We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
The Demographers' Moment: Georges Mauco, Immigration and Racial Selection in Liberation France, 1945-46.
- Authors
Burgess, Greg
- Abstract
The figure of Georges Mauco looms large over studies of the politics of French migration in the 1930s and 1940s. Influential in debates about the deleterious impact of migration on the French population and cultural identity in the 1930s, Mauco re-emerged after Liberation to head the Consultative Committee for Population and the Family (Haut Comité Consultatif de la Population et de la Famille), which was charged with, among other things, the drafting of a new immigration law (adopted 25 November 1945). Historians find Mauco's influence in 1945 evidence of a "return to kind" in French ideas about population and immigration. Mauco's advocacy of rigorous selection among prospective immigrants, based on racial preference, suggests a return to the racialist tendencies of the latter years of the Third Republic and, by extension, that these racialist ideas are deeply embedded in post-war policy. This paper recalls, however, that Mauco's ideas found little support. A study of the challenges to Mauco not only contests the historically accepted view of the influence of racial thinking of post-war French migration; it also questions why historians seem compelled to emphasise the racial currents of debates on migration, however marginal they may be.
- Subjects
FRANCE; IMMIGRATION law; MAUCO, Georges; EMIGRATION &; immigration; RACISM; DEMOGRAPHY; FRENCH national character
- Publication
French History & Civilization, 2011, Vol 4, p167
- ISSN
1832-9683
- Publication type
Article