Contrary to most European countries, France has had a history of nearconstant immigration since the 19th century. Historians only began studying immigration much later, however, within a context of the violent rise of xenophobia of the 1980s, a period when one of the leitmotivs of public opinion was to compare the recent non-European and Muslim immigrants (for the most part Algerians and their children, quickly lumped together in a ‘Maghrebi’ ensemble), considered inassimilable, to the European immigrants of the past who had ‘easily’ been assimilated into the French nation. The challenge then for historians (and other social science researchers) was to combat conventional wisdom by emphasising the similarities between past and present. In his pioneering work Le Creuset français (The French Melting Pot), Gérard Noiriel put forward a cyclic model that became authoritative and that we can summarise thusly: Throughout the migration process, a period of great mobility precedes a period of stabilisation/integration. The stabilisation, imposed by an authoritarian halt to immigration, takes place in a context of economic and xenophobic crisis; the conditions for integration were therefore essentially painful, but this pain is finally forgotten at the end of the long process of social assimilation.

The analysis put forward by Nancy Foner3 has therefore long been popular in France. By contrast, she notes that, faced with the persistent difficulties encountered by certain groups coming from immigration, the historian nowadays investigates the differences between old and new migrations. This is what we shall try to do by looking at the two emblematic cases: the Italians and the Algerians.

The Italians

The lengthiest ‘old migration’

Mass migrations to France began during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1881, there were more than a million foreigners. They came from neighbouring countries; these migrations were the prolongation of movements sometimes stretching back from before the French Revolution. The Italians (until then, settled predominantly in the Southeast) became the largest immigrant group in the country from 1901 onwards. They would remain so until the 1968 census, when the Spanish replaced them. This is the largest and longest lasting past migration, and the one that has left the most descendants in the French population, all origins taken into account.