III

Organizing Immigration after the First World War

BY the end of the war immigration was no longer free and spontaneous, but regulated and organized. Because of the war experience, all groups (except the communists, who opposed all forms of class collaboration) shared important expectations about immigration in postwar France. They recognized that if France was to capitalize on its military victory through economic expansion, additional labor was needed to replace the young workers slaughtered in the war. Heavy industry, big agriculture, and noncommunist labor all accepted the need for a large increase in immigration. They all agreed that this immigration must be regulated as well as expanded: the government must eliminate the undesirable foreigner—principally the colonial and Chinese worker, whom the French had found unacceptable during the war. The government must also secure regular streams of selected European workers. Finally, a regulated immigration would result in a reduction of spontaneous immigration and the free movement of immigrants within the French economy and, produce instead, a channeling of the foreign workers into jobs in which there was a shortage of indigenous labor. The war experience, then, had created the possibility of consensus on immigration.

Yet, by 1924, a corporatist solution was left stillborn. It was blocked by the conflicting goals with which each group accepted government intervention. Employers sought government aid to increase their access to foreign workers; labor groups, to assure natives’ priority in a regulated job market. Furthermore, during the reconstruction period, 1919—24, employers succeeded in utilizing the diplomatic and police powers of the state to shape immigration. At the same time, labor interests were largely excluded from policy making. In addition, an alternative to state-managed immigration emerged in a commercial labor contractor, the Societé générale d’immigration—SGI. This powerful company, owned and operated by a consortium of coal mining and agricultural associations, obtained a monopoly over eastern European immigration. In the SGI employers obtained an agency able, like the French state, to prevail over weak states—especially Poland—and thus control immigration. Yet the SGI was free from the critical political pressures which were imposed on the French government. Thus it was a nearly perfect vehicle for business. In effect, employer groups were able to exclude labor from a policy role both by dominating government decision-making and by establishing a private alternative to government. While there was surely an opportunity for compromise and consensus, employer dominance made a multi-class immigration policy impossible.

Preparing for the Foreign Worker, 1917–1919

In 1917, a major federation of French employer groups, the Association national d’expansion économique, laid the basis for a common program on immigration. It affirmed the necessity of a drastically enlarged immigration after the war.¹ Participants noted that hopes to capitalize on France’s expected military victory through economic expansion required foreign manpower to make up for French losses due to the war. Not just any workers would do, however. The Association agreed that colonial and Chinese workers were poor producers and sources for racial tensions.² The Association also recognized that unregulated European immigration, which had prevailed before the war, allowed foreigners with inappropriate skills or uncooperative attitudes to enter France. This employers’ group advocated that the government continue to require immigrants to obtain identity cards. Because these cards could be denied the unemployed or those having nonauthorized jobs, the state could exclude the undesirables and channel acceptable foreigners into jobs offered by politically powerful employers.³

Moreover, French failure before the war in priming new streams of immigration showed employers that only the state could assure the flow of desired foreign workers, especially in the face of foreign political pressures.⁴ As the administrator of the National Farm Labor Office, F. L. Brancher, pointed out in 1919,

the nations . . . capable of sending us labor consider it as a kind of capital. They will allow workers to immigrate only if France gives them something in return. It follows that this problem can be solved only through governmental negotiation rather than through the professional associations. As long as this is the case, the cooperation of the state will be indispensable for agriculture.⁵

An important representative of industry, Paul de Rousiers, president of the Shippers Committee, agreed at the Association d’expansion meeting when he noted that because private agencies had failed to recruit sufficient numbers of Polish workers for French mines and farms before the war, an “organization with an official authority” would be required after the war.⁶ In order to fill their demanding specifications for labor, French employers expected the government both to restrict and channel foreign manpower as well as to encourage migrations from desirable populations.

This unity of French employers, however, failed when farm interests broke rank and demanded special treatment. Because farmers believed that they could not compete with industry for foreign labor,⁷ agriculture demanded that it maintain the separate foreign labor service which was established during the war.⁸ The old problem of the exodus of farm workers to urban industry, which was greatly exacerbated by the war, lay at the heart of this attitude.⁹ Another reason for the separatism of the farmers was their suspicion of government. While industry accepted foreign workers recruited by the placement offices of the Labor Ministry, farmers preferred that their agents control all recruitment as they had during the war.¹⁰ Agricultural groups also disliked the parity commissions, which administered some of the departmental placement offices. A former minister of agriculture, J. Meline, objected that unionized industrial workers would inevitably represent unorganized farm workers on these commissions; trade unionism might spread to agriculture and wage differentials between agriculture and industry would decrease.¹¹ In order to isolate themselves from the wage competition of industry and the more modern labor relations which the parity commissions represented, farm associations stuck fast to their separate immigrant labor system. This policy was to fragment control of immigration.

Still, by 1917, both industry and agriculture had abandoned their prewar commitment to the free labor market and embraced government intervention as a solution to their needs for foreign manpower. Just as the growth sectors of the industrial economy demanded specific pools of foreign workers to break the labor bottlenecks which they anticipated would occur during the period of postwar growth, so the relatively stagnant agricultural sector pressed for immigrants to avoid competing for labor with industry and to provide a substitute for modernization. Only through state intervention could both of these broad needs be served.

Labor groups also reversed their prewar position on immigration. Key labor officials, after joining the Union Sacrée in 1914, came under the influence of corporatist ideas on immigration. They were especially impressed by the positions of the Association française pour la lutte contre le chômage, which included important officials from the Labor Ministry, especially in the placement offices.¹² The association advocated a rationally organized labor market. This involved not only government-assisted expansion of immigration as the business community demanded, but also the effective allocation of available labor within France.¹³ These objectives alone would assure social peace as well as prosperity. The association believed that French labor’s hostility to immigration might lead to violence if the state did not regulate the internal labor market to prevent excessive foreign competition. Foreign labor depots and departmental placement offices should direct immigrants into jobs left by the French and away from urban or frontier areas where foreigners might compete with native labor. In March of 1918 an article in the Bulletin de l’Association française pour la lutte contre le chômage makes the rationale for this policy very clear:

If foreign labor were employed only in the most unpleasant work, in the jobs which our citizens mostly avoid, there would be scarcely any reason to fear that their low pay would effect French wages. But for several years in Paris, luxury goods industries, such as wood, leather, and fur goods, in which workers earn rather high wages, have been flooded by foreigners, who earn a lower rate. If this prevails, it will produce lower wages in all these professions.¹⁴

The solution to this potential for social malaise was to prevent large numbers of immigrants from entering these attractive trades, especially at wage levels below the standard. Thus, in addition to helping French industry obtain supplemental labor, the governmental regulation of foreign labor should also assure that immigrant manpower complemented rather than competed with citizen labor.

The noncommunist wing of the French labor movement embraced this position wholeheartedly. For example, Léon Jouhaux, chief of the CGT, wrote in August of 1917: “After the war it will be necessary to enlist foreign workers. We will need to fill the vacuum caused by the war and to prepare ourselves for a new attempt to develop our national industries.” Again, up to this point, the CGT had reversed its protectionist attitude of the pre-1914 period, and now shared with business a commitment to prosperity through an expanded labor supply. But Jouhaux goes on and says:

But the recruitment of foreign labor must be made in a methodical way. . . . In a word it must be organized . . . to include the interests of the working class, which has so well served the general interests of the nation. . . . If the workers return from the front to find themselves faced with foreign workers, who, because there are no guarantees against their exploitation, may cause wage decreases, the discontent will be widespread and violent.¹⁵

In 1916, the CGT demanded that employers “not be allowed to import foreign workers en masse when the local workforce is sufficient. . . . it would be better to channel [already] imported labor where it may be needed,” especially into new heavy industries. The CGT advocated that parity commissions for the departmental placement offices investigate whether “the recruitment of foreign workers for an industry or region corresponds to a real need,” and that they place a “ceiling on this recruitment.”¹⁶

When one compares the expectations of industry, agriculture, the CGT and its allies in the placement offices, obvious points of agreement emerge which had not existed before the war. Employers favored government intervention which it opposed before the war and unions accepted an expanded immigration which they had formerly fought. Yet business sought government intervention primarily to improve its access to desired foreign labor supplies; French labor accepted this on condition that it had a veto over foreign employment in competitive job markets. This concession, however, employers were generally unwilling to accept.

The political complexion of postwar France was a critical factor determining the outcome of this conflict of interests. This is not to suggest that immigration policy was fashioned in parliamentary debate and legislation. Immigration was not an important issue in either elections or the Chamber of Deputies. The topics which dominated parliamentary politics between 1919 and 1926 were foreign policy (especially war reparations), economic concerns revolving around inflation and taxation, as well as the social issues of labor unions and Bolshevism. Immigration was largely irrelevant to party politics.¹⁷ Yet toward the end of the war and in the five years of reconstruction, political power swung broadly to the right, while labor and the socialist left split in two. This situation destroyed the political climate of the Union Sacrée and ended the possibility of a direct bargaining between labor and business over immigration policy.

As early as the spring of 1917, growing opposition to the Union Sacrée was shown in strikes against the war in munition factories.¹⁸ When the socialists left the government in September of 1917 in the midst of mounting leftwing antiwar pressure, the national coalition ended. The policy of cooperation between labor and management, which the socialist minister of armaments Albert Thomas had instituted, was reversed by his replacement, the industrialist Louis Loucheur. The labor and socialist leadership which had supported the war alienated a large share of the rank-and-file; many split off in unauthorized local strikes (for example by metalworkers in the spring of 1918) and rallied to the cause of Bolshevism. Following the Armistice and the threat of massive strikes, the French parliament hurriedly passed a bill for the eight-hour day in April of 1919—one of the few significant concessions to labor after the war. In the midst of this apparent upsurge of militant labor, conservatives were able to organize a Bloc National, an electoral coalition of the right, which successfully appealed to voters on the themes of order, anticommunism, and national honor. In the elections of November of 1919 the Bloc National won a smashing victory: they sat 338 supporters to the Socialists’ 68 with most of the rest of the 610 seats going to the centrist radicals and small parties who generally supported the Bloc National. During the following year, the socialists and the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) divided into bitter factions over the question of support for the Bolshevik’s Third International. The split of the socialist party in December of 1920, with a majority forming the communist party, further undercut the political strength of labor’s position. Finally, the division of the CGT, with the expulsion of the generally procommunist wing in 1921 and its formation of the Confédération générale du travail unitaire (CGTU) in December, assured the impotence of the labor movement in the 1920s.

With a conservative government in office there was little room for compromise with French labor. Following the outbreak of a general strike in support of a walkout of railway workers (May 1920), the government of the ex-socialist Alexandre Millerand succeeded briefly in winning parliamentary approval for the suppression of the CGT. The split of the left and the unions not only weakened their bargaining power but split the voice of labor on the question of immigration as on many other issues: the moderate and larger wing led by Léon Jouhaux, who retained control of the CGT, continued to advocate cooperation with management as it had during the war; the communist-led CGTU opposed any collaboration with the bourgeoisie and generally opposed any regulation of foreign labor. This assured business control over immigration policy during the precedent-setting years of reconstruction. For example, in 1920 a Conseil national de la main-d’oeuvre, was chartered by the government to give labor and management advisory roles in shaping immigration policy. Yet business representatives frustrated its promulgation until 1925 by objecting to the CGT’s claim to represent all of French labor.¹⁹ Furthermore, the Bloc National governments between 1919 and 1924 reversed the etatist trends of the war period by refusing to back Etienne Clemental’s plan for a national economic council (modeled after the Germans) and returning to a policy of liberalism.

However, labor’s interests were not entirely ignored. The Bloc National feared labor unrest, rising from the experience of the strikes in 1919 and 1920 and the haunting example of the Bolshevik Revolution. The government could not afford to undertake an entirely pro-business policy of providing an unlimited supply of foreign workers without considering the threat of competition with native workers. Nor could the Bloc National governments simply return to the free foreign labor market. Business groups, who supported these governments, still required the coordination of certain governmental agencies—especially the Foreign Ministry, the Agricultural Ministry, and the Foreign Labor Service of the Labor Ministry—to assure the flow of foreign labor.

Of equal importance is the fact that employers of immigrants did not use the parliamentary process to advance their goals. No legislation concerning immigration was passed by the French parliament during these crucial four years of the Bloc National period. This may have been in part because of the reluctance of this conservative parliament to endow the state with additional powers. More likely the beneficiaries of government assistance preferred to deal directly with the Ministries as they had done during the war in order to develop a policy without explicit parliamentary sanction. The politics of immigration were fashioned between 1919 and 1924 largely by the French executive in collaboration with powerful employers of immigrants.

The Government Organizes Immigration, 1919–1924

During the five years of postwar reconstruction, the government played a decisive role in organizing and regulating the influx of foreign labor. Anticipating large-scale unemployment of French workers and fearful of Jouhaux’s predictions of “discontent and violence,” the Ministry of Labor closed the frontier to further immigration immediately after the signing of the armistice. The Interior Ministry also repatriated as many of the colonial and Chinese workers as it could lay hands on.²⁰ Yet, with the loss of 1.3 million young men in the war and the expectation of economic growth following the victory, labor shortages rather than unemployment were soon to be the problem. At first, the government anticipated labor shortages in industries where prisoners of war had been heavily used and where housing, wages, and working conditions compared unfavorably with alternative occupations. For these reasons, dock work, as well as construction, quarrying, mining, and the glass industries were opened to immigrants during the spring of 1919.²¹ These two general policies—emergency priority for French labor and funneling foreign workers into labor-short sectors—were to become the hallmarks of postwar immigration policy.

While fears of French labor unrest entered the policy-making equation, employers’ interests dominated. The government recognized that a long-term solution to French business’ need for acceptable foreign workers required an aggressive research and development program. Drawing on its war-time experience, the government in March of 1919 established a Conference permanente de la main-d’oeuvre étrangère. The Conference was a carry-over from the Interministerial Labor Commission and included key governmental functionaries.²² It established priorities for recruiting various nationalities.²³ While rejecting out of hand any further experimentation with colonial labor, it determined that to gain access to prized nationalities, especially the Italians, Poles, and Czechs, subtle diplomatic action was required. The Conference realized that nationalistic governments of these countries would demand a quid pro quo for any workers which the French were allowed to recruit.²⁴ Consequently, France negotiated a series of bilateral treaties with Poland, Italy, and Czechoslovakia to assure a regular flow of immigrant labor. Signed in September 1919 and March 1920, these treaties established bilateral commissions to determine the number and occupational categories of immigrants who could be recruited under labor contracts. The supplying nations were to control where and in what occupations the French were allowed to recruit workers, although these nations were to have no formal authority over the working conditions or pay of their emigrating citizens.²⁵

The bilateral immigration treaties prepared the way for a large-scale flow of foreign labor into France. On January 19, 1920, all foreign manual workers under work contracts as authorized by the treaties were allowed to enter France.²⁶ The opening of the sluices coincided with a major labor shortage in France, resulting from the reconstruction of war-damaged regions. As many as 400,000 workers were needed from 1919 to 1924 to fill trenches and level bomb-scarred land, to rebuild towns and factories, and to repair flooded mines in the war zones of the northeast.²⁷

Not only had many potential workers been killed or maimed in the war, but the population had been scattered by the fighting. Even if sufficient numbers of French workers were available, very poor living and working conditions deterred French applicants for these construction jobs. At the same time, opportunities in construction threatened to draw some native labor from important mining and agricultural industries which already faced labor shortages. This could result only in general wage increases, a prospect which employers resisted.

Large-scale immigration was an inevitable solution to these problems. Not only did it alleviate the immediate labor shortage but it provided a malleable workforce: because the immigrants were single or left their families at home, they accepted barracks life more readily than did the French worker. Furthermore, employers had greater control over the foreigner than the French worker: none could enter France without a work contract nor could they remain without an identity card which specified their work assignment. These controls filtered the immigrants exclusively into reconstruction jobs, often those rejected by the French, and discouraged them from breaking their contracts (see chapter VII). Immigrants were also an advantage to the employer because they could be imported to fit specific skill requirements.

In the reconstruction zones, the state continued to dominate the immigration process as it had during the war. A Ministry for the Liberated Regions was created in 1919 to organize the reconstruction. The Office of Industrial Reconstitution, a joint government-employer agency, served as a liaison, funneling employers’ requests for labor to the Ministry for the Liberated Zones who then filled them with foreign workers recruited at government-run job offices. This whole process bypassed the departmental placement offices, which in principle were to be consulted in order to give priority to local labor. In 1920, about 200,000 Belgian workers were recruited at frontier hiring offices, mostly for the unskilled work of leveling and clearing land.²⁸

This first flow of immigrants from Belgium was relatively simple. However, as soon as masons, bricklayers, and other skilled construction workers were needed, the French were obliged to go further afield.²⁹ In 1920–1921 employers sought Czech labor from an estimated pool of 16,000 unemployed construction workers. Yet, despite French government efforts to pursuade the new Czech government to allow French recruiters to tap this labor pool, the Czechs resisted these entreaties, fearing that an exodus of skilled workers would compromise their economic development.³⁰

The French were more successful with a traditional source of skilled building workers—the Italians. Following the ratification of the bilateral immigration treaties with Italy in 1920, the Italian government allowed French employers to recruit Italian construction workers (see chapter V). The French also imported Portuguese and Spanish laborers, mostly for less skilled work. By September of 1922 there were 135,044 immigrants working in the reconstruction (44 percent of the total labor force of 307,615). Fifty-seven percent of these immigrants were skilled.³¹

As it had during the war, the government also assisted employers by attempting to prevent turnover and competition between employers for foreign labor. The state expelled immigrants who broke their contracts and threatened to withdraw government contracts from firms who pirated immigrants under work contracts. The government took a direct interest in the problem of labor instability, for it was presumed that turnover and competition for labor raised the cost of workers and thus the expense of the reconstruction.³²

Between the end of 1919 and 1924, the French state had facilitated the entry of over one million foreign workers into France.³³ This huge influx of labor was probably decisive in France’s post-war economic recovery.

Commercial Recruiters of Foreign Labor: The General Immigration Society (SGI)

The demand for immigrant labor was hardly restricted to the reconstruction industries. Coal mines and a variety of agricultural enterprises in the northeast also desperately needed foreign workers. Even before the war these industries had difficulties obtaining French workers and even nearby Flemish labor. Their situation was worsened in the tight postwar labor market, and further exacerbated by the demand for labor for the nearby reconstruction projects. They sought an alternative to the nationalities recruited for the reconstruction (Italians, Spanish, and Belgians) in order to avoid competing for workers. Their natural choice was Polish labor: not only had these industries already experimented with importing Poles before the war, but they correctly saw an opportunity to tap the labor supply of a new, relatively weak state in which the French were to have great influence.

Unlike foreign labor sent to the reconstruction projects, the government played little role in bringing Polish workers to the mines and farms of France. Rather, a commercial immigration company, the Societé générale d’immigration (SGI), controlled by coal and farm interests, imported the Poles. In general, employers resented government interference in this important prerogative of management—recruiting labor. Government intervention was tolerable in the reconstruction primarily because it was temporary, state-financed, and otherwise government controlled. Not so for the coal and agricultural industries, who were less willing to see a permanent government control over the foreign labor market, especially in the private sector. Furthermore, the coal and farm employers, who needed Polish labor, were well organized and capable of establishing a foreign labor service largely outside government control. The prospects of profit also provided an incentive to create a private commercial recruitment service.

The SGI constituted a new factor in the foreign labor system of France: a profit-making foreign labor recruiter with a near monopoly oversupplying France with eastern European workers. It supplied 541,594 workers or 28 percent of the foreign labor entering France in the 1920s.³⁴ Moreover, the SGI was an important example of organized capitalism: it was owned and operated by the trade associations of the coal industry, the Comité des houilléres (Coal Committee) and a consortium of farm groups from the northeast (the Confédération des associations agricoles des régions devastées (CARD). The SGI eliminated competition for labor between these industries and channeled eastern European workers into these labor-starved sectors. Finally, the SGI operated almost independently of the states of France or eastern Europe as a supranational corporation. The emergence and success of the SGI would help frustrate a national immigration policy in France in the 1920s. Thus we must investigate its origins and development with some care.

In 1919, Polish immigration began, as did the organized immigrations of the war period, under the control of the French state. Within two years, however, the government turned over its Polish labor service to the Coal Committee and CARD. In October 1919, immediately after the signing of the bilateral immigration treaty with Poland, the Ministry of the Liberated Regions established a mission in Warsaw to recruit Polish workers. A depot at Toul in eastern France was established to distribute these workers to worksites in northeastern France.³⁵ Almost immediately, however, employers resisted this government service. For example, farmers complained that the Poles sent to them were unqualified.³⁶ Government officials also reflected private interests’ reluctance to accept government recruiters. J. Baches, the director of the Toul depot, stated in October 1920 that “it would be best to eliminate the administrative character of the immigration,” which ought to be “a purely commercial activity” with “a unified management with responsible field agents.”³⁷ This sentiment was shared by the Minister of the Liberated Regions, G. Ogier, who in July 1920 advocated that the state “gradually allow more private action and initiative” in labor recruiting.³⁸ His successor, Louis Loucheur, followed his advice. Late in 1920, Loucheur arranged a visit to Poland for representatives of the Coal Committee and CARD to study how to set up their own recruitment services.³⁹

At first both employer groups worked independently to serve the particular interests of their members. CARD agents found ready supplies of both farm hands and skilled workers in Western Galicia, Posen, Carpathia, and the Warsaw region. CARD insisted on recruiting only farm workers still uncontaminated by urban and industrial wage expectations. They intended not only to select workers in their native villages (rather than at regional or national placement depots), but also to isolate their recruits from immigrants bound for French industry. As a CARD representative explained:

It was necessary to form convoys composed exclusively of farm workers; the contact between agricultural and industrial workers is dangerous. They may make comparisons between their wages. . . . [As a result, farm workers may be] tempted to desert the land for the factory.⁴⁰

Also to avoid turnover, workers from the same region in Poland were to be sent to the same area in France. CARD hoped to recruit whole families, both to utilize female as well as male labor, and to preserve the stabilizing influence of traditional peasant culture.⁴¹

Gradually the CARD mission in Poland gained nearly total control over labor recruited for French farms. In January 1921, with the support of the French Ministry of Agriculture, CARD established in Paris the Office central de la main-d’oeuvre agricole (Central Agricultural Labor Office). It served as a liaison between departmental farm associations, through which farmers requested Polish workers, and the CARD recruitment mission in Poland. By August 1921 this network had replaced the foreign labor service of the Ministry of the Liberated Regions in Poland.⁴² Soon this private group would send Polish workers throughout France and greatly expand the number of Polish immigrants.⁴³ Although only 5,167 Poles entered French agriculture in 1920–1921, when the government controlled recruitment, the number rose to 33,416 in 1922–1923, after the employers took over the process.⁴⁴ It became the agency of the most powerful farm interests (e.g., sugar-beet producers and large wheat farmers in the Paris region).⁴⁵

The Coal Committee followed a similar path. From January 1921 it began to recruit skilled Polish miners at missions in Upper Silesia, which were near Polish mining centers; it also sought to draw Polish miners from Westphalia in Germany at its mission at Duisburg.⁴⁶

In June 1924 CARD’s missions coalesced with those of the Coal Committee to form the Societé générale d’immigration (SGI). This alliance was possible because the labor needs of the two groups were distinct and noncompetitive. It allowed these groups to form a united front in Poland and to gain a near monopoly over immigration to France. Soon the SGI expanded its operations, winning contracts from iron mine operators to recruit Poles into the Lorraine basin.⁴⁷ The sugar beet and distillery cartels paid the SGI to recruit Poles to supplement declining numbers of Belgian workers.⁴⁸ Farm associations from southwestern France requested Polish peasants to become sharecroppers in the depopulated regions of Gascony. By 1925, the SGI had contracts with sixty industrial groups through France for Polish immigrants.⁴⁹

The SGI did not restrict itself to the Polish labor market. Edouard de Warren, a deputy from eastern France, president of CARD, and a director of the SGI, proposed that the company find alternatives to Polish labor for “reasons of economics as well as politics.”⁵⁰ Despite their entrenched position in Poland, SGI officials sought leverage by freeing themselves of dependence on the Poles. By 1928, Jean Duhamel, a representative of the Coal Committee and executive director of the SGI, expanded SGI missions to other eastern European nations including Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Austria, and Lithuania, as well as Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands; these offices enjoyed varying degrees of success and official French support.⁵¹

During the 1920s the SGI controlled a significant and increasingly large share of the immigration, rising to nearly half of total labor immigration in 1926 and 1929 (see Table 4).⁵² 76 percent (or 308,506) of the workers recruited between 1921 and 1931 by the SGI (or its predecessors) were Polish. 43 percent of the Poles recruited in the 1920s were hired in agriculture. 53 percent of the Poles sent to French industry were hired by coal mines (103,472), and 19 percent were hired by iron mines (37,733).⁵³ The SGI successfully channeled a sizeable portion of the Poles into economic sectors which could not attract Frenchmen and other foreign workers.

Why was it possible for the SGI to import large numbers of Poles in the 1920s when similar efforts had failed before the war? Severe unemployment in Poland plus restrictions on emigration to the Americas and Germany gave the French immigration company a great advantage. Especially between 1922 and 1926, the Poles were heavily dependent upon France as an outlet (see Table 5).⁵⁴ As a result, the Polish government made important concessions in amendments made to the bilateral immigration treaty in 1924 which allowed the Polish government only token control over the immigration process. The SGI gained access to one hundred public labor exchanges in Poland. Local officials could only observe the recruitment and all Polish grievances had to be forwarded to Warsaw for uncertain redress.⁵⁵

Although theoretically Polish workers could migrate to France as individuals, few could afford the train fare, which was advanced by the SGI to its recruits. Also, in order to enter France, visas were required from the French consuls. They were granted only if the Polish worker had a work contract, which was difficult to obtain outside the SGI network.⁵⁶ As a result, from 1919 to 1931 only 10 percent of the Poles emigrating to France did so as individuals outside the system controlled by the SGI (or its predecessors).⁵⁷

How did the SGI operate? Both sympathetic and critical accounts of their procedures give a similar picture: “company agents posted notices of hiring in areas of desperate unemployment, attracting crowds of up to 1,200 who fought to get in the door of the office” of the labor exchange.⁵⁸ Company agents herded the workers through a cursory selection process (involving an examination of the eyes and the size of the hands and neck), accepting from 10 to 50 percent of the applicants. Although they did receive contracts, Poles complained that they were incomplete and had insufficient time to study them. They were then sent to Posen or Myslenice (usually within twenty-four hours) for medical screening, with another 50 percent rejected and then hauled by train to Toul, where they were distributed to employers.⁵⁹ According to one Polish farm worker they were shipped in cattle cars without windows or light for three days across Germany.⁶⁰

A Polish miner recalled twenty-five years after coming to France that the “condition of the voyage was deplorable. . . . Upon arrival at Toul the emigrants were packed into old infected barracks; they slept on straw, were poorly fed and had to wait for some time for the recruiters from the French mines.” Another miner claimed that the SGI had treated the Poles “like human cattle.”⁶¹ This procedure minimized SGI costs while it maximized Polish competition for work. No doubt it also had a humbling effect on those who passed the gate. In obvious ways this process was similar to a slave trade. Like the “black cargoes” to America, the Poles were treated as merchandise and, if they were not owned by the French employers who received them, they clearly were not freely entering a free labor market.

The efficiency of this operation allowed the SGI to amass large profits from its fees. In 1926 the cost per adult immigrant worker was 445 francs, which produced a profit of about 145 francs. This yielded 4,280,472 francs in profit in 1926.⁶² The SGI used its capital not to improve the recruitment procedure, but to make highly diversified investments in Poland (e.g., timber and loans) as well as founding a holding company to undertake various immigration and land colonization schemes in North Africa and South America.⁶³

Not surprisingly, the SGI encountered criticism from customers as well as government officials. Farmers’ complaints about high fees in 1929 prompted the French government to pressure the SGI into a vague promise to set aside “excess” profits for “projects in the general interest.”⁶⁴ By 1929, the head of the French Agricultural Ministry’s labor service, Marcel Paon, began to plot with the Polish government to break the SGI monopoly over seasonal farm labor. They made an abortive effort to shift this immigration to another organization.⁶⁵ French public health officials in 1926 complained of the perfunctory screening of Polish immigrants for medical disabilities which increased French welfare costs.⁶⁶

Nevertheless, the SGI was hardly isolated. It enjoyed the cooperation of most of the great industrial associations who channelled requests for Polish labor to the SGI. It vigorously promoted immigration. Its director, Jean Duhamel, for example, declared that France’s declining birth rate was not a passport to decadence but rather gave the French an opportunity to become a “nation of supervisors” with manual labor being imported “whenever necessary, i.e., neither too soon nor too late, but on the precise day they are needed.”⁶⁷ Far from being weakened by a dependence on immigrants, French employers could tailor, through immigration, the labor supply to the business cycle.

Yet, despite its claims to serve the French economy, the General Immigration Society was essentially a transnational corporation, responsible ultimately to no nation but only to profitable international exchange. The SGI was an autonomous agency, virtually sovereign, whose impact was parallel to that of the French state in shaping immigration in the 1920s. In effect, the pro-business governments of France in the early twenties ceded to the private interests controlling the SGI an important component of national immigration policy. The consortium of mining and farm interests behind the SGI were assured of a labor supply without having to compete with other industries or make costly compromises with social policy makers (e.g., public health). Yet very quickly the SGI broke from its roots in the French economy to become a business with diverse international investments and ambiguous loyalty to France’s economic and social well-being. Clearly, the SGI was an obstacle to an integrated and consensus immigration policy.

Movements for Reforming Immigration Policy

During the reconstruction period, the state concerned itself almost exclusively with serving employers’ immediate need for supplemental labor. Wartime trends toward a corporatist development of policy failed to develop. The government took little interest in managing the social and political problems which the large-scale influx of foreigners engendered. In fact, it encouraged the commercialization of eastern European immigration.

It became apparent, however, that immigration was not a temporary phenomenon, but rather a permanent feature of French capitalism. It also became clear that the demand for foreign labor was not confined to a few industries and regions as it had been during the reconstruction, but rather permeated the economy and directly confronted French labor and the general public. Indeed, by 1924, right-wing deputies had resurrected the xenophobic appeals against the foreign peril which had peppered the parliamentary debates of the 1880s and 1890s. For example, a bill sponsored by members of the rightist coalitions of the Entente republicaine and Republicains de gauche denounced the “plethora of foreigners of all types in our country” and made a vague demand to limit their entry and movement in France. Groups like the Action française and far right journals like Revue de Paris attacked the notion of equality of economic and civil rights for immigrants, which the migration treaties were to protect, as unjust to French workers.⁶⁸ Although this xenophobic response would remain marginal until the 1930s, it was a potential threat to the government’s immigration policy. It indicates also that conservative opinion, which obviously included many businessmen who did not use foreign labor, was not unanimously in favor of the government’s immigration policy.

More important during the mid-twenties was the opposition from the left. By 1924, the Bloc National was a spent political force. Divisions within this broad coalition had led to the typical parade of governments (led by Millerand and Leygues in 1920, A. Briand in 1921, and Poincaré in 1922 and 1923). Poincaré’s invasion of the Ruhr in January of 1923 was a disaster, leading to an inflationary budget to pay for an occupation which alienated French allies. The Bloc’s uninspired record and deflationary proposals for economic recovery gave the left an opportunity for victory in the May 1924 elections. The Cartel des Gauches (which included the Socialists as well as the Radicals) won 266 seats to 229 for the members of the former Bloc National. This victory could have led to a new immigration policy if the Cartel had a clear policy. However, not only did it lack a cohesive program on this or most other economic and social issues, but its electoral victory became meaningless in Parliament: the Socialists remained true to their long-established policy of abstaining from participation in bourgeois governments—which included those made by their erstwhile Radical allies. Even if they had joined with the Radicals, ideological differences would have prevented an effective government. The Socialists, of course, favored nationalizations and higher taxes, while the Radicals with their small business and farmer constitutency supported economic liberalism and weak government. The Cartel faced a hostile banking community while its own unwillingness to raise taxes led to uncontrolled inflation. The result was two short Ministries of E. Herriot and Paul Painlevé between 1924 and July of 1926, when President Doumergue succeeded in placing the conservative Raymond Poincaré at the head of government. Again, as during the Bloc National period, the Parliament failed to take action on the immigration or almost any other issue.⁶⁹ This guaranteed the continuation of an immigration policy dominated by employers.

This, of course, did not mean that there were no proposals to reorganize immigration policy. In fact, by 1924, labor, urban, and public service interests and even business groups offered comprehensive solutions to the immigration problem. Each claimed to encompass the interests of all and included a tripartite policy-making body. Yet they represented clearly conflicting economic and social goals which, in the context of parliamentary stalemate, prevented any solution.

During the reconstruction, organized labor was surprisingly restrained in its criticism of immigration despite the large influx of aliens and the fact that labor had little direct impact on policy. There were a few isolated strikes in which foreign reconstruction workers were an issue.⁷⁰ Yet labor showed none of the hostility that one might have expected from the experience of the much smaller immigration during the prewar period.

How can this be explained? The union offensives of 1919–1920, followed by defeat and schism, hardly allowed time or energy to be focused on the question of immigration. For example, the trade union congresses of miners and construction workers ignored the issue of immigration until 1922. More importantly, the state accommodated French labor by limiting immigration at precisely the moments (December 1918 to June 1919 and 1921) when the economy was disrupted and in recession (see chapter VII). Furthermore, from 1922 to 1924, the government channeled immigrants into a few low-status jobs which were concentrated in the reconstruction zone, while French workers were allowed to move freely within the job market. Surely if French workers had not received this favored treatment, opposition to immigrants would have been greater than it had been before the war. While the reformist leadership of the CGT believed that immigration was necessary for French economic growth, the rank-and-file workers could hardly expect to have this view; they would support the government’s immigration policy only if aliens were not allowed to compete with French labor—especially in the skilled and urban job markets.

Another explanation for the muted response of French labor to the influx of foreign labor was the immigration policy of the CGT (or reformist) leadership. The CGT had chosen not to fight immigration but instead to participate in its regulation. Since 1917, the CGT had pressed the government for a role in the decision-making process of the French immigration authorities. Yet while the employers in 1920 were served by the Conference permenente de la main-d’oeuvre étrangère, the trade unions were left out in the cold. The CGT leadership could do little but regularly repeat Jouhaux’s demand that immigration be regulated by the public placement offices, in which the CGT would have had a share of power.⁷¹ However, the trade unions played only a small role in these offices outside of the Seine and other large urban areas in the early 1920s (see chapter VII). Rather than abandon their support of regulation, the CGT was eager to enhance their impact on government control of immigration.

A variety of groups and individuals not directly involved in the economic aspect of immigration also began to take an interest in the foreign influx of the early 1920s. Public health officials, the police, parliamentary representatives from urban areas, and various publicists became concerned that the strictly business-oriented policy ignored the social costs of immigration. For example, public health specialists were alarmed by the nearly nonexistent medical screening of immigrants. Police feared that the concentrations of Polish miners which had formed in 1923 in the north, harbored criminals and communists. They advocated their strict control.⁷²

Politicians from the Cartel des Gauches (especially Edouard Herriot and his Radical colleague from Lyons, Charles Lambert), stated that the new immigration would require a revision of naturalization laws to encourage the “better” foreign element to settle permanently in France.⁷³ Educational and other groups demanded that measures be taken to provide immigrant children with French schooling in order to assure their acculturation.⁷⁴ Concerns about immigrant assimilation, strikingly similar to those of American opinion, appeared in the press in the mid-1920s. Thus disparate interests sought an immigration policy which would control the social costs (see chapter VIII).

Finally, despite the fact that business groups were the primary beneficiaries of immigration during the reconstruction, they too sought a permanent and improved immigration service. As it became clear that immigration was to be a long-term source of labor, employers realized that they faced a permanent problem of procuring foreign labor in the face of formidable obstacles. These included increasingly demanding nationalistic governments—led by Fascist Italy—who threatened to cut off labor if pay and working conditions of their emigrating citizens were not improved.⁷⁵ Continued state negotiation with supplier nations and research into alternative sources proved necessary (see chapter V). French labor and a potential xenophobic opposition to unlimited recruitment of foreign labor created another threat. Thus business groups also sought to establish a national immigration service to serve their complex interests.

Indeed, business interests were the first to propose a plan. In March of 1921, Edouard de Warren, president of CARD and deputy from Meurthe-et-Moselle, sponsored a bill to create an immigration service. The key provision in de Warren’s proposal was to make the immigration office a part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and have it financially independent of the government: operating revenues were to be generated by user fees and employers’ subsidies. These provisions were designed to limit “political” influence on the office and to maximize its financial dependence upon the employer associations who used foreign labor. They were also guaranteed to weaken the influence of the Labor Ministry and the public placement system. Labor organizations were to have unequal representation in the administrative committee overseeing the office’s operations. Under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, de Warren’s immigration office would have helped to overcome the diplomatic impediments to the availability of foreign labor and to counteract the interference of foreign governments in the working lives of their citizens in France.⁷⁶ This approach, however, was apparently too flagrantly one-sided to ever reach a vote.

In response, the CGT and its Socialist allies proposed their own plan to reform immigration control. They sought the creation of a national labor office under which both the departmental placement offices and the Foreign Labor Service would be subsumed. Their national labor office would be directed by a parity commission. Through the coordination of the national labor office, the departmental placement offices could distribute labor already in France according to changing economic conditions. Only after all available French workers had been offered jobs would the Foreign Labor Service be allowed to bring in immigrants. This arrangement would have restricted the entry of immigrants beyond the needs of local labor markets and given French workers a priority for any job in the country over immigrants.⁷⁷ The CGT’s wartime allies in the Labor Ministry and the French Association for the Struggle Against Unemployment favored this proposal as the best means of preventing a massive influx of immigrants, which might have led to lower wages and thus weakened the internal consumer market. Yet, even after the victory of the Cartel des Gauches in November of 1924, the CGT-Left proposal also failed to get through Parliament.⁷⁸

The former head of the Foreign Labor Service, and Radical deputy, Bertrand Nogaro, offered a compromise in 1924. His bill represented the concerns of the third group, those interested in social controls over immigration. Nogaro’s immigration office was to coordinate all the problems of immigration, including those of hygiene, education, and naturalization. Its objectives were not only to protect French workers and to recruit and distribute needed foreign labor but also to study and act on all the social problems relating to immigration.⁷⁹ Yet this bill was also quickly killed, this time by deputies representing agriculture who opposed placing the farm labor service, still run by the Agricultural Ministry, within the immigration office. Industrial interests also opposed the state’s control over recruitment and distribution, which Nogaro’s bill included. Finally, the CGT feared that a centralized office would simply serve as a recruitment agency for the employers.⁸⁰ Divisions within the Cartel prevented either the socialist-labor bill or Nogaro’s Radical bill from becoming law.

Conclusion: Immigration and the Corporatisme Manqué

The failure of a parliamentary solution to the problem of immigration was a major defeat for corporatist politics in the 1920s. Social conflicts, which were articulated in the political system, prevented a corporatist policy. Significantly, clashes over the immigration program were not uncompromising conflicts between the advocates of lasséz-faire and exclusion as had been the case before the war. Rather, all sides clamored for governmental regulation of the foreign labor supply. Difficulties arose over whether governmental action would be primarily directed toward expanding or controlling immigration. Finally, in these critical years of 1921–1924, a powerful coalition of farm and mining interests was forming the SGI. This private immigration service was soon capable of serving disparate needs of employers for eastern European labor without any of the social constraints of a government immigration office, organized on corporatist principles.

This defeat of corporatist politics had an especially profound impact upon the reformist or non-communist wing of French labor. During the war, the leadership of the CGT had abandoned a confrontational stance toward capitalism. An important manifestation of this change was its acceptance of an expanded labor market through immigration. Reformists, such as Léon Jouhaux, were willing to forego the “class struggle” in exchange for a role in regulating capitalism, including the control of the domestic and international labor market. These labor leaders acknowledged that immigration was necessary for victory and after the war, for economic growth. They simply wished to have a part in policy making to protect their members, primarily in the skilled sectors of the work force, from competition with foreigners. This effort failed in the 1920s; it was symptomatic of the impossibility of a political resolution to social conflict in France. Ultimately, the refusal of the French elite to admit the reformist wing of labor into the inner circle of policy makers led to the defeat of the CGT’s corporatist policy in the 1930s.

When the French parliament failed to establish a corporatist immigration policy, this did not mean that France lacked a policy. Instead it was ceded to the government ministries, each working within the limits of its own powers and serving different constituencies. For example, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs continued to negotiate immigration treaties with foreign nations to supply new sources of foreign labor to French employers; the Ministry of Agriculture remained, until 1935, a willing servant of French farm interests, providing them with foreign workers through a separate distribution system. Furthermore, the bureaucracies did not leave French labor entirely out of the picture. In fact, the Ministry of Labor restricted immigration into France during recessions in 1921 and 1927, and, through the departmental placement offices, it exercised some control over immigration into the skilled trades in major urban markets. In a sense, then, the corporatism which failed at the parliamentary level was practiced by the bureaucracy.

The functionaries recognized that state regulation of foreign labor was an important tool for promoting both prosperity and social peace. Although the foreign labor system of the 1920s was an ad hoc and poorly coordinated construct, it did serve all the relevant interests. It allowed employers to obtain foreign workers on favorable terms, mollifying in the process potential competition between different economic sectors for scarce labor. The importation of labor became a critical factor in the reconstruction of the northeastern war zones and in the development of French mining and metallurgical industries. Politically articulate sections of French labor, especially skilled urban labor, were also appeased when the government directed foreign labor into unskilled sectors.

Yet the failure to establish a national immigration office clearly affected the shape of immigration in the interwar years. The fragmented and partially ineffective policy which resulted produced an environment where organized business, foreign states, and the free labor market could play decisive roles in determining the foreign labor system. In the next three chapters we will explore the patterns of immigration from different parts of Europe. Each of these migrations will be shaped in differing degrees at the hands of the French state, organized business, foreign states, nationalist organizations, and the labor market. The following analyses of the Polish, Italian, and other European migrations will stress these exogenous factors as keys to an understanding of the new immigration of the interwar years.