V

The Fascist State and Italian Emigration

THE ease with which organized business was able to dominate Polish immigration was not possible with the largest migration—the Italians. Employers from the iron and steel, construction, chemical, and agricultural industries, who used Italian labor, did not, like their colleagues in the Coal Committee and CARD, create an inter-industrial organization to recruit Italian workers. Not only did these industries lack the necessary cohesion to form a SGI, but faced a relatively strong Italian state with interests very different from their own. It was the Italian government’s Commissariato generale dell’emigrazione (CGE) which dominated the flow of Italians into France. Unlike Poland, which had only in 1919 become a state, lacked a rationalized bureaucracy, and was under the influence of French interests, the Italian state was relatively strong and independent. Italy’s elite also had a clear understanding of the importance of emigration for national economic development. The result was a nationalist emigration program which combined public regulation with private encouragement. While the religious nationalism of the Poles protected them from cultural disintegration in France, it poorly defended the economic interests of Polish workers. By contrast, the Italian state was more successful in advancing the economic position of its emigrants but less effective in maintaining the cultural cohesiveness of the Italian community in France.

Mussolini’s fascist regime inherited a well-developed emigration policy from his predecessors. Besides modifying this program somewhat to fit ideological concerns, he essentially continued the CGE’s policy. Elements of this nationalist program would be imitated by other governments in the late 1920s, frustrating French business’s desire for an unimpeded access to European labor. Immigration became increasingly less a matter of individual choice, a personal response to the market and demographic conditions, and more an affair of state.

The CGE Regulates Italian Labor Emigration

The powerful position of the Italian state vis-à-vis the French capitalist can be explained by France’s dependence upon Italian labor. Despite Italy’s need for an outlet for unemployed labor, Italian workers were well integrated into the French occupational structure and difficult to replace. Already in 1911, 256,811 Italians worked in France.¹ While southern Italians migrated primarily to the United States and Latin America, northern Italians, especially from Piedmont, Lombardy, and Venetia, took the short trek north to Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and France.² During the 1920s France’s share of continental Italian emigration increased sharply. While in the decade 1901–1910 France received an annual average of 57,262 or 22.8 percent of continental emigrants, in the period 1921–30 France’s annual share rose to 101,609 or 74.6 percent. Emigration to France was particularly important during the reconstruction period of 1922–25 as indicated in Table 8.³

Of course, Italian emigration was an indication of sluggish economic growth and population pressure. Throughout this period, workers from Italy’s often erratic metallurgical industry, as well as from the building trades, regularly migrated to France. There, many hoped to improve skills and to earn working capital in order to found small businesses upon their return to Italy. Temporary or seasonal jobs in France of wood cutters, gardeners, and orchard workers produced a necessary supplement to the income of many Italian families.⁴ Also, Italians in the 1920s had fewer options for emigration: German, Swiss, and Austrian demand for foreign labor greatly decreased in the 1920s thanks to relatively high rates of unemployment.⁵ Immigration restrictions in the United States, however, implemented in 1921 and 1924, had little impact upon the continental emigration. In 1925 southern Italians constituted only 10.6 percent of the continental emigration, scarcely more than the 7.8 percent at the peak of transcontinental emigration in 1910.⁶

While Italy needed an outlet for underutilized labor, the French also found that manpower indispensible. Italian wood cutters, masons, and other skilled construction workers were irreplaceable.⁷ Attempts to supplement Italian construction workers with Czechs in the early 1920s had failed when, in 1924, the Czech government placed prohibitive restrictions on their export.⁸ The electrochemical and metallurgical industries in the French Alps relied upon a steady supply of seasonal laborers from Piedmont.⁹ Poles or other immigrants were no substitute. While the iron and steel industries of the Lorraine attempted to replace Italians with Poles from 1924, the Italian migration into this district remained important.¹⁰ By 1926, Italians constituted 9.4 percent of the basic metal workers, 14 per cent of construction laborers, and 8.5 percent of glass and stone workers in France.¹¹ Furthermore, French employers had few options for immigrant labor, especially from neighbouring countries which required little organized recruitment. The German and Belgian populations in France actually declined in the 1920s: the number of Germans dropped from 75,625 in 1921 to 71,729 in 1931 and the number of Belgians from 253,694 to 238,986.¹²

As a result of this reliance on Italian labor, the Italian state was in a favorable position to demand a quid pro quo from the French for any labor exported. The Italian state acted as a kind of trade union for its emigrants; it attempted to bargain with France for the best jobs and wages for its citizens. The demand for their labor and the threat of withdrawal yielded bargaining power. This policy hardly reflected a deep commitment to the amelioration of Italian labor. More important was a desire to secure a profitable return on the Italian investment in the emigrant laborer. Italy lacked the political and economic resources for a genuine colonial policy of exporting capital and goods. As a result, it had to rely on its major asset, labor, for export. While Italian emigrants might have been a social and economic burden had they remained at home, through their emigration they became a potential economic benefit to Italy. They could repatriate earnings and return with new skills.

From 1901 to 1927, the CGE carried out a nationalist emigration policy. Led by Georges de Michelis from 1919, the CGE endeavored to improve the value of Italian emigration. As de Michelis claimed in 1924: “The CGE is directed toward treating the human element as an essential factor in the production of foreign exchange. . . .” The CGE became an active proponent of an imperialism through emigration in which the “interests of the emigrant coincides with the national interest.”¹³

In 1913 the Italian parliament granted the CGE the authority to prohibit any emigration which did not improve Italy’s position on the world labor market. In that same year, after having temporarily suspended emigration, the CGE forced a model work contract on the French Comité des forges and the German Feldarbeiterzentrum (Farm Labor Office). This contract compelled employers to specify wages and provide job descriptions prior to recruiting labor in Italy. During 1915, in negotiations with the French Armaments Ministry, the CGE obtained specific guarantees for the wages, housing, and food of Italians imported into French war industries.¹⁴ In 1919, in anticipation of a “disorderly exodus of our best workers,” the CGE demanded that passports be granted to workers only if they had obtained “contracts advantageous economically and morally” to Italian labor. For this purpose, in November 1919 the Italian government gave to the CGE the authority to suspend emigration in any specific geographic area or occupation.¹⁵

Armed with these sweeping powers the CGE made a systematic effort to improve the wages and skills of what it hoped would be Italy’s temporary emigrants. The CGE gathered detailed information about the wages and working-living conditions of workers in various French industries and regions. It strongly favored channeling Italian workers into building trades, especially in the reconstruction zone in the early 1920s. An Italian mason hired for the reconstruction in 1922 could average forty-five francs per day compared with the twenty to twenty-five francs offered to experienced miners and laborers in the Lorraine iron and steel industry, which had been an important zone of emigration before the war. The construction industry offered unusual opportunities for on-the-job training and promotion. The CGE claimed (1922) that many Italians progressed from the status of low-skilled laborers to specialists in the reconstruction zones in France. Some even became small contractors and hired Italian labor. Both the rapid growth of the construction industry in France from 1922 to 1924 and the relatively low capital needed to establish a business in this industry seemed to offer social mobility that the unskilled jobs in the large-scale metals and mining industries did not provide. “Our workers,” the CGE boasted, “found in the work of the war-torn regions a school of professional advancement.”¹⁶

Even in trades where advancement was more difficult, the CGE attempted to secure the highest possible wages. The CGE negotiated an agreement with the French railways in 1922 for Italian labor to lay rail beds and repair exchanges. Although workers were paid only 1.8 to 2 francs an hour, they soon earned 2.5 to 3 francs as skilled repairmen. More importantly they were housed and fed on isolated rail cars which prevented them from spending their earnings in France. Finally, these jobs provided an outlet for some of the pressure of unemployment among unskilled Italians. In a similar vein, while the wages and opportunities for advancement in the mining and metallurgical industries were limited, the Commissariato saw the advantage of subsidized housing, free gardens, family bonuses, and recreation which some of the companies provided. These benefits reduced living costs, made low wages more bearable, and gave some the opportunity to save. Even so, the disadvantages of the iron and steel industries were such that the CGE resisted the appeals of the Comité des forges for additional Italian labor, obliging them to turn to the SGI and the Polish worker in 1924. The CGE also favored emigration into industries which violated or obtained exemptions from the eight-hour day law. For example, in the early 1920s the CGE encouraged Italian emigration into the hydroelectric chemical and metallurgical centers of the French Alps because they could work ten hours a day, seven days a week, thus earning more money to return to Italy.¹⁷

The Italian government was concerned about neither the length and quality of the work day nor the living conditions which the emigrants experienced (as long as these conditions did not cause the repatriation of sick citizens). Instead, it wanted Italians to earn as much as possible in the shortest period of time and to minimize their living costs during their stay in France. Italian emigration was to be temporary; it was to improve the Italian balance of payments through wage repatriation.

In order to carry out this policy, the CGE carefully used its powers to review and veto work contracts which French employers submitted. In 1924, for example, of 37,945 contracts from French employers (some of which were requests for many workers—collective contracts), 12 per cent were rejected; in 1925, 13 per cent of the 30,339 contracts requested were refused, in both cases mostly because of the low wages offered. For instance, on account of substandard pay, the CGE rejected contracts for shipwrights, iron miners, and forestry workers. The CGE vetoed the emigration of general farm hands for the Nord, because these farms offered only 120–180 francs monthly; instead it encouraged emigration into the French southwest where there was a demand for sharecroppers. The CGE saw this as a step toward land ownership, something that the farmers of the Nord could not provide. These farmers were obliged to draw on the less protected Poles for their manpower needs.¹⁸

Finally, the CGE attempted to improve the marketability of Italian labor in France (and elsewhere). As early as 1912, the CGE stationed agents in Paris and other areas of potential emigration to investigate job openings and to publicize the advantages of Italian labor to French employers. The CGE dispersed this job information and offers of employment through a complex network of provincial and communal emigration committees and state-administered labor offices. This effort had become increasingly necessary, the CGE admitted in 1913, because of shrinking job opportunities abroad, economic crises at home, and the danger of general “disillusionment from extended unemployment.”¹⁹

The CGE also subsidized private placement offices within France. These offices found work both for those Italians who entered France as tourists and those who were temporarily unemployed. In 1924 these Comitati per l’assistanti dei lavoratori italiani (Committees to Aid Italian Workers) were established under private Italian auspices and administration in a number of centers of Italian emigration. Comitati located in Paris, Briey, Mulhouse, St. Auventin, and Modane helped to find work for Italians. The CGE had as little use for idle Italians in France as did the French government. The Comitato in Paris set up a placement office at the Gare de Lyon to find jobs for emigrants as soon as they stepped off the train from Italy as well as for construction workers as they drifted into Paris after rebuilding the war zones. During the first ten months of 1924 this office placed 4,000 Italians. In particular, it attempted to locate them outside Paris, where the high cost of living and the temptation to spend discouraged savings. The Paris and provincial Comitati also helped Italians with workers’ compensation and pension claims. The Briey Comitato assisted about 500 victims of industrial injuries in filing insurance claims in the first half of 1924 alone.²⁰ The Italian state did not want the side-effects of working in France to fall ultimately on Italy; rather, it sought to receive the full benefits of the work of its citizens in France.

The CGE also attempted to improve the skills of prospective Italian emigrants. By 1922 the CGE operated nineteen schools which trained 1,084 workers in cement, masonry, mosaic work, and other building trades in great demand in France. These programs, however, touched relatively few, since in September of 1922 almost 80,000 Italians were already working in the reconstruction of French war zones.²¹ Yet the CGE’s training programs were at least symbols of its policy of upgrading the skills of Italians. Its social services and quasi-trade union activities were designed to maintain the Italians’ identification with their homeland and thus to encourage their eventual return to Italy with their skills and savings.

Beyond this, the CGE served Italian business by discouraging any exodus of labor which might raise wages in Italy. In order to assure that only surplus labor was recruited in Italy, the CGE allowed French employers to individually select workers only in regions of high unemployment. The CGE also recruited batches of workers for French employers in “collective contracts” from these same areas. The CGE occasionally denied passports and thus the right of emigration to workers whom it considered crucial to local economic interests. For example, when Italian farm employers complained in 1924 and 1925 of excessive emigration to the French southwest, where Italian day laborers were recruited as sharecroppers, the CGE responded by prohibiting migration to this region.²² Through these discretionary powers the CGE helped to drain saturated labor markets in Italy, while still protecting the Italian employer from the foreign competitor.

The Italian state and employers expected a substantial return on the investment in emigrant labor. Government controls over expatriation helped but this did not necessarily guarantee that Italian emigrants would continue to identify with their homeland, avoid assimilation into the foreign society, and eventually return to Italy with capital and skills. Thus an integral part of Italian policy was a cultural program, which attempted to wed Italians abroad to the goals of this nationalist emigration policy. It was equally important that emigrants returned to Italy uncontaminated by French radicalism and that Italian socialists and communists did not gain influence over Italian workers in France. Thus the Italian state tried to control the leadership of the Italian community in France in much the same way as the Polish state attempted to infiltrate the Polish mining communities. The Italian elite had a very clear intention of dominating the political and cultural life of Italian expatriates. According to the Chamber of Commerce in Padua in 1922 emigration should:

develop peaceful expansion of Italian power, eliminate germs of social discontent, contribute individually to improving labor and collectively to enriching the country . . . [It should] encourage the desire to save and especially to raise the standard of living, thus improving the individual. If, however, emigration is not properly controlled, there will be corruption and subversion, a state of affairs which can and ought to be eliminated.²³

This control of the emigration was, of course, to be delegated to the public powers. In an age of growing class consciousness, employers could not attempt to control the expatriate workers directly. In turn, the state and the CGE delegated this role to supposedly neutral religious and philanthropic agencies.

This policy, already well-established before World War I, was adopted and extended by Mussolini after the fascist takeover in October 1922. Ever since the fascists began their attack on the left and the trade unions in 1920, and especially after they suppressed the unions and left parties in 1925, socialist and communist activists fled Italy, many migrating to France.²⁴ The fascist state certainly would not tolerate Italian contact with radicalism in France after it had been uprooted in Italy.

Even before the fascist victory, the CGE subsidized twenty-eight private agencies abroad and fifty-eight similar groups in Italy that were devoted to placing Italians in jobs outside the country and to perpetuating conservative and nationalist ideas among emigrants. These offices recruited workers without the stigma of government, much less that of the employers. Most of these welfare societies were linked either to the Opera Bonomelli, established in 1900 by the Catholic church, or to the secular group, Umanitaria (organized in 1901).²⁵

Although the Umanitaria was present in France, it was stronger in Switzerland and Germany. Furthermore, Mussolini destroyed it in 1924 to the temporary advantage of its rival, the Opera Bonomelli. This clerical organization, created in 1900 by a Turin priest to preserve the Catholicism of the continental emigrants, had the Vatican’s strong support. It was influential in the French Lorraine, especially in the iron and coal basins of Briey and Longwy, where it established offices in 1907, soon after Italian miners appeared. In 1909 the Opera Bonomelli spread to Marseilles and Lyons. By 1927 there were sixty-six offices in Europe (fifteen located in Italy and seventeen in France). It provided hostels in northern Italy for immigrants in route to France. Its services included clinics, nursery schools, and Italian language and cultural classes. The Opera Bonomelli had two publications, a mass weekly, La Patria, and a house organ, Opera Bonomelli, as well as almanacs and assorted brochures.²⁶

As an indication of how valuable the CGE considered the Opera Bonomelli, the CGE in 1920 paid it 183,000 lire in subsidies, or 30 percent of its budget of 599,715 lire.²⁷ Although obviously catering to Catholic emigrants, the Opera Bonomelli was hardly distinguishable from the Italian consuls. In the Lorraine, for example, it served as an intermediary between emigrants and the Italian diplomatic services.²⁸ The consuls helped to form Opera Bonomelli mutual-aid societies.²⁹ The Opera Bonomelli also helped to place temporarily unemployed Italian emigrants and performed functions. of social amelioration that would otherwise have fallen on the consuls. Most important, the CGE and Opera Bonomelli shared an ideology. This Catholic organization fostered not only religion and the cult of the family but that of the nation as well. It did not question the state’s attempt to organize Italian emigrant workers abroad under Italian “technical chiefs and leaders.”³⁰

Unlike other labor exporting states, Italy clearly recognized the economic consequences of emigration and undertook a systematic program to realize the greatest benefits. Yet what was the impact of this policy on Italians in France and how successful was it? This aggressive involvement of the Italian state and private groups may be reflected in the relatively advantageous economic position of Italians in France. If one compares the occupational and class distribution of Italians with Polish immigrants in 1931, one finds that the Italian population had gained a relatively large degree of economic mobility. As Table 9 indicates,³¹ while the Poles were heavily concentrated in primary industries (into which the SGI recruited them), the Italians realized a wide penetration of the occupations. The class distribution of the Italians was also closer to the pattern of French society as a whole than was that of the Poles, who were heavily proletarianized.

Of course there are non-political explanations for this relatively elite position of Italians in immigrant society; Italian immigration benefited from large established groups of compatriots and relatives already in France, while the Poles lacked this advantage. Italy also had a larger pool of skilled workers to export than did Poland, especially in the important construction and metal goods industries. Yet the superior position of Italians in France was also a result of the Italian state’s intervention in the distribution of emigrant labor. It blocked the kind of organized immigration under the control of employers, which had channeled the Poles into primary industries and had limited their mobility.

Furthermore, French employers were keenly aware of the countervailing power of the Italian state and its ability to frustrate their manpower plans. Edouard de Warren and other parliamentary representatives of French business had sponsored a national immigration office in 1921 in part to give French business a state-level counterpart to the Italian CGE (see p. 53). R. Blanchard, representing the Alpine hydrochemical and metallurgical industries, complained in 1924 that the Italian government had, since 1920, created “obstacles and restrictions blocking the peaceful invasion of its nationals and it is to overcome these difficulties . . . that the industrialists have used all their powers to induce contingents of other nationalities to come [to France] despite their inadequate numbers and quality in comparison to the Italian immigration.”³² Employers were often obliged to tolerate Italian “interference” when they had no alternative sources of labor.

The promotion of Italian national identity under conservative sponsorship, however, had mixed results. As in the case of the Poles, employers sometimes appreciated the conservative goals of these nationalist welfare agencies in France. For example, the Opera Bonomelli was generally “well liked in industrial circles,” for it provided non-communist workers through its job placement services.³³ The French trade-union and communist press agreed that the Opera Bonomelli served the interests of French employers: its mutual-aid societies were alternatives to unions, and the Opera recruited “backward elements” into regions and occupations, especially near Paris, weakening trade unions.³⁴

Yet the nationalism of these agencies contradicted the interests of French employers. For example, Robert Pinot, the president of the Comité des forges in the early 1920s, probably had the greatest experience among French entrepreneurs with Italian immigration. Writing to the Conférence permanente de la main-d’oeuvre étrangère in December of 1920, he complained that the Italian clergy’s nationalistic preaching undermined his attempts to “stabilize Italian labor” in France; it served the foreign-policy goals of the Italian government. Pinot claimed that this policy included encouraging emigrants to change jobs frequently to prevent their attachment to a single job or location. “Italy knows,” he said, “that if its emigrants permanently settle in France, they will not send back . . . their earnings.” He feared that they might “unite and fortify themselves around an Italian clergy established in France under the patronage of the Pope.”³⁵ Unlike the Polish church, which moved into and divided an already organized mining community in the north, Italian missionaries served as a trade union substitute where often none existed. Both Italy and Poland attempted to create colonies in France led by patriotic, conservative, and often clerical elites. Obviously, when this policy divided immigrant and French workers or maintained the docilitiy, credulity, and fertility of imported workers, French employers supported it. Clearly, when and where it united or articulated immigrant interests, even if an attempt to prevent assimilation, employers opposed it. For Pinot, a “yellow union” run by priests was almost as bad as a “red” one.

The foregoing analysis suggests that Italian policy probably helped to improve the economic status of emigrants in France and certainly frustrated French employers. Yet did it realize the ultimate goal of the Italian government—the substantial inflow of foreign exchange in repatriated wages or the return of newly skilled Italians? Despite governmental efforts, savings returned to Italy from the continental emigrants was significantly lower than repatriated savings from transoceanic emigrants. In 1923, a year of high continental savings, only 168 million lire were returned to Italy from European emigrants compared to 510 million from the transcontinental savers. For the period 1903—23, the deposits per emigrant saver in France was only 223 lire compared to 899 for the Italian who emigrated to the United States.³⁶

Moreover, the expected bonanza of repatriated labor failed as well. Although seasonal laborers returned regularly to Italy, especially during the winter months, they contributed little to Italy during their annual leaves. The emigrants who obtained skills and capital when in France often did not return to Italy. Rather, they naturalized or settled permanently in France. This is indicated by the repatriation figures which declined significantly after reaching a peak of 109,529 in 1925. Returning emigrants dropped to 85,123 in 1926 and slid to 46,296 in 1927 and 31,845 in 1928.³⁷ The number of individual contracts may also reveal a trend toward permanent migration: many Italians hired under individual contracts were relatives of Italians already settled in France. Thus a large number of individual contracts indicated a pattern of Italian families bringing kin to France for permanent settlement. In the early twenties, the number of these individual contracts increased from 8,228 in 1922 to 31,824 in 1923. The number of collective contracts rose only from 30,756 in 1922 to 33,907 in 1923.³⁸

The impact of the CGE’s policy, then, was ambiguous: it benefited Italian emigrants in France, yet was unable to provide a significant return on the social investment of Italy in her expatriated labor force. This failure became increasingly evident to the fascist leadership in Italy as the 1920s wore on, leading by 1927 to an important modification of the CGE’s program.

Fascist Modifications of Emigration Policy

Despite Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922, the fascist regime was slow to penetrate the state apparatus involved in emigration. As late as 1925, Mussolini expressed his full confidence in the CGE and the policies of its director, de Michelis. Indeed the goals of this holdover from the liberal state were basically consistent with those of the fascists. Yet the stamp of fascism was gradually placed on emigration policy. In an effort to eliminate the CGE’s autonomy and make emigration a part of fascist foreign policy, Mussolini, in January 1923, subordinated the CGE to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.³⁹ Two years later the CGE was abolished and replaced by the Directorate of Italians Abroad, a name signifying the fascist belief that emigrants remained a part of the nation and participants in fascist plans of expansion.⁴⁰

Moreover the fascists rejected the implicit assumption which guided CGE policy—that Italy was overpopulated and required emigration to disgorge her unemployable masses. Rather, fascist leaders decreed that Italy’s high fertility was a mark of vitality. Indeed in 1926 Mussolini declared that his regime would promote more births in order to raise Italy’s population to sixty million by mid-century.⁴¹ Emigration, as a French consul noted in 1927, was a word which grated in the ears of fascists,⁴² a symbol of the backwardness which the fascists pledged to abolish.

Beyond this visceral ideological rejection of emigration, the fascists and their allies objected that the economic benefits of emigration were meager, helping only the receiving nations. Francesco Coletti, writing in Corriere della sera (July 1926) complained that the French “receive especially young or adult men. They choose the immigrants who are the most useful to them. As a result, the entire population [of France] is improved both from the biological and productive points of view.” Without immigration, Coletti noted, French capital would have to be invested abroad.⁴³

Dino Grandi, Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, summed up the fascist approach to emigration in a speech in March 1927, shortly before the abolition of the CGE:

The General Commissariat of Emigration is today in obvious contradiction with the principles and aims of Fascism. . . . Italian colonies abroad should each be reproductions of the home country on a small scale. . . . Since emigration has now changed into a political phenomenon, the General Commissariat must become a political organ and must form an undivided whole with . . . the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. . . . We as Fascists must have the courage to declare that emigration is an “evil” when, as at the present, it is directed towards countries under foreign sovereignty. Emigration is necessary, but towards Italian countries and possessions.

. . . Henceforth [Italy] will send only members of her governing classes beyond the frontiers of her sovereignty, not as a remedy for her poverty but to fulfill her need for expansion. . . . Why should our race form a kind of human reservoir for the replenishment of the small or declining populations of other nations? Why should our mothers continue to bring into the world children who will grow up into soldiers for other nations?

Fascism will cease to encourage emigration, which saps the vital forces of race and State.⁴⁴

Instead of massive expatriation, the fascists promoted a program of internal colonization and agricultural colonies in Northern Africa, especially Somaliland and Eritrea. These projects were not successful and led the Italians into the disasterous military adventures of the late 1930s.⁴⁵ The fascist decision to de-emphasize emigration was an expression of nationalist pride and a recognition that emigration was not the best utilization of Italian manpower resources. Yet behind this anti-emigration rhetoric was the unspeakable fact that Italy could no longer place her unemployed in the economies of other nations. Both the catastrophic restrictions of movement into the United States and the uncertain and fluctuating demand for Italian labor in France was evident by 1925. Mussolini had attempted through the international conferences on emigration and immigration held in 1921 and 1924 to improve the conditions for economic emigration and to weaken the impact of American quotas. Yet these efforts had indifferent results.⁴⁶ The decline of opportunity for Italians in France after the completion of the reconstruction in 1924 was more bad news (see Figure 1). Finally, French revision of its naturalization law in 1927 capped the failure of the CGE’s emigration policy. This law significantly eased the process of naturalization in France, in effect frustrating Italian government hopes of retaining the national identity of emigrants in France.⁴⁷ In the light of these developments, the boisterous rejection of emigration as a social policy was a smokescreen for the inability of Italy to carry out a successful emigration program.

Yet Italy could hardly rid herself of the need for emigration or abandon the long-held policy of making emigrants an instrument of national economic growth. The fascists would simply try harder, first to improve the economic position of those who were allowed to emigrate, and secondly to redouble efforts to encourage emigrants to remain Italian nationals and to contribute to Italy’s economic development. Toward these ends, Mussolini placed even greater restrictions on emigration than had the CGE and promoted a strong nationalist movement among the emigrants.

Following the suppression of the CGE in April of 1927, Mussolini issued a series of decrees which more strictly regulated emigration. A circular of June 3 to the prefects declared that henceforth permanent emigration was to be discouraged and that passports should be granted would-be emigrants only after careful scrutiny. Edicts required Italian consuls to approve of work contracts and limited the rights of emigrants to petition visas for their relatives in Italy. At the same time, Mussolini instructed the consuls to encourage repatriation.⁴⁸ Because the fascists considered individual migration as likely to lead to permanent settlement abroad, they placed numerous restrictions on it. For example, in 1928 importers of Italian labor such as Alpine metals and chemical industries, who hired specific workers, were denied their requests.⁴⁹

Beginning in April of 1928 the Italian state allowed employers to hire only twenty emigrants by name; others had to be recruited by the Italian government under collective contracts.⁵⁰ Finally, in January of 1929, control over migration at the frontiers was taken from the emigration services and placed under the general security police. This change meant greater surveillance of the frontier to prevent clandestine emigration that naturally increased as additional emigration restrictions were imposed.⁵¹

While the shift in policy in 1927 was directed against massive emigration and especially permanent resettlement, the fascist regime continued to uphold the objectives of the CGE by attempting to encourage temporary migrations of skilled and highly paid workers. Emigration, according to a fascist deputy in 1927, was to be “reserved for those elements best armed for the economic struggle.”⁵² Thus engineers, skilled building and metal workers, as well as managerial personnel were freely granted passports.⁵³ Not only were these Italians more likely to return with savings and experience than less skilled workers, but they would enhance Italian prestige abroad. On the other hand, the fascist-dominated Directorate of Italians Abroad was even more severe than the CGE in restricting migration of unskilled Italians: for example, in July of 1928, French employers were denied requests for domestic labor and farm workers, a policy which greatly aggravated the French in the departments of the Bouches-du-Rhône and Isère.⁵⁴

Partially as a result of these policy changes, emigration to France declined significantly from 1927 to 1929. If, for 1927 this decrease could as well be explained by the recession of that year as by Italian restrictions, in 1928 and 1929, years of economic growth in France, the Italian controls obliged employers to shift their foreign labor needs to Eastern Europe.⁵⁵ However, rhetoric and formal decrees aside, the number of Italians entering France in 1930 increased sharply (by 87 percent). The onset of the economic crisis of the 1930s stimulated Italian ingenuity at sidestepping government controls. Economic realities limited the political objectives of the fascist regime.

The style more than the substance of Italian emigration policy changed with the fascist suppression of the CGE. This was as true for the semi-private cultural and assistance programs as for the policy of the state. Indeed, just as the fascists abolished the CGE only to continue its broad objectives, so it eliminated private, often religious emigration services only to carry out similar programs under the aegis of fascism. The fascists attempted, with indifferent results, to impose a nationalist-conservative leadership on the Italian community in France and to assure its continued loyalty to Italy.

In 1925 Mussolini cut off the state subsidy to the Opera Bonomelli, forcing a number of its offices to shut down. By September 1926 he had purged the nonfascists on the Opera Bonomelli’s board and replaced them with his appointees. Finally in July 1928 Mussolini induced the pope to disband the organization altogether. Most of the established missions were turned over to the fascists.⁵⁶

Beginning in 1923, fascist trade unions gradually gained control over most collective recruitment,⁵⁷ gradually eliminating the recruitment services of the Opera Bonomelli. Fascists often infiltrated emigrant work groups in France in order to spy on those who were tempted to join French unions. They also attempted to organize fascist mutual-aid societies as alternatives to these unions, which, like the Polish ZRP, intervened in workers’ compensation cases and even demanded that employers contribute to their emergency-aid funds.⁵⁸ Fascist unions were sufficiently active to annoy French employers and to force Mussolini at the Congress of Fascist Unions in 1926 to order them not to intervene in disputes and controversies in France.⁵⁹ Mussolini was, of course, not about to allow the formation of class attitudes among emigrants any more than at home, nor would he needlessly antagonize French entrepreneurs.

Fascist infiltration of the Italian community in France was, however, allowed to divide French unions. A delegate to a conference of independent construction workers complained that a fascist-led influx of Italians into many construction trades had seriously undermined the eight-hour day because Italian work-teams labored ten-hour days.⁶⁰ The French unions complained that employers kept fascist supporters on the job after others were laid off.⁶¹ Even if one generously allows for exaggeration, fascist influence must have had a considerably divisive effect in those sectors where Italians were important.

Mussolini, however, found the fascist trade unions to be too unreliable. They were purged in 1928. The fascists also found the consuls to be too bureaucratic and, of course, the Opera Bonomelli too religious to serve his nationalist goals. As a partial replacement for these agencies, Mussolini created foreign-based fasci, modeled after the local Italian fascist organizations. As early as November 1922 the first fascio was set up in Paris. In 1923 it had 200 members and published a monthly newspaper, L’ltalie nouvelle.⁶² It became the funnel for many of the cultural and welfare projects of the fascist state. For example, the Comitato d’assistenza per li lavoratori italiani in Paris was controlled and financed by the fascio of Paris. By 1926 there were fasci in most Italian centers.⁶³ The consular staffs often led these fasci, while local Italian businessmen, clerks, and artisans composed most of the membership. For example, police reported only eighty members of the fascio of Lyons. The secretary was an employee of the Banque de Rome; other officers included a tailor and a butcher.⁶⁴ One of their principal functions was to distribute Il Lavoratore d’Italia to Italian workers in the industrial towns of the Loire valley. In Nantes and doubtless elsewhere the Italian consul established a mutual-aid society, which was administered by the local fascio.⁶⁵

Teamwork between the consuls and fasci extended into every nook and cranny of Italian life in France. This was particularly true as Mussolini purged career diplomats from consular posts. In February 1927, for example, the most important consulate in France at Marseilles went to a fascist deputy E. Barduzzi. He took over the local fascio as well as various veteran, patriotic, and mutual-aid organizations. He seized the Opera Bonomelli’s facility and also took over the local Italian-language newspaper, Eco d’Italia. Barduzzi’s vice-consul, an agent from the Italian General Security, spied on so-called Italian communists and anarchists and demanded their expulsion. While Barduzzi bullied the established Italian business class (apparently sufficiently to induce some of them to subsidize anti-fascist groups), he also catered to apolitical workers. He organized festivals for Italian fishermen and sponsored summer camps in Italy for the children of Italian workers. His excesses greatly annoyed both the Italian elite of Marseilles and the French prefect; their dissatisfaction probably contributed to his early departure at the end of 1927.⁶⁶ In any case, other Italian consuls worked in a similar direction.⁶⁷

Several innovative programs paralleled this expansion of fascist influence within the emigrant “colonies.”⁶⁸ In December 1925 Mussolini instructed the consuls to develop programs for the moral and patriotic training of Italian emigrants.⁶⁹ They were to organize groups called dopolavoro.⁷⁰ In some places the dopolavoro concentrated simply on Italian language classes for French-speaking Italian children.⁷¹ Others sponsored sporting events, political indoctrination, and propaganda to encourage savings and temperance.⁷² The dopolavoro served the goals of nurturing national identity (and with it, the desire to work hard, avoid alcohol, and save) as well as of stifling class consciousness. The fascists discouraged Italian citizens from becoming naturalized citizens of France. Italy often refused to send to French authorities civil documents required for naturalization. Beginning in 1928, the fasci subsidized trips to Italy for expectant mothers in order to assure the birth of Italian citizens.⁷³ From 1928 until the Second World War the consuls and fascists organized a series of summer camps in Italy for Italian children in France in the hope of encouraging nationalism. About 800 children from the Paris region went yearly.⁷⁴

Despite these efforts, the fascists seemed to make little headway. It is, of course, difficult to determine the number of Italians even minimally affected by this nationalism. But because Italian immigrants, unlike the Poles, never constituted a large, stable, and homogeneous colony, they could hardly maintain a nationalist culture. Only immigration into the southwest and the Lorraine provided any parallel to Polish immigration into the northern coal field. Yet in January 1927 the commissaire spécial of Toulouse claimed that only 5 percent of the Italians in the French southwest were fascist. Sixty percent of these immigrants were Christian Democrats and the rest, Nitti socialists.⁷⁵ Although 78,945 Italians had concentrated in the French Lorraine by 1926, there were only eight Italian organizations with a total of 600 members in 1924 in this region and no regional Italian press or schools.⁷⁶ The fact that the fascists chose to supplant rather than use the church for its nationalist propaganda may explain its failure when compared to the Poles. For many Italians in France, especially those in the skilled trades or old established emigrants, the fascists were the enemies of democracy and the working class. By contrast, the more conservative Poles rallied around the church as the carrier of the nationalist tradition.

Italian nationalism was a failure especially among workers. No workers’ names appear on lists of the leaders of fascist-led organizations in France. In contrast, Polish workers participated in many nationalist organizations. In a word, Italians had no substitute for the Polish ZRP. Fascist strength in France was concentrated in older centers of Italian penetration where middle-class emigration was more deeply rooted.⁷⁷

The Italian state, however, more successfully regulated labor emigration. Unlike the Polish state, Italy controlled its labor supply, thus affecting where and, to a degree, at what price it would enter the French labor market. Although this policy was subordinated to the fascists’ nationalist goals in 1927, and had limited economic impact, it remained the logical means by which a labor-supplying country might gain from the export of its citizens. Thus Italy became the model for others such as Poland and Spain in the late 1920s.

Other Labor-Exporters Adopt the Italian Model, 1928–30

The great advantage which France had over labor-supplying nations in the early twenties rapidly dissipated by 1928. Not only had France a growing need for labor, but Poland, Spain and other labor exporters had begun to learn from the Italians and demand a quid pro quo from the French. As the French economy heated up, coal operators, sugar beet planters, building contractors, textile manufacturers, and steel industrialists all claimed labor shortages by 1928.⁷⁸ Moreover, these industries faced a period of sharp diminutions of young native labor as the impact of the low fertility rates of the First World War reached the labor market. Alphone Pichon, president of the Union of Metal and Mining Industries, predicted in 1929 a yearly shortage of 310,000 workers which would last until 1939. He feared that this would lead to “increased instability of labor, more contract breaking, and a rise of wages and inflation.”⁷⁹ One of the few acceptable solutions to this problem was still greater immigration.

Yet, at the same time, Poland and other labor exporters were becoming less dependent upon France. While Poland’s unemployment rate declined in the late 1920s she found new outlets for emigration: her farm workers again were in demand for Germany and new agricultural settlements in South America called many Poles who otherwise might have had no choice but France.⁸⁰

Given the apparent effectiveness of Italy’s policy, it was adopted by Poland. In 1928, Poland began to restrict immigration to France in order to force improvements in the wages and the working and living conditions of Polish emigrants. In that year the Polish government reduced the number of the highly prized female farm workers who were allowed to go to France despite the objections of French farm associations.⁸¹ In 1929, the Polish government suspended farm labor emigration altogether, pending improvements in the housing, wages, and “moral protection” given to these peasant women.⁸² In 1929, despite the French request for 96,000 Poles for all industries, the Polish government allowed only 61,000 to go to work in France.⁸³ The Polish government had begun to doubt the wisdom of exporting potentially useful labor, especially skilled miners.⁸⁴ Moreover, by 1929, Polish business began to insist on a share of the emigration trade, then monopolized by the French SGI. They demanded that the Polish government aid them in displacing the SGI.⁸⁵

Even the relatively backward Spanish government established an emigration council in early 1926.⁸⁶ In August of that year, Spain belatedly signed a migration treaty with France which provided Spanish emigrants with legal access to French social welfare benefits. The Spanish also set up an office in Paris to review work contracts and to aid Spanish emigrants with legal problems. Again, reminiscent of the Italians, the Spanish minister of labor in 1928 reduced emigration under pressure from Spanish farm employers. The authoritative newspaper ABC cited frequent repatriation of destitute emigrants and the inability of many Spaniards to compete with other nationalities as additional reasons for the policy of restriction.⁸⁷

French response to this imitation of the Italian policy was first to make compromises: for example, the French Ministry of Agriculture in 1929 sponsored Committees for the Protection of Polish Farm Women in an attempt to satisfy Polish complaints that their young women in France received inadequate moral protection (see chapter VIII).⁸⁸ However, when a policy of accommodation was not so easy, the French state attempted to weaken the bargaining position of Poland, Italy, and Spain by tapping new sources of labor. In 1929 and 1930 France signed migration treaties with Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Austria which gave official backing to new missions controlled by the SGI.⁸⁹ As a result, immigration became increasingly Balkanized. Although the core nationalities (Italians, Poles, Spaniards, and Belgians) constituted 88 percent of the immigrant in 1926, by 1929 they formed only 76 percent and by 1930 only 72 percent.⁹⁰ The balance was composed of increasingly large groups of Yugoslavs, Rumanians, and other nationalities. If the depression had not intervened, even greater ethnic diversity would have resulted. The French would have recruited workers from increasingly less developed nations, ever further from its frontiers, even Arabs and blacks. The culmination of this trend, however, had to wait until the Fourth Republic and the contemporary period.

The 1920s closed an era in which laissez-faire principles guided international migrations. Economic factors increasingly were supplanted by politics in determining population movements. Not only were the interests of employers (and labor) in the receiving countries articulated through the state, but the labor-supplying nations became involved with the fate of their expatriated citizens. French employers utilized their government to facilitate immigration on favorable terms in order to meet their demand for labor and to counteract the pressures of advanced nations like Italy. This trend was evident in 1919, when the French government signed a migration treaty with Poland.

Yet it would be barely a decade before Poland would adopt the methods bf Italy. Inevitably, as migrations became politicized, the French had to bargain at the state level with supplier nations. No longer could the employer, backed by his nation state, exercise full hegemony over the immigrant worker. The labor-exporting states became the defenders of their citizens abroad, even if they were less interested in the emigrants’ personal fates than in using them to enhance their nation’s prestige and economic advantage. Ironically, often authoritarian and nationalist regimes, more then the labor movement, represented the international working class in France. Yet the effectiveness of this effort was limited. Labor suppliers lacked the receiving nations’ advantage: there were many nations seeking buyers of their surplus labor and few markets for them. If the French were frustrated by the interference of Italian and Polish nationalists, they had the advantage of moving to other sources.

Finally, how does one assess the affect of this complex politicized climate on the individual migrant? If he was increasingly “protected” by his home government, this support often contradicted his economic and even political interests. The migrant seeking economic and political freedom was less able to find it in this new worlf of international migrations.