Appendix B, Reproductive Citizens

The Annuaire Statistique de la Ville de Paris (the municipal gazette of Paris, hereafter ASVP) also reveals that their presence in the Department of the Seine was considerable in the decade or so between 1926 and 1937.

Table 3: Foreign-Born Men and Women Residing in Paris, 1911-1926-1931

Sources: M. Galmiche, “Extrait,” 300 in 50 AP 62 (Archives Nationales, hereafter AN); “Département de la Seine – Etrangers résidant présents par principale nationalités et par sexe,” ASVP (1925-1926), 441.

Table 3 is referenced in Chapter 5, page 134, footnote 27.

Table 4: Foreigners Residing in Paris in 1926, by nationality and sex (in descending order)

Source: ASVP (1925-1926), “Département de la Seine – Etrangers résidants présents par principals nationalités et sexes,” 441.

Table 4 is referenced in Chapter 5, page 134, footnote 27.

While migrant women from Luxemburg, Belgium, Great Britain, and the United States outnumbered their male counterparts, quite possibly because of their overrepresentation in the domestic service sector, relative gender parity existed among all other major migrant groups, as Table 5 shows.

This was notably not the case for colonial populations where the female population remained negligible until after World War II.

Table 5: Percentage of Female Foreigners by Nationality in Paris in 1926 (in descending order)

Source: ASVP (1925-1926), “Département de la Seine – Etrangers résidants présents par principals nationalités et sexes,” 441.

Table 6: Foreigners in Paris by Arrondissement, 1881-1926

Source: “Étrangers présents dans chaque arrondissement à Paris de 1881 à 1911,"p. 305, in 50 AP 62 (AN); ASVP, 1921-2, p. 284-5; ASVP, 1923-4, p. 295-296).

Table 6 is referenced in the Introduction, page 10, footnote 41; in Chapter 5, page 128, footnote 5; and Chapter 5, page 133, footnote 22.

Table 7: French and Foreign Inhabitants of Paris by quartier, 1921

Source: ASVP, "Etrangers résidants présents par principales nationalités et par circonscriptions territoriales," 284-285 (1926).

Table 7 is referenced in the Introduction, page 10, footnote 41; in Chapter 5, page 128, footnote 5; and Chapter 5, page 133, footnote 22.

Table 8: French and Foreign Inhabitants of Paris by quartier, 1926

Source: ASVP, "Etrangers résidants présents par principales nationalités et par circonscriptions territoriales," 442-445 (1926).

Table 8 is referenced in the Introduction, page 10, footnote 41; in Chapter 5, page 128, footnote 5; and Chapter 5, page 133, footnote 22.

Table 9: Foreigners in Paris by gender and quartier, 1921

Source: M. Galmiche, “Extrait: Les Etrangers dans l’agglomération parisienne d’après le recensement de 1921,” Bulletin de la Statistique Générale de la France et du Service d’Observation des Prix, vol. 11, no. 3, April 1922, 306 in 50 AP 62 (AN).

Table 9 is referenced in the Introduction, page 10, footnote 41; in Chapter 5, page 128, footnote 5; and Chapter 5, page 133, footnote 22.

The argument that La Roquette and Sainte Marguerite were thus “family neighborhoods” is also supported by a 1923 study of foreign schoolchildren which reveals their greatest concentration in the 11th arrondissement.

Table 10: Foreign children attending public schools in Paris by nationality and arrondissement, October 1, 1923.

Source: "Elèves nouveaux entrés dans les écoles publiques de Paris," October 1, 1923 in 50 AP 62 (AN).

Table 10 is referenced in Chapter 5, page 135, footnote 29.

Graph 2: Mixed Marriages in Paris, 1915-1941

Source: compiled from Francisco Munoz-Perez and Michele Tribalat, “Mariages d’étrangers et mariages mixtes en France: évolution depuis la Première Guerre,” Population 39, no. 3 (June 1984): 427–462.

As Graph 3 makes abundantly clear, however, one gender-specific configuration dominated the municipal mixed marriage market: Frenchwomen and foreign men.

Graph 3: Nationality of Foreign Male Spouses in Paris, 1915-1941

Source: compiled from Annuaire Statistique de la Ville de Paris, 1915-1940.

The rate of mixed marriages between foreign women and Frenchmen remained, by contrast, relatively negligible throughout the interwar decades, accounting for only one third of all mixed marriages concluded in France and in Paris.[2] This was not, however, the case among those national groups where women outnumbered their menfolk. For instance, Belgian and Swiss women migrated in greater numbers than their men during the interwar years.[3] They also tended to be single, unmarried migrants, often coming to Paris to find work as live-in domestic servants.

Because Belgian and Swiss women were more numerous than their countrymen and were largely unmarried, their marriages with Frenchmen were among the most common in interwar Paris. While Italian women also married French men in great numbers during this period, historian Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard’s work with census data demonstrates that a number of these marriages were actually “faux” unions between second-generation (thus, French-born) daughters of Italian parents and Frenchmen.[4]

Graph 4: Nationality of Foreign Female Spouses in Paris, 1915-1941

Source: compiled from Annuaire Statistique de la Ville de Paris, 1915-1940.

Similarly, the rate of intermarriage between French soldiers and English, American, and Belgian women in Paris soared to new heights in 1920, heights never achieved again during the interwar decades. It seems likely that many of these marriages in the immediate postwar years were between Allied nurses who, like their French counterparts, struck up romantic relationships with their soldier-charges during the war.

Source: compiled from Annuaire Statistique de la Ville de Paris, 1915-1940.
* From 1932 onward, “Americans” as a category disappeared and was replaced with “North Americans.”
** From 1932 onward, “English” as a category was replaced with “British.”
*** Prior to 1932, the category for “Polish” women did not exist. Presumably, they were counted as Russians or in the category “Other Nationalities”

Throughout France, foreigners were concentrated in the lower rungs of the occupational ladder, in the domain of unskilled labor;[1] however, this case study, like others centered on immigrant groups in Paris, does not reflect those national trends.[2]

On the contrary, foreign male heads of families, mixed or otherwise, fell largely into the category of skilled labor and were further concentrated in artisanal work and skilled craftsmanship. This was largely owing to the occupational diversity of the Parisian economy and the large place accorded to skilled trades within it.

To be sure, the occupational character of the neighborhoods, discussed at length in Chapter 5, contributed to the concentration of foreign men in skilled professions, too. In Table 12, one sees roughly the same proportion of immigrant men, whether from foreign or mixed households, represented in the skilled professions.

The category of “professionals” encompassed three main groups: 1) entrepreneurs (ie: merchants, shop-keepers, store-owners, hotel and restaurants owners) 2) middle-class professionals requiring advanced degrees (ie: doctors, lawyers, professors) 3) white-collar, service-sector professionals (ie: office clerks and salesclerks; accountants, brokers, bank employees; other administrative or managerial employees). Foreign men, of mixed and foreign households, were predominantly concentrated in this first sub-category. They were neighborhood grocers, storekeepers, and merchants. 

Table 12: Occupational Breakdown of French and Foreign Husbands by Household Composition

Source: Census reports for Sainte Marguerite, 1926 (D2M8/252, D2M8/253); Sainte Marguerite, 1931 (D2M8/399, D2M8/400); La Roquette, 1926 (D2M8/254, D2M8/255); and La Roquette, 1931 (D2M8/397, D2M8/398) – Archives de Paris, hereafter AdP.

Table 12 is referenced in Chapter 3, page 74, footnote 10.

On the whole, both French and foreign wives of mixed households worked significantly more than foreign wives of immigrant households: while nearly one-third of women from mixed households worked, just 15.8 percent of foreign women from immigrant households engaged in economic activity of some sort.

In truth, these figures are probably underestimated. As women’s labor historians have long known, women’s work operated below the official radar thus it is probable that women’s salaried activity was underreported. This is particularly so in France where women had long been prevalent in the workforce, well before the twentieth-century.[3]

Table 13: Salaried Activity of French and Foreign Wives by Household Composition

Source: Census reports for Sainte Marguerite, 1926 (D2M8/252, D2M8/253); Sainte Marguerite, 1931 (D2M8/399, D2M8/400); La Roquette, 1926 (D2M8/254, D2M8/255); and La Roquette, 1931 (D2M8/397, D2M8/398) – AdP.

Tables 13+14: are referenced in Chapter 3, p. 74, footnote 10.

Because women, as a whole, were concentrated in the least-skilled, lowest paying sectors of the French economy, I used a different coding schema to differentiate between French and foreign wives of mixed and foreign households than what was used to differentiate between and among their husbands. In line with the interests of this study, I divided the economic activities of these two groups of women into two types: domestic and non-domestic.

Domestic employment corresponded to labor in which little to no division could be drawn between the home and the public sphere (ie: confection, concierge service, neighborhood maid service). Non-domestic employment corresponded to waged labor necessitating the separation between home and work (ie: day laborers in factories; secretaries and typists in offices; waitresses in restaurant service).

Results show that, although foreign women of mixed households were slightly more economically active than French women, they were more likely than French women to be employed in domestic activities. This was also the case for foreign women of foreign households. In other words, immigrant women who worked constituted a larger proportion of the female workforce concentrated in domestic labor relative to French women.

French and foreign wives employed in domestic labor were concentrated in domestic service and confection– the traditional female-dominated sectors of the French economy. Domestic service had long constituted the standard way for women new to the city to enter the waged workforce, whether from the rural countryside or from further afield, as in this study. French women were increasingly abandoning domestic service during the interwar years as new jobs became available to them with the expansion of the manufacturing sector.[4] Immigrant women flocked to fill their shoes.

In terms of the confection trades, the twentieth-century Parisian garment industry attracted women and, later, immigrants precisely because of its low-skill needs, high seasonality, and widespread subcontracting.[5] As it turns out, those very features appealed to immigrant women.  Compared to their foreign counterparts, however, French women were more likely to find work as concierges – ironic considering the stereotype of the Spanish or Portuguese concierge that now predominates in Paris.[6]

In terms of non-domestic labor, the occupational spread among French and foreign women was more varied. To generalize, French women and foreign women from mixed households tended more towards the burgeoning field of white-collar professions than did foreign women from immigrant households. Since these jobs were more typical of middle-class women, it is likely, then, that these women and, by extension, these (mixed) households represent the elite of the neighborhoods.[7]

An equal proportion of French and foreign women from mixed households also found work in factories, thanks to the expansion of food processing and canning, the proliferation of paper and cardboard box manufacturing, technological advances in printing, and above all, the growth of garment and textile industries that took place over the course of the 1920s and 1930s and changed the lives of poor women throughout Europe.

In stark contrast to the labor trends visible among women from mixed marriages, one-half of foreign women from immigrant households working in non-domestic employment were street peddlers and second-hand venders; this was a very rare occupation among French and foreign women from mixed households. Among immigrant women from foreign households, a handful were merchants at the Carreau du Temple in the Marais. This form of employment drew, especially, many Eastern European Jewish women from the 1880s onward.[8]

Unlike white-collar employment as typists and secretaries or blue-collar employment as canners and factory workers, the employment that most predominated among foreign women in immigrant households, then, was sporadic, intermittent, and unreliable. Moreover, as opposed to French and foreign women in blue- and white-collar services, peddling required far less French literacy and language competency, particularly in markets run and frequented by immigrants, veritable economic-cum-ethnic enclaves. Importantly, street vending and peddling were economic activities that could remain outside state purview, bypassing foreigners’ work paper requirements. Because it was an unregulated trade, peddling served as an ideal occupation for foreign women during the depressed thirties when making an economic livelihood became so much more difficult for foreigners, in general, and foreign women, in particular. Importantly, their foreign female counterparts from mixed households would not have felt this pressure as they had become legally French upon marriage with a Frenchman. 

Finally, foreign women from immigrant households working in non-domestic employment were frequently listed as helpmates of their husbands in running the family business, from grocers’ markets to butcher shops. This was also not the case for French and foreign women from mixed households.

Table 14: Workplace Type of Active French and Foreign Wives

Source: Census reports for Sainte Marguerite, 1926 (D2M8/252, D2M8/253); Sainte Marguerite, 1931 (D2M8/399, D2M8/400); La Roquette, 1926 (D2M8/254, D2M8/255); and La Roquette, 1931 (D2M8/397, D2M8/398) – AdP.

Tables 13+14 are referenced in Chapter 5, p. 146, footnote 88.

 Early twentieth-century French statistical reports obsessively documented the changing composition – and the declining size – of families in France. By the mid twenties, those reports began to take particular note of the role of nationality as a determining factor in family size.[9]

By 1926, the Statistique des familles revealed that foreign families in France were larger than their French counterparts across all familial configurations, whether nuclear, single male- or single female-headed.[10] Whereas French and French-naturalized families averaged 1.98 children per household, foreign families averaged 2.17.[11]

If this was the situation throughout France, the situation in Paris was, as always, more extreme. Demographers and statisticians of the period noted with alarm that birthrates in the Department of the Seine and “the Parisian region,” more specifically, represented the lowest in the country during the interwar years.[12] Certainly, in the decade between 1904 and 1914, birthrates in Paris fell well below the national average.[13] It is likely that this trend continued into the interwar years. If, between 1900 and 1940, the fertility rate[14] of Frenchwomen throughout France was 2.3, it is certain, given the reproductive patterns unique to the capital, that the fertility rate of Parisian women was much lower.[15]

Turning now to Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette between 1926 and 1931, the average foreign household was in fact significantly larger than the average mixed household, whether Frenchmen/foreign women or Frenchwomen/foreign men pairings.[16] On average, foreign households consisted of 4.17 members while mixed households consisted of 2.76 (for French men/foreign women) and 3.09 members (for French women/foreign men). 

Family size among foreign families in the capital reflected reproductive attitudes and behaviors brought to France by immigrants from their respective countries. Among foreign families, those migrating from Luxembourg and Belgium were the smallest, averaging 2 and 2.2 children, respectively. By contrast, Russian, Greco-Turkish, and Polish families in these neighborhoods boasted the largest families, averaging 2.76, 2.83, and 2.91 children per family, respectively.

As Table 15 illustrates, such reproductive comportments roughly align with those of their respective countries, such that foreign families with the greatest number of children tended to come from those countries with the highest birthrates during the interwar period; conversely, the smallest foreign families came from those countries with correspondingly lower birthrates.

 Table 15: Birthrates in Europe, 1930-1931

Source: Dudley Kirk, Europe’s Population in the Interwar Years (Geneva, League of Nations, 1946), appendix II.

Tables 15+16 are referenced in Chapter 6, page 158, footnote 26.

A census comparison of foreign household size by nationality mirrors this result, both reinforcing this conclusion and suggesting a high degree of correlation between household size and family size.

Table 16: Average Household Size of Foreign Families by Nationality

Source: Census reports for Sainte Marguerite, 1926 (D2M8/252, D2M8/253); Sainte Marguerite, 1931 (D2M8/399, D2M8/400); La Roquette, 1926 (D2M8/254, D2M8/255); and La Roquette, 1931 (D2M8/397, D2M8/398) – AdP.

Tables 15+16 are referenced in Chapter 6, page 158, footnote 26.

The habitations à bon marché of these neighborhoods were located on rue Henri Ranvier. On average, about five persons lived in each of these nine French and foreign households, but a little number-crunching gives us a more textured understanding of the living situation of families in these neighborhoods.

While foreigners averaged 1.25 pièces for an average of 4.8 persons, their French counterparts had 1.72 pièces for an average of 4.3 persons (See Table 17). This confirms what data from census reports indicates in Chapter 6 for the population of naturalized foreigners in these neighborhoods, namely that foreign-born families had less living space in which to lodge more people.

Table 17: Average Number of Pièces and Average Number of Persons Per Household     Assisted by the SSEDM in Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette, 1929-1940

Source: Dossiers familiaux, 1368W/31, no. 2338 through 1368W/279, no. 7188 (AdP).

Table 17 is referenced in Chapter 6, p. 159, footnote 28.

Only in 1929 did naturalization files begin to include a series of questions intended to gage immigrants’ potential for “rapid assimilation.” These questions were:

            1) Does the postulant speak our language?

            2) What is his degree of assimilation to our manners and customs?

            3) Does he live in an exclusively French milieu?

            4) What are his frequentations? Does he seek out foreigners or our nationals?

            5) Is he susceptible to a rapid assimilation?

By the mid-1930s, the form would also address foreigners’ level of education as well as the extent of their children’s French schooling.

Of the 483 naturalization files consulted, 98 included responses to this series of questions of which 61 concerned foreign couples, 19 intermarried couples (Frenchwomen/foreign men), 13 foreign bachelors, and 5 foreign widows. Table 18 below provides a breakdown of officials’ assessment of their French fluency.

In general, the skew of the data demonstrates a clear correlation between French fluency and successful naturalization. Of course, it remains unclear whether this correlation indicates that French-speaking foreigners sought out naturalization more than other foreigners, that French bureaucrats were more likely to reward French-speaking foreigners with naturalization, or, most likely, a combination of the two.

One interesting, if fairly predictable finding, concerns the fluency of foreign men married to immigrant women versus those married to Frenchwomen. A comparison between the two reveals that intermarried immigrant men were more fluent than immigrant men married to foreign wives. In fact, nearly 90 percent of immigrant husbands of Frenchwomen were declared “fluent” or “very fluent” by naturalization officials. By contrast, just 56 percent of foreign husbands with foreign wives received similar official commendation. The relationship between French fluency and intermarriage was likely not limited to foreign men but also surely applied to foreign women married to French men, although no sources exist to confirm this assumption.

Although only a very small number of single foreign men and single foreign women make up this sample, what little data exists is provocative. In the first place, all five women were previously-married, but widowed, while all 13 men were as yet unmarried. And all five immigrant women – three Italian-born and two of Turkish descent – were judged favorably by naturalization officials, considered entirely fluent or nearly so, which was not the case with the foreign bachelors. Although this is an extremely small sample size off of which to base conclusions, scraps of information collected from the naturalization files of foreign couples can help us to further contextualize these findings regarding foreign women’s French fluency.

Table 18: French Language Fluency of Naturalized Foreigners

Source: Naturalization files for 98 foreign applicants of Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette.
* These foreign women were of course the widows of foreign men, since foreign-born widows of Frenchmen became French upon marriage.

Tables 18+19 are referenced in Chapter 6, p. 166, footnote 69.

Of the 61 dossiers concerning foreign couples, all treated foreign men’s fluency while only one-third (22) considered the French fluency of their foreign wives. In spite of the restricted sample size, Table 19 demonstrates that a greater proportion of foreign wives were considered very fluent or fluent as compared to foreign husbands, and by a relatively large margin. 

This result is particularly surprising when considered in combination with other findings above – namely, that these same immigrant women of foreign households rarely engaged in waged labor and, when they did work, had access only to low-paying jobs entailing little to no separation between home and work.

Consequently, this table presents a riddle: if immigrant women “trapped” at home all day became as fluent as, and even more fluent than, their working husbands, perhaps “home-life” was not quite as isolating as many have assumed. This observation served as the research question driving Chapter 6 of Reproductive Citizens.

Table 19: French Fluency of Foreign Partners in Immigrant Households

Source: Naturalization files for 98 foreign applicants of Sainte Marguerite and La Roquette.

Tables 18+19 are referenced in Chapter 6, p. 166, footnote 69.

[1] Mauco, “Les Étrangers en France,” chap. 9; Cross, Immigrant Workers in Industrial France, chap. 7.

[2] Rainhorn, Paris, New York: des migrants italiens, chap. 3; Blanc-Chaléard, Les italiens dans l’Est parisien, 51–56, 110–114, 316–326.

[3] Louise Tilly and Joan Wallach Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), 150–151.

[4] Ibid., 182.

[5] Nancy Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 282.

[6] Laura Oso Casas, “La réussite paradoxale des bonnes espagnoles de Paris,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales 21, no. 1, Femmes, genre, migration et mobilités (2005): 107–129. For a cultural history of the concierge in her nineteenth-century incarnation as portière, see Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), chap. 2.

[7] Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, and Family, 156–162.

[8] These women initiated a legacy of Jewish professional activity in the Carreau du Temple that continued into the postwar years. See Marion Abélès, “Un Espace marchand à Paris: le Carreau du Temple,” Ethnologie Française 13, no. 1 (January 1, 1983): 54–55.

[9] Statistique Générale de France, Statistique des familles en 1926 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1932), 6.

[10] Ibid., 34, 40, 54, 65.

[11] Ibid., 66.

[12] Ibid., 18–19, 310–314.

[13] The average birthrate during this span of years was 18.1 in Paris, 20.0 throughout France. As a point of comparison, national birthrates only dipped to 18.2, their lowest ever, in 1914 at the start of the Great War. (ASVP (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1914), 103; “INSEE - Population - Données détaillées sur la situation démographique en 2005 - Mouvement de la population”, accessed March 14, 2012, http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/ detail.asp?ref_id=ir-sd2005&page=irweb/sd2005/dd/sd2005_fecpop.htm.)

[14] A note on fertility rates and birthrates: while fertility rates represent the average number of children born to a woman over the course of her lifetime, birthrates represent the number of live births in an area per 1,000 people per year.

[15] “INSEE - Population.”

[16] A t-test determined the significance of the mean difference between the average number household size of foreign households and mixed households. The t-test, t (200.73) = -6.53, was significant at a p value of less than .001, confirming that foreign households were indeed significantly larger than mixed households.