Reinventing the Republic: Gender, Migration, and Citizenship in France (review)

The struggles of France’s sans-papiers (undocumented immigrants) gained national and international attention in August 1996 when riot police expelled three hundred sans-papiers from the church of Saint-Bernard in Paris. Catherine Raissiguier’s book examines the sans-papiers movement, focusing on the participation of women — the sans-papières. Raissiguier contends that the sans-papiers’ approach to combating exclusion and demanding rights is notable in two respects: first, by their refusal to remain silent and in the shadows; and second, by their redefining of the terms of the debate on citizenship. She argues that the ‘sans-papiers are not staking their claims on the basis of belonging to a national community or on the basis of status citizenship but rather on the rights that “being here” affords them’ (p. 10). By adopting a feminist approach to her analysis, Raissiguier highlights the often overlooked role and contributions of the sans-papières in the movement, as well as the hurdles, such as gender bias, that they had to overcome. This rigorous study brings to the fore the precarious situations that many sans-papières face in France. This is due notably to France’s increasingly restrictive and ‘racialized’ immigration laws and the fact that most of the women came to France as part of family reunification, meaning that ‘their immigration, citizenship, income-generating power, and social benefits are connected to the status of a male family member’ (p. 60). The author’s field work, in the form of in-depth interviews with sans-papières, convincingly supports this contention. Despite the sans-papières’ important contributions to the struggle, however, their voices are conspicuously absent from the media and public discourse. Raissiguier’s analysis of cartoons and media stories about postcolonial immigrant women in France is telling, and reveals that sans-papières tend to be ‘framed’ in such a way as to point to immigration as a problem in France, and to African immigration in particular as a threat to the French nation. Raissiguier’s analysis of the sans-papiers movement and her critique of French immigration laws also function as part of a larger critique of the French Republican tradition. She argues that the ‘racially inflected forms of exclusion’ that result from French immigration and nationality laws are ‘constitutive’ of the French Republican tradition rather than simply being anomalies (p. 5). In the book’s final chapter, Raissiguier argues that this is also the case for other forms of exclusion resulting from homophobia and sexism. She sets out to consider the intersection of racism, homophobia, and sexism in France by examining the debates surrounding the parity and PaCS (Pactes civils de solidarité) movements, arguing that there needs to be collaboration and overlap between different movements vying for social change and inclusion. Although this chapter raises some interesting points, it could be further developed and seems out of place in the work as a whole, as it largely diverges from the book’s main focus on the sans-papiers movement. Overall, with the depth of research and new angles that it introduces, this book constitutes an important contribution to the study of immigration in France and the sans-papiers movement in particular.