| Description |
During the first four decades of the twentieth century, Muslim North Africans were French colonial subjects and started to become a sizable minority in France. A few thousand in the first decade, France brought over 300,000 of them to Europe as soldiers and workers during World War I. Though many returned to their homes in Algeria, Tunisia, or Morocco after the war, French officials of the interwar period found the status quo ante bellum of a negligible Muslim presence in France unattainable. Their numbers in metropolitan France never dropped below 50,000 again and continued to rise from the 1920s through the 1930s. This dissertation argues that although historians have generally interpreted this history as one of foreign immigration to France, categorizing it primarily as such imposes a postcolonial and anachronistic understanding of France and North Africa on the time period. Further, it does not fully reflect how French society and North Africans both saw this migration: as a movement of colonial subjects within a single imperial nation-state. As such, it is better to think of this as a colonial and transnational history as much as one of migration, and the metropolitan "capital of the colonies," Marseille, illustrates this. The port city served as the gateway in and out of France for Muslim North Africans and had a Muslim colonial population second only to Paris. The city's officials looked to colonial administrators and experts in governing them, thus bringing imperial practices to metropolitan France that included views on hygiene, policing, and preventing North Africans from integrating as citizens. Meanwhile, North Africans brought their knowledge of the French state and what rights they had as limited participants in that society with them as well. Thus, Muslim North Africans did not arrive in France as complete foreigners, but as members of the French imperial-state, and unlike many European immigrants, the French government prevented them from integrating as citizens. Colonialism made them partial members of French society, neither in nor out. In doing so, France placed them in a transnational existence that straddled two continents, languages, major religions, and political statuses. |
