'French like the others': Colonial Migrants in Wartime France, 1939-1947

This dissertation explores the largely unknown history of how migrants from across the colonial empire experienced the Second World War in France. By the 1930s France possessed the second-largest colonial empire in the world. Although people from across the French empire had resided in the métropole during the interwar period, the declaration of war against Nazi Germany in September 1939 necessitated the recruitment of thousands more French colonial subjects to serve as workers for the war effort. There were perhaps 100,000 from across the French empire living in France at the start of the war, and this number swelled to more than 140,000 by June 1940. While historians have recently begun to uncover the history of migration between France and its colonies, this is the first study to comparatively examine the heterogeneous mix of Southeast Asians and North Africans living on metropolitan soil. Placing colonial migration in a comparative framework reveals the extent to which racial perceptions and hierarchies within French colonial thought impacted the existence of people of color in France. I have deliberately eschewed previous ways of examining how colonialism affected French society, which tend to favor representation or exoticism, and instead constructed a social history of race and immigration geared around daily life. Utilizing over twenty public and private archival collections, this dissertation is focused on quotidian interactions between colonial workers, French men and women, employers, and officials from the French state. This reveals the dynamic between local and national issues in shaping the experience of colonial migrants in France; gives insight into how access to food, employment and social welfare was determined by colonial status; and the extent to which fears over policing, health, and non-white migration animated exclusionary policies. This dissertation argues that France should be viewed as a colonial and metropolitan space where migrants from across the empire met forms of colonial knowledge, power, and discipline. Focusing on the inherent tension between France and its empire, rather than constructing an intellectual framework that subsumes France and empire together, reveals the true impact of colonialism on metropolitan society. My focus on the 1930s and 1940s, which crosses the Third Republic, Vichy and Liberation eras, demonstrates the treatment of colonial migrants was not just about specific political regimes but firmly rooted in entrenched racial stereotypes of North Africans and Vietnamese that persist in France today.Ph