I

Introduction

DURING the past decade Europeans have discovered the foreign worker in their midst. Race riots in Britain, shifting policy toward migrants throughout Western Europe, and the plight of immigrants in the bidonvilles of France have attracted the attention of scholars, journalists, and film makers. The Europe that in the nineteenth century was a continent of emigration has today become a region of immigration. Social scientists have seen this wave of immigration as a phenomenon of the post-war world, resulting from the economic renaissance of Western Europe since 1950.¹ Yet a very similar rise of immigration occurred in France a generation earlier, between the World Wars.

Alone in Western Europe, and against a worldwide trend toward restricting migrations, France opened its doors in the 1920s to almost two million foreigners. So important was this wave of immigration that it constituted 75 percent of the population growth in France during the 1920s. Contemporaries usually explained interwar immigration as a temporary phenomenon caused by France’s loss of one and a third million young men during the war. Because the influx of foreigners was abruptly cut off in 1931 and because the numbers of immigrants declined during the depression and World War II, the almost three million foreigners in France in 1930 were quickly forgotten. Yet the return of foreign workers after World War II and their contemporary importance in French economic and social life makes the question of the earlier immigration again relevant. Several works which have analyzed contemporary immigration in France have suggested that the immigration of the interwar period was merely a demographic substitution for lost Frenchmen and of little significance to an understanding of the contemporary role of immigrants in the French economy.² As we shall demonstrate, the earlier immigration was of major historical importance. It initiated a new labor system in Europe, which was resumed after World War II. The principal features of the foreign labor systems which function in contemporary Western Europe were formed during World War I and the decade thereafter in France.

The unprecedented wave of immigration into France posed the question of whether alien labor should be assimilated into French society or treated as a permanent class of subcitizens whose movements were to be regulated to serve the exigencies of the French economy. Problems which France faced in the 1920s are similar to policy dilemmas more recently debated in other industrial nations, including the United States. The contemporary rise in extralegal Hispanic immigration to the United States has stimulated a discussion of a number of policy options ranging from open borders to exclusion and temporary regulated immigration.³ In the 1920s France anticipated many of these issues and thus an investigation of the French experience may throw light on the problems facing the United States and other advanced industrial nations.

In order to grasp the significance of this immigration it is necessary to briefly contrast the foreign labor system which emerged in the 1920s from its nineteenth century predecessors—intercontinental migrations (primarily of Europeans to the Americas and Oceania) and continental migrations of Eastern and Southern Europeans to Western Europe. Basically the familiar pattern of transoceanic migrations can be characterized as follows: immigrants were pushed by economic growth inadequate to assure prosperity for a burgeoning European population and pulled by the opportunity of the underdeveloped frontiers of the Americas and Oceania.⁴ It was an unrestricted or liberal migration which corresponded with a laissez-faire capitalist economy. Continental European migration in the nineteenth century stands in sharp contrast: traversing relatively short distances, often merely across one frontier, continental migrants were more likely to be temporary than the transoceanic migrants. Furthermore, these peoples lacked the economic opportunity of their countrymen who made the long journey to the West. The industrializing regions of Europe which offered jobs to foreign migrants sought merely an auxiliary to the labor force. These migrants filled important gaps, often with skilled labor, but did not have the opportunity for social mobility or the possibility of acquiring property which was available for some of the transoceanic migrants. In a word, unlike the massive European settlement of the Americas, the immigration into France and elsewhere in Europe could only supplement an otherwise highly developed workforce.

While we have stressed the differences between these two types of migrations in the nineteenth century, they did share at least one important feature—they were relatively unregulated. Political controls played little role in shaping the migrations. In the receiving countries, labor groups, which favored controls, lacked political power, while business lacked an incentive to press for government intervention. World War I signaled the end of this pattern of liberalism in migration and economics. While the free market on all fronts had been on the defensive since the “Great Depression” of the 1870s and 1880s, the World War was a decisive turn away from the international free market and toward state controls. One of the earliest manifestations of this trend was the restrictions placed on immigration after World War I in a number of countries. Most well-known and important were the exclusions which the United States imposed on immigration in 1921 and 1924, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe. In the United States, but also in Germany, Australia, and elsewhere, the 1920s signaled the end of a dramatic growth in employment opportunities for unskilled workers, necessitating controls on immigration.

In marked contrast, French control of immigration in the 1920s was designed less to exclude eager migrants from jobs and enterprise than to direct an expanded influx of labor into an economy sorrowfully in need of additional hands. Because of the demographic hole created by the war and by declining birth rates, the French faced a unique problem—a shortage of labor. The conditions in France in the 1920s would come to exist in much of Western Europe after 1950, leading to a similar pattern of government-stimulated immigration.

While the French fit the trend away from liberalism, their regulation of the foreign influx in the 1920s has a strikingly contemporary ring. It stimulated and organized immigration, while also channeling and restricting it. The influx was shaped to fit the often contradictory interests of politically articulated groups in France. It was a policy of indirect corporatism—one in which regulatory agencies acknowledged the interests of a number of economic forces, especially labor, agriculture, and heavy industry. The result was a foreign labor system which provided employers with immigrants to assure expansion and economic survival while guaranteeing French labor some protection against a glut of foreigners. It helped to bring prosperity and social peace.

The roots of this system can be found in the two generations before World War I, when realignments of social and political forces in France made the importation of labor necessary. First and most important, through birth control and the tight labor market which resulted, French labor gained social mobility and avoided undesired migration. The slow growth of the labor supply, however, was a drag on capital accumulation. Immigration helped solve this problem without necessarily threatening the improved labor standards of French labor. Secondly, the increasing competition for labor between traditional and modernizing sectors of the economy was partially alleviated through the importation of labor. Thirdly, the French state began to regulate immigration in order to encourage these changes: channeling foreigners into a secondary workforce and expanding the immigrant labor pool.

French laborers dramatically improved their bargaining position on the national job market during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. This occurred because of their success in reducing their fertility rate and because of their use of newly won political rights to avoid the private labor market. The so-called reserve army of labor, that group of propertyless migrants from the countryside, should have, according to Marx, expanded with the development of the market economy. Instead, it largely disappeared in France during the second half of the nineteenth century.

An important factor in explaining this decline in the labor supply is the early drop in the French birth rate. Although the French population rose by nine million between 1801 and 1860, from. 1861 to 1913 it increased by only two and one half million. The excess of births over deaths per thousand dropped from a peak of 5.8 in the period 1821–1830 to a low of 0.7 in the period 1891–1900. France stood alone in this decline of fertility. In contrast, the German rate rose from 9.3 during the decade of 1841 to 1850 to peak at 13.9 in the years 1891–1900.⁵ By the turn of the century, the decline in the French birth rate was widely recognized to be a result of deliberate restraint, brought about by the practice of birth control.⁶ The demographer Alfred Landry noted that by 1900 the first French child appeared only after five years of marriage on the average, and that the mean number of children per marriage dropped to 2.4 by 1911—1913 as compared with the peak average of 4.5 in 1770.⁷ This phenomenon has been attributed to causes as varied as the Napoleonic Code, rationalist attitudes arising out of the French Revolution,⁸ the French obsession with saving,⁹ deforestation of demographically prolific mountain regions, and the desire to limit the number of children to improve the life chances of offspring.¹⁰ Whatever the causes, the results of this control over reproduction was to reduce the potential size of the labor pool or reserve army of labor.

Unlike other Europeans, many French avoided migration, a fact which seriously threatened French industrialization. The Malthusianism of the French peasant, shopkeeper, and artisan kept families small enough so that few children would be disinherited. As a result, property or skills could be passed from generation to generation with relatively few young people being obliged to migrate in search of work. Family limitation allowed some Frenchmen to avoid proletarianization. Yet, as the demographer Alfred Sauvy notes, demographic stagnation can impede economic growth by making the occupational structure inflexible. Insufficient numbers of young, single, and mobile workers block the development of new and often more productive industries. This was especially true when, as in late nineteenth century France, rural population growth was insufficient to supply enough labor for urban industrial expansion.¹¹

Birth control gave French labor not only freedom from job hunting, but the opportunity for social mobility. They began to avoid arduous and socially unacceptable jobs. As early as 1888, the liberal economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu complained:

The French seldom are willing to be simple laborers or street sweepers, to do certain of the exhausting or painful jobs in the textile mills of the north, in the refineries or olive oil processing plants of the south. . . . Belgians, Italians and sometimes Germans are needed for all the infinite and essential tasks of civilization. The French people have become a kind of aristocracy among the more primitive peoples of Europe.¹²

To a large extent what made the French an “aristocracy” was their early control of their fertility, something the more “primitive” people had yet to learn.

The French also avoided the cold chill of the labor market by gaining access to political power and the public budget. Under the Third Republic, labor not only gained the vote but gradually learned how to use their limited access to public power to avoid economic migration. By the turn of the century, both the Socialists and the Radical Socialists promoted public works programs, public job placement, and forms of temporary income maintenance. These measures served as alternatives to migration, especially in hard times. A dramatic increase in the number of public employment opportunities (schoolmasters, postmen, etc.) provided French workers with alternatives to the factory, mine, construction site, or farm.¹³ Furthermore, real upward mobility, at least across generations, was a prerequisite for social and political stability. As political scientists have noted, without some degree of upward mobility for individuals, democratic institutions face collective demands that can easily undermine the capitalist social order.¹⁴ By the end of the century, propertied allies of labor recognized this fact in France. As T. H. Marshall notes, with the coming of universal suffrage the masses gradually extended the definition of citizenship to include social rights as well as political ones.¹⁵ These social rights include protections which moved against the worker being a commodity or mobile factor of production.¹⁶

Obviously these protections conflicted with the interests of employers who were seeking tractable labor at the lowest price possible. As one might have expected, employers combated these trends by encouraging a larger domestic labor supply, through sponsoring an anti-Malthusian movement.¹⁷ Indeed, the issues of Malthusianism became an underlying theme in the social debate in the generation before 1914. The “gréve des ventres,” as conservatives characterized the practice of birth control by the workers, was commonly associated with socialism and anarchism.¹⁸ Both business and purely Catholic groups sponsored anti-birth control legislation. The Textile Consortium of Roubaix-Tourcoing in 1907, as well as employers in St. Étienne in 1917 actively opposed the Malthusian propaganda that was passed among trade unionists.¹⁹ Although legislation outlawing abortion and limiting access to birth control was passed in 1920, the birth rate remained stagnant in the interwar years.²⁰

Business groups also attempted to limit the access to public aid and public employment and thus deny workers alternatives to the private labor market in much the same way as contemporary business leaders seek to restrict the size and cost of government.²¹ This effort to assure an adequate supply of workers was limited by the fact that French society, like all relatively advanced industrial societies, demanded an ever-growing number of services which required labor. Furthermore, without denying the vote to the proletariat and lower-middle class, employers had to fight an uphill and ultimately losing battle to control efforts to extend rights of citizenship from the purely political to the social and economic areas. If employers could not meet their demand for labor through encouraging population growth and restricting public alternatives to the private labor market, the only solution was to expand that labor supply through immigration.

Immigration might be understood simply as the replacement of unborn French with foreigners or the international extension of an inadequate internal migration.²² Yet immigrants did not move into a population vacuum. They filled specific needs of French society for a secondary labor market. This helped to solve the labor shortages which plagued business without necessarily threatening indigenous labor with competition for jobs. As a result of immigration, the rudiments of a dual labor market appeared in France as early as the 1880s: a secondary sector dominated by foreign workers in such trades as construction, seasonal agriculture, and in a variety of relatively arduous jobs; the primary sector dominated by French workers in more agreeable and better paid occupations. As Gaeton Piou noted in 1912 in the Revue Socialiste, “foreign workers specialize in the tasks that are the most repugnant, the most difficult, and the least skilled, a situation which happily has freed indigenous labor from the purely unskilled jobs and opened it to the jobs which demand greater technical and intellectual skills.”²³ Immigrants were disproportionately represented in dirty jobs and in the heavy industries. In 1906, while they constituted only 3 percent of the economically-active population, they represented 10 percent of the workforce employed in the chemical industry, 18 percent in the metal industries, and 9 percent in the construction industries.²⁴ As French workers became less available for low-status jobs, they were also able to acquire the skills and seniority necessary to gain access to preferred jobs. Immigration provided a relatively simple solution to the economic dilemma of the slow growth of the French workforce. While French workers avoided migrating to find jobs and even stayed out of the job market, immigrants took up the slack. While French citizens began to use the political process to find alternatives to the private labor market, politically powerless foreigners took their places. Because this created a dual job market, immigrants seldom competed directly with French workers for jobs. This fact tended to mitigate massive opposition of French labor to immigration.

A second broad social realignment in France, the rise of tensions between the traditional and modernizing sectors of the economy, was also mollified by immigration. Traditional sectors of the economy, including the agriculture, construction, clothing, and food industries, were characterized by relatively low productivity. They were willing or able to make only few investments in machines or other improvements which would have increased their productivity; and they sought to assure a profit through maintaining a customarily low wage and labor standard. In a tight labor market they had difficulty in luring or retaining workers. They were forced to compete with the modernizing sector.²⁵ By the turn of the century, this group of modernizers included steel, chemicals, and metal goods. These industries were characterized by concentrations of capital sufficient to make investments which increased productivity. They could afford and were willing to pay higher wages and benefits to lure workers from the traditional sector. Yet they too had to compete for labor. They sought malleable workers willing to subject themselves to factory discipline and often unpleasant working conditions. As Peter Stearns and others have pointed out, European workers, even in the late nineteenth century, avoided these types of jobs whenever they had alternatives.²⁶

If the French workforce would not sufficiently supply the needs of the labor market, neither would employers pay the price for scarce labor. On the one hand, traditional industries, especially in rural areas, refused to raise wages or sufficiently improve living and working conditions to prevent French workers from seeking alternative jobs in Paris or other large cities.²⁷ On the other hand, modernizing industries, especially in steel, also failed to lure local peasant labor to the intensive work environment of the factories. Competition for labor between traditional and modernizing sectors resulted. This competition could have produced a serious strain in the ruling classes of France if it were not relieved by an expansion of the labor supply—through immigration.

Immigration provided a kind of safety valve. It gave some traditional industries access to labor at the customary low price, thus allowing them to avoid costly capital improvements to substitute for labor. It also may have made viable some marginal enterprises which otherwise could not have competed for labor. Immigration may have, as it does today, assured the survival of enterprises which lacked the resources or skills to survive in an increasingly concentrated economic system. Rather than improve wages or working conditions, these employers accepted the loss of native workers to more attractive industries or regions (especially Paris) and replaced these French workers with immigrants at pay as close as possible to the traditional level. As the economist Leroy-Beaulieu remarked in 1888, “without this foreign assistance, it would have been necessary to pay workers an exorbitant wage. This would have raised further the costs of hard-pressed enterprises which have contributed so much to improve the financial condition of France.”²⁸ Immigration also provided a relief for modernizing firms, enabling them to expand rapidly with adequate supplies of labor. Thus immigration served to mollify conflicts between sectors of capital, removing tensions which otherwise might have weakened the hegemony of the owning classes of France.

To sum up our argument, immigration seems to have served as a kind of economic and social release. It provided additional hands in the lower levels of the labor market which the French worker was increasingly able to avoid. Thus economic growth became possible in a society in which the native workforce was unwilling to participate fully in its cost. Immigration also assured a labor supply and therefore provided an outlet for competition between the traditional and modernizing sectors of the economy. Employers were thus able to obtain prosperity without fully accepting the responsibility for the modern social costs of labor—citizenship and improved labor standards. In effect, immigration was a means of displacing the tensions inherent in a society which was unwilling to fully bear the burden of capitalism. French workers sought to avoid migrant and arduous labor; French capital, the economic consequences of competition. To a degree, immigration made possible this escape from capitalism.

Yet this happy solution was hardly flawless. Three problems emerged that disturbed the stabilizing impact of immigration. Their solution required governmental action to restore stability. The first problem was that unrestricted access of foreigners to French jobs led to conflicts between French employers and labor over the size and composition of the foreign labor pool. The second dilemma was that shortages of foreign labor threatened to stimulate competition between employers for labor. The third difficulty was that foreign governments began to realize that their emigrating citizens were national assets and that receiving nations, like France, should pay a price for the opportunity to hire them. The French state alone could overcome these problems.

In the first place, immigrants did not always remain in the secondary labor market but rather competed directly with the natives. This occurred whenever the skills of French and foreign workers were similar. Mechanization and advances in the division of labor contributed to a growing trend in the homogenization of skills. As Paul Gemahling observed in 1913, “production has become a series of elementary, simple and automatic acts; the labor market tends to become uniform. The skilled and unskilled increasingly find themselves in the same situation—without any real defense in the battle.”²⁹ Although Gemahling’s analysis was probably premature, competition for jobs was becoming more acute during the first half of the Third Republic. Furthermore, expanding the labor supply through immigration without doubt worked against wage increases. This was especially true because French employers usually had to provide immigrants with wages and working conditions only marginally better than what foreigners experienced at home. Most immigrants consumed little in France, and because their cost of living at home was lower, they were willing to accept lower wages than the French would tolerate. More important still, the alternative to migration for many of them was unemployment. Although the French had definite advantages over the foreigner in competing for jobs (e.g., skills, knowledge of the job market, and employment alternatives), direct competition between the two groups was an ever present possibility.

How did the French workers respond to that threat? Often they sought government protection—a labor tariff. However, any attempt to limit this competition was bound to draw French labor into conflict with employers. Business naturally wanted an unrestricted access to cheap foreign labor and generally sought to expand the supply of labor to keep wages down. As the Marxists point out, the size of the potential labor supply (reserve army of labor) is a prime determinant in the price of labor. While the owning classes sought a free labor market, the laboring classes favored government controls in foreign labor.

A second problem, however, also emerged which frustrated the stabilizing influence of immigration. There was no guarantee that sufficient numbers of immigrants would spontaneously appear when the crops were ready or as production was scheduled to begin. Shortages could appear, not only for big employers. Small but strategic gaps could remain unfilled in the thousands of small, marginal, and dispersed enterprises located throughout France. This could easily result in competition between employers for labor, the tendency to bid up the price of workers, and the forcing of marginal employers out of business. Thus, while immigration tended to mollify this competition, competition could easily emerge, since there were no guarantees that the size of immigration would be sufficient. As a result, employers had an incentive to demand more than merely a free labor market. Rather they had reason to violate their own liberal principles by joining together to recruit immigrants and even by seeking governmental support to expand the foreign labor supply.

This brings us to a third factor which frustrated a liberal immigration policy—the change in the conditions under which foreign labor became available to the French market. Traditional and easily accessible sources of immigrant labor (for example, from Belgium) gradually dried up. Conditions at home improved sufficiently to make it no longer necessary to migrate. Moreover, immigrants themselves became more demanding. They eventually adopted the attitudes of the French. As Piou feared, there was no guarantee that the Italians, for example, would “not try to adopt the standard of living of the new milieu in which they moved.”³⁰ Insofar as this occurred, business found immigrants less advantageous. As a result, employers were compelled to recruit labor increasingly distant and peripheral to the French core economy. Swiss, Belgian, and German workers had to be replaced by Spaniards, Portuguese, and eventually Poles, Czechs, and even North Africans.

On top of these problems was the fact that ruling elites in the labor exporting countries gradually came to realize that to allow their citizens to emigrate to France without some kind of compensation was economically unsound. Labor importers reaped the benefits of labor without sharing the costs of raising and training the workers. They received largely young adult workers in their most productive years. Labor exporting nations gained relatively little. As Charles Kindleberger observes in the context of contemporary Europe, emigration is a “capital intensive industry in a capital poor country.”³¹ It should not be surprising then that labor-supplying nations began to impose conditions and restrictions on migration; they hoped to share some of the productivity of their emigrant citizens as well as to impose a portion of the costs of maintaining and educating those citizens upon the labor importing nations. These trends would develop only gradually and at vastly different rates in the countries of emigration. Yet by the eve of the First World War, the outlines of these trends are clear in countries like Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy.

What were the consequences of these threats on the unrestricted and ample supply of immigrant labor for the French employers? One response was to band together to improve their chances of obtaining foreign labor on favorable terms. Yet, in the long run, as we shall soon see, they were obliged to call on the French government, in effect, as their bargaining agent, against the demands of the national governments of immigrants.

Because foreign labor did not spontaneously serve the interests of French labor and business, Frenchmen sought to use their access to the state for assistance. French labor wanted a labor tariff to keep foreigners from competing with them for jobs; French business eventually sought governmental support to recruit foreign labor and to reduce the demands of labor-supplying nations.

This brings us to a final factor in the emergence of the modern foreign labor system in France—the appearance of a new class of state functionaries. This group will be committed to the goal of mediating and serving the interests of various social groups in France. At least since the advent of the middle-class revolution of 1789, the French government has served the economic needs of the propertied classes through tariffs, controls over unions, and a commitment to cheap government. Yet by the beginning of the twentieth century, government services began to expand into entirely new areas. These included helping employers find and distribute new sources of foreign labor. It also involved providing diplomatic assistance to business as the political cost of importing foreign labor increased.

Yet we also see a new concern on the part of the state for mediating social conflict—witness the government of 1898, which included the Socialist, A. Millerand. Despite a well-documented history of repressing working-class movements, French governments since the 1890s made efforts to integrate the working classes into capitalist society and to seek means to avoid social conflicts. One example of this trend was governmental efforts to increase labor immigration but, at the same time, to avoid antagonizing native labor. The state, after 1914, will channel and restrict foreign labor so that it would not compete with the citizen worker. State intervention, then, comprised a critical factor in the formation of a foreign labor system in the twentieth century. It served and mediated conflicting French interests. It provided a step toward a corporatist or consensus solution to an outstanding social problem.

We believe that it is these political factors which define the unique pattern of immigration which emerged after 1914. Of course, one could fruitfully study the purely demographic and ethnographic aspects of the interwar migrations, as we hope that others will. Yet what made the foreign influx during this period enduring and innovative was the formation and consequences of a structured or directed immigration. We shall see that immigration into France after the war differed significantly from that influx before the war. Foreigners as a group became more concentrated in the working classes, more apt to be employed in primary production, and more likely to be concentrated in provincial regions. They were, in a word, more concentrated in regions and occupations which the French worker avoided and in which French employers were unwilling to pay the costs of attracting the French worker. Immigration became rationalized to serve the specific social and economic needs of the French.

At the same time, immigration after the war differed from the influx before 1914 in that it was drawn from more distant nationalities. Fewer Flemish, German, and Swiss workers came across the border and more Poles, Italians, and Greeks were recruited into occupations and regions often separate from the traditional paths of migrants. The new immigration reflected a much higher level of organization and control. While the motives and interests of individual immigrants still played a role in determining the pattern of immigration, the freedom of the foreigner was circumscribed by governmental regulations and the recruitment organizations of employers.

As a result, foreign labor became a radically distinct class in France. Not merely were immigrants predominantly property less and unskilled, but they were noncitizens. This lack of political rights became increasingly important as immigration became more controlled by government and private organizations. To a degree the new foreign labor system was a successful attempt to recreate, in a small but by no means marginal portion of the working class, the conditions which had once characterized the native citizen majority of the working class: a migratory workforce under the hegemony of the employers. New means of control in effect reinstituted a labor system under which the French working class labored before it had gained citizenship and attendant social rights.

This new foreign labor system did not emerge automatically out of a new political and social realignment. Rather, it appeared out of a long historical germination, within the context of social conflict and political debate. It would be a rather disjointed compromise between interested parties and would reflect the dominance of employer groups—mine operators and large agriculturalists, especially. The muddiness of the historical record reveals the genesis and dimensions of the directed immigration of the interwar period.

In Chapter II and III we will explain the origins of the new policy and its limits in crystallizing a consensus solution to immigration. Chapters IV through VI will trace the growth of immigration after the war and describe the varieties of foreign labor (for example, Slavic migration into mining and agriculture and Italian influx into construction). We will explain the relationship between employers and the new immigrants within the context of regulation and organized recruitment. Chapters VII and VIII will explore the roles of government in regulating immigration in order to assure that foreigners complemented rather than competed with French labor and to assure its social as well as economic subordination. Finally, in Chapter IX we will investigate the decline of immigration during the economic crisis of the 1930s, and the response of labor, business, and government to the foreign worker who remained. We will see that immigrant labor had become so important to the French economy that even the crisis did not substantially reverse the trends of the twenties. France would never again be able to do without foreign laborers or the machinery used to control, channel, and coordinate them to fit the modern social structure of France. What the French developed in the 1920s would be followed by other advanced capitalist nations after World War II. What we are about to investigate is a telling feature of contemporary European society—the emergence of a noncitizen workforce in democratic capitalist nations.