Description
Book SynopsisThe surveillance of immigrants and potential terrorists preoccupies leaders throughout the industrialized world. Yet these concerns are hardly new. Policing Paris examines a critical moment in the history of immigration control and political...
Trade Review"After the First World War France replaced the United States as the leading destination for immigrants. Working through voluminous police records designed to identify and control hundreds of thousands of foreigners in Paris, Clifford Rosenberg reconstructs not only how a regime of intensive immigration surveillance was assembled but also how this regime came to serve as a mechanism for defining distinctions between citizen and foreigner, and between French and colonial. In Rosenberg's subtle and careful treatment, the policing of foreigners in the interwar years becomes the crucible less for Vichy than for the determination of identities in the modern welfare state." -- Michael Miller, University of Miami
"Drawing on important files in Parisian police records, Clifford Rosenberg argues that the elaboration of record keeping about and control of immigrants in Paris in the interwar years was the first act in establishing the French welfare state. Policing Paris integrates current discussions of the bad treatment of immigrants from the colonial empire into a larger tradition of the reception of European foreign workers in France. Rosenberg gives us a nuanced and sophisticated treatment of the how and when of French racism against people from the colonies." -- Herman Lebovics, State University of New York at Stony Brook, author of Mona Lisa's Escort: André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture
"Policing Paris displays an original and innovative way of approching immigration policy and French colonial power and practice through local history. This important book was very well researched."
"This is political, social, and institutional history at its very best. Clifford Rosenberg transforms what is essentially a French story into a book that engages citizenship, the welfare state, immigration, and nationality in a global context. How the category of immigrant came to be defined, the legal rights (and lack thereof) that have attached to the particular status of foreigner, and the reasons for which immigrants have assimilated or not into their new homes are once again immediately relevant in Europe and the United States." -- Alice L. Conklin, The Ohio State University
