The state's policy with regard to fathers and fatherhood had a great impact on concepts of citizenship and gender in France in the era of the two World Wars. Drawing on new material that has only recently become available from the archives of the Vichy regime, Kristen Stromberg Childers analyzes the ways fathers were promoted as saviors of the nation after France's humiliating defeat by the Germans in June 1940. Childers argues that concern for the family and for the status of fathers in modern France was not merely a response to falling birthrates and German aggression, but was fundamental to the very notion of citizenship and political participation.