Abstract
This article analyzes the history of adult vocational training (AVT) programs for Algerian migrants, funded by the French state, between the end of World War II in 1945 and the aftermath of Algerian independence in 1962. These programs responded to the postwar expansion of citizenship and rights of indigenous Algerians, including rights to migrate and to take jobs in metropolitan France. Across changing governments and diverse ministries, French officials were convinced that vocational training was necessary for indigenous Algerians to find stable employment, to mitigate the supposed risks of migration, and to enable migrants to transform themselves into an idealized version of the French citizen. The widespread adoption of AVT for Algerian migrants calls into question the pervasive image of the unskilled, interchangeable migrant. At the same time, the shortcomings of AVT programs shed light on how migrants frequently contributed to postwar economic expansion and economic modernization while enjoying the fruits of economic growth only meagerly and on an individual basis. More broadly, this study reveals the importance of skill, industry, and labor in French postwar conceptions of (social) citizenship.
Cet article analyse l'histoire de la formation professionnelle des adultes (FPA) pour les immigrés algériens, entre la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale en 1945 et le lendemain de l'indépendance de l'Algérie en 1962. Cette initiative de l'Etat répondit à la conception plus large de la citoyenneté et des droits de l'indigène algérien de l'après‐guerre, y compris le droit d'immigrer en France métropolitaine et d'y travailler. A travers les gouvernements variables et les divers ministères de cette époque, les fonctionnaires restèrent convaincus que la formation professionnelle fut nécessaire pour atténuer les risques supposés de la migration, pour que l'indigène algérien trouve un emploi stable et se transforme en citoyen idéal. L'analyse de la FPA pour les immigrés algériens, très répandue à cette époque, remet en cause le stéréotype de l'immigré non qualifié et interchangeable. Néanmoins, un regard plus attentif sur la FPA met en lumière pourquoi les immigrés contribuèrent à l'expansion et à la modernisation économique de la France sans en profiter que très modérément et à titre individuel. Plus largement, cet article révèle l'importance de la qualification, de l'industrie et du travail dans les conceptions de la citoyenneté (et de la citoyenneté sociale) dans les « Trentes Glorieuses ».
Ali and Kaddour had grown up together in a small village in northeastern Algeria, facing the majestic Djurdjura mountain range. Despite the beauty, they dreamed of one thing: leaving. As citizens of France in the early 1950s, they had the right to emigrate and seek work in the metropole. However, the labor inspector in Algiers advised delaying departure until they could enroll in a vocational training program. Ali found this course prudent, but Kaddour would brook no delay. Thus Kaddour found himself alone on the cold, damp streets of greater Paris. Yet nothing depressed him like the rows of factories all with identical notices: unskilled laborers not wanted—looking for fitters and welders. With few options remaining, he packed up again for the wretched mines of the Nord, close to the Belgian border. There, he contracted tuberculosis. His treatment in hospital proved promising, but always headstrong, he stole away one night. By boat, by mule, and finally on foot, he returned to his ancestral village to die. His fate was all the more tragic when compared to that of his friend Ali. Ali's vocational training had secured him a job offer as a welder even before he migrated to Paris. His training also enabled him to earn well and to save. When he returned to his beloved village two years later, it was not to die but to marry in a handsome gray suit, to start a family, and in good time, to build a house in the fertile valley beneath the mountains.
This fictional story of Ali and Kaddour comes from a twenty‐minute propaganda film, titled Redbalkoum, or Take Heed, sponsored by the colonial General Government of Algeria in late 1952.1 There was little that was subtle about the film, which would have been screened to rural Algerian audiences by mobile projectors on trucks. However, it formed part of a broad, long‐running campaign to dissuade indigenous Algerians from migrating to the metropole unless they possessed the vocational skills that would guarantee stable employment.
Due to a series of reforms after World War II belatedly recognizing indigenous Muslims in Algeria as French citizens, indigenous Algerians had the legal right to move, work, and, to an extent, access social benefits in the French metropole. Some metropolitan officials, particularly in the Ministries of Labor and the Interior, had long mistrusted Algerian migration, fearing unemployment, crime, social unrest, disease, and a culturally “foreign” bloc living on the margins of French cities. By 1947 they were forced to accept that denying Algerians French citizenship and the right of free movement was incompatible with the goal of French control in Algeria. Other officials, particularly in the General Government of Algeria, had traditionally looked more favorably on migration as a type of safety valve for the underemployed and a way for poor regions to gain remittances. However, most postwar officials, on both sides of the Mediterranean, agreed that indigenous Algerians needed state tutelage.
Through the film and through posters and pamphlets, they argued that indigenous Algerian men needed help to obtain skills and norms that would, first, enable them to obtain “modern,” industrial jobs, and second, through these jobs, to participate in French society.2 A 1948 study by the prestigious Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques (INED) gloomily concluded that education and vocational training were Algerians' “only hope of assimilation.”3 What assimilation might mean was not fully explained. However, it was clear that the study authors, like the film propagandists, believed that the promise of citizenship could be safely and productively realized only if indigenous Algerians cultivated specific physical skills and adopted specific mental outlooks.4 It was the role of vocational training to integrate indigenous Algerians, long confined to the margins of society, into the French economy and its community of citizens.
The study of adult vocational training (AVT) for Algerians between the end of World War II and Algeria's independence in 1962 provides insight into the functioning of the postwar, trans‐Mediterranean labor market, organized around the concept of skill, and the broader logics of race and labor within postwar French citizenship. I estimate that 120,000 adult migrants to France of all nationalities received AVT between the resumption of large‐scale migration after World War II and the migration moratorium in 1974.5 The largest and symbolically most important group were Algerians, who made up nearly half of migrant trainees and who often received training apart from their “European” colleagues.6
This analysis of AVT provides more than another case study of colonial racism and of the myriad programs to differentiate and control North African migrants that are increasingly documented by scholars.7 Recent scholarship by Muriam Haleh Davis suggests that the reimagining of economic relations after World War II was deeply entwined with the reworking of racial conceptions, even as French authorities preferred the language of economic modernity.8 By drawing attention to the specific skills, industries, and valuations of migrant work, this article helps illuminate a paradox of the postwar: the centrality of migrant laborers to the postwar economic expansion known as the Trente Glorieuses, at the same time as migrants were routinely marginalized in both the workplace and society more generally. It was not just that migration accounted for nearly half the expansion in France's labor force between 1946 and 1975.9 Migrants were disproportionately trained and employed in sectors that transformed French ways of life and symbolized industrial modernity, from the construction of new housing and highways to the manufacturing of cars and machines.10 Postwar prosperity was not simply a result of exploitation in these sectors, though this sometimes played a role.11 Nor was prosperity an unconnected irony that merely highlights the injustice suffered by migrants due to racism and to colonial logics of differentiation.
Rather, examining AVT shows the practices and broader, structural logics of postwar labor markets and conceptions of citizenship that enabled migrants to contribute to this economic growth while frequently denying them the fruits of their labor. Skilled, stable, industrial male labor played an outsized role in postwar conceptions of social citizenship, in wage agreements, and in the social imaginary. At the same time, colonial structures in Algeria afforded little industrial work experience and reinforced bureaucratic traditions of (often racist) differentiation. This combination contributed to the continuing exclusion of indigenous Algerians, even as their formal citizenship rights expanded. As a result, French officials expected Algerians to acquire new jobs, new skills, and a new mindset to have the chance of enjoying the full rights of citizenship.
Vocational training promised all these things, but its effects were limited. The traits that appealed to officials also limited AVT's social impact: its focus on individual advancement in specific trades, the short duration of training, and little assumption of responsibility for the individual's career after program completion. By individualizing systemic and collective issues, it mostly helped manage, rather than overcome, underlying structural inequalities and logics of disadvantage.12 Meanwhile, collective bargaining agreements that tied wages to supposed qualifications created built‐in incentives for employers to underacknowledge migrants' skills, as migrant trainees frequently discovered on graduation.13 The increasingly skilled contributions of migrants in key sectors contributed greatly to the postwar economic boom. However, Algerian migrants themselves were rarely able to fully realize the benefits of their citizenship, and then only on an individual basis. As such, the story of Algerian migrants' training is a story not just of one group, educational practice, or economic activity but of the intersecting logics of work, skill, and citizenship in an age of imperialism and economic growth.
Work and the New Politics of Citizenship
The closing years of World War II and immediately thereafter witnessed a remarkable expansion in the groups of people holding French citizenship and an equally remarkable transformation in its meanings. Most famously, women gained the right to vote in 1944. Colonial subjects throughout the empire gained nominal citizenship, but the exercise of these rights tended to be restricted and varied across the empire, with Algeria continuing to present a unique constellation of rights.14 Meanwhile in France, as in its colonies, the concept of “social citizenship” transformed expectations of the state and of citizens' rights beyond individual freedoms and participation in government.
Before World War II roughly a tenth of the inhabitants of French Algeria were citizens. Citizens included those of French origin, naturalized European settlers, descendants of European settlers who were born on Algerian (or French) soil and automatically became citizens at the age of majority, most indigenous Jews (since 1870), and a handful of highly “assimilated Muslims” who had successfully petitioned for citizenship on an individual or familial basis, even though application meant renouncing Qur'anic law and Qur'anic courts for matters such as family law—an act critics denounced as apostasy. Most indigenous Algerians of Muslim descent had the status of French nationals. However, before the late 1940s they were sujets (subjects), rather than citizens. Similarly, the Jews of the M'zab continued to be subjects, governed by Jewish legal status. French authorities were belatedly convinced of the necessity of citizenship reform by increasing pressure from Muslim and secular groups during the Interwar period; by disappointment in the lack of reforms; by competing promises by Vichy, Free French, and foreign forces during World War II; and finally, by the riots and bloody reprisals near Sétif in 1945. The new status of French Muslim of Algeria acknowledged all Muslims' citizenship while preserving a distinct legal status for issues like family law. In the meantime, a dual electoral roll system ensured European settler control, notwithstanding a Muslim majority.15
This citizenship reform created new opportunities for indigenous Algerians to migrate and work in the metropole. Between the two world wars, migration policies had seesawed back and forth, as administrative controls on North African migration were tightened and relaxed several times with changes in governments, economic cycles, and power relations between different ministries on both sides of the Mediterranean. North African migrants had enjoyed few rights, as they were French subjects, in the case of indigenous Algerians, or foreigners under French protection (protégés), in the case of indigenous Moroccans and Tunisians.16 While French officials briefly attempted in 1946–47 to build a new regulatory apparatus of control, indigenous Algerians increasingly sidestepped these efforts. The Organic Statute for Algeria of 1947 ended this ambiguity, legislating equal rights for all categories of citizens. From thence until the Algerian War, when controls in the name of public safety were reintroduced, Algerians could freely work and travel in Algeria and the metropole as French citizens.17 The comparison to Moroccans and Tunisians, who remained members of the French Empire but technically foreign protégés, subject to migration controls, highlights the importance of citizenship. Whereas the population of Moroccan and Tunisian inhabitants in metropolitan France decreased between the 1946 and 1954 censuses, the Algerian population increased nearly ninefold.18
As important as the rights to vote and to free movement were, changing conceptions of work and of social rights opened up new debates and struggles. As Frederick Cooper has demonstrated in West Africa, negotiations about wage levels, access to jobs, and social security benefits were central to debates about citizenship and inclusion and were as vigorously contested as other issues, such as voting rights.19 The centrality of work in these citizenship debates was not new, even if the configurations of actors and ideas were context specific. From at least the time of the French Revolution, conceptions of how individuals earned their livelihoods informed debates about whether they were free, deserving, and able to exercise the full rights of citizenship. For example, distinctions between “active” and “passive” citizens in the first constitution of 1791, debates about Jewish emancipation during the French Revolution, the 1848 Revolution, franchise restrictions during the nineteenth century, and the denial of women's voting rights before 1944 all drew on idealized concepts of work.20
Likewise, the idea of “social citizenship” in the mid‐twentieth century rested on formal wage agreements and particular ideas about work.21 Mandatory employer and/or employee contributions, deducted from the paycheck, fund most social rights, such as child allowances, unemployment and disability insurance, and pensions. Like advocates for mutual aid societies before state intervention, postwar legislators justified employee contributions partly on pragmatic grounds (e.g., a collective pooling of risk) and partly because benefits can be conceptualized as deferred wages (e.g., money withheld and saved for retirement) or as an indemnification for times an individual is unable to work (e.g., due to sickness or disability). The logics of work alone cannot explain the postwar expansion of the welfare state. However, the mechanics of social citizenship upheld work, and specifically formalized wage work, as the norm. Stable, industrial employment by a male breadwinner best fit this model, though government employment and large service‐sector firms also conformed.22 In contrast, the self‐employed and workers in informal, part‐time, temporary, and some service‐oriented sectors of the economy—disproportionately women and migrants—struggled and continue to struggle to obtain social security benefits at comparable levels and hence enjoy the full rights of citizenship.23
This idealized model of work and citizenship also routinely disadvantaged those in the colonies. Algeria, for example, enjoyed a higher level of investment and overall standard of living compared to other colonies. However, a young and growing population, more than a century of land appropriation, and political exclusion jointly led to high unemployment and underemployment among indigenous Muslims. Moreover, compared to Europeans in Algeria, indigenous Muslims had lower wages and were less likely to have formal work agreements. Most of colonial Algeria's wealth and formal jobs were in agricultural products such as wine, as well as in commerce and services, all dominated by the European settler community. There was little heavy industry.24
French administrators frequently referred to this structure of colonial economies to justify distinct, colonial social security systems. Some benefits were restricted to participants in the formal labor market, not coincidentally dominated by the European community. Other benefits, such as family allowances, were restricted to those physically present in the metropole or available to those outside at vastly lower rates.25 The “father of French social security,” Pierre Laroque, rejected criticism that such arrangements reinforced a two‐tier citizenship model, whose racial disparities were lost on none. Rejecting the idea that social rights stemmed from citizenship, Laroque cited the so‐called principle of territoriality and the importance of local demographic and labor market considerations.26
Such arguments were not far from interwar discourses that equal social benefits for metropolitan citizens, on the one hand, and inhabitants of the colonies and colonial migrants in the metropole, on the other hand, would promote corruption, subvert the aims of the programs, threaten the fiscal stability of the nascent welfare state, and divert resources from “true” citizens.27 Unsurprisingly perhaps, the scenes in the film, Redbalkoum, where Kaddour was in hospital or suffering the effects of poverty, were silent about social rights. For example, the film made no mention that free hospital care for the indigent was a right of citizens since 1893. Instead, the depiction of his escape from hospital while suffering from a communicable disease was more reminiscent of equally long‐standing discourses of Algerians as a public health threat.28
In stressing that gainful employment for Algerian migrants would preclude the need for social assistance or social rights, the film sidestepped thorny debates about what the French state owed its citizens from Algeria, instead putting responsibility on individuals.29 Similarly, postwar administrators in Algeria were unwilling to undertake radical steps to expand the local job market through land reform or industrial expansion. Industry would have required a skilled workforce and cheap sources of energy, which were limited before the discovery and large‐scale exploitation of oil and gas during and after the Algerian War. There were questions of capital investment and competition with French producers. Furthermore, the growth of an industrial proletariat threatened to be both Marxist and independentist.30 Instead, most officials looked to migration and jobs in the metropole to solve Algeria's employment problems. As late as the Algerian War, the famed Constantine Plan of 1959 affirmed the importance of jobs in the metropole alongside belated investments in economic development.31
Even in the metropole, the ideals of social citizenship relied on stable work relationships and skilled labor in the formal economy. The Section on the Labor Force in the metropolitan Ministry of Labor believed that unskilled workers were more likely to be unemployed and transient.32 Although local labor officials and prefects had actively promoted flexible, migrant labor markets in places such as Marseilles during the 1920s, and some French employers continued to rely on day and seasonal labor, the postwar Ministries of Labor and the Interior largely rejected transience and pushed for worker stability.33 The Great Depression had demonstrated the strain of social assistance on budgets, and workers' movements around France in search of work had increased the complexity of determining eligibility and administering payments. Ministry of the Interior officials further feared that the supposed propensity of North African workers to switch jobs and domiciles made them not only less reliable producers but also harder to surveil.
Concerns of instability drew on long‐standing tropes of “nomadism” in conflict with “civilization,” pitting “Arabs” against “Europeans.”34 A 1956 government‐subsidized pamphlet for managers about North African workers reflected the desired transition from nomadism to sedentary, industrial modernity. The title, Du douar à l'usine, or From the Douar to the Factory, alluded to the douar not just as a rural administrative unit in Algeria but, originally, as a nomadic camp. The handbook argued that vocational training and, more generally, industrial labor in the metropole would enable the colonial indigène, depicted as somewhat “primitive,” to transform himself. Through stable, skilled, productive work in the metropole, the indigène could more closely approximate the ideal of the “modern,” “civilized,” worker‐citizen.35 As highlighted by Davis, Jean Vibert, one of the architects of the Constantine Plan, referred to this change in 1961 as the transformation of a “homo Islamicus” to a “homo economicus.”36
Labor Management through Skill
French postwar officials, however, did not merely emphasize transformation for Algerian migrants or religious “others.” Rather, government discourses reflected a broader, postwar ambition to manage the French national workforce through the lens of skill (qualification). In unprecedentedly thorough ways, emerging discourses and practices around skill shaped the processes of production, collective bargaining, wages, labor policies, and social analyses of postwar France.
By 1945 long‐term changes in manufacturing techniques had created both a specialization of tasks and clear hierarchies within firms, reflecting a worker's ability to execute or oversee increasingly complex and skilled tasks. Interwar employers had begun to quantify and manage their workforces through measurements of skill and productivity.37 Meanwhile, the Ministry of Labor took an increasingly active role in codifying collective bargaining agreements in both the private and public sectors, beginning with the Popular Front of 1936, and particularly as a result of the Parodi decrees of 1945, named after the then‐minister.
The Parodi decrees set the tone for nearly three decades of linking a worker's training with their position and wages. In accordance with the decrees, employers classified every worker's position according to his or her supposed training and skills: unskilled laborers (manœuvres), semiskilled workers (ouvriers spécialisés, OS1, OS2, etc.), skilled workers (ouvriers qualifiés or ouvriers professionels, OQ1 or OP1, OP2, etc.), foremen (contremaître), and so forth. Then, in each sector, a collective bargaining agreement set a base wage for unskilled workers and specified a premium for workers in more highly skilled classifications as a percentage of that base wage.38 Because the agreements covered such a large part of the population, census takers, sociologists, and others adopted the logic of these bargaining agreements for their classification systems of the general population. For example, the Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE) used the categories of the Parodi decrees and subsequent collective bargaining agreements for the nomenclature des métiers et des activités individuelles in 1947 and its successor, the catégories socio‐professionnelles (from 1954 to the late 1970s). Both the nomenclature and catégories embedded analyses of skill in population‐level economic and social analyses.39
At least in metropolitan postwar France, few imagined skill to be inborn. Rather, training and education imparted skill, and individuals had the capacity to learn and develop. Workers learned and developed their skills through a variety of venues, including technical schools, apprenticeships, and firm‐sponsored classes. Adults learned most frequently on the job (sur le tas), often informally, and formally through AVT (formation professionnelle des adultes). First developed around the 1930s, AVT programs in France adopted the methods of the Swiss industrial engineer and social psychologist Alfred Carrard (1889–1949). Privileging hands‐on training, the instructor (moniteur) broke each process into discrete steps, each of which the trainee (stagiaire) would master exactly before being permitted to proceed to the next skill. During an accelerated, six‐month training program, reflected in the program's initial name, formation professionnelle accélérée (accelerated vocational training), the trainee would learn all that was supposedly necessary to obtain a job as a skilled worker (ouvrier qualifié or ouvrier professionel).40 This logic of rationalizing the labor force assumed that every individual would possess exactly the skills they would need to perform their job, that such skills could be taught and mastered in discrete steps, and that the labor market could be efficiently managed and perfected by government officials, working in partnership with private firms and public‐private training organizations.
Founded in 1949, the Association Nationale Interprofessionnelle pour la Formation Rationnelle de la Main‐d'Oeuvre (ANIFRMO) was the largest provider of AVT. The Ministry of Labor provided funding, but it was administered privately, an arrangement retained after its reorganization as the Association de la Formation Professionnelle des Adultes (AFPA) in 1966. The Ministry of Labor also subsidized private centers, regional centers, and evening courses at technical colleges, though these were fewer in number. Most ANIFRMO/AFPA trainees were French men between the ages of seventeen and thirty‐five. Women rarely participated in ANIFRMO/AFPA courses during the first two decades. Training frequently represented a “second chance” for young men who had struggled in school, the unemployed in need of retraining, and, in some centers, the physically handicapped.
Alongside these young French trainees, however, and largely missing from institutionally focused histories of vocational training, were thousands of migrants. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, refugees and deportees had been “retrained” and “rehabilitated” for “productive,” manual work, alongside veterans and those in industries that would be downsizing.41 While refugee flows soon diminished, migrants made up about 10 percent of all ANIFRMO/AFPA trainees in the following decades.42 French Ministry of Labor officials saw in AVT a “goldilocks” solution for migrants' frequent lack of training or experience in industry. AVT was already targeted at adults. It did not assume education beyond primary school and basic competency in French. Finally, its six‐month duration with minimal compensation was also near the maximum amount of time many migrants could afford not to work. (Many migrants found even six months too great a sacrifice for uncertain returns.) Still, the cost of such training was not inconsiderable: 250,000 francs per migrant according to a 1953 Ministry of Labor estimate (about €5,680 in 2019 after accounting for French consumer price inflation). All told, the annual cost of training foreign workers and refugees—before a major expansion the following year—came to four hundred million francs (€9.1 million), or about one‐tenth of the total cost of AVT programs.43
Subsequent governments continued to fund AVT for migrants because it fulfilled the objectives of multiple stakeholders and was couched in the logics of development, stability, and the rational use of labor resources. Officials in the Sector on Overseas Affairs for the French Commissariat on Productivity opined that vocational training opportunities for Algerians would “prepare a ‘profitable’ labor force, namely: skilled, stable, and efficient.”44 Because labor productivity increases played a larger role in French and West European macroeconomic growth after World War II than mere increases in the size of the labor force, it was crucial to transform “raw” labor resources into something skilled and useful for metropolitan industries. At the same time, vocational training supposedly mitigated the dangers of migration to France's colonial empire, productively channeling individual ambition, minimizing the odds of disappointment in the metropole, and reducing the threat of psychological, social, and political instability.45
Training, Both Separate and Unequal, 1949–1954
To accomplish these goals, ANIFRMO officials provided training to Algerian migrants in metropolitan France, but frequently separate from their French and European colleagues. The Ministry of Labor and its counterparts in Algiers decided as early as 1948 to operate a handful of AVT centers in Algeria but to provide most training in the metropole. The relative lack of industry in Algeria and settler‐controlled economy meant that few instructors were available locally who had relevant experience and skills. In any event, job prospects for graduates were generally superior in the metropole.46 There they theoretically enjoyed equal access to vocational training opportunities as metropolitan French citizens—with the important proviso that they pass the common psychotechnical examination.
The notion of individual merit, demonstrated via supposedly objective examinations, masked and legitimized vast inequalities of opportunity. By 1953 over three thousand North African migrants sat for the entrance exams for admission to AVT centers. About one‐third of candidates were rejected, usually as a result of no or limited education; a third were accepted in regular centers; and a third were admitted to one of forty specialized sections, or cohorts, reserved for North African migrants. North African migrants, a majority Algerian, thus fared more poorly, on average, than metropolitan French on the exams.47
These poor placement exam results sparked a minor controversy among ANIFRMO testing staff. Social scientists in the testing services generally attributed these differences in test results not to “genetic inferiority or superiority,” as one member put it, but to schooling and socioeconomic conditions. Some test designers considered adapting the exams for North Africans to remove potential cultural biases that might skew results. However, others studying the problem concluded that metropolitan and North African trainees who entered regular training centers with similar test scores graduated with comparable marks, leading to little concerted effort to revise testing procedures.48 Rather, ANIFRMO officials tackled unequal opportunities through a combination of preparatory courses, discretionary admissions procedures, and separate sections or centers for North African trainees.
During his time as minister of labor between 1945 and 1947, Ambroise Croizat, a communist politician and head of the Confédération Générale du Travail, had proposed reserving some metropolitan AVT centers for indigenous Algerians.49 However, the idea was not immediately implemented, for reasons that are unknown. Then in 1951 the ministry, at the time under the direction of the Christian Democratic leadership of Paul Bacon, approved special centers for French Muslims of Algeria that would combine a preparatory stage (ultimately of three months) covering such topics as math, the French language, and the introductory use of tools, with the traditional six months of specialized training in a construction or metalworking trade. The first center in Rivesaltes (Pyrénées‐Orientales) opened in October 1951, followed by five others in the next few months.50 Such special centers designated for North African migrants increasingly became the norm. In contrast, Italian, Spanish, and other “European” migrants usually received training in their native country before departure or together with French citizens after departure.51 At a time when segregation in education was legally challenged in the United States, the French state was creating a system of vocational training that in practice, though not in law, segregated Algerian from “European” trainees.
The legal ambiguity of this practice provided Algerian migrants some scope to challenge test results and to negotiate between the two systems. For example “Ahmed” (a pseudonym) had attended school for five years before working in commerce, then taking up baking, and ultimately doing small repairs with makeshift welding tools. For five years in Pantin, outside Paris, he took French and math evening courses, at which he excelled. Finally, in 1952 he resolved to apply for AVT training as a sheet‐iron fabricator and welder. Late for his screening tests, he missed the cutoff for his desired trade and was instead assigned to be a less specialized welder. On appeal, it was found that other metropolitan candidates who had initially received poor marks had later been admitted. Thus, with the agreement of the technical director, Ahmed was finally admitted to his desired trade at a regular center.52 In contrast, “Bachir” (a pseudonym) had also wanted to receive metalworking training and had excellent exam results. However, a shortage of positions in the early 1950s resulted in long waiting lists at regular centers. Rather than wait, Bachir instead requested training as a plasterer before switching to the North African center in Foix, where he could pursue metalworking as a turner.53
For candidates less prepared than Ahmed or Bachir, separate training helped compensate for the woefully inadequate educational and developmental infrastructure of French North Africa. Yet separate centers made many Algerians, French government officials, and ANIFRMO employees uneasy, as they fit uncomfortably with republican ideas of equality. Thus, even before the outbreak of the Algerian War on November 1, 1954, the Ministry of Labor and ANIFRMO decided that dedicated centers for North Africans would be eliminated in favor of “mixed” centers that would receive both North African and metropolitan trainees, as already occurred in a few centers with distinct North African and “normal” sections. Separate ANIFRMO centers were eliminated by the end of 1955.54
This decision did not mean, however, that there was full integration, as there were generally “North African” and traditional sections within these “mixed” centers. For example, in Rivesaltes in late 1954, there were six sections for metropolitan students, four sections for North African students, and two preparatory sections for North African students. (Each section in AVT centers generally had about fifteen trainees.) Because training in each section was provided exclusively by one instructor, who supervised all academic and practical subjects, separate sections meant that North African and metropolitan trainees learned and worked apart. However, trainees shared the same facilities and thus had opportunities to socialize. This socialization troubled authorities, such as the departmental prefect of Pyrénées‐Orientales, who complained to the minister of labor that metropolitan French trainees would expose North African trainees to troublesome political and trade union ideas.55
Algerian trainees, for their part, protested nonintegrated sections and were often dissatisfied. Exacerbating the issue, nearly all Algerian trainees were assigned to construction work, which they considered inferior to metalworking, mechanics, and electronics.56 These other trades provided the chance to work indoors, paid better, and had better prospects for stable employment. Yet these sections almost exclusively comprised European trainees, leading to charges of racism and colonialism. Local administrators and inspectors argued that Algerian placement in construction sections reflected the strong demand for construction work and poorer test scores on entrance exams, and that trainees were aware of the section in which they would be placed when they signed their contracts.57 Trainees often disagreed, particularly if they had signed contracts in Algeria. Furthermore, training was sometimes poorly organized, for example, in the case of construction sections that finished in mid‐February, when no one was hiring.58 A particularly egregious example of high noncompletion rates was in Besançon in 1951, where only five Algerian trainees passed the final exam of the twenty taking construction courses that year.59
Problems within the AVT system were compounded by limited support from outside. Many employers and employer associations, such as the Union des Industries et Métiers de la Métallurgie, preferred to tailor training to the specific needs of their firms. Migrants also confronted racist assumptions that training needed to be “suited to North Africans' needs and abilities” or that “Muslim fatalism” made North African migrants resigned to their current position.60 Unions were often of little help. With weak works councils in firms and national workforce planning mostly monopolized by the Ministry of Labor and employer associations, unions found themselves mostly advocating for nondiscrimination in access to training. While this was a substantial concern to Algerian migrant workers, it was often only halfheartedly embraced by non‐Algerian union members.61 Mounting discontent with AVT led many Algerian students to “vote with their feet,” switching sections and, if need be, centers for training in more prestigious trades. Given popular stereotypes of “Arab nomadism,” however, such responses generally were not taken as a sign of workers' ambition but, rather, reinforced stereotypes that Algerian workers were shiftless and professionally unstable—precisely the problems AVT was supposed to combat.62
Training Citizens in a Time of War, 1954–1962
The Algerian War of Independence increased the significance of debates about access to jobs, the meaning of equality, and allegations of racism. Though French authorities officially refused to recognize the conflict as a war when it broke out in November 1954, they moved both to militarize their response and to gradually address some of the underlying political and social inequalities fueling anticolonialism. Once again, vocational training was envisioned as a means to reduce unemployment, to increase social stability and control, and to inculcate the supposed values of French citizenship. Now, however, officials moved more aggressively to enroll Algerians in AVT, while giving the military an increasingly prominent role in vocational training.
Reserved slots and quotas for Algerian migrants in AVT courses were the first significant innovations during the Algerian War. While extremely controversial in contemporary France, this quota system was, in fact, consistent with the Ministry of Labor's logic of securing jobs for Algerians during the postwar period. For example, in 1947 the ministry briefly experimented with quotas for private‐sector hiring of Algerians. A second quota system for public‐sector hiring was implemented during the Algerian War.63 A third quota scheme, in AVT courses, dovetailed with domestic priorities. As postwar planners moved from the necessity of restoring basic infrastructure to more ambitious social goals, the government decided in 1954 to expand and renovate the country's housing stock, committing to three hundred thousand new residences per annum. To meet this ambitious goal, ANIFRMO received funding to create four hundred new sections for training construction workers, starting in 1955. ANIFRMO and Ministry of Labor officials reserved about twenty‐five hundred out of sixteen thousand available places in metropolitan AVT centers in 1955 for Algerian workers. Ultimately, 12 percent of total AVT trainees that year and the following year were Algerian.64
Next, Ministry of Labor officials in Paris and its counterpart in Algiers, the Office Algérien de la Main‐d'Oeuvre, decided to aggressively expand preparatory courses. The first preparatory courses on Algerian soil opened in May 1957. With the help of military personnel, who compensated for the lack of civilian instructors, preparatory courses were soon serving two thousand to three thousand trainees per annum.65 Other efforts were individually smaller but had a large cumulative effect. The Office Algérien de la Main‐d'Oeuvre offered three‐week orientation sessions to migrants before departing Algiers. Several ANIFRMO centers continued to offer preparatory courses in the metropole. The state subsidized a center belonging to the Aide aux Travailleurs d'Outre‐Mer in Marseille to help colonial migrants “adapt to metropolitan life” and prepare for further vocational training. Building on their work, in 1958 Ministry of the Interior officials began construction of a new Centre de Préformation Professionnelle in Marseille for trainees from Algeria and for migrant families in the metropole.66 This combination of preparatory courses, quotas, and other efforts meant that by 1962 the number of North African (primarily Algerian) participants in metropolitan AVT programs had increased to about three thousand per year.67
As the conflict in Algeria developed into a protracted war, senior military and civilian officials also revisited long‐standing proposals to use mandatory military service for vocational training. One notable proposal came before the war in May 1954 from Joseph Fontanet and Georges Le Brun Keris, members of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire and councillors of the Assembly of the French Union, a quasi parliament with advisory functions for metropolitan and colonial governments. Le Brun Keris and Fontanet argued that widespread illiteracy, limited knowledge of French, and lack of professional qualifications were responsible for many of the problems Algerian migration caused. Luckily, the report continued, there were precedents for integrating French subjects into the nation through military service. The councillors advocated giving the approximately twenty‐eight thousand indigenous Algerians serving in the military each year introductory courses on “modern life,” on the French language, and on vocational skills.68 Later, during the Battle of Algiers in early 1957, members of Brigadier General Jacques Massu's staff began creating Centres de Formation de la Jeunesse Algérienne to provide six months of civic and preprofessional training to unemployed Algerian youths aged sixteen to eighteen.69 Other members of the army and the Ministry of Defense remained generally reluctant to train more Algerians than necessary for military needs, such as the maintenance of mechanized equipment or engineering (génie).
As the war continued poorly for the French, however, the governors‐general and ministers responsible for Algeria, supported by the Ministry of the Interior, slowly gained support for the idea of conscripting more indigenous Algerians for reasons of supervision and, at the same time, providing them with vocational training for military service and, later, civilian employment.70 After protracted negotiations, the ministers of defense, Algeria, labor, and the interior signed accords on April 17, 1958, to jointly establish vocational training for indigenous conscripts and recruits. The Ministry of Defense agreed to provide bases on metropolitan soil, and the trainees remained under the command of military officers. The Ministry for Algeria funded the operation of the centers, while the Ministry of Labor provided instructors, durable equipment, and technical expertise. The site officials selected for the first military vocational training center (centre de formation professionnelle militaire) was the military base at Rivesaltes, known as Camp Joffre, near a civilian vocational training center. The camp itself had a long history in the control of migrants, having served as an internment site for Spanish refugees beginning in 1938–39, for Jews during World War II, later for prisoners of war, and after 1962, for “Harkis,” or indigenous Algerians who had fought for the French Army. Within a matter of months the camp opened for the first 275 troops, providing them with six months of introductory vocational training in construction, similar to civilian preparatory programs. By the war's end in 1962, another three centers in metropolitan France were opened or converted for use in these militarized vocational training programs.71
Perhaps predictably, squabbling over funding, a century of underinvestment in Algerian infrastructure, and the ongoing war limited the program's success. Unlike civilian vocational preparatory programs, which required a minimal level of literacy, some conscripts at Rivesaltes were illiterate or had received very little general education. Initially, conscripts spent six months at Rivesaltes directly after undergoing basic (military) training. However, few trainees were able to find positions in the corps of engineers or otherwise put their skills to use during the rest of their time of military service. Later in 1960, when the Ministries of Labor and of Algeria agreed to shoulder more of the financial burden, training was shifted to the end of conscripts' service in the hopes of easing their transition to civilian employment.72 Nonetheless, of one cohort of fifty‐five trainees in May 1961, which came to the attention of General Jean Lagarde, none were recruited for employment in Algeria, and only two in metropolitan France, despite an impressive rate of forty‐eight trainees who passed the standardized final exam. While many more undoubtedly secured jobs on their own after leaving the center, administrators were unable to quantify how many were employed and how many were able to put the skills they learned to use.73
The conclusion of the Algerian War marked the beginning of a period in which the “lessons” learned from preparatory training of Algerian migrants became the model for managing many groups of migrants in multiple settings. Sometimes there was direct continuity of training at the same locations. For example, from late 1961 into 1962 the Ministry of Education assumed control of the military training centers other than Rivesaltes and began to recruit civilians from Algeria, newly independent states, and France's remaining overseas possessions.74 Other times training models were adapted for new settings, for example, in the case of the so‐called Harkis. The name properly referred to local auxiliaries in the French Army but was applied broadly to other officials, family members, and even other French Muslims of Algeria with no affiliation to the French state. The Ministry of the Interior and repatriates treated “Harkis” more as refugees, as Charles de Gaulle referred to them, than as other French citizens from Algeria. The ministries generally placed “Harkis” in transit and reclassification camps before resettling them in public housing on city outskirts, in private housing, or in the infamous “forest hamlets” (hameaux de forêt).75 The Ministries of Agriculture, Finance, and the Interior and repatriates backed the creation of hamlets after the forest fires of 1962. Ultimately home to about fourteen thousand individuals, the hamlets provided low‐level skills training under the stern supervision of a camp commander, frequently an ex‐military officer. Adult men planted trees, built fire lanes, and performed other forestry tasks in one of seventy‐five remote locations. Cultural technicians and instructors taught mothers and children “modern ways.”76
Less well known than the forest hamlets, but more significant for future developments, was the “transit and reclassification camp” of La Rye. It was an isolated army property, sixty‐five kilometers (forty miles) south of Poitiers, for a maximum of 936 residents.77 Unlike other camps, La Rye offered specially “adapted” vocational training opportunities to its resident “Harki” families and to young single men who transferred there. The instructors, on loan from an ANIFRMO vocational training center in Limoges, offered preparatory courses along the model previously used with North African migrants. However, many trainees could not speak French, while the instructors could speak neither Arabic nor Berber. Therefore, a hallmark of La Rye became its emphasis on supplemental French language classes.78 After passing to civilian control in 1965, the renamed Centre de Formation Professionnelle pour Travailleurs Etrangers (Vocational Training Center for Foreign Workers) served as AFPA's trademark center for migrants and a model for other migrant centers with its language and preparatory courses.79
Similar transformations happened at the Aide aux Travailleurs d'Outre‐Mer center in Marseilles, which began to accept migrants from foreign countries, in addition to oversees French citizens. Following the model of La Rye, the reformed center combined colonial‐era preparatory courses with newer language training courses. Increasing migration from former colonies contributed to this conflation of overseas French citizens and foreign migrants.80 Across the sea, the postcolonial Office National Algérien de la Main‐d'Oeuvre continued to promote vocational training as a catalyst for economic development. As before, officials of this office believed that skilling labor would result in higher capital inflows, as skilled workers could earn higher wages and send home higher remittances. They further hoped that vocational training would facilitate the return of migrants with needed skills and knowhow for domestic industries, thus facilitating development. Tellingly, one of the few rigorous studies of migrant training, published by the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development in 1970, focused on the potential of migrant skill transfer for Algerian development.81 On both sides of the Mediterranean, the assumption persisted that “modernity” required the right type of work and workers' acquisition of new skills and mentalities.
Assessment
In contrast to the popular image today of migrants trapped in low‐skilled jobs, Algerian and other migrants in postwar France were frequently skilled and upwardly mobile.82 In 1967, for example, over one‐third of foreign workers employed in industrial and commercial firms in France with at least ten employees worked in jobs classified as semiskilled. One‐quarter were employed as skilled workers, and 6 percent were white‐collar employees or managers.83 While on average migrants (particularly Algerians) were less likely to work in skilled positions than were indigenous French men and women, hundreds of thousands of migrants did not fit the stereotype.84 The history of vocational training thus reveals that migrants were neither as unskilled nor expected to remain unskilled as commonly assumed.
Three trends since the 1960s have contributed to this misremembering of migrants' skills. The economic shifts referred to as “deindustrialization” hit migrant employment in construction and industry extremely hard. This was coupled by a shift in judgments about “valuable” occupations or those that facilitate “assimilation” in favor of the service sector. There has also been a resurgence in discourses about migrants as a burden on social security regimes.85 However, even during the postwar period, migrant skills could be undercounted. For example, the mostly widely used immigration statistics, from the Office National d'Immigration, recorded migrants' first jobs in France. These first jobs did not always reflect migrants' full abilities, let alone the training or experience migrants later acquired.
The myth of the unskilled migrant has several pernicious consequences. First, this myth reinforces the idea of interchangeable, replaceable migrants. In some settings they were, but more commonly employers cared greatly about whom they employed, hence their marked preferences for certain groups of migrants.86 Second, such generalizations ignore the considerable social mobility of migrants who could train or “work their way up.” One contemporary estimated (from admittedly limited statistics) that nearly half of Algerians working in skilled positions (OQ or OP) in France in the late 1960s had received AVT.87 Finally, this myth hinders recognition of how migrants contributed to post–World War II economic prosperity in both France and Algeria. AVT shifts attention from the sheer number of migrants to their skilled contributions in key sectors.
At the same time, AVT illustrates how migrants struggled to be compensated for their skills. Many migrant trainees obtained only semiskilled worker (OS) positions on graduation. Migrants complained that the purpose of formation professionnelle (vocational training) was employment as an ouvrier professional (skilled worker). Employers argued that six months of AVT could not overcome deficits in general education.88 These deficits were the result of colonial educational and economic structures that employers and state officials largely took for granted. As Emily Marker has observed in writing about other aspects of French colonial education, “postwar racial common sense” could naturalize differential systems and their results, rather than lead to hard questions about choices made.89 Collective bargaining agreements also gave employers an incentive to downgrade workers' skill classifications to lower their wages. Indeed, many migrant trainees who were employed as semiskilled workers (OS1 or OS2) performed the duties of a skilled worker.90 Outright racism may have also played a role in hiring practices, expressed in negative stereotypes about North Africans and a preference for metropolitan French workers.91
The de facto segregation of many training programs mirrored a broader pattern of de facto segregation in jobs that increased with time, as certain occupations became associated with migrants and “migrant work.” Both before and after Algerian independence, Algerians' access to training was generally limited to trades shunned by metropolitan French workers, such as brick and block work, carpentry, and since the 1960s, welding.92 With time, increasing numbers of migrants in an occupation created a self‐reinforcing cycle, as the occupation became increasingly synonymous with migrants and unskilled work. Many women have similar experiences, as occupations become associated with “women's work,” which is regularly discounted as unskilled and undeserving of high wages.93 In both cases, the discounting of “women's work” or “migrant work” has been justified by reference to supposed disparities in “natural” abilities.94
The failures of vocational training on both individual and collective levels stemmed not just from the failure of practices to live up to the promise of ideals but also from shortcomings in the ideals and from underlying conditions. The Ministry of Labor and the semipublic organizations it financed, such as ANIFRMO/AFPA, had limited authority to manage the labor market or direct workers to the jobs they were trained for, given the power of employers and the well‐entrenched dynamics of the private labor market. Vocational training failed to substantially change the attitudes of employers toward Algerians or hiring practices. Training only partially compensated for the lack of education and industry in Algeria. Furthermore, because vocational training operated on an elective and individual basis, its successes were, at best, individual. Vocational training for Algerian migrants fulfilled the myth of opportunity for self‐improvement, which underlines many justifications for socioeconomic inequality. However, even Algerians who graduated from AVT programs faced stark inequalities in compensation, career prospects, and access to social rights compared to metropolitan French citizens.
These inequalities and challenges, which are fully seen only through a trans‐Mediterranean framework, spurred a series of innovative, if unsatisfactory, responses in evolving AVT programs between the end of World War II and the first oil crisis. The “separate and unequal” vocational training system for many Algerian migrants, as it might be described, was characteristic of French structures that ultimately managed, rather than overcame, inequalities of background and opportunity among nominally equal citizens. AVT highlights the challenges of socioeconomic inequality—often grounded in the structures of colonialism and mediated through the lens of race—both to the fundamental rights of French citizens, which were premised on equality and partaking in the same community, and to postwar objectives of economic growth, low unemployment, and social stability. Upheld by administrators as a pragmatic response to what were undeniably substantial challenges, AVT was nonetheless tinged by paternalism and racism. AVT failed many of its participants, who sought skilled jobs and acceptance as the equals of metropolitan citizens. In this sense, vocational training points to citizenship as a project, a process of approximating an ideal, rather than as a status. Yet this project never closed the gap between Algerians and the idealized vision of industrial French citizens.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the many scholars whose discussions and insights have enriched this text, especially Leora Auslander, Tara Zahra, Laura Lee Downs, Lucy Riall, and the anonymous reviewers of French Historical Studies.
Notes
“Projet de scénario pour un film dédié aux Algériens proposant de venir en métropole” (1952), Centre des Archives Contemporaines, Fontainebleau 19860271, art. 5. Many documents from Fontainebleau and Paris have since been transferred to Pierrefitte‐sur‐Seine. Original call numbers are listed.
Gouvernement Général d'Algérie, Direction du Travail, “Avis aux travailleurs désirant se rendre en métropole” (1950), Centre des Archives d'Outre‐Mer, Aix‐en‐Provence, ALG Alger 1K884; Etudes Sociales Nord‐Africaines (hereafter ESNA), “Du douar à l'usine”; MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism, 180.
INED, “Les avantages démographiques.” For similar sentiments, see Haut Comité Consultatif de la Population et de la Famille, “Ordre du jour . . . Recommandation concernant l'immigration en provenance de l'Afrique du Nord” (June 23, 1948), Centre d'Accueil et de Recherche des Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter CARAN), AP 577/4.
Muriam Haleh Davis draws attention to not dissimilar discourses in plans to transform Algerian agriculture and society in Markets of Civilization, 81–82.
The yearly bulletins of the Association de la Formation Professionnelle des Adultes (hereafter AFPA), consulted physically in Metz at the Centre National d'Archives–Association Nationale pour la Formation Professionnelle des Adultes (hereafter CNA‐AFPA), as the association was later known, report some forty‐four thousand foreign migrant trainees in AFPA centers between 1964 and 1974, extrapolating for one year. Migrants represented over 10 percent of total enrollment in these years. For the years 1947–63 I conservatively estimate that 10 percent (thirty‐five thousand) of all trainees of the AFPA's predecessor were foreign or Algerian migrants. In some years Algerian migrants alone exceeded this percentage (Trébous, Migration and Development, 129; total enrollment figures in Benoist, La formation professionnelle, 587). A further twenty‐five thousand migrants trained in bilateral programs abroad (Demondion, “La formation professionnelle,” 115–16). Data are limited for other, private training centers in France subsidized by the state. According to the 1966 AFPA yearly bulletin, the number of foreigners trained in private centers was equal to 40 percent of the foreigners trained in AFPA centers. Even if the percentage were only half that for the period 1947–74, it would add another sixteen thousand migrants.
AFPA yearly bulletins; Trébous, Migration and Development, 130–33; Khandriche, Développement et réinsertion, 177; Demondion, “La formation professionnelle,” 115–16.
Rosenberg, Policing Paris, 144, 168; Byrnes, “French Like Us?”; Lewis, Boundaries of the Republic, 102–4; Davidson, Only Muslim, 70; MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism, 153–71; Lyons, Civilizing Mission.
Davis, Markets of Civilization, 55–56.
INSEE, “Tableaux rétrospectifs.”
Khandriche, Développement et réinsertion, 177; Trébous, Migration and Development, 78; L'Algérien en Europe, “Intervention de M. Edmond Maire,” 16.
Perdoncin, “(Post)Colonial Migrations,” 79; Harp, Riviera Exposed, 55.
Sayad, “Immigrant”; Pitti, “Les luttes centrales,” 46; Varro and Perriaux, “Les sens d'une catégorisation,” 11, 27.
Michel, Les travailleurs, 84–86; Trébous, Migration and Development, 135; Pitti, “La main‐d’œuvre algérienne,” 52.
Fransee, “Without Distinction”; Marker, “Obscuring Race.”
Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 39–43; Wilder, French Imperial Nation‐State, 10; Stein, Saharan Jews; Weil, “Le statut des musulmans.”
Stora, Les immigrés, 93; Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie, 157; MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism, 117; Rosenberg, Policing Paris, 109.
Haut Comité Consultatif de la Population et de la Famille, “Ordre du jour 23 juin 1948, item 1, Recommandation concernant l'immigration en provenance de l'Afrique du Nord (Texte rédigé par MM. DEBRE, LANDRY et MAUCO),” CARAN, AP 577/4; Lyons, Civilizing Mission, 35–38; MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism, 181, 198; Spire, Etrangers à la carte, 195–200; Weil, La France et ses étrangers, 83.
INSEE, “Tableaux rétrospectifs.”
Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 178–86; Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 92–104.
Sewell, “Le Citoyen/La Citoyenne,” 106; Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies, 31–44; Frader, Breadwinners and Citizens; Lewis, Boundaries of the Republic, 92–93; Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race, 51; Downs, Manufacturing Inequalities; Andersen, “French Settlers, Familial Suffrage, and Citizenship.”
Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, 47.
Frader, Breadwinners and Citizens; Downs, Manufacturing Inequalities; Andersen, “French Settlers, Familial Suffrage, and Citizenship”; Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 261.
“Exposé sur la sécurité sociale et les allocations familiales en Algérie et en Métropole” (n.d., late 1956?), CARAN, F/1a/5125; Population, “La politique de sécurité sociale,” 18; Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 261; Jabbari, Pierre Laroque, 129; Boris, Home to Work, 273; Boris and Klein, Caring for America.
Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie, 157–60, 168.
Kozakowski, “From the Mediterranean to Europe,” 140–50; Lyons, Civilizing Mission, 94–98; Math, “Les allocations familiales”; Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 178–86; Ancelin, “D'hier à aujourd'hui,” 49; Andersen, Regeneration through Empire, 200, 220; Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 213, 216.
Laroque, preface.
Beaujon, “Policing Colonial Migrants,” 655; Rosenberg, Policing Paris, 144, 168; Schor, L'opinion française; Byrnes, “French Like Us?”; Weil, “Racisme et discrimination,” 74; Lewis, Boundaries of the Republic, 102–4; Davidson, Only Muslim, 70; MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism, 153–71; Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 92–104.
Rosenberg, Policing Paris, 168; Davidson, Only Muslim, 62.
Le Gouverneur Général de l'Algérie, Chataigneau to M le Ministre du Travail et de la Sécurité Sociale, Cabinet et Direction Général de la Main‐d’œuvre, “Objet, Mouvements de main‐d’œuvre entre l'Algérie et la métropole” (Dec. 12, 1945), CARAN, F/60/865; Colonel Spillmann (Secrétaire Générale du Comité de l'Afrique du Nord), “Note à l'attention de M. Bidault, Président du Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Française” (Oct. 30, 1946), CARAN, F/60/865; Présidence du Gouvernement: Sous‐secrétariat d'Etat aux Affaires musulmanes, unsigned, “Note au sujet de l'immigration des travailleurs nord‐africains en France” (reportedly Jan. 3, 1946, but likely 1947 from the text), CARAN, F/60/865.
Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie, 157–60, 168.
Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie, 113–33, 306–7, 367; Kateb, Européens, “indigènes” et juifs, 258.
Kozakowski, “From the Mediterranean to Europe,” 127–32.
Lewis, Boundaries of the Republic, 115–21; Ministère du Travail et de Sécurité Sociale, Bulletin d'information et de documentation professionnelle, 29–32; Robert Montagne, “Etude sociologique de la migration des travailleurs musulmans d'Algérie en métropole,” CARAN, F/1a/5047.
Kozakowski, “Making ‘Mediterranean Migrants,’” 184; MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism, 188; Silverstein, “Immigrant Racialization,” 369; INED, “Les avantages démographiques”; “I. Conclusions Provisoires sur l'enquête des nord‐africains en France” (n.d., early 1950s?), CARAN, F/1a/5126.
ESNA, “Du douar à l'usine”; Lyons, Civilizing Mission, 94.
Davis, Markets of Civilization, 82.
Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race, 51.
Sturmthal, “Collective Bargaining,” 236; Pitti, “De la différenciation coloniale?,” 78.
Bégué, “Les nomenclatures d'activités individuelles,” 63; Cézard, “Les qualifications,” 17; Pierru and Spire, “Le crépuscule des catégories socioprofessionnelles,” 459; Taffin, “Les nomenclatures,” 95.
Bayard, La formation professionnelle des adultes; Prost, “Jalons pour une histoire”; Terrot, Histoire de l’éducation des adultes; Roche, “La méthode Carrard.”
Cohen, “Regeneration through Labor,” 369.
Statistics from the AFPA yearly bulletins. For more traditional accounts of AVT in France, see Benoist, La formation professionnelle; Bonnet, La formation professionnelle des adultes, 35; and Dänzer‐Kantof, Former pour l'emploi.
Ministère du Travail et de la Sécurité sociale, Sous‐direction de la Main‐d’œuvre étrangère, “Le problème des migrations et l'immigration en France” (July 1953), Centre des Archives Contemporaines, Fontainebleau 19950493. To estimate the worth of currency, see http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/calcul-pouvoir-achat.asp.
Commissariat à la productivité, Secteur Affaires outre‐mer, “Note de présentation à la commission restreinte sur un projet de recherche concernant la formation professionnelle des nord africains en France” (Jan. 15, 1957), CARAN, F/1a/5058.
ESNA, “Du douar à l'usine”; Lyons, Civilizing Mission, 94; Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie, 126–36.
“Travaux du Haut Comité consultative de la population et de la famille année 1948,” CARAN, AP/577/4; ESNA, “Formation professionnelle,” annexe III; Trébous, Migration and Development, 40–41; d'Humières, L'armée française, 77; Michel, Les travailleurs, 76–77; Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie, 310–11.
Berlioz, “Etude de la réussite,” 43.
Berlioz, “Etude de la réussite,” 43; ANIFRMO, “F. P. A. Bâtiment spéciale pour nord‐africains,” 193; ESNA, “La psychotechnique”; ESNA, “Formation professionnelle,” 56.
Undated press clipping from Liberté du 6 juin (Alger), CARAN, F60.865.
Député Robert Lacoste, “Rapport fait au nom de la Commission des finances sur le projet de loi (nº 995),” Assemblée nationale, Annexe au procès‐verbal de la séance du 6 novembre 1951, p. 30, CARAN, F/1a/5058.
Khandriche, Développement et reinsertion, 177; Demondion, “La formation professionnelle,” 115–16.
“Sélections des candidats nord‐africains” (1952), CNA‐AFPA, 117/219.
D. Dupuis, Directeur du centre de Foix‐Labarre, to M. le Directeur des Services de sélection, “Objet Stage FPA ‘spécial’ de Foix‐Labarre (Ariège)” (Nov. 19, 1952), CNA‐AFPA, 117/219.
CARAN, F/1a/5058; Michel, Les travailleurs, 83.
Maurice Justin to the Ministre du Travail (Dec. 29, 1954), CARAN, F/1a/5059.
Trébous, Migration and Development, 129.
Pierre Chalumeau (Administrateur des services civils de l'Algérie, Préfecture d'Ille‐et‐Vilaine) to the Directeur du Service des Affaires Musulmanes, “Objet: Attitude des stagiaires musulmans des CFPA dans la IIIème Région” (Apr. 19, 1961), CARAN, F/1a/5058.
Lamassoure (Chef des Services des Affaires musulmanes) to the Sous‐direction de la Formation professionnelle, “Difficultés particulières concernant les stagiaires musulmans des CFPA recrutés directement en Algérie” (Feb. 21, 1961), CARAN, F/1a/5058.
J. M. Faverge, on behalf of the Directeur des Services de sélection, to the Directeur technique de l'ANIFRMO, “Sélection des Nord‐Africains Centre de Besançon” (May 8, 1952), CNA‐AFPA, 117/219.
Perdoncin, “(Post)colonial Migrations,” 80; Trébous, Migration and Development, 118–19, 135; Michel, Les travailleurs, 85–86, 88; ESNA, “Formation professionnelle,” 53–55.
CFDT, “La formation professionnelle,” 21; Trébous, Migration and Development, 152; Michel, Les travailleurs, 87–91.
Chalumeau to the Directeur du Service des Affaires Musulmanes, “Attitude des stagiaires musulmans”; L'Administrateur des Services civils de l'Algérie: Chargé de mission pour la Vie région, Cabinet du Préfet, Préfecture de la Moselle, “Note au sujet du recrutement de jeunes Musulmans pour la formation professionnelle du Centre de Remiremont” (June 6, 1956), CARAN, F/1a/5058; Chef de Cabinet to Service des Affaires musulmanes, Délégué général en Algérie, “Objet: Comportement de certains stagiaires musulmans de FPA en Métropole” (Apr. 5, 1961), CARAN, F/1a/5058.
Kozakowski, “From the Mediterranean to Europe,” 122–24; Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 48–51.
Trébous, Migration and Development, 129.
Bernard, “Formation et emploi de la jeunesse urbaine” (Aug. 1957), 15, CARAN, F/1a/5058, reports 60 sections and 3,000 trainees in 1958, whereas Henry d'Humières reports 101 sections and 2,180 trainees by late August 1958 (L'armée française, 77).
Bernard, “Formation et emploi”; Procès‐verbal de la Réunion interministérielle tenue au Secrétariat général à la Présidence du Conseil pour les Affaires algériennes le jeudi 18 septembre 1958, “Formation professionnelle des français musulmans algériens,” CARAN, F/1a/5058.
Service des Affaires Musulmanes, “Situation actuelle et perspectives d'avenir de la population musulmane algérienne en France métropolitaine” and the associated cover letter to Crémieux‐Brilhac, Directeur de la Documentation (Mar. 19, 1962), CARAN, F/1a/5126.
Georges Le Brun Keris and Joseph Fontanet, “Proposition tendant à inviter le gouvernement à étudier la contribution que l'armée pourrait apporter à la solution des problèmes posés par l'immigration algérienne dans la métropole,” annexe au procès‐verbal de la séance de l'Assemblée de l'Union française du 4 mai 1954, CARAN, F/1a/5059; Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 292.
D'Humières, L'armée française, 64–71, 77–78.
D'Humières, L'armée française, 109–11; Procès‐verbal de la Réunion interministérielle tenue au Secrétariat Général à la Présidence du Conseil pour les affaires algériennes, “Formation professionnelle des français musulmans algériens” (Sept. 18, 1958), CARAN, F/1a/5058.
CARAN, F/1a/5059.
Procès‐verbal de la Réunion interministérielle, “Formation professionnelle des français musulmans algériens” (Sept. 18, 1958), CARAN, F/1a/5058; and CARAN, F/1a/5059.
“Procès‐verbal de la Réunion interministérielle tenue au Secrétariat Général à la Présidence du Conseil pour les Affaires algériennes” (May 18, 1961), CARAN, F/1a/5059.
Service des Affaires musulmanes to the Ministre de l'Intérieur, “Avenants aux protocoles relatives à la répartition des compétences et des charges financières entre les Ministères participant à la formation donnée dans les Centres Militaires de Formation Professionnelle et de Jeunesse de Fontenay‐le‐Comte et d'Issoire” (Jan. 11, 1962), CARAN, F/1a/5059; Service des affaires musulmanes to the Ministre de l'Intérieur (Dec. 8, 1962), CARAN, F/1a/5059.
Jordi and Hamoumou, Les harkis, 48–49; Crapanzano, The Harkis, 117; Roux, Les harkis, 230.
Charbit, Les harkis, 78; Jordi and Hamoumou, Les harkis, 95–96; Crapanzano, The Harkis, 130–40.
“La Rye,” CNA‐AFPA, 115/25A; Albert and Gillard, “Des harkis dans la Vienne,” 436–45; Albert and Gillard, “L'arrivée des rapatriés.”
AFPA‐Bulletin d'Information 7 (Nov. 1970); AFPA‐Bulletin d'Information 8 (Dec. 1970).
J. Regior, 1966, “Contrôle technique des centres de formation professionnelle: Centre de formation professionnelle pour travailleurs étrangers Camp de La Rye—Le Vigeant (Vienne),” CNA‐AFPA, 115/25A; J. Chazelle, Lettre‐circulaire T. E. 3/65 (IX), “Centre de La Rye, ouverture de sections de préformation professionnelle destinées aux travailleurs étrangers résidant en France et ne possédant aucune qualification” (Feb. 3, 1965), CNA‐AFPA, 115/25A; Levron, “Apprendre le français,” 26–28.
Trébous, Migration and Development, 145; Centre de Préformation de Marseille, “Compte‐rendu des activités du Centre, 1966,” CNA‐AFPA, 115/31 C1; Michel Massenet (Directeur de la Population et des Migrations) and Jacques Legrand (Directeur Général du Travail et de l'Emploi), “Objet: Centre de Préformation de Marseille” (Feb. 24, 1970), CNA‐AFPA, 115/31 C1; J. Guermonprez, Circulaire SCP/JG/1916, “Objet: Informations concernant l'admission dans les stages de l'Association pour le centre de Préformation de Marseille (A.C.P.M.)” (Jan. 6, 1971), CNA‐AFPA, 115/31 C1; AFPA, Direction de la formation: Service orientation, “Etude sur les stagiaires étrangers à l'A.F.P.A.” (Sept. 1973), CNA‐AFPA, salle de lecture 244.
Trébous, Migration and Development, 7, 137.
Bruno, Les chemins de la mobilité; Sayad, “Immigrant”; Pitti, “Les luttes centrales,” 46; Varro and Perriaux, “Les sens d'une catégorisation,” 11, 27.
Ministère d’état chargé des Affaires sociales, “Effectifs des salariés étrangers des établissements industriels et commerciaux de 10 salariés et plus au 1er juillet 1967,” Bulletin mensuel de statistiques sociales: supplément C3 (Apr. 1969): 151. While migrant and foreign worker are not perfectly synonymous, to my knowledge there are no national statistics from the time that analyze migrants' skills after they obtained work permits.
Compare the aforementioned statistics on migrants by nationality to the census figures in INSEE, Recensement général de la population de 1968 . . . Population active.
Kozakowski, “Clandestine Crisis,” 103; Clarke, “Closing Moulinex,” 443; INSEE, Recensement général de la population de 1982 . . . Les étrangers, 46.
Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race, 72; Lewis, Boundaries of the Republic, 69, 84–85; Kozakowski, “From the Mediterranean to Europe,” 171, 249.
ESNA, “Formation professionnelle,” 52–55; Michel, Les travailleurs, 85–86; Trébous, Migration and Development, 136–38.
ESNA, “Formation professionnelle,” 29.
Marker, Black France, White Europe, 138.
Michel, Les travailleurs, 84–86; Trébous, Migration and Development, 135; Pitti, “La main‐d’œuvre algérienne,” 52.
Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race, 71; unsigned, likely the Préfecture de Police (Seine), “Etude sur l'immigration de la main d’œuvre étrangère” (n.d., 1967?), CARAN, F/1a/5052.
Trébous, Migration and Development, 137.
Downs, Manufacturing Inequalities, 79–80; Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 53, 97, 167; Green, Ready to Wear, 161–87; Cobble, Sex of Class, 15, 35; Boris and Klein, Caring for America, 218.
Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race, 48; unsigned, “Etude sur l'immigration.”
