Beyond ‘Bad Apples’: Tracing the colonial roots of French police

The brutal murder of Nahel Merzouk, a Muslim teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent, by a police officer, has sparked a series of violent uprisings across France. The grave injustice - occurring on the eve of Eid al Adha - and its dehumanising coverage fueled profound anger in the Muslim community. Taking the streets and attacking State institutions - town halls, prefectures, schools, police stations - had a clear political meaning. The rioters opposed systemic Islamophobia and racism established by the State to “discipline” them.

The incident exposed the dark underbelly of the French State. The body politics - supported by an Islamophobic culture - tried its best to protect the police’s reputation.

The pro-state actors and social media influencers projected the police brutality against young Muslims as events of marginal significance – as some “bad apples” amongst an otherwise healthy institution - rather than a systemic issue firmly grounded in the Republic’s history.

To unpack the fallacy of this narrative, Merzouk’s murder and perpetual police brutality need to be examined in both social and historical contexts.

A colonial lasting inheritance

According to Emmanuel Blanchard, the most authoritative scholar on the subject, the police is “colonial by essence”, finding its deepest roots in the French slavery plantation. With the 19th-century colonial expansion, new forces were created to police the conquered indigenous populations, disciplining their bodies and their behaviours through a “civilising mission”. To protect the colonial order, these forces were closely operating with the military, massacring Muslims who organised to abolish the Republic’s rule. Hence, the colonial police were systemically Islamophobic and brutal: its first task was to prevent Muslims from reconquering political domination over their lost land by any means necessary.

With the arrival of Muslims in the French metropolitan areas, the Islamophobic Republic created a police force named the North-African brigade in the 1930s. Transferring its “Algerian techniques” to the Metropole, the brigade’s main function was to monitor the “Muslim suburbs”. After the second world war, this anti-Muslim and racist force was disbanded for a brief time until its revival in the 1950s with a different denomination yet an identical responsibility.

During the Algerian War of Independence, it deployed to violently subdue Algerian Muslims. A confession by one of its officers Roger Le Taillantier reveals the extent of impunity this force enjoyed. "In our own way, with a gun in one hand and the Code of Criminal Procedure in the other, we were waging a war that the military was trying to win in Algeria,” the officer wrote in his book published in 1995.

After the War, the Anti-Criminality Brigade was created from the ashes of the North African one. Once again, despite a denomination shift, its function remained similar as it was allocated to forcefully maintain Muslims’ de facto segregation in the “banlieues”. It operates to this day.

During the Algerian Liberation Struggle, the French police and military elaborated its counterinsurgency doctrine. During the Battle of Algiers, Muslim neighbourhoods were closely flanked by the French forces. To protect the colonial rule, the State used various methods of asphyxiation to torture Muslims and choke their resistance. Amongst other techniques, constant identity checks and interrogation of any suspects took place alongside the use of tear gas and monitoring helicopters. This draconian doctrine still influences the methods used by the State to oppose riots in Muslim neighbourhoods. The resemblance with this year’s riots is striking as most of the techniques used 60 years ago are still exercised.

Existential reasons for police brutality

A recent inquiry proved that 13 men of African descent died at the hands of the police during a traffic stop in 2022 alone. Contemporary police brutality still lacks comprehensive data research in France. Nevertheless, the absence of data does not hinder our ability to prove the systemic nature of Islamophobic and racist police brutality.

Indeed, the aforementioned historical overview proves the existence of institutional continuity in the police from colonial times to our era. If the structure of the different police forces were rearranged to adapt to a shapeshifting context for Muslims, the police’s function would remain unaltered. Its responsibility was and remains a political one. It is designed to violently oppose Muslims’ dissent and obstruct their political growth. Whether Muslims’ objective was to conquer their land or oppose systemic Islamophobia and racism, their legitimate grievances are met with constant brutality meant to break their bodies and spirits.

Modern-day Muslims’ presence is the complex result of a colonial conflict which ultimately ended in their forefathers’ favour. Similar to White America’s fear of Black-white equality, White Republican France is terrified by one notion: Muslims’ political will power. In the colonial era, the liberation struggle of Muslims in colonised lands resulted in the Republic’s weakening and, ultimately, defeat. In other words, the French psyche associates Muslims’ political endeavour with their own decline. Therefore, Dhoruba Bin Wahad’s identification of the existential reasons for police brutality in the US can be used and adapted to the French context. In the eyes of White Republican France, Muslims ’presence requires “physical containment, psychological restraint, social control, and violent intimidation as well as the threat of mass punishment”.

The uprisings open a new political season for Muslims in France. The French State will remain true to itself, continuing its colonial legacy of violence and oppression. Nonetheless, French Muslims went through their own maturation process. It ushered in a new generation of grassroot leaders fully dedicated to their community’s blossoming. Their challenge is to translate the rioters’ energy into an organised political movement able to solve the systemic issues Muslims and other minorities have been subjected to for generations.