It was a time when immigration symbolized all hopes: the rebuilding of a country in ruins, the demographic vitality of a faltering France, its future prosperity. When the world takes off on December 19, 1944, Europe is devastated, and no one considers immigration a “problem.” It is an absolute necessity. “France plans to welcome 2 million foreigners in ten years.” It is not insignificant that the first important article on the subject, thus titled, was signed, on October 17, 1945, by Jacques Fauvet, future director (1969-1982) of the newspaper. It is also significant that it has the subtitle: “For an immigration policy”, five words that announce, in this regard, the message of the World.
Sifting through the thousands of articles devoted since then to this topic is not an easy journey. The geopolitical context and the state of the economy have changed. Also the perception of foreigners: as “labor” during the “thirty glorious years”, as a new population afterwards. The Italians and Poles were succeeded by the North Africans, the Portuguese, then the Africans and the Asians.
The “immigrant workers” of the 1970s were called “immigrants” during the 1980s and 1990s, often “migrants” from the 2000s onwards. A peripheral issue far removed from the main political contests during the first four decades of the government’s life. WorldImmigration has become one of the main themes, recurring since the 1980s. Read eighty years of immigration in. the worldIt is also unwinding the thread of a historical mutation in which the newspaper itself was an actor: decolonization.
There is no doubt about it when Jacques Fauvet opens, on page 4, the long chronicle of immigration. It is difficult to foresee that the “subjects” of the empire will be able to settle in France. This would be an internal migration. “We cannot call the many Algerians who come to work in France immigrants”will judge the world after the establishment, in 1947, of free movement between the French departments of Algeria and the mainland for Algerian Muslims.
Of the “migrants”, the new specialist has a vision linked to his personal history: he entered the World in June 1945, with two notable reports in the “Russian zone” of Germany where he himself wandered after his release from Oflag IV-D (essentially French prisoner of war camp, from 1940 to 1945, in Germany). Hired to cover three sections – religion, university and prisoners – it is through the latter that it addresses the issue of immigration. “More than 100,000 German prisoners are occupied in the French camp” and 18,000 in the northern coal mines. Jacques Fauvet recounts his strange situation, between hatred, imperative need and fear of competition from French workers. Concerned about the mortality in the French camps where these prisoners were held, he proclaimed that “a prisoner, even a German, is a human being.” in a title (the 1Ahem October 1945) that summarizes the Christian humanism on which the newspaper was based..
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