Nomads in Wartime (1939–1946)

Lise Foisneau in collaboration with Valentin Merlin

(Klincksieck, 272 pages, 2022)

When it comes to France during WWII, and the “dark years” so intensely studied and written about for the last four decades, it has become rare for a history book to surprise us. This is certainly not the case with Nomads in Wartime.

―Le Monde des Livres, March 23, 2022

Few historians have written about the fate of the Romani people (Gitans, Manouches,Yeniches, Sinti …), in France during World War II. Much of the research since the 1980s has focused—justifiably—on the most flagrant atrocities committed during that time. In this innovative and thoroughly documented book, the ethnologist Lise Foisneau brings attention to the drastic measures of surveillance and control adopted from 1939 to 1946 that dramatically disrupted the daily lives and the livelihood of France’s diverse nomad population and the practices of resistance that ensued.

Discrimination against the Romani did not begin with the war. The law of July 16, 1912 had already subjected them to bureaucratic constraints: They were required to carry anthropometric identity booklets and register their arrivals and departures in each village and town. But in 1940, under the pretext of national security, a decree went even further by forbidding them to circulate altogether. The Romani were assigned residency in scattered locations throughout the country’s rural areas. This policy hardened into the camps established during the Vichy Regime and lingered on during the provisional postwar government. The author begins by examining the fact that three disparate governments enacted similar policies. This becomes the starting point of a fascinating historical and ethnographic investigation into the relationship between the French state and its diverse nomad population.

 Lise Foisneau and the photographer Valentin Merlin crisscrossed France in a caravan for several years collecting testimonies from the last WWII survivors, living among their descendants, and sorting through hundreds of local archives. Their immersive approach combining history, ethnography, and active participation of witnesses—which is the strength of this book—reveals how intensified repression and persecution turned into resistance. The nomads’ actions ranged from subverting, circumventing, and escaping the legal arsenal put in place by the French administration—changing their status to that of fairground stallholders, buying houses, or marrying in town halls—to joining the armed resistance against the Occupation.

 Foisneau’s pioneering study is interwoven with micro-narratives that offer a multifaceted understanding of the Romani people’s lives during the war and the long-ingrained efforts to discipline people whose way of life is still perceived as incompatible with the Republic. Nomads in Wartime not only sheds new light on little-known, and long-hidden, aspects of contemporary French history, but it does so through the rarely heard stories and recollections of those concerned.

Lise Foisneau is an ethnologist and researcher associated with the CNRS. Specialized in Romani Studies, she has conducted research on the collective memory of the Second World War at the Central European University (Budapest), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, D.C.), and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). Nomads in Wartime (1939–1946) is her first book.

 Valentin Merlin is a photographer who, since 2015, has been documenting Romani and other itinerant groups’ encampments in reserved areas throughout France.