Jones Faculty Lecture by Caroline Sequin, Associate Professor of History

Anti-miscegenation Laws in France? Policing Interracial Marriage in a “Race-Blind” Nation

New laws passed in the early 2000s in France against so-called marriages of convenience have made it far more difficult for binational couples to officialize their union and secure French citizenship through marriage. Policymakers have presented these laws as a means to protect French citizens from immigrants who may fake love only to settle in France and obtain French citizenship through marriage. In practice, however, these legal measures have mostly targeted couples involving a foreign partner from North Africa or Sub-Saharan Africa who wished to marry a French citizen, suggesting that race and religion have informed perceptions of what a “real” union is. In this talk, Prof. Séquin will uncover France’s long yet little-known history of using a wide range of legal and extra-legal policies, including migration control, scare tactics, and administrative hurdles, to prevent the formation of interracial marriages. She will show how, in the absence of anti-miscegenation laws that explicitly ban interracial marriage and sexual relations, these measures have served to police intimacy across racial and colonial boundaries in a country that claims to be race-blind.