Empire on the Seine: The Policing of North Africans in Paris, 1925–1975, by Amit Prakash

Early in the conclusion to this excellent study, Amit Prakash poses the critical question that informs it. Why has a supposedly anti-racist France systematically discriminated against North African immigrants, Algerians above all? That the answer lies in the recent, and continuing history of French decolonisation might seem unsurprising. But what makes Prakash’s treatment so valuable is the skill with which he untangles the trans-Mediterranean colonial connections, the political controversies, and the vicious French police practices that made it so. The uncomfortable conclusion we are left with is that an arc may be traced connecting repressive policing of North African immigrants in the early twentieth century to the institutional discrimination faced by their successors during and after Algeria’s independence struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. By that late twentieth-century stage, patterns of official prejudice were, if anything, more deeply entrenched. Moving through the 1960s and into the 1970s, for North African immigrants in France the consequences of those enduring discriminations were evident almost as much in housing, education and healthcare policies as in the policing of protest.

Plainly stated, while the urban policing of Algerian immigrant communities was always repressive and sometimes segregationist, by the late 1950s it was murderous. If this suggests that the Algerian War was fought out in the tenements and squatter camps of Paris, Marseilles and elsewhere—not itself a new conclusion—what distinguishes Prakash’s book is the clarity with which its author explains how and why elements of the police force became acculturated to violence against the North Africans living at the margins of France’s major cities. While the book ranges broadly across the middle decades of the twentieth century and the spatial dynamics of French urban policing, central to its arguments are key police organisations and the individuals who directed their actions. Foremost among the former was the North African Brigade. Founded in the mid-1920s as a specialist group of thirty or so officers working under the Paris Prefecture of Police, the Brigade’s ostensible purpose was to monitor the capital’s Algerian immigrants. In practice, it coerced them.

The North African Brigade was eventually dissolved in 1944. But successor groups within the Paris police looked and acted like it, often intimidating, detaining and maltreating Algerians with virtual impunity. As this point suggests, what emerges so powerfully in Prakash’s telling are the lasting legacies of North African Brigade methods. These were evident on the one hand in styles of post-war French policing that constructed Algerian immigrants as an enemy within and, on the other hand, in the deepening conviction among those immigrants that the city policemen of Paris and other French metropolitan cities were agents of a repressive colonial state.

Little wonder, then, that Maurice Papon, who took office as Prefect of the Paris Police at the behest of Charles de Gaulle at the height of the Algerian War in 1958, would draw on the institutional heritage of police raids, immigrant evictions, street beatings and ‘coercive interrogations’ to build a new apparatus of urban policing designed not just to compel compliance but to terrorise its immigrant targets. Papon, of course, was no stranger to policing as murder. A high-flier in Algeria’s post-war colonial administration, he is better known as a former Vichyite official, infamous for his wartime role in organising the deportation of French Jews to the death camps, a crime against humanity for which he was eventually convicted in 1999. Drawing heavily on the pioneering work of Cliff Rosenberg, Emmanuel Blanchard, Jim House, and Neil MacMaster in particular, Prakash pulls no punches in unravelling the governmental and bureaucratic support that made Papon’s turn to torture, death squads and summary killings terrifyingly easy amid the cycles of violence and reprisal that marked the last years of French Algeria. Ministries, for the most part, took Papon’s side. Elysée officials chose to ignore the obvious. And, as historian Sylvie Thénault has made plain, the laws of the early Fifth Republic and the legal profession that upheld them were severely compromised.

The Algerian protesters gunned down, clubbed to death and dumped in the Seine by Paris policemen and their auxiliaries on 17 October 1961 marked the dreadful high point in this tide of police violence. But, as Prakash reminds us, the racist presumptions that rendered such actions normative in the eyes of their perpetrators were slow to recede, still less to disappear. From slum clearances to identity checks and continuing immigrant deaths at the hands of the police, imperial reflexes shaped urban housing policies, rights discriminations and police cultures in a supposedly post-colonial France. That they continue to do so is the sharpest, most painful conclusion in this important work.