In his rich and learned new book about the naturalization of foreigners, Peter Sahlins offers an unusual and unexpected contribution to the histories of immigration, nationality, and citizenship in France and Europe. Through a study of foreign...
In recent decades the combined pressures of immigration, European integration, and globalization have sparked profound crises of identity in France. Against this backdrop, scholars of France have begun to investigate the genealogy of nationality and citizenship. In his rich and learned new book, Peter Sahlins treats these themes historically, from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, from an unusual and unexpected perspective: how and why foreigners became French citizens in the Old Regime and after. "Unnaturally French is a brilliant synthesis of social, legal, and political history. At its core are the histories of thousands of individual foreigners and their families whose social identities and geographic origins are presented here for the first time. In his comprehensive account of the theory, procedure, and practice of naturalization, Sahlins draws on a wide range of juridical and political writings to consider the neglected problems of citizenship and state membership in the making and unmaking of the French absolute monarchy. Rather than date the establishment of modern political citizenship and nationality law from the French Revolution of 1789, Sahlins argues that the transformations began in the "citizenship revolution" of the eighteenth century He finds that changes in nationality law and political culture in the eighteenth century led to the much-contested abolition of the distinction between foreigners and citizens. Sahlins also shows how the Enlightenment and the political failure of the monarchy in France laid the foundations for the development of an exclusively political citizenship that found its expression before the French Revolution. His original andexhaustive treatment of naturalization sheds light on our understanding of not only the sources of the French revolution and the revolutionary process, but also its consequences.
