Despite important recent work, US historians still have much more to learn about the interaction between unions and immigrants in the years since the 1960s. One indication of this lacuna is that it is difficult to cite a US study that combines both a national narrative and a fine-grained local analysis of the subject as well as Cole Stangler's revealing new volume does for the case of France in the 1960s and 1970s.
Stangler's story is enlightening on multiple levels. He focuses not on the largest French union federation, the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), but on its smaller rival, the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), which, he convincingly demonstrates, took a much more aggressive approach to defending immigrant workers during the crucial years between 1965 and 1979.
The CFDT was founded in 1964 when the bulk of unionists in the Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens (CFTC) broke from...
