Danielle Beaujon is the holder of the "Albert Hirschman: The passions of Identity between Europe and the Mediterranean" Sciences Po Aix/Iméra Chair for the 2024-25 academic year. Her research project : « Criminalizing the Casbahs: Policing North Africans in Marseille and Algiers, 1918-1954 », interrogates through the writing of a monography the quotidian relationship between the police and North Africans in these two Mediterranean port cities.
Her work 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.
To learn more, view her resident page by clicking here
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Video transcript
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0:09 My name is Danielle Beaujean and I am an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago with a joint appointment in history and criminology law and justice. And more broadly, I'm a historian whose research focuses on questions of race, power and policing in the French Empire. And I focus in particular on the history of colonization in French Algeria. So at Imera, I'm the holder of the joint Sciences Po ex Imera Albert Hirschman chair, which examines the passions identitaires entre Europe and Mediterranean. And my project fits within this theme because I'm looking at the connections between
0:45 Marseille and Alger and framing them as existing within one connected Franco-Mediterranean space. I'm working on a manuscript project entitled Criminalizing the Casbas, Policing North Africans in Marseille and Algiers, 1918 to 1954. And the book looks at the policing of North Africans in these two cities, both ports that were claimed by France but separated by the Mediterranean in this time period. And in both Marseille and Algiers, police officers were obsessed with the dangers that they believed existed in what they called the Casbas.
1:20 In Algiers, the Casbas of course referred to the iconic neighborhood of that name, which was the sort of old city of Algiers and where most Algerian residents of the city live. But they also used the same word of Casbas to describe the North African neighborhoods in Marseille, which was centered between the Garcin-Charres and the Vieux-Port. And in both of these spaces, police officers associated a particular form of criminality that they called particularly North African with these spaces. And in demarcating and racializing space in this way, police officers were able to use
1:58 particular techniques of surveillance and control over these subjects living in the French Mediterranean. police officer police officer police officer My work tries to shift our frame of analysis for colonial studies by putting empire and metropole in the same analytical framework, this connected Franco-Mediterranean world. And as I started the research, I realized that the police were often the most constant presence in the lives, the most obvious representative of the state in the lives of North African colonial subjects.
2:27 And so this led me to ask, you know, what did policing look like on a daily level in colonial Algeria? What behaviors or social patterns were criminalized by the colonial police? And those questions are what led me to this current book project. So, Imerat is really the perfect place for me to be working on this project, which is really focused on Marseille as well as on Algiers. So, on one hand, I have the opportunity to be in close contact with the most important archives for my work, the Archive Nationale d'Outre-Mer in Aix, and the Archive
2:59 Departementale de Bouche de Rhone here in Marseille. And a residency at Imerat will also give me the opportunity to collaborate with local researchers at Aix Sciences Po and also the University d'Aix Marseille, including research groups like Mesopolis, TELEM and the Maison Méditerranée des Sciences de l'Homme. And all of these research groups work on questions of imperialism and migration that will help push my work in exciting new directions.
