Immigrant Workers in Industrial France

Transcription

1 Immigrant Workers in Industrial France Cross, Gary S. Published by Temple University Press Cross, S.. Immigrant Workers in Industrial France: The Making of a New Laboring Class. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,. Project MUSE., For additional information about this book No institutional affiliation (8 Jan :41 GMT) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

2 Nancy L. Green Before Noiriel there was Cross. We can be very grateful to Temple University Press and the NEH Humanities Open Book Program for republishing Gary Cross s 1983 book, Immigrant Workers in Industrial France: The Making of a New Laboring Class. Gérard Noiriel s Le Creuset français: Histoire de l immigration XIXe-XXe siècles, along with Yves Lequin s La Mosaïque France: Histoire des étrangers et de l immigration en France, both published in 1988, were crucial founding texts for the field of immigration history in France. But Cross blazed the trail with his earlier, finely wrought study at the crossroads of labor studies and immigration history. As my well-worn, copiously underlined, first edition attests, Cross inaugurated in-depth research into the ways in which France welcomed immigrants from the 1880s onward. He starts with the formative period before World War I, when employers groups actively recruited foreign workers for their fields, factories, and mines, and then moves to the interwar period, the primary focus of his study. France s demographic woes have been long studied, from the declining birth rate of the second half of the nineteenth century blamed variously on inheritance laws, taxes, military service, child labor laws, women, contraception, and/or an esprit de calcul to the hecatomb of World War I. A ready yet reticent solution was immigrant labor. While Belgians and Germans had been coming to work in France since the nineteenth century (until, for the latter, their welcome wore out due to the Franco-Prussian War), Poles and Italians began to be hired heavily in the decades before World War I. Their recruitment then accelerated in the 1920s, and, faced with persistent labor shortages, France signed bilateral agreements in 1929 and 1930 with Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Austria. The contrast with

3 the United States in the same period is striking, as Cross notes. As the French state encouraged immigration in the 1920s, the United States was closing its doors to (especially Eastern and Southern European) immigration through the 1921 and 1924 Quota Acts. Nonetheless, as Cross well reminds us, the interwar period in France comprised not one but two different periods: growth in the 1920s, depression in the 1930s. At first, along with urbanization, the older iron and steel industries grew alongside the rise of newer electrical and chemical industries, all of which hired immigrants. However, the downturn of the following decade meant that the welcome of foreign workers in the 1920s turned into dismissals and expulsions in the 1930s, even though, as Cross points out, the extent of discrimination was somewhat mitigated by the necessary role the immigrants played in certain sectors of the economy. Cross s work stands on the shoulders of others, as he acknowledged in his 1983 preface. Georges Mauco s 1932 Les étrangers en France (Foreigners in France) was considered the bible of immigration studies (until his anti-semitic and xenophobic Vichy past was exhumed by Elisabeth Rudinesco and Patrick Weil in 1995). Jean-Claude Bonnet s Les pouvoirs publics français et l immigration dans l entre-deuxguerres (The French Government and Immigration in the Interwar Period, 1976), ahead of its time, was an important new work noted by early scholars interested in the topic. I first learned of Bonnet s book from Georges Haupt in his seminar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he enthusiastically mentioned this new avenue of study. Haupt, who was good friends with Harvey Goldberg, Cross s dissertation adviser who suggested the topic to him, may have helped transfer the information from Paris to Madison. Indeed, one of the many strengths of Cross s book is the way he combines Bonnet s interest in public policy (see also Gary Freeman, 1979) with an examination of employers actions and, to a somewhat lesser extent, union attitudes toward foreign workers. Between the more protectionist communist Confédération général du travail (CGT) and the more immigrant-friendly Confédération général du travail unitaire (CGTU), labor itself was divided over the issue, as Cross well notes. He raises issues still pertinent for migration studies: the (false) distinction between temporary and permanent migration; the question of the structural or temporary role of immigrant labor in contemporary capitalism.

4 Following other pioneering work by Michael Piore and Suzanne Berger ( ), Cross shows how immigrant labor in France filled a need in the secondary labor market, providing a safety valve that mollified different sectors of capital while allowing the native workforce to accede to upward mobility, largely in the public employment sector. As the director of the Société générale d immigration put it in the interwar years, France s declining birth rate and immigrant labor were giving the French an opportunity to become a nation of supervisors (Cross, 1983, p.63). Cross s analysis of the ways in which the state and employers worked together to manage immigrant labor are as important today as ever. He was prescient in pointing out the importance of identification papers long before the current studies in this regard. At the same time, Cross s insightful chapters on Poles and Italians in France raise a topic that has only lately been addressed more fully: the efforts of the home states to protect their nationals abroad. One can smile at the references to Marx, to the language of a reserve army of labor, to fractions of capital, or to the reference to the fact that The French state was not, however, simply the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. But if the terms seem old fashioned, the analysis continues to raise important questions today. And Marx is having a comeback. In 1983, the important early works on Italian, Jewish, Polish and other immigrants to France had not yet appeared. Only later would France have its own mini community studies boom, marked, for example, by the Autrement publishing series on history and memory: Français d ailleurs, peuple d ici. Nor had Mary Lewis s shift of focus from the national to the local level (The Boundaries of the Republic, 2007) yet occurred, although Cross already emphasizes the importance of the departmental-level placement offices. And Cross mentions only briefly colonial workers, invited to help out during World War I and largely sent home afterward, today a focus of much more study. But in the 1920s and 1930s, France, like the U.S., was still employing mainly European immigrants. More strikingly, two other themes have blossomed in migration studies since Gary Cross s book: gender and agency. What about female immigrants, and to what extent were jobs defined as male or female, then as now? How did that have an impact on migration flows men to the

5 steel factories, women to the textile factories? And what did the immigrants themselves think about all this? Cross calls them pawns, while noting, however, that a good number of Poles ditched their agricultural contracts and migrated to industrial work. It was difficult for employers to retain immigrants when working conditions were too bad. He also notes that there was a good deal of spontaneous migration in addition to the state-regulated flows. Nonetheless, his focus remains resolutely on the latter. Since the end of the structuralist 1950s 1980s, researchers have focused on agency (sometimes excessively?). One yearns for the voices of the subaltern, in this case the Italians, Poles, and Yugoslavs who came to work in the Hexagon. Yet far be it from me to tax a trailblazer with not foreseeing yet other trails to come. The wealth of information in and the analytic insights of Cross s volume speak for themselves. Cross s contribution remains vital, reminding us of how the regulatory state and business interests may be in collusion at times without necessarily seeing eye to eye, not to mention those famous fractions within the capitalist class itself. Cross wrote in a historiographic period when understanding the structural constraints of state and of capital were à la mode, and even today, with the salutary emphasis on agency, it is still well worth contemplating the ways in which a variously split labor market and a divided labor force are constructed and function. In an era where many receiving states seek to enforce the faucet function Cross so well describes opening borders when needed, closing them when perceived not to be it is important to read and reread Immigrant Workers in Industrial France. NaNcy L. GreeN is Professor of History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.