Greg Burgess

The Limits of Tolerance

Suspicion and distrust of certain groups of foreign refugees legitimised the imposition of constraints. Their role in civil disturbances was of special concern. In August 1831, 200 Italians led disturbances in Paris, when they expressed, according to the police report, the ‘most contradictory opinions’ against the government. Because a certain number of them posed such a danger to the civil order, the police recommended that they should be removed from the city altogether.1 Elsewhere, troubles among Spanish refugees were particularly alarming. The prefect of police in Perpignan stressed the ‘shameful role’ they played, not for the first time, in local disturbances as they awaited a popular uprising. Their unrest attracted even more refugees, the prefect complained. ‘We see [more] arrive every day at the frontier … under the pretexts of persecutions they have suffered in their own country’. He advised that as a matter of urgency all foreigners should be removal from the city, and be allowed to live no closer than Montpellier.

Remaking Asylum in Post-War France, 1944–52

This article examines the steps by which asylum and the rights of refugees were remade in France after the Liberation. The legacy of the pre-1940 period, in which exclusive practices such as legislative prohibitions on refugees, expulsion and internment were the norm, resulted in the need, after the war, to restate and reaffirm republican principles. The article will examine the ideological assumptions that lay behind the postwar asylum debate, and address why it was necessary to place asylum so firmly within republican political culture.

The foreign presence in the early-industrial Haut-Rhin, 1820–22 a short history from the ‘pre-History’ of immigration to France

An attempt to limit the rights of domiciled foreigners in the Alsatian department of the Haut-Rhin in 1821 provides an opportunity to examine the impact of immigration on early-industrial society and shifting perceptions of the place of foreigners in French society in a period often omitted from histories of immigration. New conceptions of belonging become evident, which demonstrate a turn away from local and subjective bonds to community, towards bonds regulated nationally through nationality law. Imposed in an emerging urban, industrial context, the limitations of rights—on access to the biens communaux and the droit d’affouage—were traditional restrictions of rural society and modes of distinguishing the included from the excluded and were imposed on long-settled foreigners who failed to become naturalized as French citizens. The article reflects on the question why, if the concerns about immigration and industrialization turned on recently arrived foreign workers, these traditional exclusions were imposed on established resident foreigners.

Conclusion The Right of Asylum—A Site of Memory

The reconstitution of the Fourth Republic after the war set down a number of foundation principles to re-establish republican consciousness of human rights and liberties first prescribed in the 1789 Declaration of the Right of Man and the Citizen. Among these were ‘all who are persecuted for the cause of liberty have a right of asylum in the territories of the Republic’. This redressed the failure of asylum in the late 1930s, as did the following paragraph, which assured the right to employment without discrimination ‘on grounds of origin, opinion, or belief’.1 The failure of asylum in the 1930s was a failure of its practice as much as its principles. By withholding a right to work no assurance was given for personal welfare, security, and lawful residence. It can be concluded therefore that the Fourth Republic began from the recognition of wrongs perpetrated against refugees and foreigners, and against French traditions of rights, at the end of the Third Republic. The constitutional guarantees of rights and liberty recalled into French memory the ‘right of asylum’ and made it a fundamental principle of republicanism.

Socialist Revolutionaries, Mass Migration, War: 1870–1920

The mid-nineteenth century marks a historical rupture between migrations of two distinct natures, the political migrations of the age of revolutions, and the popular industrial migrations of the second half of the century. The point of division between them was as much in the French consciousness of migration as it was in the character and composition of the migrants. The social movements of mid-nineteenth century, the rationale behind the 1849 nationality law suggests, exposed France to the unintended outcomes of migration, the most alarming of which was the undesirable foreigner who benefited from French hospitality but was really a threat to the stability of its social and political order, and, most importantly, over whom France had limited control.

Asylum, Empire, and Restoration

The Napoleonic Empire and the Bourbon Restoration, both faced two problems of asylum: the inheritance of refugees, and along with them the ideals of political asylum forged in the cosmopolitan fervour of the revolution; and the asylum of new refugee communities produced by new political ruptures. In neither was there a return to monarchical asylum, although the nation was centred in the person of the emperor and the restored monarchy just as in the old regime the nation had been centred in the king. These were very different regimes with very different responses to refugees. The empire had taken the French nation into Europe to spread its revolutionary ideals in foreign monarchies. In doing so, it attracted to it adherents and collaborators, willing participants in the French occupation of their countries and eager agents in the remaking their own nations. The Restoration wound back the empire to France’s former frontiers; it was a conservative and pacific monarchy, whose political culture was organised around constitutionalism, the law, and new institutional structures. It inherited refugees from the empire, and it received new refugees from the unfolding of empire and the suppression of the forces the empire had ignited.

Exiles and Patriots

The Dutch Patriots who had taken refuge in northern France in 1787 experienced the most dramatic shifts in asylum. Originally received and assisted by the monarchy the terms of their asylum were renegotiated under the revolutionary government of the National Assembly. At the same time, the revolution exposed serious fractures among the Dutch, rupturing relations between their elites, and breaking the bonds of trust and deference to their protector, Louis XVI.

Reform, Renewal, and the End of Asylum

Restrictionists had gained the upper hand, but voices advocating reform to take immigration policy away from these restrictionist tendencies could still be heard, most prominently within the socialist and communist parties. They argued for more humanity in public responses, and their contributions to public discourses about migration and asylum suggests that Schor’s assessment of the divergence on the question of right of asylum does not go far enough. The political left and right were separated by more than divisions over the function of asylum, that is, the how and when admission should be allowed and to whom it should be allowed. These voices of reform intended a return to the fundamental principles of asylum. The right’s negation of asylum went well beyond the exclusionist tendencies of public policy; it also amounted to the negation of the principles asylum had traditionally signified. The neglect of these principles, the advocates of reform insisted, continued the exclusionist drift in policy. Asylum, they argued, was above all invested with ideals that recognised the innate right of refugees to protection from the sources of their troubles, which in turn imposed an obligation on their protecting state to recognise their rights and to respect their humanity in domestic law and public policy. The arguments for the reform of immigration policy first and foremost aimed to reinvigorate asylum with these ideals.

Migration and Asylum After the Great War

Refugees came in greatest numbers from those countries where change was most profound and most violent: from the Soviet Union and its ideological remaking of the old Russian Empire; from the Turkish republic, created out of the Ottoman empire; from the rise of Mussolini’s Fascists in Italy; from the violent race policies of Nazi Germany. They were victims of great events, a civil population displaced by ideological ruptures and refused a place in the future of the new and reformed nation-states.

The German Refugee Crisis, 1933–5

Refugees began to flee Germany from the moment of Hitler’s assumption of power in January 1933. Their flight intensified after the Nazi consolidation in March. The rush to ‘de-judaise’ the German arts, civil service, and education, and the 1 April 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses, signalled for many German Jews the urgent need to leave.1 Others the Nazis would not tolerate also fled, democrats, socialists, pacifists, academics, journalists, Catholic priests, and Protestant pastors—roughly 15 per cent of the total number of refugees in 1933.2 In response, the French Foreign Ministry instructed its consular officials in Germany to deal urgently with applications for entry visas. The Interior Ministry invited the prefects of the eastern departments to receive without reserve refugees from across the Rhine.3 These initial instructions were issued in the belief that the flight from Germany was temporary and that special measures were only required to deal with an abnormally high demand for entry visas. Yet demand remained high as the year progressed and, on several occasions, the French government affirmed its traditions of hospitality in the face of this rising human tide.4