Mothers, Welfare Organizations, and Reproducing for the Nation

This chapter discusses how France emerged both as a safe haven on the continent between the wars and as a maternal haven with Paris its undisputed capital. It discusses the demographic angst and pronatalist zeal that gripped French decision makers in the early Third Republic, which encouraged population-minded state officials and benevolent bourgeoises of private charities to join forces for the sake of the future of France. It also explains how public assistance was fleshed out by scores of private charitable organizations that were run by middle-class Frenchwomen who had emerged over the course of the nineteenth century. The chapter mentions social workers of welfarist organizations that provided French and foreign mothers financial, social, and emotional assistance with the tasks of childbearing, child-rearing, and household management. The chapter also describes public and private assistance networks that forged a wide-ranging maternalist and familialist welfare world in France.

The Forces that Push and Pull

This chapter retraces the trajectories of foreign-born men, women, and children driven out of their homelands and directed into French factories and fields by employers and labor recruitment organizations before, during, and after the Great War. It follows immigrants to the two lively melting-pot neighborhoods in Paris where they settled in greatest numbers between the wars and into the Occupation. It also looks at the lived experience of immigrants that observed how gender, marriage, and family that shaped the ways migrants moved through provincial France in search of work. The chapter discusses France's northern, eastern, and southern departments that drew large numbers of seasonal border migrants from Belgium, Italy, and Spain. It refers to migrant laborers that concentrated in mining areas of the Pas-de-Calais region after the war, as well as large city centers like Marseille or Lyon and its industrial peripheries.

Wives, Wages, and Regulating Breadwinners

This chapter cites Yolanda Foldes's 1937 novel about a Hungarian family in interwar Paris, in which the character Klari Barabas stumbles into the middle of a lovers' quarrel involving Greek Christos and his French wife. It analyses the misfortunes of fictional Christos and his French wife, which suggest men's work, missing wages, and marital discord that were intertwined in the mixed and immigrant working-class households sprouting up throughout France after the Great War. It also discusses the twin middle-class ideals of the male breadwinner and the femme au foyer that governed early twentieth century economic and social life. The chapter recounts how marriage became the most reliable legal means of securing access to a male breadwinner and his wages by the early twentieth century, especially in the event of the union's demise. It talks about alimentary pensions that were paid regularly by estranged husbands and were enforced by officials at the behest of French and foreign wives themselves.

Conclusion

This chapter mentions the Third Republican lawmakers, politicians, bureaucrats, employers, and social workers who summoned reproductive citizenship into being against the backdrop of severe depopulation and an imagined “crise de familles.” It reviews the routine application of social policies, states and social actors that worked in both official and unofficial spheres toward the goal of repopulating France with immigrant families. It also describes France's working-class urban neighborhoods, in which the gendered rhythms of neighborhood life reinforced the making and remaking of mixed and foreign-born families. The chapter points out how a female culture of mutual aid flourished in the social world of the apartment building and provided material support to French and immigrant wives and mothers. It identifies that immigrant women adopted French patterns of marriage, employment, fertility, and child-rearing.

Introduction

This chapter investigates how prevailing ideas about gender, family, and reproduction during the Third Republic shaped middle-class French officials' attitudes. It highlights the middle-class French officials' interactions with immigrants as workers and citizens, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers of a depopulating French nation. It also cites the hierarchies of exclusion embedded within modern states, such as restrictive labor, nationality, and citizenship laws to disciplinary systems of surveillance, bureaucratic logics of closure, and racist and xenophobic rhetorics of exclusion. The chapter talks about French contemporaries that saw immigrant men and women as an ideal solution to the population crisis, and expected immigrant men to adopt “proper” moral, sexual, and familial comportments necessary to stem the tide of depopulation. It explains how immigrants leveraged what they had in interactions that invoke marriage, family, and their reproductive service to France.

Bachelors, Bureaucrats, and Marrying into the Nation

This chapter recounts the passage of the 1927 Law of Independent Nationality, in which French women who married immigrant men could for the first time retain their French nationality after marriage. It explains how the 1927 law permitted the French women's foreign-born husbands to obtain French citizenship with fewer delays and decreed that the children born of those unions on French soil would automatically become French. It also analyses the state's movement to facilitate intermarriage between Frenchwomen and foreign-born men on a vast scale, using marriage as a means to repopulate France. The chapter discusses the notion of republican motherhood, which held that Frenchwomen could use their influence within the domestic sphere to assimilate their foreign husbands and their half-foreign children into the French nation. It elaborates how intermarriages between Frenchwomen and immigrant men were favorable but indispensable for many Third Republican contemporaries.

Neighborly Networks and Welfare Work under Vichy

This chapter describes the 11th arrondissement that emerged as a sustained official target of rafles or Jewish roundups in consideration of the massive settlement of foreign Jews during the German Occupation of Paris. It discusses the German authorities that collaborated with Paris police forces in orchestrating two especially large rafles from August 20 and 21, 1941, one of which was centered on the onzième. It also mentions the Comité Amelot or the Groupe Amelot as France's first Jewish resistance organization that was founded in June 1940 and pursued social assistance during the war. The chapter explores the activities of the Groupe Amelot and its social workers, which were embedded within larger rescue networks throughout France that involved Jewish and non-Jewish assistantes sociales. It shows the continuities between interwar welfarist activity and wartime resistance work undertaken by female social workers.

Neighborhood, Street Culture, and Melting-Pot Mixité

This chapter traces the social histories of migrant communities in Paris that have been attentive to how urban dynamics of mixed residential life eased the assimilation of foreigners into local society. It explains how sex and gender contributed to the formation of cross-cultural solidarities that established urban mixité in working-class neighborhoods of Paris. It also draws on the rich literature that explores gendered urban dynamics among Parisians in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century capital. The chapter demonstrates how the gendered dynamics of working-class life furnished cross-cultural networks and solidarities that contributed to immigrants' lived experience as reproductive citizens. It describes the tumult of the neighborhoods of Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette, the contiguous Parisian quartiers where foreigners of all national and colonial stripes settled in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Motherhood, Neighborhood, and Nationhood

This chapter recounts the murder of the Tokars in Sainte Marguerite that provides a remarkable window into the social dynamics of apartment life in Paris. It offers a glimpse of the social world of working women and a sense of the female community that was built in the dark hallways, crowded courtyards, and hidden recesses of the Parisian apartment building. It also traces marital disputes, family frays, and neighborly brawls involving immigrant wives and mothers that blend with the everyday history of the neighborhood and its predominantly French-born inhabitants. The chapter describes the working-class culture of want and privation that thrived in the diseased and dilapidated, close and crowded apartment buildings of the 11th arrondissement. It highlights material conditions of everyday life that brought foreign wives and mothers into daily contact with their French neighbors and local community.