During the second world war, Lyon was a stronghold of the French resistance. The city's citizens used a network of traboules - secret passages running through houses and out into narrow, winding streets - to shelter people at risk of arrest by the Gestapo.
Now the same elegant buildings, in the same picturesque streets, are being used to shelter a new generation. This time there is no Nazi Final Solution and it is not Jews who are being rooted out, but the sans papiers - migrants who fear for their futures if they are deported. And in the frontline of the resistance are ordinary French families who are doing their best to thwart deportations by hiding sans papiers children in their homes
A photo I took in Montmartre.Nicolas Sarkozy, France's interior minister, announced earlier this year that he was going to increase deportations in response to the riots that took place in 2005, many of which involved the children of immigrants. He gave sans papiers until the end of the 2006 summer term to apply for residency. Of some 300,000 people living illegally in France, 30,000 applied. Last month, Sarkozy announced that residency had been granted to fewer than 7,000 of them. The 23,000 sans papiers who applied and were refused are particularly vulnerable because the government now has all their details.
Committees to support asylum-seekers and migrants have sprung up all over France, and parents from the schools the asylum-seeking children attend are the key members. Often the children at risk are well integrated with their school and local community - some have been born in France and consider themselves French. Because the authorities will not deport parents without their children, hiding the children also protects their parents.
As the clampdown on immigrants intensifies, the number of children being hidden is increasing sharply. Due to the clandestine nature of the process there are no reliable statistics available, but René Datry, a campaigner against the deportations, claims that as many as 40,000 French families have volunteered to shelter those at risk. The system is a simple one: when a child is identified as being at risk, he or she is moved from family to family to avoid detection, all the while attending the same local school (although there have been cases of sans papiers children being removed from schools and deported, it is not a common occurrence, so schools are generally regarded as a place of safety).
