Description:
Since the 2005 urban protests in France, public debate has often centered on questions of how the country has managed its relationship with its North African citizens and residents. In Making Space Melissa K. Byrnes considers how four French suburbs near Paris and Lyon reacted to rapidly growing populations of North Africans, especially Algerians before, during, and after the Algerian War. In particular, Byrnes investigates what motivated local actors such as municipal officials, regional authorities, employers, and others to become involved in debates over migrants' rights and welfare, and the wide variety of strategies community leaders developed in response to the migrants' presence. An examination of the ways local policies and attitudes formed and re-formed communities offers a deeper understanding of the decisions that led to the current tensions in French society and questions about France's ability--and will--to fulfill the promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity for all of its citizens. Byrnes uses local experiences to contradict a version of French migration history that reads the urban unrest of recent years as preordained.
Review Quotes: "Making Space is a most welcome addition to the scholarship on twentieth-century France, decolonization, and the politics of migration. Its innovative use of archives at the municipal, departmental, and national level offers a model of detailed analysis that gets us closer to the often enigmatic question of how socialization and concomitant feelings of attachment and alienation can be described, understood, and, perhaps, addressed."--Amit Prakash, H-France Review