Abstract
Until 1945, sub-Saharan African and Caribbean migrants to France were especially soldiers and professionals. During World Wars I and II, thousands had answered the call to save the mère patrie. After each War, however, most of the soldiers were quickly dismissed.1 A few, such as the former Senegalese writer and president Leopold Senghor, remained in France, mingling with other black professionals, intellectuals, and artists from francophone Africa, the French Antilles, and the United States. 2 By 1960 the black migrant community in France was still relatively small (about fifty thousand), 3 consisting mostly of students, professionals, and a few low-skilled African workers typically recruited by car factories and naval companies. While the car factories used the Africans as temporary summer replacement, 4 naval companies often hired the men as soutiers (coal room workers) and manoeuvres (manual laborers), two unpopular trades among French seamen.5
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Notes
Eric Deroo and Antoine Champeaux, La force noire: Gloire et infortunes d, une légende coloniale (Paris: Editions Tallandier, 2006).
For a general overview, see Pascal Blanchard, Eric Deroo, and Gilles Manceron, Le Paris noir (Paris: Hazan, 2001).
For a discussion of the French Antillean and sub-Saharan African relation to the French since the onset of enslavement to the end of colonization, see William Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Raoul Girardet, L’ idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris: Hachette, 1978); and Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); and Clarence Mumford, The Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the French West Indies, 1625–1713 (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 1991).
Françoise Ega, Lettre à une Noire: récit antillais (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1978), 137.
For recent texts in French about the African Diaspora in France, see Francois Durpaire, France blanche colère noire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006); Claude Ribbe, Les nègres de la République (Monaco: Alphée, 2007); Bernard Zongo, Mensonges et vérites sur la question noire en France: Ma réponse à Gaston Kelman (Paris: Asphalte, 2006); Boubacar Diop, Négrophobie (Paris: Arènes, 2005); and Jean-Louis SagotDuvauroux, On ne nait pas noir, on le devient (Paris: Albin Michel, 2004).
See Gary Cross, Immigrant Workers in Industrial France: The Making of a New Laboring Class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); William Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Vincent Viet, La France immigrée, construction d’une politique 1914–1997 (Paris: Fayard, 1998); and PaulAndré Rosental, L’ intelligence démographique: Sciences et politiques des populations en France, 1930–1960 (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003).
Jacques Valdour, Atelier et Taudis de la banlieue de Paris (Paris, 1923).
Tyler Stovall, “The Color Line Behind the Line: Racial Violence in France During the Great War,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 737–69.
Quoted from Elisa Camiscoli, “Reproducing the ‘French Race’: Immigration and Pronatalism in Early-Twentieth-Century France,” in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, eds. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005), 225.
Martin Schain “Immigration and Trade Union in France: A Problem and an Opportunity,” in A Century of Organized Labor in France: A Union Movement for the Twenty-First Century?, eds. Erick Chapman, Mark Kesselman, and Martin Schain (New York: St. Martin Press, 1998), 97–114.
Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–62 (New York: MacMillan Press, 1997), 84.
Phillip Dewitte, Les mouvement nègres en France, 1919–1939 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985); and Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929); and Ousmane Sembène, Black Docker (London: Heinemann Educational, 1987).
Samba Gadjigo, Ralph Faulkingham, Thomas Cassirer, and Reinhard Sander, eds., Ousmane Sembène Dialogues with Critics and Writers (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). Also, one must note that Ousmane Sembène’s agency in the CGT branch in Marseilles was certainly related to the union’s own anticolonial position. Throughout the countries colonized by France, especially Guinea, Senegal, and Cameroon, the CGT had satellite operations concerned with the working conditions of colonial workers. In fact, it is through the CGT’s antenna in Africa that many of the first generation postcolonial leaders and top officials were able to gain popular support for effectively spreading a nationalist consciousness. See Elizabeth Schmidt, “Top Down or Bottom Up? Nationalist Mobilization Reconsidered, with Special Reference to Guinea (French West Africa),” American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (October 2005): 975–1014.
The CFDT or French Democratic Confederation of Labour was created in 1964 when the majority of the members of the Christian union Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens (CFTC) decided to become secular.
Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail, Perspective Socialiste (January 1964).
For the repercussion of the drame d’aubervillier, see Yvan Gasteau, “Les bidonvilles, lieux d’exclusion et de marginalité en France durant les trente glorieuses” cahiers de la meditréranée vol. 69, May 2006.
Archive de la Confédération Général du Travail, A 22g Box, Immigrés travailleurs en France, “Pour Défendre plus Efficacement les Travailleurs Immigrés de la Métalurgie de la Seine,” January 1963.
Bureau pour le Développement des Migrations Interressant les Département d’Outre Mer, Bulletin D’ information (Paris, 1967).
Jacklyn Cock, Maids and Madams: Domestic Workers under Apartheid (London: The Women’s Press, 1989).
The issue of day laborers’ exploitation concerns primarily advanced capitalist nations. These countries such as the United States, England, and France usually have a pool of undocumented migrants who can be used as cheap labor to perform the task that most nationals refuse to do. See Abel Valenzuela, “Day Labor Work,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 307–33.
Union Générale des Travailleurs Sénégalais en France, Le livre des travailleurs Africains en France (Paris: Edition François Maspéro, 1970).
Chris Howell, Regulating Labor: The State and Industrial Relations Reform in Postwar France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Odile Merckling, Immigration et marché du travail: le developpement de la flexibilite en France (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998).
Pierre Bourdieu, Homo academicus (Paris: Minuit, 1984); and Roger Gregroire, Worker–Student Action Committees, France, May 1968 (Detroit: Black & Red, 1970).
Alain Touraine, Le mouvement de mai ou le communisme utopique (Paris: Edition le Seuil, 1968).
For instance, see Kristin Ross, May 1968 and its Afterlives (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002); Bernard Brillant, Les clercs de 68 (Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 2003); and Luis Gruel, La Rébellion de 68 une relecture sociologique (Rennes: Presse Universitaire de Rennes, 2004).
Margaret Atack, May 68 in French Fiction and Film: Rethinking Society, Rethinking Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 9.
Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort, and Cornelius Castoriadis, Mai 68: La brèche (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1988); Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969); and Alain Touraine, The May Movement: Revolt and Reform (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1979).
Marie-Claire Lavabre and Henri Rey, Les Mouvements de 1968 (Firenze: Casterman, 1998).
Regarding postwar women’s movements, Myra Marx Ferree and Carol McClurg Mueller argue that transnational exchanges among women’s organizations in the previous decades played a key role in the remobilization of women in the 1970s. See Myra Marx Ferree and Carol McClurg Mueller, “Feminism and the Women’s Movement: A Global Perspective,” in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, eds. David Snow, Sarah Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 576–607. Recently, Arjun Appadurai has demonstrated how the circulation of ideas and images across national boundaries shapes identity and sociopolitical processes. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Appadurai, ed., Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
Throughout the 1960s, each year about five thousand Antilleans migrated by themselves, and another five thousand came with the BUMIDOM’s help. See Bureau pour le Développement des Migrations Interressant les Département d’Outre Mer, Mises au point (no month of publication given, 1972).
CASODOM, 1955–2001 45eme anniversaire du comité d’action sociale en faveur des originaires des départements d’outre-mer en métropole (Paris, 2001).
Alizé Bulletin de la Fédération Antillo-Guy anaise des Etudiants Catholiques, “L’émigration des Antillais vers la France,” December 1966–January 1967, 20.
Bureau pour le Développement des Migrations Interréssant les Département D’Outre Mer, Bulletin D’ information (Paris, 1967).
Fieldwork interview, Paris, May 2004. One should also note that Jean Pierre N’Diaye authored a text about African students in Paris in the 1960s. Jean Pierre N’Diaye, Enquete sur les étudiants noirs en France (Paris: Edition Réalites Africaine, 1962).
For a discussion of the social unrest in the foy ers, see Oumar Dia, Yakare: L’autobiographie d’Oumar (Paris: François Maspéro, 1982); and Michel Samuel, Le prolétariat africain noir en France (Paris: François Maspéro, 1978).
One should note that there were a few conservative student associations. For example, the Jeunesse du Mouvement Populaire de la Revolution supported their government headed by the infamous Joseph Mobutu. Centre des Archives Contemporaines, Fontainebleau, Box 19870799, art. 24.
Alizé Bulletin de la Fédération Antillo-Guy anaise des Etudiants Catholiques, May–June 1968.
Alizé Bulletin de la Fédération Antillo-Guy anaise des Etudiants Catholiques, May–June 1968.
Robin D.G. Kelley, “ ‘Afric’s Sons with Banner Red’: African-American Communists and the Politics of Culture, 1919–1934,” in Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, eds. Sidney Lemelle and Robin D.G. Kelley (New York: Verso, 1994), 37.
Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, Nanterre, pièce 9.899, “Congrè des Antillais et Guyanais résidant en France.”
The Group d’Organization Nationale de Guadeloupe (GONG) was the major independentist organization, while the Amicale Generale des Travailleurs Antillais et Guyanais (AGTAG) was the largest autonomist organization.
During my fieldwork research the current BUMIDOM archivist pointed out that certain documents printed before 1970 were destroyed during the May 1968 take over .
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© 2008 Wendy Pojmann
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Germain, F. (2008). For the Nation and for Work: Black Activism in Paris of the 1960s. In: Pojmann, W. (eds) Migration and Activism in Europe Since 1945. Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615540_2
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