Thirty Years of Growth, Built on Imported Labor
France's postwar economic boom, later named the Trente Glorieuses ("the thirty glorious years," roughly 1945-1975), required a scale of industrial labor the domestic French population could not supply alone. The state and French industry actively recruited workers from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Francophone West African territories including Senegal, Mali, and Côte d'Ivoire — many of these still formal French colonies or, after 1960, newly independent states bound to France by labor agreements and a shared currency, the CFA franc.
Unlike Britain's Windrush generation, who arrived as citizens of Commonwealth nations invited by a single, symbolically loaded piece of legislation (the British Nationality Act 1948, covered in this course's Unit 3), French recruitment was diffuse: individual companies, state agencies, and bilateral labor accords between France and specific African governments each recruited workers directly, often targeting specific ethnic groups for specific industries — Soninke and Toucouleur workers from the Senegal River valley for the automobile industry, for instance, based on recruiters' own racialized assumptions about which groups were suited to which labor.
Algeria's Distinct and Larger Position
Algerian migration to France was, both legally and numerically, distinct from the rest of French Africa. Algeria had been governed not as a colony but as an integral part of France itself since 1848, with Algerians classified as French subjects — a status that made Algerian migration to mainland France comparatively unrestricted even before independence in 1962 (the Algerian War is covered in the African History track, Unit 6). Algerian workers formed the largest single national group among the era's labor migrants, and the specific violence of the war for independence — including the massacre of Algerian protesters in Paris on 17 October 1961, a killing of at least several dozen people whose full toll and even acknowledgment by the French state remained suppressed for decades — shaped the reception of Algerian migrants in France in ways distinct from West African recruitment.
Single Men, Temporary Contracts
French recruitment policy was built on an explicit assumption: that workers, overwhelmingly single men in this period, would work in France temporarily and eventually return home. Housing, wages, and legal status were all structured around this assumption of impermanence, even as many workers stayed for decades and eventually built families in France.
Bidonvilles: Shantytowns on the Edge of the Republic
As recruitment outpaced any formal housing plan, migrant workers — Algerian, Moroccan, Senegalese, and others — built and settled informal shantytowns known as bidonvilles (literally, "tin-can towns") on the outskirts of major cities, most famously in Nanterre, just outside Paris. The Nanterre bidonville, at its peak in the 1960s, housed an estimated 14,000 people in conditions with minimal sanitation, electricity, or formal infrastructure — footsteps from a France entering one of its most prosperous eras.
The bidonvilles were not cleared until the 1970s, and their clearance did not end the underlying housing crisis — it largely relocated it into new, purpose-built structures called foyers.
Foyers: Purpose-Built for Temporary Men Who Stayed
Starting in the 1950s and expanding through the 1970s, a state-linked organization called Sonacotra (Société nationale de construction de logements pour les travailleurs, later renamed Adoma) built dormitory-style housing — foyers — specifically for single male migrant workers. Rooms were small, often shared, explicitly designed around the assumption of short-term, childless residency.
As family reunification policy shifted in the 1970s (covered in the next lesson) and workers who had lived in France for a decade or more sought to bring wives and children, the foyer system's design collided directly with a demographic reality it had never been built to accommodate. Foyer residents organized a major, sustained rent strike beginning in 1975 that spread across dozens of foyers nationwide, demanding both better conditions and a formal end to the fiction that their residency was temporary — a strike that continued in various forms into the early 1980s.
Why This Matters
France's postwar labor migration was never framed, legally or ideologically, as a single invited generation the way Windrush was in Britain. It was a diffuse, industry-driven, and initially deliberately temporary system — one whose planners assumed the workers would eventually leave, and built almost nothing, materially or legally, to accommodate the possibility that they and their children would stay.
