The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity

The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, by Gerard Noiriel. Translated by Geoffroy de Laforcade. Foreword by Charles Tilly. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 325 pp. $57.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8166-2419-4. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8166-2420-8.

The "Contradiction of Modernity" series, edited by Craig Calhoun at the University of Minnesota Press, has recently made available to the English-speaking public what is widely viewed as the most important and encompassing recent study of French immigration and national identity. The French Melting Pot, which came out in Paris in 1988 under the title Le Creusot Francais, is reshaping how social scientists approach French immigration. This book goes against the grain of taken-forgranted views on the topic by demonstrating that (1) France is not the uniform entity that is celebrated by the republican myth; (2) as is the case in the United States, only a third of its population is made of individuals whose families have been in the country for at least three generations; (3) because France's national unity was constituted prior to important nineteenth-century waves of immigration, immigrants to this country were never viewed as agents of national construction as they are in the United States; and (4) French nationbuilding required not only the creation of an "imagined community" but also the creation of a "politically sovereign institutionalized community" of citizens whose shared interests were consolidated through legal and bureaucratic mechanisms excluding...