VII

Acceptance without Integration: Regulating Immigrants in the 1920s

A LARGE and rapid flood of foreign workers into a community often leads to conflicts with native labor. French workers reflected this hostility in the industrial regions of the East in the thirty years before World War One when an essentially unregulated influx of alien labor competed with Frenchmen. Yet, despite the doubling of the percentage of foreigners in the decade after the war, native opposition to the immigrant was muted, sporadic, and strictly localized. How can we understand this anomaly?

Two broad and interrelated changes in the labor relations system after the war may explain much of the greater toleration of foreign labor: 1) the trade unionists, both more numerous and more disciplined after the war, rejected confrontation. Instead, the dominant reformist wing, which controlled the CGT, supported massive immigration while lobbying the government to limit and channel it. The CGTU, the communist-influenced minority wing of the labor movement, denounced regulation but also discouraged confrontation. Instead they favored organizing foreign workers into unions and opposed discrimination. 2) The state attempted to minimize direct competition for jobs between French and foreign workers. Although its regulations usually served the interests of employers and were not allowed to impede economic growth, the state in fact controlled immigration in order to minimize potential French labor unrest.

French Unions and Foreign Labor

The war brought an end to the ambiguous attitude of French labor: until 1914, unions expressed a formal solidarity with international workers and with it a commitment to organizing their foreign-born comrades; yet they often evidenced a real hostility to immigrant workers when they invaded local job markets. During the Union Sacrée of the war, the CGT leadership briefly tasted the fruits of collaboration with business and government. They had adopted a “politics of presence” rejecting the old program of class confrontation for a nationalist policy of cooperation. They defended massive immigration and discouraged local union opposition to alien labor in the name of French economic growth. In exchange the CGT demanded a share of power with government and business in regulating the size and distribution of foreign labor.

Léon Jouhaux and other reformist leaders of the CGT fought the internal opposition to their cooperative strategy, especially the communists, whom they expelled from the CGT in 1921. While weakening the unity of the labor movement, the schism allowed the CGT leadership to pursue their new policy of collaboration with French business and government.

The CGT, however, did not entirely abandon the effort to organize foreign workers and to defend their interests. In the early 1920s the Construction Federation tried to recruit formerly unionized Belgian workers employed in the repair of the North. Against nationalist opinion the CGT supported German workers’ entering the old war zones to take jobs in the reconstruction. Since 1919 the CGT advocated equal pay for foreigners holding the same jobs as the French; opposed the expulsion of aliens for union activity; and supported their right to become elected union officials.¹

Nevertheless, the CGT’s organizing drive was made with little sustained effort and meager success. Not until September of 1924 did the CGT establish a national office for organizing immigrants.² By 1929 only about 7,500 of the over 90,000 Polish miners had joined the CGT’s miners union. Perhaps as few as 15,000 Italians were enrolled in all CGT unions in 1926 from a pool of 428,221 Italian workers in France.³

The failure of the CGT’s organizing efforts flowed from its weakness in the industrial sector. The schism of 1921 reduced CGT membership from a conservative estimate of 1,011,913 in 1920 to about 554,896 by 1929. Further, its strength was not in industries where immigrants were concentrated but rather in the tertiary sector: government (95,028 members), teachers (66,022), and railways (70,507) in 1929. By contrast, only 11,566 construction laborers and only 16,315 metal workers belonged to the CGT. The CGT was impotent in agriculture where it had merely 1,433 members in 1929. In summary, only 29 percent of her members in this year held jobs in agriculture, mining, and industry where 71 percent (1931) of the immigrants worked.⁴

Organizing immigrants was difficult under any circumstances. French law barred foreigners from voting for or being elected to leadership positions in the unions. Language and cultural differences were an insuperable obstacle for union organizers. In some Parisian metal factories, for example, as many as twelve languages were spoken, making communication impossible.⁵

Greatly contributing to the difficulty were the attitudinal differences between immigrants and French workers. Immigrants were difficult to organize because most lacked union experience in their home countries, coming directly from peasant backgrounds. In a 1950 survey of 96 Italian construction workers (77 percent arriving before 1940), 67 percent came from rural backgrounds. In a similar study of Polish miners, only 26 percent had been miners before emigrating.⁶ Mussolini’s fascists destroyed independent trade unionism between 1920 and 1925, thus depriving emigrants of roots in the trade union movement.⁷ Polish miners were also diverted from the CGT by the aggressive competition of the conservative Polish mutual aid society, the ZRP (see chapter IV). Furthermore, skilled Belgian and Swiss workers often belonged to strong unions back home and thus were reluctant to join French unions which provided few benefits or strike funds.⁸

Perhaps most important in explaining the difficulty of organizing alien workers was that they, like the immigrants of today, had very different views of working and living conditions in France than did union militants. Upon arrival in France Polish miners and farm workers were impressed with the high living standards in comparison to conditions in Poland. One Polish miner was amazed to see fresh fruit available, the use of coal to heat houses, and the wonder of white bread. Others were impressed with the more democratic and free social relations—the absence of police and the closer relations between worker and boss. Polish immigrants escaped the low pay and degrading working conditions of Polish agriculture for the opportunity for higher pay and greater personal freedom in the mines of France. Italian construction workers (Seine) expressed similar impressions of work in France: it was a step up from the hard life back home. A Polish miner, upon arriving in France, explained to his wife: “We are in paradise.”⁹ Many immigrants expected to remain in France only as long as necessary to accumulate sufficient savings to return home to buy or extend a family farm or business. As a result many were willing to work twelve or even fourteen hours daily, live in barracks, and move quickly from job to job in search of quick earnings and low living costs. This was hardly the social material of trade unionism. Given these obstacles to organizing immigrants it is not surprising that the CGT made only a token effort to recruit them.

Certainly rank-and-file French hostility to foreign workers had hardly disappeared after the war. As we have already observed (see p. 136), French unionists saw those immigrants who worked beyond the eight-hour day and accepted poor living conditions as a threat to the French labor standard. Surely not unusual was the remark of a French miner to a recent Polish immigrant: “Go back to Poland. You came here to eat our bread.” Surely the French worker was hardly immune to cultural chauvinism. Italians were often called “Macaronis” and the Poles, “Bodies” (because some spoke German). Polish miners reported “indifference if not hostility” from French miners when they arrived at the pits. After twenty-five years, a surprisingly low level of interaction between Poles and French miners was reported in a government study of 1950–1952. Ninety percent of ninety-four surveyed had married Poles. Few had close French friends. This lack of communication between French and alien workers doubtless contributed to rank-and-file opposition to foreign workers.¹⁰

The 1921 recession produced scattered protests against foreign competition, especially in the war-devastated departments.¹¹ Since immigration outside the old war zone was unimportant until the reconstruction was completed, widespread anti-immigrant feeling did not appear until 1924. Late that year, however, construction unions in Paris demanded a stop to immigration in the reconstruction regions because they feared that immigrants already in the old war zones would soon descend upon Paris in search of work. Other CGT unions, especially the food service and hotel workers, persistently opposed immigration and advocated strict ceilings on foreign employment.¹²

Yet these concerns did not govern leadership policy. It never deviated from Jouhaux’s position, which emerged in 1917, despite the many local manifestations of anti-immigrant feeling. In fact, the CGT centralized power in the 1920s, denying autonomy to the formerly often activist locals.¹³ In effect the CGT hid under a blanket the hostility of unions to immigrants. No evidence of riots or other violent confrontations between immigrants and French workers was found in a review of the press in this period.

Instead of encouraging either internationalism or confrontation, the CGT pursued its politics of presence: it lobbied for a national manpower office, through which the CGT along with business and government would make policy. The CGT was willing to trade off their support for large-scale immigration in exchange for negotiated levels of immigration into sensitive labor markets. Despite their moderation, however, the right wing political shift after 1919 and the return of economic liberalism doomed these efforts (see chapter III). Yet the CGT did not abandon its corporatist strategy.

The communist-led CGTU, created after the schism, sharply opposed this program. For several years, CGTU leaders issued confusing policy statements, e.g., in 1924 demanding controls on the immigration of unskilled workers because they were used to lower wages. By 1926, the CGTU settled into a policy of opposing all restrictions on immigrants.¹⁴ During the ultra-left “Third Period” phase of the communist party (1927–1934), leaders proposed “open frontiers” and free individual migration rather than any government manipulation of the flow of immigrants.¹⁵ As a result of this rejection of collaboration with the bourgeois state, the CGTU had only “class solidarity” as their line of defense against employers using the immigrant in an attack on labor standards. J. Racamond, in his report as general secretary of the CGTU in 1925, observed:

If you do not support the foreign workers they will be formed in the hands of the capitalists as a mass of labor which can be used to beat you in all the demands which you make.¹⁶

To this message of solidarity it was necessary to add practical measures for their defense. The CGTU miners union in 1926 advised “strong protests in cases of the repression of any foreign workers,” equality in trade union rights, and the abolition of the identity card for foreigners.¹⁷

These efforts to win over the foreign worker, however, did not meet with success. Despite much effort, the CGTU miners’ union could claim in 1925 only 2,200 Polish members or about eight percent of Polish miners. During the 1920s the communist unions declared a membership of between 10,000 to 25,000 Italian workers,¹⁸ while 438,221 Italians were employed in France in 1926. By 1926, only forty of the 300 local unions of the CGTU had organized immigrant sections into which all foreigners were to be organized.¹⁹

Obviously the CGTU failed to integrate the foreign worker into the French working class. The CGTU was even weaker than the CGT (merely 370,260 members in 1928) with only a slightly better implantation than the CGT into industry and agriculture, sectors comprising 36 percent of CGTU membership in 1928.²⁰ Other reasons for its failure include the conservatism of many foreign workers, the indifference of the CGTU rank and file to organizing immigrants,²¹ and the government’s sustained repression of aliens who joined the CGTU (see chapter VIII). Instead of CGTU’s ideal of international class solidarity, the CGT’s nationalist policy dominated French labor from the 1920s. In fact, after 1935, when the CGTU merged with the CGT, the communists dropped their independent position.

The State Accommodates Moderate Labor

Despite the failure of corporatist politics in parliament, the French bureaucracy continued to mediate between the interests of businesses and labor. Without any legislative sanction the state used decree powers to carry out a complex immigration program. Its regulations were strongly biased in favor of business and never violated the essential needs of powerful employer groups like mining and agriculture. Yet both from fear of potential social unrest and because the demands of the CGT were largely consistent with business, the state gave labor a voice in regulating immigration in the 1920s.

An accommodation with French labor was relatively simple. In general the market and organized business tended to assure that alien workers were concentrated in the jobs which most French avoided. Regulation was required when and where this dual labor market broke down—during periods of high unemployment and in urban markets, especially Paris, where job competition was severe. Government also channeled foreign manpower into jobs disfavored by the French; this served not only the interests of domestic labor but powerful employer groups. Regulation then was a rather politically painless expedient.

In 1918 the French government made an unprecedented decision—to assume the responsibility of regulating the foreign labor market and in so doing to reduce job competition and potential social conflict. No longer was the employment market “free” and labor unrest, borne of its fluctuations, treated simply as a police matter. Central to this new function was government control over the entry of aliens into France and thus their access to her job market. The state opened and closed the frontier to labor immigration as if it were a faucet. Anticipating serious unemployment of French veterans, the Ministry of Labor’s Foreign Labor Service closed the frontier to further immigration immediately after the armistice.²² Yet because of labor shortages, it opened the faucet in January of 1920 to fill the hiring lists of construction, mining, and other employers of manual labor.²³

This pattern of opening and closing the frontier in accordance with the labor market occurred again and again during the 1920s. In December of 1920, the Foreign Labor Service shut off most new labor immigration in anticipation of the recession of 1921. The minister of the interior used his police power to deport immigrants who lacked work papers, while the prefects appealed to large enterprises to lay off foreign workers before placing the French on furlough.²⁴ Again in March of 1922, in response to encouraging economic signs and the massive needs for labor for the reconstruction of the war zones, all restrictions were lifted. However, as reconstruction funds dried up and economic growth sagged in late 1924 and 1925, a surplus of unskilled laborers and construction workers developed. As a result the Foreign Labor Service again curtailed immigration. The most expendable labor, that of North Africa, was also limited in late 1924. The same pattern of restriction took place in December of 1926, shortly before the 1927 recession, to be followed by a return to open immigration between 1928 and 1930. Figure 1 indicates the close correlation between growth and the magnitude of immigration.²⁵

Of course, this relationship could be explained by the market. Demand for foreign labor would decrease during recessions, hence the decline in immigration. Yet government restriction of immigration during general recessions may also have blocked unemployed foreigners from seeking jobs in France or prevented employers from importing desperate immigrants willing to work at substandard wages. Government restrictions mollified labor competition during recessions when it was most visible.

A second method of limiting competition was to direct foreign workers into the least desirable jobs. The Foreign Labor Service had several means of channeling foreign workers: first, it was empowered to reject the entry of immigrants hired by private recruiters. The Foreign Labor Service (at the Ministry of Labor) reviewed all work contracts in order to exclude immigrants from entering France to take jobs for which French applicants were readily available. Second, the Foreign Labor Service maintained a string of job offices along the frontier to provide jobs for immigrants seeking legal jobs in France. Similar offices, located in all major cities in France where unemployed aliens gathered, also found jobs for foreign workers. These offices provided jobs which often could not be filled at departmental placement offices or which officials knew attracted few French workers (e.g., unskilled jobs in mining, construction, and building materials). Foreign workers applied for these jobs because the job offices automatically granted them work permits necessary to live in France legally.²⁶ Between 1921 and 1930 the Foreign Labor Service channeled some 1,345,093 aliens into jobs (see Table 14).²⁷ The occupational distribution is highly revealing. Some 20 percent of this total were sent to iron or coal mines while another 23 percent went into construction. Note, however, that less than 2 percent of labor in France (1926) were miners and 3.5 percent, construction workers. Many immigrants avoided regulation by entering France as tourists and obtaining permits after finding jobs.²⁸ Yet most immigrants were relegated to a secondary work force.

The leadership of the CGT completely agreed with this policy. Although the CGT did not participate in the decision-making process of the Foreign Labor Service, this agency made regulations with their approval and even under their pressure. A good example is the government’s response to the recession of 1927. As a result of the revaluation of the franc in August 1926, which raised prices for French exports, the government expected a recession. Indeed, the index of production dropped from 126 in 1926 (1913= 100) to 100 in 1927. The government anticipated the need to shut off the flow of immigrants before the full impact of the recession translated into a sharp increase in French unemployment. By mid-December the Foreign Labor Service was already rejecting foreign work contracts.²⁹ Only in early January 1927, did the CGT mobilize its forces sufficiently to send a delegation to the minister of labor, Pierre Laval, demanding that he restrict new immigration. Laval could claim that just such a policy had been already introduced since mid-December. Furthermore, Laval promised the anxious trade union leaders that unemployed foreigners in France were to be sent to jobs and regions in which there was no unemployment; if this was not possible, the minister of labor told the CGT delegation, “action was to be taken to encourage their repatriation.”³⁰ The Labor Ministry also won the support of CGT construction workers in Paris when it promised them that it would encourage immigrants in this field to accept jobs in the provinces or to repatriate.³¹ This policy was systematically applied by the Foreign Labor Service’s placement office in Paris. In 1927, 85 percent of the 9,486 immigrants who applied for jobs at this office were sent at least one hundred kilometers from Paris. The Prefecture of Police of Paris encouraged employers to follow this same policy. Reportedly shoe, furniture, metallurgical, and other industries sent immigrant employees not needed in their Paris plants to provincial factories or “had them returned home.”³² The government made serious and well-publicized efforts to reduce the competition of foreign labor, especially in the sensitive urban market of the Seine during this major recession.

The government’s goal was in part to placate the CGT. However, its regulations were also consistent with the needs of employers: the Foreign Labor Service’s actions reduced the costs of unemployment benefits to be paid to foreigners. Indeed the Ministry of Labor insisted that even qualified recipients of unemployment compensation be sent whenever possible to jobs which had no French applicants instead of being granted aid.³³ While the government attempted to save French workers from foreign competition, it was also sparing French taxpayers the burden of social expenditures for indigent immigrants. Furthermore, these same policies also meant the return of many immigrants laid off in the cities to their original employers in the mines and farms of provincial France.³⁴ The recession was an opportunity for the government to redistribute immigrants to suit French employers’ economic needs. Finally, where this restrictive policy did not fit business desires, it was revoked. In March of 1927 sugar-beet lobbyists and representatives of the National Confederation of Agricultural Associations pursuaded the government to allow skilled farm workers to enter France. The sole condition imposed on the farm groups was that they report any movement of foreign labor out of rural areas as a guarantee that new immigrants would not further flood the urban labor market.³⁵

Although the regulatory machinery was by no means directed solely toward the interests of labor, it was nevertheless an acceptable substitute for the CGT’s corporatist immigration policy. Especially in the cities, the CGT embraced these controls as a way of preventing low-wage foreign labor from battering down the living standards of the urban and skilled workers whom they represented.³⁶ This will become clearer when we consider another regulatory mechanism—the departmental placement office—in which the unions participated directly.

Since 1915 the departmental placement offices had been the key to local control over the labor market. After the war this was the one institution which retained the principle of parity or tripartite control. Throughout the 1920s the CGT hoped to make these offices the vehicles for protecting the rights of settlement of indigenous labor—preventing employers from hiring outsiders, especially foreigners, in preference to locally unemployed French.

From October of 1920, the government gave the placement offices the power to control the hiring of immigrants. They were authorized to review the job contracts of all aliens seeking work in their departments and to issue work permits, which were required before the immigrant could obtain an identity card or residence permit. This requirement especially affected the false tourist, who entered France to seek work. In theory, the placement offices gave this authorization only if no French worker were available for the foreigner’s job. The permit was to be granted only if the pay and working conditions offered to the immigrant met local standards.³⁷ Although aliens frequently switched jobs after obtaining an identity card (valid up to three years), and thus avoided government control, the work permit did slow down their mobility.

While the work permit seems to be still another way of guaranteeing French priority on the job market, the regulation was effective only in urban departments. First, neither immigrant farm workers nor miners needed this authorization. Further, the work permit rule was merely a formality in those departments where the placement office was run by a career official. In theory, all placement offices were to be regulated by parity commissions—representing local labor and employer groups. Yet only in those departments where labor organizations, primarily the CGT, were strong enough to insist on an active parity commission was the potential of the work authorization to control or limit foreign job seekers actually realized.³⁸ There is evidence that placement office directors, even without the prodding of labor on parity commissions, actively used this power to prevent immigrants from being hired at substandard conditions,³⁹ or when French workers were available.⁴⁰ The officials sometimes recognized that they had a responsibility not only to provide labor to French enterprise but to reduce French unemployment and to prevent a decline in the local labor standard. Yet, in those departments where labor was the strongest, especially in Paris (Seine) and Marseilles (located in the Bouches-du-Rhône), the work permit powers were clearly used to restrict access of foreigners to jobs.

In these urban departments the parity commissions were divided into subcommissions for each sensitive trade which allowed the commissions to specialize in detailed review of applications for permits. Labor and employer associations nominated commission members and often chose them from their representatives on the conseils de prud’hommes (Labor Courts). The commissions usually reflected the rather narrow interests of the skilled trades and local family enterprises.⁴¹ The CGT, but generally not the CGTU participated on them. By the 1920s these subcommissions existed in the Bouches-du-Rhône for the chemical and furniture industries as well as for barbers and dock workers.⁴²

In the Seine the parity system developed into a major influence over the labor market of Paris. In 1929, a year of economic growth, we find that 68 percent (23,587) of the applications for work permits were approved by the commissions of the Seine placement office. Yet there were wide variations between trades. For example (see Table 15)⁴³, the commissions in charge of construction approved of only 39 percent of the applicants. This was a trade which showed signs of competition between the French and immigrants in the mid-1920s. Immigrants were particularly a threat to French construction workers during the “dead season” of winter.⁴⁴ Following a similar pattern were the commissions dealing with furniture workers (only 23 percent approved) and restaurant workers (22 percent), both with histories of union opposition to foreigners. On the other hand, the vast majority of foreign metal workers and general laborers received permits. These obviously were not skilled trades which the French sought to protect for themselves.

The effectiveness of the commissions in restricting foreigners can be seen by noting that in 1929 a full 88 percent of the applications were approved in the departments immediately surrounding Paris and 93 percent were approved in the department of Isère (Grenoble) where, despite large numbers of foreign workers, the parity commissions were weak.⁴⁵

The public placement offices, then, gave French unions, especially those in large cities, some veto power over foreign access to choice job markets. This bargaining structure within the job placement system gave labor unions an alternative to the local riots which pitted French against foreign workers. It also gave them an alternative to the negative demand often heard before the war for across-the-board restrictions of immigration.⁴⁶ To a limited degree the organized portion of the French working classes had gained a direct and indirect voice in the decision-making process.

A major drawback of the parity commission was, of course, that it had only local powers and was impotent in regions of significant immigration such as the Lorraine or Picardy. Since the war, the CGT favored an extension of the commissions to the national level. As described in chapter III, the parliamentary right blocked these appeals for class cooperation and no consensus on immigration policy was achieved. Yet in 1925 the Cartel des Gauches government finally gave the CGT its opportunity to practice corporatist politics by promulgating the National Manpower Council (Conseil national de la main-d’oeuvre). Its membership comprised the CGT, employer groups including the SGI, as well as job placement and immigration officials.⁴⁷ Although the council had only advisory powers dealing with national manpower problems, for the CGT it was the beginning of the longed-for national labor office. Premier Painlevé’s speech opening its deliberations anticipated a significant role for the council in finding a corporatist solution to France’s manpower problems. It was to:

protect workers in the fields and factories against the risk of unemployment that threatens them always in the present capricious fluctuations of the exchange rate; to give employers the security of having workers necessary for their enterprises; and to preserve and increase our population reserves especially with reference to the importance of foreign manpower.⁴⁸

Painlevé expected that the revaluation of the artificially low franc (which was delayed until August 1926) would lead to higher unemployment and increased pressure on French business to lower costs in order to compete on the international market. In this situation the council had the contradictory duty both to protect French labor from immigrants while jobs were scarce as well as encourage employers to import more workers in order to dampen wage pressure, improve productivity, and thus enhance their competitiveness. Clearly consensus was an illusory goal.

Despite the inherent limitations of the Council, the CGT offered it a number of concrete suggestions for improving France’s manpower management and protecting French labor from foreign competition.⁴⁹ The CGT targeted the problem of ineffective controls over immigration into the farming and mining sectors. This hole in the regulatory net weakened unions and probably slowed wage increases in these industries. Immigrants also fled the farms to seek jobs in urban industry and services, a trend which threatened the more unionized sectors of the economy, which the CGT represented.

In order to slow down immigration into the primary sector, the CGT proposed that the Farm Labor Service and labor exchanges (then administered by the Ministry of Agriculture) be placed under the Ministry of Labor, where the unions’ interests would receive a more favorable hearing. The CGT also proposed that the immigrant miner and farm worker be required to obtain work permits.⁵⁰ In order to discourage immigrants already working in farms and mines from fleeing to the urban job markets, the CGT made two additional proposals: first, that the government provide credit for farmers to build adequate lodgings for farm workers and second, that the iron mines and steel mills of the Lorraine improve working and living standards. Both of these measures would have reduced turnover and thus spared the urban French worker the competition of the immigrant. Not surprisingly, the employers’ representatives had no interest in any of these proposals which would have raised their costs and limited their freedom to employ foreign labor. To the first two proposals, the CGT met with “irreducible opposition”; to the second set, the response was merely a resolution requesting departments to set up rural housing credit offices and encouraging industrialists to “continue” to improve conditions in the Lorraine.⁵¹

Consensus between management and labor was possible, however, over one issue: the problem of immigrants’ breaking their work contracts. Since the reconstruction period both farm and industrial employers had called for governmental controls over contract breakers.⁵² Frustrated in their efforts to reduce the flow of immigrants by other means, the CGT gave its approval to a plan to compel foreigners to remain under contract.⁵³ This proposal, presented by the Labor Ministry to the National Manpower Council in 1925, required that immigrants work one year in the occupation for which they were first admitted to France and prohibited employers from hiring any worker before that year had expired. This measure became law in August of 1926 under the title, “Law for the Protection of National Labor,” the only legislation concerning immigrants during the 1920s.⁵⁴

Although the enforcement of this law was sporadic, its intent was to serve the concerns of almost all interested parties.⁵⁵ Agriculture, mining, and other basic industries were to be assured of a more stable foreign work force without having to pay the price of higher wages or improved working conditions. Reformist labor, already weak in the primary sector, gained at least an abatement of the spread of substandard wages and conditions to industries where it had a foothold. The limit of the term of indenture to one year was necessary because a longer period would have provoked diplomatic protests from the labor-exporting states and would have antagonized employers who sought access to the foreign labor supply in France.⁵⁶ The losers by this law were French workers in immigrant-dominated industries who had to compete with this foreign labor force; the immigrants themselves saw a further deterioration of their rights of occupational mobility and with it a loss of bargaining power against their French employers. This sacrifice of the freedom of foreign labor probably mollified class tensions within the French community. It served the purposes of groups that had otherwise few interests in common.

The CGT’s support of this law as well as the web of regulation was a confirmation of a trend evident since World War I: the majority wing of organized French labor viewed immigrants not as workers to be granted rights equal to the French. Rather, immigrants were seen as tools for economic expansion, but not to be allowed equality of opportunity. While the CGT eschewed xenophobia, it also rejected the integration of foreigners into the French working class.

Social Legacy of Organized Immigration

The 1920s saw the decline of liberal immigration, a pattern which before the war produced a mobile immigrant work force but also engendered social tensions. In its place emerged a massive immigration, partially under the collective control of employers and regulated by the French state. It is now appropriate to ask: what was the social impact of this organized immigration? Clearly it led to an important shift of the alien work force toward the lower rungs of the occupational and class ladder in France. This trend helps explain reduced social tensions in France during the 1920s for it placated French labor while, at the same time, it served the interests of many employers. This decline of the economic standing of immigrants becomes clear when we compare the economics status of immigrants in 1906 (in the last suitable prewar census) with the pattern revealed in the 1931 census.

One basic measure of the trend toward a more proletarian foreign population is the change in the proportion of immigrants in major social classes (see Table 16).⁵⁷ While Table 16 shows that immigrants increased proportionately in all classes, the rate of growth was substantially greater in the working class. During these twenty-five years there was also a dramatic increase in the percentage of foreigners in a number of key industries, especially mining, agriculture, construction, and industrial goods (see Table 17).⁵⁸ The increasingly working-class complexion of the foreign population in France can also be measured by comparing the change in its class distribution between 1906 and 1931 with that of the French (see Table 18).⁵⁹ The foreign population experienced a disproportionate loss of employers and the self-employed. On the other hand, there was a sharper rise in the percentage of foreign workers as compared to the French. When making the same comparison while using an occupational distribution, one observes a trend toward the concentration of immigrants in the onerous jobs of primary production (see Table 19).⁶⁰

While the proportion of French employed in primary production declined or was static, the proportion of immigrants in these occupations increased sharply. The opposite happened in the tertiary sector. In the postwar period immigrants became increasingly concentrated in the working class and in basic production.

These trends were the net effect of the change in immigration patterns after World War I. Before the war, the French state and the patronat made little effort to organize or regulate immigration. As a result, it was relatively small, with a sizable number of skilled alien workers and self-employed entering the French economy. After the war, however, the organized efforts of business and the state channeled a much increased migration into lower working-class occupations such as farming, mining, and heavy industry. Without this organized immigration, a very different French occupational structure and economy would have resulted: the tertiary sector (or the peasant population) would have had to be smaller. Labor shortages in the mining and industrial sectors would have led to less economic growth. Furthermore, after the war, the state (and business) actively discriminated against alien labor, denying it full occupational mobility. French workers therefore were allowed to move up the class and occupational ladders, whereas aliens were held back in the race.

In effect, this organized and regulated immigration made it possible for the French to abandon many essential but objectionable jobs and enter more secure, higher paying, and less arduous occupations. One way to indicate this trend is to calculate the impact of the growth of immigration on employment in the twenty-one major occupational groups. For this purpose we found the difference between the actual numbers of French active in each industry in 1931 and the number we would have expected if the ratio of French to total employed (including aliens) in 1906 had been maintained. This number measures the degree to which immigrants (or French) had displaced their counterparts in 1931 relative to the base year of 1906. By translating this number into a percentage of the work force in each industry, one has a useful indicator of the degree to which each industry was becoming more (or less) dominated by foreigners. One might suppose that much of this displacement of the French was due to the decline of the French population (due to war and demographic stagnation) which was available to join the work force. In order to discount this factor and to isolate the impact of occupational migration, we subtracted from the displacement percentage of each occupational group, 4.4 percent, which represents the decline of the French work force relative to alien manpower over the 1906–1931 period. These percentages arranged in a two part scale show the degree to which the French abandoned or moved into these occupational groups. This measure of occupational migration graphically reveals French economic mobility and its relationship to the channeling of foreigners into the lower occupational groups (see Table 20).⁶¹

Group A shows the degree to which the French abandoned the dirty and onerous jobs, while Group B shows that they in effect received an excessive share of the more attractive jobs in the craft trades and tertiary industries. With the exception of entertainment, all of the top eight classifications under Group A were characterized by large numbers of unskilled, dirty, dangerous, and often isolated jobs. The bottom three categories were characterized by relatively modern, expanding plants. The position of these industries may indicate that the French were more prone to abandon the unpleasant traditional jobs than to avoid the new mass-production industries.

It is somewhat more difficult to interpret Group B. The second and third occupations were relatively prestigious and thus naturally targets of French penetration. Yet why the transportation and domestic categories became French preserves is less obvious. The lower half of the chart is characterized by artisan-dominated or stagnant industries which relied primarily on French women (for example, textiles and clothing). Finally, the greatest anomaly is agriculture’s position on the scale: despite an increase in the proportion of immigrants employed in agriculture in the 1920s and their increased role in the farm population, they still did not migrate into agriculture at a rate sufficient to displace the French. There was a sizable influx of foreigners into farming, but once we controlled for the war loss, this number was absorbed into the still large French peasant population.

These tables show a general trend toward an occupational concentration of immigrants and a degree of French upward mobility. Obviously, the French did not all become managers or skilled workers. They did, however, tend to abandon or avoid the least attractive industries. This led to a segmentation of the labor force in France divided between the French citizen and the marginalized alien. This trend is reflected in a profound shift in working-class ideology and practice. It greatly undermined consciousness of class and further weakened the old ideal of international class solidarity. Instead, native labor increasingly identified with its nationality and the power of the French state to improve its life chances. Also this trend toward segmentation helps explain the decline of antagonisms between the French worker and the alien, for the immigrant became less a competitor in the real world of the job market than he had been before the war.

French labor during the 1920s abandoned confrontation and came to accept immigrants on the worksite, but they refused to allow their full participation in the French working class. Immigrants were viewed primarily as extra hands—vital during periods of expansion but expendable during contractions—and, because of their status as non-citizens, to be denied equality of opportunity in the job market. The government encouraged this outlook by providing a legal structure which guaranteed that immigrants would be a necessary but strictly secondary workforce, concentrated in the lower rungs of the occupational ladder. This allowed native labor to avoid significant conflict with the immigrant but also discouraged integration.

The government implemented a portion of the CGT’s immigration program. In doing so it mollified social tensions which an unregulated immigration, dominated by business groups, would have intensified. Yet this web of regulation hardly quelled all objections to the massive immigration of the 1920s. A policy concerned only with the labor market ignored a series of social problems which inevitably resulted from so large a migration: these included the appearance of the ethnic ghetto, economic exploitation which stimulated foreign radicalism, and social disruption which produced crime and other forms of social malaise within immigrant communities. By the mid-1920s these social effects of immigration gave rise to appeals for a more explicit social policy—one which would modify the manpower bias of the immigration program and which would be modeled after the American policy of assimilation.