Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

This dissertation examines how French officials, welfare specialists, and social service providers in the city of Marseille responded to North African immigration during the period roughly between 1945 and 1975. It traces the origins of the project they launched in late colonial Marseille, initially under the auspices of a specialized welfare network for Muslim North African clients, to “integrate” Muslims from the Maghreb region of North African (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) into French society, and follows this project as it continued into the postcolonial era. The central goal of this integrationist project, conducted through services such as welcome centres, professional job training courses, socio-educative family assistance programs, and social housing, was to guide Maghrebis to replace their supposedly inferior and backward customs and habits with the “Western” ways of living followed by France’s majority ethnic population.
Using a wide array of research material from several archives in France, including government documents, official reports and correspondence, and the records of Marseille welfare specialists and social service providers, this dissertation compares the ideas, strategies, and practices that informed the project to integrate Muslim North Africans in Marseille during the late colonial era and decolonization to those that shaped this project after decolonization. Special focus in this comparison is given to unpacking the complex issues of continuity and change related to the attitudes and actions of welfare specialists and providers in areas such as shantytown clearance, social housing development, and family and youth integration. Attention is also given to the lived experiences of the city’s North African immigrant population, including how the Muslim North African clients of integrationist action sociale initiatives viewed, responded to, and even shaped the kinds of social aid they received. What an examination of these issues shows is that, throughout the period in question, French officials, welfare specialists, and social service providers in Marseille remained fixated on the presence of Maghrebis as a “problem” that required their special attention and assistance.