Criminalizing the Casbahs: Policing North Africans in Marseille and Algiers, 1918-1954

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. Through local but connected histories of policing in these two cities, Criminalizing the Casbahs traces how police practices mapped the racialization of North African colonial subjects onto urban space. Beyond merely identifying residential patterns, police officers in Marseille and Algiers associated the spaces they saw as North African – the “Casbahs” – with a particular form of criminality, one they insisted was inherently North African. By demarcating and racializing space, the French police created repressive methods for controlling North African bodies while proclaiming to uphold universalist ideals of colorblind justice. The invasive, often violent, 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.