ABSTRACT
France lies at the intersections of the Mediterranean and Atlantic and of the south and the north of Europe. In the last millennium it was consistently Europe’s wealthiest country, and for 250 years it has been at the political epicentre of modernity: the historic home of human rights and individual freedoms. France’s central location on the world’s major trade routes did not just mean that most of the world’s commodities crossed its territory: so too did a huge variety of the world’s human beings. Migrants were pushed by economic or political repression and pulled by labour shortages, French economic prosperity and the prospects of political and cultural liberté. These migrants, among the most dynamic of their own generations, added and add enormously to France’s already huge existing diversity of economic, cultural, artistic, intellectual, culinary and social life. Over the last fifty years, as the numbers of migrants from non-European countries to France have risen, this diversity has become much richer. But richness and diversity have not always been universally welcome. Trade unions, in particular, have always had a degree of ambivalence about migration. ‘Foreign’ workers have often been viewed as ‘competitors’ who would undercut ‘local’ wages and conditions.
