VIII

Limits of Assimilation

THE coming of nearly two million immigrants in the 1920s was an important factor in the steady growth of French capitalism: it not only helped to assure prosperity but also social stability. Through a complex pattern of private initiative and public control, immigrants filled job orders without seriously competing with French job-seekers. This foreign labor system would become the norm for other western European nations a generation later. Yet despite its success this immigration program posed a series of conflicting policy questions: (1) the choice between manpower or social criteria for admitting foreigners into France, (2) the conflict between a policy of encouraging temporary migration to meet short-term demand for labor or permanent immigration in order to facilitate social integration and population growth, and (3) the option of creating a subclass of foreign workers through tight regulation or tolerating their free access to and mobility within the labor market. These issues which France faced in the 1920s are similar to policy dilemmas more recently encountered by other industrialized nations, including the United States.

In the face of the broad choice between a manpower and social policy, the French in the 1920s heavily stressed economical goals. Since 1919, the French government’s immigration policy was directed almost exclusively toward expanding the supply of manpower and, to a lesser extent, to regulating aliens’ access to jobs in order to prevent French unemployment. Neither employers of immigrants nor many French workers had an interest in assimilation. Yet the social question could not be entirely ignored.

Parliamentary efforts from 1921–1924 to establish a national immigration office signified an interest in broadening policy to include non-economic issues. As we have seen, political conflicts and the refusal of the dominant right-center government to accept an expanded government role foiled these efforts.¹ Still, politicians, especially from the left-center Radical Party as well as health, police, and other government officials continued to demand a more balanced policy. By 1925, when it became obvious that immigration was not a temporary phenomenon of the postwar period but was to become a permanent feature of French society, the demand for a social policy on immigrants was again heard. Critics identified three broad problems of national policy: (1) the existing policy allowed the formation of alien colonies in the cities and industrial regions (e.g., coal basins). This threatened French cultural and political hegemony in these key industrial districts. (2) The demand for temporary or seasonal immigrant labor created a class of floating alien workers. These immigrants were often illegal residents and escaped governmental controls. Their rapid mobility, lack of community ties, and clandestine behavior made them a source of social disorder. (3) Finally, a policy which served only economic interests concentrated immigrants into the lower job levels and isolated them from French society. This made foreign workers susceptible to political radicalism and thus a threat to the French status quo.

In response to these social problems posed by the new immigration, critics raised solutions which were patterned on the experience of American immigration in the early 20th century: they advocated that immigrants be preselected to reduce the number of socially desirable foreigners in France. They also proposed that socially and economically acceptable immigrants be assimilated in order to increase France’s stagnant population.

Despite widespread and diverse support for these reforms, policy changed little in the 1920s. The reforms were inconsistent with the policy already in place: government restriction of foreigners to a secondary labor market and its discouragement of immigrants’ participation in the social and political life of French labor. As a partial alternative to the “Americanization” model, the government stressed administrative and police controls over immigration. These measures reinforced rather than contradicted the policy of channeling immigrants into a secondary workforce. This chapter will analyze the social problems which immigration engendered, the debate over reform, and the failure of the French to seriously modify the manpower bias of their policy.

Foreign Enclaves, the Dangerous Class, and Communism

Foreigners and the social problems which they engendered were not new to France in the 1920s. Yet the rapid pace of immigration and the arrival of new nationalities made ethnic differences far more visible than ever before. Before World War I, the foreign population increased slowly, rising from .38 to 1.16 million between 1851 and 1911. The only sharp increases were during the periods 1881–1886 (12 percent) and 1906–1911(11 percent). After the war, the number of immigrants rose dramatically, reaching 2.7 million by 1931. Between 1921 and 1926 alone, the foreign population increased 57 percent.² Furthermore, immigrants after 1918 were no longer recruited primarily from neighboring nations, usually with close cultural affinities to the French. Rather, as Table 21 indicates,³ eastern and southern Europeans as well as Arabs and other ethnically distinct groups entered France. These nationalities concentrated in highly visible enclaves in the cities and the mining regions of the northeast. French xenophobia was the inevitable result.

Concentrations of foreigners on French soil excited anti-foreign sentiments for several reasons: first, police and the press feared that slum-dwelling Arabs would cause an epidemic of exotic diseases and crime in French cities. In the Nord, for example, the popular newspaper Reveil du Nord complained in 1924 that the “Sidis,” as the Arabs were frequently called, lived in overcrowded lodgings. According to this investigation, 563 Arabs lived in only 181 rooms.⁴ In 1924, René Martial, a professor at the Paris Institut d’hygiéne and a specialist on immigration, observed that North Africans in Paris were “lured by unscrupulous landlords who exploit them by placing four, six, and even more in a single room which normally held two; they have no way of sleeping properly or keeping clean.”⁵ Georges Dequidt, an influential public health official, warned in 1926 that France not admit the “degenerate, the sick, and the vagabonds of the Mediterranean” and prophesied that if France did nothing she would become like the “U.S. where the most prolific population was foreign, with a propensity to crime, disease, and indolence.” To substantiate his claim, Dequidt later calculated that immigrants filled 14 percent of the beds in public hospitals and that they comprised in 1924 18 percent of the sentenced criminals even though they were less than 6 percent of the population.⁶

For different reasons the European immigrant enclaves were also perceived as a threat. As we have seen, they were often tightly knit communities with well-organized nationalist cultural and even political organizations. Police, for example, claimed that Polish communities in the coal districts of the northeast could not be controlled: they harbored illegal aliens and criminals as well as practiced their customs and laws in defiance of the French authorities.⁷ The police and press also feared that Italian nationalism in the southeast was a threat to national security. The Interior Ministry monitored the activities of Italian nationalists in Nice and Marseilles for signs of irredentism: Italian agitation to return territory annexed by France to Italy.⁸ In the southwest, Italian agricultural colonies became frequent targets of the press which wrote darkly of an Italian takeover of French soil. Even the CGT condemned this concentration of Italian peasants as a “state within a state.”⁹ In 1924, the French ambassador to the United States, drawing on the American experience, warned the French government that “compact masses of people of many races made complete assimilation difficult. They could influence political elections when they became naturalized.”¹⁰ The new concentrations of foreigners therefore posed the threat of crime, disease, cultural separatism, and political dissent.

The French were also suspicious of the highly mobile foreign individual. As an uprooted person who floated from one temporary job to another, this immigrant could not be trusted. Thus the individual immigrant was automatically in a suspect class, a classe dangereuse, similar to that class of French men, described by Louis Chevalier, which had migrated to bourgeois Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century.¹¹ Especially singled out were the immigrants without families in France. They lived in boarding houses near factories and, according to the prefect of the Nord (1925), they “often constituted an undesirable element. Drunkards, violent and immoral, unfortunately they appear all too often in the chronicles of crime and scandal.”¹² One might expect this hostility toward these immigrants from the rightist press (L’Action française, L’Ami du peuple and La Victoire, for example), but it also appeared in L’Homme libre, the organ of the liberal Society for the Rights of Man and Citizen. This newspaper, in June of 1926, advocated that the government eliminate those “undesirables” who were concentrated in the cities.¹³ This identification of the single immigrant with criminality was nearly universal among the French.

There was a third factor that made the new immigration a social problem: the assumption that the immigrants were sympathetic to communism. French authorities believed that their lowly economic and social status made them likely candidates for communist organizing efforts. In France, communists could poll from 8 to 12 percent of the vote in national elections in the 1920s and could command the support of significant working-class districts. Thus, it seemed plausible that communists could recruit immigrants. The following statement published in the highly influential Revue politique et parlementaire in 1924 summed up much of public opinion:

Among the foreigners, who are normally passive, the attitude of revolt is more slow to appear than among the French; but once it has taken root it does not dissipate so easily in words and gestures. These elements need direction and discipline. If they do not receive them, they become confused and sometimes even troublemakers.¹⁴

Even a leader of the CGT miners’ union, which was then anticommunist, claimed that if the Polish miners were not quickly organized into the CGT, they would “move toward the Moscovite demagoguery.”¹⁵ Another veteran leader of the mine workers claimed that the Poles had a natural disposition towards “autocracy,” which from his anti-communist perspective, had both red and black varieties.¹⁶

As if to confirm these anti-communist suspicions, the French communist party undertook a serious effort to organize immigrants into their party and the communist-controlled unions (CGTU). The communists devoted about 16 percent of the CGTU’s budget in 1926, for example, to propaganda directed at immigrants, a significant amount when only 56 percent of this sum was provided by immigrant workers. Most of these funds were used to publish foreign language weekly newspapers. Although all were short-lived and were often simply translations or reprints of standard communist material, they represented an effort to reach all nationalities working in France.¹⁷

Yet the communists had no success organizing immigrants which justified the fear of their influence. The earliest records on immigrants in the CGTU indicate that only about 3,000 foreigners belonged in 1923 and half of these were Italian. Most of these members were probably refugees, formerly enlisted into the Italian communist party, and were not recruited out of an immigrant milieu.¹⁸ Years later, the communists had little better success: despite the fact that the CGTU had established in Paris a special office in 1928 to recruit North Africans, only a few hundred of the nearly 30,000 Arabs in the area belonged to the CGTU by May 1930.¹⁹ This failure extended throughout the immigrant community: the CGTU could organize no more than 8 percent of the Polish miners (1925) and 5 percent of the Italians (1926).²⁰

Yet upholders of the status quo in France continued to agonize over the communist threat. This was probably because the communist doctrine on immigrant labor was both potentially appealing to foreign workers as well as subversive. In contrast, the CGT’s policy was neither attractive to immigrants nor threatening to the status quo. The CGT perceived the French worker to be a citizen entitled by his birth to protection against cheap foreign labor. CGT leaders were willing to collaborate with the state and employer groups to assure this protection. The communists, on the other hand, saw less distance between French and foreign workers. They observed that a working class divided between nationalities was incapable of successfully bargaining with employers, much less of overthrowing the capitalist system.²¹ As discussed in chapter 7, the communists advocated a “class solidarity” which included the foreign workers as the only solution. By 1927, they favored the elimination of the entire legal machinery which discriminated against the foreigner (identity card, work permits, and exclusion of immigrants from union offices). Communist leaders, if not always the rank and file, supported equal treatment for immigrants within the labor movement and society. To the French authorities it was intolerable for immigrants to adhere to such an ideology. This subversive influence would have to be nipped in the bud wherever it appeared.

The French perceived the problem of immigrants in terms of the American experience: that France might become another “nation of national minorities.” Likewise the French looked for a solution to this threat in the United States.²² The American solution was to exclude foreigners who were potential social problems and to assimilate and naturalize those immigrants who were socially acceptable. French efforts to follow the American path, however, were to prove largely unsuccessful.

France Tries the “American Model”: Preselection and Assimilation

After five years of nearly unrestricted immigration, a wave of proposals for tightening admittance standards appeared in 1926. Critics demanded that diseased immigrants and political activists be excluded.²³ Charles Lambert, a prominent Radical deputy from Lyons, advocated setting quotas on each immigrant nationality. Inspired by the American immigration law of 1924, Lambert hoped that these quotas would prevent ethnic enclaves of Poles and other nationalities from forming.²⁴ In 1926, Lambert became president of the short-lived High Commission for Immigration and Naturalization which a cabinet of his party had sponsored. He hoped to make it into a permanent governmental agency similar to the American Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization. It would administer all aspects of immigration, independent of special economic interests, and thus assure that the “national interest could be served.”²⁵

The objective of national control over the selection of immigrants, however, had scanty success: in February 1928, the Interior Ministry required new immigrants to present a medical certificate before they could enter France.²⁶ In the same year, Armenians and other Middle Eastern immigrants, considered to be a health hazard, were barred from landing at Marseilles.²⁷ Advocates of reform, however, hoped to go much further in order to stem the flow of “undesirables” and prevent ethnic enclaves. Still, preselection was considerably more difficult in France with its relatively open and poorly patrolled frontiers with five countries than in the United States with its Ellis Island and Atlantic Ocean. Apart from the formidable geographical problem, there simply was no support from the business interests who imported labor. Particularly important was the General Immigration Society (SGI). This agency, which imported virtually all the Eastern European labor which entered France in the 1920s, had no interest in accepting governmental controls. With its powerful contacts with the parliamentary right, it was able to prevent any infringement upon its activity. The failure of the new right-center government in 1926 to continue Lambert’s High Commission capped the failure of this approach.²⁸

If preselection was difficult to implement, assimilation was even more problematic. Most French agreed that the foreign resident should be integrated or assimilated into French society, at least in theory.²⁹ Generally, assimilation and eventually naturalization were also to increase the French citizenry and the pool of men for military conscription.

The favorite method of assimilation followed the well-worn American path—through the education of immigrant children. William Oualid, a prominent former official in the Ministry of Labor, advocated a vigorous effort to enlist foreign children in French schools in order to counteract the cultural influence of foreign nationalists over their compatriots in France.³⁰ Since the 1880s, the public school had become a vehicle for reducing the cultural distance between classes and regions in France.³¹ The idea of winning the children of immigrants to “French civilization” was but a minor adaptation of this well-established principle.

Integration was more difficult for the adult immigrant, however. Besides the obvious problems of adult education, particularly language training, French authorities were often ambiguous about assimilating the immigrant worker. Social integration could make the immigrant less serviceable to the French economy: it could reduce the social distance between foreign and French workers, make possible labor unity, and thus could put pressure on wage levels. In the northern coal mining region, for example, employers encouraged Polish separatism rather than assimilation by placing Poles in segregated housing and subsidizing Polish Catholic activities. The result was division between the French and Polish miners.³² A final problem was into which “French Civilization” were the immigrants to be assimilated—the secular-liberal tradition of the Radicals, the Catholic-conservative position of agrarian and bourgeois groups or even the revolutionary-egalitarian movement of the socialists and communists. We will consider briefly two efforts at assimilating adult immigrants which will illustrate some of the dimensions of these problems.

The first organization, Le Foyer français, was formed in Lyons and Paris in February of 1924, largely to counteract the ultranationalist influence of Italian fascists over their compatriots in France. Sponsored by a committee of lawyers and Radical politicians, the Foyer was closely identified with the liberal tradition in France. The Foyer attempted to encourage assimilation by organizing a variety of programs including French language classes for adults and legal aid for foreigners seeking naturalization. The Foyer illustrated an attempt to assimilate immigrants into the mainstream of French liberalism. Its influence was restricted to the well-established communities of middle-class Italians in Lyons and Paris. There is no evidence that it penetrated the enclaves of immigrants in the coal and steel regions of the northeast.³³

A second and more conservative effort to assimilate immigrants was organized by the Comités d’aide et de protection des femmes polonaises—CAPFP. Like the Foyer, they organized a program of French language instruction and sponsored French cultural events. Yet, unlike the Foyer, the CAPFP were organized by the employers of these immigrants—the farm associations of the northeast—who imported these young Polish women to work on their farms. Not surprisingly, the committees’ commitment to assimilation was colored by their desire for a stable immigrant workforce. For example, the committees monitored attempts of industrial employers to hire Polish farm workers. A principle function of the CAPFP was to reduce discontent and thus turnover.

One means of encouraging immigrant stability was to support the traditional Catholicism of the Polish women workers. According to official minutes, the CAPFP were to offer “paternal advice to acclimatize [the women immigrants] to France . . . and to protect them from the dangers which threaten solitary girls. Wholesome and engaging distractions are needed so that their religious beliefs may suffer no attack.”³⁴ Toward this end the CAPFP worked with Polish nationalist organizations to provide Polish religious festivals and clerical visitations. Far from counteracting the nationalist influence over the Poles, the committees attempted to use Polish influence to maintain a docile workforce.³⁵ Assimilation for the CAPFP had a very different meaning than for the Foyer français: it was not to make French citizens; rather it was to link the Catholic conservative background of the Polish worker with a similar culture in France, thus isolating the Poles from other significant cultural and economic options in France. Given these sharp differences over strategies of assimilation, private efforts to integrate foreigners met with little tangible success.

Despite these differences, both liberals and conservatives agreed that assimilation required occupational and familial stability.³⁶ Reflecting this sentiment, the French government encouraged married foreigners to send for their families. In 1928, for example, a Franco-Polish Protocol required that employers pay 60 percent of the costs of bringing immigrant families to France.³⁷ Family immigration would help to reduce the turnover rates of foreigners as well as increase the young population—important for the army as well as the economy.

Yet many foreign workers lacked the stabilizing influence of spouse and children. A rough indication of this is found in the relative shortage of foreign women and children. For every foreign woman in 1931 there were 2.03 foreign men, while for every French woman there was .88 men. Furthermore, despite the very low French birth rate, still a larger proportion of the French population was under fifteen (23 percent) than was the foreign (20 percent).³⁸ Another means of stabilizing the immigrants was to encourage them to become sharecroppers in the depopulated regions of the southwest. This idea was widely aired in the 1920s but with little practical success. The old belief that in order to be a true Frenchman one had to have his roots in the peasantry and French soil was nostalgically expressed in this unrealistic proposal.³⁹ To many French in the 1920s, the assimilated foreigner was to mirror their idealized image of the French worker of the 19th century—the sturdy independent artisan, the docile farmhand, or the stolid peasant. How unrealistic this was becomes clear when we consider France’s naturalization policy during the 1920s.

The Narrow Road of Naturalization

Naturalization laws are surely a good indicator of a nation’s commitment to assimilating a foreign population. Up to 1927 French procedures, unchanged since 1893, were hardly an encouragement for assimilation. Not only were immigrants required to reside in France ten years before they could apply for citizenship but even then they could be granted only the status of permanent resident for three years pending a decision on their naturalization petitions.⁴⁰

A number of groups sought the revision of this law, including the Catholic church, trade unions and political parties.⁴¹ The Congrès de la Natalité, an influential proponent of population growth, sought to liberalize naturalization procedures in the hope of increasing the French population in the child bearing years and thus reversing France’s demographic decline.⁴² Others sought increased naturalization as an antidote to the cultural influence of nationalist groups, especially from Italy.⁴³ As the French Minister of Justice observed in 1927, “naturalization can, in many cases, free citizens of foreign nations from the tutelage of the representatives and agents of their governments . . . [and] help absorb them into the French nation.”⁴⁴ Naturalization was also advocated as a means of integrating the middle-class immigrant into French society: “we must not offend the foreigners who have reached a certain position in our country . . . it is necessary that they not be discouraged.”⁴⁵

The revision of the naturalization law in 1927 was addressed to these concerns.⁴⁶ The new law reduced the residence requirement to three years for those seeking naturalization and abolished the three year waiting period. As a result, the number of naturalizations rose sharply: while 38,589 were granted between 1920 and 1926 before the revision of the law, the number of naturalizations rose to 119,276 between 1927 and 1932. Furthermore, the age of naturalized French dropped after the law was adopted, a fact pleasing to the pronatalists, who wanted more French fertility: the mean age of naturalization dropped from forty-three years for both men and women in 1927 to thirty-two years for men and thirty-eight years for women ten years later.⁴⁷ The revised law seemed to be serving its purpose of integrating more foreigners into French life and of increasing the French population.

Yet, if we break down the data by nationality and occupation, we see that naturalization remained a narrow option. The law primarily benefited the older migrations. For example, the Italian share of naturalizations increased from 30 percent of the total in the period 1923–1926 to 50 percent in 1927–1930. In contrast, a newer migration of Poles, almost entirely dating from after World War I, remained a small proportion of naturalizations: only 6 percent of the total between 1927 and 1930 were Poles, rising only to 9.5 percent from 1931 to 1935, despite the fact that the Poles in 1931 comprised 19 percent of the foreign population.⁴⁸ This tendency for naturalization reform to serve disproportionately the most established and oldest migrations is indicated also by a comparison of status profiles (see Table 22).⁴⁹ Except for the unemployed, the naturalized more closely fit the status profile of the French than they did of the foreign population (compare the worker category). The fact that a higher proportion of the naturalized were self-employed than were the French indicates that the artisan and petty merchant classes were routes of integration into French society. To a degree, naturalization was a reward for moving up from the working class. Finally, naturalization would play a far smaller role in France than in the United States, even after the revision of the naturalization law. Only 11 percent of the foreign population in France was naturalized in 1931 compared to 55 percent in the United States in 1930.⁵⁰

Why did not more immigrants naturalize, especially more foreign workers? Intermittent or temporary residence in France may have precluded many workers from seeking naturalization.⁵¹ Close proximity to native countries may have helped to preserve immigrants’ identity with their homeland. In a government survey of Italian and Polish immigrant assimilation conducted in 1950–1951, a number of immigrants retained a strong loyalty to their nationality. As one Italian put it, “my nation is where I remember being a child and a youth.” Yet economic reasons were probably as important for low naturalization rates. Application fees of up to one or two thousand francs (two or more months’ pay for most workers) clearly was a discouragement for many of the respondents to the 1950–1951 survey. Furthermore, no campaigns to promote naturalization were sponsored by government or business groups. Indeed, as previously noted, some employers, especially in mining, were hostile to naturalization. A study of successful applications for naturalization in the Rhone (Lyons region) between 1927 and 1946 found that they were often arbitrarily administered, taking up to four years to process; during the depression years between 1931 and 1936, applicants were especially scrutinized. After 1936, officials appear to have favored the naturalization of those susceptible to the draft or with male children. In a postwar survey, Poles noted that their applications for naturalization were delayed or rejected in the 1930s because they were too old to be conscripted or had only female children.⁵² Obviously the French made little effort to assimilate aliens through naturalization.

Despite the powerful social and demographic motives for increasing naturalization, the French had compelling economic reasons for not encouraging immigrants to acquire citizenship. First, foreign status allowed the government to deny immigrants the right to political representation. Their diplomatic counsels served as substitute lobbyists but with minimal impact. By contrast, the French employers, through access to political power, were able to shape the immigration in their interests. Lack of citizenship also meant denial of the right of settlement in France. Especially during economic contractions, the immigrant could be repatriated. This reduced the expense of welfare and other social services for the French taxpayer. The social costs of the business cycle—the need to maintain the labor pool during periods of contraction—could be shifted to the immigrants’ native countries. Furthermore, the non-citizen worker was deprived of the right of occupational mobility. Legal residence in France depended upon obtaining a work permit, which was granted only for occupations in which there was a labor shortage. This discriminatory regulation assured that immigrants would remain in a secondary labor market of low-paying, arduous, and socially undesirable jobs (see pp. 145–158). This would protect French labor from foreign competition as well as assure French employers a labor supply. To have encouraged naturalization would have contradicted all of these economic advantages for the French. Besides the economic drawbacks of assimilation and naturalization, the government had alternatives to assimilation which minimized the social costs of immigration but did not violate French economic interests: these were administrative and police control of the immigrants.

Administrative Controls of Immigrants

In addition to the controls over the occupational movements of foreign labor, the French state imposed, by decree, extraordinary restrictions on the civil and political freedoms of foreigners. Since 1916, foreigners were obliged to obtain and carry an identity card. This device served two crucial purposes. First, it allowed the government to monitor and control the movements of immigrants. The identity card designated the geographical limits within which immigrants could travel (until 1920 and after 1935) and identified their occupation. Upon each change of residence, the immigrant had to register his identity card with local police. In addition, the Interior Ministry maintained and constantly updated these records of immigrants. In effect the identity card was an internal passport, similar to the livret which French workers were obliged to carry in the nineteenth century. It minimized the possibility that “undesirables” could move anonymously within France or hide from detection within the immigrant ghetto. Second, the identity card also served as a residence permit which the police could withdraw at any time. Loss of the identity card removed the foreigners’ right to reside in France (refoulement) and, when authorized by the Interior Ministry, could lead to formal expulsion. Thus the identity card placed the immigrant on permanent probation in France.⁵³

While the identity card was a tool for social control, it did not impede the flow of immigrant labor in the French economy. In fact, the government selectively enforced identity card regulations to complement economic activity. Regulations were liberalized during the period 1922–1924 in order to facilitate the movement of foreigners into the work of reconstructing the war zones and expanding the coal production of the north.⁵⁴ No bureaucratic controls were to impede the flow of immigrant labor when it was in demand.

Yet the threat of refoulement, expulsion, and other controls was necessary to minimize the threat of a dangerous class of immigrants. The process of refoulement and expulsion was entirely administrative: it involved none of the juridical guarantees provided for citizens. Grounds for expulsion were not codified, nor were there any of the normal provisions for due process of law. Refoulement was warranted if, in police opinion, the immigrant failed to “provide suitable guarantees.”⁵⁵ Apologists justified administrative control as an act of the sovereignty of the state “to prevent foreigners from attacking the vital interests of the nation.”⁵⁶ Immigrants were to “respect public order” and “abstain from all action which might trouble the tranquility of the population,” according to a circular from the Interior Ministry of A. Sarraut (1926).⁵⁷ The correct relationship between the state and the foreigner was one of host and guest.

This doctrine assumed that the immigrant population was transitory, while in fact it had become an integral part of French society. The state’s power to expel was a retention of the legality of old regime absolutism in an era of liberal civil and political rights. This power could be imposed on the portion of the working classes who, because of their birth, lacked citizenship. This status of non-citizen reinforced the immigrant’s economic position as a secondary worker. It also augmented their economic and social separation from French workers, for immigrants were not only channeled into the lowest occupational levels but subject to a separate and illiberal legal status.

How was this power of expulsion used by the French state? Out of an immigrant population of 2.7 million in 1931 some 93,130 foreigners were expelled between 1920 and 1932. The reasons for expulsion were extremely arbitrary: the vast majority were expelled after a prison sentence.⁵⁸ Yet only a small proportion of foreigners convicted of crimes were expelled and many “undesirables” were refoulée, i.e., denied their identity card but not expelled.⁵⁹ This served as a kind of probation. The power of expulsion was clearly used selectively.

These police controls, however, were not purely arbitrary or limited to malefactors. They were consistently applied against political radicals, especially communists and militant trade unionists. The power of expulsion was used to deny the foreigner the full right to political participation (something which could not be denied to the French radicals). Although data do not reveal the extent of political expulsions (many were hidden in criminal expulsions) documentary evidence suggests a persistent pattern of deportation for participation in communist organizations and militant strike activity. Police often attended meetings or demonstrations singling out those immigrants who “spoke out” for discrete expulsion or refoulement. Interior minister C. Chautemps in September 1924 directed the police to warn any foreign activists that they “exposed themselves to severe sanctions unless they followed [police] advice” that they quit communist groups. Indeed, those who frequently attended CGTU meetings were expelled.⁶⁰

Given the practice of open union organizing among the foreigners, the police had little difficulty identifying and expelling agitators. For example, in early 1925, Czech, Russian, and Italian leaders of the CGTU were expelled.⁶¹ As a result, the communist unions shifted from mass open meetings for foreigners to small workers’ circles to avoid expulsions.⁶² Furthermore, active involvement in any communist-led strike was sufficient grounds for expulsion. In the northern coal fields, participants in a strike in February of 1923 were expelled, a practice repeatedly followed thereafter.⁶³

Finally, through a nineteenth century decree law, the Interior Ministry could adminstratively outlaw any “subversive” foreign language publication and seize subscription lists. Between 1923 and 1932, the government suppressed twenty Polish-language publications.⁶⁴ Police also rooted out communist newspapers printed in Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Hungarian.⁶⁵ Names on the subscription lists were investigated for participation in communist activities and often signaled for expulsion.⁶⁶

Besides the obvious effect of weakening the communist unions, administrative expulsion had a sobering effect on would-be militants. One policeman in a coal district boasted that his checking identity cards of immigrants at the entrance to a communist meeting “instilled fear in the workers and drove them away from the communist organizations.”⁶⁷ The threat of expulsion could easily have dissuaded immigrants from participating in unions as well as the communist party. “The fear of expulsion,” said another police report from Longwy, “is the beginning of wisdom. . . . [It] makes them submit more easily to the bosses.”⁶⁸

It may have also reduced the loyalty of long-term resident foreigners to France. As one Pole surveyed in 1950–1952 declared: “how can one love a country where one feels undesired and hated?” A number cited the experience of family members being repatriated during the economic crisis of the 1930s. Not only did they resent this treatment but they never felt secure enough in France to feel “at home.”⁶⁹ The point is that the thrust of French policy was not to make loyal citizens of immigrants (even though the government certainly hoped that they would be loyal and probably naturalized those whose “loyalty” could be translated into military service). Their goal was instead to create “subjects” in the old regime sense of the term—subjects whose outward demeanour and behavior was “correct.”

By the mid-1920s a large influx of foreign workers in France stimulated a demand for a social program to balance the manpower bias of immigration policy. France’s similarities with the United States—a permanent need for foreign labor and the threat of numerous unacculturated aliens—made appealing the American immigration policy of preselection and assimilation. Yet the French retained an essentially economic approach. Differences in geography partially explain the failure of the American model in France: France could less easily select than it could repatriate the immigrant as a means of social control. Further, a socio-political factor was central to the differences in policy: France was less a homogeneous political culture and the employers had less influence over the political ideology of its laborers than was true in the United States. Thus, while in the United States assimilation meant integration of foreign workers into a society where business values dominated, in France such integration would have been into a French laboring class strongly influenced by socialist and communist ideas.

The key to the difference in policy, however, is economic. France was not an undeveloped frontier economy like the United States was until the early twentieth century; employers required fewer immigrants and needed many for only temporary and seasonal jobs; thus, business had less incentive for encouraging assimilation. The privileges of citizenship which gave native workers an advantage on the job market also gave French labor little practical need to sponsor massive assimilation or naturalization. Despite French unions’ frequent support of immigrant trade union and civil rights, they seldom undertook campaigns to gain naturalization status for their immigrant members. The goals of assimilation, then, had few consistent advocates.

The alternative to the American model of selection and assimilation was a policy of administrative controls. The threat of the ethnic ghetto, the classe dangereuse, and radicalism could be met negatively through police efforts to identify and purge potentially distruptive immigrants. This approach had the added advantage of reinforcing the manpower goals of French immigration policy. The identity card system and its implied threat of expulsion placed the immigrant in a legal world apart from the French citizen. He was forever merely a “guest” in France—welcome only to serve specific economic purposes.

The French labor system which emerged during the 1920s did far more than bring nearly two million immigrants and their families into France. It created a highly flexible subservient laboring class, not through racial segregation or forced labor, as had been practiced by less liberal societies, but through a policy suitable for a relatively small and dispersed class of non-citizen workers. The French denied immigrants full occupational mobility. This served not only the interests of employers but also of French labor, whose moderate leadership participated as much as it was allowed to in the regulatory process. The French also avoided some of the social costs of immigration by excluding the immigrant from the right to permanent residence in France. When immigrant workers became “undesirables,” France had no responsibility for them. In a democratic age of rising economic and social rights, denying non-citizens these rights meant public savings and economic flexibility. It also compromised French liberal and democratic values.

This foreign labor system, which had contributed so much to French prosperity and social stability in the 1920s, would be greatly transformed in the next decade. When the depression finally descended on France in mid-1931, anti-immigrant sentiment, which had been so muted in the 1920s, again dominated policy debate. Pressure to make immigrants the scapegoats of the crisis was inevitable. Yet, despite a new regimen of restrictions, the French could not rid themselves of their need for foreign labor.