Reproducing the French Race: Immigrants, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (review)

When historians of France probe the intersection of race and immigration, they tend to do so with reference to the period after 1945. In the three postwar decades, the percentage of immigrants who came from countries outside Europe increased dramatically as a proportion of the total immigrant population, while the number of foreigners in France doubled. The experiences of the first postwar generation of immigrants, who were often North African male workers relegated to low-skilled jobs and segregated, low-quality housing, and of their French-born offspring, called into question the universal applicability of the French Republican values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The issue of immigration gradually bled into one of race, and this has had profound consequences for French political, cultural, and social life in the last 35 years.

In her Reproducing the French Race, Elisa Camiscioli challenges this periodization by arguing that race was crucial to understandings of and debates about immigration in the four decades preceding the Second World War. During this period of mass migrations, France became (in the mid-1920s) the leading destination of immigrants in the industrialized world, the majority of whom were white Europeans. Drawing on recent scholarship on race, Camiscioli argues that foreigners, including white Europeans, were evaluated in racialized ways during the early 20th century and "assigned race" in a manner pointing to the Vichy regime, which emerged out of defeat in 1940 and persecuted Jews. Employing the latest scholarship on gender, sexuality, the body, biopolitics, and national identity, she further urges historians to recognize that immigrant workers were evaluated not simply for their productive value to the French economy but also for their reproductive value to a nation consumed with the spectre of demographic decline. In Reproducing the French Race, bodies and bodily practices and the intimate acts of the private realm, including childbearing and chil-drearing, become central to racemaking, nation-building, and the construction of national identity.

The book situates the discussion within the interdisciplinary literatures mentioned above, dispatching historical discussions of immigration in France in two sentences. Five intricate, linked chapters analyze discourses reflecting anxieties about immigration and the presence of foreigners in France during the early decades of the 20th century. The first chapter focuses on pronatalist debates over the consequences of immigration. Camiscioli illustrates how fears over demographic decline, which began to haunt French life in the last third of the 19th century, prompted a diverse group of pronatalists to look to foreigners to replenish the French population and regenerate the "French race," a term she traces to the late 19th century. In this effort, only white Europeans were suitable for immigration and assimilation, and they were positioned in an elaborate racial hierarchy which rewarded the top spots to Italians and Spaniards, who were viewed as Latin, white, and highly fertile.

The second chapter, which maps the shifting ways foreign workers and their labour were evaluated and categorized, will be of particular interest to labour historians. In contrast to earlier periods, when European immigrant workers were commonly associated with certain skills or trades depending on their nation of origin, Camiscioli illustrates how early 20th-century work scientists, industrialists, and investigators from the Ministry of Labour produced studies establishing clear, racialized hierarchies of workers that always drew clear distinctions between workers who were deemed white and those who were not. These studies, which began in the decade before the First World War and expanded after the wartime arrival of 660,000 foreign (male) workers from across the globe, ranked these workers according to place of origin and, especially, race. This pseudo-scientific research was saturated with bias. Thus Indochinese workers were portrayed as docile, submissive, and feminine; workers "of the Arab race" were seen as suitable for agricultural labour; and Africans and Asians were deemed unfit for factory labour. Camiscioli uses this material to argue that the labouring body was not a neutral, unmarked subject, as some historians have argued, but...