Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Latin America Otherwise) - Softcover

Camiscioli, Elisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082234565X ISBN 13: 9780822345657

Verlag: Combined Academic Publ., 2009

Inhaltsangabe

In Reproducing the French Race

, Elisa Camiscioli argues that immigration was a defining feature of early-twentieth-century France, and she examines the political, cultural, and social issues implicated in public debates about immigration and national identity at the time. Camiscioli demonstrates that mass immigration provided politicians, jurists, industrialists, racial theorists, feminists, and others with ample opportunity to explore questions of French racial belonging, France’s relationship to the colonial empire and the rest of Europe, and the connections between race and national anxieties regarding depopulation and degeneration. She also shows that discussions of the nation and its citizenry consistently returned to the body: its color and gender, its expenditure of labor power, its reproductive capacity, and its experience of desire. Of paramount importance was the question of which kinds of bodies could assimilate into the “French race.”

By focusing on telling aspects of the immigration debate, Camiscioli reveals how racial hierarchies were constructed, how gender figured in their creation, and how only white Europeans were cast as assimilable. Delving into pronatalist politics, she describes how potential immigrants were ranked according to their imagined capacity to adapt to the workplace and family life in France. She traces the links between racialized categories and concerns about industrial skills and output, and she examines medico-hygienic texts on interracial sex, connecting those to the crusade against prostitution and the related campaign to abolish “white slavery,” the alleged entrapment of (white) women for sale into prostitution abroad. Camiscioli also explores the debate surrounding the 1927 law that first made it possible for French women who married foreigners to keep their French nationality. She concludes by linking the Third Republic’s impulse to create racial hierarchies to the emergence of the Vichy regime.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elisa Camiscioli is Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Binghamton University.

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""Reproducing the French Race" skillfully traces underlying connections among immigration, gender, and national identity in interwar France, while fundamentally refiguring seemingly settled scholarship on pronatalism and labor rationalization by demonstrating the still under-recognized centrality of race to them. Elisa Camiscioli has written an accomplished and ambitious work that integrates issues typically treated separately into an innovative argument about 'embodiment' that challenges conventional assumptions about French republicanism as essentially abstract and universal."--Gary Wilder, author of "The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars"

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REPRODUCING the FRENCH RACE

Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth CenturyBy ELISA CAMISCIOLI

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4565-7

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.............................................................................ixINTRODUCTION Embodiment and the Nation.....................................................11. Immigration, Demography, and Pronatalism.................................................212. Labor Power and the Racial Economy.......................................................513. Hybridity and Its Discontents............................................................754. Black Migrants, White Slavery: Mtissage in the Metropole and Abroad.....................995. Intermarriage, Independent Nationality, and Individual Rights............................129CONCLUSION Gender, Race, and Republican Embodiment.........................................155NOTES.......................................................................................161BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................197INDEX.......................................................................................223

Chapter One

IMMIGRATION, DEMOGRAPHY, AND PRONATALISM

In December 1915 the deputy, demographer, and future minister Adolphe Landry (Gauche Radical, Corsica) submitted a bill to the Chamber of Deputies that encapsulated what he believed to be the most significant dilemma posed by mass immigration to France:

Every nation has the very legitimate concern of protecting itself as much as possible from foreign infiltrations that may alter its composition. Such a desire is especially understandable for those nations that rightly consider themselves to hold an elevated place in the order of civilization. For these nations (and we are proud to count the French nation among them), certain mixings can only lead to its degradation ... If foreign workers must mix with the French population, if their arrival in France is to introduce new elements into our race, it is necessary that these elements not be of the kind that will profoundly alter or debase the race. Thus we must endeavor to only introduce into France workers from countries whose civilization is related to ours, or those whose origin can elevate our civilization.

Landry's bill is representative of the dominant discourse on immigration in early-twentieth-century France. In the context of what contemporaries described as a "demographic crisis," Landry held that citizens as well as workers were desperately needed by the underpopulated French nation. He therefore formulated the immigrant question with reference to both the labor power and the reproductive value of potential foreigners. Along with a wide array of politicians, industrialists, social scientists, jurists, and racial theorists whom we will examine in the course of this book, Landry agreed that because of demographic decline, immigrants who came to work in France must be assimilable and able to produce French offspring. However, as Landry warned in his proposal, foreigners could contribute either positively or negatively to the "French race," depending upon their origin. If the cultural patrimony and ontological quality of some immigrants were akin to those of the French, he cautioned that the profound difference of other foreigners rendered them inassimilable.

The growing importance of assimilability in this discourse reflected the widespread panic created by depopulation, as social critics with pronatalist convictions lamented the steady drop in French births and the "individualistic" nature of French men and women, which in their view had encouraged the trend toward smaller families. They argued that depopulation had social as well as economic consequences, such as shortages of husbands for French women, young men for the army, and children for the future labor force. Despite the deeply nationalistic character of the pronatalist movement, its leaders conceded that to mitigate the effects of the demographic crisis on the labor market and the French family, the importation of foreign workers was a necessary, though temporary, solution.

This chapter will show how the immigrant question of the early twentieth century intersected with the overtly populationist agenda of Republican France. The modern state's obsession with a "political knowledge" centered on population and its regulation is a primary thesis of the social theorist Michel Foucault. His definition of "biopolitics" explicitly referred to the state's efforts to monitor the birthrate of its citizens,5 while in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, the less than fecund "Malthusian couple" is an integral category of analysis. This calls our attention to the biopolitical state's newfound investment in the various "checks" on population outlined by the political economist Thomas Malthus in the late eighteenth century, and especially to the "neo-Malthusian" practice of birth control as a means to limit population growth. Throughout this chapter I draw upon Foucault's description of the state's populationist imperative to show how the immigrant question was consistently framed with reference to neo-Malthusianism and fecundity, birthrate and potential human capital, and corporeal and national vigor.

By the late nineteenth century the state's power and international influence were no longer measured with reference to its productivity alone. In Europe populationist discourse equating demographic strength with international prominence had become increasingly common, and as a consequence the female sphere of reproduction and the intimate life of domestic space assumed a more conspicuous role in national and imperial politics. An expanding corps of social hygiene reformers turned its attention to the health and well-being of the general population, and specifically to the nation's children and mothers. In accordance with the populationist imperative described by Foucault, these "experts" evaluated the reproductive capital of the citizenry with an eye to ameliorating the quality and quantity of the population. This biopolitical climate was intensified by the prevalence of degeneration theory in several European nations, which pathologized depopulation, high infant mortality rates, venereal disease, and alcoholism. We will see that in France, where the rhetoric of demographic decline was particularly strident, a wide range of social commentators contributed to an explicitly racialized discussion of how to rebuild the citizen body.

No European nation experienced demographic decline more acutely than France, and the casualties of the First World War, added to an already low birthrate, exacerbated French anxieties. By the end of the nineteenth century the French population was reproducing itself at the lowest rate in the world. From 1911 to 1938 it had increased by only two million inhabitants, despite the addition of 1.7 million people through the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. On the eve of the Great War the average French family was composed of two children, and in 1926, only three families out of ten could claim three or more offspring. French demographic growth in this period was largely due to immigration. The census of 1931 counted 808,000 Italians, 508,000 Poles, and 352,000 Spaniards, to name the most numerous groups. In the interwar period nearly three million foreigners...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Combined Academic Publ.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 082234565X
• ISBN 13: 9780822345657
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland