The Pariahs of Yesterday: Breton Migrants in Paris by Leslie Page Moch (review)

In The Pariahs of Yesterday, Moch makes her comeback to the history of internal migrations in modern France, to which she had devoted a path-breaking book nearly twenty years ago—Paths to the City: Regional Migration in Nineteenth-Century France (New York, 1983). The title of her latest work comes from an expression coined by François Cadic in 1899 to characterize the regional flow of Breton migrants to Paris who were globally poorer, and condemned to more modest economic niches, than the other native emigrants from the French provinces. They were pariahs because Bretons were the last wave of internal migrants to have experienced a massive attraction to the capital. As such, they constituted the missing link between ancient provincial streams of mobility and twentieth-century foreign and colonial immigration. They were pariahs also because zealous end-of-the-century ideologists and politicians considered Bretons to be a backward Celtic people, who needed to be converted to the great lay, supposedly universal, République, which was then under construction. One anticlerical weekly, L'Assiette au Beurre, treated "the Breton trash [as] the negro of France."

In the 1891 census, 88,000 Bretons were registered in Paris and its blooming suburb. Most of them were (female) servants and (male) unskilled workers, but Moch complicates the picture. Through a sample of marriage certificates allowing her to compare two extremely different areas, she shows the progressive diversification and rise of Bretons' occupations toward skilled and white-collar positions—a process that started early in the socially mixed arrondissement surrounding the Montparnasse station in Paris, eventually reaching Saint-Denis, a working-class town in the north of Paris, during the interwar period. Moch stresses how the demographic diversity of this immigrant population—in terms of fertility, endogamy, and illegitimacy—was related to its local origins. Brittany was divided politically, religiously, and even linguistically (between French and Breton-speaking areas), and its variations segmented the immigrant community in Paris.

By qualifying classical statements about Bretons' social status and homogeneity, Moch, who also uses memoirs and interviews collected around the 1980s, directly questions the cultural and political representations that accompanied their settlement into the Paris region. Her book efficiently unearths a series of forgotten characters—Jean Lemoine, François Cadic, Arsène-Guillaume Trégoat, René Le Fur, Suzanne Ascoët, and Elie Gautier—who both promoted philanthropy among their fellows (charities, clothing banks, employment agencies, and medical care), and acted as their spokespeople through books and newspapers. Most of them were active Catholics, some of them even priests (nuns also played an active part among charities), but Moch does not forget socialist networks, even though she might have devoted more attention to them.

All of those self-designated advocates were struggling against great odds to maintain the dignity of their (imagined) community. The stereotype of the poor, filthy Breton went hand-in-hand with that of the stupid female servant, fluctuating between sexual naivety and excessive sensuality. They soon gave way to mockery of the ridiculous Bécassine, one of the first French comic strips, which was due to become a several-decade-long bestseller. Moch follows the durable traces of these clichés in the most "legitimate" literary writings, from Guy de Maupasssant and Émile Zola to Octave Mirbeau and Roger Martin du Gard. Most interesting is the way in which Moch studies the Breton reaction toward these caricatures. In the 1930s, cinematographic transpositions of these depreciative clichés prompted actual riots from a community whose social and economic integration in Paris was now complete. The time was ripe to transfer the racist burden on other shoulders, Jewish immigrants ranking then at the top of the list.

The book ends in the 1970s, when doubt about modernization accumulated and Republican self-confidence waned: Ethnological testimonies and Celtic music then paved the way to a mix between pride and nostalgia, which in contemporary France characterizes...