Migration and Migration Research in France

Abstract

France has been a country of immigration without its being recognised as such by its political elites and by significant segments of its scientific community. According to the findings of the migration historian Leslie Page Moch (1992, 1999), its sedentary model which has been dominant since during its early modern period has contributed to the non-recognition of this factor. French people have seemingly always emphasised their peasant attachment to the soil, suggesting an essentially sedentary society. However, this model was quite early challenged by the ‘micromobility’ associated in the provinces with marriage, rural service, sharecropping and temporary seasonal migration. Paris, the largest city on the continent north of Italy, and which more than doubled in size during the seventeenth century, was already a major centre of attraction for the whole of Europe. France was, de facto, a multicultural country, but the notion has been much contested. Until the Revolution of 1789, the country was made up of provinces with their own cultures, languages, parliaments and systems of measures, although the compulsory use of French in administrative and judicial rules (Edict of Villers-Cotterets, 1539), the defence and unification of the French language (through the setting up of the Academie francaise in 1735 by Richelieu), as well as the centralisation of the civil service, occurred very early.