FOREIGNERS IN PARIS
History of Paris France

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The foreign population is not at all homogeneous. American writers who, in the 1920’s, escaped from the United States met at the Shakespeare Library or at Gertrude Stein’s. They did not have the same social background as the Algerian workers who were looking for a job.

What to say about the Spanish, Scandinavian, Brazilian, North-American architects who built many of the outstanding monuments of the contemporary Paris? And what about those painters who struggled along in Montparnasse before knowing, for the most gifted ones, an immortal fame!

The Polish too are a specific group among foreigners who settled in Paris. They were very discreet. The French ignored their presence. Different from the Italians or other nationalities, born-catholic Polish had not chosen to live in a particular area of Paris, but rather had scattered over fifteen different districts. The Polish quarter lay between rue "Saint-Honoré" and the Library of "Ile Saint-Louis", not forgetting the famous library on Boulevard "Saint-Germain".

A great number of foreign Jewish settled in between the two wars "rue des Rosiers" and in "Belleville". A strong German emigration had to escape from the Third Reich.

Latin-Americans in Paris: the first remark to be made when speaking about them, and to compare them with the other group of foreigners, it is the restrictive aspect of these colonies. One must wait until the era of easy public transportation, after the war, to notice significant arrivals: Chilians exiled in the 1970s were, without any doubt, the largest part of them. A Latin-Americain typology in Paris always ended up in showing a list of the highest ranked population either financially sometimes, but almost always intellectually.

From 1922, the Russians wave reached its peak in 1925-1926 and decreased in the mid-1930s.

A history of foreigners in Paris is, after all, the history of Paris!

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