Frontier of Empire : From North to East – Colonial soldiers and immigrations from Souths.

Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Ahmed Boubeker, Eric Deroo.

22 May 2008 - Editions “la Découverte”

Book

French

The Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Lorraine, Alsace, Picardie, Champagne-Ardenne and Franche-Comte, from Lille to Strasbourg, have forged a unique relationship with travellers, workers, artists, soldiers, refugees, returnees and undocumented people from the Souths.
Since the last third of the nineteenth century, the North-East is a real frontier of empire which has received over a million soldiers and colonial workers during the 3 conflicts between France and Germany.

Meanwhile, dozens of colonial and ethnographic exhibitions contribute to the formation of a colonial culture and accompany a first flow from the colonies to the metropolis, particularly in the northern mines.
Throughout the twentieth century, from the four corners of the empire and the world, recruited and Chinese dockworkers, soldiers and black African students, soldiers, workers and activists in the Maghreb, Turkish migrant workers, mobilized Indochinese and Vietnamese or Algerians returnees, activists and children from second and third generations, pass or settle down in these regions ...

This book relates immigrants’career and also endeavours to stress on the the look at the hundreds of thousands of migrants, now becoming an important component of local society. Through of exceptional and unprecedented pictures, this is history "on the edge of an empire," which appears here. A long, complex and surprising history,,always in motion, partly constitutive of memories and local identities.
It was essential for the authors to work at regional level to provide a mapping of accurate memory in the territories by definition, specific to each major regional space using the best specialists. The aim was to offer local stories that ultimately form an “all-national ".

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Marika Kovacs / Frédéric Rousselle

CNFETP

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