Recherche

Since the Middle Ages, millions of men and women have travelled through, passed through, lived in or sought refuge on French soil, shaping the history of France. This film traces, in eight chapters, the major stages of these migrations: arrivals, departures, exiles and settling down. It looks back at the main migratory movements, the changing attitudes towards migrants, the political and social contexts, and the forms of resistance and activism that have marked this history.

The mobile exhibition Paris-London. Music Migrations is drawn from the temporary exhibition held at the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration in 2019. It emphasizes musical movements as spaces of protest over three decades that saw the settlement in France and Great Britain of several hundred thousand men and women coming from the colonies and former colonies of these two countries.

The Spanish war prompted several waves of refugees to leave for France, from 1936 until 1939, when the fall of Barcelona brought about an unprecedented exodus in the space of two weeks. Almost half a million people crossed the border through the Pyrenees in terrible conditions. This was the Retirada.

Throughout the 20 th century, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards emigrated to France looking for better living conditions. The political and economic development of the societies they left and arrived in had a huge effect on their future and their decision to settle definitively in France, or not.

The family trees of several million French people include an Italian branch, even if it isn’t always visible or clearly identified due to the gradual Gallicisation of family names which, regardless of the era, shows how they integrated to the point of blending into the rest of society. Transalpine immigration to France does in fact have a long history.

The Algerian presence in France spans over a century of unique history. Algerians fuelled an early and large migratory flow of colonials to mainland France from the second half of the 19th century. Neither French nor foreign until 1962, Algerians were in turn "indigenous", "French subjects" then "Muslim French from Algeria". This undeclared form of immigration nevertheless encountered all the difficulties of exile and, something new, drove the fight for independence from the mainland.