# Managing Global Student Migration in the Twentieth Century: The Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris Experiment

Dzovinar Kévonian, Guillaume Tronchet

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Dzovinar Kévonian, Guillaume Tronchet (Dir.). Managing Global Student Migration in the Twentieth Century: The Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris Experiment. Palgrave Macmillan. Springer Nature, 292 p., 2025, (Palgrave Studies in Migration History), 978-3-031-81765-6. 10.1007/978-3-031-81766-3. hal-05264983

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Managing Global Student
Migration in the Twentieth
Century

The Cité Internationale Universitaire
de Paris Experiment

Edited by
Dzovinar Kévonian · Guillaume Tronchet

OPEN ACCESS

palgrave
macmillan
Palgrave Studies in Migration History

Series Editors

Philippe Rygiel, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon,
Saint-Germain-du-Puy, France

Per-Olof Grönberg, Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden

Marlou Schrover, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
This series explores the history of migration, from antiquity to the present
day and across a wide geographical scope. Taking a broad definition of
migration, the editors welcome books that consider all forms of mobility,
including cross-border mobility, internal migration and forced migra-
tion. These books investigate the causes and consequences of migration,
whether for economic, religious, humanitarian or political reasons, and
the policies and organizations that facilitate or challenge mobility. Consider-
ing responses to migration, the series looks to migrants' experiences,
the communities left behind and the societies in which they settled.
The editors welcome proposals for monographs, edited collections and
Palgrave Pivots.
Dzovinar Kévonian · Guillaume Tronchet
Editors

# Managing Global Student Migration in the Twentieth Century

The Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris
Experiment

palgrave
macmillan
Editors

Dzovinar Kévonian

Histemé

Caen-Normandie University

Caen, France

Guillaume Tronchet

Institut d'histoire moderne et contemporaine

Ecole normale supérieure-PSL,

University of Paris 1

Panthéon-Sorbonne, CNRS

Paris, France

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

ISSN 2946-4358

ISSN 2946-4366 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Migration History

ISBN 978-3-031-81765-6

ISBN 978-3-031-81766-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81766-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2025. This book is an open access publication.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors of this volume wish to express their gratitude to all colleagues
who contributed to this work, as well as to the scientific institutions that
supported the research presented herein. Special thanks go to the Institut
d'histoire moderne et contemporaine (IHMC) in Paris, France (École
normale supérieure-PSL, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, CNRS)
and the HisTeMé research unit at the Université de Caen, France.

This book received funding from the French National Research
Agency (ANR) as part of the GlobalYouth research program, directed
by Guillaume Tronchet between 2018 and 2023 at the École normale
supérieure-PSL (ANR-17-CE28-0005, 2017–2022).

The editors also wish to acknowledge the program's administrative
team for their management of the project. Finally, they extend their
sincere thanks to Professor Philippe Rygiel for his trust and support in
the publication of this volume.
CONTENTS

1 Localizing Global Student Migration: Geopolitics, Individual Path, and Transnational Dynamics
Dzovinar Kévonian and Guillaume Tronchet
1

2 Choose Paris: Letters in support of application to the Paris' Cité Universitaire in the 1950s
Antonin Durand
31

3 Hijacking Internationalism: International Student Migration, Political Activism, and the Western Order at Paris' Cité Universitaire, 1930s–1970s
Guillaume Tronchet
51

4 The Cité Universitaire de Paris as seen from Fascist Italy
Elisa Signori
75

5 The Cité universitaire de Paris during the war: International mobility between global constraints and local issues (1936–1944)
Dzovinar Kévonian
95

6 The end of the war and the American presence at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris (1944–1950)
Elisa Capdevila
113
7 Maghreb at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris: A political and social history (1925–2011) 131

Guillaume Denglos and Pierre Vermeren

8 Going West: Indochinese Students and the Shaping of Identities at the Maison des Étudiants de l'Indochine, late 1920s-early 1970s 153

Sara Legrandjacques

9 From the Maison de la France d'Outre-mer to the Résidence Lucien Paye or How an Empire Unravels: From the French Union to Cooperation 175

Françoise Blum

10 A Portuguese Pavilion at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris: Between the Republic, Patronage and Protest (1924–1974) 201

Victor Pereira

11 The Maison du Brésil During the Long'68: Between the Internationalism of University Networks and the Authoritarian Nationalism of the Military 227

Angélica Müller

12 To Fight at and for the Cité: Iranian Student Mobilisations in the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris (1948–1979) 247

Valentin Rebour

Bibliography and Printed Sources 263
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

**Françoise Blum** is a research engineer at the Centre d'histoire sociale des mondes contemporains (CNRS/University Paris1-Sorbonne). She has worked and is working on social movements in sub-Saharan Africa, on African students and on socialisms in Africa. She has recently co-edited several books including: *Socialismes en Afrique/Socialisms in Africa*, Paris, Ed. de la MSH, 2021; *Les partis communistes occidentaux et l'Afrique*, Paris, Hémisphères, 2022.

**Elisa Capdevila** teaches in classes préparatoires (college level preparatory school for entrance exam to the Ecole normale supérieure) in Lille in France and is an associate researcher at the centre d'histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines at Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University. She holds a PHD in Contemporary History from Sciences Po Paris. Her research focuses on American artists in Paris and on cultural transatlantic exchanges during the Cold War. She has published a book on American artists in Paris (*Des Américains à Paris. Artistes et bohèmes dans la France de l'après-guerre*, Paris, Armand Colin, 2017) and contributed to the catalog of a recent exhibition at New York University Grey Art Museum (*Americans in Paris. Artists working in postwar France, 1946-1962*, Munich, Hirmer, 2022). She has been a member of the editorial board of French online academic review *Revue d'histoire Culturelle 18e-21e siècle* since its foundation in 2020.
**Guillaume Denglos** holds a PhD in contemporary history from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and is a research partner at the Laboratoire SIRICE (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). A specialist in contemporary Maghreb and twentieth-century defense issues, he has published several books on Morocco: *La revue Maghreb. Une publication franco-marocaines engagé (1932-1936)*, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2015; *Juin. La maréchal africain*, Paris, Belin, 2018; *La Maison du Maroc à la Cité U. Lieu de mémoire des étudiants marocains à Paris*, Paris Riveneuve, 2022. He has also published two books on the history of French national defense with Philippe Vial: *Penser la défense. Histoire de l'IHEDN*, Paris, Tallandier, 2021; *Au cœur de l'État. Une histoire du Secrétariat général de la défense et de la sécurité nationale (XIXe-XXe siècles)*, Paris, Nouveau monde éditions, 2023.

**Antonin Durand** is an associated professor at Sorbonne University. His PhD dealt with the involvement of mathematicians in Italian political life around national unification. A specialist in the social and cultural history of Europe in the second century, he focuses on scholarly, student and musical circulations as well as forced migrations from and to France and Italy. He authored *La Quadrature du cercle. Les mathématiciens italiens et la vie parlementaire (1848-1913)* (Éditions rue d'Ulm, 2018) *Les voyages forment la jeunesse. Les boursières scientifiques David-Weill à la découverte du monde (1910-1939)* (Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2020) and *Le Chœur des esclaves. Quand Verdi écrivait l'histoire* (Buchet-Chastel, 2022).

**Dzovinar Kévonian** is Professor of Contemporary History at Caen-Normandie University. She is a member of the Histoire, Territoire, Mémoires research unit (UR7455), an associate member of the Institut des Sciences sociales du Politique (UMR 7220) and a fellow of the Institut Convergences Migrations. Her research focuses on transnational legal, social and humanitarian issues, refugees, stateless persons and human rights. Her publications include: *La Danse du pendule. Les juristes et l'internationalisation des droits de l'homme, 1919-1939*, Paris, Ed. de la Sorbonne, 2021; with Guillaume Tronchet, *La Babel étudiante. La CIUP, 1920-1960*, Rennes, PUR, 2013; *Le Campus-Monde. La CIUP, 1950-2000*, Rennes, PUR, 2022; with M. Amar, A. Angoustures, A. Kunth, *Entre décolonisation et guerre froide. Administrer l'asile, 1960-1990*, Rennes, PUR, 2024. She is a member of several journals, in particular *Monde(s)* and *Histoire@Politique*.
**Sara Legrandjacques** PhD, is an associate researcher at IHMC and fellow of the Institut Convergences Migrations, both located in Paris. Her research deals with student mobility in colonial Asia, with a focus on British India and French Indochina. Associating global history with history of education and colonial studies, she currently explores the gender dimension of (post-)colonial academic migration through the case of Indian women during the twentieth century. Her latest publications in English are: «A Healthy Body for a Healthy Mind? The Corporal Impact of Student Mobility From and Towards Indochina, 1900–1945», in *Bodies Beyond Binaries*, Leiden University Press, to be published in 2024; «Law of the Strongest? A Global Approach to Law Studies and Its Social and Professional Impact in British India (1850s–1940s)», *Social Sciences*, vol. 10 (3), 2021; «Go East! 1905 as a Turning Point for the Transnational History of Vietnamese Education», *TRANS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia*, 2020.

**Angélica Müller**, Professor of Brazilian History at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF—Rio de Janeiro—Brazil). Associate researcher at the Centre d'histoire du monde contenporain of the Université Panthéon Sorbonne. CNPq Productivity Fellow and Faperj Young Scientist Fellow. Visiting professor at Iheal/Sorbonne Nouvelle University (2018). Fellow DEA—Directeur d'étude associé at the Maison Sciences de l'Homme Foundation (2022). She was a senior researcher at the National Truth Commission, responsible for organizing and writing the chapter «Grave violations of human rights in universities», which is included in volume II of the report (2014). She is the coordinator of the Present Time Observatory. Her work includes: *O movimento estudantil na resistência à ditadura militar, 1969–1979* (Garamond, 2016); with Camille Goirand, she co-ordinated *Documenter les violences: Usages publics du passé dans la justice transitionnelle* (Iheal, 2020). His most recent articles are: «The Maison du Brésil at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris: a project towards national development and internationalism», in: *Espacio, Tiempo y Educación* (2023); «Social demands and historiographical production. Writing on the history of the brazilian student movement from two experiences in the brazilian present time», in: *Cian-Revista de Historia de las Universidades* (2024).

**Victor Pereira** holds a PhD in contemporary history from the Institut d'études politiques de Paris and is currently a researcher at the Instituto de História Contemporânea of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
He directs the Imprensa de História Contemporânea (Contemporary History Press) and is a member of several editorial boards (Lusotopie, Histoire@Politique, Análise social). He has won a number of prizes, including the Aristides de Sousa Mendes Prize awarded by the Associação sindical dos Diplomatas portugueses in 2023. His research focuses on Portuguese migration and the history of twentieth-century Portugal. His publications include *La dictature de Salazar face à l'émigration. L'État portugais et ses migrants en France (1957-1974)* (Presses de Sciences Po, 2012, translated into Portuguese by Temas & Debates in 2014) and *C'est le peuple qui commande. La Révolution des Œillets, 1974-1976* (Éditions du détour, 2023).

**Valentin Rebour** a graduate of the ENS Lyon (2016-2020), is a contractual doctoral student at the Institute of Social Sciences in Politics at the University of Paris Nanterre. He is also a Fellow at the Centre Marc Bloch and the Collaborative Institute on Migration. His doctoral thesis, “The Migratory Experience of Iranian Students in France and West Germany: Spaces, Sociabilities, and Engagements (1948-1981)”, investigates the transition from state-supervised student migration to an autonomous and transnational community, deeply rooted within the student movement in Western Europe. By comparing the situations in France and West Germany, the study aims to highlight the distinct characteristics of this group and the impact of the host countries on the trajectories of these students. Valentin’s research interests include migration studies, social movements, and transnationalism. His recent publication in the *Journal of International Mobility* explores the repertoire of actions used by Iranian students in exile in France during the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah.

**Elisa Signori**, graduated in Humanities in Pavia, student and graduate student of the Ghislieri College of Pavia (1972-1978). Scholarships: Luigi Einaudi Foundation of Turin, Accademia dei Lincei, Roma; CNR. Full professor of Contemporary history at the Department of Humanities of the University of Pavia until 2021 and professor of Contemporary History at the University of Italian Switzerland (USI) too. Currently retired from university, she is honorary member of the Interuniversity Center for the History of Italian Universities (CISUI), member of the Scientific Committee for the publication of the works of Gaetano Salvemini and of the Rossi-Salvemini Foundation, director of the Istituto pavese per la storia della Resistenza e dell'età contemporanea (rete Parri) and president of Article 21 Lombardia.
**Guillaume Tronchet** is a senior civil servant in higher education, former general delegate of the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris. He is also agrégé, PhD in History from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and associate researcher at the Institut d'histoire moderne et contemporaine (ENS-PSL, Paris 1, CNRS). His research focuses on the history of international relations of universities and international student mobility. From 2017 to 2023, he led at the École normale supérieure-PSL the GlobalYouth research program, which was awarded funding by the French National Research Agency. He co-edited with Dzovinar Kévonian *La Babel étudiante. La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, 1920-1950* (PUR, 2013) and *Le Campus monde. La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, de 1945 aux années 2000* (PUR, 2022), and published *André Honnorat. Un visionnaire en politique* (Hémisphères éditions, 2020). He is currently working with Antonin Durand on a forthcoming book about the history of foreign students in France, and co-edited with Françoise Blum *Les passeurs de révolte. Étudiants et intellectuels étrangers et postcoloniaux dans les années 1968 en France*, to be published by the Presses universitaires de Rennes in 2025.

**Pierre Vermeren** is professor of contemporary history at the University of Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, specializing in the contemporary history of Arab and Berber societies in North Africa and the Middle East, and a member of the SIRICE laboratory He's the author of *Le Choc des décolonisations. De la guerre d'Algérie aux Printemps arabes* (Odile Jacob, pocket, Paris, 2023), *Déni français: notre histoire secrète des liaisons franco-arabes* (Albin Michel, Paris, 2019), and *Histoire du Maroc depuis l'indépendance* (Repères, La Découverte, Paris, republished 2016). He is President of the Société française d'Histoire d'outre-mer (SFHOM), and Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Fondation pour la mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie et des combats du Maroc et de Tunisie (FM-GACMT).
LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 9.1 Donations to the Maison de la France d'Outre-mer (1950) 181

Fig. 9.2 Capacity of the Maison de la France d'Outre-mer (1951) 182
LIST OF TABLES

<table><tr><td>Table 8.1</td><td>Origins of MEI residents, 1930–1936</td><td>162</td></tr><tr><td>Table 8.2</td><td>Applications for admission to MEI, 1934–1938</td><td>163</td></tr></table>
# Localizing Global Student Migration:
Geopolitics, Individual Path,
and Transnational Dynamics

*Dzovinar Kévonian and Guillaume Tronchet*

What is the history of global student migration? Over the past thirty years, this research field has experienced remarkable growth, partly due to the surge in student migration. Although this phenomenon dates back to the Middle Ages and persisted through the modern era, it initially involved only a few hundred individuals each year. From the late nineteenth century onwards, as universities expanded to train the managers of industrial and post-industrial societies, there was a steady increase in inter-university relations and the number of students seeking higher education abroad. Europe has traditionally been the main hub in this global university landscape, with the exception of a brief period during

<footnote>D. Kévonian
Caen-Normandie University, Caen, France
e-mail: dzovinar.kevonian@unicaen.fr</footnote>

<footnote>G. Tronchet (✉)
Institut d'histoire Moderne Et Contemporaine (IHMC), Paris, France
e-mail: gtronchet@gmail.com</footnote>
and immediately after World War II, when North America (USA and Canada) surpassed it. From just 80,000 mobile students during the interwar period, the number steadily grew in the second half of the twentieth century, surpassing 100,000 after 1945, reaching around 500,000 in the 1970s, over a million in the 1980s, and over 2 million by the 2000s. By 2024, the number of mobile students has tripled to over 6 million and is projected to reach 10 million by 2030, according to UNESCO.<fnref n="1" />

To explain the rise of these migrations, their geographical distribution, and their effects on organizations and societies, historians generally focus on three areas of analysis: the sociology of mobile students, the political and diplomatic history of strategies to encourage mobility, and the study of the student experience, particularly in relation to practices of student internationalism.

The first area focuses on the social history of demand, examining the backgrounds of mobile students, their national affiliations, social origins, gender, and their political, cultural, and religious allegiances. This analysis identifies three primary dynamics: national elites seeking social legitimation through study abroad; knowledge migrants pursuing qualifications unavailable in their home countries due to underdeveloped university systems; and those excluded from higher education at home, leading to academic exile. Pioneering work in this area by Victor Karady in the 1990s and 2000s,<fnref n="2" /> followed by research conducted by the European network led by Hartmut R. Peter and Natalia Tikhonov in the 2000s-2010s,<fnref n="3" /> and studies on specific social groups since 2010–2020, such as the collective

<footnote n="1">¹ Isabella Löhr, Globale Bildungsmobilität 1850-1930. Von der Bekehrung der Welt zur globalen studentischen Gemeinschaft (Moderne europäische Geschichte, Bd. 21.) Göttingen, Wallstein 2021; H. Perraton, *International Students 1860-2010: Policy and practice round the world* (Cham, 2020), 195–224</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² V. Karady, 'Student mobility and Western universities: patterns and unequal exchanges in the European academic market, 1880-1930' in C. Charle, J. Schriewer and P. Wagner (eds), *Transnational Intellectual Networks: Forms of academic knowledge and the search for cultural identities* (Frankfurt am Main, 2004).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ PETER, Hartmut R., and TIKHONOV, Natalia (eds.), *Universitäten als Brucken in Europa/Les Universités: des ponts à travers l'Europe*, Peter Lang, 2003; FERTÉ, Patrick, BARRERA, Caroline (eds.), *Étudiants de l'exil. Migrations internationales et universités refuges (XVIe-XXe s.)*, Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2009.</footnote>
work on African and Arab students in the USSR and Eastern Europe<fnref n="4" /> or
Sarah Legrandjacques’ research on student mobility in colonial Asia, all
fall within this framework.<fnref n="5" />

Concurrently, other studies focus on the dynamics of supply and
university policies aimed at developing, regulating, or curbing student
mobility. These efforts are part of a renewed transnational history
of universities,<fnref n="6" /> seeking to understand the social conditions enabling
mobility within the contexts of competition and collaboration between
states and universities. This includes research on “academic diplomacy”

<footnote n="4">⁴ DE SAINT MARTIN Monique, SCARFO GHELLAB Grazia and MELLAKH Kamal (dir.), *Étudier à l'Est : Trajectoires d'étudiants africains et arabes en URSS et dans les pays d'Europe de l'Est*, Karthala, 2015</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Sara Legrandjacques, "Voies étudiantes : pour une histoire globale des mobilités étudi-
antes en Asie (Inde britannique - Indochine française, années 1850-1940)", PhD thesis
in History, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - Paris I, 2021.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ C. Charle, J. Schriewer and P. Wagner (eds), *Transnational Intellectual Networks: Forms of academic knowledge and the search for cultural identities* (Frankfurt am Main, 2004.)</footnote>
in western countries⁷ or in Soviet Union,⁸ transatlantic university relations,⁹ regional cooperation policies,¹⁰ and public and private scholarship

⁷ On this notion, see G. Tronchet, « Diplomatie universitaire ou diplomatie culturelle? La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris entre deux rives (1920-1940) », in Dzovinar Kévonian and Guillaume Tronchet, eds, *La Babel étudiante. La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris (1920-1950)*, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013, pp. 59-88 ; G. Tronchet, ‘Savoirs en diplomatie: une histoire sociale et internationale de la politique universitaire internationale de la France’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2014) ; T. Adam and C. A. Lerg, ‘Diplomacy on campus: The political dimensions of academic exchange in the North Atlantic’, *Journal of Transatlantic Studies*, 13, 4 (2015), 299-310 ; G. Tronchet, ‘The defeat of university autonomy: French academic diplomacy, mobility scholarships and exchange programs (1880s-1930s)’, in G. Scott-Smith and L. Tournès (eds) *Global Exchanges: Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World* (New York 2017), 50-64 ; G. Tronchet, ‘L’expertise universitaire en diplomatie: entre valorisation sociale et assignation à résidence, 1880-1940’, in S. Jeannesson, F. Jesné and E. Schakenbourg (eds), *Experts et expertises en diplomatie: la mobilisation des compétences dans les relations internationales, du Congrès de Westphalie à la naissance de l'ONU* (Rennes 2018), 305-317 ; C. A. Lerg, *Universitätsdiplomatie. Wissenschaft und Prestige in den transatlantischen Beziehungen, 1890-1920* (Göttingen 2019). On Great Britain, see also H. Perraton, *Learning Abroad: A history of the Commonwealth scholarship and fellowship plan* (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009) ; Perraton, Hillary, *A History of Foreign Students in Britain*, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 ; Tamson Pietsch, *Empire of Scholars Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850-1939*, Manchester University Press, 2013.

⁸ C. Katsakioris, 'Les étudiants de pays arabes formés en Union soviétique pendant la Guerre froide (1956-1991)', *Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales*, 35, 2 (2016), 13-38; KATSAKIORIS, *Constantin, The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Africa in the Cold War: The Educational Ties*, Working paper series des SFB 1199 an der Universität Leipzig, n°16, 2019;

⁹ P.A. Kramer, 'Is the world our campus? International students and US global power in the long twentieth century', *Diplomatic History*, 33, 5 (2009), 775-806; Werner, Anja, *The Transatlantic World of Higher Education Americans at German Universities, 1776-1914*, Berghan Books, 2013.

¹⁰ RAVINET, Pauline, *La genèse et l'institutionnalisation du Processus de Bologne. Entre chemin de traverse et sentier de dépendance*, doctoral thesis in political science, IEP de Paris, 2007; TEICHLER, Ulrich (et alii.), *Der berufliche Ertrag der ERASMUS Mobilität. Die Auswirkungen internationalen Erfahrungen auf die Berufswege von ehemals mobilen Studierenden und Lehrenden*, BMBF, 2009
programs,<fnref n="11" /> supporting both voluntary and forced mobility, such as that of refugee students.<fnref n="12" />

Lastly, a body of historiography explores what happens during student mobility experiences, focusing on the intersection of youth leadership, international and transnational student sociability, and processes of social and political mobilization. For example, recent studies on student internationalism between the wars and during the Cold War,<fnref n="13" /> as well as on colonial and post-colonial student mobility as a breeding ground for nationalism and anti-imperialism, particularly in France<fnref n="14" /> and Germany,<fnref n="15" /> are noteworthy.

Let's make here a little note on terminology: why speak of student migration? How does *student migration* differ from *student mobility*? Most recent analyses of academic globalization that distinguish between *migration* and *mobility* agree that the distinction is based on three main criteria: duration of stay (mobility is shorter-term); purpose of movement (mobility is often associated with a temporary stay as part of an exchange semester, whereas migration is linked to a longer-term project of settlement and integration); and geographical scope (mobility is more

<footnote n="11">¹¹ G. Gemelli and R. MacLeod (eds.), *American Foundations in Europe: Grant-giving policies, cultural diplomacy and Trans-Atlantic relations, 1920–1980* (Brussels, 2003); Tournès and G. Scott-Smith (eds.), *Global Exchanges: Scholarships and transnational circulations in the modern world* (New York, 2018); DURAND, Antonin (dir.), *Les voyages forment la jeunesse. Les boursières scientifiques David-Weill à la découverte du monde (1910–1939)*, Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2020.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² TRONCHET, Guillaume, “L’accueil des étudiants réfugiés au XXe siècle. Un chantier d’histoire globale”, *Monde(s). Histoire, espaces, relations*, n°15, 2019, pp. 93-116</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ W. Walton, *Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad: France and the United States, 1890–1970* (Stanford, CA, 2010); Daniel Laqua, Activism in the ‘Students’ League of Nations’: International Student Politics and the Confédération Internationale des Étudiants, 1919–1939, *The English Historical Review*, Volume 132, Issue 556, June 2017, pp. 605–637; and for a recent synthesis, see Laqua, D., & Papadogiannis, N. (2023). Youth and internationalism in the twentieth century: an introduction. *Social History*, 48(1), 1–16.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ GOEBEL Michael, *Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism*, Cambridge University Press, 2015; BLUM, Françoise, *Trajectoires millénantes et (re)conversions: à propos de la FEANF. Que sont-ils/elles devenus-e-s?*, Habilitation à diriger des recherches, EHESS, 2016.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ SLOBODIAN, Quinn, *Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany*, Duke University Press, 2012; PUGACH, Sara, “Agents of dissent: African student organizations in the German Democratic Republic”, *Africa*, n°89, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 90–108</footnote>
commonly discussed within national or regional frameworks, while migration tends to be framed in an intercontinental context).<fnref n="16" /> However, this distinction is often shaped by social and political perceptions: students from the Global North are more frequently described as mobile, while those from the Global South are more often categorized as migrants. This reflects unequal, ethnocentric representations linked to students’ origins and economic status.

We find these semantic distinctions inadequate and propose a different approach. In our view, migration refers to a legal and political reality shaped by the regulation of interstate relations on an international scale—crossing borders, obtaining passports and residence visas, and differentiating between nationals and foreigners in access to education or the labor market. In contrast, mobility describes a physical dynamic of movement, which can apply to both international and domestic movements.

As this book contributes to a historical sociology of the international—focusing on the social and political dynamics governing student flows to France—we have chosen to use the term migration to encompass all the situations described (including exchange students, free movers or academic refugees). However, we occasionally use the term mobility when referring specifically to spatial movement.

Bringing together these different approaches, while addressing political and geopolitical issues, individual trajectories, and transnational dynamics, is a complex task, especially as it requires multi-scalar analysis (local, national, international, global). A potential approach is to examine the spatial and social positioning of the actors involved and the cultural transfers in question. As Jacques Revel observes, “there is no hiatus, let alone opposition, between local and global history [...], as the experience of an individual, a group, or a space allows us to grasp [...] a specific modulation of global history”.<fnref n="17" /> Additionally, as Blaise Wilfert-Portal notes, “the complex territoriality of cultural phenomena is not only in the eye of the researcher: it is regularly asserted by the actors themselves, formulated by them, and integrated into their strategies and resources, whether

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ R. KING and A. M., FINDLAY, “Student migration”, in M. MARTINIELLO & J. RATH (eds.), *An introduction to international migration studies: European perspectives*, Amsterdam University Press, 2012, pp. 259–280.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ REVEL J., *Jeux d'échelles*, Paris, Éditions de l'ÉHESS, 2004, p. 26.</footnote>
consciously or not”.<fnref n="18" /> In this context, the case of the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris (CIUP) provides a stimulating observational framework. This is the purpose of this book, which builds upon two previous works by the editors, originally published in French,<fnref n="19" /> partially revised and presented here for the first time in English, supplemented by new, unpublished case studies conducted as part of the GlobalYouth research program.<fnref n="20" />

## PARIS'S FIRST MODERN INTERNATIONAL CAMPUS

Located in the southern part of the French capital, the CIUP is an expansive campus inaugurated in 1925. It spans over 30 hectares and includes approximately 40 houses for French and international students and researchers, as well as facilities for health (dispensary and later hospital), sports (swimming pool, gymnasium, and sports fields), dining, and cultural activities (libraries, music rooms, theater). At the time of its creation, there were no university campuses of this type in France, either in Paris or elsewhere. From the outset, the CIUP was designed as an innovative institution for campus life—uniquely so in France at its inception—offering modern comforts aligned with the hygienist trends of the 1920s and 1930s, and setting the stage for the development of French student life policy from the 1940s and 1950s onward.

The history of the CIUP's construction can be divided into three phases. The first phase, during the founders' era, extends from the 1920s to the Second World War and saw the construction of nineteen student

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Blaise Wilfert-Portal, "L'histoire culturelle de l'Europe d'un point de vue transnational", *Revue Sciences/Lettres*, 1 | 2013.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ KÉVONIAN, Dzovinar, TRONCHET, Guillaume (dir.), *La Babel étudiante La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris (1920-1950)*, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013; *Le Campus monde. La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, des années 1950 à nos jours*, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ *A Global Youth in the Making: the 200,000 Residents of the Cité internationale universitaire in 20th-Century Paris*, Project GlobalYouth, financed by the French National Research Agency, Institut d'histoire moderne et contemporaine (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Ecole normale supérieure ENS-PSL, CNRS), lead by Guillaume Tronchet, ANR-17-CE28-0005, 2017-2022.</footnote>
and service pavilions between 1925 and 1938.<fnref n="21" /> During this period, the CIUP accommodated up to 2,500 residents. The second phase began in the 1950s and resulted in the addition of seventeen pavilions between 1950 and 1969, increasing the CIUP's capacity to approximately 5,500 residents.<fnref n="22" /> The third phase, from 2010 to the present, involved the opening of ten new pavilions, with the goal of accommodating around 8,000 students simultaneously by 2025, and managing a total flow of approximately 12,000 people over a full academic year, considering varying lengths of stay.

Consequently, the CIUP has become an urban space in its own right, grappling with typical challenges such as land acquisition, spatial planning, architectural considerations, and connectivity to transport networks. It is also integrated into numerous development and expansion projects of both the University of Paris and the City of Paris throughout the twentieth century. The architecture of the CIUP, designed by internationally renowned architects (such as Le Corbusier and Dudok), is a notable feature of this campus, making it an exceptional institution in the French and global university landscape, where most international campuses elsewhere are characterized by architectural unity.<fnref n="23" />

As an urban space, the CIUP is also an academic environment, operating under the authority of the Rector Chancellor of the University of Paris, from which it emerged in the early 1920s. It was established with the dual aims of addressing the student housing crisis that had plagued the French capital since the late nineteenth century<fnref n="24" /> and enhancing the attractiveness of the University of Paris in a competitive international market for foreign elite training. Since July 1925, the *Fondation nationale de la Cité internationale universitaire de Paris* has been responsible for developing and administering the campus, managing its assets, enforcing

<footnote n="21">²¹ On this first period, see D. Kévonian and G. Tronchet, *La Babel étudiante. La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris (1920–1950)*, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² On this second period, see D. Kévonian and G. Tronchet, *Le Campus monde. La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, de 1945 à nos jours*, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Cf. Brigitte Blanc, *La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris : de la cité-jardin à la cité-monde*, Lieux-dits, 2017.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Moulinier P., *Les étudiants étrangers à Paris au XIXᵉ siècle*, Rennes, PUR, 2012.
Également: Bettar Y., Birk F., *Étudiants étrangers en France. L'émergence de nouveaux pôles d'attraction au début du XXᵉ siècle*, Nancy, Presses universitaires de Nancy, 2009.</footnote>
its internal regulations, and welcoming its residents. While the Founda-
tion's general missions have remained consistent over the past century,
the profile of its administrators has evolved significantly, impacting the
development of its institutional strategy. Initially led by political figures,
diplomats, and academics—such as André Honnorat, former minister and
senator, president of the CIUP from 1925 to 1948²⁵; Raoul Dautry,
former minister, who succeeded him (1948–1951); and André-François
Poncet, former minister and ambassador, president of the CIUP from
1951 to 1962—the Foundation gradually came under the leadership
of senior French civil servants. Similarly, the governance of the CIUP,
which before 1940 was dominated by the Jewish bourgeoisie of the Third
Republic, faced a dramatic shift due to the anti-Semitic policies of Vichy,
the Aryanization of the French economy, and Nazi extermination poli-
cies,<fnref n="26" /> leading to dominance by social Catholics and Christian Democrats
in the post-war period.

However, the CIUP is not a monolithic entity with a singular French perspective. It is important to distinguish between the *Fondation nationale* and the approximately twenty pavilions under its control and management, known as “maisons rattachées” and the other pavilions, which are generally financed by foreign states. While subject to the CIUP’s common rules, these pavilions are managed autonomously by private foundations and are commonly referred to as “maisons non rattachées”. This distinction underscores another fundamental aspect of the CIUP: its international dimension.

The CIUP is distinctly international in its composition. Historically,
over a third of its residents were foreign students in the 1930s, and today
that figure exceeds 80%. The campus also practices “brassage,” a system
of integrating students from various nationalities within each pavilion.<fnref n="27" />

Additionally, the architectural diversity of the CIUP reflects its inter-
national character. Many buildings were designed in styles reminiscent of

<footnote n="25">²⁵ See G. Tronchet, *André Honnorat. Un visionnaire en politique*, Hémisphères éditions/Maisonneuve et Larose/, 2020.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ GRANGE Cyril, *Une élite parisienne: les familles de la grande bourgeoisie juive (1870-1939)*, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2016.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ This practice means that a percentage of the students admitted by the admissions committees of each foundation or house are housed in another foundation or house, giving foreign students a double cultural experience: coming to France and living in a house that represents a second cultural and linguistic environment.</footnote>
World's Fair pavilions, each symbolizing a different “national culture,” sometimes incorporating elements inspired by folklore. Alongside contributions from the French state and local authorities (City of Paris, *départements*, and *régions*), the CIUP pavilions were primarily funded by international patrons, private philanthropists, and foreign governments who sought to provide accommodations for students from their countries studying in France.

The CIUP's ambitions are inherently international. In the aftermath of World War I, driven by the imperial and internationalist spirit prevalent among Western elites of the time,<fnref n="28" /> its founders assigned it a dual mission: enhancing France's international appeal and fostering peace among nations by uniting the global elite of youth in training, in anticipation of the new League of Nations. The CIUP's idealistic goal is to teach future ruling elites from various nations to understand and respect one another to secure lasting peace. This vision is rooted in a pacifist utopia based on applying liberal solidarist philosophy to international relations—a form of liberal internationalism that posits the possibility of building an “international community” by leveraging the potential of each individual to be, in Alfred Zimmern's words, “educated to a global social consciousness”.<fnref n="29" />

However, this idealistic vision transcends mere description and prompts a deeper inquiry into the projections and expectations imposed on the institution by various stakeholders, including both French and foreign governments and patrons. These projections are embedded within specific political, social, and cultural contexts, which need to be carefully deconstructed and analyzed.

## AN ACADEMIC DIPLOMACY ARENA: STUDENT MIGRATION IN THE STRUGGLE OF NATIONS

Considering the CIUP within its global context is crucial because, since the late nineteenth century, the internationalization of knowledge has been a pivotal component of national power. For “imperial nations,” this meant extending their economic, political, or colonial dominance beyond

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Cf. CHARLE C., *La crise des sociétés impériales. Allemagne, France, Grande-Bretagne (1900-1940)*, Paris, Seuil, 2001.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Quoted in SMITH M., *Realist thought from Weber to Kissinger*, Louisiana State University Press, 1986, pp. 55-56.</footnote>
their borders by promoting a cultural model with varying degrees of universalist intent.<fnref n="30" /> For other nations, particularly emerging states, the goal was to enhance the availability of high-quality education that was not yet available domestically. These nations sought to address this need through “planned” strategies for training functional elites abroad.<fnref n="31" />

As a result, the transnational intellectual field has been shaped by competition among major powers—primarily Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States—whose state actors aimed to attract foreign elites seeking higher education by offering comparative advantages, such as scholarships and special programs.<fnref n="32" /> At the same time, these states

<footnote n="30">³⁰ CHARLE C., "Enseignement supérieur et expansion internationale (1870-1930): des instituts pour un nouvel empire?", in HEILBRON J., LENOIR R., SAPIRO G., PARGAMIN P. (dir.), *Pour une histoire des sciences sociales. Hommage à Pierre Bourdieu*, Paris, Fayard, 2004, p. 323.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ KARADY V., “L’émergence d’un espace européen des connaissances sur l’homme en société: cadres institutionnels et démographiques”, in SAPIRO G. (ed.), *L’espace intellectuel en Europe, op. cit.* p. 60.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Cf. KARADY V., “La migration internationale d’étudiants en Europe, 1890-1940”, *Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales*, n°145, December 2002, pp. 47-60; MANITAKIS N., “Les migrations estudiantines en Europe, 1890-1930”, in LEBOUTTE R. (ed.), *Migrations et migrants dans une perspective historique: permanences et innovations*, New York-Brussels-Berlin, European University Press, 2000, pp. 243-270; PETER H. R. and TIKHONOV N. (eds.), *Les Universités, des ponts à travers l’Europe. Études sur l’histoire des migrations étudiantes*, Frankfurt-Am-Main, Peter Lang, 2003; FERTÉ P., BARRERA C. (dir.), *Migrations internationales et universités refuges (XVIᵉ-XXᵉ siècles)*, Toulouse, Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2009. For a perspective on France: “Mutations de la science et des universités en France depuis 1945”, CHAPOULIE J.-M., FRIDENSON P. and PROST A. (dir.), special issue of *Revue du Mouvement social*, no. 233, 201; TRONCHET G., *Savoirs en diplomatie, op. cit.*</footnote>
sought to integrate these knowledge migrants into their national immigration policies to better manage their influx<fnref n="33" /> as part of a broader strategy of “academic diplomacy”.<fnref n="34" />

An examination of the geography of the CIUP pavilions reveals the evolution of this geopolitics of student mobility and the development of academic diplomacy. The initial pavilions established in the interwar years, such as the *Collège franco-britannique, Fondation des Etats-Unis, Maison des étudiants argentins, and Maison du Japon*, mirrored both the international networks of French scientific institutions and the strategic priorities of French diplomacy or colonial policy, as exemplified by the *Maison des étudiants indochinois*. Similarly, CIUP leaders like André Honnorat and mathematician Paul Appell, Rector of the University of Paris (1920–1925), connected the institution to the networks of Geneva internationalism and American philanthropy, including organizations such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Rockefeller Foundation.<fnref n="35" />

This highlights a fundamental aspect of the political reality of institutions managing student migration: their role in shaping a new international order. This new order, predicated on “the triumph of democracy and economic liberalism across Europe,” rested on “the right of peoples to self-determination and the full sovereignty of states,” with “the ideal European state being a nation-state in the French tradition—one based on the protection of individual rights rather than the recognition of historical or ethnic communities”.<fnref n="36" /> The CIUP’s involvement in this dynamic

<footnote n="33">³³ Cf. in particular MANITAKIS N., “Étudiants étrangers, universités françaises et marché de l’emploi du travail intellectuel (fin XIXe-années 1930) : certifier sans gratifier, des titres universitaires pour l’exportation”, in GUICHARD E. and NOIRIEL G. (dir.), *Construction des nationalités et immigration dans la France contemporaine*, Paris, Presses de l’ENS, 1997 pp. 123–154; see also part five of GREEN N., POINSOT M. (dir.), *Histoire de l’immigration et question coloniale en France*, Paris, Documentation française, 2008. It’s no coincidence that one of the Cité’s founders, André Honnorat, was heavily involved in redefining French immigration and nationality policies from the 1920s onwards. Cf. WEIL P., *Qu’est-ce qu’un français? Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution*, Paris, Grasset, 2002, pp. 76–82, 265–266.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ See above.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Cf. G. Tronchet, “La Cité Universitaire: une joint-venture transnationale dans le Paris des années 1920 et 1930”, in Serge Jaumain and Pierre Van den Dungen (eds.), *Biermans-Lapôtre: Histoire d’un mécène et de sa fondation*, Brussels, 2013, pp. 85–100.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ SOUTOU G.-H., “La Première Guerre mondiale: une rupture dans l’évolution de l’ordre européen”, *Politique étrangère*, n°3/4, 2000, pp. 847–848.</footnote>
is twofold: the institution either participated in existing efforts to redefine international relations<fnref n="37" /> or actively promoted its own vision as part of a broader power strategy. In other words, by striving to serve as a practical school of international relations—a “school of nations” with its own model for integrating global student and academic elites through soft power diplomacy—the CIUP aimed to contribute to the establishment of enduring peace between nations in the wake of the First World War, within the framework of a global order dominated by Western, and preferably French, influence.

The influence of interstate diplomacy is evident not only in the houses that were constructed but also in the projects that failed.<fnref n="38" /> The various attempts to establish a German house at the CIUP between the 1930s and the 1950s, along with unsuccessful proposals for houses associated with Central and Eastern European states between the wars, reflect a “virtual cartography” of the CIUP as envisioned by its leaders. These examples are emblematic of the constraints impacting the project’s realization. Moreover, the absence of a house at the CIUP did not imply a lack of significant student migration for certain nationalities or politically influential groups identified by French diplomacy, such as refugee students or exiles from Central and Eastern Europe. For these groups, the CIUP has occasionally offered accommodation within existing pavilions, as seen with Czechoslovak refugees in 1938.<fnref n="39" />

This political ambition is mirrored in the legitimizing rhetoric of CIUP leaders, frequently articulated during inaugurations of new houses. By invoking the medieval “College of Nations,” these speeches aimed to root the creation of the CIUP in the long tradition of European university communities, thereby asserting their legacy. André Honnorat, for instance, often linked the medieval College of Nations with his “Society of Student Nations” and the League of Nations in Geneva. Similarly, Paris

<footnote n="37">³⁷ HORNE, J., “Reconstruction, Reform and Peace in Europe after the First World War”, in Verpoest L., Engelen L., Heynickx R., Schmidt J., Uyttenhove P., & Verstraete P. (Eds.), *Revival After the Great War: Rebuild, Remember, Repair, Reform*, Leuven University Press, pp. 297–316.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ BOCK, H. M., “Die Maison de l’Allemagne in der Cite Internationale Universitaire de Paris, 1956–1972. Zur Implmentierung des ersten kultupolitischen Projekts der Bundeserepublik in der franzosischen Hauptstadt”, *Lendemains - vergleichende Frankeichforschung*, 32, n°125, 2007, pp. 110–149.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ See Guillaume Tronchet, « Diplomatie universitaire ou diplomatie culturelle? », op. cit.</footnote>
Rector Sébastien Charléty, during the 1930s foundation-laying for the Hellenic Foundation, remarked, “It’s the Acropolis visiting Montagne Saint-Geneviève”.<fnref n="40" /> The CIUP project reflected a Eurocentric world-view, seeking to localize academic, political, and social exchanges in Paris, France, and thereby polarize an emerging international academic space.

Other international initiatives—some overlapping with the CIUP project—also found significant support at the CIUP. The extensive investments by international patrons, as detailed in various records, are less a sudden surge of disinterested generosity<fnref n="41" /> and more a manifestation of transnational philanthropy as a tool for shaping global space, what could be termed “philanthropic diplomacy”.<fnref n="42" /> American foundations, notably Carnegie and Rockefeller, play a prominent role in this context. It is notable that some foreign houses result not from state policies but from the efforts of individuals, associations, and private circles committed to establishing a student residence at the CIUP. For instance, the *Maison de Cuba*, initiated by French and Cuban figures and doctors’ associations, was made possible through financing from Pierre and Rosalia Sanchez Abreu in 1933.<fnref n="43" /> Similarly, the *Maison des étudiants arméniens*, funded by philanthropist and political figure Boghos Nubar Pacha, aimed to reconstitute an Armenian elite devastated by genocide and the displacement of survivors and refugees. The CIUP exemplifies a major shift in international relations since the mid-nineteenth century: diplomacy has expanded beyond the realm of diplomats.<fnref n="44" /> Alongside governments, “non-governmental actors, who develop ideas and implement actions in the realm of international regulation, have emerged as co-producers of

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ AN, AJ/16/7041.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Cf. BOURDIEU P., *Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l'action*, Paris, Seuil, 1994 ("Un acte désintéressé est-il possible?", pp. 147-167).</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² TOURNÈS L., *L'argent de l'influence. American foundations and their European networks*, Paris, Autrement, 2010, p. 25.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Pierre Sanchez Abreu (1890-1950) was the nephew of Professor Joseph Grancher, Pasteur's research companion.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ BADIE B., *Le diplomate et l'intrus. L'entrée des sociétés dans l'arène internationale*, Paris, Fayard, 2008.</footnote>
concepts such as the ‘society of nations’ and, later, the ‘international community’”.<fnref n="45" />

After World War II, a significant turning point was reached. While the goals of the CIUP’s directors remained consistent, the international landscape of decolonization and the Cold War shifted the institution’s focus. The emphasis at CIUP moved from solely promoting French influence to accommodating foreign states aiming to establish their presence and project their influence in France. Constructing a pavilion at the CIUP became a means of cultural projection, integrated into the soft power strategies of both Western powers (such as the *Maison de l’Allemagne*, *Maison de l’Italie*, and *Maison du Portugal*) and newly independent states emerging from decolonization (including the *Maison de l’Inde*, *Maison du Maroc*, *Maison de la Tunisie*, and *Maison du Cambodge*).

From this perspective, the establishment of national pavilions at the CIUP mirrors the global expansion of the nation-state model, a consequence of the nationalization process underway in Europe since the nineteenth century.<fnref n="46" /> This development underscores the need for national elites seeking to assert their influence on the international stage.<fnref n="47" /> As Blaise Wilfert-Portal notes, “the invention of nations functions [...] in a highly international manner: nation-states recognize each other, which means, from a socio-historical perspective, that the elites governing these states only fully benefit when they receive recognition from other national elites”.<fnref n="48" /> In this context, the CIUP can be viewed as a platform for identity entrepreneurs seeking to validate their presence in the international arena by financing a pavilion and sending their youth to Paris. Contrary to appearances, the CIUP is not merely the product of the French nation-state—or the French “imperial state,” to use Frédéric

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ TOURNÈS L., *op. cit.* p. 192. See also: BOLI J. and THOMAS G. M. (eds.), *Constructing World Culture. International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875*, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ THIESSE A.-M., *La création des identités nationales. Europe XVIII-XXᵉ s.*, Paris, Seuil, 1999.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ On this subject, see CHARLE C., *La crise des sociétés impériales, op. cit.* and Iriye A. and Saunier P.-Y. (eds.), *The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History*, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan publication, 2009.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ WILFERT-PORTAL B., “Nation et nationalisme”, in DOSSE F., GARCIA P., OFFENSTADT N. (dir.), *Dictionnaire d’historiographie*, tome 2, Paris, Gallimard, 2010, p. 1100.</footnote>
Cooper’s term<fnref n="49" />—but also a product of the transnational circulation of elites engaged in both national and international power strategies.<fnref n="50" />

Certain trends have persisted: the post-war leadership of the CIUP, rooted in Christian Democratic circles, explains the strong connections with Europeanist groups and the creation of the German<fnref n="51" /> (1956) and Italian (1958) houses amid European economic integration. The CIUP’s ongoing integration into the national-imperial framework, despite the decolonization movement, is still evident in projects such as the inauguration of the Maison de la France d’Outre-mer in 1951 (modeled on the Maison de l’Indochine, a residence for students from colonial territories) and the construction of pavilions for Morocco and Tunisia in 1953 (three years before their independence). Similarly, the Cambodian government’s donation in 1950 facilitated the construction of the Maison du Cambodge, which was inaugurated post-independence.

In this new era, the CIUP operated within an international system structured by the Cold War. The CIUP did not build houses for Eastern European countries, aligning instead with the contours of the Iron Curtain and the Western bloc, in line with prevailing French foreign policy orientations. This period also saw a shift in the balance between private investment and government funding, as newly independent states from decolonization asserted their presence. Unlike the interwar period, new pavilions funded by private endowments were relatively rare from the 1950s onward (such as the Maison Victor Lyon in 1950, which followed the model of patronage by the upper middle classes of the IIIe republic,<fnref n="52" /> or the Maison du Portugal in 1963, financed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) and were predominantly driven by foreign state authorities and/or government funds. Examples include the Maison du Mexique (1953), the Maison du Brésil (1959), the Maison de l’Inde (1968), and

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ COOPER F., *Le colonialisme en question. Théorie, connaissance, histoire*, Paris, Payot, 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ DEZALAY Y. and MADSEN M. R., “Espaces de pouvoir nationaux, espaces de pouvoir internationaux”, in COHEN A., LACROIX B., RIUTORT P. (dir), *Nouveau manuel de science politique*, Paris, La Découverte, 2009, pp. 681–682.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Deed of gift signed in 1953, first representation of the FRG in France.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">⁵² Victor-Lyon (1878–1963) was a businessman and art collector, married to Hélène Loeb (1883–1946), from an Alsatian Jewish family who had emigrated to Paris. In 1948, he donated 100 million francs to the University of Paris for the construction, fitting-out and management of a student residence in memory of his wife. Décret du 27 août 1948 in JORF, 1er septembre 1948, p. 8641.</footnote>
the *Maison de l'Iran* (1969). Newly independent states structured their internationalization and recognition by investing in universities of former imperial metropolises, often lacking sufficient internal university infrastructure or choosing to invest in the overseas education of their new elites through public scholarships.<fnref n="53" />

The final decade of the twentieth century was marked by a dynamic process of renovation and modernization of facilities to meet new expectations of student comfort, such as individual sanitary facilities and showers. This period also acknowledged the end of the Cold War and the “shattering of empires” with a refounding speech that revitalized the notion of “esprit de la Cité,” promoting both French and international culture, friendships transcending political and intellectual boundaries, and “the fight against centrifugal forces that push each House to turn inward”.<fnref n="54" /> In the brief interval between the collapse of communism and the 2001 attacks, the CIUP experienced a resurgence of liberal internationalism, highlighting the vibrancy of civil societies and private transnational actors amid the decline of a “Westphalian” world of rival states and ideological blocs, frozen since the 1970s. This belief in the ideological triumph of liberal democracy and the representation of the CIUP as a territorialization of an international civil society of youth and new migratory flows of elites does not, however, mark the end of the history.<fnref n="55" /> Since the early 2010s, as part of its new phase of development and urban expansion (notably with the construction of the *Maison de l'Égypte* and the *Maison de la Chine* in 2023-2024), the CIUP has become integrated into an international university landscape characterized by the decline of French influence, the dominance of Anglo-American standards, the rise of commercial logic driven by the knowledge economy, and the increasing interest of authoritarian states in student migration. For these states, student mobility is no longer merely a tool of soft power but also of hard

<footnote n="53">⁵³ See, for example, Valentin Rebour's current thesis, « L'expérience migratoire des étudiants et étudiantes iraniens en France et en RFA. Espaces, sociabilités et mobilisations (1953-1989) », under the supervision of Dzovinar Kévonian, Université Paris-Nanterre.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ LAURENT Pierre (President of the Fondation nationale de la CIUP), “L’esprit de la Cité”, *Revue de l’Alliance internationale de la Cité universitaire de Paris*, n°1, 1992, p. 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ See Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye's theories on the dynamism of civil societies and FUKUYAMA Francis's famous article, “The End of History?”, published in *The National Interest* in 1989.</footnote>
power, as illustrated by recent debates on Chinese influence in Western universities.

This extensive history of the geopolitics of student migration at CIUP reflects the ambivalence of the discourse on international cooperation as perpetuated by the institution throughout the twentieth century and into the present day. As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu points out, “We believe that intellectual life is spontaneously international. Nothing could be further from the truth. Intellectual life, like all other social spaces, is the site of nationalism and imperialism, and intellectuals, almost as much as anyone else, convey prejudices, stereotypes, and very basic, elementary representations”.<fnref n="56" /> Thus, the notion of the “ideal of the CIUP,” which aims to unite elites from all nations within a shared intellectual sphere to foster mutual understanding and peace in international relations, does not encapsulate the essence of the CIUP. Instead, it represents one of many discourses propagated by elites who may, in practice, act contrary to their stated aims, within an international space whose axiological neutrality remains unestablished.

## REAPPROPRIATION: EXAMINING THE AGENCY OF MIGRANT STUDENTS

Analyzing the CIUP as a site of international student migration extends beyond merely assessing the stated objectives of the institution's stakeholders. It needs a deep examination of the students who are the intended beneficiaries of the institution, exploring the diversity of their sociological backgrounds, trajectories, and practices.

Who are these students? Prior to World War II, foreign students were a minority at CIUP, with between 100 and 900 foreign residents recorded between 1925 and 1939 out of a total student population ranging from 350 to 2,500. These early foreign students often included individuals from countries aligned with the nationalities of their respective residences (e.g., English, American, Japanese, and Belgian). However, by the latter half of the twentieth century, this ratio shifted significantly. In 1947, with a total of just over 3,000 residents, French students still constituted the majority (53.5%), while 11% were from French Union territories and

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ BOURDIEU P., "Les conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées", *Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales*, n°145, December 2002, p. 3.</footnote>
35.5% were international. By 1955, as capacity increased to 4,600 residents, the proportion of international students remained stable at 33%, but the number of French residents decreased to 48%, with residents from the French Union rising to 19%. By 1965, international students made up 52% of the approximately 5,400 residents.<fnref n="57" /> This trend continued through to 2003, when international students represented 72% of the CIUP’s population, while French students made up only 28%. Given that no new buildings have been constructed at the Cité since 1969, this widening gap reflects not just an increase in international students, but also a decline in French students, alongside an overall decrease of around 15% between 1965 and 2003.

From the 1960s onwards, the representation of students from “Third World” countries increased compared to their European and American counterparts, whose numbers remained stable but whose share of total enrollment decreased. In 1947, 64% of international students were from Europe and 18% from North America. By the 1970s, the proportion of European students at the CIUP had decreased to 30% (a figure that remained relatively stable until the 2000s), while North American students made up only 10% (6.5% in 2003) of the population, which now included over 120 nationalities. Although the number of African students increased significantly (a 68% rise between 1947 and 2003), their proportion of the foreign student population declined from 35% in 1947 to 19% in 2003.

Conversely, there was a notable increase in the number and proportion of students from Asia (0.5% of residents in 1947, compared to 18.9% in 2003), Central and North America (4.5% in 1947, compared to 12% in 2003), and the Middle East (1.7% in 1947, compared to around 15% in 2003). This increase reflects both the expansion of accommodation capacities at the CIUP (such as the creation of houses for Indian, Brazilian, and Cambodian students) and shifts in international student mobility trends during the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly in the context of the “brain drain” towards Western educational institutions. These regional trends, however, mask significant internal fluctuations driven by international political dynamics, such as the disappearance of certain nationalities from the CIUP (e.g., the decline from 25 Chinese students in 1946 to just one in 1970, as well as changes in

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ La Cité (AIRCUP), n°2, 1965.</footnote>
Iranian student numbers), the influx of refugees, and the reception of foreign scholarship recipients funded by either the French government or their home governments. These sub-groups warrant further detailed study, considering the specific dynamics influencing each group.

Similar to the previous period, refugee students remain largely invisible in official records<fnref n="58" /> due to the absence of specific documentation in admissions files. Only a longitudinal analysis of nationalities within the general admissions file, which is organized alphabetically, could offer a quantitative perspective, though it would only include those who are formally declared residents. To fully understand this situation, it is necessary to cross-reference indirect sources such as residents' testimonies, charity association archives, and police records concerning foreigners. For instance, within the International Alliance of Former Residents, Spanish and Central European members who had previously been student refugees at the CIUP acted as intermediaries to assist new refugees. In March 1957, the Alliance issued an “S.O.S.” to its members for approximately thirty Hungarian refugees residing at the CIUP, encouraging them to “adopt” a refugee into their family to provide a supportive and familial environment.<fnref n="59" /> By 1953, Joseph Molnos, a Hungarian refugee and General Secretary of the Centre Culturel International de Royaumont, was already included on the Alliance’s board of directors and later served as a member of the Bureau.

By 1965, over 68% of residents were under the age of 24. However, by the 1980s, this proportion had decreased to 44%,<fnref n="60" /> while the percentage of residents over the age of 30 had increased from 8% in 1965 to over 17% in the early 2000s. This change was primarily due to the introduction of an internship policy and the restriction of student admissions to those in the second and third cycles of university education. There were also significant changes in the fields of study: the proportion of medical students

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ ANGOUSTURES Aline, KÉVONIAN Dzovinar, Dossier Réfugiés, sujets d'une histoire globale, *Monde(s). Histoire, espaces, relations*, n°15, 2019. In this issue: TRONCHET Guillaume, " L'accueil des étudiants réfugiés au xxᵉ siècle : un chantier d'histoire globale ", pp. 93-116.</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ *L'Alliance internationale des anciens de la Cité universitaire*, n°24, 1er March 1957, p. 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ "La population totale de la Cité internationale universitaire en 1984-1985", *Bulletin de l'Alliance internationale des anciens de la Cité universitaire de Paris*, n°104, January 1986, p. 4.</footnote>
declined sharply from 19% in 1947 to 7% in 2003, and literature students decreased, though to a lesser extent (24% in 1970 compared to 17.5% in 2003). Conversely, the number of students pursuing sciences increased substantially, comprising more than half of all students in universities and grandes écoles by the early 2000s. Additionally, there was an increase in students studying law and economics, with their numbers rising from 11% in 1970 to nearly 20% in 2003. New profiles also emerged, such as art school students, who were virtually absent in the 1940s but made up almost 8% of the student body by 2003.

Another notable development during this period is the shift in gender distribution. In 1947, there was a ratio of 83% men to 17% women, a distribution that remained relatively stable until 1968. The CIUP continued to reflect pre-war practices of spatial gender segregation, with most pavilions either prohibiting or regulating access based on gender. For example, the Résidence Honnorat, completely renovated in 1965 to accommodate female students, featured Swedish furniture and turquoise walls, but maintained strict access controls with glazed doors monitored by bells.<fnref n="61" /> Only a few pavilions, including the Maison de Monaco, the Maison des Provinces de France, the Maison du Maroc, and the Maison du Japon, allowed mixed-gender movement.

In the case of the Maison des Provinces de France, the significant change occurred in 1958 rather than 1968. That year, residents threatened a rent strike, which led the new director, Henri van Effenterre, to end the “taboos of sexual morality” and introduce co-management of the house’s board of directors.<fnref n="62" /> Although the proportion of women in the workforce increased significantly, reaching over 25% in 1970, it experienced a surprising decline thereafter, dropping to 11.2% by 1985. A comprehensive study to understand this decline, which contrasts with the overall feminization of the international academic workforce, is ongoing. This study also aims to analyze gender relations at the CIUP and the impact of the masculinization of the workforce on social practices. Similarly, no detailed analysis of students’ social origins is available, though existing data from certain periods suggest a notable underrepresentation of children from blue-collar and artisan backgrounds compared to those from civil service, executive, professional, and merchant families.

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ “La Cité (AIRCUP)”, n°1, January 1965.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² *Bulletin de l'Alliance internationale des anciens de la CIUP*, n°94, 1982, p. 2.</footnote>
The diversity within the student population highlights the importance of studying student sociability, cultural exchange, and social and political mobilization facilitated by these interactions. This can be explored through the activities of formal campus-wide associations. For example, the *Association Internationale des Résidents de la Cité* (AIRCUP), affiliated with Christian Democrat Europeanist circles and UNESCO networks, publishes student newsletters, organizes an annual “Garden Party of the Nations” starting in 1948, provides mutual aid, and played a key role in social mobilizations during the 1950s and 1960s. Another example is the *Association Sportive de la Cité* (ASCUP), established in 1945 as a successor to a pre-existing sports club, which organizes competitions and connects with transnational university sports networks.<fnref n="63" /> Additionally, the *Alliance Internationale*, an alumni association created in 1948 following the Prague coup and the Congress of Europe in The Hague, was significantly influenced by François Fontaine, a former resident of the Collège Franco-Britannique and a key figure in European integration.

These associative and cultural activities were closely linked with the union and militant activities of CIUP residents, who were involved in social and political mobilization reflecting the international political struggles of the period. The CIUP served as a forum for national (political mobilizations, revolutions, dictatorships, and civil wars), regional (e.g., the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Armenian question, the Palestinian issue, South American repression), and international (e.g., major Cold War crises) conflicts, with the May 1968 crisis and the early 1970s representing significant moments. Authoritarian regimes in Portugal (1933–1974), Brazil (1964–1985), Greece (1967–1974), and Argentina (1976–1983) affected both the residences and their interactions with the CIUP. The arrival of refugee and exiled students paralleled waves of repression in various countries (e.g., Hungary and Egypt in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Chile in 1973), often remaining invisible as in the interwar

<footnote n="63">⁶³ LESNYKH Lidia, “La réorganisation du sport dans la Cité universitaire d’après-guerre. Entre autonomie associative et enjeux institutionnels”, in KÉVONIAN D., TRONCHET G., *Le Campus-monde...*, op. cit. pp. 251–264.</footnote>
period<fnref n="64" /> through clandestine residence and discreet admissions by house directors.

Concurrently, the CIUP emerged as a hub for nationalisms and anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-authoritarian political cultures, with several generations of activists and international leaders beginning their journeys there from the 1930s to the 1970s. Many CIUP pavilions became centers of protest and mobilization, with demonstrations, hunger strikes, brawls, occupations, and administrative closures becoming commonplace, particularly in pavilions housing opponents to their countries' political regimes (Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, etc.), with a mix of residents and illegal immigrants, many of them refugees. For instance, the *Collège d'Espagne* was closed by Franco in 1968 after being occupied by residents and remained closed until 1987, while the *Maison du Cambodge* was closed from 1973 to 2003, and the *Maison de l'Iran* saw disengagement in the 1970s after becoming a center of political protest against the Shah Reza Pahlavi's regime.

## HISTORY AT THE HEART OF A STUDENT MELTING POT

This book seeks to address some of these several questions by examining the transnational dimensions of an internationalized social space through the lens of twentieth-century international student migration.

Since the publication of the first doctoral thesis in law in 1931,<fnref n="65" /> the CIUP has been extensively studied, primarily focusing until the 2010s on its institutional and architectural history. These studies often appeared in commemorative publications, and a comprehensive bibliography of such works is provided at the end of this volume. However, scholarly work specifically addressing the CIUP as a site of student migration has been minimal. Notable exceptions include Anne d'Huart-Gouletquer's sociology thesis defended in 1977⁶⁶ and Frank Séréni's

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ With the exception of the Armenian Students' House (1930), intended for young students who had become stateless following the denationalization of Ottoman Armenians by the new Kemalist regime in Turkey.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ PRIAULT M., *La Cité universitaire et son rôle social*, Paris, Rousseau, 1931. A study which, as we know, owes much to exchanges between the author and André Honnorat himself.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ HUART GOULETQUER A. d', « Étude psycho-sociologique sur la Cité universitaire de Paris », 3e cycle thesis in sociology, Université Paris-V, 1977, 2 vols.</footnote>
brief studies in international relations, which explore the reception of international elites at the CIUP and the interplay between Europeanism and Geneva internationalism.<fnref n="67" /> It was not until the 2000s that social and political history studies emerged, focusing on the institution’s early decades and the wartime period, as well as its role in mediating tensions between cultural internationalism and French ambitions for international “influence” during the interwar years.<fnref n="68" />

Since the 2010s, there has been a notable advancement in academic research related to the CIUP. This includes the publication of the first two review books in French by Dzovinar Kévonian and Guillaume Tronchet in 2013 and 2022,<fnref n="69" /> respectively, Guillaume Tronchet’s 2014 thesis on the history of the French academic diplomacy,<fnref n="70" /> Marion Ink’s 2018 dissertation on the sociology and micropolitics of the sociabilities within three international university residences, including the CIUP,<fnref n="71" /> as well

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ SÉRÉNI F., “Les contacts entre élites internationales dans le cadre de la Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, 1924–1954”, DEA thesis in history, Université Paris-I, 1988; "La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, ambitions mondiales et réalités européennes, 1925–1956", in GIRAULT R. and BOSSUAT G. (eds.), *Europe brisée, Europe retrouvée. Nouvelles réflexions sur l’unité européenne au XXe siècle*, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1994, pp. 89–107; “La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris de la Société des Nations à la construction de l’Europe”, *Relations internationales*, n°72, 1992, pp. 399–407.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ POLSIMON A., « La Cité universitaire de Paris des origines à la Seconde Guerre mondiale », Master’s thesis, Université Paris-1, 2003; TRONCHET G., « André Honnorat (1868–1950). Essai de biographie politique », Master’s thesis in history, Université Paris-I, 2004; KELLER A., « La Cité universitaire de Paris face à la montée de l’État nazi et à la guerre : un idéal en question (1937–1945) », Master’s thesis in history, Université Paris-X, 2005; REIS J., “French and Foreign Students in Interwar Paris: Creating the Cité Universitaire”, PhD Dissertation, University of Virginia, 2007; REIS J., “Cultural internationalism at the Cité Universitaire: international education between the First and Second World Wars”, *History of Education*, vol. 39, n°2, March 2010, pp. 155–173.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ KÉVONIAN, Dzovinar, TRONCHET, Guillaume (dir.), *La Babel étudiante, op. cit.*; Le *Campus monde, op. cit.*.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Savoirs en diplomatie..., op. cit.</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ INK Marion, *Sociologie et micropolitique des sociabilités. Ethnographies comparées dans trois résidences universitaires internationales - France, Etats-Unis, Canada*, Doctoral dissertation from PSL University, EHESS, 2018. See also: INK Marion, “Les quatre temps d’un séjour en résidence universitaire”, *Temporalités* [online], 27 | 2018, consulted on June 16, 2024.</footnote>
as various monographs, dissertations, and articles reflecting the current scholarly interest in student mobility and knowledge exchange.<fnref n="72" />

This book represents the first English-language volume dedicated to the history of international student migration to France in the twentieth century, using the CIUP as a focal point. The CIUP serves as a transnational social space and meeting place influenced by major twentieth-century social and political movements, including imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, communism, fascism, anti-fascism, and the Cold War. It has been a site of cultural and ideological exchange among migrant students.

By examining the diversity of students welcomed at the CIUP—such as democratic elites, exiled students from military dictatorships, emerging elites from developing countries, and scholars at risk<fnref n="73" />—this book aims to explore the discourses, practices, social positions, and trajectories of migrant students. It also considers the various stakes of this migration—academic, cultural, and political—within the context of a unique global institution specifically designed to accommodate international students. This study contributes to a broader understanding of the history of universities, diplomacy, philanthropy, social and political movements, and cultural exchange.

The book features ten detailed case studies, each contributing a unique perspective on the transnational dimensions of student migration at the CIUP.

The chapters are structured around four central themes. The first ones examine the role of Paris and the CIUP in the dynamics of international academic migration and their impact on the experiences of international students, particularly through the lens of campus-wide political engagements from the 1930s to the 1970s. In “Choosing France,” Antonin Durand examines international students’ applications to the CIUP by analyzing their cover letters. This study forms part of a social history of representations, probing the motivations behind student migrations and

<footnote n="72">⁷² See in particular, in the bibliography at the end of the volume: Sophie Mouton (2006 and 2009), Hans Manfred Bock (2007), Perrine Plisson (2008), Violette Matuszeski (2014), Matthieu Gillabert (2015), Antonia Maria Mora Luna (2016), Elisa Capdevila (2017), Angelica Müller (2018), Nino Lima (2018), Kostis Kometis (2018), Valentin Rebour (2018 and 2019), Sara Legrandjacques (2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ See: Leyla Dakhli, Pascale Laborier, Frank Wolff, *Academics in a century of displacement. The Global History and Politics of protecting endangered scholars*, Springer, 2024.</footnote>
the influence of French policies aimed at enhancing the attractiveness of
the University of Paris during the 1950s.

In “Hijacking Internationalism”, Guillaume Tronchet investigates the politicization of internationalism as reflected in student migrations. Tronchet demonstrates how the CIUP functioned as a laboratory for the development of nationalism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and anti-authoritarian political cultures. He explores how the institution became involved in global “currents of contentious politics” and contributed to the transnational circulation of protest discourses and practices, as well as the formation of “cross-border coalitions” that challenged the prevailing political order between the 1930s and 1970s.

The following three chapters present a series of case studies addressing the tensions and reconfigurations associated with the pre-war, Second World War, and post-war periods.

Elisa Signori's contribution explores the reactions of various Italian cultural and political circles to the CIUP's development. She traces how the project's evolution during the 1920s and 1930s was closely linked to the rise of fascist imperialism, which rejected collaboration and pursued cultural “autarchy,” ultimately leading to strained relations with the “Latin Sister” and explicit hostility during the war years.

Dzovinar Kévonian focuses on the pre-war period and World War II, analyzing the paradoxes faced by an institution grappling with radicalized and fragmented youth amidst forced exile. During the Occupation, Kévonian examines the CIUP's ambivalent role between clandestine resistance networks, the anti-Semitic policies of the Vichy regime, and the protection of a campus that aligned with the hygienist ideology of the National Revolution.

Elisa Capdevila examines the CIUP's transition to civilian life and its educational missions from the end of World War II to the onset of the Cold War, with particular emphasis on the role played by the United States during this period.

The next three chapters focus specifically on issues concerning students from colonial and post-colonial contexts.

Guillaume Denglos and Pierre Vermeren investigate the politicization of North African students at the CIUP from the early 1920s through to independence and beyond, up to the 2000s. He explores the history of the houses of Morocco and Tunisia, as well as the failed project for a house for Algeria, highlighting the complex interplay between state
control, elite training, and political dissent among students who asserted
themselves against authorities in Paris.

In “Going West,” Sara Legrandjacques examines the *Maison des Étudi-
ants de l'Indochine*, inaugurated in 1930, and its role in shaping regional
and political identities in Asia until its renaming in 1972. By providing
a broad chronology that extends before and after World War II, she
challenges existing studies that focus solely on the politicization of colo-
nized students in the 1930s, questioning the notion of a break linked to
decolonization post-1945.

Françoise Blum offers a micro-historical analysis of the *Maison de la France d'Outre-Mer*, focusing on the African student movement from its acquisition of the house in the 1950s and 1960s to its peak in 1968, and its eventual institutional takeover. Blum's study highlights the renegotiation of France's relationships with its former African colonies at the end of the French Empire.

The final three chapters examine the particular case of student migra-
tion from countries affected by authoritarian regimes or undergoing
democratic transitions.

Victor Pereira explores the history of the Portuguese Students House
from the 1920s through the Carnation Revolution of 1974. This chapter
details several student mobilizations, occupations, and debates on anti-
fascism, anti-colonialism, and anti-authoritarianism, illustrating the impact
of radicalized resistance against the Portuguese dictatorship and colo-
nialism up to April 25, 1974.

Angelica Müller examines the socio-cultural relations between Brazil
and France through the lens of the *Maison du Brésil* during the late
1960s. Her study highlights the paradox of the Maison as both a refuge
for exiled and potentially persecuted academics and a site of “subver-
sion,” juxtaposed with the perspectives of the military regime as revealed
through official surveillance documents and the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs.

Finally, Valentin Rebour investigates how Iranian student opposition
organized itself at the CIUP between the 1950s and 1970s. Amidst a
repressive Iranian regime and rising student demands in France, Rebour
uses CIUP sources, French Intelligence Service archives, and interviews
with former residents to illustrate how Iranian students leveraged the
CIUP's opportunities for socialization and political organization to estab-
lish themselves as a significant opposition force. He also discusses how the
CIUP, particularly the *Maison de l'Iran*, became a focal point for these
struggles.

**Conflict of Interest** The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this chapter.

Dzovinar Kévonian is Professor of Contemporary History at Caen-Normandie University. She is a member of the Histoire, Territoire, Mémoires research unit (UR7455), an associate member of the Institut des Sciences sociales du Politique (UMR 7220) and a fellow of the Institut Convergences Migrations. Her research focuses on transnational legal, social and humanitarian issues, refugees, stateless persons and human rights. Her publications include: *La Danse du pendule. Les juristes et l'internationalisation des droits de l'homme, 1919-1939*, Paris, Ed. de la Sorbonne, 2021; with Guillaume Tronchet, *La Babel étudiante. La CIUP, 1920-1960*, Rennes, PUR, 2013; *Le Campus-Monde. La CIUP, 1950-2000*, Rennes, PUR, 2022; with M. Amar, A. Angoustures, A. Kunth, *Entre décolonisation et guerre froide. Administrer l'asile, 1960-1990*, Rennes, PUR, 2024. She is a member of several journals, in particular *Monde(s)* and *Histoire@Politique*.

Guillaume Tronchet is a senior civil servant in higher education, former general delegate of the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris. He is also agrégé, PhD in History from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and associate researcher at the Institut d'histoire moderne et contemporaine (ENS-PSL, Paris 1, CNRS). His research focuses on the history of international relations of universities and international student mobility. From 2017 to 2023, he led at the École normale supérieure-PSL the GlobalYouth research program, which was awarded funding by the French National Research Agency. He co-edited with Dzovinar Kévonian *La Babel étudiante. La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, 1920-1950* (PUR, 2013) and *Le Campus monde. La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, de 1945 aux années 2000* (PUR, 2022), and published André Honnorat. *Un visionnaire en politique* (Hémisphères éditions, 2020). He is currently working with Antonin Durand on a forthcoming book about the history of foreign students in France, and co-edited with Françoise Blum *Les passeurs de révolte. Étudiants et intellectuels étrangers et postcoloniaux dans les années 1968 en France*, published by the Presses universitaires de Rennes in 2025.
**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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# Choose Paris: Letters in support of application to the Paris’ Cité Universitaire in the 1950s

*Antonin Durand*

The use of cover letters to select candidates for employment or training is a relatively recent invention. The use of the written word—whether on the part of recruiters in the form of job advertisements published in the press and then on the Internet, or on the part of candidates in the form of curricula vitae and cover letters—is the result of a historical process that only took shape during the twentieth century. The cover letter has accompanied this process, extending its hold from specific job offers requiring candidates to demonstrate their appetence for positions requiring particular forms of investment, to being required in almost all professional fields and even for the youngest seeking internships, training, or entry into specific school or university courses. Despite the widespread

<footnote>A. Durand (✉)
Centre d'histoire du XIXe siècle, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France
e-mail: antonin.durand@sorbonne-universite.fr</footnote>
nature of this practice, historians have shown little interest in it. Even sociologists of work, who could find a rich field here, have rarely examined the question.<fnref n="1" />

How can we explain the relative silence of the human sciences? No doubt, the genre lacks nobility and material diversity: the cover letter certainly belongs to the genre of ego-documents, but the self-image it constructs is entirely focused on one objective—to convince and be recruited—so that little attention is often paid to its content. One might argue that no self-presentation, even a diary, is entirely devoid of rhetorical strategy, but the cover letter definitely presents the purest form of a written document basically aimed at convincing. In this respect, it is similar to the neighbouring genre of the supplication or the petition, much better known to historians<fnref n="2" />: in these two types of documentation, an actor addressed an authority who has the power to grant or deny him a right or a status: in each case, the aim is to bend the authority’s position in his favour, by means of a self-presentation calibrated to correspond to the authority’s expectations as one imagines them to be: A good Frenchman, a good subject, a good student… The particularity of the cover letter is that it is required in a dossier, whereas the supplication is the result of the supplicant’s initiative and is most often presented as an exceptional

<footnote n="1">¹ See Yves Lochard, Pascal Ughetto, “Candidater et embaucher: le courrier de candidature comme dispositif de rencontre”, *La Revue de l’Ires*, vol. 52/3, 2006, pp. 133-154; Marie-Paule Couto, Marion Valarcher, “La motivation au pied de la lettre. Construction et expression des aspirations scolaires sur Parcoursup”, *L’Orientation scolaire et professionnelle*, 51/1, 2022, pp. 41-75. More generally, labor sociologists have taken a more or less direct interest in cover letters as part of their work on recruitment processes: François Eymard-Duvernay, Emmanuelle Marchal, *Façons de recruter: le jugement des compétences sur le marché du travail*, Paris, Métailié, 1997. Guillemette de Larquier, Emmanuelle Marchal, *Le Jugement des candidats par les entreprises lors des recrutements*, Centre d’études pour l’emploi, Document de travail, n° 109, November 2008. Emmanuelle Marchal, *Les Embarras des recruteurs. Enquête sur le marché du travail*, Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS, 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² For a recent update on this type of writing, see for example Enrica Asquer and Lucia Ceci (eds.), *Scrivere alle autorità. Suppliche, petizioni, appelli, richieste di deroga in età contemporanea*, Rome, Viella, 2021. See also Frédéric Moret, “Adresses et pétitions” in Michel Pigenet, Danielle Tartakowsky (eds.), *Histoire des mouvements sociaux en France de 1814 à nos jours*, Paris, La Découverte, 2014, pp. 152-159. Lex Heerma van Voss (ed.), *Petitions in Social History*, Cambridge University Press, 2002 or the classic Natalie Zemon Davis, *Fiction in the Archives. Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France*, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1987.</footnote>
request. This observation leads to question the ambiguous status of the cover letter: what sense does it make to be motivated on request?

Analyzing the cover letters of applicants for a room at the Cité inter-
nationale universitaire de Paris (CIUP) is thus very instructive. Firstly,
because the institution was one of the first to systematically require such
a document in all applications. This choice is the result of particularly
strong pressure on student rooms, forcing academic authorities to make
a drastic selection of applications. How to choose between students from
universities all over the world, at all levels of study and in all disciplines?
There were many possible selection criteria: giving preference to students
from certain countries or regions, as part of a strategy of influence or
university diplomacy, as Guillaume Tronchet puts it<fnref n="3" />? Selecting students
according to their level of study, either to give priority to the youngest,
so that they can take advantage of their first years in Paris to find accom-
modation elsewhere, or to encourage more advanced students? Should
housing be used to reinforce disciplines or faculties considered to be
priorities, or to aim for a balance, or should the room allocation be inde-
pendent of disciplinary issues? Should it prioritize academic excellence or
encourage social diversity? All these criteria can be taken into account in
a selection process made all the more complex by the fact that its players
are multiple: some houses of the CIUP reserve a monopoly on recruiting
their tenants, while others leave it up to the CIUP management and the
Paris Academy rectorate.

However, the latter case is in the majority, and has the advantage of
producing centralized sources, now gathered at the Archives Nationales
de France, in the more than fifty boxes that preserve the files of former
residents. Of course, not all the letters in this collection have been
preserved. In the individual files deposited at the Archives Nationales,
only a minority include one or more cover letters, without it being known
whether the others were missing from the file from the outset, or whether
the administration did not deem it useful to keep them. Nonetheless,
several thousand letters are kept in the files, a few hundred of which were
consulted for the preparation of this article, taken from five randomly
selected boxes. This number seems sufficient to get an idea of the general
tone of these documents, and to review the arguments developed in them.

<footnote n="3">³ Guillaume Tronchet “Savoirs en diplomatie. Une histoire sociale et transnationale de la politique universitaire internationale de la France (années 1870-années 1930)”, PhD thesis in contemporary history, under the supervision of Patrick Weil, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2014.</footnote>
While the files cover a broad period from the CIUP's origins to the end of the twentieth century, a large majority of the cover letters date from the 1950s, with no documentary evidence to suggest that the practice was subsequently lost. This focus on the 1950s nonetheless provides an excellent observatory of the reconfiguration of student mobility to Paris in a context where the French empire was called into question, with the independences of Tunisia and Morocco, the start of the Algerian war and the decolonization of almost all of French sub-Saharan Africa. The way in which decolonization reconfigured relations between metropolitan France and the former colonies, masterfully analyzed by Françoise Blum,<fnref n="4" /> can thus be observed anew thanks to the partial observatory of motivational letters from mobile students: how did the geopolitical context transform their desire to study in France, and how did it affect their self-presentation to the authorities responsible for evaluating them?

Following in the footsteps of sociologists who have taken an interest in this type of documentation, we will consider these letters as *dispositifs* [device], adopting a concept inspired by Michel Foucault and defined by Nicolas Dodier and Janine Barbot as follows: “Generally speaking, a *dispositif* can be conceived as a prepared sequence of sequences, intended to qualify or transform states of affairs through the intermediary of an arrangement of material and linguistic elements”.<fnref n="5" /> The cover letter thus combines biographical elements and life projects with a performative ambition. It also embodies the discretionary power of the administration, which, by relying on the impression produced by an uncodified document, protects itself against any objectification of its judgment criteria—and therefore against any challenge.

While the cover letter exercise has become routine for students of the twenty-first century, it was still unfamiliar to those of the first twentieth century. This makes it all the more interesting to watch the development of the norms of a new academic genre<fnref n="6" />: we can observe the trial and

<footnote n="4">⁴ Françoise Blum. Trajectoires militantes et (re)conversions: à propos de la FEANF Que sont-ils/elles devenus-e-s? Mémoire d'habilitation à diriger des recherches, EHESS, Paris, 2016.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Nicolas Dodier and Janine Barbot, “La force des dispositifs”, *Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales*, 2016/2, pp. 421–450, p. 431.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ We had already tried our hand at this type of analysis with the trip report, another new genre of academic practice in the first part of the 20thᵉ century: Antonin Durand (ed.), *Les voyages forment la jeunesse. Les boursières scientifiques David-Weill à la découverte du monde (1910-1939)*, Strasbourg, Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2020.</footnote>
error surrounding the expectations of the exercise: was the cover letter a simple account of previous studies demonstrating the candidate's aptitudes? Should it describe the more intimate reasons why the candidate wishes to live in Paris? Based on fairly succinct guidelines, aspirants had to develop an argument capable of persuading the people in charge of examining their files. The task was made all the more complex by the fact that the procedure for processing the letters was not at all clear to candidates—and far from clear to historians. While the letters were formally addressed to the rector in person, it is certain that most of them followed a reading circuit that can only be reconstructed through clues in the letters themselves. The lack of publicity surrounding the procedures for allocating rooms tended to accentuate inequalities between candidates, who were confronted with a strong asymmetry of information between nationals and internationals, as well as between those who already had networks within the CIUP as opposed to complete *outsiders*.

What explains the relative lack of interest in cover letters—their uniquely strategic dimension—is therefore also, what makes their study so interesting? Neither letter-writers nor recipients were fooled by the other's aims, but each tried to play on them, some to get a room, others to inform their judgment. The result is a series of questions that we will address one by one to the same letters, since they offer different possible readings of this source and, as a complement, the forms they accompany. What were the students' real motivations for applying for housing at the CIUP? How did the administration present its expectations? How did applicants imagine these expectations, and what strategies did they implement to meet them? How did evaluation committees receive these letters? Can we measure the impact of these letters and the arguments they developed in the selection and recruitment process?

## WHAT STUDENTS WERE LOOKING FOR

Nothing is more difficult than establishing the motivations of past actors. Even when intimate writings mention motivations, it is always easier for the historian to establish facts than to reconstruct the reasons for action that led to them. Cover letters are no exception to this principle: on the contrary, there is every reason to believe that the motivations set out in the letters often differed from those displayed. For example, it's safe to assume that the primary reason for wanting to move to the CIUP was the affordability of the rooms.
The CIUP project itself was born as a reaction to the serious shortcomings of student housing in Paris, perceived as an obstacle to the intellectual influence of the French capital.<fnref n="7" /> While furnished hotels and boarding houses had, year in, year out, absorbed the needs during the nineteenth century, the development of student housing was slow to keep pace with the massification of universities that began at the turn of the century. The problem was even more acute for young women who, apart from very limited initiatives such as the *Student hostel* founded on Boulevard Saint-Michel in 1906 by patron Grace Whitney-Hoff and later to become the *Foyer International des Etudiantes*, faced a real housing shortage.

Things seem quite clear: it's necessity that drives students to apply for a room at the CIUP. A perusal of the motivation letters, however, reveals a certain discomfort with too material reasons. While some letters candidly conceded that this was the primary reason for their choice, as Frenchman Jacques Berna did, acknowledging that he “would be happy to be able to live at the Cité [...], as any other accommodation would be difficult to find and especially to support financially”,<fnref n="8" /> most of the letters referred to it only in passing, as if it were something obvious that they didn't want to emphasize too much. The few letters that went into details about the difficulties of housing are nevertheless interesting sources of information about the material conditions of student life in the Paris region, as shown by this extract from a letter from the Tunisian Touhami Khalfalaa:

> I'm currently living in an uncomfortable room in the Halles district. I pay 6,000 francs in rent and am warmed only by the few puffs of tepid air I get from my landlady's kitchen. On the other hand, I would so much like to abandon this district full of grime and night-time tumult for the eminently friendly neighborhood of the Cité, where I could enjoy all the cultural advantages it provides.<fnref n="9" />

<footnote n="7">⁷ Dzovinar Kévonian and Guillaume Tronchet (dir.), *La Babel étudiante, la Cité internationale universitaire de Paris (1920-1950)*, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Letter from Jacques Berna to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, July 4, 1947, AN, 20090013/546.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Letter from Touhami Khalfalaa to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, December 27, 1951, 20090013/572.</footnote>
The more subtle ones try to make the link between the obvious material advantages of residence in the CIUP and the characteristics expected from applicants. Mohsen Achty, for example, argued as follows:

> As you know, the question of accommodation in Paris for a student of modest means is difficult to resolve. Above all, the atmosphere in the hotels that are not student-friendly, is incompatible with the essential purpose of my coming to France, which is to make contact with French fellows and others.<fnref n="10" />

> This letter shows a willingness to conceal the obsessive problem of student housing in a discourse already matching the expectations of the Paris Academy's rectorat, or at least how the candidate perceived them: those of hard-working students engaged in exchanges with their French and foreign fellows. But how could candidates anticipate these expectations?

## WHAT THE RECTOR WANTED

To guide them in drafting their letters, applicants were given brief instructions in a letter signed by the rector and enclosed with all applications. In this letter, the rector explicitly ruled out material arguments: “The Cité Universitaire is not a furnished hotel in a pleasant setting, with ancillary amenities that no other hotel can offer”.

Before specifying the expectations of the exercise, the rector introduced the letter as follows:

> Although the large number of requests leads me, for reasons of economy, to give this letter an anonymous execution, you will please regard it as personally addressed to you.

This ambiguous formula reflects the tension between the need to process a large number of applications and the desire for a personalized selection process. The “reasons of economy” that prevented the Rector from writing personally to each candidate may well prevent him—or even his departments—from reading the letters in question. Indeed, the

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Letter from Mohsen Achty to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, July 4, 1949, AN, 20090013/540.</footnote>
Rector reiterated the need for a drastic selection process, and presented the opportunity to live in the CIUP as a “privilege” which “as such, must be reserved for an elite”. In addition to responding to the material impossibility of welcoming all applicants, selection thus assumed an elitist dimension, the growing importance of which Guillaume Tronchet has shown in the policy of welcoming foreign students to France since the 1930s<fnref n="11" />.

The rector also specified what the letter should not be: because the file already contained all the elements concerning the “family, [the] financial situation, etc.”, other elements were expected:

> Would you please tell me how you intend to contribute to the common good? It goes without saying that we are not asking you to demonstrate exceptional gifts; but every resident must bring to the City a wholehearted willingness to cooperate, and know in which direction (social, cultural, sporting, etc.) this willingness is most likely to be employed effectively.

The letter went on to emphasize in bold print that the candidate’s response constituted a commitment to get involved in the life of the community. Clearly, the requirements formulated by the rectorat included two expectations and excluded one: an assumed elitism coupled with a desire to facilitate community life by selecting the candidates most likely to take part in it. On the other hand, social criteria—family situation, distance—were explicitly excluded from the letters, even though it was specified that they would be taken into account on the basis of the application file.

## HOW CANDIDATES PERCEIVED THE INSTITUTION'S EXPECTATIONS

While the criteria of excellence and social origin were already well known at university, the idea of convincing a student of his or her motivation in writing is quite disconcerting. In a letter from 1955, a Moroccan applicant, Maurice Adjiman, expressed his astonishment:

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Guillaume Tronchet, “La qualité plutôt que la quantité”: le tournant élitiste de l’accueil des étudiants étrangers en France dans les années 1930”, in *Marianne Amar and Nancy Green (dir.), *Migrations d’élite. Etat des lieux et approches comparatives*, Tours, Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2022, pp. 189–206.</footnote>
As for me, this is the first time I have been given the opportunity to
make an entirely personal application. It is customary for an institution
requiring a written application to provide a stereotyped template. But this
is something quite different, and I believe the best way to respond is to
be direct and sincere. We all feel that we have to do the right thing, and
that we will be judged somewhat on what we have written.<fnref n="12" />

The applicant did not seem surprised by the necessity to assess his moti-
vation, but by the necessity to do it in writing. Another French candidate,
Michel Sanouillet, consideed that "an interview [would] undoubtedly
have provided a better understanding of the nature of the qualities
[sought] in [future] residents".<fnref n="13" /> It's worth noting that some files
included cover letters for applications to re-enter the CIUP—either to
extend their stay, or to return after a break outside Paris. These letters
tend to be more detailed and well-argued, which suggests that those who
knew the CIUP from the inside had a better grasp of its expectations.

However, even the most outsider candidates had no choice but to try
to meet these expectations. The unusual nature of the request can be
seen in the fact that many applicants adopted a rather academic approach
to the expectations announced in the letter, in an attempt to fit into the
framework thus set: they highlighted their academic background to match
the elitism displayed, and described their passion for sport or theater to
prove their willingness to cooperate.

The reference to elitism is not self-evident, however. Some candidates
pointed to their academic credentials or results with aplomb. But most
of the time, students seemed embarrassed to have to highlight their own
merit, like Frenchman Michel Kernevez, who stressed how "it's always
difficult to give one's own eulogy"<fnref n="14" /> or Moroccan Hamid Khalès, who
mocked an exercise that "verge[d] at all times on personal panegyric".<fnref n="15" />

<footnote n="12">¹² Letter from Maurice Adjiman to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, [1955], AN, 20090013/540. NB: when letters are undated—which is the case in the majority of cases—the date in square brackets corresponds to the year of application known from the rest of the file.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Letter from David Sanouillet to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, [1956], AN, 20090013/591.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Letter from Michel Kernevez to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, [1953], AN, 20090013/572.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Letter from Hamid Khalès to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, ibid.</footnote>
More often than not, then, candidates refused to take the plunge. Such is the case of Frenchman Hervé Bernard, who described himself as having “no exceptional personal qualities”<fnref n="16" /> or Michel Bernier, who made it clear from the outset that he was “not an exceptional person”.<fnref n="17" /> As for Jean Keravec, in his letter of April 17, 1953, he denied any “vanity in believing that he belong[ed] to an elite”, and acknowledged only an “honorable level”.<fnref n="18" /> The rhetorical balancing act is clear: distinguish oneself through academic excellence without offending with excessive arrogance. In the most extensive applications, where cover letters were coupled with letters of recommendation from a parent or teacher, this contradictory injunction to excellence and modesty translated into a division of labor: the candidate’s modest posture, the recommender’s elitist emphasis.

As for the “willingness to cooperate” that the rector expected from applicants, this is the subject of a series of comments on the cultural and sporting activities that applicants had enjoyed in the past, and which they promised to pursue in contact with new comrades: scouting, drama classes, a taste for travel... This is also where the French students highlighted their language skills, and the foreigners talked about their previous stays in France. Serial reading of the letters reveals few salient features in these expected arguments.

Despite the injunction to leave social aspects aside, many students took advantage of their cover letters to clarify their social position, sometimes in opposite directions. Some emphasized the influence of their wealthy families, even if it meant dangling the benefits that the CIUP could derive from these relationships. Mohamed-Mehdi Abdeljalil, for example, “simply point[ed] out” that he “belong[ed] to a great Moroccan family”.<fnref n="19" /> The Syrian Abd Kelzieh was more explicit in 1951:

> I’m in touch with the former Minister of Public Education, Dr. A. Homed, a doctor of law from Paris, and with other wealthy people in Syria in order to set up a Maison de la Syrie at the Cité Universitaire in Paris. It is

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Letter from Hervé Bernard to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, [1956], AN, 20090013/546.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Letter from Michel Bernier to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, [1953], ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Letter from Jean Keravec to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, April 17, 1953, AN, 20090013/572.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Letter from Mohamed-Mehdi Abdeljalil to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, [1956], AN, 20090013/540.</footnote>
commonly said that “opening a school closes a prison”. But founding a
house at the Cité Universitaire is more like closing a war factory.<fnref n="20" />

Even if the Syrian House project was unsuccessful, the red pencil lines
in the margin show that the argument was taken into account.

Candidates who pointed to their wealth were, however, very much in
the minority. In fact, it is more often difficult situations that were put
forward to justify the imperative need for housing facilities. Cover letters
are full of more or less tragic stories, such as the one written by Ali Ozcan
Kaya from Turkey:

Since last year, having lost my father, I have been an orphan and being the
eldest son in my family, I have had to work to replace my father's work.
His death has caused many difficulties in the pursuit of my studies [...].
However, I worked hard to arrange my father's affairs and left them to my
brother to come to France to satisfy my sole desire to study. But it's very
difficult to live in Paris on the 10,000 frcs I get. Rent is very expensive.<fnref n="21" />

Others pointed to the number of their brothers and sister their parents
had to feed, or to more or less serious health problems. Although the
CIUP was not specifically equipped to accommodate students in poor
health, the argument seemed to be one of commiseration. In the after-
math of the Second World War, many candidates also put forward their
war experience, either because they had fought in the war themselves, or
because they or their parents had been prisoners or displaced during the
conflict. More seldom, a candidate could refer to direct persecution, for
example, Cuban Rafael Santadreu, a victim of the closure of the Univer-
sity of Havana in 1956, relied on the hospitality of the CIUP to enable
him to complete his medical studies, which had been interrupted in their
third year.<fnref n="22" /> The sample does not allow for an in-depth analysis of the
type of arguments developed in the letters. It does not, however, preclude
the hypothesis that this argumentative register, rare as it was, is essentially
masculine, while arguments relating to health or a need for security were

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Letter from Abd Kelzieh to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, [1951], AN, 20090013/572.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Letter from Ali Ozcan to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, [1954], 20090013/572.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Letter from Rafael Santadreu to the Rector of the Paris Academy, October 19, 1957, 20090013/591.</footnote>
more common in female letters. These are impressions that may only be confirmed by a broader quantified analysis.<fnref n="23" />

Appeals to commiseration place cover letters in the same vein as letters of complaint or supplication, which also borrow from this register as well as that of law. As with the latter, in order to capture the reader's benevolence, these letters required the author to demonstrate his or her adherence to the institution to which they addressed and to the standards it upheld. In this sense, addressing a letter of motivation to the rector is similar to the kind of “pact” identified by Simona Cerutti for supplications to the Piedmontese sovereign in the eighteenth century<fnref n="24" />: the acceptance of an authority and the norm it upholds, in return for the benevolent consideration of a request. Essayist Johan Faerber calls this pact “Faustian” to denounce the consequences of the generalization of the cover letter in the school world today, which seems to force applicants to adhere to the capitalist system in which they are enrolled—the French mass selection process for entry into higher education Parcoursup set up in 2020 in his case.<fnref n="25" /> Indeed, it presupposes at least formal acceptance on the part of the candidate not only of the exercise but of all the norms underlying its elaboration.

Without going that far, it is worth noting that many of the candidates for the CIUP turned their letters into internationalist professions of faith, demonstrating their support for the CIUP's project from its very origins.<fnref n="26" /> Frenchwoman Rose-Marie Bernot, a candidate in 1953, described the CIUP's mission as follows: “The Cité universitaire offers all the possibilities of international cooperation: it represents in miniature what will one day be the whole Humanity”.<fnref n="27" /> The image of the CIUP and its pavilions as a reduced model of a humanity where conflict would

<footnote n="23">²³ We arrived at the same type of result by analyzing the letters of supplication addressed to the Piedmontese authorities during the expulsion of political refugees accused of having taken part in the anti-Austrian riots of February 6, 1853: Antonin Durand, “Éloigner les Barabbas. Sur une campagne d’expulsion d’étrangers en Piémont en 1853”, *Diasporas. Circulations, migrations, histoire*, n° 33, 2019, pp. 119-135.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Simona Cerutti, “Suppliques: De la déférence et des droits (États savoyards, XVIIIe siècle), in Enrica Asquer and Lucia Ceci (eds.), *Scrivere alle autorità...*, op. cit. pp. 21-44.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Johan Faerber, *Parlez-vous le Parcoursup?*, Paris, Éd. du Seuil, 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ On this project, see Dzovinar Kévonian and Guillaume Tronchet (dir.), *La Babel étudiante. La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris (1920-1950)*, op. cit.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Letter from Rose-Marie Bernot to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, [1953], AN, 20090013/546.</footnote>
give way to peaceful competition based on culture and intellectual influ-
ence is to be found in an even more accomplished form in a letter from
Alexandre Sarfati:

It pleases me to think that homelands are immortal realities, but also to
believe that these homelands, daughters of the same civilization, that is to
say of the same spirit and the same desire for refinement, can and must
carry their rivalry to levels other than those of trade and arms.<fnref n="28" />

These proclamations of principle, reminiscent of Geneva’s pacifism
between the wars, were given a new lease of life in the aftermath of the
Second World War. Even the German candidates took particular care to
place their stay under the banner of reconciliation based on greater under-
standing between young people on both sides of the Rhine, following
the example of Helmut Kern, who in 1949 called for “overcoming the
difficulties currently existing between countries and nations, and thus
contributing to universal understanding”.<fnref n="29" />

In the same spirit, a number of international candidates have pledged
to take on the role expected of them as representatives and ambassadors of
French higher education, responsible for publicizing the quality of French
universities in their home countries. Such is the case of Abd Kelzieh, who
promised to write reports for the Syrian newspapers *Islam* and *Al Chabab*
on “the activities of university life in Paris and all the creations of French
civilization and culture”.<fnref n="30" /> Tahar ben Zouhami Abdou made the same
promise, pledging: “Tomorrow, as each of these student brothers returns
to his home country, he will not forget to emphasize and repeat aloud
the unforgettable recognition of the City’s work on his behalf.”<fnref n="31" />

In some cases, internationalist professions of faith resemble a kind of
catechism recited in writing, as in this letter from the Syrian Mohamed
Katrangi, quoted here in full:

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Letter from Arthur Sarfati to the Rector of the Paris Academy, s. d., AN, 20090013/591.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Letter from Helmut Kern to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, [1949], 20090013/572.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Letter from Abd Kelzieh to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, [1951], AN, 20090013/572.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ Letter from Tahar ben Zouhami Abdou Kelzieh to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, [1953], 20090013/591.</footnote>
By entering the Cité, I will benefit from the work of peace and cooperation between men of good will to which the Cité is dedicated.

I pledge to bring to the Cité my full commitment to social, cultural and sporting cooperation.

I also pledge to join in the work of international understanding and cooperation.

It's hard to tell from these internationalist professions of faith whether CIUP residents were really committed to the values on which it was founded, or whether they were simply trying to live up to the institution's supposed expectations. The fact remains, however, that this omnipresent discourse confirms the image that the CIUP gave of itself: that of an institution heir to the pacifism of the inter-war years, which had not given up working to bring the world's youth closer together, despite the Second World War.

These various considerations help to sketch out the image of the ideal resident as the applicants thought the CIUP saw him or her: with an excellent but modest academic record, sociable and open-minded, all the more deserving for his or her journey having been fraught with difficulties, and who recognized himself or herself in the internationalist project promoted by the Institution. But did this anticipation of candidates match the reality of expectations?

## HOW LETTERS WERE READ

A final way of looking at cover letters is to consider how they were read by their recipients, and the effectiveness of the strategies deployed by candidates. Understanding which arguments had an effect on reality is a fascinating and daunting question. What makes it complex is the difficulty of disentangling, in the complexity of the files, the elements that won the decision and those that had no effect. The weight of the letters themselves in the overall file is difficult to assess: subsequent exchanges with candidates requesting clarification or additional documents may even give the impression that they were not always read. Even when they were, it is highly likely that the final decision was often based more on strategic or diplomatic choices, or on the search for a balance within the CIUP between disciplines, nationalities, or gender, than on the arrangement of the arguments in the cover letters. What's more, even if the letters were decisive in some cases, how are we to know which of the many elements it contained caught the reader's attention?
To arrive at a satisfactory answer, a quantitative approach seems
possible. The “Global Youth” project, which has set itself the goal of
creating a vast database of CIUP residents’ files, makes such an approach
conceivable: the large number of files (several tens of thousands) makes
it possible to identify the various characteristics of candidates and their
letters, and to isolate those which, all other things being equal, have
an influence on the selection process. By coding the various argumen-
tative elements presented in the letters—social difficulties, adherence to
community values, sporting and cultural background, for example—we
can hope to isolate those elements that have a significant effect on the
recruitment process. There are, however, several obstacles to this consid-
erable undertaking. The main one is the difficulty of understanding the
constitution of the corpus: among the files kept, some did not lead to an
actual residence in the cité, but it is highly likely that a significant propor-
tion of the files of rejected applicants were not kept. Worse still, in a large
number of cases, the outcome of the application remains uncertain. In
addition, some of the letters addressed directly to the houses directors
are not included in this corpus.

In any case, our ambition here is more modest: to rely on the letters
themselves, and on the files in which they are embedded, in an attempt
to detect traces of how they may have been read. The surest clue is, of
course, the existence of a reply to the letter. This is not a frequent occur-
rence, but it does give an indication of which element of the letter the
administration is bouncing off to ask for clarification or to contest a point.

Among the salient features of these responses, one in particular stands
out: the administration systematically rejects applicants who claim to have
a right to accommodation. In the complex dialectic between deference
and assertion of rights that always structures the supplications, according
to Enrica Asquer,<fnref n="32" /> the rectorate is keen to assert its discretionary power
and to point out, as the Frenchwoman Hélène Sarrade must concede
after an exchange with the administration, that “no one is *entitled to*
admission to the Cité universitaire”.<fnref n="33" /> Generally speaking, it seems that
legal arguments are systematically dismissed. The standards governing the

<footnote n="32">³² Enrica Asquer, “Entre déférence et revendication des droits. Suppliques et demandes de dérogation à la législation antisémité dans l’Italie fasciste et la France de Vichy” in Enrica Asquer and Lucia Ceci (eds.), *Scrivere alle autorità...*, *op.cit.*, pp. 71–112.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Letter from Hélène Sarrade to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, October 23, 1950, AN, 20090013/591. Underlining is original.</footnote>
recruitment of residents were designed to be unenforceable by applicants,
making the legal approach ineffective.

However, responses to cover letters are rare. It is therefore on the
letters themselves that we must focus in order to obtain clues as to how
they have been read, drawing inspiration from ethnographic methods
which pay attention to the meaningful content of texts as well as to
material traces.<fnref n="34" />

The reactions of the first readers can be reconstructed on several levels: sometimes there are mentions in the margin, either reacting directly to an argument in the letter, or giving a general opinion on the case, sometimes with an argument. For example, at the end of the letter from Abdelhamid Berrada, admitted to the École spéciale de mécanique et d'électricité, we find the following opinion, signed by Jean Arnaud, director of the *Maison du Maroc* at the CIUP: "Avis favorable à cause de l'orientation technique de l'étudiant" [positive opinion because of the technical orientation taken by the student].<fnref n="35" />

In a different vein, Touhami Khalfallah, a Tunisian candidate for
accommodation at the Deutsch de la Meurthe Foundation, seems to have
hit the nail on the head in his letter of October 26, 1951, in which he
compared his case with that of one of his less-qualified comrades who
received a favorable response while he himself applied for the second
time.<fnref n="36" /> A line in the margin and a question mark indicate that a first
reader had isolated the passage in search of an explanation. A second hand
added the words "dossier à remettre à M. le recteur" (file to be given to
the rector again) with a date of October 29, 1951, three days after the
letter was sent. A third note, signed by the same hand but without the
date, reads "Dossier à voir" ("File to be seen").<fnref n="37" />

This succession of mentions, which are as many layers of readings, first
gives an idea of the circuit followed by the letter once received. The fact
that it is marked "to be delivered again" to the Rector indicates that a

<footnote n="34">³⁴ See, for example, Jérôme Denis and David Pontille, “Ficelles pour une ethnographie de l’écrit!” in *Caroline Datchary* (ed.), *Le sens du détail: petit précis méthodologique en sciences sociales*, Lormont, Le bord de l’eau Éditions, 2013, pp. 17–30.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Notice stapled to letter from Abdelhamid Berrada to the rector of the Académie de Paris, [1954], AN, 20090013/546.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Letter from Touhami Khalfallah to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, October 26, 1951, AN, 20090013/572.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Ibid.</footnote>
first reading was made on receipt at the Rector's Office, before being redirected, probably to the administration of the Deutsch de la Meurthe Foundation, which sent back to the Rector's Office those cases that merit further consideration. On the merits, the case is a little exceptional and perhaps the result of overzealousness on the part of the Foundation's reader. Questioning a fellow student's admission in order to highlight the injustice of which one feels victim is rarely good politics; it is an exceptional argument in letters and seems to have been deemed admissible only in this single case.

In addition to the few explicit references in the margins or at the end of letters, there are more subtle but frequent clues. In particular, a close reading of the various CIUP application files reveals the recurrent use of pencils—usually red, sometimes blue—to underline salient points in the file, to facilitate processing. Unfortunately, there is nothing to identify the authors of these pencil strokes, who could be secretaries in charge of an initial examination before reading by the decision-makers—hence the desire to highlight the elements to be retained during a diagonal reading—or decision-makers themselves—house directors, rectors... We find traces of these pencil strokes both on administrative forms—to underline the training followed, the number of brothers and sisters or the house the student was applying for at the CIUP—and within letters. In the letter from Parisian Nadine Katz, for example, the link she established between the conditions of accommodation at the CIUP and the specific needs of preparing for the agréation in English seems to have caught the reader's attention.

> This year, I am preparing for the second time for the English agrégation, and I realize that it is not merely a matter of residing in a student residence but also of living in an environment conducive to my studies.<fnref n="38" />

Sometimes, the pencil stops over entire paragraphs with a line in the margin or systematic underlining, or both. In other cases, as in the letter from Vosgiens Jean Kempf, only certain expressions or passages were underlined, thus targeting more precisely the arguments that caught the eye.

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Letter from Nadine Katz to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, September 22, 1950, AN, 20090013/572.</footnote>
Indeed, *my rather profound nature* leads me to avoid the inhabitants of the large city, particularly Paris and the Latin Quarter. Unable to tolerate the often superficial mindset manifested in trivial conversations, *I have resolved to live in solitude*. This is against my will, as I do enjoy company.<fnref n="39" />

Several conclusions can be drawn from this analysis. The first is quite disappointing: it seems to confirm the fairly marginal weight of letters in the selection process. Pencilling is often much more intensive in the administrative part of the file—that which took the form of closed-answer forms. This is undoubtedly due to the sheer volume of applications to be processed, and the fact that it was easier to compare candidates on the basis of pre-defined criteria than on their motivation. Worse still, if we rely on pencilling alone, it appears that a significant proportion of the letters may not have been read, or may have been read with far less attention than the forms: in many files, the forms are the subject of pencilling and marginal notes, while the remaining letters bear no trace of having been read. This does not mean, however, that the letters have no effect on the process: on the contrary, it can be assumed that they are only read with attention for tangential files, for which the forms were not sufficient to make a decision.

In the same vein, it seems that letters of recommendation, which are less numerous in the files than cover letters, benefitted from more sustained attention, as evidenced by the more intensive pencilling they received. This is particularly true when recommendations came from political or diplomatic authorities—mayors of French communes, ambassadors of countries of origin—but it is also true when parents wrote letters to support their children’s applications. This undoubtedly says something about the continued infantilization of adult students at the CIUP.

If we confine ourselves to the letters bearing traces of reading, what can we retain? Firstly, contrary to the request made in the Rector's letter, the information on the candidates' social and family situation were minutely examined in cover letters. Whether to emphasize the strength of their family network or, on the contrary, their extreme poverty, candidates who detailed their social position by adding elements to what appeared on their forms, had every chance of being read with attention. In the same way, a special case seems to be made of the assessment candidates

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Letter from Jean Kempf to the Rector of the Académie de Paris, [1953], AN, 20090013/572.</footnote>
made of their own educational record: whether they indulged in elitist
self-congratulation or seeked to explain mediocre results, they increased
their chances of being pencilled.

Conversely, internationalist professions of faith were largely ignored.
With the exception of those candidates who skillfully combined their own
career path with their internationalist commitment, simple declarations of
support for the values of the City appeared too standardized and too
unsurprising to attract the attention of decision-makers.

At the end of this reflection, it becomes clear that cover letters played
a secondary, but not neglectable, role in the selection process. Not all
were read, but those that were often concerned the most tangential or
hotly debated applications. Our attempt to understand how the reading
strategies of some seeked to neutralize the rhetorical effects of the writing
strategies of others does, however, enable us to make progress in under-
standing the vocation of the CIUP and the image it projected in France
and internationally. This observatory is all the more interesting in that it
comes at a time when the expectations of the cover letter exercise were
in full development. While the genre has come to dominate application
practices among students, the CIUP was one of the first institutions to
make systematic use of it. As a result, there was a gap between expecta-
tions and proposals, and standards were gradually being set. The rector
himself, in expressing his expectations, formulated requests that did not
always correspond to the elements that seemed to attract attention at the
time of the selection process.

**Conflict of Interest** The author has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this chapter.

Antonin Durand is an associated professor at Sorbonne University. His PhD dealt with the involvement of mathematicians in Italian political life around national unification. A specialist in the social and cultural history of Europe in the second century, he focuses on scholarly, student and musical circulations as well as forced migrations from and to France and Italy. He authored *La Quadra-ture du cercle. Les mathématiciens italiens et la vie parlementaire (1848-1913)* (Éditions rue d'Ulm, 2018) *Les voyages forment la jeunesse. Les boursières scien-tifiques David-Weill à la découverte du monde (1910-1939)* (Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2020) and *Le Chœur des esclaves. Quand Verdi écrivait l'histoire* (Buchet-Chastel, 2022).
**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>
# Hijacking Internationalism: International Student Migration, Political Activism, and the Western Order at Paris' Cité Universitaire, 1930s–1970s

Guillaume Tronchet

What do these diverse political and intellectual figures have in common: Hô Van Nga, leader of Vietnam's National Independence Party in 1945; Habib Bourguiba, first president of the Republic of Tunisia in 1957; Léopold Sédar Senghor, first president of Senegal in 1960; Aimé Césaire, poet of Negritude and member of parliament for Martinique for nearly fifty years; Henri Lopes, former minister and prime minister of Congo; Saloth Sâr, the Khmer Rouge leader in Cambodia, better known as Pol Pot in the late 1970s; Mahmoud Hamchari and Ezzeddine Kalak, the first representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization in France; Greek terrorist Alexandros Giotopoulos; Japanese leftist Toru Tagaki; and Iranian journalist and feminist Faranguis Habibi?

G. Tronchet (✉️)

Institut d'histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (IHMC), Paris, France

e-mail: gtronchet@gmail.com
Apart from the fact that they were contemporaries, all of these activists and political leaders, along with several hundred of their compatriots, were residents of the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris (CIUP), mostly during their higher education in France, where many received their political training. This presents a paradox. The CIUP was never intended by its founders to be a haven for rebellion or subversion. On the contrary, it was created in the 1920s by Parisian political and academic elites at the intersection of French cultural imperialism, academic diplomacy,<fnref n="1" /> and liberal internationalism. Its mission was to bring together the future elites of international student youth in post-war Paris, with the dual goals of promoting world peace and maintaining a global order under Western dominance.<fnref n="2" /> Situated on Boulevard Jourdan in the southern part of Paris, the 30-hectare campus housed up to 2,500 students in the interwar period, across some twenty national and colonial pavilions funded by French and foreign patrons, as well as certain states (e.g., Fondation des États-Unis, Maison de l'Argentine, Maison de l'Indochine).

From its inception, the CIUP aligned itself intellectually with the League of Nations (it was even nicknamed the “League of Nations of

<footnote n="1">¹ On this notion, see G. Tronchet, 'Savoirs en diplomatie: une histoire sociale et internationale de la politique universitaire internationale de la France', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2014); T. Adam and C. Lerg, 'Diplomacy on campus: The political dimensions of academic exchange in the North Atlantic', *Journal of Transatlantic Studies*, 13, 4 (2015), 299-310; G. Tronchet, 'The defeat of university autonomy: French academic diplomacy, mobility scholarships and exchange programs (1880s-1930s)', in G. Scott-Smith and L. Tournès (eds) *Global Exchanges: Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World* (New York 2017), 50-64; G. Tronchet, 'L'expertise universitaire en diplomatie: entre valorisation sociale et assignation à résidence, 1880-1940', in S. Jeannesson, F. Jesné and E. Schakenbourg (eds), *Experts et expertises en diplomatie: la mobilisation des compétences dans les relations internationales, du Congrès de Westphalie à la naissance de l'ONU* (Rennes 2018), 305-317; C. Lerg, *Universitätsdiplomatie. Wissenschaft und Prestige in den transatlantischen Beziehungen, 1890-1920* (Göttingen 2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² For more details, see G. Tronchet, 'La Cité Universitaire: une joint-venture transnationale dans le Paris des années 1920 et 1930', in S. Jaumain and P. Van den Dungen (eds) *Biermans-Lapôtre: Histoire d'un mécène et de sa fondation* (Brussels 2013), 85-100; G. Tronchet, 'Diplomatie universitaire ou diplomatie culturelle? La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris entre deux rives (1920-1940)', in D. Kévonian and G. Tronchet (eds) *La Babel étudiante: La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, 1920-1950* (Rennes 2013), 59-88; J. Reis, 'Cultural internationalism at the Cité Universitaire: international education between the First and the Second World Wars', *History of Education*, 39, 2 (March 2010), 155-173; J. Reis, 'French and Foreign Students in Interwar Paris: Creating the Cité Universitaire', unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Virginia (2007).</footnote>
Students”<fnref n="3" /> or the “League of Nations of Youth”<fnref n="4" />) in a context characterized by the growth of international university exchanges and competition among Western powers for the training of national elites.<fnref n="5" /> Its leaders, such as Senator André Honnorat, President of the CIUP from 1925 to 1948, and mathematician Paul Appell, Rector of the University of Paris (1920–1925), were closely connected with networks of Geneva internationalism and American philanthropy, including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Rockefeller Foundation.<fnref n="6" /> John D. Rockefeller Jr. himself financed the construction of an International House at the CIUP, modeled after similar International Houses already established in cities like New York, Berkeley, and Chicago to accommodate international students.<fnref n="7" />

Moreover, from the 1920s to the 1960s, all political activism was prohibited within the CIUP, as its administrators feared the diplomatic repercussions of conflicts between students from different nationalities. Political meetings, publications, and the distribution of pamphlets were banned by the internal regulations, and the institution enforced what Pierre Bourdieu termed a “depoliticized political discourse”,<fnref n="8" /> which, under the guise of neutrality, sought to neutralize the politicization of

<footnote n="3">³ *Gazette de Lausanne*, 25 May 1936.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ *Excelsior*, November 8, 1936.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Among many references, see C. Charle, 'Paris: National, International, Transnational, Cultural Capital City? (19 h-20th Century)', in M. Middell (ed.), *The Practice of Global History: European Perspectives* (London 2019), 45-80; T. Bevis, *A World History of Higher Education Exchange: The Legacy of American Scholarship* (Cham, 2019); C. Charle, 'L'internationalisation des universités, XIX-XXᵉ siècles', in F. Le lièvre et al. (eds) *Langues et cultures dans l'internationalisation de l'enseignement supérieur au XXIᵉ siècle* (Bern 2018), 5-40; D. Laqua, 'Activism in the “Students' League of Nations”: International Students Politics and the Confédération Internationale des Etudiants, 1919-1939', *The English Historical Review*, 32, 556 (2017), 605-637; W. Walton, *Internationalism, National Identities and Study Abroad: France and The United States, 1890-1970* (Stanford 2010); V. Karady, 'La migration internationale d'étudiants en Europe, 1890-1940', *Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales*, 145 (2002), 47-60.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ See G. Tronchet, *André Honnorat: Un visionnaire en politique* (Paris 2020).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ W. Weymans, 'At Home Abroad? International House New York and the Cité Universitaire in Paris: Cosmopolitan versus Diasporic Internationalism', in F. Kläger and K. Stierstorfer (eds) *Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging* (Berlin/Boston 2015), 279-295.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ P. Bourdieu, *Ce que parler veut dire* (Paris 1982), 155.</footnote>
international issues by promoting a technical approach to international relations, supposedly less contentious.

However, upon closer examination of the historical sources, rather than merely accepting the statements of the institution's founders and leaders, it becomes clear that from the 1930s to the 1970s, the CIUP was precisely the space where a student activism critical of the global political order flourished. This period witnessed the repoliticization of internationalism from below, transforming the CIUP into a unique laboratory for the growth of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-authoritarian nationalisms and political cultures. As a result, the CIUP presents historians with a striking example of the “return of the political repressed”,<fnref n="9" /> a process that has attracted growing attention in studies of international organizations, countering long-standing theories in international relations that have perpetuated the myth of their apolitical or politically impotent nature.<fnref n="10" />

In this context, this article seeks to demonstrate the role of the CIUP in global “streams of contentious politics”,<fnref n="11" /> illustrating how, as a central hub for international student migration to France, it inadvertently contributed to the transnational circulation of oppositional discourses and practices. Moreover, it helped to forge “coalitions across borders”<fnref n="12" /> that challenged and reshaped the dominant political order between the 1930s and 1970s.<fnref n="13" />

<footnote n="9">⁹ F. Petiteville, 'The resilient politicization of international organizations', *Critique internationale*, 76, 3 (2017), 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ See M. Barnett and M. Finnemore, *Rules for the World. International Organisations in Global Politics* (Ithaca 2004). Hans-Martin Jaeger, “Global Civil Society” and the Political Depoliticization of Global Governance”, *International Political Sociology*, 1, 2007, pp. 257–277; Béatrice Pouligny, “La construction de la paix”, *Annuaire français de relations internationales*, vol. IV, 2003, pp. 791–799.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ C. Tilly and S. Tarrow, *Contentious Politics* (Oxford 2006).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² See *Coalitions across Borders: Transnational Protest and the Neoliberal Order*, edited by Joe Bandy and Jackie Smith, Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ This article is a translated and revised version of the following contribution: « “La Cité en ébullition”: jeunesse étudiante et action collective à la Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, de 1945 aux années 1968: contestations, mobilisations et circulations», in Dzovinar Kévonian et Guillaume Tronchet (ed.), *Le Campus monde. La Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, de 1945 aux années 2000*, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2022, p. 71–120.</footnote>
A CAULDRON OF TRANSNATIONAL
ANTI-COLONIALISM AND ANTI-IMPERIALISM

Since welcoming its first students in 1925, the CIUP quickly became a hub for anti-colonial and nationalist student movements and a training ground for many future leaders in the struggle for decolonization and independence. Despite its significant role in this historical context, the CIUP's contribution remains largely overlooked and warrants closer examination.<fnref n="14" />

Among the most organized groups were the Indochinese students. Housed in the *Maison des étudiants de l'Indochine* since the 1930s, a colonial project financed by French business interests in Indochina, these students were grouped under the *Association des étudiants annamites de Paris*, which openly resisted the colonial administration's control over the *Maison*, a tool to regulate student migration from Southeast Asia to France.<fnref n="15" />

The CIUP facilitated the exchange of activist practices: the institutionalization of the Indochinese student movement directly inspired the creation of the *Association des étudiants musulmans nord-africains* (AEMNA) in 1927, modeled on the former association.<fnref n="16" /> A small group of Tunisian, Moroccan, and Algerian students, expelled from the cafés of the Latin Quarter by French police, established their organization in the Belgian Pavilion of the CIUP.<fnref n="17" /> This group included future leaders of North African nationalism, many of whom resided at the CIUP: Tunisian Ahmed Ben Milad (1902–1994) and Moroccan Mohammed Hassan el-Ouazzani (1910–1978), both central figures in Moroccan nationalism, shared a room in the Belgian Pavilion; Tunisian nationalists Bahri Guiga (1904–1995) and Tahar Sfar (1903–1942), close friends of Habib Bourguiba, shared a room in the *Pavillon Deutsch-de-la-Meurthe*.

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ The Cité Universitaire is thus hardly mentioned, for example, in Michael Goebel's book, *Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism*, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ For more details, see the work of Sarah Legrandjacques, particularly in her chapter in this book.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ C.-R. Ageron, ‘L’Association des étudiants musulmans nord-africains en France durant l’entre-deux-guerres. Contribution à l’étude des nationalismes maghrébins’, *Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer*, 70, 258–259 (1983), 29.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Youssef Belal, *Le cheikh et le calife: Sociologie religieuse de l’islam politique au Maroc*, Paris, ENS Editions, 2014, p. 35.</footnote>
with Bourguiba; Slimane Ben Slimane (1905–1986), another Tunisian student, was eventually expelled from the CIUP for his activism.<fnref n="18" /> By the late 1920s, Tunisian students at the CIUP formed the core leadership of the *Néo-Destour*, the political party created in 1934 to combat French rule in Tunisia.

In the 1930s, the CIUP campus also became a site for the emergence of black anti-colonialist consciousness. A small group of Africans and Overseas Students became active in several student organizations, including the *Association des étudiants ouest-africains*, founded in 1933 at the CIUP<fnref n="19" /> and led by Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), a resident at the *Fondation Deutsch de la Meurthe*. Similarly, the *Association des étudiants martiniquais*, founded in 1932, headquartered on campus from 1933,<fnref n="20" /> where leaders such as Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), Joseph-Henri Edmé, Joseph Marty, Aristide Maugée (1914–1967), and René Sauphanor were based.<fnref n="21" /> Under their leadership, the publication *L'Etudiant noir* was launched in 1935, with its offices at the *Maison des Provinces de France*, marking the birth of the Negritude movement led by Senghor and Césaire. The magazine criticized racial injustices, such as the domination of Europeans “over the best opportunities in colonized countries”.<fnref n="22" />

Most of these anti-colonial student movements had connections with socialist and communist movements. Some CIUP residents, such as Senghor among socialist students, were actively involved. Others included Claude Lewy (1906–1981), a future mayor of Orléans and close associate of Front Populaire minister Jean Zay, and Georges Soulès (1907–1986), who would later gain prominence as the writer Raymond Abellio. The CIUP also attracted leftist groups from its inception in 1925, with the presence of socialist and communist-affiliated groups opposing far-right movements like *Action Française*.<fnref n="23" /> By the late 1930s, student groups,

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ S. Ben Slimane, *Souvenirs politiques* (Tunis, 1989).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ *Bulletin de l'Office central des œuvres de bienfaisance*, 41, May 1934, 38.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ *Journal officiel de la République française*, 14 January 1934, 407.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ *L'Etudiant noir*, 1, March 1935, 8.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² *L'Etudiant noir*, 1, March 1935, 8.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ “Petites nouvelles de la nuit”, *L’Action française*, March 5, 1926.</footnote>
such as the little known *Fédération des étudiants révolutionnaires*<fnref n="24" /> and the *Comité international des étudiants* created in 1931,<fnref n="25" /> operated on the campus, although communist leadership faced challenges from far-right factions during student strikes in 1936 and 1937.<fnref n="26" />

After 1945, communist influence grew at the CIUP in the context of the Cold War, with the formation of communist cells on campus. Resistance fighter and history student Armand Guillotin (1920–1995) led one such cell in 1946–1947,<fnref n="27" /> as did Henri Van Regemorter (1925–2002), a resident at the Belgian Pavilion and a doctoral student in astrophysics, who trained numerous communist students at the CIUP between the late 1940s and early 1950s. The history student Pierre Brocheux recalls in his memoirs three Communist cells at the CIUP.<fnref n="28" /> These students led anti-nuclear campaigns and protested the Indochina War and German rearmament, circulating petitions and distributing newspapers such as *La Cité libre* and *Propositions*, which supported in 1950 student peace movements, under the lead of Henri Van Regemorter and several students from the Pavillon Belge and Pavillon Deutsch<fnref n="29" />.

This communist presence revitalized pre-war anti-colonial traditions, especially as the CIUP expanded to accommodate more colonial students, with new pavilions such as *Maison de la France d'Outre-mer* (1951), *Maison de la Tunisie* and *Maison du Maroc* (1953), and *Maison du Cambodge* (1957). According to Pierre Brocheux, “the anti-colonial struggle, the fight against the Indochina War, and the Cold War were

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Quoted by André Balent, “Grau Roger, François, Gabriel”, *Dictionnaire biographique du Mouvement ouvrier* (*Le Maitron*), online: https://maitron.fr/spip.php?article87253.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ *Bulletin de la coopération intellectuelle*, May 1931, 243.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ L'Etudiant français, 16ᵉ year, June 8, 1936; 17ᵉ year, December 2, 10, 1936; January 4, 25, 1937; February 5, 10, 1937; February 6, 25, 1937; 18ᵉ year, January 4, 25, 1938; 19ᵉ year, April 5, 1938; see also “Une provocation des fascistes à la Cité universitaire”, *Le Populaire*, February 19, 1937.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ GIRault Jacques, “Guillotin Armand, Albert, Joseph, Marie”, *Le Maitron. Dictionnaire Biographique. Mouvement ouvrier. Mouvement social*, online version May 3, 2010, modified June 14, 2014.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ BROCHEUX Pierre, “Henri Van Regemorter at the Cité universitaire internationale de Paris (1952–1954). Souvenirs”, *Viet Nam, une coopération exemplaire*. Henri Van Regemorter (1925–2002). *Parcours d’un militant*, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2004, p. 22–24.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ SIMON-CORTÈS Nicole, “Henri Van Regemorter et Propositions, journal du Conseil de la paix du Quartier Latin (1950–1954)”, *Viet Nam, une coopération exemplaire...*, op. cit. p. 17–21.</footnote>
all intertwined during these years. The CIUP offered a fertile ground for far-left activism".<fnref n="30" />

Colonial students from Asia, Africa, Overseas territories, and Latin America, many of whom would become political leaders, joined the CIUP's communist networks against colonialism and imperialism, much to the dismay of the French police, who kept a close watch on their activities.<fnref n="31" /> These included Haitian poet René Depestre (b. 1926), resident of the Maison de Cuba,<fnref n="32" /> Guadeloupean Henri Bangou (b. 1922), president of the residents' committee of the Maison de la France d'Outre-mer (1949), vice-president of the Union nationale des étudiants de France (UNEF), president of the Association générale des étudiants guadeloupéens and leader of the Comité de liaison des étudiants anticolonialistes with future lawyer Jacques Vergès.<fnref n="33" /> This was also the case of South American students “of communist or at least progressive leanings” who, in January 1950, set up at the CIUP the “first political group” in Paris to “discuss political issues of interest to Latin America”.<fnref n="34" /> There were also African students at the communist cell of the Maison des Provinces de France, such as Senegalese Amady Aly Dieng (1923–2015) and future Minister and President of the Supreme Court Ousmane Camara (b. 1931), both linked to the Marxist-Leninist African Independence Party and residents of the Maison de la France d'Outre-mer in 1957.<fnref n="35" /> In the same time, other residents from the Portuguese colonies in Africa who, following orders from the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), sought to establish at the CIUP “links between international communism and the PCP, and to more easily

<footnote n="30">³⁰ BROCHEUX Pierre, *op. cit.* p. 22.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ "La propagande communiste au sein de la Cité universitaire", report from the Préfecture de police de Paris, 1952 (AN, 19,880,312/6).</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Cf. COUFFON Claude, René Depestre, Paris, Seghers, 1986.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ BANGOU Henri, *Ancien sénateur et maire de Pointe-à-Pitre: Soixante années d'engagement politique, de l'UNEF au Sénat en passant par les cinquante années de gestion municipale*, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2008, p. 21-23.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ "Formation d'un groupe politique d'étudiants sud-américains à Paris", note from the Préfecture de police de Paris, January 25, 1950 (APP, 77W/74, 34,181/2).</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ CAMARA Ousmane, *Mémoires d'un juge africain. Itinéraire d'un homme libre*, Paris, Karthala-CREPOS, p. 44; BLUM Françoise, "Dieng Amady Aly", *Le Maitron. Dictionnaire Biographique. Mouvement ouvrier. Mouvement social*, online version February 13, 2015, modified March 11, 2016.</footnote>
disseminate communist propaganda designed to uplift the African continent”<fnref n="36" />. From 1957 onwards, within the Maison de l'Indochine and later the Maison du Cambodge, Vietnamese and Cambodian students played a significant role in the communist cells of the CIUP. Initially active in the Association des Étudiants Khmers, founded at the Maison de l'Indochine in 1946 and dissolved by French authorities in 1953, they later formed the Cercle Khmer d'Études Marxistes and ultimately the Union des Étudiants Khmers in 1957. These increasingly revolutionary organizations nurtured the future leadership of the Khmer Rouge regime, including Saloth Sâr, later known as Pol Pot (1925–1958), and Khieu Samphan (b. 1931).

The widespread influence of anti-imperialist communism significantly increased the opportunities for leaflet distribution and meetings related to the ongoing processes of decolonization and independence. For instance, in February 1955, a lecture by Léopold Sédar Senghor on federalism in Black Africa, held at the Maison Internationale, transformed into an anti-colonial rally initiated by members of the Fédération des étudiants d'Afrique noire en France (FEANF).<fnref n="37" /> A few weeks later, on April 16, 1955, during the Bandung Conference of “Third World” countries in Indonesia, another meeting was organized at the Maison Internationale, “which was regarded as important among Middle Eastern student groups”.<fnref n="38" /> This gathering brought “together around one hundred students of various nationalities (Syrian, Lebanese, Egyptian, Sudanese, Iraqi, Iranian, Jordanian, and Armenian)” to “protest against all forms of colonialism”. The meeting resulted in a manifesto, written in Arabic, that was sent to the Bandung delegates. According to the Paris Prefecture of Police, “Syrian officers were present as observers”.<fnref n="39" />

In December 1955, during a book fair, a group of around twenty far-right students disrupted the event by overturning tables displaying books on the Indochina War and “student life in the USSR”, sparking a violent

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Note from the Portuguese State Political Police to the French Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), October 12, 1957 (quoted in PEREIRA Victor, *La dictature de Salazar face à l'émigration. L'Etat portugais et ses migrants en France (1957-1974)*, Paris, Presses universitaires de Sciences Po, 2012, p. 373).</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ AGERON Charles-Robert and MICHEL Marc (dir), *L'Afrique noire française, l'heure des indépendances*, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 1992, p. 50.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ “Student meeting at the Cité Universitaire”, April 20, 1955, confidential note (APP, 77W/74, 34,181/2).</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Ibid.</footnote>
altercation.<fnref n="40" /> The Algerian War further intensified tensions at the CIUP, where “announcements about the disappearance of Algerian students were regularly posted at the campus gates”.<fnref n="41" /> In February 1956, during a leaflet distribution, Algerian students were attacked by other students supporting French Algeria. This incident prompted the formation of the *Comité antifasciste de la Cité universitaire*, led by Communist students.<fnref n="42" /> Various unofficial collectives, including the *Comité antifasciste des États-Unis*, the *Comité antifasciste de la Deutsch*, and the *Comité d’union des gauches du Parc Ouest*, joined forces with other student political groups, such as socialist, radical, and MRP students.<fnref n="43" /> A few weeks later, another confrontation with far-right students led to the expulsion of Claude Quin, a member of the communist student group, from the CIUP.<fnref n="44" />

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the influence of the communist left at the CIUP—or at least the perception of its influence—had become so pronounced that it was publicly condemned by right-wing factions, even from the floor of the French National Assembly. The Gaullist right criticized the distribution of communist leaflets and newspapers at the CIUP,<fnref n="45" /> while the Poujadist right denounced what they described as the “colonization” of the CIUP by the French Communist Party (PCF).<fnref n="46" />

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ “Incident between students at the Cité Universitaire”, note from the Commissaire Principal of the 14ᵉ arrondissement to the Directeur Général de la Police Municipale, Paris, December 19, 1955 (APP, 77W/74, 34,181/2).</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ LE GALLOU Claude, *Une fille du siècle. Une autobiographie*, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2019, p. 37.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² During an intervention at the Cité against a leaflet distribution by the committee, the police arrested Simon Lévy (1934–2012), a Jewish Moroccan anti-Zionist, communist and anti-Islamist student, then staying at the Maison du Maroc, and who would become—among others—one of the co-founders of the Union nationale des étudiants du Maroc (“Distribution de tracts à la Cité universitaire”, note from the Préfecture de police de Paris, February 11, 1956, APP, 77W/74, 34,181/2).</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ “No fascist demonstrators at the Cité”, leaflet n.d. (APP, 77W/74, 34,181/2).</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ “Après l’expulsion de la Cité universitaire, pour activité politique, du résident Claude Quin”, note from the Préfecture de police de Paris, July 4, 1956 (APP, 77W/74, 34,181/2).</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Question écrite du député Michel Habib-Deloncle au ministre de l'Éducation nationale, n°7728, November 5, 1960, *Journal officiel, Assemblée nationale, Débats parlementaires*, December 8, 1960.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ “You are not unaware of the role played by the communization of black and North African students by the Communist Party which, over the last fifteen years, has literally colonized the university campus, the Latin Quarter and the new university campuses”</footnote>
However, this influence waned in the aftermath of decolonization and in the lead-up to May 1968. Like elsewhere,<fnref n="47" /> the influence of communist students at the CIUP declined as they faced growing competition from nationalist and anti-imperialist movements linked to the home countries of post-colonial residents. Additionally, new leftist movements emerged, including the Parti socialiste unifié (PSU), which had a presence among residents, and far-left groups such as Trotskyist and Maoist factions active in Vietnam solidarity committees.<fnref n="48" /> Among these activists was Greek student Alexandre Giotopoulos, a 21-year-old son of a former Trotskyist, who was part of the leftist group at the Hellenic Foundation between 1965 and 1967.<fnref n="49" /> Italian philosopher Alessandro Fontana, 25, who resided at the *Maison de l'Italie* in 1964, also became an active militant in support of Vietnam, working alongside comrades from the Ecole normale supérieure who were associated with Althusser.<fnref n="50" />

In the mid-1960s, however, militant engagement appeared relatively marginal among the residents of the CIUP. Although the diverse nationalities present in the pavilions and the prevailing international context—the Vietnam War, the Cultural Revolution in China, Che Guevara's activities in Latin America, and so forth—were conducive to the development of “political consciousness”,<fnref n="51" /> the actual level of activism remained limited. The CIUP served as a venue for meetings and debates, fostering a form of intellectual politicization. As Gérard Mauger, a resident at the *Fondation Biermans-Lapôtre* from 1964 to 1965, recalled, “We used to go to Maspero and explore Marx, Freud, Althusser, and others. I remember we organized a reading group for *Capital* at the CIUP”.<fnref n="52" />

The management of the CIUP continued to strictly enforce its internal regulations prohibiting all forms of political activity, including

(Speech by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Séance du 30 avril 1959, *Journal officiel, Assemblée nationale, Débats parlementaires*, 1er mai 1959, p. 408).

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ BANTIGNY Ludivine, *De grands soirs en petits matins*, Paris, Seuil, 2018.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ “La Cité universitaire. De l’intégration à la lutte”, *Politique hebdo*, January 25, 1973, p. 17.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ CHICLET Christophe, “Grèce: une démocratie apaisée”, *Politique internationale*, n°98, 2003 (note 5).</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ FONTANA Alessandro, “Una educazione intellettuale”, *aut aut*, n°362, April-June 2014, pp. 7-8.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Telephone interview with Ezio Ornato, May 29, 2020.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">⁵² Telephone interview of June 2, 2020.</footnote>
group meetings, publications, leaflet distribution, and conferences. This included expelling individuals deemed undesirable and perceiving subversion in even the slightest criticism. In 1966, following the disturbances and confrontations around the *Maison du Maroc* related to the Ben Barka affair from the previous year, the directors of the *Maison* were unequivocally reminded of these policies, which, in practice, proved increasingly unfeasible and were even criticized as “too rigid” in the pages of the french newspaper *Le Monde*.<fnref n="53" />

Despite this, the management of the CIUP remained clear-eyed about the situation. Pierre Marthelot, the CIUP's general delegate, noted in his annual activity report, “No conflict, no internal revolution or coup d'état in the world occurs without its repercussions here at the Cité. It is not always easy to convey to students, or even to the representatives of the concerned countries, that debates should be conducted outside the Cité”.<fnref n="54" /> The events of May 1968 would ultimately validate his observations even further.

## THE CIUP IN THE GLOBAL STUDENT PROTEST OF THE LONG '68

The events of May–June 1968 at the CIUP represented not so much a rupture as a radical intensification of earlier protests from the 1950s and 1960s. This new phase in the cycle of mobilizations at the CIUP was significantly influenced by the intersection of traditional Parisian student demands—such as student co-management, co-education, and opposition to paternalism and elitism—with critiques of the political and international order that had previously been localized within specific pavilions. These critiques included anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism, and they emerged within a context of increased international exchange of ideas and protest practices.<fnref n="55" />

<footnote n="53">⁵³ “La direction de la Cité internationale de Paris interdit toute conférence politique”, *Le Monde*, February 7, 1966.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ “Rapport moral sur l’année 1967”, Appendix to the minutes of the Board of Directors meeting of February 9, 1968, p. 11 (AN, 20,090,013/88).</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ For a recent overview, see Françoise Blum and Guillaume Tronchet (ed.), *Les passeurs de révolte. Etudiants et intellectuels étrangers et postcoloniaux dans les années 1968 en France*, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, forthcoming 2025.</footnote>
This analysis will not delve into the specific events of May 68 at the CIUP, which have been discussed extensively elsewhere,<fnref n="56" /> including the demonstrations, building occupations, and the formation of organized associations and collectives. Instead, it will focus on the transnational dynamics of student mobilization on campus. These dynamics primarily stemmed from opponents of the political regimes associated with their respective occupied houses, who transformed these symbolic spaces into platforms for their anti-imperialist, anti-authoritarian, and revolutionary demands. As a result, the Cité came to be perceived as a “sanctuary of subversion”.<fnref n="57" />

For instance, the *Maison d'Afrique* underwent a name change to explicitly denounce French neo-colonialism and assert control over what was perceived as a house under French influence. Similarly, the *Maison du Portugal* was occupied with cries of “Death to Salazar! Down with colonialism!” and was declared the “first free and socialist territory of Portugal,” with its rooms renamed after Che Guevara, Marx, and Engels.<fnref n="58" /> The *Maison du Maroc* also saw its management flee, and residents, supported by “members from the Maison des Étudiants Nord-Africains, 115 boulevard Saint Michel”,<fnref n="59" /> transformed the “liberated” space into a center of opposition to Hassan II’s regime. The two buildings were renamed “Ben Barka” and “Al Fath” respectively,<fnref n="60" /> and debates were organized to reassert anti-imperialism from the pre-68 era, such as the May 19, 1968, discussion titled “Third World and Europe against Soviet-American Imperialism” aimed at “exploring strategies to dismantle the global imperialist system”.<fnref n="61" />

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ See Guillaume Tronchet, “La Cité en ébullition’. Jeunesse étudiante et action collective à la Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, de 1945 aux années 1968: contestations, mobilisations et circulations”, in KEVONIAN Dzovinar and TRONCHET Guillaume (eds.), *Le Campus monde...*, op. cit., pp. 71–120.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ Michel Kajman on the events of May 68 at La Cité in *Le Monde*, June 25, 1975.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ Agnès Pellerin, *Les Portugais à Paris: au fil des siècles et des arrondissements*, Paris, Éditions Chandeigne, 2009, p. 154.</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ Letter from Pierre Marthelot to Jean Basdevant, Director General of Cultural Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Paris, May 30, 1968 (AN, 20,090,013/22).</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ “La Cité universitaire. De l’intégration à la lutte”, *Politique hebdo*, January 25, 1973, p. 17.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Tract no. 2405, May 19, 1968 (BnF, 4-LB61–600).</footnote>
The same was true for the Hellenic Foundation,<fnref n="62" /> where intelligence reports indicated that most residents—anarchists or far-left militants—were actively opposing the military dictatorship in Greece.<fnref n="63" /> Among them were several individuals aged between 25 and 31, including students from the Sorbonne and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), as well as a researcher from the CNRS. These residents were affiliated with the *Association des Étudiants Hellènes de Paris* and the *Comité d'Action des Étudiants Grecs de la Sorbonne*, which brought together Maoists, Trotskyists, and young revolutionary communists. With a black flag raised atop the Hellenic Foundation, the occupiers declared it “free Greek territory” and called for “the overthrow of fascist tyranny in our country”.<fnref n="64" />

At the Collège d'Espagne, red flags were prominently displayed alongside portraits of Che Guevara, Cuban slogans such as "The duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution", and graffiti mocking Franco's regime. The Spanish students aimed to "unequivocally align themselves with the great French revolutionary movement" and sought to strengthen ties with Spanish workers in France, clearly intending their actions as a denunciation of Franco's regime.<fnref n="65" /> The occupation drew considerable attention and curiosity. "For a week now," noted *Le Monde* on May 29, 1968, "families of Spaniards from Paris, with children in tow, have been coming here, somewhat surprised to find this 'piece of revolutionary Spain' in the heart of Paris". Prominent French writers, filmmakers, and renowned Spanish intellectuals agreed in principle to join a "patronage committee" supporting the occupation.<fnref n="66" />

The Argentinian pavilion also garnered significant public attention. The occupants, who condemned the military dictatorship's grip on the institution, the deviation from its academic mission, and the abandonment of the management team that had fled during the early hours of the occupation, renamed the building the "Che Guevara Pavilion".

<footnote n="62">⁶² Cf. KORNETIS Konstantinos, "Les premiers mètres carrés de territoire grecé libéré": la Fondation hellénique sous la dictature des colonels (1967-1974)", in Maria Gravari-Barbas (ed.), *La Fondation hellénique de la Cité internationale de Paris: lieu de vie, lieu de mémoire*, Paris, Éditions Kallimages/Fondation hellénique, 2015, p. 121-160.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³ "La participation des étudiants grecs lors de l'agitation estudiantine à Paris", note dated June 22, 1968 (Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris, FB57).</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ "Motion", leaflet no. 003814, May 22, 1968 (CHS, Fonds Mai-68).</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ *Le Monde*, May 29, 1968.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ Ibid.</footnote>
Their actions were supported by around fifty French, Spanish, and Latin American intellectuals, including Fernando Arrabal, Carlos Barral, Simone de Beauvoir, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Jean-Luc Godard, Gisèle Halimi, Michel Leiris, Nathalie Sarraute, Jean-Paul Sartre, Antonio Seguí, and Mario Vargas Llosa.<fnref n="67" />

The political nature of these occupations was also evident in the violence sometimes directed at certain opponents of the movement, who were typically aligned with the political regimes of their countries of origin. For instance, at the Argentinian Pavilion, where the occupation did not have the support of the majority of residents, about thirty individuals were forcibly removed from the building.<fnref n="68" /> At the *Maison du Portugal*, the director was held captive for a week before managing to escape.<fnref n="69" /> Similarly, the director of the *Maison du Brésil* was “sequestered for six hours in his office and interrogated in a very harsh manner about his political activities”, while “the director’s secretariat and apartment were searched” and “the director’s personal correspondence was seized”.<fnref n="70" /> Additionally, a resident who had compiled a list of the pavilion’s Communists to hand over to the police was “severely interrogated” in his room by members of the occupation committee, many of whom were from outside the *Maison*.<fnref n="71" /> The *Collège d’Espagne* was reportedly transformed into a “veritable ‘armed hotbed’,” allegedly storing “weapons of all kinds”<fnref n="72" />.

While each occupied pavilion at the CIUP developed its own distinct action and political-cultural programs, several joint meetings were also organized among them. In early June 1968, the occupation committees from the African, Argentinian, Spanish, Greek, Moroccan, and

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Tract no. 003828, May 28, 1968; Tract no. 003842, May 1968 (CHS, Fonds Mai-68).</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ *Le Monde*, May 29, 1968.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ “La Cité internationale de l’Université de Paris, boulevard Jourdan (14e)”, n°15-70, report by the Direction des renseignements généraux et des jeunes, Préfecture de police de Paris, June 1970 (APP, GD57).</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Letter from Pierre Marthelot to Jean Basdevant, Director General of Cultural Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Paris, May 30, 1968 (AN, 20,090,013/22).</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ *Le Monde*, June 2, 1968.</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² “La Cité internationale de l’Université de Paris, boulevard Jourdan (14e)”, n°15-70, report by the Direction des renseignements généraux et des jeunes, Préfecture de police de Paris, June 1970 (APP, GD57).</footnote>
Portuguese pavilions convened a debate on “the national and international causes of the occupations”.<fnref n="73" /> On June 11, Pierre Marthelot, who kept the French Ministry of Foreign Affair and relevant embassies informed about the escalating situation at the “Cité en ébullition”<fnref n="74" />, expressed his concern: “Given the current pace of events, it is not out of the question that an order to occupy the entire Cité may be issued in the near future”<fnref n="75" />. On June 17, 1968, a major “Meeting of the Liberated Pavilions” of the CIUP was held at the *Maison Internationale*, attended by prominent figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jorge Semprún.<fnref n="76" />

Furthermore, solidarity meetings in support of expelled foreign students, including residents of the CIUP, were organized to unite the mobilized groups. Among the 765 foreigners arrested in Paris following the May and June 1968 demonstrations, 221 were students, 40 of whom faced ministerial expulsion orders.<fnref n="77" /> This group included three residents of the CIUP who were detained at a banned demonstration site: two German students, aged 22 and 23, who were expelled on June 14 and 15, 1968, and a 20-year-old Argentinian student, expelled on June 26, 1968. A Danish student, arrested on June 11 and held at the Vincennes center, was fortunate; the director of the Danish Foundation intervened after the Danish Consul appealed to the Prefect.<fnref n="78" /> On June 12, 1968, a meeting was held in the gardens of the CIUP to support the expelled students, organized by the action committees, the *Mouvement de soutien aux luttes du peuple*, and the *Mouvement du 22-Mars*.<fnref n="79" /> Another meeting on June 28 protested “against the massive and arbitrary expulsions of

<footnote n="73">⁷³ Tract no. 003855, before June 3, 1968 (CHS, Fonds Mai-68).</footnote>

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Letter from Pierre Marthelot to Raymond Poussard, Deputy Director of Cultural Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Paris, June 12, 1968 (AN, 20,090,013/22).</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ Letter from Pierre Marthelot to Jean Basdevant, Director General of Cultural Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Paris, June 11, 1968 (AN, 20,090,013/22).</footnote>

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ Tract no. 003868, June 17, 1968 (CHS, Fonds Mai-68).</footnote>

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ “Étrangers frappés d’une mesure d’expulsion pour avoir pris part aux manifestations des mois de mai et juin 1968”, Note dated June 27, 1968 (Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris, FB 57).</footnote>

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ *Ibid*.</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ “Communiqué”, June 12, 1968, in “La Sorbonne par elle-même. Mai-Juin 1968, Documents rassemblés et présentés par Jean-Claude et Michelle Perrot, Madeleine Rebérioux, Jean Maitron”, *Le Mouvement social*, n°64, July-September 1968, p. 227.</footnote>
our fellow students and foreign workers”, attended by Marguerite Duras, Christiane de Rochefort, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, among others.<fnref n="80" />

By mid-June 1968, the movement at the CIUP began to wane, reflecting a broader trend across France. The occupation of the pavilions on Boulevard Jourdan gradually ended, with the Brazil, Portugal, and Spain pavilions being the first to be vacated between June 12 and 15, 1968. These pavilions were reported to be “in a state close to devas-tation after systematic looting”, according to the general delegate who was involved in the process of abandonment.<fnref n="81" /> “Discreet contacts” were made with the occupiers to convey the “risk that law enforcement might enter the Cité and proceed to ‘clean up’ the occupied houses”.<fnref n="82" /> A repre-sentative of the President of the French Republic confirmed this, stating that “the director of the Cité covertly encouraged this departure, which was motivated by the fear of the extremists’ own excesses and the false rumors of an impending crackdown, which, in the minds of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilians, was expected to mirror actions taken in their own countries”.<fnref n="83" />

In other pavilions, normal resident life began to resume. The diverse dynamics—student, social, and political—that had initially converged to drive the movement at the CIUP gradually diverged. French and Francophone students most actively involved in the call for student co-management shifted to a power struggle with the CIUP’s administration to advance student participation in institutional governance, with negotia-tions continuing throughout the 1970s.<fnref n="84" /> Meanwhile, politically engaged foreign students found the CIUP of the 1970s to be a fertile ground for continuing their anti-imperialist demands and struggles.

In the 1970s, the CIUP naturally became a focal point for debates and gatherings among the diverse cultural and political groups that emerged

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ Tract no. 003874, June 28, 1968 (CHS, Fonds Mai-68).</footnote>

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ Board of Directors of the Fondation nationale, minutes of June 19, 1968 (AN, 20,090,013/88).</footnote>

<footnote n="82">⁸² Letter from Pierre Marthelot to Jean Basdevant, Director General of Cultural Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Paris, June 17, 1968 (AN, 20,090,013/22).</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ “Note sur la situation de la Cité universitaire”, note from Sébastien Loste, chargé de mission at the Secrétariat général de la Présidence de la République, Paris, June 17, 1968 (AN, 640AP46).</footnote>

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ See Guillaume Tronchet, “La Cité en ébullition”, art. cité.</footnote>
from the May 1968 movement. These included socialists, leftists, feminists, hippies, ecologists, homosexuals, protest artists, and others.<fnref n="85" /> The leftist groups, particularly Trotskyists and Maoists from the Gauche prolétarienne, were especially active and “omnipresent”<fnref n="86" /> at the CIUP. A prominent figure among them was the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, a former resident, who occasionally returned to the CIUP. The influence of leftist movements extended beyond France, with the CIUP becoming a vibrant center for international leftists, including many from the Arab world. Toufic Hindi recalls that the CIUP was “the ideal place to forge links with Arab revolutionaries”.<fnref n="87" />

As leftism, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-imperialism were deeply intertwined, many of these activists were engaged—sometimes independently—in various micro-struggles within the CIUP's pavilions, reminiscent of the May 68 occupations. These pavilions became hotbeds of agitation, protest, and mobilization, serving either as a support base or battleground for political and geopolitical conflicts imported to Boulevard Jourdan with increased intensity following the May movement. Demonstrations, hunger strikes, brawls, occupations of premises, and administrative closures were common occurrences during this period. The pavilions saw a mix of political opponents from their countries of origin, residents, and undocumented immigrants, including several refugees.<fnref n="88" />

The micro-struggles at the CIUP were particularly evident around the *Collège d'Espagne*, which, still under construction after May 1968, witnessed several attempted occupations. One such attempt in May 1969 aimed to protest “the brutal repression experienced by the Spanish university under the fascist dictatorship”.<fnref n="89" /> Similarly, the *Maison du Canada* was occupied in October 1970 by the *Comité de Mobilisation des Québécois à Paris*, in support of the *Front de Libération du Québec* against the

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ See Guillaume Tronchet, “La Cité en ébullition”, art. cité.</footnote>

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ Interview with Bernard Morel, resident of the Maison du Maroc (1969–1970), November 14, 2018, Paris.</footnote>

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ HINDI Toufic, *A third world war like no other. Stratégies pour confronter un djihadisme sans frontières*, Paris, Éditions du Panthéon, 2018.</footnote>

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ “There were a lot of political refugees in the pavilions: activists committed against repression in Morocco at the Maison du Maroc, Italian political refugees at the Maison de l’Italie, Vietnam War deserters at the Fondation des États-Unis, etc.” (Interview with Bernard Morel, November 14, 2018, Paris).</footnote>

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ *Le Monde*, May 26, 1969.</footnote>
Canadian government.<fnref n="90" /> At the *Maison de la Tunisie*, numerous demonstrations and hunger strikes occurred in February 1972 and May 1973, opposing the policies of Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba, who had been a resident of the CIUP in the mid-1920s.<fnref n="91" /> The *Maison de l'Iran* experienced frequent incidents and hunger strikes between 1970 and 1976, with notable support from intellectuals like Jean Genet,<fnref n="92" /> to draw attention to the repression and imprisonment of political opponents of the Shah's regime. The *Maison de l'Iran* was evacuated by police in July 1972 and permanently closed by the CIUP's management in August.<fnref n="93" /> Since 1968, the *Maison d'Afrique*, which retained and formalized its name through the CIUP's Board of Directors, also faced occupations, staff kidnappings, and police interventions, culminating in its closure in 1972.

The *Maison du Maroc* occupied a distinctive position within this landscape of protest. Like its predecessors, it was a center of opposition to the political regime of its associated country. This was particularly evident given that François della Sudda, the Maison's director, had long been an opponent of King Hassan II. Della Sudda had also clandestinely housed militants from the *Union des Étudiants Marocains* on Boulevard Jourdan, including Hamid Barrada, whom he had smuggled out of Morocco in 1963 by concealing him in the trunk of his car.<fnref n="94" /> Moreover, the *Maison du Maroc* served as a focal point for the evolving Arab militancy. According to Jocelyne Berdu, a resident from 1969 to 1973, member of the residents' committee and then an activist with the far-left organization Ilá Al Amame founded by Abraham Serfaty, “We were the junction point for all the struggles and militants from the Arab countries (Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Palestine, etc.), around which the PSU, the Gauche Prolétarienne, the Maoists of the UJCML, and the

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ *Le Monde*, October 20, 1970.</footnote>

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ *Le Monde*, February 24, 1972; May 29, 1973.</footnote>

<footnote n="92">⁹² REZVANI Serge, *Le tourbillon de ma vie*, Paris, Éditions Ecriture, 2015; see also REBOUR Valentin, *La politisation des étudiants et étudiantes iranien.nes en France. Expériences, sociabilités, mobilisations (1948-1980)*, Master 2 de Sciences sociales thesis, ENS Lyon, 2019.</footnote>

<footnote n="93">⁹³ *Le Monde*, May 5 1970; November 15 1971; February 17 1972; August 1st 1972.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ Testimony of Hamid Barrada, quoted in BUTTIN Maurice, *Ben Barka, Hassan II, De Gaulle. Ce que je sais d'eux*, Paris, Karthala, 2010, p. 191.</footnote>
Trotskyists also gathered. We were a place for debate where everyone
came at least once a week".<fnref n="95" />

The *Maison du Maroc* was also instrumental in advancing the Palestinian cause in France. With the support of François della Sudda, Mahmoud Hamchari and Ezzedine Kalak, the first official representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Paris, were secretly housed there. During “Black September” in 1970, when Jordan attacked the PLO, the Maison became a center for Palestinian aid. A French Office for Aid to the Palestinian Revolution was established on Boulevard Jourdan to coordinate “collections of money, medicines, and medical equipment in collaboration with the Palestinian Red Crescent”,<fnref n="96" /> which also had its headquarters at the *Maison du Maroc*. This effort received backing from della Sudda, the residents’ committee—of which Jocelyne Berdu was a key member<fnref n="97" />—the Maoist networks of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (PCML) led by philosopher Gilbert Mury, and the PSU section of the CIUP.<fnref n="98" /> For several weeks, the Palestinian flag was even displayed on the Maison’s façade, although it was later removed to avoid drawing excessive attention from Israeli intelligence services at a time when Hamchari and Kalak were negotiating for the PLO’s recognition by the French government.<fnref n="99" /> Simultaneously, to raise awareness of Arab struggles, including the Palestinian cause, Hamchari and Kalak, along with Bahgat Elnadi and Adel Rifaat—Egyptian left-wing opponents of Nasser known by the pseudonym Mahmoud Hussein—published a magazine titled *Al-Massira* (“The March”). The magazine was edited and distributed by several of the Cité’s Arab residents linked to the Maoists

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ Telephone interview from June 1er 2020.</footnote>

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ “Bureau français d’aide à la révolution palestinienne, 1 bld Jourdan, 75 Paris 14e “, 1970 (document forwarded by Bernard Morel).</footnote>

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷ Telephone interview from June 1er 2020.</footnote>

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸ Testimony of François della Sudda (November 2003) quoted by Bernard Ravenel, “François della Sudda” (document forwarded by Bernard Morel); Interview with Bernard Morel, November 14, 2018, Paris.</footnote>

<footnote n="99">⁹⁹ *Ibid.* More generally, see: HAJJAT Abdellali, "Les comités Palestine (1970–1972). Aux origines du soutien de la cause palestinienne en France", *Revue d’études palestiniennes*, 2006, pp. 74–92.</footnote>
of the Gauche Prolétarienne, such as Toufic Hindi, then a resident at the
*Maison du Liban*.<fnref n="100" />

The *Maison du Cambodge* witnessed some of the most severe violence, largely due to the importation of the civil conflict between the Khmer Rouge, allied with Prince Sihanouk, and the supporters of the Phnom Penh regime, which had been in power since the March 1970 coup d'état. The Maison's director, Sisowath Essaro, was aligned with the latter group. On May 4, 1970, a student supporting Prince Sihanouk was injured by a bottle; the next day, a Lebanese student was attacked with a sabre by a Cambodian resident. On September 7 of the same year, four residents of the *Maison du Cambodge* were injured, three of whom required hospitalization.<fnref n="101" />

The violence escalated further on March 18, 1971, during a meeting commemorating the anniversary of the Phnom Penh regime, when gunfire injured several residents, including an English student. By 1972, the atmosphere had worsened, with frequent death threats reported in the corridors.<fnref n="102" /> Khmer Rouge-affiliated residents who had been asked to leave refused to vacate, changed the locks on their rooms, and challenged the authority of the director. On January 7, 1973, an altercation escalated into armed conflict overnight, resulting in seven students being stabbed and a 24-year-old supporter of Prince Sihanouk being killed by a rifle shot fired at close range by another resident, who was the director's nephew. In the early morning, police arrested over 200 individuals, evacuated the pavilion, and subsequently closed it down. This incident underscored how “the Cité universitaire reflects the divisions of contested nations”.<fnref n="103" /> These repeated incidents and conflicts, which occasionally made headlines, raised concerns about the institution's condition as it neared its fiftieth anniversary. In June 1975, *Le Monde* queried whether the Cité had reached its “critical age”, asking questions about its “problems, ” “malaise,” and even its “decline”.<fnref n="104" />

<footnote n="100">¹⁰⁰ HINDI Toufic, *Une troisième guerre mondiale...*, op. cit. telephone interview, May 31 2020.</footnote>

<footnote n="101">101 *Le Monde*, January 13, 1973.</footnote>

<footnote n="102">102 *Ibid*.</footnote>

<footnote n="103">103 Le Monde, January 13, 1973.</footnote>

<footnote n="104">104 “Le déclin d’une œuvre universaliste”, *Le Monde*, June 25, 1975.</footnote>