When the Musulman Became the Algérien? Labeling, Categorical Transition, and the Bureaucratic Mediation of Decolonization in Parisian Police Reports, 1945–1965

Léo P. Henry, University of Toronto
Ron Levi, University of Toronto

How does the State manage the categorical conversion of the colonial subject into a foreign one? State symbolic power produces the social categories it records: the foreigner is administratively created, constituted through classificatory practices (Noiriel 1991, 2016; Spire 2008). In parallel, Colonial states develop ethnographic state knowledge – classificatory technologies shaped by the practical demands of domination (Chatterjee 1993; Bhabha 1994; Steinmetz 2007). The transition from empire to nation-state reorganizes the valuation regimes through which racialized populations are governed, differentiated, and positioned. Yet the administrative trace of that reorganization – legible in the instability of labeling practices across institutional positions and over time – remains largely unexamined. How does state symbolic power reconfigure its classificatory apparatus when the legal status of a racialized population undergoes radical transformation?Drawing on a corpus of four types of Parisian police reports – renseignements généraux, prefecture, municipal police, and judicial records – spanning 1945 to 1965 – a period encompassing the aftermath of WWII, the beginning of the war in Algeria, and aftermath of the independence of the French colony – we map the differential deployment of three labels applied to the same population: Musulman, Algérien, and Nord-Africain. Co-occurrence analysis, multilevel logistic regression and qualitative analysis help tracking how each label distributes across different thematic registers.Three labels structure distinct positions within the police reports. While the three terms emerge at the same time in the 50s in the report, with the intensification of the immigration from the Maghreb, Musulman first concentrates in the criminality register while Algérien gravitates toward labor and social conditions, encoding the colonial valuation regime. Around 1956–1958, the distribution reconfigures: Algérien migrates into the terrorism register, Nord-Africain absorbs routine criminality, while Musulman detaches from the report entirely. This trajectory indexes the conversion of the colonial subject into the immigrant.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 202. Crime, Justice and the Law