Abstract
In the French context, métissage refers both to racial and cultural mixing. However, official statistical data on mixed race people is non-existent. The French construction of the national myth around the ideal of the French Republic and the assimilation of migrants and their descendants into the French nation led to a long resistance to the measurement of migration paths in French statistics. Other factors are determinant to the understanding of the structuration of French data, including past governance of the French colonies, the memory of the Vichy regime (1940–1944), and current migration flows. For many years, no criterion other than an individual’s current citizenship was therefore available in quantitative surveys, partly hiding people with migration backgrounds and overlooking people of mixed descent. With the recognition of second-generation migrants in the 1990s, quantitative surveys have been developed where mixed people could be identified according to various criteria such as parental nationality, country of birth, language, or religion. However, ‘ethnic statistics’ academic and politic debates in the 1990s still constrained the use of ethnic or racial categories. Today, mixed people are thus not officially defined on the basis of their ethnicity but as people whose parents were socialized in two different countries.
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Notes
- 1.
A combination of approximately sixty articles regulating slavery and slaves’ lives in the French colonies.
- 2.
Slaves were however considered Catholics.
- 3.
This does not mean that ethno-racial discrimination is non-existent in the French context.
- 4.
In countries following the jus soli, citizenship is dependent on place of birth. ‘Double jus soli’ means that an individual having foreign parents will become a citizen of his/her country of birth if his/her parents were born in that country themselves.
- 5.
The EDP provides information about the country of birth of an individual’s parents and the parents’ nationality at the time of the person’s birth. The past citizenship of the parent is known only if the person became a French citizen when he/ she was under eighteen thanks to parental naturalization. Otherwise, mixed people can be studied using the EDP only by looking at their parents’ country of birth and current nationality.
- 6.
Equality before law and no distinction between French citizens on the basis on their origin, race, or religion was stated in article 1 of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic of 1958.
- 7.
In fact, the document was a set of files of arrested and deported Jews produced afterwards.
- 8.
Assigned/external artificial identities.
- 9.
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Unterreiner, A. (2020). The Identification of Mixed People in France: National Myth and Recognition of Family Migration Paths. In: Rocha, Z.L., Aspinall, P.J. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22874-3_14
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