The Poles

From Stateless Workers to Invisible Citizens

They arrived without a country.

They built a nation that barely noticed them.

After World War I, France turned east in desperation. Its mines were empty, its workforce decimated, its reconstruction at risk. From a reborn but broken Poland came hundreds of thousands of workers—stateless, rural, disposable.

They were recruited, controlled, and isolated.

This book tells the untold story of Polish migration to France: not as a tale of celebration, but as a history of labor, silence, and disappearance.

From the coal mines of the North to the expulsion campaigns of the 1930s, from parallel Polish worlds to Cold War fractures, The Poles reveals how an entire population was essential to France’s survival—and yet kept at the margins for decades.

They lived in company towns.

Prayed in their own churches.

Educated their children between two languages.

When fear finally faded, something else vanished with it: memory.

Unlike other migrations, Polish integration followed a different path—one of endurance rather than recognition, invisibility rather than confrontation. Their success became their erasure.

Drawing on archival research, labor history, and generational experience, Julien Peltier reconstructs a migration France often cites—but rarely understands.

This is not a nostalgic story.

It is a political one.

Part of the series Strangers Who Made France, this book asks a troubling question:

What does a country gain—and lose—when those who build it disappear from its story?