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In 1923 the Parisian Municipal Council created a special police unit to control North Africans in Paris, known as the Brigade Nord-Africaine (BNA). During its twenty-year tenure, the BNA controlled the North Africans they policed through intimation and violence, but also through personal knowledge of the community. The BNA's harsh tactics had to be balanced by its officers' admitted reliance on North Africans for information. This article explores both the uniquely discriminatory and colonial nature of the BNA and the nuanced, intimate relationships that developed between the officers and the North African community. A repatriation of colonial control, the BNA reified the difference of those it policed, uniquely targeting North Africans but also offering a space of possible agency for them in interwar Paris. The BNA gives us insight into policing in the 1930s, demonstrating the acceptability of targeted policing but also showing the limits of coercive power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of North African colonial migrants during the interwar years spurred the Parisian Prefecture of Police to adopt some elements of colonial administration. From 1925 to approximately 1970, the Parisian police engaged in the specialized surveillance of the North African community. While official North African police services existed only from 1925 to 1945 and again from 1958 to 1962, a durable conception of North Africans as prone to violence and susceptible to anticolonial politics led the police to undertake systematic if at times unofficial surveillance of North Africans for the entire period under study. This colonial perspective on policing became integrated into the general policing of Paris and outlasted colonialism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the relationship between colonial and metropolitan influences on the provision of health care for North Africans in interwar Paris, France. Fears of Communist anti-imperialism and colonial nationalism; Reasons French authorities invested money in assistance programs for colonial subjects; Challenge to colonial authority.