Spoiler: without ALL the immigration, Saint-Etienne would not really exist today, or at least not as a city.
Foreword, this post is of course largely sourced from sociological and historical studies on Saint-Etienne (Sociology of Saint-Etienne, History of Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne the unique …). This post of course summarizes this sociological question that you can find in the books indicated above.
A little history.
Saint-Etienne is a somewhat unusual story, a sort of major project that perhaps should not have seen the light of day. Yes, if we go back to the earliest texts of Saint-Etienne’s history, the city was built without any notable advantage of the time. Far from a river (the only major French city without a river), far from the road and commercial axes of the time, we will only speak of a few pilgrims on the Lyon – Le Puy axis, for the pilgrimage to Compostela.
We are on a mid-mountain topography and a good part of the city is marshy land. If we get closer to us, we will add to that a city that has been bruised555 by the industrial crisis, with a record loss of jobs in a time … record too.
As you will have understood, we are faced with a cocktail which offers very little guarantee for the growth of a large city.
And yet this is where the beautiful story, a sort of Saint-Etienne dream, worked. Where many imagined the typical example of a mushroom town, it will come to confront the resilience of Saint-Etienne. No other French (or even European) city could have survived there, but it is this new identity, different from other large French cities, which has made the people of Saint-Etienne more receptive to all this.
The famous big city in the countryside.
Before talking about its rich subsoil, Saint-Etienne discovered in its engineering, a capacity for the manufacture of weapons. It seems that this would be linked to the quality of the water of the Furan which would facilitate the work of the blacksmiths. The city with 7 hills then quickly became renowned4 for its industrial intelligence and quickly people came from everywhere to supply themselves but also to settle there.
Let’s keep in mind that we are talking about a city of max 4000 inhabitants, but the foundations of the Saint-Etienne adventure are laid. All that’s missing is the Saint-Etienne people.
The industrial revolution brought with it the golden age of Saint-Etienne’s history. The city grew without any real urban planning (the famous ugly city) and people came from everywhere to work. At first, people from Velay and Ardèche, then came the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Italians and the Maghrebis and Poles.
We are here faced with the very example of the creation of a new population, the “native” Stéphanois is therefore the fruit of this population mix.
Saint-Etienne politics
Politically, we are at that time rather on a conservative and religious population. It is necessary to understand that the populations who came to work in Saint-Etienne are largely from the countryside. They therefore bring with them an ideology of humility, hospitality but also a strong relationship of submission to religion and power.
It is therefore no surprise that the city, even if working class in its essence, has regularly been on the right. It should be remembered that the “peasant” populations were then much less politicized than the urban populations. The successive crises and the working class consciousness will however quickly bring a new identity to this “new” population. Saint-Etienne will have its commune for example. It will also be greatly involved in the various social movements. Today it is one of the only large French cities not to have an established far-right group, which would come to disrupt this Saint-Etienne living together.
Living together in Saint-Etienne style
It is because we have always stood together, without any distinction of class, ethnicity or religion, that Saint-Etienne offers us today a great humanist victory.
Because it is in Saint-Etienne that the share of immigrants is one of the highest in France (around 20%) and yet it is one of the safest large cities in France (even the 2nd safest large city in Auvergne Rhône-Alpes behind Annecy: source Le Parisien 2024).
A first way to twist the neck of a cliché of the French extreme right. It is the people of Saint-Etienne themselves who have taken precedence over the problem of vacant commercial premises, by proposing before others many independent concepts, it is they who have brought life to their neighborhoods by keeping the tradition of secular friendly societies there.
So, yes, like everywhere, there are internal quarrels, but the Saint-Etienne people have always stood firm when they were ostracized by French society and its centralism which gradually took away everything in terms of national, then regional and finally local weight.
Because if we had not lived, created, celebrated, sung, existed together, we would have been destroyed like many other “mushroom towns”, our interest having become minimal. Yet it is here that the history of the most beautiful record of French football is written, here that in 100 years we created the bicycle, mail order, the sewing machine, the hydraulic turbine, the catalog. Here we had the first railway in France, the oldest tram network. Here in the city with 1000 patents, the best speakers in the world, the socks of the French champions and the pacifiers for our children are made.
Here, the children of Sainté, from Michel Rondet to Dub Inc, including Bernard Lavilliers and Michel Durafour, have always defended a humanist image of this city whose only greatest wealth was its people.
Living together is what defines us as Saint-Etienne residents. Far from populism, unrest and xenophobic temptations. The mix is what makes us strong here, because we built this city together. In its typography, in its urban planning, in its streets, in its endearing identity. When we are made fun of, like this filthy article in Le Monde 10 years ago, it is all of us who are affected, not one Saint-Etienne resident more than another. And it is together that we respond.
Everything in Saint-Etienne is the result of a mixture of cultures, so we may not have done it as well as French excellence suggests, but we did it in our own way. And above all, we did it together.
To my grandfather.
