How did immigrants shape French society? This is essentially the question to which the museum of immigration proposes to answer, which must reopen its doors on Tuesday in Paris after three years of closure, completely redesigned around this “common history”. To better show the gradual infusion of immigration into all spheres of society, the permanent exhibition will now follow a chronological sequence, based on eleven major dates, from 1685 to the present day.
“Immigration is an integral part of the history of France, of a common history. On each of these dates, we will ask (…) the place that foreigners have had and the way in which they have made the history of France”, reminds AFP Constance Rivière, director general of the Palais de la Porte Dorée, which houses the national museum of the history of immigration. An approach justified by the fact that “today, one in three French people is an immigrant, child of an immigrant or grandchild of an immigrant”, she continues.
“We wanted to make this story in its complexity, with the story of the people who are already there”, French, and that “of those who arrive, therefore the migrants”, underlines the historian Marianne Amar, one of the commissioners museum scientists. To “weave together these two stories” which do not advance “parallelly” but “together”.
Immigration today is therefore just as much about this boat loaded with bundles of African fabrics and resting on empty bottles, a work by the Cameroonian artist Barthélémy Toguo representing the risky crossings of the Mediterranean, as these doctors and nurses foreigners photographed in French hospitals during the Covid-19 crisis.
Before arriving there, the visitor strolls through the 1,800 meters of the exhibition, 80% of the works of which have been renewed since the closure in December 2020. The visit starts in 1685, year of the Black Code, symbol of the colonial period, but also that of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the exile of the Huguenots: a date “deliberately provocative” because the museum, “it is not a textbook”, assumes Marianne Amar. It is a date which shows “that France is not only a country of immigration, but also a country of emigration”, she continues.
The visitor then goes back through the years and the turbulence of an often thwarted History, to find an answer to this question, summarized by the executive curator of the exhibition, Emilie Gandon: “How do we become French over time?” In 1848, France witnessed the arrival of Polish exiles while a petition was launched – and displayed in the museum – by Italian and Spanish refugees against their house arrest in the provinces. At the time, that of the first census of foreigners, the latter formed 1% of the population, against 10% today. It must be said that in the middle of the 19th century, people from Quimper or Carpentras coming to Paris were considered in artistic representations as exiles.
Participation of foreigners in the war effort in 1917, independence of Algeria in 1962, consequences of decolonization, mobilizations in 1973 for the rights of foreign workers… The exhibition gives to see in cards, photos, paintings and others documents all the key events in the network leading from immigration to integration. In the 1995 section, the year the Schengen area was created, the visitor is greeted by a series of photos by Thomas Mailaender representing the “cathedral cars”, as the port of Marseilles dockers called them at the time, these cars with roofs overloaded with furniture and household appliances on board which immigrant families took the road in the summer, especially towards the Maghreb.
It is also the ephemeral era of “France Black-Blanc-Beur”, observes Ms. Amar, in front of some puppets from the Guignols, including that of Zinedine Zidane in the jersey of the French football team. Quickly, the visitor leaves the chronology to witness the immigration seen today by the artists: the photos of the camps under the Parisian ring road juxtaposed with those of the Ukrainians welcomed with open arms. And, another novelty, some demographic data from the latest studies, posted on the walls. “Our conviction is that prejudices” are born “from a form of ignorance,” said the director of the Palace, Constance Rivière. The museum, officially inaugurated on Tuesday, is due to open to the general public on June 17.
