Search

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]

Africans continue to migrate across the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea, where tens of thousands have drowned. In Libya, many suffer enslavement and other harsh treatment as they flee persecution or poverty, or both. Yet there have been few studies of their journey. This study, based primarily on some sixty interviews by the author in 2014-2016 with African migrants in Italy and France, provides a portrait of resilience, courage, and strategic decisions that differs sharply from media images of helplessness. It suggests reconsidering migrant networks and typologies in view of the breakdown and attempted repair of networks on these journeys, where categories blur, ranging from free to slave and back to free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the policies that the French government pursued to house repatriates from Algeria in 1962. These initiatives took place in the context of a French society overwhelmed by eight years of war, OAS terrorism that sought to overthrow the established order in metropolitan France, and the arrival of more than 600,000 people during the spring and the summer of 1962, a migration that challenged the social and economic balance of the country. To spare the repatriates the need to settle in shantytowns that would have put them on the fringe of society, the government opened collective housing and other centres d'hébergement. These efforts served the purpose of a policy of integration established through the 26 December 1962 law for people who were paradoxically both migrants and members of the national community. This policy in fact helped facilitate their integration into the metropolitan society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]