The proposed paper will examine the application of French criminal procedures in colonial Algeria, with a focus on the magistrates responsible for investigating a 1901 anti-colonial revolt in the village of Margueritte. Drawing on the voluminous judicial instruction dossier and contemporary debates among jurists and policymakers about the applicability to ...
(Show more)The proposed paper will examine the application of French criminal procedures in colonial Algeria, with a focus on the magistrates responsible for investigating a 1901 anti-colonial revolt in the village of Margueritte. Drawing on the voluminous judicial instruction dossier and contemporary debates among jurists and policymakers about the applicability to Algeria of the metropolitan code of criminal procedure, I will consider the role of the juge d’instruction (investigating magistrate) and his colleagues in the parquet (court) of Blida in the unfolding of the “monster” case.
The juge d’instruction is the lynchpin of the modern French criminal justice system. “Local” officials affiliated with regional courts, the role of juges d’instruction is to gather evidence, hear witnesses, depose suspects, and determine whether to refer a case for trial. To that end, they enjoy extensive powers to search private property and to arrest and incarcerate suspects. And yet, despite extensive research on the judicial professions in nineteenth-century France and on the organization of criminal justice in the French colonies, we know almost nothing about the juges d’instruction of French Algeria. The first part of the proposed paper will, therefore, reconstruct the careers of the magistrates involved in the Margueritte case, with the goal of comparing their professional trajectories with those of their better-known metropolitan colleagues. The second part of the paper will turn to the interrogations of hundreds of suspected “insurgents” and witnesses interviewed in the months following the April 26, 1901 revolt. The official reports on these interrogations provide an invaluable window into the interrogation process and the role of language barriers, racial prejudices, and social hierarchies in shaping the operation of colonial justice. By comparing magistrates’ interactions with and attitudes towards Algerian colonial subjects and European settlers, we can begin to establish a portrait of a critical, but as-yet little understood part of the colonial judiciary and an understanding of the role of the magistrature in constituting the colonial state in French Algeria.
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