The Algerian Enemy Within

Abstract During World War II police officers in Marseille and Algiers relentlessly hunted Algerian black market operatives. Hundreds of reports from these two cities detail the actions taken to prevent individuals from selling contraband goods, exceeding fixed market prices, or ignoring rationing protocols. Long-standing colonial stereotypes had labeled Algerians as prone to theft and violence, but the economic restrictions of war created a new category of the imagined Algerian criminal: the black market trafficker. In police reports the figure of the Algerian profiteer is omnipresent, but internal communications acknowledged that Europeans profited from the black market, too. Why, then, the fixation on Algerians? This article argues that police developed a narrative of Algerians as “internal enemies” of France. Their underlying suspicion of Algerians endured throughout World War II even as governments rose and fell in France and loyalties of the entire nation shifted. In treating Algerians as threats to national security, the police justified a system of control that homogenized the Algerian community along racial lines. The racialized policing of “anti-French” Algerian traffickers built not just on visual codes of race but also on how police practice mapped ideas of race onto the space of the city.