In France, unlike the United Kingdom, the urban growth that characterized the industrial period came relatively late, only really starting in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 1 This growth was also very localized, concentrated in the capital and the large industrial cities. Thanks to Marseille, the Bouches-du-Rhône department was second behind Seine in its rate of urbanization between 1851 and 1911.Footnote 2 The growth of the city was remarkable on a national scale.
From 1830 to 1910, the economic boom took the city to the height of its commercial and industrial influence.Footnote 3 The value of industrial production was multiplied by 12, and the growth rate averaged 3 per cent per year. During the same period, the activity of the port increased tenfold, benefiting from advances in navigation. The surge in industrial activity benefited from the opening onto the Mediterranean, which it also enabled and sustained.
It was a particular kind of economic growth, based less on raw materials or rich subsoil than on men. Geographically isolated from the rest of the country and with practically no natural resources, Marseille nevertheless underwent a genuine early industrial revolution based on a constantly replenished supply of labour.Footnote 4 This ever-present labour force was the common denominator of the three sectors the growth was based on: building, maritime activities and industry.
The economic boom was accompanied by a population explosion between the period of the July Monarchy (1830–48) and the early twentieth century. Officially, the population increased from just over 195,000 inhabitants to almost 560,000 between 1851 and 1911. Due to the falsification of census results, it would be more correct to say that there was a 250 per cent rather than 300 per cent increase in Marseille's population between these two dates, but it remains a remarkable phenomenon. Such a surge in the population could not be caused by natural increase, which in Marseille, as elsewhere in France, was rather sluggish. The growth of the city was enabled by immigration. A trend that dated back centuries was reinforced and reconfigured: not only were there more immigrants, they came from further away, in particular from Italy. The great wave of immigration from the Italian peninsula began in the 1870s. Between 1851 and 1911, the number of Italians in Marseille grew from 8 per cent to 20 per cent of the city's population.Footnote 5 They joined immigrants from the rest of Provence and the French Alps, plus a large floating population, as indicated by the various censuses.
This economic and human growth created a dynamic of rapid urban spread. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, Marseille came to occupy the full 22,000 hectares of the municipality's administrative zone.Footnote 6 Urbanization overtook villages as industrial facilities established themselves there. While it would not be appropriate to refer to ‘segregation’, the urban zone did nevertheless appear to be divided between middle-class neighbourhoods south and east of the Old Port and working-class and industrial neighbourhoods in the north. The rate of new settlement was rapid, and sometimes preceded the provision of amenities, thus leading to problems of supplies, sanitation and law and order. Similarly, the construction of new port areas at the beginning of the Second Empire produced a new high-use transit zone that needed to be integrated into the rest of the city (the challenge of the Rue Impériale project).
This growth was noticed by contemporaries; it formed part of the general interest shown in the city from a national point of view. Marseille entered the national imaginary during this period, becoming the subject of strong opinions that oscillated between fascination and repulsion.Footnote 7 From the local point of view, it represented a real challenge that upset municipal functions, in particular the maintenance of law and order in the city. It was naturally a recurring topic in the multiple exchanges between the national security services (la Sûreté) and the departmental Prefecture, between the Prefecture and the city's police headquarters (commissariat central) and between the police headquarters and the office of the mayor.Footnote 8
Apart from presenting evidence of the reality of the upheavals caused by this growth, we can thus also offer an analysis of their representation. Throughout this period, many different correspondents described a crisis situation. The municipal government and police never seemed able to handle the consequences of these rapid changes. The case of Marseille thus allows us to test the connection between a growth situation interpreted as a ‘permanent crisis’Footnote 9 and police reform in a city that was not covered by the special police regime applied to Paris and Lyon, but was still in a special position due to its economic importance and status as a city-port and border town.
There were in fact several reforms of the various law enforcement agencies in Marseille during the period under consideration. The persistence of the crisis discourse thus invites us to examine the connection between the alarmist rhetoric and reforms in law enforcement. Is the first the cause of the second and, if not, how do we interpret the continuing complaints of a crisis for more than half a century, when they must lose their effectiveness?
After presenting the main critical aspects of growth that contributed to the discourse of ‘crisis’ in Marseille during the nineteenth century, we will focus on the producers of this discourse to highlight the different readings of the crisis. This will allow us to examine the weakness and discontinuity of the relationship between claims of a crisis and police reforms and to situate these reforms within the political context of tensions between the national and local levels.
Complaints about growth
The acceleration of trade and intensification of maritime traffic throughout this period led to expressions of concern, all more or less explicitly insisting on the need to increase or adapt law enforcement in the port area or the centre of the city. Already in 1855, the managers of the Messageries Maritimes shipping line stressed the critical situation they found themselves in, attempting to cope with a commercial boom that in other ways the company benefited from:
The number of passengers departing or arriving on our ships, including military travellers, has risen to about 12,000 per month. . .Apart from the activity caused by the arrival and departure of travellers, the depot in which all this traffic takes place must at the same time be used for loading and unloading goods. You can understand from this, Monsieur le Préfet, how essential it is to have constant policing.Footnote 10
The company requested the right for its security services – ‘a kind of internal police force. . .whose mission becomes more difficult every day and its efforts more futile’Footnote 11 – to issue notices of infractions, and was assigned two sergents de ville on the condition that it covered their salaries. This quick response, representing a temporary solution, demonstrates the Prefecture's adaptability, but also reveals a case-by-case approach that did not make any profound changes to the overall operation of the police. The same observation can be made throughout the decades that follow. In 1861, Charlemagne Émile de Maupas, then prefect of the department of Bouches-du-Rhône and a senator, drew the attention of the Ministry of the Interior to the particular effects of the country's economic and commercial growth on the Mediterranean port. Stressing the impact of the free trade agreements that were concluded in 1860, he highlighted the need to ‘reorganize the police service’ so that it ‘reflects the importance of [the] city’.Footnote 12 According to Maupas, the rapid increase in trade, while undoubtedly bringing remarkable economic growth, threatened the safety of the inhabitants of Marseille, as its corollary was the arrival of a foreign population whose volatility and criminal tendencies he deplored. The senator, who counted on his influence as a close associate of the emperor, was not the only one to develop such an argument. From the 1870s, it reappeared in the writings of local police officials, starting with the commissaire central. In 1883, he described an ‘incessant back and forth’ and the ‘continuous to and fro of liners of all sizes and from every place, of traders, industrialists and foreigners from every country’, leading to an ‘inevitable population increase’ in the city and ‘the presence of the mixed elements of this population’.Footnote 13
While the increase in trade raised concerns, the fact that maritime activity also opened the door to people of all nationalities and backgrounds – sailors, travellers on a stopover, migrants, refugees and workers coming to take advantage of the wealth of jobs created on the port – generated even greater anxiety. It was in fact the population growth, more than the growth in trade, that was seen through the lens of a crisis. We see a twin preoccupation: on the one hand, the idea that Marseille was a haven for criminals from all countries, and on the other, the increase in the city's foreign population, whose behaviour was associated with what were described as rising crime levels. Well before the 1880s, which represented a high point in xenophobic tensions in Marseille and nationally,Footnote 14 a dark view was taken of this population growth. Already in 1860, the commissaire central stressed the disruption caused by ‘the significant population increase’ and the urgent need to increase the number of sergents de ville as a result.Footnote 15 Prefect Maupas, the recipient of this correspondence, was even more explicit in passing the message on to the Ministry of the Interior. He stressed the problems posed by the presence of a large floating population in Marseille and the high proportion of Italians in the city. Long before the great wave of Italian migration in the 1870s and 1880s, he wrote, ‘over the last 10 years the population has increased significantly and this increase continues. . .in an upward direction; foreign, disruptive and dangerous elements are introduced each day into the local-born population’.Footnote 16 In this letter he stressed at three different points that the difficulties increase ‘every day’. For this Parisian, the unruly behaviour of the Marseillais population was not only caused by the natural esprit méridional of the locals, but was exacerbated by the Italian presence.Footnote 17 The views of the prefect and the commissaire on the harmful effects of Italian immigration and population growth in Marseille were passed down from higher to lower ranks in the 1870s and 1880s. This argument was used constantly by the commissaire central over these decades, to such a degree that, given the context, including the drama of the Marseille Vespers,Footnote 18 these letters can be said to have helped build a discourse of xenophobia on the side of the agents of law and order in the city. Referring to the Italian community in 1883, the commissaire central claimed:
It is this depraved and parasitic element that, seeking to live at the expense of the economy and its workers, sometimes injects terror and sorrow into our quiet and orderly population. This is the source of this perpetual ferment of perversity and criminality, a giant reservoir for all of these vagabond, stateless and nameless foreigners. This is the ever-renewed breeding ground for the thieves, murderers and hardened criminals who seem to have singled out Marseille as the preferred stage for their exploits.Footnote 19
In a climate of tension aggravated by the Long Depression (1875–95), the Italian presence was constantly emphasized up to the beginning of the twentieth century, in reports and letters describing the difficulties the police had in maintaining law and order, or in arguments in support of police reform.
The last recurring feature of this interpretation of Marseille's state of crisis was the city's geographical expansion, and in particular its spread into what gradually became suburbs. Even though these suburbs grew inside the municipal zone, they preceded the provision of amenities and police services. This presented new problems for the co-ordination and adaptation of police operations. Here again, Senator Maupas, who took office in 1860, made a remark of the commissaire central on ‘Marseille's expansion’Footnote 20 into a central point of his argument to the Ministry of the Interior for more substantial subsidies for the police in his department. Outlining the factors that were conducive to local crime, he stressed the harmful consequences of the urban sprawl, describing Marseille's situation as ‘almost exceptional’: ‘Its configuration and topography seem to offer impunity to criminals: the vast suburbs, covered with narrow, winding streets, lined with high walls and criss-crossing in all directions, offer a veritable labyrinth where criminals can lie in wait with the certainty of easily escaping the pursuit of the police officers performing surveillance.’Footnote 21 This argument was later taken up by the commissaire central when discussing changes to the boundaries of the city's outermost police districts or organizing night-time police stations in the suburbs.Footnote 22 In 1882, the next commissaire used the same argument to encourage the municipal government to increase police funding. He noted that ‘the municipality of Marseille is one of the largest in France, it covers a considerable area and its very large suburbs are made up of more than 60 rural villages, all densely populated and an average distance of 6 km from the city’. This, according to him, required the recruitment of ‘100 guards recruited exclusively from the ranks of able-bodied ex-army officers between 25 and 40 years old, and 300 police officers who are men selected for their special skills and suitably rewarded’, plus the creation of ‘a municipal guard on horseback (about 50 men) to patrol the suburbs and secure the outlying districts of the city with regular rounds’.Footnote 23
These three arguments were not just products of the imagination. As indicated earlier, major population growth took place during this period, based largely on labour force immigration. Marseille was a very cosmopolitan city in the second half of the nineteenth century and there were frequent tensions between the different communities, accentuated by cooling Franco-Italian relations and a latent xenophobia that became overt at the end of the century. The increase in maritime traffic (of goods and passengers) also undoubtedly presented new problems of maintaining law and order. Finally, urban sprawl was a reality that the municipal authorities struggled to cope with. A specific form of criminality developed in the suburbs of Marseille, in part due to a lack of police presence.Footnote 24 These upheavals therefore had a significant impact on crime in Marseille.Footnote 25
Even so, analysing this situation as a ‘crisis’ for a full half-century raises questions about its reality. Apart from some genuinely critical moments (the Commune, the Marseille Vespers, the major strikes of the beginning of the twentieth century), should we really speak of a crisis or rather an alarmist reading of strong growth whose effects were not well anticipated or managed? In other cities at other times, economic upheavals have provoked similar comments, and sometimes profound reforms of the police system.Footnote 26 There is no question that growth disrupted the different forms of urban management. In order to promote reform, it was natural to argue the existence of a crisis in order to alert the relevant authorities and hasten reform, but also to point out shortcomings.Footnote 27
The ‘crisis’ argument, apart from its short-term goals, was also more broadly part of the anxiety-laden representations of the city that developed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The correlate of the fascination with the modernity of ever-larger urban centres was a concern about the consequences of this growth. For many contemporary observers, the city seemed criminogenic, producing danger and disorder.Footnote 28 This type of discourse clearly influenced the descriptions of growth in terms of crisis. While its roots lay in the deep and real upheavals connected with Marseille's growth, the interpretation of the situation was also guided by its goal – police reform – and by representations that were differently nuanced depending on their author, which we will now examine.
The effects of perspective
The themes that structure this perception of a crisis were clearly transmitted between the different speakers to make up a global discursive framework. This perception was thus in some ways a shared one, but was nevertheless inflected in different ways depending on whether the point of view was national or local.
During this period, the Parisian authorities – which is to say the security services of the Ministry of the Interior – moved from an authoritarian position to a more solicitous point of view that was receptive to the arguments presented in the reports on the situation in Marseille. In the 1850s and 1860s, the repeated requests to reform the status of the Marseille police – which since 1855 had been under the same regime as other cities with over 40,000 inhabitants, but excluded from the special status of Paris and Lyon governed by a Prefecture of PoliceFootnote 29 – were brushed aside by the minister, on the authority of the legislation in force at that time. In 1855, a circular sent to the departmental prefects by the Ministry of the Interior presented the new decree for controlling the movements of French and foreign emigrants. This decree did not, however, primarily concern the Prefecture of Bouches-du-Rhône, since only the departments in the east and south-west received extra resources under this legislation.Footnote 30 In 1857, the ministry explained that ‘as long as emigration is not significant enough to justify the creation of a special police unit (commissariat spécial)’ in Marseille, the local police force had to be responsible for monitoring migrants.Footnote 31
Apart from the problems connected with the ports and the movements of travellers, it was the overall situation of Marseille's police that the Prefecture regularly brought to the attention of the Parisian authorities. Maupas did not hesitate to describe local problems in order to obtain extra national government subsidies to compensate for the shortcomings of the municipal administration. Even though Maupas had been at the head of a short-lived Ministry of Police in the early days of the empire, and despite his privileged relationship with the emperor, he still could not overcome the inflexibility of the Ministry. Despite presenting extensive arguments in support of his requests, they were met with a flat refusal at the end of 1861:
An increase in personnel would therefore be desirable, but I must tell you right away that the city will have to provide for this increase in essential expenditure on its own, and it would be absolutely impossible for the State to contribute any amount whatsoever. . .There is no question that the significant influx of foreigners into Marseille from all sides requires special surveillance, but this situation and the increase in costs it entails are inevitable consequences of its size, and there is no real reason to grant it a favour on those grounds that would not also be extended to other towns who equally fall under Article 50 of the Law of 5 May 1855. The city of Lyon, which you would like Marseille to be compared to, is in an entirely different position.Footnote 32
This inflexibility did not stop the Ministry from pressuring the prefect and, through him, the commissaire central, to put an end to what from Paris appeared to be an inexcusable level of disorder. We can detect a certain weariness in a letter from Maupas to his superiors in 1862, ‘concerning the armed assaults the minister has complained about’ and the ‘greater attention to the work of the police’ the minister asked for, as he once again explained the situation in Marseille and asked on these grounds for a financial contribution from the state.Footnote 33
As the high crime levels in Marseille became a generally accepted fact, including at the national level, the response of the Ministry of the Interior was to increase its demands of the Prefecture rather than allocate resources or change the status of the police force. Apart from not wanting to change the legal framework governing municipal police forces in France, where making an exception of Marseille would create a precedent obliging a complete overhaul of the framework, this attitude is also likely to have been a product of negative attitudes to Marseille. For Parisians in the second half of the nineteenth century, the capital of the Midi was an ‘anti-model’, whose troubles were regarded with disdain and even a touch of contempt. The attitude of the Ministry at the end of this period could thus be explained by the development of this image of Marseille at the end of the nineteenth century. During that time, the picturesque and turbulent provincial capital became a symbol of organized crime and depravity.Footnote 34
On the local level, we should first examine the perspective from the position of the Prefecture. Before 1867, when the municipal police was given more powers,Footnote 35 the prefect was both the representative of the state in the department and an intermediary between the Ministry of the Interior and the municipal police, which he managed to a large extent through the commissaire central. After 1867, the increased powers of the municipalities meant the Prefecture had to work in conjunction with these authorities to manage law enforcement in the department. When faced with the economic and demographic upheavals affecting the city of Marseille, each successive prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône immediately set about informing the Ministry of the situation in order to obtain extra resources for maintaining law and order.
Maupas was an active spokesperson for the Marseille cause. The series of letters he sent to his superiors in the early 1860s provide an unaffected portrait of how a statesman from Paris came to recognize the reality of a critical local situation from his first-hand experience of Marseille. Taking stock of his first year in his position, he wrote at the end of 1861: ‘my experience over the past year of the many demands and serious complications that the near-exceptional situation of Marseille caused for public security services has only confirmed the opinion I submitted to Your Excellency at that time’.Footnote 36 The end of his message indicated his status as an intermediary. On the local level, he was a spokesperson for the state, just as on the national level he represented the department. His language combined the two perspectives, no doubt hoping to convince the Ministry of the need to support the Marseille police and strengthen the special police units in the city, directly managed by the Ministry of the Interior: ‘Marseille is France's front and back door, so to speak. It is through this door that all its relationships with Italy and the East are established. The political events occurring in these countries today make this city a vital site to monitor and where general policing requires more energy and activity.’Footnote 37
After 1867, the Prefecture found itself even more caught between the demands of the national government and the desire of the local government to assert its reinstated autonomy. In the 1870s, commenting that ‘the number of crimes, especially night-time attacks, violent robberies, murders and murders followed by theft, had been increasing for some time in a most alarming way’, the prefect sent a terse letter to the municipal government with the aim of eliciting a reaction:
There is no doubt that the state must share in the cost of criminal investigations (police judiciaire) in a large port where the interests of France as a whole are at stake. But the city that profits from this large port, that has gathered, grown, worked and become rich around its basins, cannot avoid also making a large contribution to this expense. I am working to obtain the intervention of the minister. . .This work will be fruitless, Monsieur le Maire, if the municipal council does not do the same. I invite you to submit the question to the council. It is obvious that it must make a larger amount available to security and local police services than is currently allocated for this purpose.Footnote 38
The unique position of the Prefecture explains how it perceived and represented the crisis situation in Marseille. Before 1867, the prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône played the role of an advocate for the local cause to the national authorities, so that the local government would receive extra funding for police forces that appeared to be inadequate. After 1867, when the police were placed under municipal control, and until 1908, when Marseille's police force was nationalized, the prefect still produced the crisis argument, but now it was to compel the municipal government to increase the budget for policing and to instigate police reforms.
Before the 1870s, there were discussions between the office of the commissaire central and the Prefecture that essentially concerned the distribution of police districts. The rapid urban expansion posed a challenge for a police system that always seemed to be falling behind. The commissaire central had already noted in 1856 that ‘there are drawbacks to the distribution of the police districts as it exists today’.Footnote 39 The outer arrondissements of Marseille were very spread out, some had large populations and their boundaries were constantly adjusted.
It was only from the 1870s that the theme of the unruliness of the Marseille population, constantly linked to its foreign and multicultural elements, was developed in the various reports and messages coming out of the commissaire's office. It was during this period that the ‘crisis’ theme replaced the bureaucratic arguments about district boundaries in the correspondence of the commissariat. Urban expansion and the growth of the foreign population made it imperative to increase police numbers by a significant amount. In 1873, the commissaire central noted that ‘in a city of 312,864 people such as Marseille, [there is a need] not only to put in place a staffing structure that follows the decree of 30 May 1868, which sets the number of police employees at 369, but to further raise this number to at least 500, which would represent an increase of 131 men’.Footnote 40 His successor observed an ‘exceptionally unfavourable level of surveillance’.Footnote 41 In 1882, it was reported that ‘the press, the public, indeed everybody in Marseille has been concerned and is still concerned about the inadequacy of the police personnel’.Footnote 42 What could be done, however, when the municipal government had the decision-making power in this area? The commissaire central could only resort to exhortation: ‘I earnestly enjoin you, Monsieur le Maire, to be so good as to examine my proposals and inform me of your decision’, he wrote in 1875.Footnote 43 In a report in 1882 on Marseille's police force, we read, ‘The organization of the police has always had some disadvantages, but today more than ever, the services of this administration are suffering as a result and it is truly time to remedy the situation.’Footnote 44 The discourse of the commissaires centraux remained the same until the Law of 1908, which ‘nationalized’ the police of Marseille in the same way as the police of Paris and Lyon.Footnote 45 Based on the correspondence coming out of the commissaire's office, the crisis seemed to intensify constantly from the beginning of the Third Republic. Could the crisis have been a way of inciting the Ministry of the Interior, via the Prefecture, to place the police under state control and push the municipal government to increase subsidies for the police?
Those in the town hall were not so easily swayed. While the independence of Marseille's municipal government had a long history,Footnote 46 it became even stronger in the second half of the nineteenth century due to two factors. First, the city was never Bonapartist, and while Napoléon III managed to lessen the resentment of a city that a few decades earlier was still ‘blanche’ (royalist), it was never really an enthusiastic supporter of the empire, apart from in trading circles.Footnote 47 Secondly, even before the Law of 1867, the municipality's opposition to the regime was increasingly overt, to the point where it placed Prefect Maupas in a difficult position. In 1865, Maupas noted that ‘the current municipal council doesn't share the same sentiments [as the prefect] towards the government and the emperor’.Footnote 48 That year, the municipal elections saw the election of 26 candidates from parties opposing Napoléon III, representing the great majority of the municipal council. The trend only became stronger afterwards. Marseille was an early bastion of Republican resistance.Footnote 49 The municipal correspondence reflected this political history. While it occasionally referred to a crisis, the major concerns that could result from such a situation were initially swept under the carpet. In 1872, the mayor, urged by the prefect and the commissaire central to give ‘the most serious attention to the armed hold-ups, attempted murders and thefts that have been multiplying to an alarming extent in Marseille for some time’, simply replied: ‘I can only make a heartfelt appeal to the enthusiasm and dedication of the police and invite them to increase their efforts to prevent such serious incidents, reported each day in the local press, from continuing.’ He added, ‘I recognize, as you do, [the] inadequacy of the numbers [of police personnel] and I will submit this question to the consideration of a municipal council committee.’Footnote 50 The municipal government did not, however, have the resources required for such a reform. Moreover, from its point of view, Marseille's situation was a national issue, as Marseille was not just a town like any other:
we have to manage, with the resources of the municipality alone, not only the needs of the Marseillaise population proper, but those of a multitude of foreigners from all corners of the globe who constantly pass through our city. . .Marseille performs a national role, it is the gateway to France's relationships with the Mediterranean and the East, and the whole country should contribute to the costs this situation creates for the city, just as it contributes to the security of our internal transport network.Footnote 51
The situation of the municipality, and its line of argument, was thus paradoxical. It showed a certain will to autonomy, but in other respects, from the 1890s onwards, it was more oriented towards demands for national support on the grounds of the city's special status. The ‘crisis’ claim was handled differently depending on what the aim was. Sometimes, it was simply conceded, as when acknowledging the reproaches of a Prefecture that wanted to make its authority felt. Besides, it was put forward more forcefully when it was used to present the city as a national symbol that was blighted by crime.
Examining this play of perspectives thus shows that, beyond the question of its reality, the crisis was above all a discourse developed by the various opposing parties to strengthen their own positions, give more weight to their arguments or prompt reforms. The balance of powers between the Ministry, the Prefecture and the municipal government played a determining role in these exchanges. To confirm this impression, we can finally examine the real effects of this discourse on the Marseille ‘crisis’ in the area of police reform.
The claims of a crisis and police reforms in Marseille: a faint echo
The permanence of the ‘crisis’ argument in fact stands in striking contrast to the absence of reform of the Marseille police prior to 1908. Apart from the laws of 1855, 1867 and 1884, which reorganized the administration of the municipal police in major French cities and thus in Marseille as a matter of course, and despite the constant comparisons with the situation of Lyon in the correspondence, the crisis argument did not bring about any major reform, as it might have done for Paris in the seventeenth century or Lyon in 1851.Footnote 52
The creation of a special police unit (commissariat spécial) in charge of immigration to police the ports and railways seems, at first glance, to suggest the opposite. The crisis argument, stressing the increase in traffic and the number of travellers in Marseille, certainly seems to have produced a result in this case.Footnote 53 This special commission, however, encountering the resistance of the local police and the power of the shipping lines, was dismantled in 1870, 10 years after it was created. Its existence was erratic after that: re-established in 1878, it disappeared permanently in 1885.Footnote 54 Following this, the main project for reforming the local police, proposed in 1891 by the deputy to Mayor Barbaroux and based on lengthy arguments claiming the existence of a crisis, was completely ignored.Footnote 55 Its introductory sentence highlights the permanence of the criticisms of the Marseille police and implicitly suggests the ineffectiveness of such complaints: ‘The organization of the police in Marseille has always, but more especially in recent years, been the target of the strongest and often the most justified criticisms.’ The author insisted on this point, multiplying references to the demands that had been reiterated ‘for a long time’ by the municipal governments ‘who have successively occupied the town hall’.Footnote 56 Lastly, the amendment of Article 104 of the Law of 1884, granting Marseille a state-controlled police force from 1908, recapitulated the main themes of the ‘Marseille crisis’ that had been elaborated since the 1860s. The bill presented by Clemenceau on 24 October 1907, who was then president of the Council of Ministers and minister of the interior, stressed the disorganization and inadequacy of the municipal police for handling a situation described as critical: the urban spread, the presence of a large foreign population and the existence of organized crime were all mentioned, in the same way as they had previously been mentioned by the prefects and commissaire centrals.Footnote 57 Several new arguments, however, were offered in support of this proposed law. In the first place, there was an emphasis on the presence of ‘Apaches’ in Marseille, and the organized local gangs called the ‘Nervis’, as an item of concern.Footnote 58 Their activities were described with a certain level of detail. Secondly, social unrest was also presented as a concern. When ‘strikes and demonstrations’ occurred in Marseille, requiring ‘the concentration of most if not all of the available superintendents and officers in the areas of unrest’, the rest of the city was ‘almost entirely abandoned to the exploits and plundering of gangs seeking to do mischief’. Finally, the proposed law alluded to public dissatisfaction with the situation, describing in particular the shopkeepers, storemen and industrialists who had rallied together to present a petition of 26,700 signatures to the Ministry of the Interior via the deputies of the Bouches-du-Rhône.
If it was a crisis that led to the reform of Marseille's police, it must have involved different elements to the ones that had been raised previously without result. Three factors seem to have been decisive. First, the fact that security became a national issue, as the presence of Apache gangs in Marseille, as in Paris, was a national security concern at the time. The attention to the dissatisfaction expressed by public opinion reveals the new awareness on the part of politicians of the issue of public insecurity.Footnote 59 Secondly, was the will of this government to maintain law and order, including in the face of social unrest. We know of Clemenceau's resolve in this area, and his position in relation to social agitation in Marseille was no exception. Finally, Marseille's police had a reputation of weakness at that time.Footnote 60
For the crisis argument to work, the concerns it raises need to be shared by those it is addressed to. When this is not the case, it leads to adjustments that serve as provisional solutions. Thus, over the 50 years or so between 1855 and 1908, the Marseille police underwent many minor alterations. This complex, almost impressionistic, series of alterations produced modifications in district boundaries, reductions or increases in the number of police superintendents and reorganizations of their duties. Solutions were found in emergency situations, which indicates the adaptability and ability to co-operate between the different agencies of law enforcement. In 1875, for example, the commissaire central suggested to the mayor that the offices of the suburban police superintendents could be used as night-time police stations, so that the residents felt safer at night. Keen for his proposal to succeed and anticipating the objection that could be made on financial grounds, he added: ‘In this way, with a very minimal outlay, we could organize a service that, I have no doubt, would enormously improve night policing in the city of Marseille. . .In previous reports, I raised the possibility of using the individual night guards paid by the residents of various districts.’ The police did all they could with the resources at hand to ensure that law and order was maintained.Footnote 61 Another example is the Decree of 7 July 1881 that made the Chamber of Commerce responsible for managing the public port rather than the Compagnie des Docks. The administration of the port was one of the most important functions of this company, still largely dominated in the first half of the twentieth century by trading and shipping circles,Footnote 62 and policing was one of these functions. In 1899, however, the Chamber of Commerce formalized a practice that already existed in private (but non-centralized) law enforcement with the creation of a private ‘brigade’, ‘responsible for the surveillance of the unloading and storage of goods’.Footnote 63 In 1904, this brigade was disbanded, after the accidental murder of a docker by one of its officers, and the surveillance of goods was returned to guards paid by the shipping companies or provided by private enterprise. The cost of this surveillance, which was not very effective in any case, prompted the Chamber to try once again to assemble a unified police service. This was achieved in 1920, with a service that included auxiliary guards paid by the Chamber of Commerce and police officers remunerated by the state.
This case of Marseille allows us to highlight a particular and historical use of the notion of ‘crisis’. The importance of the discourses evoking a ‘crisis’ situation has been stressed here, but the evocation of such a situation is not enough to prove the reality of a crisis or to bring about reform. Marseille appears to have been a city perpetually in a state of crisis, and this perception has not been challenged since that time, even less so in recent years. The situation of the city in the second half of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly complex, given the strong growth that animated it and the major social and economic upheavals that took place there. But the ‘Marseille crisis’ was above all a topos that functioned as a sort of shorthand for referring to the city's difficulties. Running through the various communications according to the interests of their authors, it was designed to attract attention and bring about police reform, which was only realized by the police being placed under state control at the end of this period. There was effectively no reform before 1908. Instead, case-by-case solutions were preferred, indicating the elasticity of the institutions and their ability to come to terms with the necessities of maintaining law and order. The link between crisis and reform, which was far from being systematic in the case of Marseille, must therefore be questioned. Reform takes place when all the players involved share the perception of a crisis. It thus relies not only on a will to act but also and above all upon a shared representation of the faults in the old system and of the advantages to be gained by transforming them.
