Sixty years after the events described in this book and as it was going to press, France was undergoing what might be read as a crisis of assimilationism. Some people of immigrant origin born in the country were believed to feel a lesser sense of belonging than they should, and the same went for immigrants who had lived in France for many years. In any case, the two categories were often confused. Whether the ‘crisis’ was crystallized by Muslim girls who sought to identify their religion in that bulwark of state secularism, the school; or the largely male football fans who booed the national anthem at matches between teams whose Frenchness — being Corsican or Algerian — was highly contested; or the increasing respectability of the extreme right, especially among male voters, problems of assimilation were coming into ever-sharper focus at the turn of the twenty-first century. As each of these examples suggests, the crisis was one in which questions of race and racialization were deeply entwined with and affected by gender.

This book has traced some of the historical foundations of another crisis of assimilationism and national identity. In its incarnation as liberationist foundation for the new republic that was expected to emerge after the war, assimilationism gained in significance at one of the defining moments of the French twentieth century. Assimilationism applied to gender, nationality and ethnicity, elements that reinforced and conditioned each other in a complex web.