Two striking, and opposite, images come to mind when contemplating the evolution of interaction between the state and the child in France. The first concerns the scene depicted by authors such as Jacques Donzelot and Philippe Meyer, in scholarship dating from the 1970s and 80s, of a predatory, usurping state that intrudes into family life on the pretext of protecting children from bad parents, usually fathers. Here, the child is little more than a stalking horse for the designs of an increasingly bureaucratic and tutelary state, where the real struggle for power is fought out between representatives of the state and the lone working man, struggling to maintain autonomy in the face of constant accusations of inadequacy.

The other image emerges from the deluge of pro-natalist propaganda emanating from social reformers of the Third Republic and Vichy regime, of a state zealously, if rather ineffectually, trying to increase the sheer number of children born in France. Scholars of the last decade or so have shown us that with remarkable continuity across time periods and party lines, officials of the republican and authoritarian regimes frantically sought to compel French citizens to reproduce themselves at greater rates, emphasizing the civic duty to produce a quantity of children. In pro-natalist propaganda, unborn children's rights were vigorously promoted over rights to ‘egotistical’ happiness, but children were thought of less as autonomous individuals than as emblems of their parents’ sense of national duty. Here the state appears not as a progressively intrusive guardian, but as an unconvincing and increasingly ineffectual advocate of large families. This state seems more akin to the image of France's parliamentary democracy in the interwar years – immobile, futile in its efforts to assert itself and preoccupied with loss.

Both of these images have been nuanced by further scholarship, and both have benefited from new insights from gender studies as well as research in the history of social reform in France. The French state depicted by Donzelot and Meyer has proved to be less monolithic, less predatory and less in connivance with women than these Foucauldian theorists have implied. On the other hand, the political paralysis of the Third Republic must be tempered by evidence of many progressive initiatives in the realms of social welfare and public health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, long before the welfare state emerged fully formed in 1946.