Making French Algiers
Travelers to Algiers arriving by boat often commented on their first sight of Algiers. Rising from the choppy blue of the Mediterranean, Algiers was a mass of white buildings, glinting in bright sunshine. The white-washed walls of Algiers, particularly the oldest section of the city – The Casbah – earned the city the nickname of “Alger la blanche” or “Algiers the white.” Algiers, like Marseille, had been an important port town since antiquity and had always had economic ties to the larger Mediterranean world. These economic links were violently reinforced in 1830 when French invaded Algiers and established a colony.
Embarquement au port d’Alger by Léon Cauvy. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Narbonne
As France asserted control over Algeria, the conquerors reshaped the city, too. The French army requisitioned homes, hotels and even mosques, turning them into barracks for soldiers or knocking them down to build new roads and neighborhoods. In 1848, France established civilian rule in Algeria, integrating it as three départements, roughly equivalent to American states. The French government also began to encourage immigration to Algeria. European immigrants arrived from France, Italy, Malta, and Spain, creating their own colon communities and identities. The huge influx of Europeans changed the demographics of Algiers. By the 1940s, the population of the colonial capital was roughly 70% European, with the indigenous Algerians now a minority population.
The Casbah
Algerians became increasingly confined to specific neighborhoods of the city, principally the the Casbah. The Casbah, taken from an Arabic word meaning fortress or castle, was once an Ottoman walled fort. Located on a steep hill, the streets of the Casbah were narrow and irregular, punctuated by staircases and covered arcades. Under French colonial rule, the once wealthy neighborhood became overcrowded and run-down. Laws reserved “beautification” projects for European neighborhood and prevented European immigrants from settling in the Casbah, ostensibly preserving the space for Algerians but also marking it as a space of racialized colonial subjects. The population density of the Casbah swelled with the continuous arrival of rural Algerian migrants.
Poverty and vice began to characterize popular French descriptions of the Casbah. European travelers to Algiers emphasized the sensuality of the Casbah but also described it as riddled with crime. French travel writer, Lucienne Favre, for example, described the Casbah this way:
“The evening and the night belong to sailors, to police officers, to murderers, to soldiers [zouaves], to prostitutes, to the lamplighters, to musicians, to singers and to insomniac cats.” (Dans la Casbah, p. 43)
A street in the Casbah of Algiers (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
As the quote from Favre suggests, French colonial observers saw the Casbah as a place that was uniquely criminal. French colonial authorities believed that Algerians were inherently jealous, crafty, violent and lazy, thus prone to crimes of passion and theft. These racial stereotypes sought to highlight the supposed differences of Algerians, as opposed to Frenchmen, to justify French conquest of Algeria as part of a “civilizing mission” of global uplift. But these ideas also had real consequences for the Algerian residents of the Casbah, as it meant they faced tighter police scrutiny.
World War II in Algiers
After an initial stalemate at the front, in 1940, Germany staged a new attack and the French army crumbled, almost overnight. The defeated French government agreed to the occupation of Northern France by the German army and a new government, led by World War I hero Maréchal Pétain, was established in the southern spa town of Vichy. Called the Vichy regime, this new government controlled Southern France and the French Empire, including Algiers. Vichy held power in Algiers until 1942, when the Allies conquered North Africa with “Operation Torch,” setting up a base in North Africa for the Allied conquest of Europe. These rapid shifts in government created chaos in wartime Algiers, as local residents tried to anticipate the consequences of collaboration with a series of new regimes.
Allied and French West African soldiers interact with children in Algiers (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Crime in Algiers
Criminal Casbahs examines crime in the aftermath of these tumultuous war years. The graphs below offers visualizations of the rates of different types of crimes, organized by the nationality of the accused criminal. Notably, these are police records, not court records. This means the numbers represent arrests or incidents reported to the police, but do not represent convictions or guilt.
This graph shows the total number of arrests by nationality. As demonstrated, North Africans were arrested at a rate over 6x that of Europeans, despite the fact that the city of Algiers had a majority European population in this period.
Theft is almost always committed by “unknown” actors, as it is reported to the police by the victims for various reasons, including insurance claims. However, in cases where arrests were made, once again North Africans were overwhelmingly more likely to be arrested.
During World War II, a strict series of rationing laws restricted access to foodstuffs or basic goods like oil, cloth, and rubber. Police reports consistently expressed their certainty that the black market in Algiers was principally happening in Algerian neighborhoods. This police assumption is reflected in the arrest records, showing that North Africans were arrested at 4x the rates of Europeans.
These same patterns can all be seen in the information on crimes like possession of illegal arms and fraud, also crimes often described by the police as particularly associated, in their minds, with an “Algerian mindset.”
This graph demonstrates the relatively low murder rates for a city like Algiers, in the 1940s. Still, despite, the low overall numbers of murder, North Africans are once again disproportionately accused. It is notable, too, that these reports include not just people caught red-handed by the police but also accusations brought to the police by locals.
These graphs reveal a telling pattern in Algiers. In the 1940s, Europeans outnumbered Algerians in the city. Yet the data on arrest records would have us believe that North Africans were overwhelmingly committing the crimes. Where are the white criminals, we might ask? The daily police reports this data comes from does not and cannot tell us about the actual nature of crime in Algiers in 1946. What it can tell us is what the police did. As these arrest records show, police overwhelmingly targeted North Africans in their mission of repression, to the point that their arrest records would suggest the overwhelming majority of crimes, of all types, were committed by North Africans. I have selected the subset of types of crime shown in these graphs because they are crimes that official reports, ethnographic studies, and contemporary French newspaper articles tended to identify as being particularly “Arab” vices. These racist stereotypes had real influence, forming a picture of the “usual suspects” that the police operationalized in their daily rounds.
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