Homes of the Republic: Representations of the 'Rightful Home' in French Migrant Housing Policy


Marie-Aminata Peron, University of Toronto

For many of us, home is a relatively undisputed sanctuary to which we turn to find comfort, ease, and equanimity. However, this everyday imagery of the ‘Home Sweet Home!’ overshadows the inequalities which lay at the core of global access to, and experiences of, home. The home, far from insular, is subject to systemic dynamics of power and control. Literature in the social sciences has widely explored the concept of home and challenged the notions of universality, domesticity and familiarity which tend to be attached to it. Though scholarship has established the political nature of the home, little attention has been paid to how states, through policy development and implementation, create and promote ideals of the ‘right’ type of home. In this paper, I aim to address this gap by asking: What does housing policy discourse on French migrant workers’ foyers reveal about state spaces’ understandings of what a home should be? I argue that governments construct implicit narratives of the ideal home through institutional discourse on housing policy directed at marginalized groups. These narratives, I further argue, frame the homing experiences of marginalised populations whose homing practices fall outside this predetermined ideal of what I call the ‘rightful home’. Migrant workers’ foyers (MWFs) are a specific type of communal social housing created by the French state in the 1950s to house isolated migrant workers coming from West Africa and the Maghreb. Over the years, MWFs were constituted as a ‘problem’ which led to the introduction of a five-year plan for their transformation into social residences (SRs) in 1997. This plan, designed to align 687 MWFs with more normative social housing was reconducted in 2006 and 2013. Nearly three decades after the introduction of the first plan, state authorities are left to convert 126 MWFs into SRs. This is in part due to political mobilisation against the transformation project from foyers residents and allies who advocate residents’ right to maintain a form of communal housing which corresponds to their cultural, socio-economic, and religious habits. In this article, I conduct a discourse analysis of 560 official documents about or referring to MWFs. These include parliamentary questions, debates, auditions, and speeches, legal and policy documents, ministry communiqués, reports from various government organs, as well as official statements and guidelines from foyers’ managers. These documents were collected in the summer of 2023 by consulting French online and on-site archives and start in 1989 – with preparatory work for the transformation of the foyers – up to June 2023. Adopting discourse analysis as analytical framework allowed me to approach institutional discourses on MWFs, SRs, and social housing all together, as ‘social practices constitutive of identities, norms, and perceptions, which comprise both explicit and implicit dimensions’ (Alejandro and Zhao, 2023, p. 2). Using inductive reasoning, I analysed underlying narratives pertaining to state apprehensions of what the ‘right’ type of home should be – especially as they are brought out through comparisons between the homes of immigrant populations living in the foyers and that of normative social housing’ residents. This allowed me to unearth the various ways in which, government institutions construct the homes of migrants in opposition to a set homing ideal, exposing a hierarchical system of representation of the home in the process. I find that housing policy discourse on French MWFs revealed three broad typologies of state spaces’ understandings of what a home should be: 1) HOME AS A NATIONAL SPACE. Within this typology of the rightful home, home was made integral to a spatially rooted national project dictating and hierarchizing individuals most intimate experiences as they intersected with broader concerns for security, sovereignty, and unity. 2) HOME AS A SOCIO-CULTURAL SPACE. Within this typology, authorities discussed the rightful home as one which does not contort to serve cultural relations to space. Rather, officials in introducing SRs advocated the breaking up of foyers residents’ cultural ties and their respective spatial expressions. 3) HOME AS AN ARCHITECTURAL SPACE. Within this typology of rightful home, officials approached the home as a set architectural entity defined by overarching principles of autonomy and individualism.

This paper will be presented at the following session: