Since the 19th century, immigrants as “scapegoats for Franco-French crises”

He was called “the barbarian”, “the metic”, “the Rital” or “the bicot”; he is now called the undocumented, the asylum “fraudster” or the “scum” of the suburbs. Since France opened its doors to immigration at the end of the 19^e century, the “other”, whether a newcomer or a descendant of migrants, has many faces – but all, or almost all, are negative. The Italians of 1880, the Poles of 1930, the Algerians of 1960 or the Malians of 2020 are often accused of constituting a threat to social cohesion, competition on the labor market, or even a danger to the homeland.

Since the first great waves of immigration in the III^e Republic, workers born beyond the borders of France are, in fact, considered as “identity and cultural spoilsports », according to the expression of the researchers Hélène Bertheleu and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden. In political speeches, scholarly works, newspaper articles or popular novels, these “uprooted », writes the historian Gérard Noiriel in French Le Creuset (Le Seuil, 1988), are often victims of the worried, mocking, condescending, even hostile looks of those who, because of their birth, have ” standards for them ».

Their stories and nationalities hardly matter: prejudices about Belgian miners at the end of the 19th century^e century look like two drops of water to those that targeted the Algerian workers of the “glorious thirty” or the young people of today’s suburbs. “Since 1870, we observe a great permanence of stereotypes, observes Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, emeritus research director at the CNRS and teacher at the Center for International Research (CERI) at Sciences Po. The Italians of the 1880s and the Poles of the 1930s were leveled with the same reproaches that are leveled at the Arabs today: they live among themselves, they are violent, they have an obscurantist religious practice that threatens secularism French. »

Imaginary of distinction

How is this figure of the other created? Why has France, since the end of the 19th^e century, builds borders that separate it, not from the passing visitor to whom it offers hospitality, but from the foreigner who “claims to settle down and thus become a relative”, as historian Laurent Dornel writes. How was this imaginary based on the distinction, even the hierarchy, between “them” and “us” formed? Born in the wake of the first waves of immigration, at the beginning of the III^e Republic, these social representations have been shaped, over the decades, by the jolts of history – and by crises.

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