when a building in Plaine-Saint-Denis recounts 50 years of migrations

In a carefully documented work, the historian Fabrice Langrognet offers an original reflection on the journey of thousands of individuals for whom Plaine-Saint-Denis was not the place of birth, between 1882 and 1932.

Passing neighbors – A microhistory of migrations by Fabrice Langrognet, published by La Découverte, is the ideal document for approaching individuals at the heart of migration issues, used today in the French and European political debate where they arouse passion, friction and excesses of all kinds. As in a film, the academic transports us to Plaine-Saint-Denis, at 96-102 avenue de Paris (which changed its name in 1919 to become avenue du Président Wilson), between 1882 and 1932, a period during which A major conflict will occur, the First World War. The Great War will have a considerable impact on the movements of these migrant-tenants to whom the work is devoted. The term “migrant” designating “any person who was not born in the municipality where they reside”. In Plaine-Saint-Denis, “like 100 years ago”migrants are still in the majority.

In total, 4,845 people lived at this address over the five decades in which Fabrice Langrognet was interested, who shows the setting of this documentary book. At the time, the box springs were whitewashed “turpentine to protect against bedbugs”, these insects which made a sensational return to the news last summer. The historian allows the reader to know almost intimately all these passing tenants, from the agricultural world and now employed in industry, among others in the Legras glassworks, near the building. We know what they looked like and we even know their state of health, which was poor since “average age at death” was 24 years over the period concerned. The causes include poor diet and harsh working conditions: work accidents were also “more frequent” than diseases. Life is therefore hard, with poor pay and high rents, debt is a recurring phenomenon.

Companions in galley

Precariousness is at all levels, more so when you are a woman, for these people from more than 1,000 localities spread across 21 countries. The proportion of those who are “born in Saint-Denis never exceeded 25%, and these natives were mainly children of migrants”. In this building, in turn, Alsatians and Lorraines (1882-1898), Southern Italians (1898-1908), Spaniards (1908-1914), displaced persons and refugees from the Great War, Eastern Europeans (1918-1932) and many others happily cross paths. There we meet Luigi (later Louis) Pirolli, born in 1886 in a “remote region (…) halfway between Rome and Napless” who found himself at 15 years old at number 100 avenue de Paris in La Plaine-Saint-Denis in 1901. We also meet Lorraine Victor Spreisser, 23 years old, on May 27, 1899, under a gray sky… Langrognet thus offers a gallery of characters, who embody the migratory experience both in its singularity and in a more universal dimension.

And for good reason, to reconstruct the journey of these thousands of women, children and men, Langrognet chose the approach of microhistory, “which allows us to grasp, as finely as possible, the nuances and hybridizations of the societies of the past”. A rare bias given the fact that this approach requires the exploitation of specific resources, such as police and judicial archives, and has become easier thanks to “new digital tools that facilitate the search for particular individuals in historical sources.

Identity patterns forged by public institutions

In Passing neighbors, we obviously find elements already known about migratory movements, such as their often economic causes. But above all we discover the way in which public institutions, particularly during the war, had no “to stop creating, between tenants, differences of nationality and citizenship”. Especially since in everyday life, “identifications based on origin remained dominant in the positive interactions of many migrants in the building” and “their few intergroup antagonisms”, according to available sources, were “mostly motivated by non-ethnic factors”.

Fabrice Langrognet’s book reminds us that the political situation is decisive in the place of migrants in a society. It also reinforces the idea that national preference is more of an economic argument and that the mechanisms at work in migration frequently lead to being the foreigner of another migrant, given the position occupied over time and in the different migratory waves. “At a time when migration and cultural diversity provoke ready-made answers (…), research that promotes nuance and discernment is perhaps more necessary than ever”pleads researcher at the University of Oxford and at the Center for the Social History of Contemporary Worlds at the University of Paris 1. A point that he illustrates with his eloquent work, a possible future scenario for filmmakers and series creators interested in certain aspects of the migration issue. His story is so lively and close to these men and women exercising their right to improve their daily lives and not letting themselves be hindered by any borders. Even more so when it comes to the permanent movement of humanity.

“Passing neighbors – A microhistory of migrations” by Fabrice Langrognet (La Découverte, 368 pages, 24 euros)