VI

Foreign Labor in a Period of Growth

WHAT distinguished immigration after World War I in France was the role of the state and business organization: beyond the push and pull of the labor market and population, the individual immigrant was manipulated by the agencies of the French state, corporate business, and his or her home government. Each migration was affected by a different mix of these three agencies which competed for control. This pattern seems particularly applicable to the Poles and Italians. Yet, by the end of the post-war period of growth (1931), of all the immigrants in the French labor force only 30 percent came from Italy and 18 percent from Poland. In fact the foreign work force was Balkanized with thirteen nationalities which each comprised at least one percent of that labor force.¹

Some of these nationalities lacked the influence of their home governments, for example, French subjects from North Africa or stateless refugees from Russia or Armenians from Turkey. Despite France’s negative reaction to colonial and refugee labor during the war, the shortages of labor in the 1920s made it impossible for French employers to dispense with them entirely. As important, workers from several of the bordering nations entered France with little organized encouragement and minimal regulation. Much as before the war, they were attracted to jobs in the economies of the frontier regions or were drawn to the diverse labor market of the capital. Moreover, while some employers, especially the coal mine operators, tried to organize and stabilize the foreign population, others had neither the resources nor the incentives to undertake this effort. Instead they relied on a loose and mobile labor market and on a plentiful supply of immigrants for their immediate and diverse manpower needs. The result was a highly complex foreign labor system, only part of which was organized, and which served the disparate needs of French employers.

Colonial and Refugee Labor

The political and economic chaos in postwar Europe and in the Mediterranean basin produced a stream of immigrants from French North Africa and refugees fleeing to France from Russia and Turkey. While colonials and refugees never constituted more than 10 percent of the foreign work force, they played an important role in the manpower program of French industry during the 1920s. After the war, controls were not liberalized for orientals as they were for the European immigrant. Employers had alternative sources of unskilled labor and they generally believed that orientals were inferior laborers; for these reasons French industry employed North Africans and Armenian refugees for the least attractive jobs. Demand for their labor also was more sensitive than that of European immigrants to economic change.

World War I brought the first sizable introduction of North Africans to France. While this category included Tunisians and Moroccans who were nationals of French protectorates, many of the available statistics included only Algerians, who were true colonial subjects. The Colonial Ministry imported 132,421 North Africans between 1916 and 1918. After the armistice, however, the state feared that French veterans would protest the competition of colonial labor; as a result the police summarily deported North Africans after raids on their neighborhoods in Paris and Marseilles.² Probably only about 6,000 remained by the end of 1920.³ The government continued to isolate North Africans in special camps until at least April 1920; Algerians in Marseilles complained of arbitrary arrest and expulsion as late as January 1921.⁴

North African immigration was allowed, however, during the expansion between 1922 and 1924. The Labor Ministry established a special colonial labor service in Marseilles in 1919, which throughout the interwar period segregated North Africans from European immigrants.⁵ Algerians, especially, were pulled by the prospect of wages which were 75 percent higher in France than in Algeria. They were also pushed into the French labor market by the takeover of land by French settlers (colons) which increased 300 percent between 1901 and 1926.⁶ As a result, in the 1920s, 471,330 Algerians entered France to work (see Table 10).⁷

Unlike the European immigrants, however, they were much more likely to repatriate as is shown by the ratios of repatriations to entries. In part, this may indicate a continued reluctance of French employers to hire Algerians for anything but temporary jobs or to retain them during a reduction in the labor force. When the Labor Ministry tried to funnel Algerians into farm jobs, the agricultural societies resisted, strongly preferring Spanish or Polish workers.⁸ In several surveys of employer opinion on the value of immigrant workers, North Africans were rated lowest. Employers thought that they were physically inferior and less stable than other immigrants.⁹ In fact, Algerians frequently failed the medical examinations for military conscription because their physical size and strength was often below European standards.¹⁰

This high rate of repatriation may also indicate another characteristic of Algerian migration: as is common with peasant populations in pre-industrial regions, Algerians often sent members of families to France for a short stint of work merely to be replaced after a few months by another family member.¹¹ Clearly these North Africans had little expectation of settling permanently in France. Only 3 percent of the North African immigrants in 1931 were women, a fact which suggests that male workers left their families at home and intended to return. Thus, despite the fact that nearly one half million Algerians entered France in the 1920s, only 98,153 remained by 1931.¹²

Most of the Algerians were hired by the military or by large enterprises where they were assigned the worst jobs.¹³ Continuing a pattern set during the First World War, 42 percent of the North Africans were employed in military construction, while 17 percent worked in metal plants (especially auto factories); gas works, chemical plants and mines were other major employers of North Africans.¹⁴

Only in growth periods, when French or European immigrants could not be found for the worst jobs, were the North Africans hired. Again, Table 10 indicates the sensitivity of Algerian migration to shifts in the economy. Note the downturns in 1925, 1927, and 1930. The drop in the demand for North Africans in 1925 was paralleled by government restrictions on its supply. A decree from the Interior Ministry (September 1924) allowed North Africans to embark for France only if they possessed a validated work contract and a certificate of health. Complaints from French colons that farm labor was being drained to France for industrial work probably prompted these restrictions. Soon the colons demanded even more severe controls while the French government anticipated a new recession; thus, in August 1926, the Interior Ministry required Algerian immigrants to deposit 150 francs before embarking for France to pay for their later repatriation.¹⁵ The sum was prohibitive for many Algerians. Immigrants from the French protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco were even more restricted.¹⁶ North Africans circumvented the rules by passing false work contracts and visas as well as undertaking illegal landings on the French coast near Marseilles; professional labor smugglers also brought North Africans to France.¹⁷

French employers also found a limited supply of labor among penniless refugees: the communist victory in Russia as well as the Turkish persecution of Armenians brought a wave of refugees to Western Europe. As they had during the war, French employers seized the opportunity to hire many of these stateless people. Following the pattern of her treatment of the Greeks from 1916–1918, the French state simply issued visas in Sofia and Istanbul to these displaced persons, shipped them to Marseilles, herded them into tightly supervised camps, and, as rapidly as possible, disseminated them throughout France. Russians were employed primarily in auto and metal plants in Paris, Lyons, Le Creuset, and Lille. Although Armenians were also hired in these industries, about 18,000 remained in the south to work in the textile industry. By 1926, France had roughly 67,000 Russians and somewhat less than 45,000 Armenians. As displaced persons, they did not necessarily belong to the working class. As a result, they often quickly abandoned their unskilled jobs in order to engage in petty commerce.¹⁸

Unlike the Poles or Italians, employers did not aggressively recruit colonial and refugee immigrants. They served primarily to supplement the immigrant work force. They were small but significant streams which flowed into the labor reservoir required by the turbines of French capitalism. They were not permitted to move freely into and within the labor market as were the immigrants from border nations. Unlike Western European immigrants, colonials and refugees brought few skills; had no established patterns of immigration; and in most cases lacked cultural affinities to the French. Most importantly, because refugees and colonial immigrants were stateless, discrimination was inevitable. No organized power defended their dignity, freedom, and working conditions, as the Belgian, Italian, Polish, and Spanish states at least occasionally did for their citizens. In addition, French racism, especially directed against the North Africans, hampered their mobility. In a word, these “undesirables,” as the French frequently called them, were used only when the well of other labor sources ran dry, but were not allowed the mobility of other immigrants.

The Persistence of Traditional Patterns of Migration

While the new organized immigration dominated France’s attention during the 1920s, older streams of migrants continued as before the war to flow into the French economy. These migrations were relatively unrestricted movements of neighboring nationalities into areas adjacent to their homelands and into the Paris region. As members of well-established migrations these individuals were often aided by family ties that already existed in France. With no concerted effort to channel their labor into a few industries, they moved rather freely within regional labor markets. Many became self-employed. Yet these traditional migrations declined during the 1920s, particularly in the rapidly growing industrial regions of the north, east, and the Paris suburbs. Here an organized influx of Poles gradually supplanted traditional sources of Belgian and Italian labor.

In contrast to colonial and refugee workers, immigrants from the border regions were relatively unrestricted. Unlike Eastern Europeans, the Swiss, Luxembourgeois, and Belgians did not even need passports, while Spanish and Italian immigrants needed passports only, but not visas. Only in 1928 were any restrictions placed on the 60,000 Belgian frontaliers. In addition, with the significant exception of Italy, these border states did not control immigration. Only the push of low wages and unemployment at home and the pull of job opportunities in France regulated their migration.¹⁹

Belgians continued as they had before the war, albeit in decreasing numbers, to migrate seasonally to northern French brickworks, sugar refineries, and fruit and grain harvests. Likewise, Spanish vineyard laborers continued their yearly journey into the Hérault. Unskilled farm migrants often shifted into temporary and seasonal jobs in industry, especially in construction. As a floating population often hired for short-term jobs, the frontier nationalities tended to gravitate toward Paris or provincial urban centers like Lille, Marseilles, and Lyons.²⁰ At the same time these older migrations continued to flow into a vast number of skilled occupations, such as forestry, leather crafts, masonry, and quality furniture and clothing trades, which had become lost arts to the French.²¹

Despite the continuing importance of migrations from border regions, they declined proportionately to more distant migrations in the 1920s (see Table ll).²² The share of neighbor nationalities in the alien workforce in France dropped by over 30 percent between 1911 and 1931. This was due to the large influx of Eastern Europeans, especially Poles, and to the improved economic climate in Western Europe, which gave these peoples alternatives to migration. This was particularly true of the Belgians (60 percent decline) and the Germans (78 percent decline). On the other hand, the less developed economy of Spain resulted in a slightly increased proportion of Spanish workers in France by the end of the 1920s.

If the prewar pattern of spontaneous migration was on the wane, this trend was hardly universal. Traditional patterns of immigration remained important in Paris and in many southern departments. Even in an age when French employers were increasingly committed to corporate and state-controlled labor migrations, many businesses still required an unregulated pool of immigrant workers. Petty capitalists, especially in the still large artisan sector, could not afford to recruit labor over long distances and instead required a ready supply of cheap immigrants whom they could hire through personal connections or off the street without burdensome restrictions. This pool of labor formed spontaneously, as it had before the war in Paris and along the frontiers where immigrants were attracted to the diverse employment and economic mobility that these regions offered.

The capital had long attracted foreign workers because of its diverse cultural environment as well as its relatively high wages and varied opportunities for employment.²³ As Table 12 indicates,²⁴ in the city of Paris, immigrants competed successfully in a number of occupations; in no industry did more than 12 percent of the foreign labor force concentrate. Moreover, a strikingly large percentage of these immigrants were self-employed or employers (23 percent in 1926, which was high for the city, for almost half of the foreign employers in France were farmers).²⁵ Many participated in the traditional artisan sector, which was still significant in Paris: they were skilled craftsmen making quality watches, shoes, clothing, and fine woodwork. Others were entertainers, hotel personnel, taxi drivers, and petty merchants. Paris attracted not only immigrants from the bordering nations but also eastern Europeans. Of the 22,800 foreign craftsmen in Paris, 4,100 were Russian, 2,600 were Polish, and 7,600 were natives of Balkan nations, many of the Jewish religion. Immigrants sent for members of their families and villages to work in these foreign-owned enterprises in Paris.²⁶ Clearly Paris continued to be a center of traditional spontaneous immigration, largely because Paris remained a city of small businesses and artisans.

By contrast, the suburbs of Paris attracted a different type of immigrant. The suburban immigrants were concentrated in only a few industries, especially metal goods which comprised 35 per cent of the immigrant workforce. Only 14 percent of these foreigners were self-employed or employers. The vast majority were unskilled laborers drawn to jobs in the thriving heavy industry of the suburbs of Billancourt, St. Denis, Aubervilliers, and Puteaux.²⁷ This reflects an economy very different from the city of Paris—the predominance of modern large scale industries. Clearly, it was the newer pattern of the suburbs which was gaining ground in the 1920s over the older immigration of Paris: while the proportion of alien workers in the suburbs grew 146 percent between 1921 and 1931, it increased only 46 percent in Paris.²⁸

These labor pools which formed in the Seine quite naturally suited employers who were thus able both to select their personnel with greater choice and to weaken the bargaining position of labor. Yet, as will be discussed in the next chapter, this also created tensions with the French work force who had to face the immigrant competition. This concentration of often intermittently employed immigrants also led to the kind of social problems familiar to contemporary American cities with their black and hispanic populations. While a large influx of foreign labor into a complex and burgeoning Parisian job market had obvious economic advantages, it posed also the threat of labor unrest and the necessity of policing and pacifying an unstable foreign population.

Employers in the frontier regions had, like businesses in the Seine, an easy access to immigrants. By 1931, southeastern departments had exceptionally high percentages of immigrants (e.g., Alpes-Maritimes with 28 percent and Bouches-du-Rhône with nearly 23 percent). The same was true of departments facing the Pyrénées (e.g. Pyrénées-Orientales with almost 16 percent). France’s northeastern industrial frontier also drew on a large pool of workers from Italy, Germany, and Belgium. This was particularly true of Moselle (19 percent immigrant), Meurthe-et-Moselle (17 percent) and the Nord (11 percent).²⁹

Like the capital, these frontier regions had long been magnets for a relatively spontaneous migration; and, as a result, aliens had penetrated deeply into the class and occupational structure of these regions. This pattern was evident especially in the south where short-distance migration of Italians and Spaniards still dominated. For example, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, generations of Italians had migrated into the port of Marseilles: as a result, 32 percent of the foreign work force had penetrated the employer and self-employed classes by 1931 (see Table 13).³⁰

Another effect of spontaneous immigration was the rather wide occupational distribution of foreigners in the Bouches-du-Rhône. Reflecting the impact of the port of Marseilles, 16 percent of the foreign labor force or 13,320 was employed in the shipping industry, primarily on the docks. Other important concentrations were in construction (9 percent), agriculture (10.6 percent), chemicals (8.7 percent), and metal goods (6.3 percent). Another striking feature of immigrants in the Bouches-du-Rhône was that 12.3 percent worked in commerce, often as petty tradesmen or cafe owners, 38 percent above the national average for foreigners. While the Italian work force predominated (52 percent of the immigrants), substantial numbers of Spaniards (13 percent), North Africans (7.3 percent) and other nationalities floated into this cosmopolitan region.³¹

A rather different southern border department was the Pyrénées-Orientales. By 1931 this land-locked and underdeveloped region on the Iberian frontier attracted mostly Spanish manpower (89 percent) and a near majority (48 percent) worked in agriculture. Here too, effects of an older migration is evident: 41 percent were self-employed or employers of labor; this also indicates a degree of economic mobility for individual immigrants.³²

For both southern departments we see signs of the economic integration of the foreign work force. While, as Table 13 indicates, the foreigners were much more concentrated in the working class than was the labor force of the entire department, immigrants more closely approximated the class distribution of these two departments than did the alien work force in the French economy as a whole (compare ratios, especially in the employer and self-employed categories). This suggests that in these frontier regions, immigrants from neighboring nationalities would experience the earliest and most thorough assimilation (see chapter VIII).

Yet the older pattern of short-distance individual immigration into border regions declined in the 1920s relative to long-distance and organized immigration. In a pattern which parallels that of migrations to the United States a generation earlier, the older migratory streams to France from neighboring countries dried up. As immigrant families acquired property and economic knowledge in France, they moved out of the wage-earning classes, or, at least, low status laboring jobs. While this had not yet become a problem for employers in the south, largely because economic development lagged in this region, in the rapidly growing regions of the northeast, traditional sources of foreign labor were clearly insufficient. As we have already detailed, an organized immigration of Poles supplemented these workers. This contributed to a foreign population more concentrated in a few industries and less mobile than in the southern departments. An analysis of two departments will illustrate this phenomenon.

In the Nord, despite a long history of migration from nearby Belgium, nearly a third of the immigrant work force was Polish by 1931. This reflected ten years of organized immigration into mining and agriculture. Still 18 percent of foreign manpower worked in textiles; this industry was mostly supplied by Flemish workers who had been attracted to jobs in Lille, Roubaix, and Tourcoing since the mid-nineteenth century. Nevertheless, even more immigrants worked in mining (18 percent) and a substantial number in the metal goods industry (10 percent), both of which were growth industries in the 1920s and drew the eastern European workers.³³ In contrast to the pattern of the Bouches-du-Rhône (see Table 13), few immigrants were able to rise out of the working class.

In the eastern department of the Moselle, we see an even greater deviation from the traditional pattern of border region migration: despite its proximity to Italy and Germany, it was the Poles with 30 percent that dominated the foreign work force in 1931. Italians trailed with 26 percent and the Germans constituted only 21 percent. Even a smaller proportion than in the Nord had left the ranks of the working classes (19 percent) and a majority worked in the related industries of mining (30 percent) and metallurgy (22.4 percent).³⁴ Finally, as the ratios in Table 13 show, the immigrant work force deviated sharply from the class distribution of Moselle as a whole. This suggests a minimum of social integration in French society. Clearly, traditional immigration from the frontier nations into the border departments was declining in significance. Employers replaced Belgians and Italians with Poles. Along with this new foreign worker went a pattern of economic segregation.

The Imperative of Informal Migration

Despite a trend toward a more rationalized foreign work force, especially in the modernizing sectors, definite limits to change remained. First, many industries, especially those employing seasonal labor, had neither the resources nor the incentive to organize an immigration. Yet these industries, often far from traditional streams of migrants,³⁵ had critical needs for foreign labor. Second, many companies with large resources, such as those in the steel industry, had no incentive to complete the rationalization process by stabilizing their foreign manpower. In both cases, employers relied on informal substitutes for a rationalized manpower program: labor contractors, pirating immigrants from other employers, and ultimately the relatively free flow of foreign workers into France.

Labor subcontractors, both foreign and French, recruited and managed work teams of Italians and Spaniards, who formed an essential supplement of seasonal labor for large construction projects; these labor gangs did hard physical work extending railways, building canals, digging subways in Paris, and laying tramways in other cities. They also were essential for France’s extensive program of military fortifications (for example, the Maginot Line).³⁶ Other industries, such as cement, plaster, and stone quarrying also used temporary teams of immigrants. Few French could be found for this hazardous and often only temporary employment. Because they were usually distant from urban labor markets, these industries were dependent upon the subcontractor for skilled labor. In many stone quarries Italians and Spaniards formed the bulk of the skilled cutters and shapers. In a survey of 220 brick factories cromprising about 8,550 workers, only 33 percent were immigrant in the off-season, but during peak periods that proportion rose to 65 percent.³⁷

The unstables, as the French called them, migrated frequently between France and their home villages. Typically, they worked in the warm months for a subcontractor and migrated south in the winter. Seasonal but regular migration was institutionalized when in 1922 the French government granted immigrants annual leaves of absence, during the “dead season” in winter. This eliminated any red tape when the employer recalled them.³⁸

French trade unions in Paris, Armentières, and Lyons complained when employers brought these teams of foreign workers into construction sites. Because these gangs moved from job to job as a group under the control of a subcontractor, they were isolated from the labor organizer. Usually they worked ten or twelve hour shifts and thus ignored the eight-hour-day law. Pay rates (obscured by the piece-rate system) were well below local standards. Subcontractors sometimes profited from the immigrants’ ignorance of local wages and took a share of the team’s earnings. These workers were often housed in flimsy temporary barracks near the work site and fed in company canteens.³⁹ Under this system alien workers could be relatively easily maintained and dismissed. When their work was complete, they could be laid off, transferred to other jobs as a part of a work team, or simply forced to disperse. For example, in March 1925 at Amiens, although 2,000 foreign laborers had just been discharged from a public works project the prefect reported no noticeable unemployment in the area.⁴⁰ Having no roots or permanent residences in the district, the unemployed foreign workers quickly moved on.

The subcontract system not only created a flexible and cheaply maintained labor force, but guaranteed its segregation from the French. Foreign unstables were effectively isolated from the regular French workers by both working conditions and outlook. This was at least suggested by one disgruntled French unionist, who complained that

foreign workers accept almost anything. They have no ambition, no desire to elevate themselves. We French want to be as well dressed as our employers; we want an easy life; we try to be well housed. The foreign workers accept being housed in barracks and fed in canteens.⁴¹

Not only were they different in culture and language from their French fellow workers, but they had the outlook of a migrant: a willingness to forego the “civilized” living standards of the French for the opportunity to work and save for their return home.

In Paris also the subcontract system was employed. It sometimes took the form of “yellow unions.” In 1927 the Confédération national du travail and La Liberte du travail recruited foreign and colonial workers as strike-breakers, according to the Paris Prefect of Police. He reported that these organizations masqueraded as mutual-aid societies but in fact were illegal placement services, directly subsidized by big construction companies.⁴²

Other industries also took advantage of pools of available foreign labor to avoid recruiting immigrants abroad. Even before the war the glass industry had become notorious for employing immigrant children as apprentices, often under illegal conditions.⁴³ Le Peuple reported in 1930 that Portuguese youths, who entered France under contract as woodsmen, were immediately diverted to glass factories in Bordeaux.⁴⁴ In 1929 recruiters promised Polish miners a bounty of seventy francs per month to apprentice their children to glass works in the Somme, although they received only forty francs.⁴⁵ Some petty manufacturers, especially in the textile and clothing industries of Marseilles and Paris, hired laborers from the mass of illegal and thus powerless immigrants, who worked under hazardous and illegal conditions.⁴⁶

Some companies hired the immigrants recruited by others. Textile firms, often within commuting distance from stable immigrant centers in the northern mine fields, pilfered the daughters of Polish miners for so-called apprenticeships, much to the annoyance of the mine operators. As a result, they avoided both the cost of recruiting and housing their manpower.⁴⁷ Many employers lured foreign workers from companies which had recruited and transported them to France. Only about 20 percent of the unmarried immigrants who had entered France under a contract in 1926 completed a year of service to the company which had recruited them. Most of them broke their contracts for other jobs. The chief of the departmental placement office for Isère estimated that in 1923 only 60 percent of the immigrants entering Isère under work contract ever picked up their identity cards.⁴⁸

Being able to obtain a cheap, tractable work force simply through the looseness of the foreign labor market, many employers had no interest in a rigidly controlled foreign labor system. Despite the trend toward a more rationalized manpower program in France, a free, informal, and indeed often illegal market for alien labor flourished. It fed upon the half-hearted efforts of government to regulate the foreign influx and lived off the labor recruited by organized business, especially the SGI. The massive influx of alien workers in the 1920s engendered opposition from those seeking social stability in France; yet those who relied on this unrestrained influx of labor helped to retard pressure for greater regulation (see chapter VIII).

Even employers who used the organized sector of the foreign labor system, those who were the clients of the SGI or patronized the government’s job placement service, did not always complete the rationalization process: they did not attempt to stabilize their immigrant manpower. By their failure to reduce turnover, they contributed to the loose market of alien workers. Good examples are the iron mining and basic steel industries of the Lorraine and the hydroelectric industries of the Alpine region.⁴⁹ The ferrous metal industries relied heavily on alien laborers, especially in the Briey and Longwy districts of Moselle and Meurthe-et-Moselle. Unlike construction or farming, they had the resources to undertake a program of stabilization. Yet, with a few exceptions, these industries did not follow the path of the coal operators and build houses, encourage the immigration of families, or launch a cultural program to root the immigrant to the mill or mining pit.⁵⁰ Instead single male immigrants were recruited and housed in overcrowded company barracks. Far from encouraging stability, these living quarters helped to create a transitory labor force. The Commission of Hygiene in Meurthe-et-Moselle reported in 1928 that barracks lacked windows and the beds of Moroccan workers had no sheets or blankets. Labor inspectors (Labor Ministry) noted in 1926 that twenty miners in Longwy were lodged in company barracks adequate for only two. A government study of miners’ housing in the Meurthe-et-Moselle in 1928 revealed only 10,904 of 37,904 immigrants were sheltered in family apartments; 10,073 were housed in dormitories, while the rest found shelter with other families or in attics, barns and other usually unsuitable private lodgings.

Not only poor housing but inferior pay and working conditions stimulated turnover: a CGT organizer from Moselle reported in 1928 that Polish iron miners were promised twenty-eight frances per day in their contracts but earned barely seventeen francs because they were placed on a piece rate. This was much below prevailing wage standards in French industry for unskilled labor (about twenty-seven francs). Immigrants at the iron mine of Sainte Marie complained that they received only 351 francs of the 460 earned per month after the company deducted numerous dues and insurance premiums. Some found themselves endebted to the company store as a result of high prices. Furthermore, immigrants faced an extraordinarily harsh management which since the turn of the century had adopted a sink-or-swim policy for new workers: companies provided little training in the difficult work of mining and refining iron and steel. In fact few workers could endure the drudgery of deep mining which characterized the region. Finally, immigrants had many alternative job opportunities if conditions in the mines or mills of French Lorraine were too difficult: they could flee the short distance across the frontier to heavy industry in Germany or Luxembourg; they might find work in the construction of French military fortifications; or they could dash off to Paris or other large job markets and compete with the French for work.⁵¹

As a result of these conditions, the Lorraine bled immigrants over the body of France. For example, at a large iron complex in Moselle, immigrant terminations reached 2,020 for an average of 2,690 employed in 1928. This is a turnover rate of 75 percent (in contrast to a rate of 12 percent for the French). In a metallurgical plant in the Calvados, 3,287 of the 4,000 aliens hired in 1928 terminated before the end of a year.⁵²

Not only the iron and steel industry but chemical, aluminium, and other heavy industries had similar problems with retaining foreign labor. For example, in the hydroelectric-based chemical, paper, and metals industries of the Alpine regions, immigrants continually came and went. Since the turn of the century, industries thrived in the valleys and moutains slopes in Isère, Alpes-Maritimes, and Hautes-Alpes. Because of the sparse native population and large requirements of labor, immigrants were essential. Of the 110,000 factory workers in the Alpine departments in 1928, 35,000 were foreign (31,000 of whom were Italian).

Labor recruitment was a major and constant management chore. Companies not only sought workers from Italy, but recruited North Africans and refugees from Marseilles. By 1925, the hydro-electric companies were even hiring Poles from the SGI. Yet like the iron and steel industry they had no serious program designed to stabilize this manpower. Although these industries maintained fixed plants and regularly operated them, because of their reliance on water power, they reached optimal output only in the warm months. During the winter many of the immigrants were laid off, creating an unstable work force. Partly because of the seasonal nature of the industry, housing was rudimentary (e.g., old army barracks continued to be used a decade after the war); few immigrants brought their families; and thus turnover was substantial.⁵³

The onerous nature of the work and seasonal employment may explain part of the instability of foreign labor in these industries. Yet employers had little incentive to reduce turnover. The revolving factory door kept wages low, for few workers remained long enough to earn raises. High turnover rates also discouraged unionization which had practically no success in the Lorraine or Alpine region.⁵⁴

Furthermore, these industries had an alternative to a stabilization policy for creating docile and productive workers: a program of mixing nationalities. It had already been advocated in 1917 by the War Ministry’s Colonial Labor Service as a way to “diminish the cause of strikes and to facilitate an exact assessment of the value of each worker.”⁵⁵ Following this advice in 1926, an auto company employing 13,537 workers used 4,366 immigrants or 32 percent of the total. This company relied heavily on Arabs and refugees; their numbers varied with the plant. From 2.1 percent to 3.4 percent of all workers were Armenian, 6.9 percent to 9.1 percent were Arab, and 5 percent to 13 percent were Russian, while only 2.1 percent to 5 percent were Italian. In 1925 the iron mines of the Lorraine were almost equally divided between Italians (12,179) and Poles (11,574). Indeed, even in the coal mines, the Poles in 1925 constituted only 61.5 percent (72,969) of the foreign miners. The others included 11,945 Germans, 10,245 Italians, 5,481 Spaniards, 6,449 Belgians, 5,785 Czechoslovaks, 3,079 Moroccans, and 1,696 Hungarians.⁵⁶ In 1924 R. Blanchard, in Les Alpes économiques, gave a colorful description of the impact of mixing nationalities in the Alpine industries:

When one rises in the morning, one encounters an odd assortment of swarthy men: some wear a turban or a fez; some are blinking Chinese; others, Spaniards with blue chins or Russians still wearing the uniform of the Czar, all mixed in with French and Italian peasants.⁵⁷

He observed that this multi-national work force helped to prevent strikes because “peoples with such marked differences cannot communicate.” Another inexpensive means of assuring managerial authority was for employers associations (such as the Association française des industries alpines and Comité des forges) to agree to blacklist foreigners who broke contracts.⁵⁸ In the potash industry an immigrant could secure a new job only by presenting a satisfactory reference from his first employer.⁵⁹ This provided a cheap substitute for a policy of family housing to stabilize immigrants. Finally, for all their complaints about labor instability, many employers were apparently willing to tolerate high turnover rates if new labor was readily available. For this reason employers pressed the government to expand the foreign sources of labor.

Parallel to the organized market of immigrant labor, there functioned a free market: seasonal, backward, and marginal industries relied on spontaneous migrations of foreigners from border nations to meet their demands. Others made use of labor contractors or immigrants recruited by their competitors. This unorganized and sometimes illegal alien labor market was vital to the success of a highly diverse French capitalism. The availability of this labor discouraged employers from making the investments necessary to satisfy and thus retain this foreign manpower.

The past three chapters have analyzed the foreign labor system which emerged in the 1920s. They have stressed the innovative factors, especially the mix of agencies which impinged upon the new immigration: the French state, organized business, and foreign governments. Yet this chapter showed an even more complex picture: the use of stateless refugee and colonial labor as well as the survival of a relatively unregulated migration. All of this suggests an immigration which served a highly diverse market and accommodated different managerial strategies. The foreign labor system was not always satisfactory to employers; for many, foreign governments had too much influence over their citizens in France; for others, immigrants were too free to seek their economic advantage. Yet the system gave employers most of what they wanted in a complex blend of organization, regulation, and laissez-faire. This was the final result of the failure of an integrated or corporatist immigration policy in the 1920s.

But this system was far less pleasing to other elements of French society. Labor, the principle losers in the struggle over immigration policy in the early twenties, naturally feared the influx of foreign labor which the government encouraged and business, to a degree, organized. Trade unions had hardly abandoned their hope for a role in policy making. They continued to seek guarantees against the competition of cheap foreign labor. Other critics saw in the flood of new immigrants the makings of serious social problems: they feared the formation of alien cultural enclaves in France, the emergence of a criminal society from the uprooted immigrants, and the threat of communist influence within this exploited laboring class. Instead of a narrow manpower approach to immigration, these critics advocated a program of assimilation and social control in order to reduce these social problems. For both labor and the advocates of assimilation, the state was the instrument of reform. The bureaucracy attempted throughout the 1920s to accommodate these groups, in a kind of informal corporatism, without, at the same time, threatening business interests. It was a formidable task.