“We Have the Right to a Home!”: Squatting Families and the Meaning of Welfare in Post-Liberation France

After 1944, France began post-war reconstruction amidst a crippling housing shortage.  During this moment, homeless families sought shelter in bombed buildings, under bridges, or in privately owned properties.  As squatting families grew increasingly desperate, facing forceful evictions from illegally occupied buildings, they began to organize and attend local gatherings.   From these meetings, first in Marseille, then Lyon, Paris, and other cities around France, a national movement began to take shape.  Women played a prominent role in the growing movement, helping to articulate an evolving agenda.  They claimed that squatting families had a social right to housing.

The housing crisis—and emerging squatters’ movement—shaped and gave a sense of urgency to debates about the meaning of social welfare during post-war reconstruction.  During this period, local and national government officials, and ordinary people were attempting to re-build, but also to re-think the relationship between citizen and state, and what it meant to be French.  This essay discusses how squatting families from diverse neighborhoods around France negotiated postwar plans for reconstruction, articulating as they did so the possibility of a new form of Republican social citizenship in France.  More specifically, the paper considers the role of women squatters and activists within the movement and how they re-imagined and negotiated their roles as mothers, workers, and citizens.