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`La France aux François!` Displacing the Foreign Worker During the 1930s Depression
Abstract
Unemployment in the 1930s was low in France by international standards, nevertheless there was a virulent drive to expel immigrant workers as a means of limiting domestic unemployment. This involved not only the repatriation of the foreign ch�meur, but also legislation to displace the foreign worker from his workplace. This paper extends the current debate over the effectiveness of this strategy with the use of two archival datasets. The inability of the State to reach its immigrant employment targets is confirmed, but it is suggested that it was not that unemployed Frenchmen were not willing to take the unattractive jobs that immigrants held, but that employers were unwilling to substitute their foreign workers with their French unemployed equivalents that undermined this repatriation drive. One implication is that the repatriation of foreign workers that did take place compromised the economic recovery that would begin in 1936.
Like their European counterparts, the stadiums of Paris were used for more than sporting fixtures in the 1930s, and the Parc des Princes was no exception to the rule. Situated on the outskirts of the capital between the nineteenth-century pleasure gardens of the Bois de Boulogne and the ultramodern Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt, the Parc was the scene for demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, mass meetings and theatrical performances, conflict and reconciliation. Conflict could be both rhetorical and physical, and on a sultry afternoon in early October 1936 the Parc was the epicentre of a violent encounter between left and right, one of the many street battles to disturb the peace of the French capital in the interwar years. Crowded inside the stadium, 40,000 Communists in red scarves and red berets protested angrily against a proposed mass meeting of the Parti Social Français, a new party of the extreme right. Outside the enclosure, 20,000 members of the new right-wing party infiltrated shops and cafés, equally incensed that the government had authorized the Communist meeting and not their own. Some wore workers’ caps to escape detection, for the police guarding the stadium were under strict instructions to allow passage only to the ‘visibly left-wing’.
This article provides a historical overview of the migration of foreign labour to France between 1891 and 1936, highlighting both the specificity of the circumstances that prevailed in this period and the similarities with the period after 1945. It demonstrates the extent to which the legislation, the policies, and the flows themselves were determined by the vagaries of the economy in the country of immigration. It emphasizes that there is a subtle, if at times apparently contradictory, connection between the interests of the employers and the actions of the state.
Mutations Économiques Structurelles et Conflits Mondiaux: L'Industrie Houillère Française (1914-1950)
- J.-L Escudier
Escudier, J.-L. (1992). ‘Mutations Économiques Structurelles et Conflits Mondiaux: L'Industrie Houillère Française (1914-1950)’, Revue Historique, 281, 193-217