Portuguese immigration in France in the 20th century
Whereas emigration has been common within Portuguese society for several centuries, the massive arrival of Portuguese people in France only dates from the late 1950s. Until this time, Portuguese migrants preferred the distant coasts of America, Africa or even the Pacific. From representing a residual share of foreigners in France during the first five decades of the 20th century, in the space of a few years, the Portuguese became the largest foreign "community". In seventeen years, the number of Portuguese living in France went from 20,000 (1958) to 750,000 (1975).
Reduced migration
Before the 20th century, France was not a terra incognita in Portugal. Many Jews settled in France to flee the Portuguese inquisition. During the 19th century, artists and exiles lived in France. But very few Portuguese workers settled north of the Pyrenees. The 1876 census, the first to mention the Portuguese, counted only 1,237 of them, much fewer than the 374,498 Belgians, 165,513 Italians, 62,437 Spaniards or 18,099 Dutch. Unlike the other foreign populations whose volume was increasing, during the following censuses the Portuguese population stagnated. There were only 1,292 of them in 1886, 1,331 in 1891, 1,280 in 1896. Subsequently, since there were not enough Portuguese for it to be deemed necessary to devote columns to them, they disappeared from the censuses altogether.
It was during World War 1 that a larger number of Portuguese settled in France. The military mobilisation of millions of men and the need for an economy fully focused on the war effort prompted a large migration trend. The French authorities were actively seeking workers abroad and in the colonial empire. Among the 600,000 or so colonial workers and foreigners brought into France during the conflict, slightly more than 22,000 were Portuguese. In March 1916, Portugal declared war on Germany and sent soldiers to fight in Flanders. Portuguese people were recruited and went to work in France. Some of these workers and soldiers remained in France after the war ended, particularly in the North and East.
Vulnerable migrants
Within the context of post-war reconstruction, the French authorities wanted to maintain the flow of Portuguese into France. Despite the requests made in 1918 and 1919 by France, no agreement could be secured with the Portuguese government. Since France was signing agreements with other countries (Poland, Belgium, Italy, Czechoslovakia, etc.), the failure of negotiations with Portugal had few consequences. Moreover, the absence of an agreement did not prevent Portuguese workers from entering France illegally. That is how the Portuguese came to reappear in the 1931 census: there were 49,000 of them at the time, men for the overwhelming majority, and most of them were working in industry.
The crisis of the 1930s had dramatic effects for Portuguese migrants. The French governments enacted measures and laws to prevent new immigrants from coming and to keep foreign workers – now viewed as undesirable – away. Many Portuguese were thus deported when they became unemployed. As Philippe Rygiel has shown for the Cher region, the Portuguese were the foreigners most impacted by the deportations and the non-renewal of their worker’s ID card.
Having arrived not long before, not fluent in French, having no great social capital, with little protection from their country of origin, which had refused to sign any agreement with France, they were the main victims of a nit-picking administration that claimed to protect national workers.
By the 1930s, as a consequence of naturalisations, voluntary returns, deportations and deaths, the Portuguese population had dropped considerably: there were only 28,290 of them in 1936.
During the phoney war, the French authorities looked once again to Portugal, one of the few neutral countries in Europe, for a source of workers. A labour agreement providing for the arrival in France of 30,000 workers was ratified on April 30th 1940. As a result of the German invasion, it was never applied. Many Portuguese therefore left France, sometimes in dramatic conditions, and returned to their homeland. Some did however remain in France and took part in the Resistance movement (like Emídio Guerreiro or Antoine Ferreira-Dias).
Migration refused
By 1945, only a few thousand Portuguese were living in France. With the Liberation, the French government requested application of the 1940 labour agreement, but the authorities in Lisbon refused. They claimed to want to keep their workforce at home. The highly influential farm owners were opposed to the population leaving. Moreover, as the French Ambassador to Portugal stated, the dictatorship feared "seeing Portuguese workers return home with ideas that were too liberal and maybe communist". So the Portuguese authorities refused to work with the Office National d’Immigration and even banned emigration to France in 1955.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, departures for France were limited (a few hundred a year) and happened illegally. Those who left for France at the time usually had relatives who had already emigrated before the war or returned to France after leaving voluntarily or involuntarily. For example, in 1953, António P. was arrested at the French-Spanish border just after entering France illegally. Born near Longwy in 1928, his parents had returned to Portugal in 1939-1940. His father had fought during World War 1 and one of his brothers in Indochina.
Massive departures
From 1957 there was an increasing number of departures. That year 4,640 Portuguese entered France. Clandestine migration networks were gradually being set up. Since it was impossible for farm and manual workers to obtain tourist passports, and especially emigration passports, these networks enabled Portuguese people to leave Portugal, cross Spain illegally, then enter France, through the Pyrenean mountain passes. These clandestine journeys, immortalised by Gérald Bloncourt, were very expensive and required great physical effort, so they were only for men willing to endure the torturous journey and who were able to put together the sums needed or obtain one or several loans.
In 1961, departures for France exceeded the 10,000 per year mark, and throughout the 1960s the volume of departures increased. In 1969, 110,614 Portuguese entered France.
This vertiginous increase was due to the conjunction of various factors. First of all, a large share of the Portuguese population were living in wretched conditions. Portugal was still a predominantly rural country (42% of the working population in 1960 were employed in the primary sector). In the centre and north of the country, small family farms dominated. But peasants, who owned small plots of land bringing in paltry incomes, had to work for larger property owners or sell a part of the family’s workforce (women and/or children) to industrial companies dispersed across the countryside. Those companies, especially in the north of the country, were not yet really modernised. The economic fabric was incapable of absorbing the growth of the population, which had accelerated in the 1940s and 1950s. Underemployment and unemployment hit a large proportion of the working population. Emigration to France was the best means to secure a much better paid job than they could find in Portugal.
Next, from 1961, anti-colonial movements started an armed struggle in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. Portugal deployed a massive military effort: 40% of the budget was devoted to the colonial wars in the late 1960s. This conflict forced Salazar to accelerate the modernisation of the economy by opening the country up more broadly to foreign capital and encouraging an increase in productivity in the industrial sector. These transformations freed up a workforce now viewed as surplus. Moreover, the colonial wars prompted the departure of tens of thousands of young men who refused to do their military service. Between 1961 and 1974, the proportion of rebels and conscientious objectors grew considerably, going from 11.6% in 1961 to 20.3% in 1972. Many of them settled in France.
Lastly, the dictatorial nature of the regime was behind some of the departures. Opponents fearing imprisonment or who could no longer find a job in their country (notably some teachers and researchers) came to France, as did young students who had taken part in the protest movements and had been expelled from universities, etc. More broadly, the stifling of civil liberties, repression, the regime’s protection of rigid social hierarchies, the lack of investment in education, caused the population to leave.
However, these elements pushing people to leave are not enough to explain emigration, and especially at such a high volume. The strength of a "mobile village culture" in the Portuguese countryside also needs to be taken into account. For the Portuguese working classes, for many decades emigration had represented the primary means of improving their living conditions or position, of leaving rural farm life behind, or staying there in better conditions. Many left so they could return better. Given the impossibility of social climbing in their own country due to the rigidity of social structures, departure was the best way to improve their living conditions and those of their children. That is why emigration and migrants have often been caricatured in Portugal: they disrupt social borders in a way viewed as illegitimate.
Migration encouraged
The French authorities played a decisive role in the massive arrival of Portuguese people. With the exception of the particular configurations linked to the two world wars, until the 1960s, the French and Portuguese authorities were never able to come to an agreement to ensure the legal arrival of Portuguese nationals in France. France looked for the workforce it needed in other countries. After 1945, it was mainly Italy that was supplying France with workers. However, in the late 1950s, Italian immigration to France was dropping whereas the need for labour was increasing as a result of economic growth and the effects of the Algerian war of independence (suspension of free circulation between Algeria and France, mobilisation of French contingent soldiers). While Spain became the main source of immigrant workers, the French authorities began to tolerate the illegal arrival of foreigners with greater indulgence.
Since the government in Lisbon was blocking legal exits from the country, the French administration legalised clandestine arrivals from Portugal. This legalisation became systematic from April 1964. From then on, the Portuguese, informed by their relatives and by recruiters and people-smugglers who were distributing the information widely, knew that they could easily find a job in France, reimburse the cost of the clandestine journey, and regularise their situation. Moreover, the price and difficulty of these journeys decreased considerably from 1965-1966.
Indeed, the toughest part of the clandestine journey was in Spain. Without passports, the Portuguese had to cross the long route through Spain hidden in trucks, cars, or walking through the night. By no longer cracking down on illegal crossings by Portuguese from 1965, the Spanish government prompted a drastic drop in the financial cost of the trip and transformed the profile of Portuguese emigration to France. From then on, women, children and the elderly could also go to France illegally. With this change in attitude on the part of Spain, Portuguese emigration to France increased considerably.
By deciding to regularise the situation of all Portuguese entering France illegally, the French government was deliberately encouraging Portuguese immigration. For many political and administrative players, Portuguese immigration was not just viewed as positive from an economic point of view (the Portuguese were seen as reliable and submissive workers). In an outlook by no means devoid of racist assumptions, these migrants were seen as the last European, white, Christian migrants, and thus easy to assimilate from a demographic perspective. Encouraging the clandestine arrival of Portuguese people boiled down for some people to reducing extra-European migrations, particularly from Algeria, viewed as problematic since these populations were claimed to be unassimilable. From then on, until 1974, the Portuguese enjoyed special treatment. The various measures taken from 1968 to reduce illegal immigration excluded the Portuguese.
The suspension of immigration decided upon by the French government in 1974 came at around the same time as the Carnation Revolution. With democracy being established in Portugal, thousands of migrants were returning home, like Mário Soares, future president of the Republic. For the country’s new elites, emigration should now be a thing of the past and disappear with the onset of democracy and Portugal’s entry into Europe. Migratory circulation between the two countries did not disappear however. Since wages were still higher in France, Portuguese nationals, who enjoyed European citizenship from 1992, came to settle and work in France. Strong migration chains still linked the Portuguese countryside and towns to France, which explains the low visibility of these migrations. However, the crisis that has hit Portugal hard since 2008 has led to new and massive emigration in the direction of Europe, Brazil, but also to the former Portuguese colonies in Africa. This new wave of massive departures has been interpreted in Portugal as a failure on the part of the elites in power since 1974 and as a step backwards, a sign that the country will never be a modern European country like the others.
Victor Pereira (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour), February 2014
Find out more about Portuguese immigration:
- Podcast: Migrations clandestines oubliées (lecture by Victor Pereira at L'UniverCité)
- Remarkable stories: Baptista de Matos (portrait)
- Oral archives: Interview with Alvaro Pimenta
- Exhibition: For a better life, photographs by Gérald Bloncourt
- Interview: Encounter with Gérald Bloncourt