Abstract 

As war, domestic and foreign terrorism continue to headline many news sources within the United States as well as the international scene, immigration and how it may shape national identity has become a pressing question. This thesis explores literary representations of Jewish and immigrant integration and assimilation in French texts of the 1940s and 1980s. The following bildungsromans – or novels of education--Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba (“Shantytown Kid,”1986), Vercors’s La Marche à l’étoile (“Guiding Star,” 1943) and his L’Imprimerie de Verdun (“The Verdun Press, 1945), and Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Enfance d’un Chef  (“Childhood of a Leader,” 1939) –will comprise the main corpus of my analysis. Whereas Jewish figures were historically typified as the ultimate “Other” in the earlier narratives that I address, the Muslim immigrant embodies this role in the more recent Le Gone du Chaâba. My research focuses on what these Bildungsromans may tell us about narratives of national identity and alterity, as well as how they and the discourses that they represent may function. Conclusions will situate present discourses of Muslims immigrants in France. 

​

Conclusion

The challenges faced by excluded or “othered” groups in their efforts to assert French national belonging arise from contradictory nature of French national narratives. Even when standards of assimilation are perfectly adhered to (as depicted by Jewish Immigrant figures in Vercors’s texts, as well as in Begag’s text), these excluded groups face continued rejection, as the influence of harmful stereotypes continue to affect their social presentation. Furthermore, the lacking presence of immigrant or religious minority voices in the earlier texts of Sartre and Vercors also demonstrate a missing presence of Immigrant and religious minority voices in discourses of national identity. Immigrant, Muslim, Jewish, as well as any other minority or excluded voices contribute insightful perspectives to the challenges to integration in France, as their stories draw attention to the suppression of agency of these figures. 

The implications of this work have relevance in today’s discourses as they pertain to the massive influx of non- European immigrant and refugee populations in Western societies. This study provides insight to the burdens and sacrifices that excluded individuals make as they struggle to share the nomination provided by a French identity.