Appendix A

1. Paris, France. Since the study of migration first gained traction in the field of French history, it has labored under the misconception that immigrant women did not arrive en masse until after the Second World War. In recent years, however, scholars such as Nancy Green, Linda Guerry, and Judith Rainhorn have chipped away at that notion.[1] Nevertheless, at the start of the project, I spent considerable time poring over population statistics to prove that immigrant women did, indeed, comprise a significant portion of migration waves to France from roughly 1881 to 1940. In addition to the growing secondary scholarship on migrant communities in France, and in Paris, more specifically, I managed to substantiate this claim through a combination of statistics from INSEE, the Annuaire Statistique de la Ville de Paris (the municipal gazette of Paris), and stray archival finds at the Archives Nationales (see Tables 1-5, Appendix B).

2. The neighborhoods of Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette. Once it became clear that Paris, France, afforded me the greatest opportunity to locate immigrant women in the archives, I decided to follow in the footsteps of several social historians of migration, including Judith Rainhorn and Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaleard, and set my sights on specific neighborhoods.[2] Once again, the Annuaire Statistique de la Ville de Paris allowed me to zero in on the 11th arrondissement and the quartiers of Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette, specifically (see Tables 6-10, Appendix B).

3. Census reports and naturalization dossiers. After limiting the study to Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette, I used census reports at the Archives de Paris to generate a list of all foreign-born individuals naturalized in the years that censuses were taken (1921, 1926, 1931 and 1936 for La Roquette; 1921, 1926, and 1931 for Sainte Marguerite).[3] Once I had located the names of naturalized foreigners (marked with an “N” in census reports), I then used the publication Liste alphabétique des personnes ayant acquis ou perdu la nationalité française par décret (naturalisations, réintégrations, libérations des liens d'allégeance, etc. to identify the decree number associated with the naturalization of the foreigner(s) in question.[4]  In the likely event that the decree number was missing, I located it using the online database NATNUM at the Archives Nationales-Paris (AN-Paris), searching for the date the naturalization decree was issued. Once all decree numbers had been compiled, I could then order and consult naturalization files according to the limits set by the archival administration at both the AN-Paris and AN-Fontainebleau.[5] Of the 938 naturalization dossiers corresponding to immigrants located in Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette between 1921 and 1936, I examined 592.

Table 1: Naturalization Dossiers for Inhabitants of Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette, 1921-1936

4. Mains courantes. In order to get a sense of everyday life in Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette, I used mains courantes at the Archives de la Préfecture de Police (APP). This source is a record of petty offenses and complaints brought by one neighbor against another and registered at the local commissariat. Registers exist for each of the 80 quartiers of Paris from the nineteenth century onward.

For purposes of comparison, I consulted registers from two years, 1926 and 1933, allowing me to juxtapose neighborhood life in a year of economic prosperity with a year of economic contraction. When sampling the source, I marked the offense recorded every five entrees (#5, #10, #15, etc.) to get a general sense of neighborhood life. I also recorded all details from entries in which foreigners appeared as individuals bringing suit, individuals against whom the suit was brought, or witnesses in a suit. The approach yielded 1,156 complete, detailed entries divided in the following manner:

Table 2: Mains Courantes Concerning Foreign Residents of Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette, 1926 and 1933

5. Court cases: The Archives de Paris conserve court case files for the period 1863 – 1911 and 1931 – 1940. Unfortunately, files dating from 1911-1931 were destroyed in a fire at Fort Montlignon where they were once kept. While the arrest lists for the missing two decades were left intact, it is not possible to glean much useful information from them; they record only names of the accused and their alleged crime. As a result, the court case source base for this study was necessarily restricted to what was available – that is, cases from the period 1931-1940.

Using arrest lists for the period 1931-1940, I compiled a list of 108 court cases involving one or more foreigners in Paris as either victim or accused during the period from January 1931 to September 1940. Methodologically speaking, court cases serve as a contrast to the pedestrian offenses recorded in mains courantes. As the table below makes clear, they overwhelmingly document cases of violent crime: homicide accounts for roughly 65 percent of the cases examined in this study.

If extreme violence renders court cases unique, however, the information yielded resembles that of mains courantes insofar as it reveals a surprising degree of intimacy between victims and perpetrators. For instance, of the 70 homicide cases, a mere seven involved two or more complete strangers. Rather, the majority of murder cases involved familiars, especially former friends, embittered couples, and jilted lovers. Of all court cases involving two parties, more than 83 percent involved people who knew one another, typically as neighbors, friends, and couples. Examined together, then, court cases and mains courantes reveal the most intimate portrait of life available to historians of neighborhood and community life in Paris populaire.

 Table 3: Court Cases Involving One or More Foreigners Residing in Paris, 1931-1940

Table 4: Type of Relationship between Victim and Aggressor

6. Social Worker Reports. This study relies on the files of three major immigrant aid and social service organizations: the Foyer Français, the League for the Protection of Abandoned Mothers, and the Social Service for Children in Moral Danger. Each are dealt with below:

a. Foyer Français. The files for the Foyer Français are dispersed throughout archives in Paris. Information culled for the book came from the Archives de Paris and the private papers of André Honnorat held at the Archives Nationales (50 AP 62). The organization did not maintain records regarding those foreign families offered aid; however, the naturalization files of a small handful of families from Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette exhibited clear evidence of intervention on their behalf by Foyer Français representatives. These stories are documented and interpreted in Chapter 4, “Mothers, Welfare Organizations, and Reproducing for the Nation.”

b. Ligue Pour la Protection des Mères Abandonnées (League for the Protection of Abandoned Mothers, hereafter LPAM). To sample the fichiers de mère that comprise the social service files of the LPAM, I used a computer program to first generate 500 random dates between February 1, 1925, when the League first opened its doors, and May 10, 1940, the beginning of the German Occupation of France. I then recorded information from fichiers that most closely approximated the date generated and related to either foreign women or French women involved with foreign men. The approach yielded information on 440 foreign women and 60 Frenchwomen.

When I returned to Paris in January 2018 to complete research for Chapter 7, it became imperative to return to these files and interrogate whether and to what extent immigrant, and immigrant Jewish women, in particular, received help from LPMA social workers. Consequently, I once again used a computer program to generate 150 random dates between May 10, 1940 and September 1, 1944, recording information on any woman who interacted with the organization on those dates. This approach yielded just 12 entries corresponding to immigrant women.

c. Service Social pour l’Enfance en Danger Moral (Social Service for Children in Moral Danger, hereafter SSCMD. Later, the SSCMD became the Olga Spitzer Association). SSCMD files were perhaps the most precious find, permitting me to enter immigrant and mixed households and take a close look at family dynamics that often remain invisible to scholars. Although the organization was founded in 1923, it was only in 1929 that social workers began to record the addresses of families aided by the organization. Using these social service files, I located all families, both French and foreign, residing in Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette before May 10, 1940. The approach yielded 103 dossiers of which 75 concerned French families and 28 foreign families.

As the book expanded into the Second World War, it once again became imperative to understand the nature of aid afforded to immigrant women, especially immigrant Jewish women, in Occupied Paris. Of course, by 2018, the catalogue system for these files had changed. First, I used the 3602W registers to identify foreign-born families living in Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette between May 10, 1940 and September 1, 1944 before locating and consulting each of the resulting dossiers. Of 82 families in these neighborhoods that interacted with SSCMD social workers, 25 were foreign and/or mixed.

Chapter 4, and the book overall, forwards a strong argument about the favorable nature of welfare intervention in immigrant households prior to 1945. Chapter 6, too, makes a strong claim about the strength of neighborhood solidarities between and among French and foreign women. SSCMD files were pivotal to these arguments.

Working closely with Delphine Serre, we developed a coding method to ascertain the quality of relations between immigrants and their various neighbors. SSCMD social workers solicited eye-witness “testimonies” about French and foreign fathers, mothers, and children with whom they interacted from six main sources: neighborhood police officers, the justice of the peace of the quartier (juge de paix), and the family’s concierge as well as neighbors, school teachers (directrices d’école), and employers. Under Serre’s guidance, we outlined a system whereby the opinion (avis) of each of these constituents was coded as positive, negative, contradictory, or missing (nothing noted). This coding system was then applied to all of case files I consulted, yielding the interpretations proffered in the book.

[1] See especially Linda Guerry, “Femmes et Genre Dans l’histoire de l’immigration.  Naissance et Cheminement d’un Sujet de Recherche,” Genre & Histoire, no. 5 (Automne 2009); Nancy L. Green, Repenser Les Migrations (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002), chap. 5; Judith Rainhorn, Paris, New York: des migrants italiens (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2005).

[2] Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard, Les italiens dans l’est parisien: Une histoire d’intégration (1880–1960) (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 2000); Rainhorn, Paris, New York: des migrants italiens.

[3] Due to perennial fires that ravage archival sources, no 1936 census report exists for the neighborhood of Sainte Marguerite, which accounts for why so few naturalization dossiers were located in the post-1930 period (a mere 4 in Sainte Marguerite versus 88 in La Roquette). In general, the number of naturalizations sagged in the 1930s as a result of the Depression. See Patrick Weil, Qu’est-Ce Qu’un Français: Histoire de La Nationalité Française Depuis La Révolution (Paris: Grasset, 2002), chap. 3.

[4] Decree numbers are denoted with a series of 3-5 numbers followed by an “x” followed by the last two digits of the year in which the decree was issued, ie: 2365x27 correlates to dossier number 2365 in the year 1927.

[5] At the AN-Paris, researchers may consult 10 dossiers per week; at the AN-Fontainebleau (where naturalization dossiers compiled after 1930 are housed), up to 15.

Appendix B →