Immigrant Workers in Industrial France

Abstract

The Making of a New Laboring Class.Gérard Noiriel's Le Creuset français: Histoire de l'im migration XIXe-XXe siècles, along with Yves Lequin's La Mosaïque France: Histoire des étrangers et de l'immigration en France, both published in 1988, were crucial founding texts for the field of immi gration history in France.But Cross blazed the trail with his earlier, finely wrought study at the crossroads of labor studies and immigration histor y.As my well-worn, copiously underlined, first edition attests, Cross inaugurated in-depth research into the ways in which France welcomed immigrants from the 1880s onward.He starts with the formative period before World War I, when employers' groups actively recruited foreign workers for their fields, factories, and mines, and then moves to the interwar period, the primary focus of his study.France's demographic woes have been long studied, from the declining birth rate of the second half of the nineteenth century -blamed variously on inheritance laws, taxes, military service, child labor laws, women, contraception, and/or an "esprit de calcul" -to the hecatomb of World War I.A ready yet reticent solution was immigrant labor.While Belgians and Germans had been coming to work in France since the nineteenth century (until, for the latter, their welcome wore out due to the Franco-Prussian War), Poles and Italians began to be hired heavily in the decades before World War I. Their recruitment then accelerated in the 1920s, and, faced with persistent labor shortages, France signed bilateral agreements in 1929 and 1930 with Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Austria.The contrast with Foreword the United States in the same period is striking, as Cross notes.As the French state encouraged immigration in the 1920s, the United States was closing its doors to (especially Eastern and Southern European) immigration through the 1921 and 1924 Quota Acts.Nonetheless, as Cross well reminds us, the "interwar period in France" comprised not one but two different periods: growth in the 1920s, depression in the 1930s.At first, along with urbanization, the older iron and steel indus tries grew alongside the rise of newer electrical and chemical industries, all of which hired immigrants.However, the downturn of the following decade meant that the welcome of foreign workers in the 1920s turned into dismissals and expulsions in the 1930s, even though, as Cross points out, the extent of discrimination was somewhat mitigated by the necessary role the immigrants played in certain sectors of the economy.Cross's work stands on the shoulders of others, as he acknowledged in his 1983 preface.Georges Mauco's 1932 Les étrangers en France (Foreigners in France) was considered the bible of immigration stud ies (until his anti-Semitic and xenophobic Vichy past was exhumed by Elisabeth Rudinesco and Patrick Weil in 1995).Jean-Claude Bonnet's Les pouvoirs publics français et l'immigration dans l'entre-deux guerres (The French Government and Immigration in the Interwar Period, 1976), ahead of its time, was an important new work noted by early scholars interested in the topic.I first learned of Bonnet's book from Georges Haupt in his 1977-1978 seminar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he enthusiastically mentioned this new avenue of study.Haupt, who was good friends with Harvey Goldberg, Cross's dissertation adviser who suggested the topic to him, may have helped transfer the information from Paris to Madison.Indeed, one of the many strengths of Cross's book is the way he combines Bonnet's interest in public policy (see also Gary Freeman, 1979) with an examination of employers' actions and, to a somewhat lesser extent, union attitudes toward foreign workers.Between the more protectionist communist Confédération général du travail (CGT) and the more immigrant-friendly Confédération général du travail unitaire (CGTU), labor itself was divided over the issue, as Cross well notes.He raises issues still pertinent for migration studies: the (false) distinction between temporary and permanent migration; the question of the struc tural or temporary role of immigrant labor in contemporary capitalism.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.