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The migration of swiss cheesemakers to Franche-Comté (1860-1920): an example of the importance of social networks
| Rural migrations are of less interest to researchers because of the difficulties of this type of investigation (lack of sources, dispersion of people) and case studies are rare. This paper summarizes the main results of an empirical and prosopagraphic study, which focuses on the migration of Swiss cheesemakers to Franche-Comté, a region in France's eastern border with Switzerland, between 1880 and 1920. The objective of this work was to prove that distance and push and pull factors alone could not explain migration and that social networks and especially family links play an important role. French and Swiss sources, such as census data, registers of birth, marriage and death, and folders of naturalization or police reports were used to study migration patterns between Switzerland and Franche-Comté. More than 150 individual biographies and trajectories of this well-defined group were reconstructed. Both the host society, the community of origin were taken into account. The migration of persons coming from the Gruyère valley (Canton of Friburg) was very different from that of cheesemakers from Emmental valley (Canton of Berne). The first group benefited from a traditional migration pattern between the Gruyère area and Franche-Comté ; they migrated to France as young men, married in France and in majority never returned to Switzerland. Many of them came from a small swiss village, called Cerniat. A few families from this village controlled this migration. The second group, persons coming from Emmental valley migrated later in life because they married in Switzerland. However the role of family networks was also important for them. Furthermore, in the host society, family networks continued to provide migrants a lot of resources and this partly explains the high degree of mobility of swiss cheesemakers in the area of destination.
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