Colonial Techniques in the Imperial Capital: The Prefecture of Police and the Surveillance of North Africans in Paris, 1925-circa 1970 (original) (raw)
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Historical Reflections/Reflexions historiques, 2010
By the early 1960s, an increasing number of Africans migrated to France from their former colonies in West Africa. Most were men hoping to gain employment in several diff erent industries. Their settlement in Paris and other cities signaled the start of "post-colonial" African immigration to France. While scholars have analyzed several facets of this migration, they often overlook the ways in which France's role as a colonial power in West Africa impacted the reception of these immigrants after 1960, where surveillance played a critical role. Colonial regimes policed and monitored the activities of indigenous populations and anyone else they deemed problematic. The desire to understand newly arriving immigrant groups and suspicion of foreign-born populations intersected with the state's capacity to monitor certain groups in order to regulate and control them. While not physically violent, these surveillance practices refl ected the role that symbolic violence played in the French government's approach to this post-colonial immigrant population.
Law and Disorder: How Colonialism Shaped French Policing
Africa Is a Country | The Jacobin, 2020
Inspired by the George Floyd protests, thousands have demonstrated in France against the brutality and racism of their country’s police—a force shaped by the crime of French colonialism. Historical violent policing towards Africans also partly explains the repression of dissent in France’s former colonies.
European History Quarterly, 1994
The hundred years between 1750 and 1850 saw the development in Europe of `modern' police forces. They differed from the earlier police in being professional, bureaucratic and centralized, very often organized along military lines. 2 The literature on the `new police', and on the related subjects of crime and law, has flowered in recent years, and has been strongly influenced by the work of Michel Foucault and others on the development of the penitentiary, as well as by E.P. Thompson's studies of the uses of the law by the English ruling classes. 3 This work has led to a questioning of the uncritical assumption that the changes in the police were positive `reforms', steps towards a modern (improved) organization of society. It has also stimulated historians to ask again why such changes took place. The most common answer to that question is that the development of police forces, of prison systems, and of other disciplinary institutions was a response by the ruling classes to changes in society which threatened their position. The changes most often mentioned are, for the eighteenth century, the growth or the perceived growth in the numbers of beggars and vagabonds, and for the nineteenth, industrialization and fears of revolution. The expansion of capitalism, according to some authors, produced proletarianization and poverty in the eighteenth century and acute class tension in the nineteenth. The growth of cities made the old forms of control, based on deference to the local squire and on face-to-face interaction, unworkable. The old, small-scale, self-policing, largely rural society was giving way to a more anonymous, largescale, urban mass society. As a result, order could no longer be maintained through community sanctions, leading to a rise in crime, and new mechanisms of control were required. At the same time the developing factory [p. 512] system required a more 1 disciplined work force. Finally, the French Revolution and the disturbances of the first half of the nineteenth century frightened the ruling classes as never before, and led them to seek new forms of social control. More recent accounts have combined these explanations with an emphasis on the expansion of the state. 4
The chapter investigates how the historical intertwinement between colonialism, corporate interests and policing is mirrored in the current ways that Europe attempts to control migration from West Africa. It first considers the role of public-private relationships and surveillance during and in the aftermath of French colonization. It then goes on to explore the case of Civipol, an agency specializing in the capacity-building of African countries' internal security co-owned by the French state and major European security companies, which has gained a prominent role as a main implementing partner of EU funds to control migration. Looking especially at Civipol's engagement in the building of national civil registries, it is argued that colonial continuities can be traced in present mobility policing, and that corporate interests coshape the securitization of Europe's relations with Africa.
Reproducing Colonial Patterns of Policing
Police reform in many developing countries has become one of the most common and contentious elements of security sector reform processes in 'weak' or 'fragile' states. Typically viewed as part of broader SSR that emphasises security, including the military, contemporary police reform exhibits a number of specific characteristics that reproduce the colonial concepts of the police as an instrument of control. In the modern era this has come to have two critical aspects: internal control in terms of expanding state legitimacy and power across a territory; and globally in terms of enhancing the capabilities of local forces to deal with non-traditional security threats. With an emphasis on 'professionalisation' and the expansion of the liberal state in to Africa, there is little consideration of the implications of looking at police forces through the lens of colonial patterns, despite the fact that many of these contemporary reforms reproduce concerns and patterns associated with the maintenance of colonial control and also that some police structures held by contemporary international donors to be 'African models' are in fact colonial institutional structures. This paper examines what this looks like and the implications for policing and power.
Policing Paris : 'Out of' or 'stil in' Napoleonic Time?
2014
No scholar, policy-maker or practitioner of policing could be taken seriously who did not acknowledge and take into account the radical transformation which privatization and pluralisation has brought to the field of policing (Jones & Newburn, 2006). Nevertheless, this transformation is largely influenced by the nature of the policing tradition in each nation state. To illustrate this argument a descriptive analysis of plural policing in the metropolis Paris is presented. Being part of the Napoleonic policing tradition in France, Paris takes up a unique political and administrative position which affects its security architecture. It stands out as the most developed example of centralisation and the State’s wish to control its citizens. Despite the observed pluralisation in terms of privatization; Paris is still a ‘state’ in the state. Its Napoleonic tradition largely ‘suppresses’ civil non-commercial initiatives and influences the development of municipal police forces and other pu...
In the last few years, our understanding of police forces in Africa has increased significantly. Whilst in previous literature the police tended to be presented as a mere instrument in the hands of state elites, recent studies have shown the ability of policemen to defend their group interests. This article analyses a pivotal moment in the history of French West Africa, namely the creation of the Service de Sûreté in the early 1930s. Drawing on archival evidence from Togo, it takes a close look at the shift from military to urban policing, arguing that the bureaucratization of security modified the agency of African policemen. Whereas previously their forms of protest were very much connected with the specific setting of military camps (indiscipline, desertion, rebellion), these now increasingly included written protests within the administration.