Just like immigration itself, the history of immigration is a story of insiders and outsiders. At its simplest, a lot of academic writing about immigration involves ‘native’ insiders discussing the arrival of ‘foreign’ outsiders. But these are not the only dynamics at play. In France, the history of immigration has depended on – or struggled against – a whole variety of institutional and political formations. At a formal level, it emerged from the margins of French academia, often dispersed across different disciplines or research centres. At a more informal level, it was the product of immigration itself, with migrants to France becoming interested in their own family or community histories. This, too, was on the fringes of both the activist and university milieus, which then (as now) were dominated by a white, metropolitan French elite. Even when the history of immigration began to reach a larger mainstream audience in the 2000s, it still had to contend with a sometimes prickly relationship between French and foreign scholars. The former often claimed that outsiders misunderstood the basic tenets of French republican citizenship, while the latter accused the French of being in denial about colonialism, race, and discrimination.
Yet, despite these challenges, the history of immigration has now become a distinct sub-field of French history, with connections to a remarkable range of intellectual and political movements. Indeed, one could say that immigration exposes some of the central concerns of modern French history – about the boundaries of citizenship, the power of the state, and the revolutionary potential of those who are kept on the margins of Frenchness. In this article, we therefore present the history of immigration in France not simply as an important – and growing – area of scholarship but also as intimately intertwined with some of the most important civic debates that have animated the French public sphere since the 1970s.
We begin by tracing the emergence of the history of immigration in France through the field of labour history. This led overwhelmingly to a focus on the economic activity of male immigrants and a lack of consideration for immigrant women and families. We move on to explore two parallel developments in immigration history: a so-called sociohistoire approach, which became dominant in France in the 1990s; and a postcolonial approach, which became dominant outside France in the same period. Both of these were constructed in dialogue with major public debates about the far right, colonial memory, secularism (laïcité), and the contentious use of the term ‘race’. We close by looking at the tight relationship between the history of immigration and France’s twenty-first-century culture wars. This is not new: the history of immigration has always been closely intertwined with and dependent on the politics of the present. Nevertheless, while the field has now penetrated the mainstream of academic scholarship, it faces new threats from the growing political backlash to immigration.
I
It is often thought that the history of immigration in France was launched in the 1980s by Gérard Noiriel, whose Le creuset français (1988) marked a watershed. His claim that immigration in France was a ‘non-site of memory’, particularly in contrast to the United States, encouraged the notion that his book represented the ground zero of French immigration historiography in France.Footnote 1 However, Noiriel was one of a wider set of scholars and activists engaging with immigration history at the time. He became the most famous, but was not the first. In fact, as early as 1947 the historian Louis Chevalier, better known for work on poverty, promised an entire research programme on the history of immigration – only to acknowledge in 1962 that it had not taken place.Footnote 2 This was mainly because the topic of immigration in the immediate post-war years was more readily open to social scientists, deemed better equipped to make a case for immigration and the adaptation of immigrants to French society.Footnote 3 The work of both Noiriel and less celebrated pioneers of immigration history therefore needs to be placed in an earlier context. An important clue is given by Noiriel’s observation that his generation was ‘marked by the hopes of the period after May 1968’.Footnote 4 Significantly, Noiriel’s PhD was not primarily based in migration history; the word ‘immigrant’ did not feature at all in his original thesis title.Footnote 5 Rather, like many social historians trained in the 1970s, he cast his work as labour history. In his words: ‘researchers met immigrants behind the workers’.Footnote 6
Labour history – and its close cousins the ‘new social history’ and ‘history from below’ – reached their peak when Marxism was still the leading intellectual frame of reference in France.Footnote 7 This reflected the politics of the time, in which the French Communist Party (PCF), a key vector of immigrant workers’ integration into French society since the interwar period, could claim to be the mass party of the French working class.Footnote 8 Noiriel’s thesis was supervised by Madeleine Rebérioux, one of the great figures of French left historiography, who had been expelled from the PCF in 1969.Footnote 9 Even in a post-1968 context where the PCF’s dominance of left-wing politics and its claims to a consistent record of anti-racist solidarity were increasingly challenged, the designation of immigrants as first and foremost ‘immigrant workers’ was something on which the whole left could agree.Footnote 10
Noiriel’s most formative experience was the 1979–80 battle against redundancies in the Lorraine steel industry, which employed considerable numbers of migrant workers. It inspired his first book, written while teaching at a local high school and moonlighting on an activist pirate radio station at the epicentre of these struggles, and co-authored with a Moroccan trade unionist, Benaceur Azzaoui.Footnote 11 While critical of the party’s record on migration, Noiriel remained unapologetic about ‘the generosity, the devotion and the modesty’ he experienced in the communist milieu.Footnote 12 Not surprisingly, then, his early analyses had more than a hint of the 1970s Marxist orthodoxy that immigration and racism were capitalist tools to divide the working class.Footnote 13
Noiriel’s link with 1968 is a reminder that a vital point of origin for immigration research in the 1970s was the world of activism. In the early years of the decade, there was a wave of politicization of migration, closely linked to the activities of France’s then prominent extreme left. This led to the first movement of sans-papiers in 1972–3, a campaign for the regularization of illegalized migrants.Footnote 14 Immigration scholarship published around the time of these protests tended to be more in social science than history, such as the work of the sociologist Maryse Tripier, who published in 1972 on challenges posed to union activism by migrant labour.Footnote 15 The following year, the sociologist Juliette Minces published an exposé of the experiences of recent economic migrants to France – important in giving the French reading public access to multiple testimonies from immigrants in their own words.Footnote 16
By contrast, Minces’s book was silent about the author’s own remarkable migration history: she was the daughter of Polish-Jewish migrants; she had been a supporter of the Algerian National Liberation Front, whose activists Minces smuggled from Belgium and Switzerland to Paris; and she had lived in post-independence Algeria, from where she had worked for the anticolonialist magazine Révolution Africaine and travelled to meet militant leaders like Sékou Touré in Guinea and Modibo Keïta in Mali.Footnote 17 Yet before the 1970s were out, Minces would testify to her own traumatic experiences, deprived of family life by the Third Republic’s deportation of her father for union activities, and then as a child survivor of the Vichy regime’s concentration camp at Gurs. As Minces starkly put it in her book’s title, Je hais cette France-là (I hate that France), a sentiment she extended to more contemporary examples of racism.Footnote 18
Nor was a historical consciousness entirely absent in relation to the colonial roots of the migratory present. For example, the cut-price pocket book L’immigration algérienne en France, co-authored in 1976 by the Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad under the pseudonym Malek Ath-Messaoud, traced the roots of Algerian labour migration to France right back to the pauperization, displacement, and dispossession that followed the repression of the Paris Commune in the early 1870s.Footnote 19 More generally, change over time was an integral part of Sayad’s oeuvre, with his important 1977 article identifying three distinct ‘ages’ of Algerian emigration.Footnote 20
In the academic realm, several proto-immigration historians were already beavering away in the archives by the mid-1970s. Janine Ponty, two decades Noiriel’s senior, had previously worked on the Dreyfus Affair, but, by 1977, she was publishing articles on the schooling of Polish children in France after the First World War as part of her doctorat d’État. The resulting publication, Polonais méconnus, now seen as a classic, did not reach book form until 1988 – the same year as Noiriel’s Creuset – after ten years of research and two years of editing.Footnote 21 Similarly, Ralph Schor’s monumental yet highly readable 1985 monograph on French public opinion and foreigners in interwar France was at least a decade in the making: he published articles on the subject in 1975, 1976, and 1977, and completed his thesis in 1980.Footnote 22 The self-effacing scholarly manner of Schor, described by his students as ‘a man attentive to others without ostentation or posturing’, and his peripheral institutional location at the then new University of Nice, probably limited the credit he was given.Footnote 23
While neither Schor’s nor Ponty’s work was translated into English, non-French scholars had also begun to research French immigration by the 1970s. This was especially true of Americans, since immigration history was already mainstream in the US. In 1977, Gary Cross completed the PhD that would become his 1983 monograph on the making of the foreign labour system in France between 1880 and 1939, before reverting to work on American history.Footnote 24 By 1976, Nancy Green, today an authority on migration history and herself an immigrant to France, was carrying out interviews for what would become her 1980 thesis and 1986 monograph on The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish immigrant workers in the belle époque.Footnote 25 While Green’s study of the Marais neighbourhood was also pitched as an intervention in Jewish history, it was emphatically a history of class conflict within communities, with wider implications for the history of other minority groups. Hence Green explicitly drew links between past and present, mentioning the 1980 movement of Turkish sans-papiers garment workers in the nearby Sentier district and calling for a broader history of migrant workers.Footnote 26
At a time when the typical migrant worker was commonly, if misleadingly, thought of as a single man, gender was something of a blind spot in much early migration historiography. As Green later put it, ‘the assumption long prevalent that men move and women wait has been shown to be deeply flawed’.Footnote 27 It is highly probable that the hidden injuries of gender, as well as the classic hazards of being ahead of one’s time, played a part in which historians’ work became most influential. One obituary describes Ponty, whose work was unusual in incorporating female migrant workers, as part of a generation of female historians who ‘had to work harder and better than their male opposite numbers, without always receiving all the credit for it’.Footnote 28 Indeed, as early as 1959, one of the outstanding historians of that generation, Michelle Perrot, had given a seminar paper about xenophobic actions by French workers against Italian and Belgian workers in the 1880s. Yet Perrot’s work on immigrants is far less well known than her very influential later work on women’s history, or even her thesis on strikes, of which that paper was a byproduct.Footnote 29
It was a similar story for Marie-Christine Volovitch-Tavares, born in 1943 to Russian refugee parents, who wrote a masters thesis at the Ecole normale supérieure in 1968 on immigrant and women factory workers during the First World War. Volovitch-Tavares is better known for her later work on Portuguese migration, the results of which were mostly published from the 1990s onwards.Footnote 30 Hence neither Ponty, nor Perrot, nor Volovitch-Tavares got to acquire the same ‘pioneer’ status as Noiriel. Meanwhile, in Green’s case, the combination of being a woman, American, and Jewish had a similar effect, but her book did have an impact because it appeared during a rebirth of French-Jewish identities following a series of antisemitic terrorist attacks in Paris in the early 1980s. Green eventually found a job in a Jewish Studies programme at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS).Footnote 31 This fitted a pattern whereby women came to be perceived as specialists on particular minorities, while men were seen as qualified to make claims about migration as a whole.
But Cross’s, Green’s, Ponty’s, and Schor’s were not the first doctoral theses specifically devoted to French immigration history. That distinction belongs to Jean-Charles Bonnet, who published Les pouvoirs publics français et l’immigration dans l’entre deux guerres in 1976, the book of a thesis for which research had already commenced in 1969 in Lyon.Footnote 32 Yet Pouvoirs publics bore all the limitations of an institutional administrative history in which migrants appear as a problem to be solved. Bonnet argued that France lacked a real immigration policy in the interwar period, and ended with a lament that this was still apparently the case at the time of the book’s publication.Footnote 33 Despite this top-down perspective, his close-grained empirical research – cited in later important monographs such as Mary Lewis’s The boundaries of the republic – fitted with a marked preference among the first generation of scholarship for locally grounded studies.Footnote 34 For example, Noiriel’s work was rooted in Lorraine and Schor’s work in Nice. One could also mention Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, who defended a PhD dissertation on Algerian immigration in Lyon under the supervision of the labour historian Yves Lequin in 1989; and Emile Temime, a historian of the Spanish Civil War who later revisited his Algerian-Jewish roots and wrote about immigration in Marseille.Footnote 35
Much of this early research was carried out by individuals either in splendid isolation or in research networks not specifically dedicated to immigration, thus forming no distinct academic ‘school’ of immigration history, and occasionally subject to rivalries. But there was at least one common context that shaped emerging scholarship: the end of the French overseas empire and the legacy of anti-colonialism, much of which was tied up with the bloody dénouement of the Algerian War (1954–62). Some French historians of immigration initially trained as historians of North Africa, and lived and taught there after independence, notably the Marxist historian René Gallissot, who, by 1980, had started to work on migration.Footnote 36 Such themes were also of interest to Gallissot’s fellow ex-communist, the Moroccan-born Claude Liauzu, who, after returning from teaching in Tunisia to France, published ground-breaking research on colonial students in France and the interwar origins of Third Worldism in the early 1980s.Footnote 37
Even so, as Liauzu later noted, the history of immigration was not yet an autonomous field of research, which meant it was neither a mainstream nor a career-opening specialism.Footnote 38 This can be seen in the fact that one of France’s flagship history journals, the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, published just one article on migration to France between 1974 and 1983 – and its author was David Pike, an American based at the American University in Paris.Footnote 39 Professional precarity was a particular problem for scholars from or with roots in the former colonies, and for female scholars. Sayad, for example, was unable to obtain a stable academic post until the age of forty-four, and Massard-Guilbaud faced such difficulties in conducting research on immigration that she redirected her interest to environmental history, of which she became a pioneer.Footnote 40 As for Minces, despite many book contracts, she never held more than temporary teaching or research positions.Footnote 41
As a result, some of the most exciting early work on immigration was carried out either on the fringes of academia or well beyond it. A vital outlet for politically engaged immigrant intellectuals like Sayad was the weekly newspaper Sans Frontière, France’s first mass-circulation paper for immigrants by immigrants. This was founded in 1979 in Barbès, Paris’s most symbolically charged site of North African settlement, by former activists in the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes (MTA). This organization was the most important of the immigrant-left activist groups to flourish in the first half of the 1970s, built by activists such as the Tunisian Fawzia Bouziri, who moved between pro-Palestinian advocacy and migrants’ rights campaigns. The core of Sans Frontière consisted of both immigrants and intellectuals, but not trained historians. Fawzia Bouziri’s husband, Saïd Bouziri, migrated from Tunis to Lyon to train as a bookkeeper, before becoming a key activist in Barbès, and Driss El Yazami migrated from Fez to Marseille to study in a business school before turning to activism.Footnote 42 Over time, these ex-MTA activists came to understand that their activities, which took on a more cultural and less overtly militant form following repression by the French and Moroccan states, formed part of a much longer tradition of organization by foreigners in France.Footnote 43
The pages of Sans Frontière are a vital resource for historians of immigration in France. They testify to the organic historical consciousness of a generation of migrant activists acutely concerned with transmitting their own and earlier experiences of struggle to new generations of anti-racist activists in France’s multi-ethnic suburbs. This provided opportunities to journalistic talents like Farid Aïchoune who had grown up in France as the offspring of colonial migrants. At the turn of the 1980s, Sans Frontière published articles under the headings ‘Immigrant memory’ and ‘People’s memory’. These were narratives of individual migrants’ lived experiences over long periods, in keeping with a broader vogue for oral history and life-writing among post-1968 activists.Footnote 44 An important legacy of the Sans Frontière era was a lively militant aspect to public discussions of immigration history, with figures forged during the struggles of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as the journalist Mogniss Abdallah, still keen to show that migrant activism has a history even many decades later.Footnote 45 Sans Frontière also opened up its pages to fresh analyses of the colonial past that were often dissident in nature, challenging not only the French state’s silences about brutal racist atrocities such as the Paris police massacre of Algerian protesters on 17 October 1961, but also the narrow nationalist orthodoxies that prevailed in post-independence Algeria and its migrant diaspora.Footnote 46 In this way, it more closely resembled today’s diverse modern historiography than the stark binaries and heavy silences often thought to characterize immediate postcolonial memories.
While Sans Frontière was, in important respects, the product of autodidact culture, it also involved contact with emergent professional historians such as Benjamin Stora, who in 1982 contributed to a special issue to mark the twentieth anniversary of Algerian independence.Footnote 47 Although initially working far more on Algerian Muslims than Algerian Jews, Stora’s writing was rooted in a deep sense of shame and dislocation after his familial and familiar world of indigenous Algerian Jewry in his home city of Constantine was destroyed by the polarization of the Algerian War. Stora found his earliest adult sense of political belonging in the internationalist and workerist world of Trotskyism after 1968.Footnote 48 It was thus appropriate that his first major piece of research, a doctorate completed in 1978, was on Messali Hadj, the ‘Trotsky’ of the Algerian revolution. Messali’s pivotal contribution to the birth of Algerian nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, later deliberately effaced by younger rivals, had mainly taken place on French rather than Algerian soil, organizing migrant workers in France in the cause of self-determination for Algeria.
Figures like Messali were rescued from the dustbin of history not only by Stora’s writings but also by Sans Frontière’s distribution networks and imaginatively free editorial policy.Footnote 49 Yet four decades later, Stora’s journey from outsider to insider would culminate in being entrusted by President Emmanuel Macron with producing the official 2021 report into the memorial legacies of the Algerian War. Stora’s report was painstaking in its attempts to address the sensitivities of all sides, but it was still criticized for too great an emphasis on reconciliation at the expense of justice.Footnote 50 The persistence of such controversies is a product of the supremely divisive memories of the war that Stora and many others have spent a lifetime trying to explain but that seem almost impossible to overcome.Footnote 51
II
The period from the early 1980s to the late 2000s was characterized by three key developments that heavily shaped the history of immigration in France: the politicization of immigration; the rise of identity-based political mobilization; and the escalation of the public debate over France’s colonial legacy. Each of these worked to redirect the scholarly agenda, bringing to the fore research that had been hidden in the 1970s and pushing certain issues – such as ‘second-generation’ immigrants – up the intellectual pecking order. The end result was that, by the 2000s, studying the history or sociology of immigration was a viable academic career path and could even result in media attention.
The politicization of immigration policy in France began in the early 1970s with the first co-ordinated attempt to limit immigration in the form of the Marcellin-Fontanet circulars of 1972, which were also the catalyst for the first sans-papiers movement.Footnote 52 Ensuing decisions to halt the circulation of migrants predominantly from former colonies came partly as a response to the economic recession following the 1973 oil shock, but had earlier origins, resulting from years of administrative concern for ‘clandestine’ or ‘out-of-control (sauvage)’ immigration.Footnote 53 This led to a consensus among policy-makers, civil servants, and politicians that immigration was adversely affecting the labour market.Footnote 54 Although many of the key elements of the Marcellin-Fontanet circulars were struck down by the Conseil d’État, the shift from a permissive to a restrictive immigration policy was confirmed when the newly elected president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, announced the ‘suspension’ of both individual and family immigration in July 1974.Footnote 55
This top-down pressure was exacerbated by the rise of what has now become one of western Europe’s most famous far-right parties, the Front national (FN). Founded in 1972 and led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the FN made its first major electoral breakthrough in local elections in Dreux in 1983. It gained further strength in every electoral cycle until 2002, when Le Pen caused a spectacular upset by narrowly beating the socialist candidate Lionel Jospin to second place in the run-off for the presidential election. Since then, the FN – now rebaptized the Rassemblement national (RN) – has been a permanent feature of the French political landscape and regularly achieves election results of between 20 and 40 per cent.Footnote 56 With radical opposition to immigration as its most stable core manifesto promise since the 1980s, the FN can fairly lay claim to having kept the phenomenon of immigration permanently in the public eye in France in the last four decades.Footnote 57
The threat of the far right accelerated the emergence of a distinct history of immigration. Writing about the subject became a renewed terrain of political struggle, not so much between different factions of the left but against the far right. Public figures such as Stora and Noiriel led the charge against a right-wing vision of immigration as a fundamental threat to the French nation-state, while many other scholars discussed in the previous section – such as Ponty and Green – finally found some degree of recognition by the 1990s as their research became part of a general defence of France as a ‘land of immigration’. This was reinforced by parallel work on France as a terre d’accueil for refugees and those fleeing political persecution, for instance, Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand’s book on Spanish republican exiles in France.Footnote 58 The key point for almost all of these scholars was to show that foreigners had lived in France in earlier periods, and it had been feasible for them to assimilate and become French. As Noiriel put it in Le creuset français: ‘Is not the clearest proof of the effectiveness of the French melting pot illustrated precisely by the fact that the diversity of its origins today passes unnoticed by specialists of immigration themselves …?’Footnote 59 By making such a claim, Noiriel was trying to counter right-wing political rhetoric about immigrants. In so doing, however, he dismissed social problems among contemporary immigrant communities as simply another manifestation of a more general social malaise, and he reduced feelings of alienation among young ethnic minorities to a ‘crisis of hope’.Footnote 60
The problem was that this neo-Marxist view of immigration could not reckon with the steep rise of identity-based political mobilization in the 1980s. As a number of scholars have persuasively argued, the electoral success of François Mitterrand and the Parti socialiste in 1981 marked a break in terms of cultural and political manifestations of immigrant identity.Footnote 61 Whether in terms of the state’s stance on homosexuality, or in the efforts made to support the development of regional identities and language, the first years of the Socialist administration demonstrated a desire to dismantle those aspects of the Jacobin and Gaullist models considered most inimical to pluralism.Footnote 62 To some extent this was a belated recognition of important intellectual and political strands that had emerged on the left after 1968, but it also reflected a shift away from Marxist economic orthodoxy to a more cultural approach to the question of inequality. The concepts of ‘difference’ and ‘identity’, which had long been delegitimized by Gaullism’s emphasis on national unity, began to make an appearance in political discussions. Within a year or two, this new approach had a name: droit à la différence, an idea that deftly combined the notion of difference with a rather Jacobin-sounding rights-based claim on the French state.
For a brief moment in the early 1980s, then, it was acceptable to articulate politically one’s cultural, historical, and linguistic diversity – and such expressions might receive significant state support.Footnote 63 In this context, immigration became associated with the debate surrounding droit à la différence. Immigrant organizations, which previously had expressed themselves in terms of anti-colonial or far-left politics, increasingly began to articulate their claims around collective identities.Footnote 64 The most obvious manifestation of this was in the realm of language. In the early 1980s, the older phrase travailleurs immigrés (immigrant workers) began to give way to the notion of immigrés (immigrants), with its more obvious implication of cultural difference. This shift was particularly visible in the famous March for Equality and Against Racism in 1983, which gathered hundreds of thousands of people around the collective experience of racial discrimination and violence, and featured banners with phrases such as ‘pour une France pluriethnique et pluriculturelle’ (‘for a pluri-ethnic and pluri-cultural France’).Footnote 65
At the same time, the word beur – French verlan (reverse slang) for ‘Arab’ – began to be used to describe a younger, often second, generation of North African immigrants. As French scholars, activists, and journalists grappled with the divided identities of immigrant children, they became increasingly interested in beur politics and literature. The latter, embodied in the heavily autobiographical early work of authors like Leïla Sebbar, Mehdi Charef, and Azouz Begag, provided an insight into the everyday contradictions of what commentators described as ‘the Beur generation’. This literary consciousness was augmented by other cultural expressions of difference, such as the community radio station Radio Beur (later Beur FM), founded in 1981, and the contemporary dance troupe ‘Black, Blanc, Beur’, founded in 1984.Footnote 66
Above all, new immigrant identities were visible in a growing strand of political activism, which demanded that links be forged between ‘first-generation’ and ‘second-generation’ experiences. One example of this was the organization Génériques, launched in 1987 by the same group of activists who had been involved with Sans Frontière. In a sign of shifting priorities, Génériques was as concerned with the past as the present. One of its main aims was to preserve, organize, and catalogue personal papers and archival collections pertaining to migration histories. This made it both a research centre that could dig deeper into the ‘life narratives’ of immigrants themselves and also a repository for future research. It organized exhibitions on the history of immigration – the first was in 1989 – and was, for a while, a publishing house of its own, with its journal Migrance, founded in 1993, becoming a key resource for immigration history.Footnote 67 In the 2000s and 2010s, its primarily male and ‘first-generation’ immigrant founders sought to professionalize the organization. They recruited professional archivists, historians, and event organizers, mostly female and mostly French-born, from diverse family backgrounds. Using newer technologies to record testimonies, they greatly contributed to the evolution and expansion of understandings of France’s migration history to include previously neglected areas such as the experiences and struggles of migrant women.Footnote 68 Génériques eventually folded in 2018, precipitated by funding difficulties, but it had a considerable impact on the organizational and institutional landscape of immigration history.Footnote 69
The 1980s also saw the development of social scientific research on multi-culturalism and anti-racism. This filled in the gaps left by historians who had hitherto been keen to downplay the exceptionality of postcolonial immigration to France. Emblematic of this social scientific movement was Michel Wieviorka. A student of the sociologist Alain Touraine, with whom he published a number of collaborative volumes on social movements in the late 1970s and 1980s, Wieviorka consistently sought to push a very broad multi-cultural agenda in his work and his public interventions from the late 1980s onwards.Footnote 70 This culminated in a key collaborative text entitled Une société fragmentée. Le multiculturalisme en débat (1996) that propelled Wieviorka to the heart of an ongoing civic debate around the ‘integration’ of France’s ethnic minority communities.Footnote 71 In comparison to the kind of multi-culturalism that was then in vogue in Canada, the US, the Netherlands, or the UK, the defence of ethnic and religious pluralism that underpinned the essays in Une société fragmentée appeared rather tame. But it is important to remember that, by the 1990s, enthusiasm for droit à la différence had faded, to be replaced by a universalist republican rhetoric that condemned all expressions of ‘communitarian’ difference on the part of ethnic minorities.Footnote 72 By bringing together a number of specialists, and training a new generation of doctoral students, Wieviorka was able to secure a (sometimes tenuous) place for empirical studies of multi-culturalism and diversity.Footnote 73 His research centre at the EHESS, the Centre d’analyses et d’interventions stratégiques (CADIS), became a key site of dissemination for such work, and he and his colleagues had an impact on both scholarly work and government policy.Footnote 74
The last – but by no means least – variable for understanding the explosion of scholarly interest in immigration in France at the turn of the century lay in the heated debate surrounding the colonial past. It has now become a truism to say that France was extremely resistant to the wave of postcolonial theory that shook the Anglo-American academy in the 1980s.Footnote 75 This also affected the history of immigration, which found itself stranded between two intellectual poles hostile to postcolonial approaches. The first was the – now declining – neo-Marxist approach to immigration outlined earlier; the second was a newer approach that came to be known as sociohistoire.
Sociohistoire had its origins in the desire to encourage dialogue between historians and social scientists. As presented by one of its leading journals, Genèses, founded in 1990, it involves using analytical tools from disciplines such as sociology, political science, anthropology, and legal studies to write history, and using history to reconstruct the processes that have shaped our contemporary societies.Footnote 76 Although the origins of sociohistoire did not lie in the history of immigration, the fact that one of its pioneers was Noiriel meant that it soon became associated with immigration history. By the 2000s, there was a large pool of doctoral students and a network of important research seminars devoted to sociohistoire, and it quickly became the dominant lens through which scholarship on immigration in France was produced. This led to seminal work on the administration of immigration, migrant housing, migrant shopkeepers, and the recruitment and management of the migrant workforce.Footnote 77 However, it also undermined attempts to bring Anglo-American postcolonial approaches to bear on the history of immigration. Rather than study colonial representations, advocates of sociohistoire argued instead for an analysis of concrete practices.Footnote 78 This stemmed directly from Bourdieu’s insistence on the fact that particular (class) dispositions gave rise to particular practices.Footnote 79 When this method was applied to the history of immigration in France, it led researchers to identify colonial legacies not in discourse or representation but in concrete manifestations of domination that could be tracked institutionally and archivally: for instance, in the practices of state administration and civil servants.Footnote 80
At the same time, outside the purely academic realm, the Algerian War re-emerged as a subject of polemic when the French state’s decision in 1999 to recognize the Algerian conflict as a ‘war’ opened the door for a reassessment of France’s responsibility for colonial violence.Footnote 81 In some cases, this re-examination was instigated by the actors themselves. This was evident in the widespread public debate in 2000–1 over the use of torture during the Algerian War, which saw conflicting testimonies from generals and victims come together with new historical work from scholars such as Sylvie Thénault and Raphaëlle Branche.Footnote 82 Similarly, in 2005, the French parliament, led by a right-wing majority and under pressure from years of campaigning by former European settlers in Algeria – the so-called pieds-noirs – passed a highly contentious law which recognized France’s ‘debt’ to all those who had participated in the colonization of the French empire. Article 4 of the legislation stipulated that the French school curriculum should recognize ‘the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in North Africa … and the sacrifices of those combatants of the French army who came from these territories’. This attempt to rewrite the history of colonialism drew widespread condemnation from left-wing historians of immigration: Liauzu, for example, repeatedly attacked the premises of the legislation, while a separate group of historians joined together to form Liberté pour l’histoire, a lobby group designed to combat the ‘politicization’ of history. In the end, the outcry led to Jacques Chirac abrogating Article 4 of the law by presidential decree in 2006 but the rest of the law remained untouched.
Coming at the same time as the disastrous fallout of the urban unrest that shook France in November 2005, controversies over colonial memory served as the basis for another wave of activism around immigration, immigrants, and their descendants.Footnote 83 Organizations such as the Conseil représentatif des associations noires and the Parti des Indigènes de la République, both founded in 2005, sought to celebrate immigrant histories and identities, with the former engaged in lobbying on behalf of Black people, and the latter demanding that France shed its colonial past and neo-colonial present. This process was accelerated by a change in paradigm at the level of public policy, with the implementation of the European directive on antidiscrimination in the early 2000s.Footnote 84 For a short period of time, it became possible to acknowledge ethno-racial discrimination and articulate identity-based claims in the public sphere.Footnote 85 This, in turn, encouraged new scholarship. A good example of this is the historian Pap Ndiaye. A specialist of US economic history working at the EHESS, he burst onto the intellectual and political scene with the publication in 2008 of his essay La condition noire, which focused on the experience of being Black and French in France.Footnote 86
Another example of historical scholarship that grew directly out of activism was the Association pour la connaissance de l’histoire de l’Afrique contemporaine (ACHAC), founded in 1989 by Pascal Blanchard, a scholar of the body and imperialism. Along with his colleagues Nicolas Bancel (at Lausanne University) and Sandrine Lemaire, Blanchard built an organization that worked tirelessly to bring Anglo-American postcolonial studies to France. This included frequent appearances in print, radio, and television media, and a number of exhibitions in Paris and elsewhere on subjects that ranged from the presence of Black people in the French football team to the objectification of the exotic body in the colonial period.Footnote 87 In addition, ACHAC supported a bewildering array of publications, which in a short space of time came to constitute the most substantial corpus of explicitly ‘postcolonial’ scholarship on the history of immigration in France.Footnote 88 Yet, despite its longevity, ACHAC remains today at the margins of French academia and is not an affiliated research centre of any state-supported institution of higher education and research in France.
Outside France, scholarship on immigration received a boost thanks to the so-called ‘global turn’ in French history. This was the result of a steep decline in interest and funding for European history in the US in the 1990s, with the consequence that American students and scholars had to scramble to repackage their research in a more global key. This led to outstanding new work on the global history of the French and Haitian revolutions, as well as the French resistance.Footnote 89 More immediately relevant to the history of immigration was a flurry of innovative writing on the Algerian War and its legacy from the mid-2000s onwards, including work by Todd Shepard and James McDougall on the French state; by Martin Evans, Neil Macmaster, and Jim House on war and violence; by Natalya Vince on revolutionary women; by Claire Eldridge on the pieds-noirs; and by Amelia Lyons and Minayo Nasiali on welfare and social policy in postcolonial France.Footnote 90
This outpouring of research vastly improved the knowledge of Algerian and other immigrant communities in metropolitan France, but French and non-French scholarship did not always develop in dialogue with each other. Partly this was due to a still prevalent language barrier, but it also related to method and tone. With regard to method, the pre-eminence of a sociohistoire approach that examined immigration through the analysis of practices did not find much echo among non-French scholars who were interested in colonial representations. With regard to tone, the divergence was even more acute. Whether intentionally or not, the premise of much of the new research on the Algerian War and the French colonial empire by foreign scholars was that the French were ‘in denial’ about their colonial past. This insider–outsider trope has a certain pedigree: from revisionist accounts of the French Revolution to the debunking of myths surrounding Vichy France, there is a long tradition of foreign scholars opening up new areas of research or offering radical reinterpretations of major events in modern French history. But such external intervention has always been controversial – and there is always the risk that it will be mobilized for political purposes.
III
Today, it is still not easy to work on the history of immigration in France. In large part, this is because scholars in the field are spread out among a variety of different research centres, most of which do not include many historians. The Migrinter research centre at the University of Poitiers, for example, was set up in 1985 by a geographer. Similarly, the Unité de recherche migrations et société research centre in Paris and Nice was launched in 1994 as an interdisciplinary hub for social scientific work on migration. And the Institut convergences migrations (ICM) existed from 2016 to 2026 as a funded network of scholars working in the broad field of migration. Such dispersion has made it difficult to institutionalize the history of immigration, a situation that has been made worse in recent years both by funding restrictions and, above all, by the eruption of a culture war specifically targeting scholars of race and immigration.Footnote 91 This has taken the form of a concerted attack from the right-wing media and, in some cases, the highest levels of government.
In this highly charged context, ‘immigration’ has often been a code word for a wide array of topics.Footnote 92 This is particularly visible in the virulent debates surrounding the wearing of the hijab and other forms of Islamic dress in French schools since the 1990s. What began in 1989 as a controversy over the exclusion of a group of middle-school students wearing the hijab – the so-called affaire du foulard (headscarf affair) – ended up reshaping the understanding of the relationship between immigration and national identity in the twenty-first century. The fact that school students wearing a form of Islamic dress in a state school might be infringing the principle of laïcité was already a reinterpretation of legislation that dated back more than a hundred years.Footnote 93 The 1881–2 Ferry laws, which had made schooling free, compulsory, and secular, stated that no religious dogma and no religious teachers were to be involved in the education of French citizens. But the implementation of laïcité in school did not apply to pupils, and it was only the vastly increased visibility of Muslims in French society in the 1980s that prompted a reassessment of the legal framework surrounding it. Initially, this was limited to specific state schools, where headteachers made the decision to exclude pupils wearing the hijab, but it soon became a more general principle that was enshrined in the 2004 law that forbade the ‘ostentatious’ display of ‘religious symbols’ in state schools.Footnote 94
Quite apart from triggering a steep rise in Islamophobic rhetoric and policy, this new association between Muslims and laïcité also brought the history of immigration centre-stage. For many scholars of immigration, the targeting of Muslims made it hard to sustain Noiriel’s claim that all immigration to France was equal. The long history of France’s relationship to Islam, in metropolitan France but especially in North and West Africa, meant that postcolonial Muslim immigrants were confronted with much more intense racism and discrimination than their European counterparts.Footnote 95 This needed to be explained – and many scholars working on immigration, religion, and feminism began to do just that. For example, the historian Florence Rochefort, who specialized in feminism in the nineteenth century, introduced a new field of research on the articulation between twentieth-century feminism and religion in France.Footnote 96 Likewise, the sociologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas published several important books on immigrant and second-generation immigrant women in the 1990s and 2000s, emphasizing the importance of their subjectivity and agency.Footnote 97 Some historians of immigration – such as Patrick Weil – were even involved in the government commission that led to the passing of the 2004 law.
The fallout from the headscarf affair was also of great interest to foreign scholars, and the 2000s brought forth a veritable deluge of writing about France, Islam, and laïcité by historians, political theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians of religion.Footnote 98 In some countries, these topics even found their way into school curriculums: any student learning French language in a UK school from the late 1990s onwards was made to study the headscarf affair, read Azouz Begag’s autobiographical account of growing up with Algerian parents in France, Shantytown kid (1986), or watch films like La haine (1995) that offered a glimpse into postcolonial France. Seen from the outside, laïcité appeared as one of the most important social and political issues in France – and one that was entirely sui generis. It therefore profoundly shaped the interpretations of the history of immigration in France for an entire generation of foreign students and scholars.Footnote 99
Another key intellectual battleground that has involved historians of immigration has been the question of race. In the same way that there was resistance to multi-culturalism in the 1990s and postcolonial studies in the 2000s, scholarship on race has often fallen on deaf ears in France.Footnote 100 Several arguments can be put forth to explain this, perhaps the most important of which is simply the fact that the word ‘race’ is rarely used in a positive or analytical sense in France (the same could be said of Germany, Belgium, Italy, or Spain). The origins of this taboo lie in the legacy of the Second World War and subsequent efforts to eradicate racial and racist thinking from the scholarly community.Footnote 101 It is a sign of how deeply entrenched this view is that, on more than ten occasions since 2000, French parliamentarians have tried to eliminate the word ‘race’ from the first article of the French constitution, which reads ‘The Republic guarantees equality before the law for all citizens regardless of origin, race, or religion’ (1958). Although the proposed constitutional amendments have not been ratified, the idea has widespread support across the political spectrum and demonstrates how the very use of the term ‘race’ is regarded as contributing to the reification of racial differences.
A similar reluctance to discuss race explains the heated debate over the collection of ethno-racial data in France. As early as 1999, when the census introduced a question on the nationality at birth of foreign-born French citizens, there was a vigorous discussion over the divisive power of statistics.Footnote 102 In 2008, when the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) and the National Office for Economic Statistics (INSEE) launched a large survey on population diversity and discrimination in France, even mainstream anti-racist organizations like SOS Racisme criticized the move, arguing that identity-based categories themselves create differences and divide the national community. Given that ‘hyphenated’ expressions of identity were – and are – extremely rare in France, this argument was not unusual, but it did capture a widely shared belief that identification by ethnicity or race undermines rather than reinforces the claim to full French citizenship.Footnote 103
Such a broad political and civic consensus on race did not, however, mean the absence of critical scholarship on the subject. Most famously, the social theorist Étienne Balibar was instrumental in advancing the study of racism and anti-racism in France. In a similar vein, the reprint of Colette Guillaumin’s 1972 book L’idéologie raciste in the early 2000s offered a theoretical framework to think about race as a social relation.Footnote 104 And, in 2006, the sociologists Éric and Didier Fassin published De la question sociale à la question raciale, advocating for a better grasp of social issues through the scope of race, and pointing to the limits of colour blindness when fighting racism. Part of the reason for the success of these books was the depth of the taboos surrounding the subject in France. While historians of early modern France and the French empire – and especially historians of slavery – have incorporated race as an analytical framework, historians of modern immigration have been more reticent to do so.Footnote 105 Some of the rare exceptions are the sociologist Anton Perdoncin, who studied the racialization of Moroccan miners in the north of France, and the historian Laurent Dornel, who has written on the emergence of a racial order caused by the arrival of indigenous peoples in metropolitan France during the First World War.Footnote 106 There has also been vital engagement on the relationship between race, citizenship, Frenchness, and immigration in recent work focusing on France’s Caribbean territories of Martinique and Guadeloupe by scholars such as Audrey Célestine and Pierre Odin.Footnote 107 It is surely no coincidence that, in recent years, work on Black populations and Blackness in France and its former colonies has been one of the most favoured avenues for transatlantic academic collaboration.Footnote 108
The difficulty is that historians of immigration in France have not been able to detach themselves from the aggressive political polemic surrounding the concept of race. Spurred on by an expanding right-wing media ecosystem (including the twenty-four-hour news channel CNews, founded in 1999), parts of the political and intellectual class have launched a French variant of the ‘war on woke’ since the early 2020s. This has involved targeting academics and activists who work on topics such as immigration, Islamophobia, race, slavery, and theories of intersectionality. Not only are they seen to be furthering le wokisme, but they are also seen to be importing dangerous new ideas into France. In some cases, the consequences of this continuous harassment by right-wing pundits and what the French call the fachosphère – the far-right equivalent of the online ‘manosphere’ – has been extremely damaging. Several French academics working on race and immigration have left the country and taken up positions in universities in Belgium, the US, or the UK.
While the intensification of this culture war should not come as a surprise given the right-wing drift of French intellectual life since the 1990s, it has been especially troubling to see right and far-right talking points reach the upper echelons of the French government. The most spectacular example of this was the attack on islamogauchisme (Islamo-leftism) that followed the assassination of Samuel Paty, a history and geography teacher, in late 2020. The brutality of the act – and the fact that it took place in the symbolically charged location of a French state school – forced the government to respond. It did so by passing a law ‘reinforcing the respect for the principles of republicanism’, which rapidly became known as the ‘law on separatism’. One of the consequences of this law was to create a renewed moral panic around Islam. This manifested itself in academic circles in an unexpected attack by successive education and interior ministers on islamogauchisme, which they claimed had contributed to the attack.Footnote 109
As a result of these attacks, academics who worked on topics related to Islam, including scholars of immigration, found themselves in the firing line. But it was not simply right-wing pundits and ministers who were targeting them; it was also other academics. The government’s denunciations of islamogauchisme provided the ideal opportunity for those who resented the penetration of new theories to plead their case. The ‘Manifeste des cent’, a manifesto published in Le Monde in 2020 shortly after Paty’s death, captured precisely this position. It claimed that
indigenist, racialist and ‘decolonial’ ideologies (transferred from North American college campuses) are very much present [in French universities], and they contribute to a hatred of ‘white people’ and France, and a sometimes violent activism that condemns anyone who dares to push back against this anti-Western dogma and holier-than-thou multi-culturalism.Footnote 110
Signed by a raft of senior (and overwhelmingly male) academics, the petition was designed to stake out a position in the ongoing battle between new approaches to the history of race and immigration in France and older approaches that were hostile to overt expressions of identity politics and difference. Paradoxically, the hyperbolic language – so typical of this kind of French intellectual petition – actually demonstrated the fragility of the old guard, a position confirmed when Le Monde published a counter-petition with more than 2,000 signatures.Footnote 111
Still, a natural tendency to dramatize the political stakes of the present should not obscure a longer view on the politicization of the history of immigration in France. As early as the 1970s, immigration was a highly charged topic, which engaged both activist and intellectual networks in a wider struggle over the recognition of immigrants’ rights. That this should have transformed in the 2020s into a pitched battle over ‘wokeness’ suggests that the form of the polemic has changed more than the substance. In reality, excellent work continues to appear on immigrants and immigrant activism, including books by scholars such as Abdellali Hajjat, Marwan Mohammed, and Rachida Brahim, who have repeatedly found themselves at the sharp end of the culture war.Footnote 112 Similarly, stimulating new work by scholars outside France such as Amit Prakash, Danielle Beaujon, and Nimisha Barton has built on the historiography of the Algerian War from the 2000s to probe further the relationship between immigration, race, gender, and the formation of the modern French state.Footnote 113 We might even go so far as to say that the politicization of the history of immigration in France has ensured the survival of the field by giving it a renewed raison d’être.
Perhaps the clearest sign that the history of immigration has achieved something akin to mainstream status in France is the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris. An immigration museum had long been one of the demands of immigrant activist organizations like Génériques, who felt that the establishment of a permanent public institution dedicated to the history of immigration would restore immigration to its rightful place at the heart of the French national narrative. But, when the project was announced in 2004, Génériques and other immigrant activist organizations found themselves sidelined. Instead, the project stemmed directly from a desire to consolidate the position of President-elect Jacques Chirac as a defender of an anti-racist republican order in the wake of his crushing victory against Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 2002 presidential election.Footnote 114 As a way of recognizing that many French people had voted for him purely in order to block the far right, members of Chirac’s cabinet decided to follow up on the demand for a museum of immigration history and entrusted the task to one of Chirac’s closest associates, the well-known right-wing politician Jacques Toubon.
From its inception, however, the museum was not considered a priority. Chirac himself was more concerned with the construction of the Musée du Quai Branly dedicated to the ‘arts and civilization’ of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, which was located next to the Eiffel Tower and designed by the renowned architect Jean Nouvel. By contrast, the immigration museum was to be located in the Palais de la Porte Dorée, on the outskirts of the city next to the Bois de Vincennes.Footnote 115 Nor was the building itself a blank canvas: it was originally constructed for the Colonial Exhibition in 1931 and subsequently used as a museum for the ‘colonies’, the ‘overseas territories’, and ‘Asian and African art’.Footnote 116 One of its most striking features was the façade, which was carved for the Colonial Exhibition and showed different ‘scenes’ from the French colonial empire. The museum’s designers chose to retain the façade in its existing form, but such open colonial propaganda seemed decidedly at odds with the long-standing activist project of a true lieu de mémoire that would celebrate the history of immigration.
The museum finally opened its doors in 2007, but it was only inaugurated in 2014 by the socialist president François Hollande (his right-wing predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, refused to have anything to do with it). Today, it remains underfunded and there have been several internal crises as it has found itself drawn into the ongoing culture wars. Yet it has gradually established itself as part of the commemorative landscape of the French capital, and it now plays host to a series of exhibitions on immigrants and the immigrant experience in France and abroad.Footnote 117 In particular, the 2023 redesign of the permanent exhibition pays tribute to the global turn in French immigration history.Footnote 118 Beginning with the establishment of the so-called 1685 Code Noir (Black Code) that regulated the relations between enslavers and enslaved people in the colonies of the kingdom of France, the museum conveys a new narrative of mobility across the French empire, in and out of its evolving boundaries.Footnote 119
Clearly, the museum has nothing like the symbolic power of, say, the National Museum of Immigration on Ellis Island in New York. But it still represents a major step forward in the recognition of immigration – and the history of immigration – in France. Whether this forward momentum can be sustained in the future is an open question. With a culture war raging and the prospect of a far-right government in France growing every year, the history of immigration could well face serious threats. As the polemics over islamogauchisme clearly demonstrate, it does not take much to shut down academic debate, even in a country that is well accustomed to highly polarized intellectual battles. If nothing else, this fight for survival matches the urgency of the subject matter: just as immigrants have struggled to make themselves visible in France, so too the history of immigration will have to struggle to make itself heard.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the members of the British Academy project team who were involved in the collective reflection that gave rise to this article: Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, Rachida Brahim, Alex Hensby, Liam Liburd, Camilla Schofield, Tim Peace, and Emilie Wiedemann.
Funding statement
The research for this article was funded by a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research grant entitled ‘A new democratic (dis)order: race, identity, and political mobilisation in France and the UK, c.1970–present’ (KF7100258). The grant ran from April 2023 to December 2025.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
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