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Book Review
| Mary Dewhurst Lewis, The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918–1940, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. 384. $65.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-804-75582-5); $25.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-804-75722-5).
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| In this meticulously researched account, Mary Dewhurst Lewis documents the contingent nature of migrant rights in interwar Lyon and Marseille, the largest French cities outside of Paris. She contrasts the state's response to three different types of migrants: "labor migrants" (overwhelmingly Europeans), stateless refugees (Armenians, Russians, and Jews), and colonial subjects from Algeria. Lewis highlights how local officials tailored national policy to fit the circumstances of their cities, and how migrants responded to directives imposed from above by advocating on their own behalf. In addition, Lewis reminds us that international politics—bilateral labor treaties, the rise of fascist regimes, and the shifting fates of nations in the interwar period—influenced the dispersal of social entitlements within France. To this already complicated portrait she adds France's imperial relationship with North Africa, which legitimized the denial of rights to subject peoples. Lewis skillfully weaves these narratives together to demonstrate how a liberal republic like France reconciled its purported egalitarianism with restrictions on immigration and residency rights. Moreover, by highlighting the uneven application of immigration policy across time, place, and migrant group, she insists that "incorporation into French public life" was dependent on "social relationships" rather than the "blind application of republican principles" (16). |
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Lewis begins with the immediate postwar period, arguing that at this time, "France established Europe's first 'guest-worker' regime in all but name" (3). Residency rights were linked to labor contracts, and the ideal foreign worker was, in theory, one who could be strategically directed to deficient segments of the economy, and sent home once his labor became redundant. But in practice, the application of guest-worker regulations was subject to local culture. Most importantly, the differing economies of Lyon and Marseille required different sorts of workers. In Lyon, migrant labor staffed around-the-clock, large-scale factory production for which worker turnover would be anathema. In contrast, the seasonal nature of production in the port city of Marseille demanded a flexible workforce which could be hired by the week, day, or half-day. |
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With the economic downturn of the early 1930s, Lyon officials worked "proactively" to exclude foreigners they deemed superfluous from social welfare lists, if not expel them from the region. In Marseille, however, where employers wanted as few controls on foreign workers as possible, employment quotas handed down from state to local authorities were circumvented in a variety of ways. Lewis is careful to emphasize how migrants responded to government policy with strategies of their own: in both cities, applications for naturalization increased, as did claims on unemployment insurance. That is, migrants acted as though they had an investment in French society, rather than as a reserve army of labor. |
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Although guest-worker policy called for a mobile workforce of single men, migrants without roots in the community were far more likely to be arrested or expelled. Social stability became especially privileged in the mid-1930s, when the guest-worker regime was replaced with a populationist logic which favored long-term residents with family attachments to France. State officials ordered prefectures to refrain from renewing residency papers for migrants who had been in the country for fewer than two years, thereby making work contingent upon residency, rather than the other way around. In turn, foreigners seeking naturalization highlighted their "investments" in French society: work, property, and children who would perform military service. |
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Refugees further complicated the question of rights, and surprisingly, French policies were often out of synch with protections mandated by the League of Nations. An influx of Jews fleeing Nazism in 1933–34 coincided with the amplification of the depression, and as anti-Semitism fueled economic protectionism, local officials characterized Jews as "inauthentic" refugees. They rejected residency requests by claiming that Jewish migration to France had been "voluntary," and that German boycotts of Jewish businesses were economic rather than political acts. Only with the Popular Front government were Jews from Germany recognized as legitimate refugees, and as Lewis shows, Jews were expelled from France well before the hard-line policies of the late 1930s. |
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Lewis appears more comfortable discussing French anti-Semitism than racism, which she does not put forth as a prime motivation for the unequal treatment of colonial subjects. Nevertheless, she shows that even though Algerians possessed French nationality, they were less protected than European migrants whose governments had negotiated bilateral treaties with France. More than any other group, North Africans were subject to raids, summary arrests, and repatriations; even their right to free circulation to mainland France was hindered by the creation of an "internal passport." French authorities also implemented a separate assistance program for North Africans, but the organization devoted more time to repatriating colonial workers than attending to job placement or unemployment compensation. Tellingly, in the case of Algerians, nationality did not confer access to social welfare, "even as other migrant groups were increasingly invited to take part in France's burgeoning social citizenship" (206). |
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| Elisa Camiscioli
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Binghamton University,
State University of New York |
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