Femina migrans: German Domestic Servants in Paris, 1870–1914, a Case Study

Mobility has a long tradition on the European continent. Recent historical research shows migration as a “normal and structural element of human societies throughout history.”¹ Among these people on the move were young men and women working as servants and domestics in farm or urban households. Before the nineteenth century most of them covered shorter distances and thus participated in a rural-rural movement, not yet fully explored by historical research.² Beginning in the late eighteenth century the steady extension of a bourgeois lifestyle imitating noble habits lead to an increasing demand for domestics in many urban middle-class households.³ Due to rural overpopulation and the poverty that accompanied it, the nineteenth century saw a rising number of single young women migrating mostly—but not exclusively—from the countryside to the towns. The improved transportation infrastructure supported this migration movement. Thus, domestic work became the main way of integrating young rural women into urban wage-working. It was also the main reason for women to migrate.⁴ In the 1880s between 30 percent and 40 percent of all women employed in Europe were working in city households.⁵ Working as a domestic was hence an experience shared by great numbers of young women in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Long unattended by historical research, migration of women and especially of domestics is now explored through family, cultural, gender, and transnational history, as well as historical demography.⁶Femina migrans was a decisive agent.⁷ Women acted independently and were as aware of their labor market value and the higher wages they could realize abroad as their male counterparts.”⁸

This article aims to take a close look at German-speaking domestics in Paris from 1870 to 1914. Although the labor market for foreign domestics, it was said, was firmly ruled by the German Fräulein, this migration is nowadays almost forgotten. German domestics in Paris shared to a large extent the same experiences as other migrant domestic servants elsewhere in Europe at that time. Yet the hostile political background after the Franco-German war in 1870–71 distinguished the German domestic’s stay in Paris considerably from the experience of other national groups in other countries. Based on some rare autobiographical sources presented in the first part of the article, several points brought up by recent research on migration and domestics can be confirmed and explored throughout this article: German domestics in Paris showed high mobility and adaptability to the labor market as well as to actual (political) circumstances. They also built and maintained long–lasting informal networks that helped them get along in a strange and often hostile environment. Migrant domestics’ agency can therefore be strongly highlighted. German domestics experienced differences on a social, religious, and gender level, and they were especially exposed to the effects of growing nationalism in France and in Germany in the aftermath of the war in 1870–71. Not only did nation and language play the most important roles in the development of the young women’s identities, but they also caused German charitable institutions to strengthen the links of the migrants with the newly founded Kaiserreich.

Sources

Any historical work on the Germans in Paris in the nineteenth century is based on incomplete sources—due to fires during the Paris Commune and two waves of expulsion of the German population from Paris, once during the Franco-German war of 1870–71 and again at the beginning of World War I.⁹ As a result of these enforced, hasty departures many documents are now lost. Although they are somewhat dispersed, there are, however, sources on German maids living in Paris. These can be arranged into four groups: autobiographical sources, charity organization sources, contemporary observers’ sources, and official statistics.

There are very few autobiographical sources—letters written and received by young women, personal diaries and accounts—even though reading and writing were important parts of a maid’s life.¹⁰ They were a means of passing the time before and after work and during a break. Writing was also...