Sans papiers as Beginners

In the centre of Paris, there is a public square called Place du Châtelet. Below is the largest underground station of the whole regional network, above are crowds of passers-by and tourists. On Saturday afternoons, there also used to be a gathering of foreigners whose purposes were anything but touristic. These were unregistered immigrants, from a number of countries, demonstrating as part of a larger movement known as the movement of sans papiers (literally, ‘without papers’, meaning they have no official documents allowing or recognising their presence in France). Officially, these people demonstrating at the heart of the French capital did not exist. Yet there they were, chanting and demonstrating, demanding political rights in a country that neither wanted nor allowed them to be there. What is the political significance of exposing themselves to others – to fellow sans papiers, allies and opponents, passers-by, the police – and making themselves spatially manifest?

Although the mobilisation of sans papiers in France has a longer history going back to the 1970s (Siméant 1998; Cissé 1999), it was the occupation of the Saint-Ambroise church in Paris in 1996 that brought the issue to the attention of a broader public. The occupation took place in a context of increased mobilisation by anti-racist associations in the mid-1990s in response to the increasingly restrictive and repressive measures against immigrants, marked by the passing of the second ‘Pasqua law’ in 1993. The undocumented immigrants were particularly hard hit by this law, which not only made their ‘regularisation’ harder and their expulsion easier, but also deprived them of basic social protection, thus leaving them in an extremely precarious situation. As Cissé (1999) explains, many undocumented immigrants initially enter France through regular channels, work, pay taxes and make their social-security contributions, but find themselves ‘without papers’ when their request for the renewal of their residency permit is refused. What the 1993 Pasqua law did was to make social protection dependent on the ‘regularity’ of stay; even those who paid their taxes and social-security contributions for years were thus deprived of social protection once they had lost their papers.