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"This extraordinarily well-conceived book enriches scholarship on French Armenians and Jews by exploring how genocide shaped communal life and the processes by which national and ethnic identities converged in twentieth-century France."--Leslie P. Moch, author of "Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650"

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In the Aftermath of Genocide

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................................................ixNote on Transliteration............................................................................xiiiIntroduction.......................................................................................11 Orphans of the Nation: Armenian Refugees in France...............................................192 The Strange Silence: France, French Jews, and the Return to Republican Order.....................523 Integrating into the Polity: The Problem of Inclusion after Genocide.............................864 Diaspora, Nation, and Homeland among Survivors...................................................1185 Maintaining a Visible Presence...................................................................1516 Genocide Revisited: Armenians and the French Polity after World War II...........................178Conclusion.........................................................................................202Notes..............................................................................................209Bibliography.......................................................................................291Index..............................................................................................311

Chapter One

Writing in the late 1930s, Aram Turabian, an Ottoman-born Armenian who migrated to France in the 1890s and fought as an officer in the French army, thanked local authorities for opening the nation's doors to Armenian refugees in the aftermath of World War I. Assuring his readers that in their gratitude Armenians would "respect and submit willingly to the laws of this noble country," he asked only "that our French friends do not confuse us with all the other foreigners. Our situation is special, we have neither consulate nor ambassador to defend us, we do not even have a national homeland ... where we could seek refuge if necessary; all our trust is placed in French Justice and we respectfully request that the competent authorities of this country take our grievances into serious consideration."

Although Turabian viewed the Armenian plight as "special," the situation he described in fact clearly illustrated the problem that most refugees posed to post-World War I European governments intent on consolidating along national lines. The war had led to the disintegration of the large multiethnic Romanov, Hapsburg, and Ottoman Empires. The small national states that replaced them and the violent conflict that accompanied their births produced large populations of stateless refugees. Having been stripped of citizenship and national allegiance, these new refugees posed particular problems for the international community. Unlike earlier generations of political exiles who had sought refuge in central and western Europe, these newcomers arrived in unprecedented numbers, straining the international community's abilities to care for them. In 1926, for example, approximately 9.5 million refugees were said to be wandering Europe. Moreover, twentieth-century European refugees often remained in exile for extraordinary lengths of time without being able to "regularize" their status, at times even passing this refugee status on to a second generation. Perhaps most important, however, the exiles of the post-World War I era and after were a unique addition to the European landscape because of the particular nature of their homelessness, "which removed them so dramatically and so uniquely from civil society." The consolidation of the modern nation-state in the war's aftermath increasingly solidified the relationship between the citizen and the state. Presuming that citizens followed through on all national obligations, the state provided for their basic protection and welfare. International treaties provided some protection to those who migrated from one nation to another, but refugees, by virtue of having lost their citizenship, were not beneficiaries of such arrangements; they found themselves "deprived of legal protection, mutual support, the access to employment, and the measure of freedom of movement which happier mortals take as a matter of course." Although diplomats in Paris attempted to make some provisions for refugees in postwar peace treaties and the League of Nations created a High Commission for Refugees, "these efforts were like using bedroom sheets to block a hurricane."

Rendered stateless by the Ottoman genocidal attack against them, Armenian refugees who made their way to France were thus part of a larger problem facing European nations in the aftermath of World War I. If Armenians like Turabian saw their postgenocide plight as exceptional, French authorities were blind to the distinction. On a per capita basis, France ranked highest among western European nations to open its doors to World War I refugees. Eager to rebuild Its war-devastated economy, the French government recruited foreign labor of all kinds. Immigration numbers had been steadily increasing since the mid-nineteenth century, especially from countries such as Belgium, Italy, and Poland, and liberal immigration policies accompanying the labor shortages of World War I transformed France into the leading "immigrant nation" in Europe. Newcomers from central and eastern Europe fleeing the First World War's political and economic upheaval as well as those from former French colonies not only increased the number of foreigners in France but changed the makeup of the population as well. Then, after 1924, when the United States began tightening its own immigration policies, the numbers coming to France increased further. By 1931 a full 11 percent of France's workforce was made up of foreigners, and for all but three years in the 1920s, between 150,000 and 200,000 foreigners arrived annually.

For government officials interested in increasing the labor pool, distinctions between immigrants and refugees were irrelevant. As a result, when large numbers of Russian migrs began to flee the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik regime, France admitted nearly 120,000, basically opening the door to any who were willing to work as industrial or day laborers. In the early 1920s approximately 65,000 Armenians (nearly 30 percent of all Armenian refugees in Europe and the Near East), driven from their homes first by the Young Turks in the genocide of 1915 and then by Kemal Ataturk's forces a few years later, sought shelter in France. These new populations, however, presented the French government with complex socioadministrative problems for which they had no ready solutions. Whereas most foreign immigrants settling in France at this time maintained an obvious national-political (and thus administrative) link to their country of origin, the apatride, or stateless person, fell "under no particular state's jurisdiction." These "orphans of the nation," as one sympathetic journalist referred to them, had no passports or visas to facilitate their movements, no consulates to represent them, nor any treaties to protect them. Nor could they return to the lands from which they had come.

As a result, the apatrides threw into question previous understandings of immigrant participation in the polity, defying previous immigration categorizations and befuddling administrators...