“Pas un droit, mais une faveur”: Immigration, Nationalism, and Population in 1920’s France

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2016
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Tri-College users only
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Abstract
The amount of French casualties after World War One forced the Third Republic to recruit foreign labor from Europe and North Africa to replenish the economy. The government created the Société Générale d’Immigration (SGI) in 1924 to recruit workers from Eastern Europe. As thousands of Poles and other Eastern Europeans poured in, in addition to Italians, Spaniards, and North Africans, fears of immigrant assimilation in French society percolated among natives. Tensions grew between the government’s aggressive recruitment processes and the native’s desire to limit entry into France. This thesis explores the recruitment tactics employed by the SGI to lure workers to France in the 1920s and the subsequent tensions surrounding immigration policy. Publications by French eugenicists, doctors of hygiene, and journalists reveal hostility toward the government’s recruitment procedures and the immigrant community. The native’s fears surrounding immigrant assimilation stemmed from ideas of racial hierarchy and diseased immigrants infecting the weakened French population. The tensions of the 1920s reveal France’s struggle to maintain its Republican principles of civic nationalism, universalism, and acceptance during a period of crisis.
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