Stopgap Territories. Inns, Hotels and Boarding Houses in Marseille at the beginning of the 1870s.

Abstract

This article focuses on temporary accommodations in Marseille at the end of the 19th century. As a port city, Marseille was the second largest city in France by population and a preferred destination for French and international migrants. Nevertheless, the system used to house these migrants in Marseille is still largely unknown. The article is based on an examination of police registers for the period 1869-1874 conducted through multiple levels of analysis. In the first section, it examines the distribution of accommodations throughout the city as a whole and emphasizes the emergence of a social and spatial convergence between the structure of the housing, the identity of the neighbourhoods and the profiles of the populations being housed. On a more micro scale, section two focuses on the 5th police district in order to create a sociological map of the 1804 tenants that passed through it over the course of 10 months and shed light on the choice of lodgings within the framework of individual or group strategies. Finally, thanks to a street level analysis focused on rue Caisserie, the article shows that temporary accommodations were part of a larger local social and economic system.