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  • Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century
  • Edward Ousselin
Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century. By Elisa Camiscioli. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. xi + 227 pp., ill. Hb $77.95. Pb $22.95.

The starting point of Elisa Camiscioli's book is now well known, having been thoroughly investigated by such researchers as Gérard Noiriel: after the First World War, large-scale immigration allowed French society to recover, in demographic and economic terms, from the wartime death toll of 1.4 million and from a historically low birth rate. Immigration thus became not just a salient social phenomenon, but also led to racially tinged debates over its effect on 'national identity' (an issue recently renewed, for obvious electoral purposes, by President Sarkozy and his government). Most studies of immigration in France tend to focus on the intersection of race and class. In this respect France is similar to the United States in that it has absorbed successive waves of immigrants from different parts of the world. In both countries immigrants generally began on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. What distinguishes Camiscioli's study is that it privileges the analysis of race and gender, with a compelling argument that, during debates over immigration, the image and the roles of French women were portrayed as crucially important. On the one hand, women were presumed to facilitate the assimilation into French society of the immigrants they married and of the children they bore. On the other, the nation and its women were to be preserved from intimate contact with non-white immigrants: 'the integrity of the imperial nation was reflected in the sexual modesty of white women' (p. 127). Public discourse on immigration was partly structured around corporal metaphors: while it was necessary for the regeneration of the national body, immigration, if left uncontrolled, also carried the threat of allowing into the country large numbers of immigrants — of African and Asian origin, obviously — who were deemed to be inassimilable. Camiscioli uses the category of 'embodiment' to explore both the ways in which the state became increasingly concerned with personal or intimate issues (within and outside of marriage) and to explain the apparent conceptual disconnection between the principle of French universalism [End Page 282] and the practice of racial discrimination in the context of immigration. The author argues that both universalism and particularism were part of the political discourse and practice of the Third Republic. The lofty rhetoric of its stated values coexisted with racist policies throughout the French colonial empire. Camiscioli, therefore, finds a degree of continuity between the Republic and the Vichy regime: 'racialization and racism were familiar features of the Republican landscape, not aberrant ideologies which would only garner popular, institutional, and state support under Nazi occupation and Pétain's leadership' (p. 159). Among other topics explored in Reproducing the French Race, the issue of the nationality of French women who married foreigners is especially interesting. As Camiscioli details, this issue was mostly framed in demographic terms and led to a 1927 law that allowed women married to foreigners to keep their French citizenship (thereby reversing the rule established by the 1804 Code civil). In a country obsessed with increasing its population, retaining citizens (and their child-bearing capacities) was of paramount concern.

Edward Ousselin
Western Washington University
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