.

28 French National Archives (subsequently AN), *Archive of the Commission d’aide aux enfants espagnols réfugiés en France*, 20010225/1, f. 1–7, Meeting minutes of the French Popular Front National Committee, 7 January 1937.

29 F. Montseny, *Mi Experiencia en el Ministerio de Sanidad y Asistencia Social. Conference pronunciada el 6 de junio de 1937 en el Teatro Apolo de Valencia* (CNT, Valencia, 1937), 8.

30 Presidential Decree of 21 November 1936. *Gaceta de la República*, 330 (25 November 1936), 786–787. My italics.

31 Ministerial Decree of 14 January 1937. *Gaceta de la República*, 17 (17 January 1937), 380.

32 Presidential Decree of 4 January 1937, *Gaceta de la República*, 7 (7 January 1937), 107.
33 The National Committee on Refugees was created on 5 October 1936 as a Pop-
ular Front, public-private entity, typical of the governance regime of Republi-
can Spain during the early months of the Civil War. It was placed directly under
the responsibility of the Prime Minister. Presidential Decree of 30 January 1937.
*Gaceta de la República*, 33 (2 February 1937), 589–590.

34 F. Godicheau, *La guerre d’Espagne: République et révolution en Catalogne, 1936–1939* (Paris, 2004), 76.

35 *Ibid*., 130–135.

36 Montseny, *op. cit.*, 14, 27.

37 A good example is P. Carasa Soto, ‘La asistencia social privada en la España moderna y contemporánea’, *Estudios de historia de España*, 19 (2017), 255–290.

38 A. Guillén, ‘The emergence of the Spanish welfare state’, *International Journal of Political Economy*, 20, 2 (1990), 82–96; M.D. de la Calle Velasco, ‘Sobre los orígenes del Estado social en España’, *Ayer*, 25 (1997), 127–150.

39 J.M. Fernández Soria and A. Mayordomo Pérez, ‘Perspectiva histórica de la protección a la infancia en España’, *Historia de la Educación*, 3 (1984), 191–214.

40 Febus Agency dispatch, ‘La evacuación de niños a Francia’, *ABC de Madrid* (19 December 1936), 6.

41 ‘Indications pour la venue en France des enfants d’Espagne’, *La Voix du Peuple* [internal CGT Bulletin] (December 1936), 793.

42 CGT Archives, *CAEE Papers*, 97 CFD 46/1, f. 104ss. Statement of expenses of the CAEE.

43 Febus Agency dispatch, ‘Organización de expediciones de niños para el extran-
jero’, CNT, 485 (10 December 1936), 2.

44 The presidential decree of 21 November 1936 organizing ministerial services did provide for the creation of Provincial Councils of Social Welfare, but actually setting them up took months.

45 Fundación Pablo Iglesias (subsequently FPI), *Amós Sabrás Papers*, AH-81-4, f. 6, Telegram from Federica Montseny to the Secretary General for Social Welfare of the Basque country, 3 March 1937.

46 Ibid., f. 18, Letter from Amós Sabrás to Federica Montseny, Paris, 17 March 1937.

47 Ibid.

48 Ministerial Orders of 17 and 23 February 1937. *Gaceta de la República*, 49 (18 February 1937), 871, and 57 (26 February 1937), 982–983.

49 FPI, *Amós Sabrás Papers*, AH-81-4, f. 17 and 23, Telegram from Federica Montseny to Amós Sabrás of 19 March 1937 and letter from Federica Montseny to the CAEE of 8 April 1937.

50 AGA, *Asuntos exteriores*, 54/11044, Report from Victoria Kent and Bernardino Valle, Spanish Embassy delegates at the November 1937 international conference for aid to Spanish children in Paris, 20 November 1937.

51 AN, *Archive of the Commission d'aide aux enfants espagnols réfugiés en France*, 20010221/9, inventory 2, folder 3, f. 181–186, Letter from Georges Buisson to the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, undated [31 March 1937].

52 On this issue, see Keren, ‘Négocier l’aide humanitaire’, *op. cit*.

53 Ministerial Order of 25 February 1937. *Gaceta de la República*, 60 (1 March 1937), 1021.

54 AGA, *Educación*, 31/1347, Meeting minutes of the Central Delegation for Colonies, 26 February 1937.

55 *Ibid.*, Meeting minutes of the Central Delegation for Colonies, 4 April 1937.

56 Presidential Decree of 28 June, *Gaceta de la República*, 180 (29 June 1937), 1405–1406.

57 Besides the Presidential Decree cited in *ibid.*, the most important were the Presidential Decree of 6 August 1937, the Ministerial Order of 10 August 1937 and
the Ministerial Order of 24 August 1937. They were, respectively, published in the *Gaceta de la República*, 219 (7 August 1937), 510–511; 228 (16 August 1937) and 671–672; 240 (28 August 1937), 827.

58 Ministerial Order of 24 August 1937, op. cit.

59 Ministerial Order of 10 August 1937, op. cit.

60 AGA, *Presidencia*, 51/21120, Letter from the delegate Regina Lago de Comas to the foreign relations section of the CNIE, Paris, 23 April 1938.

61 Ministerial Order of 10 August 1937, op. cit. My italics.

62 AN, *Archive of the Commission d'aide aux enfants espagnols réfugiés en France*, 20010221/9, inventory 2, folder 2, f. 101–102, Letter from Juan Comas to the CAEE, Paris, 1 September 1937.

63 *Ibid.*, f. 105–106, 'Points fondamentaux d'accord préalable', attached to the letter from Juan Comas to Georges Buisson, Paris, 3 September 1937.

64 E. Moradiellos, *Don Juan Negrín* (Barcelona, 2006), 257–289.

65 F. Hernández Sánchez, *Guerra o Revolución: El partido comunista de España en la guerra civil* (Barcelona, 2010), 133–135.

66 Godicheau, *op. cit.*, 17.

67 Ministerial Order of 4 July 1938, *Gaceta de la República*, 190 (9 July 1938), 107. I thank Alba Padrós for pointing this out to me.

68 Fernández Soria and Mayordomo Pérez, *op. cit.*, 198; N. Stargardt, *Witnesses of War: Children's lives under the Nazis* (New York, 2007), 13; for a general view, see H. Cunningham, *Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500* (3rd edn, London and New York, 2020), 109–161.

69 A. Cohen Amselem, 'La mortalidad de los niños', in J.M. Borrás Llop (ed), *Historia de la infancia en la España contemporánea (1834-1936)* (Madrid, 1996); E. Rodríguez Ocaña, 'Una medicina para la infancia', in *ibid.*; M. Nash, 'Social eugenics and nationalist race hygiene in early twentieth century Spain', *History of European Ideas*, 15, 4–6 (1992).

70 M. del Mar del Pozo Andrés and J.F.A. Braster, 'The rebirth of the “Spanish race”: The state, nationalism, and education in Spain, 1875–1931', *European History Quarterly*, 29, 1 (1999), 75–107; for an international view, see B. Falaize and al. (eds), *L'école et la Nation* (Lyon, 2013); for a view on Eastern Europe, see T. Zahra, *Kidnapped Souls: National indifference and the battle for children in the Bohemian lands, 1900-1948* (Ithaca, NY and London, 2008).

71 International Institute of Social History, *CNT Papers*, 66E. 2, Report by Secretary Enrique Alaiz on the current state of the CNIE, Barcelona, 1 August 1938.

72 E. White, 'Relief, reconstruction and the rights of the child: The case of Russian displaced children in Constantinople, 1920–22', in N. Baron (ed), *Displaced Children in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1915–1953. Ideologies, identities, experiences* (Leiden, 2017), 84.

73 *Ibid*, 75.

74 K.D. Watenpaugh, 'The League of Nations' rescue of Armenian genocide survivors and the making of modern humanitarianism, 1920–1927', *The American Historical Review*, 115, 5 (2010), 1315–1339.

75 T. Zahra, *The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's families after World War II* (Cambridge and London, 2011).

76 AN, *Archive of the Commission d'aide aux enfants espagnols réfugiés en France*, 20010221/9, inventory 2, folder 2, f. 101–102, Letter from Juan Comas to the CAEE, Paris, 1 September 1937.

77 *Ibid.*, f. 116–119, Letter from Juan Comas to Georges Buisson, Paris, 17 September 1937.

78 Presidential Decree of 6 August 1937, op. cit.

79 Ministerial Order of 10 August 1937, op. cit.

80 On the crucial importance of language in defining Spanish identity, see J. Moreno Luzón, 'El genio de la raza. Las conmemoraciones cervantinas a comienzos del
siglo xx, entre lo nacional y lo transnacional', *Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez*, 50, 2 (2020), 67-90.

81 M. del Mar del Pozo Andrés, 'Educación para la ciudadanía democrática en la Segunda República: Un intento de construcción de la identidad desde la escuela', *Historia de la Educación. Revista interuniversitaria*, 27 (2008), 106.

82 L. Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla, 'La enseñanza de los emigrantes. Entre la defensa de la identidad española y la política de asimilación francesa', *Hispania*, 62, 211 (2002), 524.

83 *Ibid.*, 528.

84 AGA, *Presidencia*, 54/11675, Letter from Wenceslao Roces, Under-Secretary for Education, to Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo, Spanish Ambassador to France, Barcelona, 2 December 1937.

85 *Ibid.*, 51/21120, Letter from the delegate Regina Lago de Comas to the foreign relations section of the CNIE, Paris, 23 April 1938.

86 These appointments can be found in the Ministerial Orders of 18 November 1932 and 21 November 1933, respectively, published in *Gaceta de la República*, 324 (19 November 1932), 1235-1236; and 335 (1 December 1937), 1417.

87 Junta de Relaciones Culturales, *Memoria correspondiente a los años 1931 a 1933* (Ministerio de Estado, Madrid, 1934), 14.

88 AN, *Archive of the Commission d'aide aux enfants espagnols réfugiés en France*, 20010221/9, inventory 2, folder 2, f. 125, Letter from Alejandro Tarragó to Georges Buisson, Paris, 7 September 1937.

89 P.L. Moreno Martínez, 'De la caridad y la filantropía a la protección social del Estado: las colonias escolares de vacaciones en España (1887-1936)', *Historia de la Educación. Revista Interuniversitaria*, 28 (2009), 135-159.

90 J. Comas Camps and D. Correas, *Cantinas y Colonias Escolares* (Madrid, 1935).

91 AN, *Archive of the Commission d'aide aux enfants espagnols réfugiés en France*, 20010221/9, inventory 2, folder 2, f. 101-102, Letter from Juan Comas to the CAEE, Paris, 1 September 1937.

92 According to Spanish official counts, in November 1937, 2,683 Spanish children were living in colonies, and 4,143 in families, for a total of 6,826 Spanish children evacuated to France. Report of the DEIE at the international conference for aid to Spanish children, Paris, November 1937. AN, *Archive of the Commission d'aide aux enfants espagnols réfugiés en France*, 20010221/9, inventory 2, folder 2, f. 48-76.

93 Letter from Juan Comas to Spanish Ambassador Angel Ossorio y Gallardo, Paris, 17 September 1937. *Ibid*. The October 1936 Statute of Autonomy did include education and culture in Article 4.

94 Keren, 'Négocier l'aide humanitaire', *op. cit*.

95 AN, *Archive of the Commission d'aide aux enfants espagnols réfugiés en France*, 20010221/9, inventory 2, folder 2, f. 105-106, see the 'Points fondamentaux d'accord préalable', attached to the letter from Juan Comas to Georges Buisson, Paris, 3 September 1937.

96 *Ibid.*, f. 131-136, Letter from Georges Buisson to Juan Comas, Paris, 30 September 1937.

97 International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, *CNT Papers*, 66E. 2, Report by Secretary Enrique Alaiz on the current state of the CNIE, Barcelona, 1 August 1938.

98 AN, *Archive of the Commission d'aide aux enfants espagnols réfugiés en France*, 20010221/9, inventory 2, folder 2, f. 145-146, and 148-149, Official communication from Jesús Hernández to Juan Comas, for the CAEE, 15 October 1937; and Note from the DEIE to the CAEE, Paris, 25 October 1937.

99 *Ibid.*, f. 103, Letter from Juan Comas to Georges Buisson, Paris, 2 September 1937.

100 AGA, *Asuntos exteriores*, 54/11056, folder 6446, Letter from Juan Comas to Spanish Ambassador Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo, Paris, 21 September 1937.
101 AGA, *Presidencia*, 51/21120, Letter from the delegate Regina Lago de Comas to the foreign relations section of the CNIE, Paris, 23 April 1938. The numbers given here come from CGT Archives, *CAEE Papers*, 97 CFD 45/6, f. 27-31, List of children's colonies in France 'managed and controlled by the DEIE', 4 May 1938. According to this list, there were 2,567 Spanish children living in colonies in France at that time.

102 AGA, *Asuntos exteriores*, 82/02666, folder 182, Telegram from Spanish Ambassador Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo to Foreign Minister José Giral, Paris, 23 October 1937.

103 CGT Archives, *CAEE Papers*, 97 CFD 46/3, Letter from Émile Baynac, director of Lamothe castle colony, to Georges Buisson, Villeneuve-sur-Lot, 13 November 1937.

104 AGA, *Asuntos exteriores*, 54/11239, folder 6109, Letter from José Carner Puig Oriol, Deputy Spanish Ambassador in Paris, to José de Benito, consul in Sète, Paris, 27 June 1938.

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# 7 Dividing international work on social protection of migrants

The International Labour Office and private organizations (1921–1935)¹

Linda Guerry

## Introduction

Immediately after World War I, the idea of regulations about international migration integrating the concept of migrant protection was raised for the first time by an international organization: the newly formed International Labour Organization (ILO),² whose goal was to build ‘a universal system of protection providing minimum guarantees to all emigrants.’³ Its permanent secretariat, the International Labour Office, tried to find a stance that could satisfy the often divergent interests of its different members by leaning in particular on non-governmental organizations, which were referred to at the time as ‘private organizations.’ Above and beyond an assessment of the unequal influence of the various players involved, this chapter aims to show how that inequality led to establishing a division of labour⁴ that would contribute to the internationalization of the question of social protection for migrants.

The ILO, an organization tied to the League of Nations, was created by the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919. Its purpose was to employ international law to create social justice in the interest of peace. In its early years, the organization, with its unique three-party structure (comprised representatives of governments, workers and employers), had to impose itself on the international scene. Its permanent secretariat, the International Labour Office, the organization's central hub, worked hard to establish its legitimacy, negotiating with representatives of governments asserting their sovereignty in a context of tension and economic crisis. The Office's project of adopting international labour standards, known as Conventions and Recommendations, was an extension of the social-policy reform work already being done by private organizations before the First World War.⁵ Those reformers – some of whom, including the first director, the Socialist Reformist and former French Minister of Armament Albert Thomas (1878–1932), went on to join the Office – supported the idea of impartial, coordinated management of migration flows in order to regulate the labour market at the international level, while increasing migrants' social protection at the same time.⁶ Their goal was also to use migration as a lever to help spread the rights recently won by nationals in order to create universal labour rights.⁷
The need for consensus among the different parties led the Office both to develop ties and to collaborate discreetly with private migrant-protection associations. Most of them had been founded by religious organizations, often in the late nineteenth century, as migration flows had been increasing to several countries, primarily in Europe, the British Empire and North America. As recent historiography has shown, the Office, whose director hoped to turn it into a centre for social expertise, used private groups as resources for information as well as for networking in different fields.⁸ Studies of the ‘transnational sphere,’⁹ which focus on the connections between and circulation amongst players in and on the fringes of international organizations during the interwar period, have revealed the role of non-state actors. With ties to various movements, such as Social Christianity, humanitarian aid and the feminist movement, they participated in getting certain issues onto the international agenda, and in drafting new international standards, particularly by providing expert information to various advisory bodies.¹⁰ This chapter will focus on actors who have seldom been studied in the history of migration policies and who were key players in the early stages of international migration governance.¹¹ While research on the ILO has increased in recent years on the occasion of the centenary of the organization,¹² little attention has been paid to the organization’s migration work in the 1920s and 1930s.¹³ The analysis I propose is in a similar vein to recent research focusing on key collective and individual players and policy-makers and on their discourse and practices in constructing and internationalizing public issues. From that point of view, the interactions between private and international organizations in constructing the issue of social protection for migrants have not been studied in depth.¹⁴ This chapter will focus on the relationships between the Office and the migrant-protection groups that banded together into an umbrella organization: the Permanent Conference for the Protection of Migrants (CPPM). The history of the construction of those relationships, the factors that led to those organizations uniting and the division of labour put into place by the Office and its consequences on how the issue of migrant protection was shaped remain to be written. Research for the chapter drew largely on the archives of the Office and the League, which included minutes of meetings, records of decisions, reports and publications as well as correspondence and internal memos. The latter sources shed light on issues that would not necessarily appear in texts meant to be made public. The research focussed on the players present, their material and symbolic resources, their practices and relationships, and both the constraints imposed and the opportunities provided by institutional frameworks and international events. This chapter will successively analyse the relationship established between migrant-protection organizations and the Office in 1921, the process that led to migrant-protection groups coming together under the banner of the CPPM, and that collective organization’s status and role within the framework of the division of labour devised by the Office. It will also explore what the CPPM produced as well as what caused it to disappear.
## Establishing ties between the office and migrant-protection organizations: The International Emigration Commission

The first bonds between migrant-protection organizations and Office officials were woven at a meeting of an advisory board on the question of migrations that had been established to define the ILO's stance on that issue. In accordance with a decision approved in a resolution on unemployment that was adopted at the first session of the International Labour Conference (held in Washington DC, in November, 1919), the Governing Body¹⁵ of the ILO established the International Emigration Commission (IEC), which would meet in Geneva from 2 to 11 August 1921. The tripartite commission included 18 representatives of governments, employers and workers (nine European and nine non-European countries were represented). The IEC, which had no permanent mandate, adopted 29 resolutions covering a broad programme: 'to find remedies for the various abuses to which emigrants are subject' while respecting 'the sovereign right of each state.'¹⁶ Among the resolutions adopted were: information-gathering (legislation and migration statistics), creating a permanent emigration commission, state supervision of emigration agents, insuring emigrants during the voyage, examining emigrants before embarkation and protecting emigrants in ports and at borders. On the margins of national-sovereignty issues, or else reinforcing government control of migratory paths, the resolutions addressed subjects to which governments did not raise objections. Alongside representatives of governments, workers and employers, the Commission also heard both from representatives of British steamship companies – who defended 'a policy of free play of emigration and immigration' and from 'the representatives of certain international associations whose object is to improve the conditions of emigrants.'¹⁷ 'Several delegates, both men and women, came from America,' and their organizations and associations provided the commission with 'special enquiries.'¹⁸

Louis Varlez (1868–1930), a Belgian who was a close associate of Albert Thomas, was appointed to be secretary of the IEC. A lawyer who taught at the University of Ghent, Varlez was instrumental in building bonds between the Office and the private organizations. In 1900, he founded a system of assistance to unemployed people in the city of Ghent that involved both public authorities (the municipal government) and unions; it would go on to be applied in many other cities. Having cofounded the International Association on Unemployment (IAU) in 1910, he used it as a pulpit for defending the public system of assistance to the unemployed.¹⁹ The IAU's role was to co-ordinate the efforts to limit unemployment being made in various countries. They used a range of different means to achieve this: organizing conferences, subsidizing and publishing research, and soliciting both private and public institutions. The association was close to both Socialist and labour-union circles and particularly with Albert Thomas; in the 1920s, several high-ranking
officials and experts at the Office came from the IAU.²⁰ In 1920, Varlez was appointed to run one of the Office's technical departments,²¹ the Unemployment Section, which was renamed the Emigration and Unemployment Section (or Service) in 1921.²² In 1928, having reached mandatory retirement age, he was replaced by his Belgian colleague Henri Fuss (1882–1964).²³ From 1921 on, thanks to a meeting with the IEC, Varlez began to develop ties with the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), which he saw as a resource for useful information for the Office. This umbrella movement of protestant women's organizations was founded in England in the mid-nineteenth century and then spread to North America, where aiding female immigrants became the principle focus of its work.²⁴ It eventually developed enormous expertise and experience in a social approach to migrations on an international scale. Varlez had this to say about them:

> The many international charitable organizations, such as the YMCA [Young Men's Christian Association] and the YWCA, and national ones, such as the countless groups and institutions of emigrants in the countries of immigration, should be seen as agents of information in terms of the abuses they are aware of – ardently impassioned agents, granted, but ones whose information could be effectively verified.²⁵

Varlez also grabbed at the chance to build ties with the United States, at a time when the country was closing its borders and expressing hostility to the idea of the Office handling migratory issues (it had not sent a delegation to the IEC). Varlez followed the advice of Ernest Greenwood, the Office's representative in Washington DC, who suggested that Thomas accept American organizations' requests for invitations to attend the IEC:

> It would be a matter of good policy, [would help us] make friends and give us some most desirable publicity [...] the more interest which is taken by organizations such as these in the work of the International Labour Office, the easier it will be to deal with the administration.²⁶

On their end, YWCA members reached out to the freshly minted international organizations, offering to help enlarge their networks and develop their resources. They used their ability to provide information and to investigate situations to gain access on the Genevan international scene. In April 1921, the young American social worker Mary E. Hurlbutt²⁷ met with Thomas and Varlez to present a report-in-progress based on what social workers had gleaned about the hardship and abuse suffered by migrants in their countries of origin (Poland and Czechoslovakia), transit (France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and Turkey) and destination (United States and Canada). At that time, Hurlbutt was working for the first international organization specifically dedicated to social work with migrants, the International Migration Service (IMS),²⁸ which had been founded in London just a month earlier, in
March 1921, and which had replaced the Migration Committee of the World YWCA (WYWCA).²⁹

Subsequent correspondence between Varlez and Hurlbutt nonetheless allowed the Office to limit the scope of cooperation between the international organization and the private ones; it also shows the influence of the government-level players whose demands Thomas had to meet. Hurlbutt asked Varlez for the Office's support (an official letter of cooperation) for an investigation she was conducting, *The Welfare of Migrants*, that she was presenting as a contribution to the work of the IEC, which would be convening a few months later.³⁰ Varlez refused; the Office could not commission an investigation from a private organization without running the risk of provoking governmental ire, particularly in the immigration nations, which were resisting the idea of letting the international organization address migration. A questionnaire made for the purposes of the investigation, which implied that it was being conducted under the Office's aegis, led to a complaint being filed by the High Commissioner of the Dominion of New Zealand. The situation angered Thomas, who remembered, 'the little lady's visit' and insisted that Varlez clarify their respective positions: the YWCA's work had to remain 'unofficial.' The Office, as an official agency, could not provide patronage for such a survey, 'which would not please the various governments.'³¹

Although the Office had to insist that the IMS's work was 'unofficial,' it was nonetheless helpful to Thomas, who could take advantage of the information found through its investigations. He also maintained ties with its members and counted on their presence at the IEC. Hurlbutt's report, which was printed a month before the IEC was held, was sent by Elizabeth Clark, co-founder of the IMS, to Thomas before the Commission was convened. A few days later, Thomas urged Varlez to write Clark a 'warm and polite letter in response,' letting her know that he hoped she would be able to 'attend the commission as an auditor', adding that she 'was worth the trouble.'³² The summer of 1921 saw the beginning of a steady stream of correspondence between the women of the IMS and Varlez. In July, Clark (IMS) and Ruth Crawford (a member of the American branch of the YWCA) met with Varlez in Geneva, where they were able to audit the IEC meeting. In their correspondence, Clark presents her organization as a key international player and criticizes other organizations' amateurism. She flaunts her international capital,³³ mentioning, among other things, her organization's ties to parliamentarians and its ability to mobilize people in numerous countries on the issue:

> Just returned from a long trip in Scandinavia, the Baltic states and Germany, doing preliminary work to arouse interest in the welfare of women migrants. It is an extremely easy subject on which to arouse enthusiasm, and I had an opportunity of leaving a definite impression on about 3,000 people, both within and without our organisation.³⁴
More than once, Clark ordered copies of the Office's publications in order to distribute them, including 2,000 copies in several languages of the *International Labour Review*'s article about the IEC,³⁵ which pleased Thomas and Varlez; the latter offered to send her copies of other documents for distribution.³⁶ For that reason, he asked Clark for the addresses of the national YWCAs as well as the list of European organizations they were in contact with.³⁷

American organizations that were active in other countries tried to establish a place for themselves in international organizations as early as 1921 at the IEC meeting in Geneva. That meeting offered them opportunities both to become better known internationally and to develop their European network. From the Office's point of view, the organizations represented special relationships: although the Office had to maintain a certain distance from them, it also needed to build ties for two key reasons: both because it was in the Office's interest to become better known and to build a network in the United States, which had not joined the ILO (until 1934) despite playing a crucial role in the era's migration policy; and because the organizations in question possessed knowledge and produced information that would be useful for the Office's future programme on the migration question.

## Uniting migrant-protection organizations

In order to increase migrant-protection groups' influence, three competing initiatives aiming to bring them together under an umbrella organization emerged in the early 1920s.³⁸ This eventually led to the founding of the CPPM. The first was initiated by the Office, which needed those groups to support its actions. That initiative illustrates how Varlez, a key player, used his experience and multi-positionality to implement it. As early as March 1921, Varlez discussed the project of an umbrella organization with Clark,³⁹ broaching the idea of the 'possibility of an agreement on principles, and co-operation in action, with the chief international associations interested in migration problems'⁴⁰ at the General Assembly of the IAU held in Luxembourg on 1 September 1923.

The IAU, which was the forerunner of the ILO to a certain extent,⁴¹ was meeting again after having gone into dormancy during World War I; it established an emigration and colonization commission as a remedy to unemployment, a subject it had already begun to address in 1913.⁴² Varlez already had considerable experience in international umbrella organizations for private organizations. He had played an important role in organizing the International Conference on Unemployment that was held in Paris in 1910 (before the founding of the IAU to which he also participated), an umbrella organization with hundreds of members from 27 countries, which had been conceived 'as a means for institutionalizing a new sector of reform'.⁴³ That experience, as well as Varlez's deep ties to the voluntary sector, made it possible for the Office to launch the umbrella organization it needed. Thomas,
a founding member of the French section of the AIU attended the 1923 as-
sembly in Luxembourg, where he gave a speech emphasizing

the importance of the freedom that major international social-policy
groups can contribute to the work of the Office [which] is obligated to
respect a certain reserve. It is up to them to act as stimuli for the official
bodies themselves.⁴⁴

The second initiative had been launched by an Englishman called Lucien Wolf, a journalist, minority-rights activist, key member of the Joint Foreign Committee – a civil-rights organization for British Jews – and a member of the Jewish Colonisation Association (JCA), which was founded in 1891 in London by Baron de Hirsch, a philanthropist who supported emigration to South America for Eastern European Jews.⁴⁵ In 1921, seeking support from international organizations, Wolf contacted the Office to make sure that the IEC would take into account the Jewish emigration that his organization was implementing in agricultural colonies that had both economic and humanitarian objectives. Wolf wrote to Thomas to suggest an advisory board of migrant-protection organizations attached to the Office, modelled on the Advisory Board of Private Organizations created by Albert Thomas's friend Fridtjof Nansen, from the League's High Commission for Refugees, where Wolf had represented the JCA.⁴⁶ Created in 1921, the League advisory board's mandate was to coordinate private migrant-assistance actions with those taken by governing bodies in countries that had accepted refugees. Wolf's initiative emerged in September 1923, and Thomas, Wolf and Varlez discussed it more than once. The Office was 'particularly interested in it'⁴⁷ because Thomas saw Wolf as an influential 'liaison between the Office and private organizations' (particularly British ones).⁴⁸ It would also seem that Office officials may have been hoping that the JCA would finance an umbrella organization of migrant-protection groups, as Thomas and Varlez referred to 'Baron Hirsch's millions' as a possible resource.⁴⁹

In the context of a certain competition between emigration nations (Italy first among them), which sought to organize protection for their own emigrants, and the Office's programme that had been adopted by the IEC in 1921, the third initiative had Thomas worried.⁵⁰ In May 1924, the Italian government's High Commissioner for Emigration, Giuseppe De Michelis,⁵¹ organized an inter-governmental meeting in Rome: the International Conference on Immigration and Emigration.⁵² Preparations for the conference fuelled tension between Thomas and De Michelis: the latter, having accused the Office of failing to implement the IEC's 1921 programme, originally intended not to involve the Office in the organization of the Conference.⁵³ The Italian commissioner planned to start by using the Conference to assemble all the private organizations involved in emigrant protection – many of which were controlled by the Italian government – in order to draw up their own programme.⁵⁴ Protests from the immigration nations participating in
the Conference obliged De Michelis to abandon that idea.⁵⁵ In the end, in response to those governments' distrust, the private organizations' resolutions were marginalized: they were debated during a special session towards the end of the Conference and distributed to delegates without any official action being taken.⁵⁶

As preparations for the Rome Conference were underway, Thomas and Varlez took advantage of that competing initiative to bring migrant-protection groups together, blending Varlez's initiative with 'the Wolf committee's' and getting them to work on a common programme of resolutions to present at the Conference. On 5 March 1924, two months before the Conference was scheduled to begin, Varlez, in the name of the IAU, summoned the international protection organizations in attendance in Luxembourg six months earlier: Catholic groups, like the International Catholic Association of Charities Protecting Young Women, and Saint Raphael Societies for the Protection of Emigrants; Protestant ones, like the YMCA and the YWCA; and Jewish ones, like the JCA, the Unified Committee for Jewish Emigration and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.⁵⁷ Over a dozen organizations were represented as well as delegates from the labour movement.⁵⁸ Together, they created an ad hoc international committee of emigrant-protection organizations in order to draft resolutions.⁵⁹ Varlez was appointed to preside that committee. The organizations that gathered on 5 March decided to reconvene on 23 April, two weeks before the conference in Rome. At that time, 63 resolutions to present in Rome were adopted and sorted into categories: 'emigrant transport,' 'hygiene and sanitary services,' 'collaboration between emigration and immigration service in various countries,' 'charities providing assistance to emigrants in their countries of embarkation, to candidates for immigration in ports of debarkation and to immigrants - including special assistance to women and children,' 'emigrants' adaptation to immigration countries' labour needs and means for achieving that end,' 'developing cooperation, provident societies and mutuality among emigrants' and a 'list of principles to which emigration treaties must conform,' which echoed the 'principles established in the texts adopted by the International Labour Conference.'⁶⁰

The Office's winning strategy was to take advantage of the private organization's distrust of governments to federate them and convince them to accept the Office's patronage at the Rome Conference. The approach enabled the Office to reinforce its legitimacy, which had been weakened by the organization of the inter-governmental conference, by flaunting the private organizations' faith in it.⁶¹ Those organizations had requested that the Office be their intermediary, handing their resolutions to the secretary of the Rome Conference. The members of the ad hoc International Committee of Emigrant Protection Organizations that Varlez, an Office official, had managed to convene through his organization, adopted a resolution asking Albert Thomas to 'please inform them of the conditions in which the present ad hoc committee could be allowed to collaborate with the Office in an advisory-committee status.'⁶²
**What was the point of the umbrella organization?**

Discussions about the International Committee of Private Organisations for the Protection of Emigrants' status and purpose took up a good portion of their first few meetings. There was much internal debate and negotiating about obtaining official recognition. The Office steered the committee towards unofficial work, defining an independent status that could advance the cause of migrant protection unfettered by official constraints, while enabling international organizations to consult with them on certain topics.

In September 1924, the third committee meeting involved almost a dozen delegates from different groups. Varlez came with two colleagues from the Office's Emigration and Unemployment Section, who attended in their roles as members of the IAU: Henri Fuss and Imre Ferenczi (1884–1945), a Hungarian.⁶³ Different points of view were aired at that meeting. Wolf expressed concern that without official recognition as an advisory board to the Office, the committee's role would be too limited, and it would lack funding. Defending the Office's objective, Varlez, Fuss and Ferenczi encouraged them to continue their work, emphasizing the committee's specific nature: it could act “where official bodies are regretfully obliged to abstain,” conducting investigations that would be “unofficial, but from an international standpoint.” Whereas Zevi Aberson, who was representing several different Jewish organizations, and Olivier H. Mc Cowen, from the World YMCA Executive Committee, advocated for the idea of coordinating private associations via a ‘liaison committee’ in order to bring ‘emigration issues into the scope of international humanitarian action.’ Wolf wound up being persuaded by Thomas, who spoke at the meeting, steering the committee towards a role as experts for the Office’s official advisory board, which was then being formed.⁶⁴

In order to develop its legislative work as well as its capacity for investigation and documentation, the Office needed knowledgeable external partners. To that end, it began creating advisory boards of different types, composed of recognized experts in their fields, such as the Permanent Migration Committee (PMC), an advisory board preparing conventions on the subject of migration to propose at the ILO's annual conference that was founded by the Governing Body in January 1925.⁶⁵ The idea of creating a permanent advisory board on the subject of migrations had been proposed by the IEC as far back as 1921. Various obstacles – not only immigration and emigration countries' differing interests, but also pressure from steamship companies who opposed to having migration regulated – had delayed its implementation. The Rome Conference's resolutions enabled the Office to speed up the process of creating that board. Convened at the Governing Body's request (it met only five times: in 1925, 1926, 1930, 1934 and 1936), the advisory board respected the ILO's tripartite rule: it had just three members, the president of the Governing Body and both of his vice-presidents,⁶⁶ who could request expert studies on specific issues. A list of nearly 100 approved experts, 13 of whom belonged to private organizations (including 11 from the ad hoc
international committee of migrant-protection organizations),⁶⁷ was drawn up and adopted by the Governing Body.⁶⁸ Composing the list had been no easy matter, particularly, ‘the idea of private emigrant-protection organizations’ representation.⁶⁹ Thomas had to emphasize the ‘strictly technical and non-representative capacity’ of members of emigrant-protection groups, who had to join in their own name rather than their organizations’.⁷⁰ Once the experts had been named, Wolf and Ruth Larned, the IMS’s International Director, concluded that the ad hoc international committee of migrant-protection organizations’ work was done, insofar as it had achieved their initial goal: official consultation of its members by the Office. Other members, however, insisted that ‘the committee’s most important task is propaganda’ and that ‘representatives of private associations’ influence [...] will be increased by periodic meetings where resolutions will be adopted, goals stated, and actions potentially organized.’⁷¹ Their stance carried the day, as the ad hoc committee became an established organization in February 1925,⁷² adopting statutes six months later, at their first session,⁷³ which was attended by delegates from 48 different organizations.⁷⁴

What was by then the Permanent Conference for the Protection of Migrants – referred to in both French and English by its French acronym, CPPM – included an eight-member board of directors that Larned, Varlez and Wolf were elected to⁷⁵ and that met two to five times a year; a secretary; and an annual conference held every September right before the League assembly, as some CPPM members were also on other committees connected to the League. Several Office officials attended as representatives of member organizations. A 1927 article in the IMS’s in-house newsletter mentioned that the board of directors was composed of ‘the usual International Labour Office crowd.’⁷⁶ Etienne Clouzot, head administrator for the International Committee of the Red Cross, was elected president, a position he held until 1930.⁷⁷ The CPPM’s funding came from annual fees paid by member associations. The Office supplied material assistance, providing its meeting rooms, interpreters and stenographers free of charge for CPPM conferences.⁷⁸ The IMS, which played an important role in the CPPM, provided both a room in its Geneva office and a mailing address for the CPPM’s administration, which had just one part-time employee, occasionally assisted by volunteers.

Despite the appointment of experts to the migration advisory board, which was insufficient in some people’s eyes, official recognition of the CPPM by the Office appeared on the agenda of its first three sessions (1925, 1926 and 1927). During the discussion in 1926, Georg Timpe, the delegate from the Saint Raphael Association of Hamburg, felt ‘obliged to call the Conference’s attention to the often illusory nature of consultations with experts’ singling out the CPPM’s usefulness for the Office and asserting that the latter ‘had obligations towards the conference’ and ‘would be entirely mistaken if it believed that it needed the Private Organisations’ support less than the aforementioned organisations needed its collaboration’ in a context in which its action ‘on the
issue of migrations was encountering obstacles, particularly from the British
Empire and the United States.’⁷⁹ In response to those rebukes, the Office
made some effort to build CPPM members’ trust, proposing solutions. In
1926, Albert Thomas, who made a point of making an appearance at most
of the CPPM’s annual conferences, establishing it as a ‘tradition,’⁸⁰ said he
would be willing to look into what legal status an institution would have to
have in order for the ILO’s Constitution to allow it to be officially recog-
nized.⁸¹ At the 1927 conference, Varlez presented different possible options
for international recognition. Various legal statuses were considered or con-
ceived of: an international status comparable to the Red Cross’s, recogni-
tion by the International Labour Conference or some other conference and
becoming an agency under the aegis of the League. He raised the idea of
putting the issue of official recognition on the agenda of the International
Conference on Emigration and Immigration at Havana, which was scheduled
for 1928 (making it the second international and inter-governmental confer-
ence, after the one in Rome) in order to ‘win public opinion over to the idea
of legal recognition’ and perhaps obtain a ‘stated goal’ on the issue. Proposed
by Belgium (perhaps thanks to Varlez’s connections in government circles in
his native country), the proposed goal appeared on the agenda at the Cuban
conference, which adopted a resolution requesting that ‘the CPPM be con-
sulted as frequently as possible by competent official international bodies on
issues related to the practical execution of migrant protection.’⁸² Empowered
by the resolution adopted by the inter-governmental conference, the CPPM
demanded effective representation in the League and ILO’s commissions and
conferences that dealt with the subject of migrations.

Influencing international migration regulation:
morality and expertise

An analysis of the CPPM's productions (reports and adopted resolutions) shows how the Office unofficially used the member organizations' work to buttress its point of view within the advisory board on migration that was preparing futures conventions as well as the organizations' desire to be involved in migration policy in their capacity as suppliers of social services. To begin with, the CPPM would be asked to produce a report supporting the work of the ILO's advisory board on migration (PMC), which was preparing a convention to 'simplify inspection procedures for emigrants on board steamships.'⁸³ When the three members of the committee met in Brussels in December 1925, along with Thomas, Varlez and Phelan (head of the diplomatic division⁸⁴) to compose the list of experts, Thomas proposed counter-balancing the steamship companies' many experts with ones from the protection organizations, who 'defend the migrants' interests' and who 'just examined the issue at a special conference.' He chose Larned, Louis Oungre (a Belgian associate of Wolf's and the head of the Paris JCA) and Clouzot.⁸⁵ Informed of
the Office's intentions, the CPPM had indeed just concluded a major report on the topic and had had it approved at its December 1925 conference.⁸⁶ A cover letter for a questionnaire sent to member associations made what was expected of them perfectly clear:

> What our conference hopes to get from you is a report about the results of your practical experience and the experience of reliable persons whom you know. Concrete facts are more valuable than opinions. We would appreciate it if you could refer to specific cases.⁸⁷

The contents of the report make the co-production process clear,⁸⁸ the ultimate aim being to provide support for projects sponsored by the Office.

The groups were also trying to influence migration regulations, but the nationalization of migration policy – as countries wrenched control from the steamship companies – hampered the recognition of private organizations. Among the general recommendations in the report on the on-board inspection of emigrants, the CPPM focussed on training for the inspectors, both men and women (particularly social workers) and the importance of their independence from the steamship companies. It also offered the services of private migrant-protection organizations. The draft of the convention mentioned the fact that it was essential for inspectors to be neither directly nor indirectly connected to the steamship companies or in any way dependent on them. That point constitutes Article 4 of the Convention that wound up being adopted in 1926.⁸⁹ On the other hand, the suggestion about female inspectors coming from emigrant-protection societies or institutions, which the Office had picked up, was not included by the International Labour Conference⁹⁰ which only adopted a recommendation about women on that score.⁹¹

The CPPM's productions⁹² and resolutions also show a certain distancing from politics through an approach that was at once moral (due to the groups' religious backgrounds) and technical, and which focused on individuals and families. For example, at the 1925 session, American groups, which had produced a large number of studies and surveys on the subject, raised the question of family separations. The issue was presented as a consequence of the United States' restrictive immigration policy, but it was addressed from an essentially moral angle, alongside a scientific approach analysing both the causes and the effects of separation.⁹³ Medical examination of Polish emigrants at the American consulate in Warsaw is another example. The topic was raised by Lucie Kipa (delegate from the Polish Emigration Society) in 1927, and it appears on the agenda for four years in a row, with several reports presented based on cases of wives whose emigration to the United States was refused because they had failed mental tests. This subject, which mobilized both the organizations and the American press, put the groups in an awkward position. So Larned proposed that the CPPM take a stand on the social and moral consequences of the tests rather than on their legitimacy (which is what
Kipa had at first attempted, with a scientific approach) in order not to challenge America's selective policy.⁹⁴ A 1927 article about the CPPM published in the IMS's in-house newsletter justifies that choice:

> These examinations are, of course, not above criticism, but the question was how far a conference of private organizations could go in criticizing a legislative procedure which is, after all, part of the sovereign power of a state. It was finally decided that the enquiry should be considered only as part of a wider enquiry into methods of examination before departure, so as to avoid the appearance of criticism of any one government, an attitude which is much more satisfactory to us.⁹⁵

Along with the Great Depression of the 1930s, which exacerbated the hardships migrants suffered, the idea of migrants' rights correlated with a stronger criticism of governmental policies showed up. Although the notion was never inscribed in any resolutions, a nine-point "common declaration" about 'migrants' rights' such as 'Migrants should not be seen as commercial goods,' 'Due to the unique hardships they encounter, migrants should receive particular solicitude; they should be informed of and in a position to exercise their rights' and 'Migrants must be carefully and disinterestedly informed and warned at various stages in their journey' was written.⁹⁶ In the end, the declaration was not adopted; yet, it does bear witness to the emergence of a migrants'-rights cause and shows how the associations were asserting the role they intended to play in that cause.

After the stated goal at the 1928 Havana conference, ties between the CPPM and the League were reinforced. The League was also working on the legal and diplomatic aspects of migrations. Representatives of the League's Social and Transit sections attended conferences, requesting the CPPM's expertise on a range of different subjects. The Office also asked for reports from the CPPM in order to reply to demands from the League on some dossiers. In 1931, for example, in order to help prepare their own contribution, the Office asked the CPPM for a report on seasonal foreign child labour for the Child Welfare Committee (CWC), a League advisory board composed of government delegates and advisors representing the private organizations.⁹⁷ The CWC also invited CPPM delegates as observers or advisors for certain points on the agenda. For instance, they were asked for a report about alimony and child support payments in families separated by migration.⁹⁸ At the European conference in 1929, the CPPM also worked with the League on the issue of transit cards and helped Wolf and Hurlbutt 'enter into private negotiations' with steamship companies, particularly Major Bustard, for the North Atlantic conference (an umbrella organization representing German, French, British and Dutch companies).⁹⁹ The increase in collaborations, plus the attendant need to produce reports on a wide range of subjects, considerably increased the CPPM's work load.
A lack of both human and financial resources

Only a few of the several dozen member associations of the CPPM – essentially
IMS members who could take advantage of that organization’s experience
of social work on an international level – were involved in investigating and
writing reports. Therefore, a large portion of the administrative, treasury
and coordination work was done by Office officials who were also CPPM
members. The CPPM’s human-resource pool was too small to cope with the
development of its activity; the problem was exacerbated by the lack of finan-
cial resources in the context of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In the late 1920s, the intensification of labour required in the framework of
its activities led the CPPM to consider ‘a programme of rationalization of the
Conference’s work’ with an administration up to the task so as to enable the
Office and the League to depend on the CPPM’s ‘technical skills.’ Since the
Conference ‘had acquired authority [...] how could its activity be used most
efficiently?’, the IMS delegate enquired at the 1929 session.¹⁰⁰ In order to save
time, the following session was divided into three commissions held simul-
taneously that reported back to the whole conference the following day. The
reorganization project rekindled debate about the CPPM’s role. The growing
rapprochement with the Office and the League fuelled criticism from those
who decried ‘the subordination of the interests of the migrants to some unex-
plained political preoccupations.’ Wolf took issue with that, insisting that col-
laboration with the Office ‘alone can give a legal basis to the just interests of
the migrants.’¹⁰¹ Dr Kreutz, delegate from the German organization Caritas
(from Fribourg im Breisgau), suggested envisaging reducing the activities of
the CPPM, turning it into a tribune for statements and debates, without get-
ting involved in politics or research.¹⁰² To rise above the rift, Jacques Legouis
(from the Office),¹⁰³ who was in charge of the CPPM’s administrative work,
suggested that Varlez create, alongside the Conference, an action committee
for the protection of migrants that would be open to organizations willing
to share in expenses and to commit to collaborating on ‘enforcing clear-cut
decisions made in common’.¹⁰⁴

The CPPM's financial situation went rapidly downhill from 1928 onwards; collaborating – without means – with international organizations was costing more than the contributions received: for an annual budget of approximately 10,000 Swiss francs in 1931, the deficit was FS5000. The constantly increasing research work led to new expenses (translating, correspondence, typing, etc.)¹⁰⁵ that the CPPM's limited funds could not handle. 'In fact, for 7 years now, our conference has been suspended in a provisional state, and living hand to mouth,' Legouis wrote in a letter to Varlez in 1929.¹⁰⁶ In his personal notes about the financial reorganization, Varlez, who was then treasurer, acknowledged the flip side of the independence the Office had insisted on for the CPPM: 'In order to increase this meagre budget, we can reach out neither to governments, nor to trade or financial organizations that would soon demolish the very independence that is so crucial to the conference's work.'¹⁰⁷ In an attempt to resolve their financial woes, Varlez, who was no longer
working for the Office, but who happened to be traveling in North America in 1929, went to New York and Toronto to present the CPPM's work to try to drum up financial support from affiliated American organizations. Despite an enthusiastic reception, his efforts failed.¹⁰⁸

Upon the death in 1930 of both Wolf and Varlez, two pillars of the CPPM, a reorganization of the administration was decided in order to maintain and develop the Conference's activities.¹⁰⁹ Forced to acknowledge that most member organizations were neither very active nor even paying their membership fees, the idea of 'decentralizing' the work of the CPPM, which until then had been done by just a handful of organizations, was raised.¹¹⁰ To that effect, several steps were taken to encourage cooperation: a tri-lingual (French, English, German) newsletter was launched in 1931 to 'kindle shared interests' and to help create ties between organizations; a brochure, which had originally been created in English as a fund-raising tool, was eventually translated into both French and German and distributed to members; the CPPM's directory, which had been distributed in the 1920s for publicity purposes, was updated and republished in 1931, for member organizations' use as well as consulates and public officials.¹¹¹

In order to be able to hire administrative staff, the bureau looked towards the member organizations, hoping that they would become more financially supportive. They decided to increase the annual membership fee from 100 to 150 Swiss Francs, and exceptionally, to appeal for additional donations. Only those organizations that were already heavily involved (the IMS and JCA) made significant ones. The appeal failed, betraying member organizations' growing indifference in the context of economic crisis. At the 1931 conference, Fuss, representing the Office, reminded attendees that the Office could not subsidize the CPPM on its own. He offered to pay member organizations to produce certain reports as well to use his influence to help get funding from the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations to make up the difference.¹¹² Those efforts also failed, however.¹¹³ The Office's lack of financial support irked several CPPM members, leading Fuss to remind them about the Office's material support and assistance, which they preferred 'not to publicize.'¹¹⁴

A note from the Office dated 1934 mentions that the CPPM's board of directors was considering dissolution after unfruitful trips to Paris and Brussels in search of private funding. The Office and a few members opposed dissolution and Dr Kreutz suggested soliciting funds from governments who had not previously been contacted.¹¹⁵ Fuss informed the director of the Office that the CPPM was considering organizing a meeting towards that end:

> We could invite delegates from a few governments to a small evening gathering that would be held during the [International Labour] Conference [...] to inform them about the work of the Conference of Private Organizations and to get them to help us obtain low-level funding quickly. We are talking about 10 000 francs, total.
For the situation had in fact been getting worse: the general secretary, the social worker Helene Hoffmann-Von Sokolowskaja, the CPPM's only paid staff member, had been let go after four years of service, although she was considering continuing to work 'on a more or less volunteer basis.' Fuss pointed out at the end of his letter: 'I am trying to help keep the Conference afloat. The initiative came from here (Albert Thomas and Varlez), and it would be a shame to see the results of ten years of effort go up in smoke.'<sup>116</sup> The sources consulted do not provide information about what happened to the CPPM next or the precise year of its dissolution. The Office's notes from the summer of 1934 specify only that the Conference had been forced to leave the office space loaned by the IMS, that for lack of available space, the Office had refused to store the 17 boxes, 2 tables and 4 chairs, and that Hoffman had gone back to Freiburg 'as the Conference's coffers were empty.'<sup>117</sup>

## Conclusion

Created to support the Office's activity by enabling labour to be divided into the 'official' and the 'unofficial,' the CPPM received frequent encouragement from Thomas, who paid 'careful attention' to it in order to 'maintain and develop the sympathy quotient it [the Office] needs.'<sup>118</sup> As Fuss said at the CPPM's 1932 session, the collaboration with the Office was 'actually an exchange of services more than anything else.'<sup>119</sup> Indeed, the CPPM allowed organizations to obtain resources – although ones that were more symbolic than concrete: a network and recognition of their skills and knowledge by major migration-policy players, legitimacy through expertise, and tribunes at both the national and international levels. For the Office, the migrant-protection umbrella organization that it initiated represented an opportunity to obtain and circulate information that was helpful to its international regulation of migrations project that the official framework of its activity prevented it from obtaining more directly.

The migrant-protection organizations' religious roots allowed them to address the question from a moral and disinterested standpoint and to flaunt their 'practical and technical knowledge.' When dealing with reluctant nations, that admittedly depoliticized stance was reinforced by its moral status. At the request, generally, of the Office or the League, the CPPM conducted studies and investigations in the margins of national sovereignty, in places that highlighted international migration policies. It created new fields of expertise, adopting an approach in which the international and individual scales were cross-referenced in order to observe the obstacles and risks inherent to migratory journeys both in places of transit and in migrants' more private spaces such as the domestic sphere. Taking nations' key role in migration policy into consideration, the CPPM's resolutions tended to focus on the policies' social and moral consequences without challenging the policies themselves.

Among the factors that contributed to enabling the creation of the CPPM, an analysis shows the multi-positionality of Office officials in both official
and more private capacities as well as the importance of commissions and con-
ferences as opportunities for making connections and uniting into umbrella
organizations – moments of ‘coalescence’¹²⁰ between the different players
in the internationalization of the migration question. As a discreet, unher-
alded creation of the Office, the CPPM was constantly seeking both official
recognition and financing for its actions. Its members worked with different
migration-policy players in order to influence migration regulations. The
umbrella organization also contributed to shaping the migration-protection
cause, an impact that showed up in the following years both in legal and so-
cial norms¹²¹ and in the increasing recognition as experts that international
bodies granted to non-governmental organizations specialized in migration.

Notes

1 This work benefitted from the financial support of the French Collabora-
tive Institute on Migration, coordinated by the CNRS under the reference
ANR-17-CONV-0001.

2 To avoid confusion, in this chapter, the International Labour Organization will be referred to as the ILO and the International Labour Office as the Office.

3 'The International Emigration Commission', *International Labour Review*, IV, 3 (1921), 85-110.

4 About the division of labour in international organizations, see J. Siméant, V. Lickert and F. Pouponneau, ‘Échelles, récifs, bureaux – Terrains du politique à l’international’, in J. Siméant (ed), *Guide de l'Enquête Globale en Sciences Sociales* (Paris, 2015).

5 S. Kott, ‘From transnational reformist network to international organization: The International Association for Labour Legislation and the International Labour Organization, 1900–1930s’, in D. Rodogno, B. Struck and J. Vogel (eds), *Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, networks and issues from the 1840s to the 1930s* (New York and Oxford, 2015).

6 'Albert Thomas on the international control of migration', *Population and Development Review*, 9, 4 (1983), 703–711. Text of speech given at the 1927 World Population Conference in Geneva.

7 P.-A. Rosental, ‘Géopolitique et État-providence. Le BIT et la politique mondiale des migrations dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, *Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales*, 61, 1 (2006), 99–134.

8 For example: P.-Y. Saunier. ‘Borderline work: ILO explorations onto the housing scene until 1940’, in J. Van Daele, M. Rodríguez García, G. Van Goethem and M. Van der Linden (eds), *ILO Histories. Essays on the International Labour Organization and its impact on the world during the twentieth century* (Bern, 2010).

9 Rodogno, Struck and Vogel, op. cit.

10 S. Kott and J. Droux (eds), *Globalizing Social Rights. The International Labour Organization and beyond* (Basingstoke and Geneva, 2013); D. Laqua (ed), *Internationalism Reconfigured. Transnational ideas and movements between the world wars* (London, 2011); F. Thébaud, ‘Difficult inroads, unexpected results: The correspondence committee on women’s work in the 1930s’, in E. Boris, D. Hoehtker and S. Zimmermann (eds), *Women’s ILO: Transnational networks, global labour standards and gender equity, 1919 to present* (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2018), 50–74.

11 M. Schrover, T. Vosters and I. Glynn, ‘NGOs and west European migration governance (1860s until present). Introduction to a special issue’, *Journal of Migration History*, 5, 2 (2019), 189–217.
12 D. Maul, *The International Labour Organization. 100 years of global social policy* (Berlin and Geneva, 2019).

13 Except for Rosental’s article, *op. cit.*, and D. Kévonian’s work on the Office and refugees: D. Kévonian, ‘Enjeux de catégorisations et migrations internationales’, *Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales*, 21, 3 (2005), 95–124; D. Kévonian, *Réfugiés et Diplomatie Humanitaire: Les acteurs européens et la scène proche-orientale pendant l’entre-deux-guerres* (Paris, 2004); on the refugees issue, see also C. Skran, *Refugees in Interwar Europe: The emergence of a regime* (Oxford, 1995), and P. Gatrell, *The Making of the Modern Refugee* (Oxford, 2013) (Chapter 2 on Interwar Europe).

14 Only Paul-André Rosental has described it briefly in an article: Rosental, *op. cit*.

15 The International Labour Conference and the Governing Body, which are both tripartite, are the ILO's representative and policy-making bodies.

16 This addendum, made during the preparatory stages, is a response to the countries of immigration's resistance to the idea of letting the Office be put in charge of protecting foreign workers: International Labour Office, *International Labour Office Archives* (subsequently ILOA) E101/000, L. Varlez's report on creating an Emigration Commission, 16 February 1920.

17 The organizations represented were: The World Young Women's Christian Association and the American YWCA (Ruth Crawford and Elizabeth Clark), the National Catholic War Council, a Jewish society and 'one other person representing no organization, but making a semi-official report in an official quarter', ILOA E100/25, E. Clark, 'The international emigration commission at Geneva', *News of the Young Women's Christian Association throughout the World* (1921), p. i.

18 'The International Emigration Commission', op.cit., 85–110.

19 J. Van Daele, *Van Gent tot Genève. Louis Varlez. Een biografie* (Gand, 2002).

20 I. Lespinet-Moret and I. Liebeskind-Sauthier, 'Albert Thomas, le BIT et le chômage: Expertise, catégorisation et action politique internationale', *Les Cahiers Irice*, 2, 2 (2008), 157–179.

21 The technical departments were concerned with subjects the Office considered priorities.

22 This section was created shortly after the 1919 Conference in Washington and tasked with gathering documentation and information and publishing studies, reports and articles.

23 Fuss, a Belgian anarchist, moved to Paris in 1910 and became involved in the fight against unemployment. He went on to become the secretary of the IAU. After the war, he became a civil servant in Belgium (Employment Office and Unemployment Fund inspector). In 1920, Louis Varlez invited him to Geneva; he was hired by the Emigration and Unemployment Section, which he led after Varlez's retirement. He resigned from the Office in 1936, when the Belgium government appointed him 'Royal Commissioner for the Unemployment Problem.' K. Vleminckx, 'Henri Fuss (1882-1964): la sécurité sociale comme instrument de paix et de justice sociale', *Revue de la Sécurité Sociale*, 1, 51 (2009), 79-96.

24 The movement followed the Social Gospel, which advocated women working together for social reform. Based on a moral approach and to encourage autonomy, member organizations provided housing, job training and various other resources to female migrants arriving in cities.

25 International Labour Office Archives (subsequently ILOA), E101/100, Notes on proposals to submit to the Emigration Commission bureau's session of 4 April 1921.

26 ILOA, E 100/25, cable from Greenwood to Thomas, 22 June 1921 and letter from Greenwood to Thomas, 24 June 1921.
27 A doctor's daughter, Mary Emerson Hurlbutt (1888-1980) belonged to the generation of female graduates from the New York School of Social Work who adopted an international approach to working with migrants.

28 L. Guerry, 'Mobilisations transnationales. Le cas de l'International Migration Service, 1921-1939', *Monde(s), Histoire, Espaces, Relations*, 5, (2014), 219-237.

29 In 1894, the various national YWCA's organized a united World YWCA.

30 ILOA, E 100/25, Note from Varlez to Thomas, 27 April 1921.

31 *Ibid.*, Note from Thomas to Varlez, 28 April 1921 and undated letter from Varlez to Hurlbutt.

32 *Ibid.*, Letter from Varlez to Clark, 2 February 1922.

33 A. C. Wagner and B. Réau, 'Le capital international: un outil d'analyse de la reconfiguration des rapports de domination', in Siméant, *op. cit.*

34 ILOA, E100/25, Letter from Clark to Varlez, 10 March 1922.

35 *Ibid.*, Letter from Clark to Varlez, 22 December 1921.

36 *Ibid.*, Letter from Mildred Hughes to Ferenszi, 5 May 1922 and letter from Varlez to Clark, 2 February 1922.

37 *Ibid.*, Letter from Varlez to Clark, 21 March 1921.

38 *Ibid.*, Note from Thomas à Varlez, 2 November 1923.

39 *Ibid.*, Letter from Clark to Varlez, 10 March 1922.

40 'MIGRATION. Conferences and Congresses', *International Labour Review*, VIII, 5 (1923), 716.

41 Lespinet-Moret and Liebeskind-Sauthier, *op. cit.*

42 I. Ferenczi, *Unemployment and the International Migration of Workers*, report for IAU, 1913.

43 C. Topalov, *Naissance du Chômeur* (Paris, 1994), 84.

44 'MIGRATION, Conferences and Congresses', *op. cit.*

45 D. Frischer, 'Le baron Maurice de Hirsch et les Juifs de Russie. Entre philanthropie et utopie', *Archives Juives*, 44, 1 (2011), 70-82.

46 For more about this commission, see Kévonian, *Réfugiés et Diplomatie Humaine*, *op. cit.*, 343-353.

47 ILOA, E100/0, Note from Thomas to Varlez, 2 November 1923.

48 ILOA, E 100/0/1, Letter from Oungre to Varlez, 24 December 1923.

49 *ibid.*, Notes from 7 and 8 September 1923.

50 ILOA, E100/0, Note from Thomas to Varlez, 2 November 1923.

51 De Michelis was a member of the ILO's Governing Body; for more about the Italian High Commissioner for emigration, see C. Douki, 'The liberal Italian state and mass emigration, 1860-1914', in N. Green and F. Weil (eds), *Citizenship and Those Who Leave. The politics of emigration and expatriation* (Urbana and Chicago, IL, 2007).

52 Rosental, *op. cit.*

53 ILOA, E118/1, Memo about the Permanent Migration Committee meeting in Brussels on 15 December 1925.

54 ILOA, E111/0/1, Note from Varlez to Thomas, 1 November 1923.

55 *Ibid.*, n°2, Note from Albert Thomas, 7 March 1924.

56 United Nations Library & Archives, *League of Nations Archives* (subsequently LONA), R1220, Minutes of the third meeting of the International Committee of Private Organisations for the Protection of Emigrants, 10 September 1924; *Chroniques Mensuelles des Migrations* (1924), 75.

57 ILOA, E111/0/1, n°2, Letter from Varlez to Thomas, 2 February 1924.

58 Naum Reichesberg, of the International Association for Labour Legislation attended that meeting, as did Léon Jouhaux, as a representative of the International Federation of Trade Unions. ILOA, 111/0/1, Letter from Varlez to Thomas, 25 April 1924.
59 *Chronique Mensuelle des Migrations, op. cit.*, 527-28.

60 ILOA, E111/0/1 n°2, International Committee of Private Organisations for the Protection of Emigrants, Resolutions presented at the International Conference on Emigration and Immigration, Rome 1924, Geneva, March-April 1924.

61 *Ibid.*, Excerpt from provisional minutes for the meeting of 23 April 1924.

62 ILOA, E111/1/7, Letter from Butler to the head of the Washington office, 9 May 1924 and E111/0/1, Resolution adopted at the meeting of 23 April 1924.

63 A municipal-housing expert, Imre Ferenszi taught social policy at the University of Budapest before becoming an advisor to the Budapest municipal government. He represented the Hungarian section of the IAU, for whom he wrote a 1913 report entitled *Unemployment and the International Migration of Workers*. He joined the Office's Emigration and Unemployment section in 1921. He authored *Migration Movement 1920-1923* and contributed to a volume edited by Walter F. Wilcox, an American, *International Migrations*, published by the Office in 1928 and 1929. Reid, Ira De Augustine, 1901-1968. Memorandum on Dr. Imre Ferenczi, ca. February 13, 1941. University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, *Special Collections and University Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers*, MS 312.

64 LONA, R1220, Minutes from the third meeting of the International Committee of Private Organisations for the Protection of Emigrants, 10 September 1924.

65 The PMC was first called the Permanent Emigration Committee and then the Migration Committee.

66 Arthur Fontaine, the governmental delegate; Jules Carlier, the employers' delegate; and Jan Oudegeest, the workers' delegate.

67 Ms. Edith Abbott, Messrs. Aberson\* and Clouzot,\* Ms. LB Mitchell, Messrs. Golden\* and Bascom Johnson,\* Ms. Larned,\* Messrs. McCowen,\* Oungre,\* Reichesberg,\* Santoliquido,\* Timpe (replacing Hoffman at the German government's request),\* and Wolfe.\* (\* from the ad hoc committee).

68 ILOA, E118/000, Minutes from the meeting of the ad hoc bureau of the Conference of Private Organisations for the Protection of Emigrants held in Geneva on 19 June 1925.

69 *Ibid.*, Draft of a letter from Ferenczi to McCowen, 30 April 1925.

70 *Ibid.*

71 ILOA, E118/000, Note from Ferenczi to Phelan and Thomas, 22 June 1925.

72 The first bureau was composed of Wolf (JCA), Timpe (St Raphaels-Verein), McCowen (YMCA), Aberson (Association juive unifiée), Reichesberg (International Association for Labour Legislation) and Varlez (IAU). Larned did not attend that first meeting.

73 The first articles:

Article 1: A Permanent International Conference of Private Organizations for Protecting and Improving the Well-Being of Migrants is hereby constituted. Article 2: The Conference encourages international cooperation in terms of protecting migrants' well-being. Article 3: The Conference will meet at least once a year.

74 LONA, R1220, Minutes of the first session of the International Conference of Private Organisations for the Protection of Migrants, 8 and 9 September 1925.

75 The following were elected for two years at the first session: Ms. Hoffman, Ms. Larned, Mr. McCowen, and Mr. Varlez (with 40 votes each); as well as Ms. Bromer: 34 votes; Mr. Reichesberg, 32 votes; Mr. Wolf: 29 votes; and Mr. Cohen: 28 votes.

76 Departmental archives of the Bouches du Rhône, 'Social services for emigrants collection (1928-1932), 128J1', *The Whisper*, 1, 5 (1927), 12.
77 He would later be replaced by Varlez, interim president, then by S. Cohen, vice-president of the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, London.

78 LONA, R3573, Minutes of the 7th session of the CPPM, 11–12 September 1930.

79 ILOA, E118/001, CPPP, 3rd session, 7–8 September 1926, Resolution n°1.

80 LONA, R3573, Minutes of the 6th session of the CPPM, 5–6 September 1929.

81 LONA, R1220, CPPM, Third session, 6–7 September 1926. Minutes.

82 *Ibid.*, Committee for the International Conference on Migration and Immigration, Proposal Commission, Annex 2.

83 On this issue, addressed by Italy in the early twentieth century: C. Douki, 'Protection sociale et mobilité transatlantique: Les migrants italiens au début du XXe siècle', *Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales*, 66, 2 (2011), 375–410.

84 The diplomatic division handled relations with governments and diplomatic instruments developed by the International Labour Conference.

85 ILOA, E/118/1, Meeting of the Permanent Migration Committee (without experts) in Brussels, 15 December 1925.

86 ILOA, E118/000, CPPM report: On-board Inspection of Emigrants. Committee report and Conference Resolution, 10–11 December 1925, Geneva, 1926.

87 ILOA, E100/0/6, Letter from the CPPM to affiliated organizations, 1 October 1925.

88 V. Gayon, ‘Un atelier d’écriture internationale: l’OCDE au travail. Éléments de sociologie de la forme “rapport”’, *Sociologie du Travail*, 51, 3 (2009), 324–342.

89 Convention n°21 on the inspection of emigrants, 1926, effective 1927.

90 LONA, R1220, CPPM, Third session, 6–7 September 1926. Minutes.

91 Recommendation n°26 about the protection of emigrant women aboard, 1926, 5 June 1926.

92 An article about the CPPM written production is underway.

93 ILOA, E1/08, Reports and Resolutions. Separation of Families of Migrants, CPPM, 1926.

94 LONA, R3573, Minutes of the 7th session of the CPPM, 11–12 September 1930.

95 Departmental archives of the Bouches du Rhône, ‘Social services for emigrants collection (1928–1932), 128J1’, *op.cit.*, 13.

96 ILOA, E1/08, n°2, Example of a common statement that the Conference could adopt, 31 May 1930.

97 For more about the CWC, see J. Droux, ‘La tectonique des causes humanitaires: concurrences et collaborations autour du Comité de protection de l’enfance de la Société des Nations (1880–1940)’, *Relations Internationales*, 151 (2012), 77–90, and J. Droux, ‘A league of its own? The League of Nations’ child welfare committee (1919–1936) and international monitoring of child welfare policies’, in M. Rodriguez Garcia, D. Rodogno, and L. Kozma (eds), *The League of Nations’ Work on Social Issues: Visions, endeavours and experiments* (Genève, 2016).

98 LONA, R3573, Minutes of the 7th session of the CPPM, 11–12 September 1930.

99 *Ibid.*, Minutes of the 6th session of the CPPM, 5–6 September 1929.

100 *Ibid.*

101 ILOA, E 1/08, n°2, Reorganisation of the CPPM. Supplementary Memorandum submitted by the JCA, 8 February 1930.

102 *Ibid.*, Undated notes from Legouis.

103 Jacques Legouis, born in Lyon in 1895, son of Emile Legouis (who taught English language and literature at the Sorbonne) worked as a copywriter/editor for the Office.
104 ILOA, E 1/08, n°2, Letter from Legouis to Varlez, 1929.

105 *Ibid.*, Treasurer's note about the financial reorganisation of the Conference, written by Varlez, 15 July 1930.

106 *Ibid.*, Letter from Legouis to Varlez, 4 July 1930.

107 *Ibid.*, Varlez's personal notes, 1 March 1929.

108 *Ibid.*, various notes and letters by Varlez about his travels.

109 *Ibid.*, CPPM, memo to member organizations, 26 January 1931.

110 *Ibid.*, Reorganizing the conference; the administrative issue, 31 May 1930.

111 LONA, R3573, Minutes of the 8th session of the CPPM, 7 and 8 September 1931.

112 *Ibid.*

113 LONA, R3573, Minutes of the 9th session of the CPPM, 27–28 September 1932.

114 LONA, R3573, Minutes of the 8th session of the CPPM, 7 and 8 September 1931.

115 ILOA, E1/08, Various notes.

116 *Ibid.*, Letter from Henri Fuss to the head of the Office, 16 May 1934.

117 *Ibid.*, Various notes.

118 ILOA, E118/000, Note to all departments from Albert Thomas, 15 September 1925.

119 LONA, R3573, Minutes of the 9th session of the CPPM, 27–28 September 1932.

120 Siméant, *op. cit.*, 23.

121 For example, Convention n°66 about migrant workers (adopted by the International Labour Conference on 28 June 1939) includes a provision related to preventing abandoning families and mentions an information and assistance service to emigrants and immigrants performed by private organizations that were 'recognized [...] and controlled by public authorities.' The convention was never ratified, but it inspired other conventions that were adopted during the post-war period.

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# 8 Big Pharma, the World Health Organization, and the co-constitution of international policies against river blindness

Auriane Guilbaud

## Introduction

For seven consecutive years from 1987 to 1993, the US-based pharmaceutical company Merck earned the title of ‘most admired business’ awarded by Fortune magazine – a highly recognized distinction in the business world. It rewarded the company for its rising profits (from 1985 to 1989 sales almost doubled¹), but also for setting up the Mectizan Donation Program (MDP) in 1987, a drug donation program against river blindness.² Also known under its scientific name onchocerciasis, it was until then a neglected tropical disease without adequate treatment. Caused by a parasite, it provokes dermatological and ocular infections that can lead to complete blindness. It affects mainly people in sub-Saharan Africa (90% of cases), Yemen and Latin America. In the late 1970s, it was estimated that 18 million people were infected with the parasite and that 100 million were at risk of infection.

However, Merck is not the only organization claiming a key role in the fight against river blindness. In front of the World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters in Geneva stands a statue depicting an African child guiding a blind man.³ As explained on the accompanying plaque, it symbolizes the ‘success’ of the fight against river blindness, a ‘unique public health action’ conducted thanks to several WHO-led programs, ‘which also fostered socio-economic development’.⁴ A close look at the plaque reveals that the statue was built, thanks to the donations of several philanthropic organizations and NGOs,⁵ the World Bank, but also Merck and the MDP.

Although it is not obvious from the above-mentioned awards and symbols, which put emphasis only on one actor’s role, the fight against onchocerciasis/ river blindness is actually a cooperative one, and there is a rich and long history of interactions among different actors to study.

The international fight against the disease started during the later years of first half of the twentieth century. Onchocerciasis, caused by the parasite *onchocerca volvulus*, which is transmitted to humans through the bite of an intermediate host (or vector), a *simulium* black fly, was one of the last tropical diseases to be discovered, its symptoms being first attributed to other causes (trachoma, infection, nutrition deficiencies...). The complete transmission