The Pariahs of Yesterday. Breton Migrants in Paris

Abstract

Leslie Page Moch presents her study of Breton migrants to Paris between 1871 and 1940 as part of the ‘challenge to the traditional vision of France’, to master narratives based on ‘national identity’ and ‘national-state history’. Emphasis has instead shifted to consideration of the ‘rich varieties of people’ within the nation’, to the complex trajectories of internal migration, and the processes of integration into urban society. Her key primary sources are the actes de mariage which identify bride and groom, their parents and witnesses, by place of birth, occupation and residence, providing the historian with the raw material necessary to locate individuals in time and space, and to engage in the difficult process of constructing and analysing social networks. Census data, together with emblematic cases drawn from memoirs and oral histories conducted in the 1970s provide invaluable supplements and correctives. Attention is focused on the two main, and significantly different, centres of Breton settlement in greater Paris—the professionally and socially heterogeneous 14th arrondissement (Montparnasse) and the suburban commune of Saint Denis, a predominantly working class community, based on large scale industry, and with especially serious housing and social problems. As Moch points out, substantial population movements, both temporary and permanent, were a feature of pre-industrial society. Permanent mass migration developed in the second part of the nineteenth century, and in the case of Brittany from the 1880s, with the chronology influenced to a large degree by improved communications and labour market conditions. By the eve of the First World War an estimated 160,000 Bretons lived in Paris and its immediate suburbs. Further surges of migration from even the most remote areas of Finistère would develop to meet the demands of the war economy, during the prosperous post war decade, and again during the trente glorieuses after1945.