Danielle Beaujon

My book project, Criminalizing the Casbahs: Policing North Africans in Marseille and Algiers, 1918-1954, interrogates the quotidian relationship between the police and North Africans in these two Mediterranean port cities. French police officers obsessed over the dangers that they believed lurked in the narrow, densely-packed streets of the Casbahs of Marseille and Algiers, two cities claimed by France but separated by the Mediterranean. In Algiers, the Casbah referred to the ancient citadel inhabited by “native” Algerians, but journalists in Marseille appropriated the term to describe their city’s North African immigrant neighborhoods, too.

Drawing on two local case studies, I argue that the racialized policing of North Africans in Marseille and Algiers built not just on visual codes of race, but on how police practice mapped ideas of race onto the space of the city. Beyond merely identifying residential patterns, police discourse associated the spaces they saw as Algerian – the “Casbahs” – with a particular form of criminality, one they insisted was inherently Algerian and inherently male. By demarcating and racializing space, the French police created repressive methods for controlling North African bodies while proclaiming to uphold republican ideals of colorblind justice. By examining connected histories of migration, repression, and crime in two cities, my project makes clear the role of local concerns and individual decisions in the formation of imperial policing.

My focus on interpersonal experiences also shows the fissures within colonial policing, demonstrating that institutional histories alone cannot explain the fraught yet interdependent relationship of police and policed. The invasive, often violent, and yet intimate policing of North Africans in the French Mediterranean blurred the political and the personal, broadening the spectrum of police power with lasting consequences for post-colonial policing.

My book offers new perspectives on colonial policing by foregrounding local, everyday history. The policing of North Africans in the connected Mediterranean world relied fundamentally on the police’s legitimate monopoly on the use of force. Violence underpins the essence of the institution of the police and has marked police practice since the earliest iterations of organized policing. Yet if violence was ubiquitous, police officers’ use of violence on the bodies of North Africans developed in relation to both imperial discourses of racial inferiority and French colonial might, and local, individual relationships of power and opposition. Moving beyond a solely institutional study of police brutality, my research examines the personal and relational nature of police violence. The limits of “legitimate” force shifted over time, as varying political contexts and local priorities changed the tools available to police officers. Further, my work challenges the imposed boundaries of studies of colonial policing by including metropolitan and colonial spaces within a single analytical frame. In doing so, I show how the connections forged by constant exchanges of information, personnel, and expertise formed urban policing. Analyzing the differences and similarities in policing Algerians in Marseille and Algiers enables me to determine what was distinctly local, and what was trans- Mediterranean, about the dynamics of power, racialization, and colonial subjecthood in these two cities.