A collective work takes stock of the concept of foreigners from Antiquity to the present day. It reveals the differentiation strategies to which a company engages in order to demonstrate its power. The stranger is this other which allows one to exist, but he is above all an individual deprived of rights.
Faced with the overinvestment of the category “ stranger In the contemporary debate, this work aims to restore all its temporal thickness to a form of designation of the other which dates back to Antiquity. Proceeding both chronologically and thematic, the book brings together the communications of a conference organized by the Paris University VII In the spring of 2006. They were numerous (thirty-three), multiplying the angles of attack of a complex to say the least. From abroad as a legal category of ancient Rome in the Middle Ages, the reader is led to consider multiple representations of the other in literary or artistic forms, as well as to understand the specific roles assigned to him by our societies-trader, immigrant, undocumented, etc. All allow us to see at work the strategies of differentiation to which a company engages in order to demonstrate its power and its right to exist.
Urban space, producer of legal standards
If Yves Perrin shows us that there are several ways of not being Roman at the time of the High Empire, and thereby poses a characteristic element of the foreigner, that is to say its definition in the negative, it also introduces the importance of the urban context, that of the city of Rome compared to its provinces (p. 29). In the Middle Ages and in modern times, the urban space also appears to be the main producer of legal standards aimed at delimiting the status of the foreigner (which he can do or cannot do, sell or not sell, etc.), from the German city in lack of labor to the Italian city of the Italian city of XVIe century in pain of categorizing these “ passing individuals (P. 65).
It is also interesting to see, in various forms, the same phenomenon of stratification of law still relevant today. In the same way is no foreign to the one who came to establish a business and the one who came to work. The economic interest in the city concerned is not the same, the rights given to it differ greatly. Thus the Jews were considered high-risk individuals likely to lead to conversions of Christians in the lisbon of XVIIe century. Nevertheless, the city granted exceptional status to few traders who still wanted to come to trade there (p. 103). In a similar way, the German cities set up courts for foreigners (Gastgerichte) in order to allow traders in dispute to settle their business more conveniently (p. 51). Conversely, an individual who came to the city to work enjoyed a deeply uneven criminal status. The attenuating circumstances were refused to him as well as the right to appeal, making him a second -class citizen, subject to significant discrimination (p. 59).
Long -lasting and multiplication of looks
In the second part of the work, the multiplication of looks makes it possible to take the measure of what the designation of foreigner has varied according to the objects studied, from the literature to the cinema through the different forms of categorization that the most authoritarian and the most “ racialists “(Liliane Crips details the Nazi Germany project, Paul Weindling addresses the question of genocides). In this part, the object “ foreigners and society Is less circumscribed, like a digression that goes beyond the simple citizen-foreign duality and declines the ranges of otherness.
From a reflection on the different statutes of foreigners, whether traders, diplomats or come to work and settle, we evolve towards the theme of the foreigner-immigrant. The shift, although coherent, nevertheless considers it for granted than the foreigner in our contemporary societies is the immigrant and, thereby, sometimes omits to question a process however carrying meaning. From this point of view, the articles benefit from being resonated with the first part, in order to really take advantage of the historical depth thus developed and to grasp in all its scale the history project in the long term. The analysis elements, for example, are present in the observations carried out with the advice of extra-community foreigners of the City of Paris. Excluded from the vote, foreigners of XIXe And XXe Paris district are invited to a simulacrum of council which does not seem to satisfy even the municipal councilor who is however one of the protagonists (p. 193). Michelle Zancarini-Fournel also shows the weight of the management methods of colonial or foreign populations used by the French administration, making categories and legal standards of real instruments of creation of social conflicts (p. 387).
Beyond the diversity of communications included in the work, its contribution remains important for the history of immigration and the history of our societies in the long term. It highlights the construction of the foreigner through the ages, not only like this other which by mirror allows one to exist, but above all as an individual deprived of rights, in a more or less obvious and more or less assumed manner.