Toward Social Peace and Prosperity

Alone in Western Europe and against a world-wide trend toward restricting migrations, France encouraged a great wave of immigration in the decade after World War I. From a prewar high of 1.18 million foreigners in 1911 (or 2.9 per cent of the population), the number rose to 2.98 million in 1931 (or 6.6 per cent).1 Much of this increase can be understood as compensation for France's drastic loss of productive population during the war. Yet postwar immigration was much more than simply a short-term adjustment in French demographic conditions; rather it signified a radical departure from prewar forms of immigration and French attitudes toward foreign labor. While before the war immigration was primarily a free moverpent of populations adjacent to France into border labor markets, postwar immigration was a greatly expanded but regulated influx of foreign workers throughout the French economy. Furthermore, although immigration and its control was a hotly debated issue before 1914, by the 1920s most French recognized that a regulated flow of foreign workers was essential to French prosperity. Two broad and interrelated factors explain these changes: 1) the intervention of the state in the foreign labor market and 2) tentative moves toward corporatism2-the cooperative effort of disparate

Development economics · Economic history · Economics · Immigration · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Prosperity · Sociology · World War II · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender

• C hinese Labour in W orld W ar I F rance and the Fluctuations of Historical Memory

  Open Access•Paul J Bailey, Paul Bailey•Studies in Ethnicity and…•2014

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