Open Access“It was Peugeot that brought us here!”
Author(s) -
Juliette Ronsin
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
history in flux
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2706-414X
pISSN - 2706-4441
DOI - 10.32728/flux.2020.2.3
Subject(s) - emigration , immigration , communism , politics , subject (documents) , political science , history , economic history , sociology , law , library science , computer science
The objective of this article is to analyze the consequences of the political, social, and economic ruptures of Yugoslavia and France on thetrajectories of Yugoslavs recruited by the Peugeot company in France after the the 1965 Franco-Yugoslav bilateral agreement on the employmentof temporary labor. Using a monographic approach to the case of the employment area of Sochaux, it is clear that (post-)Yugoslav workers went through periods of upheaval and even disillusionment after their arrival in France. This study mainly deals with a generation of men bornin the 1940s and 1950s and recruited by Peugeot from 1965 onwards, but also includes other members of the family and the plurality of generations. The history of Yugoslav immigration to France has rarely been the subject of research, although studying it makes it possible to analyze relations between a western country and a communist country and the consequences of the breakup of a country for emigrants living abroad. To do so, this article relies on archival sources (files on foreigners kept in the archives of prefectures, archives of associations, and the Peugeot company’s archives) and on interviews withformer workers.