In the Abusable Past’s latest installment of “What We’re Reading,” Marisol LeBrón interviews Danielle Beaujon about her new book, Criminalizing the Casbahs: Policing North Africans in Marseille and Algiers, 1918–1954 (Cornell University Press, 2025). In the book, Beaujon meticulously traces how French police officials wrote criminality onto “casbahs,” distinctly North African spaces in both Marseille and Algiers. According to Beaujon, policing emerged as a crucial means of controlling North Africans and slotting them into the racial hierarchy that existed within the supposedly colorblind French republic. In this interview, Beaujon explains how she came to the project, how she navigated the power relations embedded within state archives, and the importance of thinking about the intimate sphere in histories of policing.
Marisol LeBrón (ML): Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to this research?
Danielle Beaujon (DB): I have lived with the research that became Criminalizing the Casbahs for the better part of a decade, because it grew out of my dissertation project. I first came to French history by taking French as a foreign language in high school. When you learn French in the US school system, you leave with a hyper-romanticized vision of France that is all baguettes, red wine, berets and “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” But the first time I had the opportunity to visit France, I found a much more complicated reality. France was not the land of fraternal equality I had learned about, or at least not only that. Instead, I saw racism and social inequality that mirrored the realities I was familiar with from the US. When I started graduate school in history, I knew I wanted to understand the roots of discrimination in France and especially the everyday racism I had seen directed against North African people.
When I began graduate school in 2015, policing was at the center of my political consciousness. In the US, we had just witnessed the murder of Michael Brown and the violent repression of the subsequent uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri. Then in 2016, protests erupted in France following the death of Adama Traoré while in police custody, a reckoning that similarly centered the racialized power of police. As I was trying to develop an approach to the history of state and structural racism in France, policing started to feel like the obvious “way in” to my questions.
Like many historians, my book was inspired by the contemporary world around me, but the research itself led me to themes and arguments I wouldn’t have predicted. If contemporary politics gave me a starting point, the records I found in the archives surprised me, opening questions I didn’t know I should have been asking, including an emphasis on space and intimacy that I didn’t anticipate.
ML: Reading Criminalizing the Casbahs, I was really struck by how you are able to create such a rich and textured narrative throughout the book. There are so many stories in the book that are very evocative and paint a powerful picture for the reader. You note that while some of these stories are drawn directly from police records, others, borrowing from Saidiya Hartman, deploy “critical fabulation” in order to address historical omissions. Departing from Hartman, you note that you didn’t face an absence of archival records necessarily, but rather an erasure of Algerians’ experiences with the French colonial policing apparatus. How did a storytelling approach allow you to more fully capture how policing operated in the lives of Algerians and other North Africans?
DB: Despite their obvious violence, police reports can be oddly captivating. Nothing is more bureaucratic than French government services and most of the state documents I work with are incredibly dry, formulaic, and boring. Police investigations, in contrast, are full of juicy details, witness statements, follow-up reports, analysis. I am often drawn into the stories and lives I find within these reports.
But I would also have moments during my research that disrupted my fantasy of finding Algerian “voices” in the archive, like a story I tell in chapter six of the book. The chapter gives an example of police violence, in which an Algerian man is shot by an off-duty cop in Marseille. The statement of the police officer tells one version of the events, the testimony of the neighbors another, and the interview with the Algerian victim a third. At first, I wanted to focus on the testimony of the Algerian man, Mohamed, using his interview to push back against the police narrative. But then I noticed something on the page. On the bottom, in small letters, some anonymous officer noted that Mohamed “refused to sign, on the excuse that he was injured.” This line stayed with me. The “testimony” in this report was not actually Mohamed’s voice, as badly as I wanted it to be. It was a story told by police officers, mediated by what they chose to write down. Yes, it might be true that the report accurately represented what Mohamed said and that he physically couldn’t sign the document. But it could also be true that Mohamed’s refusal to sign was an act of resistance, a rejection of the version of the story this officer had written down.
What a method of “historical curiosity,” as I have called it, does in cases like this is that it allows me to ask questions. I was flooded with documents. In the archive, there were hundreds of boxes, thousands of pieces of paper that could have been part of this book. Within that abundance, however, there were so many things left unsaid. Historical curiosity allows me to wonder, along with the reader, what the silences might contain. It allows me to tell the stories told by the police without taking for granted that their narrative is truth. It allows me to tell of conflicts between couples, neighbors, and families where I think all parties might be lying. Historians all encounter these moments when our sources simply cannot tell us what we want to know. Asking questions and imagining possibilities is one method to communicate my own unmet desire to know more.
Storytelling also allowed me, I hope, to humanize a book about state violence. When scholars talk about policing and immigration, we tend to offer aggregates or statistics. There is a real utility to big-picture thinking, but I was more interested in the personal. Each anecdote in my book is a real person. A narrative approach allowed me to recognize the humanity of the people I wrote about. I wanted to make an argument about how we should understand structures and histories of policing and racial control, but I also wanted the book to show the North African communities of Marseille and Algiers as made up of full, complex, multifaceted historical actors, not nameless generalizations.
ML: Relatedly, one of the things I really appreciated about the book was your attention to the intimate. In nearly every chapter, you walk the reader through the ways that the criminalization of Algerians in both Marseille and colonial Algiers inserted police into the seemingly most mundane aspects of everyday life. We tend to think about policing in its most spectacular and overtly violent moments – chases, busts, raids, organized brutality – but your book shows the insidious and often invisible ways that colonial racial schemas wove policing into the very fabric of community and family interaction. Can you talk a little bit about your decision to pay attention to these intimate forms of policing?
DB: In the scholarship on policing North Africans, other scholars have focused primarily on political policing or moments of spectacular violence – wars, rebellions, massacres. These histories, of course, are essential. But I wanted to understand policing beyond those exceptional moments. What did policing and social control look like when the colony was not actively at war? What work did everyday policing do when we look beyond histories of silencing protests or overt anti-colonial resistance?
Police documents in Marseille and Algiers talked about theft, murder, violence, and political surveillance, of course. But I was surprised to find many more reports on things that seemed totally mundane – reports about neighbors complaining about each other, surveillance operations targeting birthday parties or religious holidays, long notes about operas, worried letters about bickering in marketplaces or bars. Policing North Africans was, I quickly learned, an inherently intimate practice.
Policing North Africans in Marseille and Algiers was not about only, or even primarily, about crime or the law. Just as often, officers focused on information gathering, categorization, intimate knowledge and familial intervention. This more personal side of policing was fundamental to the project of colonial control because it meant that no aspect of North African life was protected from state intervention. Did you stop and listen to a street performer, get into an argument with your brother-in-law, participate in a sports club, sit down to read a paper at a café? All these actions might make their way onto a list of reasons police found you to be untrustworthy. The intimate realm of policing shows the inescapability of state surveillance in the lives of North Africans and demonstrates that police assertions of inherent North African criminality were never more than justifications for blanket control.
ML: I saw a lot of parallels between our work – mine on colonial policing in Puerto Rico and yours on the colonial policing of Algerians between France and Algeria – in particular, I was struck by the way that discourses of space and crime become stand-ins for discussions about race. If colonialism promises its subjects a kind of recognition in the form of a variegated citizenship, then we see how policing, upholding a façade of colonial benevolence and inclusion, attempts to manage these populations in ways that appear on their face race neutral. Puerto Ricans and Algerians are not subjected to excessive forms of policing and surveillance because of their place within a national racial structure; instead, it is simply that the places where they congregate are teeming with illegal activity. Of course, as you show, police constantly reinforced ideas about North Africans and Arabs as uniquely criminogenic populations by encoding criminality to the “casbahs” of Marseille and Algiers and painting these areas as in constant needs of intervention. Can you talk about the relationship between race, space, and policing that your book charts?
DB:Policing Life and Death is a masterful study of colonialism, police control, and resistance and I’m honored to be in conversation with you and your work. And as you point out, the interplay of race and space in policing is a dynamic that holds across many (post)colonial contexts, including Puerto Rico and my own Mediterranean case studies.
The relationship between race and space is perhaps particularly key in France. France has so proudly positioned itself as the birthplace of republicanism (not unlike the United States). When they justified imperial expansion, 19th-century French politicians claimed to be spreading civilization, “uplifting” the places they conquered. After World War II, France granted citizenship to Algerian men and claimed a “colorblind” approach to democracy that is still central to how the French Republic defines itself. In this framework, the racialization of space allowed discrimination without evoking an explicit language of race.
In Algiers, Orientalist observers described the Casbah, the primary Algerian neighborhood of the city, as vice-ridden and dangerous, but they ignored how French colonial policy helped create conditions of insecurity. By constantly criminalizing the Casbah in newspapers, ethnographic studies, and police reports, French observers could justify an omnipresent police presence there. Police officers, relying on these same tropes, labeled any Algerian in the Casbah as automatically suspect. In Marseille, this same process played out. The streets near Rue des Chapeliers, closely associated with North African immigration, became coded as dangerous and deviant. In defining the neighborhood in this way, police officers could rationalize the specific brigades and daily raids that indiscriminately targeted the North African population moving around Rue des Chapeliers. By using a language of space, the French state could pay lip service to the ideals of colorblindness while continuing practices that singled out North Africans.
Race and space are still linked in France today. Now, instead of talking about the inherent criminality of “Arabs,” pundits and politicians talk about drug rings and revenge killings in Marseille’s Quartiers Nord or the Belsunce neighborhood, both spaces that are coded as Maghrebi. The processes of racializing space that I document in my book continue still, with a resulting over-policing and lack of safety that is also a tragic continuity.
ML: I thought your book did a really great job complicating how we think about the category of political policing. While you touch on the policing of the Algerian resistance, especially at the end, you offer a more nuanced picture of how political policing worked in both Marseille and Algiers, especially during the Vichy government. Can you talk about how police work functioned to politicize the very category of the “Algerian” during this period and how that echoes in the contemporary moment?
DB: I’ll admit that when I started this project, I wanted to avoid talking about political policing. I thought other historians had done a great job looking at that topic, especially during the Algerian War of Independence, and I wasn’t sure I had anything new to say. But the more I trawled through the archives, the more politics I found, and often in ways I didn’t anticipate. In the records of the political police of Algiers, for example, I found dozens of reports about theater and music. I found notes about fights between Messali Hadj and his wife that spoke more to marital discord than nationalist politics. I found Algerians considered political suspects simply because they circulated between Paris, Marseille, and Algiers.
Of course, art, family, and mobility can all be political. But this politicization seemed inescapable for Algerians. The very fact of being identified as Algerian was enough to make you a potential criminal, a potential enemy in the eyes of the French police. This became really clear, as your question suggests, during World War II. Both Vichy officials and Allied forces obsessed over the idea that Algerians were “natural” allies of Nazi Germany and would not hesitate to betray France, even though each side had a competing idea of what France was. The Vichy, Allied, and later 4th Republic assumptions of suspect politics ignored the agency of Algerians. Many Algerians made complex and daring political choices and resisted French control throughout the colonial period. But in some ways, it didn’t matter to the police if someone chose to engage in politics or not; the French state would view you as an enemy, or at least a potential enemy, either way.
Today, we can still see this attitude in the treatment of North African men and women living in France, many of them French citizens. The casual “Where are you from?”, the daily micro-aggressions, the macro discriminations in education, housing, employment, criminal justice, religious self-expression – all are legacies of the politicization of a “North African” identity. North Africans are still being asked to perform Frenchness to be accepted by the state, and this acceptance is revocable. Police, too, continue to see North Africans as potentially suspect. For example, a 2009 study showed that French police are eight times more likely to “randomly” stop and search someone they perceive as Arab, as opposed to white residents.[1] This is an enduring legacy of the patterns of criminalization that I document from over one hundred years ago.
ML: What are you working on next?
DB: While I was working on Criminalizing the Casbahs, I stumbled across archival records of a murder trial from 1930s Algiers. This is what the files reported: The Muphti of Algiers, a religious leader appointed by the colonial government, had been stabbed on the street of Algiers. The police quickly found the killer, but as the man had no personal motive to kill the Muphti, investigators decided it must have been a hired political assassination. Police determined that the anti-colonial religious leader, Cheikh El Okbi, was the mastermind behind the crime but during the subsequent trial, he was exonerated. The murderer was found guilty, but the mystery of the instigator remained unsolved.
What caught my attention about this case wasn’t the political drama, though that was the center of most press coverage. Instead, I wanted to know more about Akacha, the Algerian man accused of murdering the Muphti. The more I read from the trial records, the more I became convinced that everyone had gotten the story wrong. The case against him was full of holes and Akacha claimed his confession had been coerced by police torture, a claim the prosecution dismissed as ridiculous despite physical evidence.
In my next project, I want to retell the story of the murder of the Muphti from Akacha’s perspective, without taking his guilt for granted the way the French courts did. In doing so, my hope is to expose the quotidian use of police torture in colonial Algeria. While historians have thought and written about torture in Algeria, it has so far been in the context of the Algerian War of Independence, a phenomenon memorialized in scenes in the famous film The Battle of Algiers. Instead, I want to show that torture was an endemic and ubiquitous part of colonial violence that seeped into police work and the colonial court system well before the war, creating a carceral system that punished poverty and treated Algerians like Akacha as guilty unless proven innocent.
Danielle Beaujon is an Assistant Professor of History and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois Chicago. Danielle is a historian with broad research interests in policing, race, and power in a global context. Her first book project Criminalizing the Casbahs examines the intimate and oppositional relationship of police officers and North Africans in a connected Franco-Mediterranean world. The book explores how the racialized policing of North Africans in Marseille and Algiers built not just on visual codes of race, but on the way that police practice mapped ideas of race onto the space of the city.
Marisol LeBrón is an Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico and Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua. Along with Yarimar Bonilla, she is the co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm. Her next book, Policed: A Latinx History of State Violence, is forthcoming with UC Press.
[1] Goris, Indira, Fabien Jobard, and René Lévy. Police et minorités visibles: Les contrôles d’identité à Paris. Open Society Institute, 2009.