Synopses & Reviews
After the devastation of the First World War, France welcomed immigrants on an unprecedented scale. To manage these new residents, the French government devised Europes first guestworker program, then encouraged family settlements and finally cracked down on all foreigners on the eve of the Second World War. Despite Frances famous doctrine of universal rights, these policies were egalitarian only in theory, not in reality. Mary Dewhurst Lewis uncovers the French Republics hidden history of inequality as she reconstructs the life stories of immigrants—from their extraordinary successes to their sometimes heartbreaking failures as they attempted to secure basic rights. Situating migrants lives within dramatic reversals in the economy, politics, and international affairs, Lewis shows how factors large and small combined to shape immigrant rights. At once an arresting account of European social and political unrest in the 1920s and 1930s and an exposé of the origins of Frances enduring conflicts over immigration, The Boundaries of the Republic is an important reflection on both the power and the fragility of rights in democratic societies.
Review
"The Boundaries of the Republic is a sophisticated analysis that makes a major contribution to the field of immigrant history, urban history, and the history of international human rights policy. This is an extremely important book."Vicki Caron, Cornell University
Review
"The Boundaries of the Republic is a sophisticated analysis that makes a major contribution to the field of immigrant history, urban history, and the history of international human rights policy. This is an extremely important book."Vicki Caron, Cornell University
Review
"The Boundaries of the Republic is an extraordinary accomplishment. It is brilliantly conceived at a time when it is important to disseminate the highest quality histories of immigration."Leslie Page Moch, Michigan State University
Review
"This is a very sophisticated project. Rarely has the interplay between state and society, with vector lines running up and down, and with deflection coming in at all angles, been so deftly handled."Michael Miller,
Journal of Social History"The greatest strength of Lewis's book is the way she tells the story of immigrants from a local and often individual perspective, challenging in the process not only the French republican myth of inclusivity, but also the traditional representation of the French state as 'Jacobin': it provides a valuable reminder that even the most centralized state cannot entirely control its population."Times Literary Supplement
Review
"This is a very good book. Mary Dewhurst Lewis... brings balance and outstanding scholarship to discussions of migrant rights which, although focusing on the interwar years in France, have a contemporary ring."Modern and Contemporary France
Review
"Lewis's book is a major contribution to the existing scholarship on French and European immigration, the history of the French Third Republic 'in the provinces,' and the history of the republican ideology of universal rights more generally. The book is deeply researched and highly innovative in its particular focus on migrant practices and interactions with the "state" and employers."Alice Conklin, The Ohio State University
Synopsis
“The Boundaries of the Republic is a sophisticated analysis that makes a major contribution to the field of immigrant history, urban history, and the history of international human rights policy. This is an extremely important book.”—Vicki Caron, Cornell University
“The Boundaries of the Republic is an extraordinary accomplishment. It is brilliantly conceived at a time when it is important to disseminate the highest quality histories of immigration.”—Leslie Page Moch, Michigan State University
Synopsis
In this first comprehensive history of immigrant inequality in France, Mary D. Lewis chronicles the conflicts arising from mass immigration between the First and Second World Wars, the uneven rights arrangements that emerged during this time, and their legacy for contemporary France.
About the Author
Mary Dewhurst Lewis is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, where she teaches in the History Department.