Danielle Beaujon
Research Project
Criminalizing the Casbahs: Policing North Africans in Marseille & Algiers, 1918-1954
Project Abstract
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.
Methodology
My methodology weaves together a mix of local and national sources in French and Arabic, producing an intimate history of the colonial police. I examine documents created by French police officers in Marseille and Algiers, including investigation notes, individual case files, policy circulars, and detailed daily and weekly centralized crime reports. There is a risk in relying so heavily on official police sources. Police reports provide tantalizingly rich descriptions of daily life and routine police encounters in Marseille and Algiers. However, police officers tend to present their accounts as objective observations. Yet these accounts are far from neutral.
To counteract this inherent bias, I deliberately question police records. By engaging with Algerian sources, particularly press records, I highlight the strategies Algerians developed to resist police intervention. I also endeavor to read police documents “against the grain.” With this methodology, I propose an imaginative history of the police, engaging with events as they were recorded by police officers but also using contextualized understandings of the documents to suggest alternative interpretations. Through thick descriptions of individual incidents, I weave a history of policing that explores multiple versions of the past and seeks to investigate motivations, emotions, and consequences, despite the frequent silence of my sources on these matters.
Biography
Danielle Beaujon is an Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law & Justice and History at the University of Illinois Chicago. She received her PhD with distinction from New York University’s joint program in History and French Studies in 2021. She previously earned a dual B.A. in Honors History and French & European Studies at Vanderbilt University. Danielle is a historian with broad research interests in policing, race, and power in a global context.
Danielle’s current research examines the intimate and oppositional relationship of police officers and North Africans in a connected Franco-Mediterranean world. Her research has received support from the American Institute for Maghreb Studies, the Robert Holmes Award for African Scholarship, the Michel Beaujor Research Fellowship, the Remarque Institute-École Normale Supérieure Fellowship, and the US Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Areas Studies Summer Fellowship. Her article “Policing Colonial Migrants” was awarded the Coordinating Council for Women in History’s Nupur Chaudhuri Prize, recognizing the best article by a first-time author.
