After 1945, thanks to the theories elaborated by French demographers (Haut Comité à la Population) the French administration decided to give a preferential channel to the immigration from Italy. This choice explains how a special system of rules was established and applied to Italians different from the procedures provided for foreigners of other nationalities. A typical, but in no way unique, example of the privileges granted to Italian immigrants was the payment of family allowances to workers whose family remained in Italy; at that time a similar favor was systematically denied to French citizens and, particularly, to French Muslims coming from Algeria. Comparing the different treatment of these two populations, it appears that, gradually, the permanent settlement of Italians in France was encouraged, while a short-term approach was kept toward Algerian immigration.

The paper is based on a series of interviews with the chief-medical officer who, from 1953 to 1963, used to examine men and women who intended to emigrate to France, and who were supposed to be screened by the ONI ("Office National de l’Immigration") delegation in Milan. This evidence shows how poorly Italian workers were appreciated by French officials, even in a period when Italians were supposed to be preferred to every other national group likely to emigrate to France. The paper emphasizes the nature and the deep roots of a certain number of negative stereotypes which greatly influenced French representations of "Italy" and "Italians". It also shows how complex and discouraging were the bureaucratic procedures meant to allow French and Italian authorities to choose the number and the kind of workers to be sent to France. All this can explain why, during most of the period, Italians migrating legally to France were so much fewer than what both French and Italian officials had initially planned.

With the end of second World-War in Europe, mass migration of Italian workers to Lorraine started again, characterised by new features which have become increasingly evident. First of all, while the Italian community still occupies the first place among other foreign communities in the region, it’s importance has diminished gradually and concerns mostly workers coming only from the south of the peninsula. The majority of Italian workers are employed in the industrial factories, but are also present in other sectors of the labour market. The participation of women in the labour force is higher than in the past. Finally, with the decline of the steel industry at the end of the sixties, the Italian immigration has become less relevant and has taken up a different profile.

Crossing oral sources with the acts of the Neapolitan and French registry office, a series of family genealogies is traced in order to reconstruct the original context from which every migrant departed. The analysis of some specific life-stories shows that the migrants’ choices are always the result of the complex interaction of the determinations, expectations, and individual and family constraints matured in the context of origin. The aim of the paper is to outline the range of social opportunities the Neapolitan migrants could enjoy in the Parisian space in the 50s and beyond, and to stress the strategies they were able to carry out vis-à-vis the opportunities offered by the social, economic and political circumstances of the period concerned.

The paramount importance for the building industry of the years immediately following the second World-War should not be overstressed. It was a period of transition from the old way of operating of the small enterprise, to that of the big corporation, very often multinational, which became largely predominant at the end of the XXth century. The building yard was also a significant test of social change and transformation. It was there that the upcoming human landscape first appeared, and new human relations in the working place were first experienced. In this essay, the author tries to bring the reader into those building yards and show the way people work, the kind of relations they entertain with each-other, what kind of faces the main actors have. The paper also tries to understand the different strategies which were carried out, what kind of new professions appeared, how the management of the enterprise has been transformed, the new ways of hiring workers and the new ethnic groups involved.

The paper presents a two-fold analysis. It studies on one side the impact of growth and modernization of the countryside in the South West of France during the 1950s and the 1960s on Italians migratory strategies, and the passage of a fairly great number of migrants from the original status of share-cropper or wage-earner to that of medium size land-owner and/or more or less wealthy farmer. It also tries to examine in which ways the family structure of most Italian migrants, based on communitarian brotherhood, changed in reaction to the modernization processes and to the emergency of individualistic, entrepreneurial strategies. The author stresses also the difference between to various generations of Italian migrants in the French South-western countryside: the ones who arrived in the 1920s (due to the difficult circumstances experienced in the 1930s and during the war) finally acceded to land ownership and a certain wealth at the end of the 1950s, more or less at the same time than those arrived after the war.

The second World-War years were of paramount importance for the relations between French people and Italian immigrants – that is why this difficult period has been the object and the stake of conflicting memories. The paper tries to figure out the collective representations at work since the early post-war period, and the transformations they underwent until today when this past is still present – or on the contrary eluded – in the words and conversations of the actors.

In the 1960s, the French Communist party developed strong links with the Italian immigrants, rooted in the antifascist struggle memory. At the beginning of this period, the Party followed a three-fold policy. In the first place, it tried to take into account the peculiar problems experienced by the Italian migrant workers. It also wanted to make them join the struggles carried out by French workers. Finally it accepted to entertain the immigrants’ concern for the political debate in Italy. This policy implied that the Party’s immigrants’ organisation would be strengthened while being associated with the Italian Communist Party. It also meant that the communist network involving trade unions, as well as associations, had to be appealed for. The monthly journal L’Emigrante gives evidence of the extent to which the links between Party, trade unions and associations were interconnected and served the communist propaganda. Thanks to its own press and through its elected members, the French Communist Party was able to act as a spokesman for the community claims. In the late 1960s, the Party decided to follow the general trend that consisted in turning to immigrants coming from outside Europe, thus putting the Italian immigrants aside.

The paper deals with the Italian presence in the construction trade-unions under the influence of the Communist Party. It stresses the contradiction between the fact that, while there was a great number of Italians in the building yards, they were practically absent from the trade-unions’ directing boards. The Author explains this absence by the changing character of the trade-unions attitude towards immigration in general, and especially Italian immigration. After 1948, when it loses influence in the choice of migrants, the communist leading CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail) starts opposing immigration. Even if it tries to fight against French workers’ xenophobia, the French Trade Union makes no particular effort towards Italian immigrants. It is only at the end of the 1950s that the CGT realizes how important the Italian presence is in the building industry, and finally decides to sign an agreement with the Italian CGIL (1958).

This essay deals with an important sociological inquiry that had been carried out by two French sociologists in 1953. The inquiry’s aim was to ascertain the degree of integration to French society and way of living of Italian migrants, most of whom had come to rural France during the previous twenty years. The Author has examined the original material – mostly written transcriptions of oral interviews conducted by elementary school teachers – on which the conclusions of the inquiry were based. He can thus show to what extent the results of that part of the inquiry which had been published were biased by the will to demonstrate a degree of assimilation to French life much more significant than what the original interviews actually show.