| This dissertation analyzes how French politicians, jurists, industrials, physicians, and social scientists categorized, and then hierarchized, immigrant populations entering France in the first half of the twentieth century. Employing parliamentary debates, nationality laws, newspapers, propaganda from the social hygiene crusade, and published tracts in demography, anthropology, and medicine, it examines how social critics understood the possibility of assimilating foreigners in this period of immense human mobility. The thesis extends previous work by arguing that race was central to the history of immigration to prewar France, as several interrelated. racial projects were elaborated in the realms of production and reproduction. It explores in detail the relationship of the "immigrant question" to pronatalist politics, the selection of foreign workers, contemporary debates on racial mixing and the fitness of mixed-blood children, and the legal ramifications of intermarriage. |
