The history of immigration remains a difficult subject to think for the French as for their governments. From concrete cases, Mary Dewhurst Lewis analyzes the complexity of local situations which gradually led to a policy of the rights of foreigners in France in the interwar period.
The inauguration in the Catimini on October 10, 2007 of the National City of the History of Immigration in Paris recalled the persistence of the difficulties of the French and their governments to think of immigration. However, responding to invitations made since the 1980s by historians like Gérard Noiriel and Pierre Milza, the outcome of this ancient project was to demonstrate the progress carried out and the desire to finally recognize the place of immigration in the history of the country and in the individual trajectories, thus correcting “ amnesia »Collective of France in front of its past and its present land of immigration. Structure with multiple functions, the national city of the history of immigration must also be only a museum but also a place and a vector of research on immigration in France.
A concrete analysis of immigration in the interwar period
The work of Mary Dewhurst Lewis participates in this renewal of immigration studies in France. American, professor at Harvard, a graduate of the New York University but working on France, she also represents this Franco-American intellectual exchange which allowed the renewal or the opening of studies on immigration in France in a comparative approach. However, his work is distinguished by a radically local anchoring, as close as possible to the actors, in the daily life of immigrants and their relations with the authorities.
Continuing the previous work of the author, The Boundaries of the Republic is a fine analysis of the definition of the rights of foreigners in France in the interwar period, both in the 1920s when France knew and tried to organize its first big wave of massive immigration in the aftermath of the Great War, as in the 1930s, faced with the economic recession and then to the threat of war. The author carefully operates his two local case studies (Greater Lyon and Marseille) and his two specific studies on refugees and North African workers, thus confronting normative texts with a reality that she can observe in the many departmental and municipal archives that she knows how to mobilize.
By studying naturalization, expulsion or even access to social assistance, Mr. D. Lewis highlights how the “ rights (foreigners in France) have not existed as stable abstractions ». On the contrary, the definition of rights depended less on the many normative texts or the principles of universalism and equality than “ Economic conditions, social relations, political pressures, bureaucratic disputes, international affairs and colonial relations which, all, combined to shape, and possibly alter, the form of these rights, both in law and beyond it ».
The local and comparatist approach between Lyon and Marseille, as well as between the different groups and districts of the two agglomerations, is fruitful. It allows the author to show the existence of borders (boundaries) not only between French and foreigners, but also within the group of foreigners, as between nationals of countries that have signed a treaty with France (Belgium, Poland, Italy, Czechoslovakia) and nationals of other countries, or between foreign and colonial workers. However, these borders, such as the rights that determine them, are not fixed and stable but vary and evolve according to contexts and times. Thus the young man, single and without attachments in France, model of the foreign worker in the Greater Lyon of the 1920s in full industrial expansion, was at the same time the most threatened with expulsion in Marseille where the police, in sub-employed, attacked in priority to the most visible categories: young men living alone in the central district of the port, and not families settled in peripheral districts. Faced with the economic crisis of the 1930s, the single foreign worker became in Lyon the undesirable whose exclusion by the protection of national work is justified (after the law of 1932) or the weight he can represent for the social protection system, while, faced with the threat of war, it is ultimately the large family of family married to a French who is most likely to be naturalized.
Mr. D. Lewis’s care always fueling his study with the “ human flesh »Of the many individual cases which she reconstitutes, makes reading alive. Immigration courses like those of Boris M. (Russia) and Bruno G. (Italy) that Lewis manages to reconstruct to better compare them to study the reality of an experience that it is possible to observe in the long term and in relations with the authorities: from their entry into the national territory to their expulsion, the suspensions they obtain or the prison sentences they undergo, the division of the latter.
Questions on local conditions
However, faced with this multiplication of examples which sometimes prevents from going beyond conjectures, we regret that the logics of exclusion (or integration) are not more questioned, especially in the case of North African workers whose lewis shows admirably the discriminated situation, including compared to other foreign workers. But the causes of this discrimination do not seem to be explained enough (settlers’ pressure ? Fear of contact with French workers ? National Labor Protection ? or pure and simple racism of employers and political authorities ?). To better identify the logics of inclusion and exclusion, we regret that the statistical treatment of the results is not more advanced, that certain actors are not studied more or that the Lyon and Marseille cases are not replaced in a national context and enlightened by comparisons with other French situations, such as that of the North-East France.
The role of municipalities is for example addressed only too marginally, especially in the case of the municipalities of Greater Lyon. In the absence of a national providence state, the role of municipalities in the organization of such a system and in the definition of its beneficiaries was however essential. We would therefore like that more attention was paid to municipal policy, especially in these red industrial communes of East Lyonnais where foreigners could represent almost half of the population in the early 1930s. The commune of Vaulx-en-Velin thus experienced a demographic growth of 462% between 1911 and 1936 thanks to the artificial silk industry, and while it was not the part of it in 1901 last in the population of 1931 was 43%. In this context, how have municipalities determined the social rights of foreigners ? How has the election of communist or socialist municipalities influenced the processes of inclusion and exclusion ?
In the Marseille case, if the importance of local elected officials in expulsion or naturalization procedures is very well highlighted, we would sometimes like the logics of the actors to be more studied. The only search for customers by local elected officials is enough to explain their actions and support for naturalization requests, especially in the case of large families ? What role could the origins of these elected officials play in a commune where immigration was an ancient phenomenon and which gave itself in 1935 a son of Italian immigrants for mayor (Henri Tasso) ?
An important milestone for the history of an immigration policy
The fact remains that Mr. D. Lewis delivers here an essential contribution to the history of immigration to France which recalls the importance of immigration of the interwar period as well as the seniority of the debates and policies aimed at organizing this immigration. The study by M. D. Lewis makes the story of a first failed attempt at organization and control of massive immigration. She describes a system of recruitment of foreign workforce which turned in the 1930s into a real immigration policy, first of all by the exclusion of workers without family and without attachments in France in the name of the protection of “ national employment », In particular under the government of Pierre Laval, then by integration and the facilitated naturalization of families and young men capable of serving in the army while the threat of a return of war grew. But far from supposed universalism or national political proclamations, the very local approach makes it possible to highlight the complexity and diversity of the situation of foreigners in France from the interwar period. The discovery of these “ boundaries »External and internal of the Republic is finally a powerful call for new research on the processes of integration and exclusion in the various aspects of the daily life of immigrants such as the company, the school, the army, relations with the” French Or community solidarity.