The Portuguese

The Invisible Builders of Modern France

They crossed borders at night.

They worked without contracts.

They built a country that pretended not to see them.

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of Portuguese men and women entered France illegally, fleeing dictatorship, poverty, and war. They became construction workers, cleaners, laborers—the workforce that rebuilt postwar France.

They did not protest.

They did not demand.

They disappeared into work.

The Portuguese tells the untold story of Europe’s most silent mass migration—and explains why its success came at a price.

Drawing on historical research, archival material, and decades of forgotten experience, this book reveals how Portugal’s migrants integrated through invisibility, how the French state tolerated illegality while benefiting from it, and how silence became both protection and erasure.

From clandestine border crossings and bidonvilles to home ownership, small businesses, and the disappearance of memory, this book challenges the comforting myth of the “model immigrant.”

It asks a difficult question:

What does it cost to integrate without being seen?

Part of the acclaimed series Strangers Who Made France, this volume stands alongside The Italians and The Poles as a powerful reassessment of how modern France was built—quietly, illegally, and collectively.

For readers of history, migration, sociology, and anyone seeking to understand France beyond its myths.