As soon as World War I broke out, American citizens established an important wartime relief organization that was effective in providing refuge to child war victims from France’s northern and eastern regions. The Committee Franco-American for the Protection of the Children of the Frontier (CFAPCF), the first Franco-American response aimed at ensuring the protection of France’s children, provided financial and material assistance to rescue, shelter, heal, and educate displaced, injured, ill, and orphaned children. It collaborated with groups of nuns who ran some of the colonies, with teachers in charge of schooling and with American health experts overseeing provisions of sanitary conditions and hygiene. American women traveled to France and worked in the Franco-American colonies. In addition to caring for the children, they taught them about their friendly nation whose people were helping to ensure their survival. Running a network of colonies across France required considerable human and material resources, and the CFAPCF drew on social networks of wealthy French citizens and American expatriates eager to shield France’s children from hunger, destitution, and death. Shipments of clothing, garments, books, toys, and other gifts from the United States signaled the Americans’ mobilization to save France’s orphans.

This chapter examines petitioners and petitioning communities within a range of localities to explore the politics of place. First, the analysis demonstrates the ways in which particular topics, such as those associated with mass subscription campaigns, could bring together petitioners from across the four nations. Second, the chapter zooms in to survey a range of localities to offer a comparative study of petitioning communities, emphasising similarities and patterns as well as local variations and differences. Religious congregations were a particularly important, and enduring, form of petitioning community across the period. On other issues, petitioning communities were defined by occupation, profession, trade, or perceived economic interest, such as shipowners or merchants in port cities. Petitioning communities could also be defined by official roles, as when local boards of poor law guardians petitioned regarding social policy, or associational memberships. More generally, it is possible to discern particular continuities and traditions within particular places that reflected the interplay between local political culture and petitioning communities. A study of petitioning communities reveals the diversity of local political cultures, but also shows how they were connected horizontally to petitioners in other localities, and vertically, to national institutions such as Parliament.