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This article takes a comparison of the French and British evacuations of children to the countryside in 1939-40 as a starting point for a larger reflection on the very different meanings and practices that surrounded child-rearing in twentieth-century France and Great Britain. More specifically, it argues that the educational practices characteristic of each society point to deeper differences in the way that the triangle of relationships among families, children and the state were conceptualized in a liberal versus a republican democracy at the end of the 1930s. Among other things, this meant that children’s affective needs were understood very differently inside the two systems, a difference that was in part linked to divergent ways of thinking about citizenship and the place of children within the polity.