The Changing Social Basis of French Republicanism: Capitalist Restructuring, Social Reproduction, and the Immigrant Question

ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of the “immigrant question” to account for the social tensions surrounding immigrants and their descendants in contemporary France, and, more broadly, to shed light on the transformation of the French polity in the context of changing capitalist social relations. Rather than locating these tensions primarily in the politico‐legal features of French republicanism or in cultural and identity‐based explanations, it argues that they emerge at the intersection of historically specific state forms and shifts in the organization of class relations under capitalism. Drawing on a historical–sociological framework, the article situates the immigrant question within the reorganization of capitalism since the mid‐1970s, emphasizing the transformation of labor regimes and the corresponding reconfiguration in patterns of social reproduction among immigrant communities. From this perspective, the limits of the French model are not understood as the simple failure of republican principles, but as the erosion of the conditions under which these principles were sustained. As these conditions have been progressively dismantled under neoliberal restructuring, different models of integration have increasingly exhibited their limits. By linking the immigrant question to changing relations of production and social reproduction, the article advances a structural account that moves beyond both institutionalist and identity‐based explanations.