France

Iparralde, the French Basque Country, with Lapurdi, Lower Navarre and Zuberoa, is part of Euskal Herria, and whoever left it for Paris or Bordeaux did not change state. This page tells the story of that emigration to the rest of France, above all to Paris, and of the eight Basque centres recognised in the country today, from Bordeaux to Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon.¹

It is a diaspora that changed destination halfway. During the nineteenth century, Iparralde was a land of mass emigration to America, with some eighty thousand people leaving between 1832 and 1891. In the twentieth, America practically stopped drawing people and its place was taken by the Paris region, where after the Second World War a generation of young people arrived who worked in domestic service, in the parishes, on the metro or as municipal employees. They were later joined by Basques from the south, who came for economic or political reasons. Out of those currents come today’s centres, the oldest from 1947 and the most recent from 2020.

The first current was the American one. According to Argitxu Camus Etchecopar, author of the history of the Maison Basque de Paris, some 80,000 people left Iparralde for America between 1832 and 1891, with the peak between 1850 and 1880. The figure is calculated from passports and, she warns, is not entirely reliable.²

In the twentieth century, for the same author, America practically stopped drawing people and its place was taken by the Paris region. After the Second World War, the departure of the young for the cities emptied the countryside: between 1954 and 1962 agriculture in Lower Navarre and Zuberoa lost a third of its workers.²

In Paris there had been organised Basques long before that. In 1897 they joined the people of Béarn in the Réveil Basco-Béarnais, and after a split they founded their own association, Eskualduna, in 1912. In Bordeaux, at the end of the nineteenth century, Basques and Béarnais also started out together (see the Maison Basque de Paris).² The war of 1936 brought exile: the Basque Government opened a Delegation in Paris in October of that year, and the city was the seat of the Government in exile (see the Basque Government in Paris).³

The young people of the post-war years arrived in the early fifties. They were the first large generation of young Basques in the city, and most of them worked in modest jobs: in parishes, in domestic service, as municipal employees or on the metro. It was for them that the Maison Basque opened in 1956.² In the sixties and seventies, with Iparralde in economic crisis, northern Basques and Navarrese kept arriving in Paris for economic reasons, and southern Basques for political ones.²

Outside Paris, Bordeaux has had a Basque house since 1947, Pau since 1967 and Lyon, the most recent, since 2020 (see the Basque community today).¹⁵⁶