Policing and Surveillance in France

Abstract

Although the colonial lobby was successful in its campaign for stringent immigration controls, the administrative hurdles were still insufficient to block the movement to France. The statistics of departures from Algerian ports, while showing a dramatic fall immediately following the Chautemps decrees, soon recovered and in 1926 reached nearly 50 000 men (see Table Al). Experienced migrants quickly learned how to cope with the administrative requirements, while there was a dramatic increase in clandestine migration. Whether they liked it or not the lobby was faced with the existence of a large and irreducible Algerian presence in France, a community which was increasingly recruited into the ranks of the Communist Party, trade unions and the nationalist/independence movements of the Oulémas and the Étoile Nord-Africaine. The colonial lobby therefore engaged in a campaign, complementary to that for immigration controls, to create a special policing and surveillance apparatus to contain these subversive dangers. The surveillance operation was established first in Paris in 1925 as the Services de Surveillance, Protection et Assistance des Indigènes Nord-Africains (SAINA) and was later extended to the rest of France in 1928. This represented an attempt to insert colonial methods of policing and ‘native management’ into metropolitan France on a scale that was unprecedented in Europe.¹