`La France aux FranÃÂffois!` Displacing the Foreign Worker During the 1930s Depression

Unemployment in the 1930s was low in France by international standards, nevertheless there was a virulent drive to expel immigrant workers as a means of limiting domestic unemployment. This involved not only the repatriation of the foreign chômeur, but also legislation to displace the foreign worker from his workplace. This paper extends the current debate over the effectiveness of this strategy with the use of two archival datasets. The inability of the State to reach its immigrant employment targets is confirmed, but it is suggested that it was not that unemployed Frenchmen were not willing to take the unattractive jobs that immigrants held, but that employers were unwilling to substitute their foreign workers with their French unemployed equivalents that undermined this repatriation drive. One implication is that the repatriation of foreign workers that did take place compromised the economic recovery that would begin in 1936.