mcdonnell - water, north african immigrants and the parisian bidonvilles, 1950s-1960s

Water, North African Immigrants,

and the Parisian Bidonvilles, 1950s – 1960s

Hugh McDonnell

Water. The obsessive fear of all these poor people.— France- Soir, October 30, 1965

Premiering at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, the highly acclaimed and controver-sial Hors- la- loi (Outside the Law) presented the Parisian shantytowns to an inter-national audience for the first time. The film depicts one such bidonville in Paris in the course of the Algerian war as it unfolded in the metropole, as part of the broader narrative of the trajectory of three Algerian brothers from the massacre in the east-ern Algerian town of Sétif in 1945, to the conclusion of the conflict in 1962.1 These informal settlements peppered the outskirts of Paris and other French cities begin-ning in the early post – Second World War years and were not completely removed until the 1970s.

The French historian Muriel Cohen notes that the film was not without historical misrepresentations, however. The most striking of these included the depiction of public water fountains right in the middle of the bidonvilles.2 With-out wishing to be ungenerous about the writer and director Rachid Bouchareb’s achievement, this mistake is symptomatic of a certain trend in the treatment of the history of Algerian migrants in France. Indeed, the history of everyday life of Alge-rian immigrants has been somewhat obscured by attention to the dynamics of high politics and military confrontation between France and Algeria, particularly in the period around the Algerian war of decolonization from 1954 to 1962. Works such as

Radical History Review Issue 116 (Spring 2013) doi 10.1215/01636545- 1965684© 2013 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

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Ali Haroun’s La 7e wilaya: La guerre du FLN en France, 1954 – 1962 (The Seventh Wilaya: The FLN’s War in France, 1954 – 1962) and Linda Amiri’s La bataille de France: La guerre d’Algérie en métropole (The Battle of France: The Algerian War in the Metropole) have made an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the unfolding of the French- Algerian war in France.3 But perhaps the price of this advance in knowledge of this formative period of postwar history has been the side-lining of the daily experience of Algerian immigrants, whose number doubled pre-cisely in these years of conflict.4 This inattention extends to their bidonville coresi-dents from Morocco and Tunisia, who usually arrived later in the 1960s. Likewise, Benjamin Stora’s history of Algerian migrants in France, Ils venaient d’Algérie (They Came from Algeria), to a large extent reads more as an account of the elite level of Algerian nationalist militancy in the metropole, rather than of Algerian immigrants per se.5 Yet the history of the latter is irreducible to the events of the Algerian war, however deeply it was permeated and scarred by it.

It is important to note that shantytowns in France were also populated by Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and indeed French, as well as North African, resi-dents. However, North Africans were disproportionately represented in the most deprived of these settlements. The North African bidonvilles have come to be seen as emblematic of Algerian nationalism in the metropole, but to a remarkable extent their actual quotidian existence that is sidelined in historiography and memory was shaped by water. Contrary to the easy availability of water in Hors- la- loi, Abdel-malek Sayad notes that “it was ordinary things that caused the most terrible anxiet-ies. Above all, water. It was an issue that bordered on obsession, an issue that one finds in statements from that period and also in those of today, in the memories that residents have about it.”6

This was, then, a quite different everyday life than that which contemporary French theorists had in mind. Yet, as we will see, there are points of correspon-dence between the experience of North African immigrants in relation to their daily struggle over water and the intellectual preoccupations of circles ranging from exis-tentialists to phenomenologists to Marxists.

In large part, this article draws from the diaries, interviews, and archives of Monique Hervo, who lived and worked in the La Folie bidonville in Nanterre in the northwestern suburbs of the French capital and was a member of the humanitar-ian organization Service civil international (International Civil Service). I not only draw from this wealth of material but also engage with Hervo’s own guiding com-mitment to justice. Jim House in his discussion of multidirectional memory outlines how this dedication derived in large part from Hervo’s formative life experience as a sixteen- year- old in the spring of 1945, when she helped stretcher returnees from the Buchenwald concentration camp as they arrived in Paris. Due to this experi-ence, wrote Hervo: “I discovered how far hatred of the Other can lead. Since then my existence has not had the same color to it.”7 Hervo also maintained that justice

McDonnell | Parisian Bidonvilles 33

can be an elusive concept and can often slide into an attitude of charitable contempt that undercuts any restitution of dignity. She insisted that what the North African shantytown settlers desired was not to be given charity or to be treated like beggars, but “quite simply the right to live like others.”8

There are two common threads to the article that continually converge — first, an analysis of daily life in the bidonvilles with regard to water and, second, an examination of how water was implicated in questions of justice, in terms of both material distribution and recognition.9 The article begins by examining the material poverty and inadequacy of the settlements in the face of the wet, damp Paris weather and muddy environment and then discussing the experience of the daily supply and use of water in the shantytown home. It then turns to examine the bidonville residents’ experience of being gazed at by French neighbors of the bidonvilles whether because of their muddy appearance or while undergoing the time- consuming and arduous task of fetching water from communal water points. This experience ties into the question of recognition, which is examined in relation to the issue of placement in social hierarchy via the theories of Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Rancière. Finally, a section on water and justice in the bidon-villes restates the case that the conditions of daily life in relation to water were expe-rienced not so much as a hardship but as an injustice. A specific, concrete example of an attempt to redress this perceived injustice through a campaign to install a second water point in the La Folie bidonville is then examined.

The Bidonvilles and the Paris ClimateThe most immediate sense in which bidonville inhabitants originating from the Maghreb encountered water was in relation to the Parisian climate. In the sum-mer months, shacks trapped heat to the extent that the dehydration of babies was a constant concern of resident families.10 Furthermore, water supplies at communal fountains or taps located on the peripheries of the settlements sometimes dried up completely and so made provision of water even more arduous.11 But, of course, coming from a Mediterranean, and often desert, environment, the frequently wet Parisian climate, especially in the winter months, was the more difficult adjustment to make for these residents. True, this sentiment was common to many North Afri-can and other immigrants. But the crucial point here is that the material poverty of shacks in the bidonvilles meant that they were particularly starkly exposed to the wet Parisian weather and wholly inadequate to withstand rain. Not even the naivety of youth could compensate for this sodden squalor — Brahim Benaïcha recalls his shock as a young boy at seeing for the first time the vulnerability to the elements of his new home in the Rue des Pacquerettes in Nanterre.12 Although descriptions of bidonville wretchedness and disorder were often overdrawn or overly generalized, as Neil MacMaster demonstrates, the construction of shacks was usually restricted to materials such as wood, corrugated iron, and tar paper.13 Nor was this very lim-


ited basis for shelter enhanced when roofs were flat.14 That they withstood the kind of scene that Hervo describes is certainly not imaginable: “Torrential rain at cock-crow. The vast waste ground turned into a swamp. Vast expanses of water spread out, shining like so many mirrors. . . . Becoming a stream, it snaked its way between the shacks until the makeshift footpaths disappeared.”15

Rainwater disrupted the inhabitants’ sleep, and it was not uncommon to have to move around several times in the same night to avoid leaking water, which sur-reptitiously circumnavigated attempts to plug gaps in the walls and roof.16 In the winter months it was unremarkable to wake up with ice inside the shack.17 Rain also led to the damage of furniture, which in many cases had to be kept outside during the night to make room to sleep in what were minimal living spaces.18 Leaking water and damp further undermined attempts to reestablish a sense of home, ruining, for instance, the traditional Maghrebian internal painted decoration of the shacks.19 For those inhabitants who worked night shifts, the small inside area to which their children were necessarily confined during daytime rains over school holidays was obviously not conducive to much- needed recuperation from taxing manual labor.20 Nor was the burden of rain merely borne during its actual downfall since rain-water inside the home took several days to sink into the ground.21 Ubiquitous damp exacerbated health problems of the residents, including lung illnesses.22 Ill health had serious economic consequences, all the more so because bosses were often not understanding and bidonville residents were imperfectly integrated into the wel-fare system.23 Less quantifiable, but plausibly more devastating, was the loss of the equilibrium such illnesses entailed for the immigrants’ disposition in terms of their status as workers.24

Hervo describes the immediate aftermath of one particular storm and the flood-ing of dwellings as an exacerbation of fear, depression, exhaustion, and weariness — reactions that no doubt took on a cumulative nature over time and compounded the psychological stresses associated with the general poverty of the bidonvilles.25 Mehdi Lallaoui describes this situation as a seasonally “renewed fight against nature.”26 But this assessment is inexact. For perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this exposure was that the inhabitants were systematically obstructed from tak-ing preventive measures to keep out water. The status of the bidonville as a “non- lieu” (nonplace) meant that extensions or repairs such as coverings, windows, or new roofs were cynically prohibited, fastidiously surveyed, and then dismantled, often to the point of demolishing the entire house.27 This police tactic was an important aspect of the war of attrition against the bidonville residents as a collectivity during the Algerian war of decolonization.28 Hervo described the ordeal of this campaign as “hell” — a conclusion that her powerful account of her time there in these war years only reinforces.29 But just as police surveillance of the bidonvilles continued after the end of that war, so too did the practice of prohibited repairs and punitive


demolitions. The significance of the bidonville as a “nonplace” in relation to water is further examined below.

Most catastrophically, the omnipresent risk and probably the greatest fear of shantytown life — fire — was increased, as faulty or unreliable stoves or heating apparatuses were used to try to ameliorate this unwelcoming, saturated domestic environment. Furthermore, the scarcity of readily available water hindered extin-guishing a fire once it had started.30

The corollary of the Parisian rain was bidonville mud. As Michel Murty and Monique Brienne’s 1968 song “Aux bidonvilles de Nanterre” (“In the Bidonvilles of Nanterre”) expressed it:

And when the rain makes a quagmire, Of the smallest earth path, You’re splattered with mud from head to toe, You’re never clean in Nanterre. [Et quand la pluie fait un bourbier, Du plus petit chemin de terre, On est souillé d’la tête aux pieds, On n’est jamais propr’à Nanterre.]31

Benaïcha recalls being lured into stepping on planks that had been laid down to stop residents from dirtying their shoes. One’s foot disappeared into the mud the moment it was planted, however.32 These conditions give a gauge of the additional difficulty female residents faced when negotiating their path with a baby carriage.33 The problem was exacerbated when trucks had been moving around the settle-ments, leaving ruts that created additional puddles and were difficult to maneuver around. In turn, these paths were often irretrievably obstructed by the mud.

Excessive rain also undermined the structure of bidonville homes, as walls sagged and sank into their muddy foundations.34 The sense of a permanent home was itself undermined by the French authorities’ constant promises to demolish the shantytowns and rehouse their inhabitants in one breath, only to postpone the operation without fail in the next.35 This structural deterioration certainly high-lighted the exclusion from postwar European governments’ priority of guaranteeing comfort and security of domicile.36 This is not to claim that the bidonvilles were the sole relics of the severe postwar French housing crisis. But as the postwar boom, or “les trente glorieuses” (the thirty glorious years), moved into high gear, these settle-ments were becoming radically anachronistic. Indeed, many Parisians were report-edly skeptical about the shantytowns’ mere existence.37 After all, common norms of comfort advanced ceaselessly in the postwar period.38

Testimonies abound of the inability to keep mud either out of living spaces or off the clothes of their residents, especially with regard to children. This was not


a question of negligence or insouciance. A 1957 report by the organization Amitié Nord- africaine de Nanterre (Nanterre Friends of North Africans) referred to the social embarrassment of muddy children at school but insisted that this muddi-ness was wholly predictable given their living environment.39 Furthermore, Sayad describes a sort of overcompensation of trying to keep clean, and women applied themselves unquestioningly to the Sisyphean chore of washing muddied clothes and cleaning the dirtied home.40 As Dalila, the wife of an Algerian factory worker, told Hervo: “I used to live well and now look at me! I’ve changed a lot, you know, because I’m worried all the time. I wash and afterward, when I’ve finished, I say to myself ‘look at me!’ Even though I clean my home constantly, I find that I’m always uncom-fortable where I live. Even if I wash everything really well there’s no way you can even be the slightest bit clean. . . . So I’m ‘tired’ of the bidonville.”41

Supply and Use of Water in the Bidonville HomeThough not all bidonvilles were without running water, for those that were it was one of the biggest discomforts and resented absences in their residents’ lives. Even those shantytowns that had running water were not exempt from the problems associated with lack of sanitation, including vermin and illness.42 In those without running water, relieving oneself in a dug hole outside, helping one’s children who were too young to go the toilet themselves, or washing oneself were distinctly incon-venient and unpleasant experiences.43 Meanwhile, children in particular suffered illnesses resulting from a lack of facilities to wash their hands.44 François Lefort noted the difficulty and inconvenience of washing oneself and the self- thwarting nature of doing so in a settlement thoroughly inundated by mud: “Everything was difficult, even to wash yourself. You couldn’t wash yourself adequately, and we Arabs do not like to be disgusting. But washing yourself without a tap wasn’t washing at all, because with the earth in paths or in the house you were covered with mud in five minutes.”45 The bitter and frustrated tone of such typical complaints stood at odds with the idea that the French authorities needed to promote the importance of hygiene and cleanliness as part of the modernization of the North African women of the bidonvilles.46 There is also a distinct irony that Algerian women often specifi-cally resented the lack of running water and sanitation in the bidonvilles to which they had fled from the actions of the French army in Algeria. For part of its cam-paign there included sending social workers to instruct the local women on skills like using tapped water, the importance of soaps and of bathrooms, and the link between cleanliness and health.47

The communal provision of water was a decisive factor from the very moment families were installed in the shantytowns, as they intentionally settled as near as possible to water points, though this was increasingly unfeasible as the bidonvilles expanded, particularly from the later years of the Algerian war.48 Water points were situated on the edge of settlements and typically compelled residents to trek over


several hundred yards to reach them. Lallaoui refers to much less fortunate immi-grants whose walk to communal water sources was measured in miles.49 According to a representative of the antipoverty organization, the Secours populaire français (French Popular Aid), the placement of the water points here was quite deliberate and reasonable, since any fountain that was placed in the bidonville would quickly be damaged and unusable. This assertion apparently needed no explanation.50 Moreover, the availability of taps and fountains in the bidonvilles was very limited. Indeed, it was entirely usual for a single water point to be shared by thousands of residents. This scarcity was acutely exacerbated when they froze in winter or dried up in the summer. Hervo recounts an example from June 1960 when the ten thou-sand inhabitants of La Folie were left without water.51 Conversely, when freezing temperatures in winter led to frozen taps and fountains, residents attempted to set fire to wood or paper around a fountain and allow it to heat up.52 This effort was not always successful, though, and the lack of a ready supply of water was prolonged, often for days.53 Occasionally, there are accounts of accessing alternative supplies of water by digging wells into the ground or of women accessing water from either the river or from public bathrooms. But these do not seem to have been consistent alternatives.

Collected water was then stored in drums. But many found that if the lids were not securely fastened, children could get into what was already stagnant water and that it could then become even more contaminated by grit or rats.54 Naturally, such water was boiled before being used for tea and cooking, and residents avoided giving it to children at all. For this purpose they preferred to buy bottled water, despite the significant impact this had on their budget. Evian, then, invoked less the eponymous treaty that concluded the French- Algerian war in 1962 and the hope in the future that this represented for the people of Algeria; rather, it was an expensive brand they were compelled to purchase in an environment in which the future was expressly felt to be out of their control.55

In discussing the source and storage of water, one must not overlook that prob-ably the most taxing aspect of bidonville life was the intermediate stage — fetching the water. This “corvée d’eau” (drudgery for water) was indeed “a painful daily necessity.”56 A typical load of ten and a half gallons of water, or between one and three drums of two and a half to five gallons, was pushed on rickety makeshift carts.57 Moreover, the task of fetching water invariably necessitated waiting in a line — a burdensome necessity for Algerian migrant workers who had worked a full and tiring day, usually as manual labor in construction, metalworks, or the auto-mobile industry.58 One resident recalled delaying picking up water, going around midnight, so as to avoid the waiting.59 Hervo was indignant about this daily grind in a letter in February 1963: “What they desire on a day- to- day basis [en temps habituel] is the possibility to supply themselves with water in a way that is less inhu-mane than that which makes fathers wait in a line for more than half an hour in the


evening after returning from work, to fill two lousy [malheureux] drums that they have to heave along with difficulty for more than five hundred meters [or a third of a mile], sometimes over potholes in the bidonville paths.”60 Lines reportedly could even take up to an hour and a half of one’s free time, and sometimes several trips a day were needed. In certain cases, working men had to rearrange, interrupt, or limit their working hours only to supply their homes with water. Sometimes one might consider a trade- off in getting water from a tap farther away, where the line was shorter but whose distance compounded the physical toll of the task. A letter from the residents of La Folie in Nanterre implored a (unspecified) government minister to install a second water point in order to reduce waiting times before the onset of another winter. This request suggests that it was a particularly miserable task at that time of year and, of course, all the more dangerous for children crossing the road with water because of the shorter daylight hours.61

Fetching water could also be detrimental to one’s health, quite apart from the physical exertion it entailed. Lefort pointed to the constant alternation between overheating and getting chilled that was entailed in pushing carts to the water point, waiting in a line in the cold for an hour to reach the tap, and then returning. It was identified as a contributory factor to conditions like asthma and a certain character-istically raspy bidonville voice.62 Hervo documented an Algerian immigrant from Khenchela who formerly worked in a factory before being stricken with bad health. He was suffering from his third bout of tuberculosis at the time of the interview. Because the man’s own health was so bad, his nine- year- old son sometimes went to fetch water despite the anxiety this engendered, since another child had an accident by the fountain: “And the kid was nearly dead, he suffered for six months in the hospital: all for water [à cause de l’eau].”63 The cause of the accident was not speci-fied, though because he says that, as a result, he no longer allowed his son to fetch water at night suggests it was a traffic accident, which was not an infrequent occur-rence. Instead, either he or his wife would now go if they needed water after dark.64 Appeals to various authorities in 1962 for the installation of a second water point in La Folie, some three years before this interview, went unheeded despite the high-lighting of precisely these kinds of tragedies involving children seriously hurt while fetching water there.65

As a particularly cruel example of the gender dimension of the practice of the corvée d’eau, this same interviewee’s wife’s health had in turn suffered from his incapacity. He explained that at one period in which he was ill, his wife took care of the water: “She was all alone and, at that time, she was four months pregnant. Getting so much water while pregnant (the drums are heavy, I have twenty- five- liter [six- and- a- half- gallon] ones), she fell ill one day and had a miscarriage because of water.”66 His emphasis on “because of water” again reiterated the absurdity of trivial everyday chores carrying such consequences. Moreover, one might surmise that the latter misfortune was not isolated, or at least was a common concern, given the high


birthrate and overworking of women in the bidonvilles, assuming that the findings of the 1962 Petit Nanterre bidonville study generalized.67 Another interviewee orig-inating from Morocco recalled making repeated consecutive trips carrying cans of eight to ten and a half gallons of water when she was eight months pregnant. In the meantime, her anxiety was compounded by having to leave her children unsuper-vised by the stove.68

In terms of the sheer physical difficulty and practical inconvenience of get-ting water, one female resident who lived in the bidonville between 1958 and 1966 made an interesting comparison between her experience of collecting water in Alge-ria and thereafter in the bidonville in Paris. She recalled that she had spent her entire life since childhood worrying about water. In Algeria she had carried jugs on her back on mountain paths up to a source. She had expected her burden would be eased in coming to France, “to the country of taps inside houses. But not at all. It’s worse than in Kabylia.” Carrying the standard bidonville drums or milk churns of water in her arms in her new home was in fact even more painful.69 The taps and fountains, then, were the worst of both worlds — neither what might have been conceived of, according to contemporary intellectual fashion, as a certain Heideg-gerian existential authenticity of fetching water from its natural source, nor the con-venience of modern domestic plumbing. Precisely because it was such a difficulty, she recollected that “water was very important for us at that time, it was more pre-cious than oil. Water was our principal worry, more important even than bread. . . . Water has always been the most precious basic consumer good for me because I know and I remember what it has taken out of me [ce qu’elle m’a couté]. It is more precious than oil, than honey, or whatever: it’s our blood, a part of ourselves.”70 One might surmise that the corvée d’eau instilled a practical and instinctual affinity with Marx’s labor theory of value, and that the bidonville residents appreciated the labor congealed in commodities far better than the putatively Marxist local authorities controlled by the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, or PCF) did. It was these, as it happened, that often perpetuated the existence of the bidon-villes more than any generic “colonial state.”71

In Algerian village life, it was commonly the traditional role of women to get water, an exercise that sometimes necessitated walking for miles. We have already seen the examples of the resident of La Folie from Kabylia who found the task far more strenuous physically because of the mud and pregnant women who undertook the chore. Other female inhabitants were exempt or even prohibited from getting water, whether because of their husbands’ insistence that they be spared the strain of such work, or a patriarchal prohibition on their presence in public, or some com-bination of the two. There is no evidence as to whether those women who were pro-hibited from fetching water had undertaken this task in North Africa before moving to France. Nonetheless, women’s role in procuring water would be an interesting point of further research, specifically in the context of theories about patriarchy


being deepened rather than confronted by (neo)colonial contact. In some cases the inability of women to fetch water was simply a question of practicality, such as an unwillingness to leave young children unsupervised given the risk of fire at home. Some of Hervo’s interviewees were asked if the man of the household criticized the amount of water they consumed during his absence from home during work hours, which suggests that this was sometimes a source of discord.

Alleviating the Burden of Fetching WaterThe corvée d’eau was obviously an easier task in the summer months, as the ground hardened and carts were thus easier to maneuver even if potholes remained, but also because children were more available to help as school stopped until the autumn. But even poor weather could be co- opted. For all the inconveniences of rainfall, it also alleviated the necessity of fetching water, since it collected in drums by the house and could be at least used for washing clothes.

Children sometimes found fetching water fun, applying themselves to mak-ing carts and using them in a chore that was experienced more as a game.72 Seem-ingly, they were much less susceptible to the feeling of being looked at in the course of this task, to which adults constantly testified with such a profound sense of shame and humiliation. But if this undertaking was for some children a fond memory of summer days, it was presumably less fondly recollected by children who fetched water before school on freezing winter mornings or in the evening after school at the time their peers would be doing their homework.73 Letters from residents to municipal authorities repeatedly lamented that their children had to fetch water while they were still at work — a task that was not only too strenuous for them but also dangerous because of the necessity of crossing a road.74 Lefort even recalls that the proximity of a water point to a road facilitated the targeting of North African children by cruising pedophiles.75

Another palliative for the experience of getting water was the use of ironic terminology to refer to the carts used to transport the drums of water: “coaches,” “chariots,” “little chariots,” or the names of luxury cars such as Porsche, Lambor-ghini, or Ferrari.76 Walter Benjamin endorsed irony as the “most European of accom-plishments.”77 The bidonville residents’ own irony was as such compounded by the French state’s conceptualization, as Françoise de Barros demonstrates, of Algerian immigrants’ character, behavior, and values as quintessentially un- European, espe-cially in the context of bidonville life. She argues that this extended to the point of instituting “an insurmountable barrier between Algerians and “Europeans.”78

For the families of the bidonvilles, the burden could also be lessened by dividing the work among their members, though this was not an option for the higher proportion of single immigrant men who lived in the settlements. Still, the latter could draw from a broader culture, or rather an “absolute law,” of mutual help in the bidonvilles.79 Inhabitants called upon one another to lend water and


to pick it up in times of need and would alert one another ahead of time about broken taps or fountains. This common effort was surely facilitated by the very con-stitution of the settlements, in that their informal nature and construction from scratch allowed immigrants to reproduce in close proximity extended family, kin, or village networks.80

Services for collecting water also proliferated, which prompts us here to examine the implications of water as a commodity in the bidonville. By 1959 France had the highest per capita consumption in Europe as the postwar boom acceler-ated.81 The commodification of water that the water service put into relief was at once an interesting parallel to, and aberration from, the new France of material plenty. Hence, perhaps, the bemusement of a journalist at the sale of water by the cup at a Sunday market in a Nanterre bidonville.82

From the fragmentary evidence, it is hard to make definitive judgments about the water collection service. Seemingly, prices did not vary according to sea-son or the level of recent rainfall. Examples from Hervo’s interviews indicate that around 1967 – 68 the price per drum of water was typically F 100 and a family could thus spend upward of F 400 a day, though there are some examples of services for F 50 a drum. As a point of comparison, taking figures from 1960, an Algerian laborer typically earned F 196 an hour (compared with the F 240 – 60 earned by a European in the same position).83 The cost of the service was as such not insignificant, even allowing for inflation in the intervening years, and is indicative of how wearisome fetching water was that residents would use the service, at least occasionally. By the same token though, the amount of time and effort expended by the water carriers in servicing each client leads one to need to nuance Sayad’s contention that the unrelenting preoccupation about water that defined shantytown life invariably led to exploitation.84

Nevertheless, residents noted that buying water did make an impact on their limited budgets, and some just used the water service sporadically, when husbands were particularly tired after work, for example. Others who were incapacitated depended on the service, although presumably they were cushioned by the mutual aid described above. Still, the price of supplying water in the Paris bidonville, in terms of percentage of daily income, does not compare with the most egregious examples of the private provision of water in the slums of today’s developing world, as analyzed by Mike Davis. A key distinction was that North African residents in Paris always had recourse to undertaking the corvée d’eau themselves or could enlist the help of family or neighbors. The bidonville water service was a commodification of the service of delivery, rather than of the product of water itself, whose scarcity, as opposed to inconvenience of access for the North Africans in Paris, leads today to huge markups on private sales of public water.85

The water collection service was in fact carried out by various sectors of bidonville society: children earning pocket money, the unemployed, the physically


and mentally disabled, vagabonds, as well as professional water carriers, some of whom worked as such in a continuation of the tradition of this job in the Souf region in southeastern Algeria. This supports the observation made in the Petit Nanterre study that the logic of the internal economy of the shantytown was other than mere accumulation and that it emphasized cohesion and solidarity.86 Without idealizing this state of affairs, for economic exploitation still occurred in bidonville life, it is interesting that the contemporary French Far Right invoked the bidonvilles, espe-cially in Nanterre, as a quintessential symbol of the menace of immigration and the degeneracy of non- European peoples. Yet the bidonvilles’ water service ironically constituted, to a significant extent, the kind of noncapitalist and socially cohesive market economy the Far Right often championed.87

Furthermore, in a refutation of a stereotype of static tradition, professional water carriers often invested in a car to bolster the efficiency of their trade.88 This flexible and innovative approach to their tradition refuted the common image of Algerian migrants as rooted incorrigibly in their anachronistic customs. One also thinks here of the common complaint of the bidonvilles’ French neighbors that the investment in these cars was nonsensical while their owners lived, supposedly through choice, in such poor conditions. These cars were in fact valued in large part for their value in picking up water. Scholars have recently identified aspects of colo-nial practice that were reconstituted in postcolonial Europe. Here one might add Ann Laura Stoler’s demonstration of the inordinate attention colonial authorities paid to boundary zones to police and reaffirm the distinction between European and non- European. In the same way, we can understand the disconcerting effect of Algerian migrants creatively combining perceived traditional and modern norms, appearances, and behavior and, in doing so, displacing received understandings of French and non- French, European and non- European.89

Other residents made arrangements to purchase water from local cafés around the bidonvilles, whose owners sometimes doubled as the landlords of the residents’ shacks, thus compounding rents that were often already quite dispropor-tionate to their degree of comfort and the initial investment in their construction.90 Grocery shops were also a part of the remarkably autarkic bidonville economy, and it is presumably from these that families purchased bottled water. Benaïcha reminds us that one should not overly generalize about those aspects of the bidonvilles’ econ-omy underpinned by solidarity and that these grocery shops were not beyond mark-ing up prices mischievously. Moreover, the eager pushing of credit was as much a problem as a convenience, as illiterate customers were taken advantage of.91 While it is implausible that bottled water alone accounted for the burden of steep monthly grocery debts, its sale was part of this nefarious practice.

On the subject of water and debt, and as an interesting postscript, there are instances of Algerians falling into debt over water after being rehoused from the bidonvilles, either to the cités de transit (transit settlements) or in habitations à


loyer modéré, or HLMs (high- rise public housing projects).92 The water supply had been cut off before advocacy groups stepped in to cover the debts.93 Given the cur-rent intellectual interest in debt, it would be a fruitful avenue of further research to analyze such situations of immigrants becoming indebted, particularly over resources understood as common. It would be interesting to explore the possibili-ties and limitations of the application of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s argu-ment about indebtedness, namely, that the particular virtue of the debtor- creditor relationship is its demystification of the fundamental relations of inequality at the foundation of capitalist society.94

Water and the Gaze in the BidonvillesIn a televised debate with Alain Badiou in May 2010, the French philosopher Alain Finkelkraut reproached Muslims in France over the issue of the veil. French society is defined by “the exchange of looks,” he insisted.95 It is curious that an important formative experience in postcolonial France, with which Finkelkraut is so uneasy, was precisely that of the look. Indeed, the experience of the gaze, whether at the North Africans’ muddy appearance or at their toil tackling the corvée d’eau, was one of the most commented upon aspects of bidonville life, as well as one of the hardest to endure.96

Mud, of course, was the perennial accompaniment to the truth of Benaïcha’s lament that “all around us there was nothing but water.”97 Indeed, this mud was not merely a practical inconvenience but also a social embarrassment or even stigma. Employers complained about muddy shoes and clothes, and bus drivers might refuse admission on this basis. Sayad documents residents who preferred to get up at five o’clock in the morning to walk to work, rather than risk being humiliated by being refused public transport.98 As he describes it, a fundamental concern of the occu-pants was to “get rid of the mark of the bidonville stamped on the body and clothes, of the mud that you carry on your shoes. In a way, mud betrays a social condition, the condition of the person who is ‘out of place,’ just as the mud that one carries onto the bus, the shops and to work or school is out of place.”99 Perhaps mud func-tioned here as an alibi for the looks of contempt French people gave to those mud-died bidonville inhabitants. In an age in which, as Frederick Cooper argues, racial justifications were no longer explicitly serviceable, this mud served as a material disavowal of Fanon’s observation that it is the racist who creates his object.100 To the extent that one had something tangible to point to, rather than refer back to expired racial ideas, the French observer expunged him- or herself of (neo)colonial guilt. One thereby confirmed a practical understanding that one’s superior place was obvious, natural, and unimpeachable rather than arbitrary, prejudicial, and unjust.

The notion of place in the sense of social hierarchy that Sayad brings up here is also useful in understanding the bidonvilles and their relationship to discourse of Frenchness. And if it is true in one sense that mud betrayed the bidonville resi-


dents as out of place, in another their muddy appearance and their fetching water were instrumental to identifying them as very much in their place. The philosopher Rancière’s thought is particularly important in this regard and is examined below.

The most striking and consistent aspect of the accounts of fetching water in the bidonvilles was, likewise, being looked at by neighboring French men and women and the deep sense of shame and humiliation this engendered. It was not necessary for such looks to be unsympathetic to prompt these reactions. Such tes-timonies do not occur in the recollection of fetching other basic commodities like coal, though this presented other sorts of difficulties. This was presumably because of the frequent necessity, and so heightened visibility, of the corvée d’eau and the position of the water points at the borders of the settlements, which precluded any possibility of anonymity.

In November 1965, France- Soir (France Evening) republished a letter from a former resident of La Folie as an article in the context of a series in the newspaper examining bidonvilles in the French capital: “I am writing to you on the subject of your campaign against the bidonvilles. . . . I wouldn’t go back there for all the money in the world, not even for a week. I know all about the corvée d’eau . . . we were subjected to the most contemptuous looks from so- called ‘normal’ neighbors since the tap was located on a main road [une route nationale].”101 Hervo described this situation in even stronger terms as she recollected the terrifying laughter of French neighbors at children fetching water. These laughs “left you frozen with horror. Left you helpless before such hatred.”102 The comparable gaze and sneers of residents of neighboring fully plumbed and clean HLMs might have given the bidonville residents, who had often worked building these new housing complexes, a bitterly underscored instruction in the contemporary intellectual interest in the early Marx’s notion of alienation.103 Not only removed from the product of their labor, they were denigrated for lacking precisely those amenities from which they were removed.

Humiliation was more notable than anger, however. One resident recalled deliberately fetching water at night so as not to be seen. This shame could even take on a corporeal sense, as powerfully described by a Moroccan couple inter-viewed by Hervo. The husband regretted that every time he performed this task he was ashamed, that he would hide his body from view if he could. Indeed, his wife remarked that “he always lowers his head. If he could put it in a hole he’d do so because he is so ashamed [il a trop de honte].”104 Likewise, another testified that he was quite aware that he was lowly, nothing admirable like a doctor or a lawyer. And yet still, he stated, it “makes you suffer when you feel from their look they are always marking a difference . . . that they always manage to make you understand that you’re not of their world.”105

Sayad in his study of the suffering of immigrants analyzes the impact of the increasingly felt sense of distance from the country of origin.106 This also arises in the memoirs of bidonville residents.107 Being gazed at undertaking the corvée d’eau


was in a sense a reminder of this detachment and displacement. For the shame it engendered contrasted utterly from Sartre’s encapsulation of the rising mood of self- empowerment in the non- European world in his “Black Orpheus,” originally published in 1948:

Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you — like me — will feel the shock of being seen. For three thousand years, the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen. . . . Today, these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes; in their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than chinese [sic] lanterns swinging in the wind.108

Sartre in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth reminded his reader that for Marx shame was a revolutionary sentiment. The bidonville residents were heavily involved in the demonstrations on and around October 17, 1961, in which, as it happened, Hervo was one of the very few Europeans to participate.109 A prime objective of these initiatives was the restitution of dignity — incidentally mani-fested in Algerian women’s refusal of water even for children, having been rounded up and sequestered. But this claim to dignity sat ill at ease with the shame described here with regard to carrying water or being seen muddy. This collective disposition seemed better to correspond to the disabling sense of shame Fanon pointed to in his White Skin, Black Masks. Fanon’s advance over the early Sartre’s phenomenological approach was to insist that in the colonial situation the gaze is not merely the gaze of an Other, that there is also a relationship of mastery and superiority and infe-riority, whether real or imagined.110 The testimonies of the bidonville inhabitants immediately recall Fanon’s succinct summary of the lived experience of the black man or woman in a white world: “Shame. Shame and self- contempt. Nausea.”111 Robert J. C. Young explains that from Sartre’s account of how a lack of self- worth is mediated by the look of the Other, Fanon developed an insight into the mechanics of how colonialism was able to produce a sense of inferiority in colonial subjects, how the colonial gaze turned the subject into an object.112 This conclusion is supple-mented by Sayad’s observation that the feeling of humiliation and shame that the gaze induced was, in fact, all the more pronounced in situations of anonymity when it was aimed randomly at any resident as a collective reaction against the bidonville as a whole.113 The important point, however, is that the analysis of the experience of water in the Paris shantytowns here clearly shows that this colonial mechanism was reconstituted in the metropole during and after France’s decolonization.

Fanon also analyzes the importance of appearance in these kinds of phe-nomenological power relations. He describes how the objectification of the black differs from that of the Jew, in that the latter can sometimes pass unnoticed in terms of his or her physical appearance. In terms of appearance, the North African inhabitants of the bidonvilles were doubly marked: in the first instance because of


their Maghrebian appearance and, in the second, because of the public appearance of carrying water or the pervasiveness of the inescapable and distinctive mud and dirt of bidonville life. A water carrier from Souf described the humiliation of being looked at when carrying water, the mocking smiles, the assumption that they were equivalent to worms or rats, and the sense of superiority that permeated the French people’s gazes. But, instructively, he added: “Between us, they’re right. They are on the right side [ils sont du bon coté].”114 This was an unexceptional example of the phenomenon of bidonville inhabitants colluding with the terms of the justification of their disenfranchisement and the corresponding hierarchy between the French and immigrants, Europeans and non- Europeans. Often the extreme sense of “shame of oneself,” as Sayad describes it and which was perpetuated by the corvée d’eau and the exposure to mud, correlated to a distinct sense in which its inhabitants often fully accepted their disenfranchisement in the French social hierarchy. They thus limited their claims to a minimal relief of their material impoverishment and drew short of attacking the pathological constitution of the division between European and non- European, for which Fanon’s work held out hope.

In this regard, the thought of Bourdieu is useful. He argues that the natu-ralization of what he terms doxa has the effect that people living in conditions of hardship or low social rank are prepared to put up with much more than intellec-tuals and academics would tend to credit. Furthermore, Bourdieu argues that the farther one looks down the social order, the greater the general acceptance that society is in fact transparently meritocratic and the more likely one is to accept one’s own exclusion, which is rationalized by one’s own supposed personal deficien-cies and failures. Importantly, however, the internalization of this doxa does not mean that people are well adjusted to and comfortable with their place in the status quo. On the contrary, they often suffer enormously, and this is often projected in self- hatred and self- punishment — an observation supported by testimonies from the bidonvilles.115 Indeed, as one resident put it: “We hid ourselves quite with-out needing anyone else to hide us away . . . We didn’t want to be seen by others because there was nothing to see, nothing worth showing in our world [rien à mon-trer dans notre monde à nous]. We don’t like to be seen. We hate ourselves. Our life is detestable. We hate living.”116

The French neighbors, for their part, he continued, did not like to see them either. It is argued here that there was more to this phenomenon than that, however, and that it is likely that looking at the bidonville residents in this way had a distinct value in terms of identity and placement in the sense of instilling social hierarchy. To gaze at the bidonville inhabitants by the water point or at their muddy appearance as a symbol or embodiment of the bidonville corresponds to Rancière’s arguments about spatialization and fixing people in their place. To extend Rancière’s point and understand the gaze as a form of spatialization entails that it “ensures that people stay at ‘their’ place and cling to their identity.” As part of this argument, we can bor-


row and adapt to the bidonville Rancière’s analysis of the traditional literary trope of traveling down to the hell of popular misery:

Of course, those narratives were an appeal to fear and pity. I would assume, however, that this was not the main point. The first concern was not provoking fear or pity. It was localizing. Horrible as the underworld may be, it is still a world. It is a place where you can find the disease of society, designate and touch it with your fingers. People are pitiful or dreadful but they are there, clinging to their place, identical to themselves — and all the more identical to themselves as they have less self, as their “self” is hardly distinct from the dirt and mud which is “their” place. The descent into hell is not simply a pitiful visit to the land of the poor — it is also a way of making sense, a procedure of meaning. . . .

Frightening as it might seem, it was still reassuring to envisage society as threatened by a power lying beneath it, in the underground. Because the main threat would lie in the discovery that society had no underground: no underground because it had no ground at all. The enigma and threat of democracy is not the army of the shadows in the underground. The enigma and threat of democracy is merely its own indeterminacy. This means that people have no place, that they are not “identical” to themselves: that indeterminacy in fact is a permanent challenge to the rationality of policy and the rationality of social knowledge. Spatialization is a way of conjuring with the challenge of safely grounding reasonable democracy and rational social knowledge.117

Unlike these narratives, the gaze at the bidonville residents was not most typically characterized by pity. But, to draw a parallel, the bidonville inhabitants hauling water or traipsing to work muddied might have been contemptible or fright-ening in their primitiveness. But seeing a bidonville as a non- French alien space or underground was less frightening than not being able to locate the contours of the societal hierarchy between the French and North Africans. And it was certainly less disturbing than the notion that French society’s hierarchy was arbitrary and artificial or even ephemeral — a fear that was all the more present in an age when the certainties of France and Europe’s imperial or hegemonic place in the world were quickly exposed as credulous and complacent. The look to which the mud-died and water- carrying bidonville residents were subjected was, then, the visual equivalent of Fanon’s depiction of the instilling of hierarchy between European and non- European in the use of “pidgin- nigger” or patois French to speak to Antilleans or francophone Africans. This was to express the sentiment that “you’d better keep your place.”118

Justice and the Redress of Water ProblemsThe conditions of the Parisian bidonvilles, and particularly those pertaining to water, were expressly felt by the inhabitants to be an injustice and not simply a hardship.


They were offended by notions that they were charity cases.119 Residents repeatedly objected that such living conditions still existed in the twentieth century.120 French authorities might have continually emphasized the need to instill modern values in North African migrants, but it was in terms of their expectations of modern French civilization that the bidonville residents indicted the French authorities.

Many complained that they had in fact lived better before moving to the Parisian bidonvilles and often pointed to their prior access to running water in the home as an illustrative example. This charge confounds the 1962 Petit Nanterre bidonville study, which insisted that “the material discomfort is harsh, but, apart from the climate, it is no worse than in Algeria or North African hotels [in Paris].”121 The dubious assumption of J. P. Imhoff’s study is that the bidonvilles were a neutral fact without context, or a zero point, to be administered, and suggested that the French authorities were in credit for poor living conditions elsewhere, rather than responsible for the conditions they allowed to proliferate in the shantytowns. Bidon-ville residents were under no such illusions, however, and resented their material indigence, especially in relation to mud and the lack of water. The obligation to live this way was seen as contingent, an unnecessary consequence of French colonialism, whether through de- development in North Africa, the displacement caused by the French war effort in Algeria (particularly the acceleration of displacement in 1958), or the exploitation of their labor to power the postwar boom without making any provision for decent housing for them.

I now turn to examine a specific example of an attempt to redress a felt injus-tice over water with the requests to have a second water point installed by the Rue de la Garenne adjacent to the La Folie bidonville. The issue of the scarcity of water here had been noted as early as July 1957 by Amitié Nord- africaine de Nanterre, which highlighted that the situation had recently only worsened.122 It was at this time that the water issue became much more pressing, given the rapid increase in the number of residents moving into the bidonville, particularly families. Many of these had been driven out of Algeria by the programs of forcing entire populations into resettlement villages. In any case, ninety- three residents of La Folie explained the demographic pressures on the water supply in an appeal to the mayor of Nan-terre for a second water point in November 1962: whereas in 1957 the water point had been shared by twenty- five families and several hundred single workers, it now had to suffice for more than two hundred families and many single workers.123

The logic of the families’ request did not translate into any success, however, despite additional letters to the mayor from parents whose children had been seri-ously injured while fetching water; to the mayor from residents as a collective; to a government minister; to the Water Company of the Paris Suburbs (Compagnie des eaux de la banlieue de Paris); as well as the advocacy of Hervo and the Amitié Nord- africaine de Nanterre on the issue. Three factors here are identified by way of explanation.


First, there was the factor of institutional attitudes to the North African resi-dents. With regard to these, Sayad notes that the younger generation of bidonville inhabitants tended to be less fatalistic about their unsatisfactory living conditions and saw these as the product of a deliberate political will on the part of the French authorities.124 This view was surely overblown in the sense that blatant scorn, like that experienced during the corvée d’eau, did not characterize the decision- making institutions and personnel in any very obvious way. Yet it is nonetheless true that North Africans were often a low priority beyond a certain range of actions to lure the Algerian residents away from the influence of the Front de libération nationale (FLN; National Liberation Front) during the Algerian war.125 Of course, after the conclusion of that conflict in 1962, Algerians were no longer citizens, no longer theo-retically “French like us.” Their subsequent electoral disenfranchisement was seen by the residents themselves to be a reason for their neglect, if scant justification.126 Melissa Byrnes in her study of municipal policy toward North African immigrants in Paris in this period shows that such feelings were correct to a certain extent, though she also suggests that the point can easily be overstated. Policies on these issues also varied considerably across different municipalities. In any case, municipal actions were irreducible to immediate electoral calculation. And even before 1962, munici-pal responsibility for aspects of the welfare of the North African constituents was often denied and passed on.127

Likewise, the intransigence of municipal authorities was not a self- evident given. Byrnes points to the example of a joint municipal Fonds d’action sociale (FAS, Social Action Fund) project to “humanize” the Portuguese bidonvilles in Cham-pigny in the eastern suburbs of Paris, an effort that included the provision of water. Yet “no such projects were launched in the region’s predominantly North African bidonvilles,” she notes.128 Furthermore, there was more of an acceptance that the shantytown was an appropriate environment for North Africans.129 Or, rather, it was a feeling that the shantytowns were more properly to be understood as a North African importation than as a symptom of French negligence.

A second obstacle to redressing the water issue was institutional inertia and conflicts over jurisdictions and protectiveness of municipal powers and budgets. Byrnes notes that the militancy and oppositional culture of PCF- controlled com-munes was often self- defeating in terms of getting things done for North African residents. Indeed, the evident obstinacy of the town hall of Nanterre was unpropi-tious to a speedy and satisfactory resolution to the water problem in La Folie.130 Furthermore, Nanterre town hall corresponds to a general pattern that Byrnes points to with regard to Communist municipalities. Although it was receptive to the problems and complaints of North Africans, if the redress of that complaint necessitated a substantial financial cost, it reflexively resorted to the insistence that the burden of responsibility lay with others, notably the capitalist French state and employers. This appears to have been the case with regard to the question of install-


ing a second water point in La Folie. The Compagnie des eaux de la banlieue de Paris indicated that the installation was possible but technically difficult and costly. As such, it would only be financially viable for the company to undertake the work if the municipality paid for the connection and undertook to pay the rates of water for ordinary consumers, rather than the rate for municipal services. Otherwise, it would be a case of the company’s losing more money the more water it provided. The municipality had refused to countenance this plan, however.131 Interestingly, the ninety- three residents who wrote to the mayor emphasized the moderation of their demand for another water point: “We are not asking for running water for each one of us but simply one water point for ninety- three families.”132 Seemingly, the municipality quite agreed and would not budge on the principle that this moderate use should be reflected in the water company’s tariffs.

A third factor was that both governmental authorities and private support groups increasingly saw the bidonville issue solely in terms of demolishing them and rehousing their residents in regular accommodation.133 Hervo, for instance, received a letter in February 1963 from the deputy mayor of Nanterre concerning a separate issue from the water problem, but its rationale was instructive. Besides his defensive tone, he made it clear that in his estimation it was scandalous that the bidonvilles had been allowed to be built in the first place. The overwhelming priority was to move its inhabitants into proper accommodation. He nodded to the need to alle-viate bidonville residents’ deleterious living conditions in the meantime but then reminded Hervo of the already overwhelming cost of supporting the North Africans in the municipality, suggesting that that initial gesture was perfunctory.134

The interesting point about his response, though, is the implication that mak-ing any material distributive concessions to the bidonvilles would be to accord them an unacceptable recognition, that any material concessions like installing water would grant the settlements a legitimacy that they did not warrant. Indeed, it was less these living conditions that were scandalous and shameful than the fact “that one allows such sordid agglomerations to be constructed so near [à proximité de] to the Eiffel Tower and the Palais de la Défense.”135

The interaction between these strands of the water issue — material distribu-tion and recognition — was a recurring issue. In general, appeals to local authorities to alleviate the difficulty of water supply by installing more fountains fell on deaf ears. Lallaoui points to one example when local authorities refused to supply water to a bidonville because to do so would be to recognize what was an illegal settle-ment.136 Hervo, too, comments on the use of the status of unlawfulness (“non- droit”) to oppose new water fountains, construction, or the installation of sanitary appli-ances.137 Nancy Fraser in her discussion of justice addresses the notion of redistribu-tion and recognition in terms of cross redressing, whereby action according to one criterion can advance justice in terms of the other.138 Conversely, this example of


material impoverishment and lack of recognition might be conceptualized as cross disenfranchisement. If maldistribution stems here from lack of recognition, then the reverse is also true. The refusal to countenance improvements, whether for the supply of water or anything else, perpetuated the disrespect for the bidonville as a collectivity and sustained the notion that it was irredeemable as a space and so by association were its residents. This lack of recognition was expressed in the reluc-tance to move North Africans into HLMs and the use of intermediary cités de tran-sit. The contradictory impulse to include and exclude North Africans, as Amelia H. Lyons identified in French policy in the metropole and Cooper identifies as general to postwar European imperialism, certainly survived the end of the Algerian war in 1962.139 As such, the very slow embrace of these issues suggested that the North African bidonvilles in the French capital — muddy, lacking in adequate shelter and supply of water — were at once intolerable and indispensable.

ConclusionThe particular importance of the issue of water in the Parisian bidonvilles is that it permeated so many aspects of the lives of the North African immigrant residents. This was the case regarding the wet climate; the trials of living in ubiquitous mud; the difficulties of living with wet and damp and their impact in undermining the inhabitants’ homes, both structurally and affectively; the provision of water and absence of plumbing without which child care and the hygiene of the whole family suffered; the humiliation of being perpetually muddied; and the arduous task of fetching water and the experience of being gazed at doing so, which were particu-larly central and resented aspects of shantytown life.

If in all these ways water was in one sense a thoroughly quotidian concern, in another it transcended daily routine to connect to weighty questions of justice, in terms of both material distribution and recognition. Indeed, the very place of these North Africans within a hierarchical French society was at stake, most emblemati-cally through the mechanism of a reconstituted colonial gaze. These two strands of felt injustice interconnected in various ways, and yet their redress was difficult to achieve. Problems of water relating to material impoverishment, such as the lack of a second water point in La Folie, were easier to point to than those pertaining to recognition. Yet claims to rectify them were regularly frustrated for various reasons of institutional inertia, lack of will, or a lack of means. The sense of devaluation and injured dignity involved in being seen muddy or undertaking the corvée d’eau were particularly difficult to rectify, given the lack of an obvious forum in which to do so. Municipal or state authorities could at least consider material claims about water in terms of adequate accommodation or for the provision of water. But they were institutionally incapable of processing grievances of misrecognition that were largely unarticulated before the growth of organized identity politics, broadly conceived.


What is more, this misrecognition was experienced contradictorily as it was felt as a painful injustice, yet at the same time many of its underlying assumptions about hierarchy and place were internalized by the bidonville residents.

Laurent Dubois in his work on today’s French Republic and its minorities points to the Réseau express régional (RER; Regional Express Network) — the rail network that connects the Paris banlieues (suburbs) to the city center — as a key bor-der. Here exclusion is structurally reinscribed through extensive and intrusive iden-tity checks, carried out according to the unspoken criteria of looking “foreign.”140 This might be thought of as a palimpsest.141 For the demolition of the bidonvilles and the construction of the RER in Nanterre are roughly contemporaneous and spa-tially proximate. The examination of water here has allowed us a profitable point of entry to highlight the interconnection between the experience of everyday life and understandings and conditions of justice and injustice. These are vital to the kind of work Dubois undertakes impressively in locating continuities and discontinuities in the history and contemporaneity of those groups who had or have a diminished stake in French society.

NotesUnless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. Particular thanks for comments, suggestions, and assistance to two anonymous reviewers, Anne- Marie Pathé of the Institut de l’histoire du temps présent, Muriel Cohen, Jim House, and Neil MacMaster.1. On the Sétif massacre, see Jean- Louis Planche, Sétif 1945: Histoire d’un massacre annoncé

(Sétif 1945: A Massacre Foretold) (Paris: Perrin, 2006). It should be noted that it was not until June 1999 that the French National Assembly acknowledged that the conflict that had taken place in Algeria was actually a “war.”

2. Muriel Cohen, “Les bidonvilles de Nanterre: Entre ‘trop plein’ de mémoire et silences?” (“The Shantytowns of Nanterre: Between an ‘Overflow’ of Memory and Silence?”), Diasporas, no. 17 (2011): 53n.

3. See Ali Haroun, La 7e wilaya: La guerre du FLN en France, 1954 – 1962 (Paris: Seuil, 1986); and Linda Amiri, La bataille de France: La guerre d’Algérie en métropole (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004).

4. Benjamin Stora, Ils venaient d’Algérie: I’immigration algérienne en France (1912 – 1992) (They Came from Algeria: Algerian Immigration in France [1912 – 1992]) (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 143.

5. See ibid.6. Abdelmalek Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, terre de bidonvilles (An Algerian Nanterre, Land

of Shantytowns) (Paris: Autrement, 1995), 44.7. Quoted in Jim House, “Memory and the Creation of Solidarity during the Decolonization of

Algeria,” Yale French Studies, nos. 118 – 19 (2011): 33 – 34.8. Letter from Hervo, no addressee, February 1, 1963, Dossier général thématique (General

Subjects Folder), Fonds Monique Hervo (Monique Hervo Collection) (hereafter FMH), ARC 3019- 2, 2, Institut de l’histoire du temps présent (Institute of Contemporary History), Paris.

9. An important discussion of these two concepts of justice is Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political- Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso,


2003). For the purposes of this article, I have bracketed Fraser and Honneth’s dispute about the proper conceptualization of the two terms, whereby Fraser’s “perspectival dualism” of redistribution and recognition is opposed to Honneth’s “normative monism” of recognition, which subsumes the category of redistribution.

10. “Bidonvilles: Un médecin parle” (“Shantytowns: A Doctor Speaks”), France Nouvelle, January 26, 1966; Monique Hervo, Chroniques du Bidonville: Nanterre en guerre d’Algérie (Chronicles of the Shantytown: Nanterre during the Algerian War) (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 82.

11. Hervo, Chroniques, 12.12. Brahim Benaïcha, Vivre au paradis: D’une oasis à un bidonville (Living in Paradise: From

an Oasis to a Shantytown) (Paris: Desdée de Brouwer, 1992), 31 – 34.13. Neil MacMaster, “Shantytown Republics: Algerian Migrants and the Culture of Space in the

Bidonvilles,” in Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, ed. Hafid Gafaïti, Patricia M. E. Lorcin, and David G. Troyansky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 74.

14. Hervo, Chroniques, 72.15. Ibid., 86 – 87.16. Monique Hervo and Marie- Ange Charras, Bidonvilles: L’enlisement (Shantytowns: Stuck in

the Mud) (Paris: Maspero, 1971), 79. This work contains transcripts of interviews conducted with the residents of La Folie in 1965 – 68. See also François Lefort, Du bidonville à l’expulsion: Itinéraire d’un jeune Algérien de Nanterre (From the Shantytown to Expulsion: Itinerary of a Young Algerian from Nanterre) (Paris: Centre d’information et d’études sur les migrations méditerranéennes, 1980), 54. Lefort worked with young Algerians when the Algerian war ended, in the Paris suburbs of Nanterre, Colombes, and Gennevilliers. His work is written in the first person, from the perspective of a young Algerian, as a composite representation of his real- life observations.

17. Lefort, Du bidonville à l’expulsion, 53.18. Hervo, Chroniques, 71; Andrée Michel, Les travailleurs algériens en France (Algerian

Workers in France) (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1956), 119 – 20.19. MacMaster, “Shantytown Republics,” 79.20. Hervo and Charras, Bidonvilles, 140.21. Lefort, Du bidonville à l’expulsion, 52.22. Hervo and Charras, Bidonvilles, 91 – 92, 155, 199, 200; “Bidonvilles: Un médecin parle.”23. Amelia H. Lyons, “The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Immigrants in

France and the Politics of Adaptation during Decolonization,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft (History and Society) 32, no. 4 (2006): 494.

24. See Abdelmalek Sayad, “Illness, Suffering, and the Body,” chap. 9 in The Suffering of the Immigrant, trans. David Macey (Malden, MA: Polity, 2004).

25. Hervo, Chroniques, 118. The article “Bidonvilles: Un médecin parle” refers to the psychological strains of bidonville life, and also the difficulties in accurately describing and analyzing them, and as such puts the issue aside.

26. Mehdi Lallaoui, Du bidonville aux HLM (From the Shantytown to the HLM [Public Housing Projects]) (Paris: Syros, 1993), 59.

27. MacMaster, “Shantytown Republics,” 81.28. See Hervo, Chroniques; and Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State

Terror, and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). On the relationship between the police and Algerians in general in Paris, see Emmanuel Blanchard, La police parisienne et les Algériens (1944 – 1962) (The Paris Police and the Algerians [1944 – 1962]) (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2011).


29. Hervo, Chroniques, 207.30. Maurice Josco, “Bidonville” (“Shantytown”), France- Soir (France Evening), October 27,

1965.31. Cited in the unpublished draft version of Cohen, “Les bidonvilles de Nanterre.”32. Benaïcha, Vivre au paradis, 32.33. Hervo, Chroniques, 179.34. Ibid., 46.35. Mohammed Kenzi in his memoir of bidonville life notes that the leveling of the bidonvilles

and the rehousing of their residents was a costly enterprise and as such dissuaded municipalities from undertaking this work. See Mohammed Kenzi, La menthe sauvage (Wild Mint) (Lutry, Switzerland: Jean- Marie Bouchain, 1984), 48.

36. See Leif Jerram, Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

37. Hervo and Charras, Bidonvilles, 67. For the classic work about France’s postwar economic boom and its attendant social effects, see Jean Fourastié, Les trente glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (The Thirty Glorious Years, or The Invisible Revolution from 1946 to 1975) (Paris: Fayard, 1979).

38. Lallaoui, Du bidonville aux HLM, 21.39. Report of the Amitié Nord- africaine de Nanterre (Report of the Nanterre Friends of North

Africans), July 12, 1957, Dossier général chronologique (General Chronological File), FMH, ARC 3019- 2, 1.

40. Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 51.41. Quoted in Hervo and Charras, Bidonvilles, 52 – 53.42. Lallaoui, Du bidonville aux HLM, 56.43. Lefort, Du bidonville à l’expulsion, 53.44. Ibid., 65.45. Ibid., 53.46. See, e.g., the policy prescriptions of J. P. Imhof, “Le ‘bidonville’ du Petit Nanterre” (“The

‘Shantytown’ of Petit Nanterre”), Cahiers Nord- Africains (North African Journal), no. 89 (1962): 48 – 50. Lyons notes that Cahiers Nord- Africains was the most widely circulated journal among social service providers. See Amelia H. Lyons, “Social Welfare, French Muslims, and Decolonization in France: The Case of the Fonds d’action sociale,” Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 1 (2009): 79.

47. MacMaster, “Shantytown Republics,” 82 – 83.48. On bidonville residents’ settlement near water points, see Hervo, Chroniques, 37, 42.49. Lallaoui, Du bidonville aux HLM, 60.50. Secours populaire français to Hervo, October 8, 1962, Dossier général thématique, FMH,

ARC 3019- 2, 2.51. Hervo, Chroniques, 81, 100.52. Lefort, Du bidonville à l’expulsion, 53 – 54.53. Hervo and Charras, Bidonvilles, 138 – 39.54. “Un monde ‘à part’: Les bidonvilles,” Pax Christi France, March 1964. Letters from

residents to the French authorities complain about stagnant water and note its link to illness, contrary to the notion they were ignorant on issues of hygiene. See the letter from a representative group of heads of families to an unspecified minister, n.d. [presumably from late 1962], Dossier général thématique, FMH, ARC 3019- 2, 2.

55. On the feeling of the future being out of control for bidonville residents, see Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 97.


56. Ibid., 48. 57. Ibid., 57; “Bidonvilles: Un médecin parle.”58. On the occupations of Algerians in general, see Michel, Les travailleurs.59. FMH, ARC 3019- 5 – 7, Nanterre. Dossiers des familles (DF) 41.60. Hervo, letter, February 1, 1963.61. Representative group of heads of families to an unspecified minister, [1962].62. Lefort, Du bidonville à l’expulsion, 65.63. Quoted in Hervo and Charras, Bidonvilles, 88 – 89.64. Ibid., 89.65. See the series of documents pertaining to the request for a second water point for the Rue

de la Garenne, July – November 1962, Dossier général thématique, FMH, ARC 3019- 2, 2.66. Hervo and Charras, Bidonvilles, 89.67. Imhof, “Le ‘bidonville’ du Petit Nanterre,” 28, 46.68. Hervo and Charras, Bidonvilles, 202.69. Quoted in Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 52 – 53. 70. Ibid., 53. 71. See, e.g., Olivier Masclet, “Une municipalité communiste face à l’immigration algérienne

et marocaine: Gennevilliers, 1950 – 1972” (“A Communist Municipality Facing Moroccan and Algerian Immigration: Gennevilliers, 1950 – 1972”), Genèses (Geneses), no. 45 (2001): 150 – 63.

72. Benaïcha, Vivre au paradis, 128; Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 55 – 56.73. Lefort, Du bidonville à l’expulsion, 55, 59.74. Ninety- three residents of La Folie to the mayor of Nanterre, November 16, 1962, Dossier

général thématique, FMH, ARC 3019- 2, 2; representative group of heads of families to an unspecified minister, [1962].

75. Lefort, Du bidonville à l’expulsion, 44.76. Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 51, 52.77. Quoted in Richard Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1994), 152.78. Françoise de Barros, “Des ‘Français musulmans d’Algérie’ aux ‘immigrés’: L’importation

de classifications coloniales dans les politiques du logement en France (1950 – )” (“ ‘French Muslims from Algeria’ to ‘Immigrants’: The Importation of Colonial Classifications into Housing Policy in France [1950 – ]”), Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (Proceedings in Research in the Social Sciences) 4, no. 159 (2005): 28.

79. “Entretien avec des syndicalistes algériens” (“Interview with Algerian Trade Unionists”), Vérité Liberté: Cahiers d’information sur la guerre d’Algérie (Truth Liberty: Information Bulletin on the Algerian War), September 1960.

80. MacMaster, “Shantytown Republics,” 89; Benaïcha, Vivre au paradis, 39.81. Rod Kedward, La Vie en Bleu: France and the French since 1900 (London: Allen Lane,

2005), 375.82. “Bidonvilles” (“Shantytowns”), France- Soir, October 30, 1965.83. “Entretien avec des syndicalistes algériens.”84. Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 57.85. See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2007), 144 – 46.86. Imhof, “Le ‘bidonville’ du Petit Nanterre,” 50 – 51.87. See, e.g., “La capitale des bidonvilles” (“The Capital of Shantytowns”), Cahiers

universitaires (University Journal), no. 22 (1965), 22 – 23. This was the journal of the Far Right student group the Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (Federation of Nationalist


Students). Issues are available in the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, Centre d’histoire de l’Europe du vingtième siècle (National Foundation for Political Science, Center for the History of Europe in the Twentieth Century), Fonds Étudiants nationalistes (Nationalist Students Collection), 1, dossier 3. For more on the group and its understanding of Europe and Europeanism, see Hugh McDonnell, “The Journal as a European Space in Post- war Paris: The Fédération des étudiants nationalistes and Cahiers universitaires, 1961 – 1963,” Tijdschrift voor Tijdschriftstudies (Journal for Journal Studies), no. 30 (2011): 94 – 106.

88. Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 55.89. Ann Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the

Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 198 – 237.

90. See Michel, Les travailleurs, 120.91. Benaïcha, Vivre au paradis, 40 – 42.92. The cités de transit were a form of intermediate accommodation into which North Africans

were often moved until they were deemed sufficiently integrated to modern French living standards and values to move into regular accommodation.

93. Note of the Établissement public pour l’aménagement de la région de la Défense about the cités de transit, Dossier général thématique, FMH, ARC 3019- 2, 2; Al djazaïri: Organe de l’émigration algérienne en France et en Europe (Al djazaïri: Organ of Algerian Emigrants in France and Europe), September 3, 1964.

94. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration (Allen, TX: Argo- Navis, 2012), Kindle edition. For an important recent work on debt, see David Graeber, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (New York: Melville House, 2011).

95. See “Badiou- Finkielkraut débat (part 2)” (“Badiou- Finkielkraut Debate [Part 2]”), Dailymotion, May 20, 2010, www.dailymotion.com/video/xddsqw_badiou- finkielkraut - debat- part2_webcam#.

96. Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 43.97. Benaïcha, Vivre au paradis, 34.98. Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 46. 99. Ibid., 45.100. See Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2005); and Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 93.

101. Thérèse Nadji, “Je sors de l’enfer des bidonvilles, voilà ce que c’est” (“I Came out of the Hell of the Shantytowns: This Is What It Is”), France- Soir, November 13, 1965.

102. Hervo, Chroniques, 89.103. See Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).104. Quoted in Hervo and Charras, Bidonvilles, 36.105. Quoted in Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 50.106. Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien.107. See, e.g., Kenzi, La menthe sauvage, 36 – 37.108. Jean- Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” trans. John MacCombie, Massachusetts Review 6, no. 1

(1964 – 65): 13.109. On the evening of October 17, 1961, the Paris police attacked a march of thirty thousand


Algerians in the center of Paris, killing between one and two hundred unarmed demonstrators. See House and MacMaster, Paris 1961.

110. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 138n.111. Ibid., 116.112. Robert J. C. Young, “Preface: Sartre the ‘African Philosopher,’ ” in Colonialism and

Neocolonialism, by Jean- Paul Sartre, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (New York: Routledge, 2006), xiv.

113. Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 43. 114. Quoted in ibid., 54 – 55.115. See Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton, “Doxa and Common Life,” New Left Review,

no. 191 (1992): 111 – 21.116. Quoted in Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 90.117. Jacques Rancière, “Discovering New Worlds: Politics of Travel and Metaphors of Space,” in

Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, ed. George Robertson et al. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 33 – 34.

118. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 34. Likewise, Fanon recalls: “I was told to stay within bounds, to go back where I belonged” (115).

119. Daniel Gordon, “ ‘A Nanterre, ça bouge’: Immigrés et gauchistes en banlieue, 1968 à 1971” (“ ‘It’s Lively at Nanterre’: Immigrants and Leftists in the Suburbs, 1968 – 1971”), Historiens et Géographes (Historians and Geographers), no. 385 (2004): 77, 84.

120. See Nadji, “Je sors de l’enfer des bidonvilles”; and Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 42. Likewise, Benaïcha in Vivre au paradis (39) recalls the incorrect assumption of French people that the bidonville residents refused to countenance progress.

121. Imhof, “ ‘Le “bidonville’ du Petit Nanterre,” 52.122. Report of the Amitié Nord- africaine de Nanterre, July 12, 1957.123. Ninety- three residents of La Folie to the mayor of Nanterre, November 16, 1962.124. Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, 87 – 88, 91.125. See Lyons, “Civilizing Mission”; and Lyons, “Social Welfare.”126. Maurice Josco, “Bidonville” (“Shantytown”), France- Soir, October 30, 1965; Kenzi, La

menthe sauvage, 70.127. Melissa Byrnes, “Political Pawns or Community Members?,” chap. 6 in “French like Us?

Municipal Policies and North African Migrants in the Parisian Banlieues, 1945 – 1975” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2008).

128. Ibid., 184. On the FAS — an umbrella organization for aid and welfare for Algerians during the Algerian war — see Lyons, “Social Welfare.”

129. Byrnes, French like Us?, 6; Hervo, Chroniques, 49.130. See, e.g., Groupe d’étude et d’action pour les Nord- Africains de la région parisienne

(GENARP; Study and Action Group for North Africans in the Paris Region), report on the relations between GENARP and public and semipublic services, n.d. [probably 1961], Dossier général chronologique, FMH, ARC 3019- 2, 1; and deputy mayor of Nanterre to Hervo, February 15, 1963, Dossier général thématique, FMH, ARC 3019- 2, 2.

131. Compagnie des eaux de la banlieue de Paris to M. Douaire, October 29, 1962, Dossier général thématique, FMH, ARC 3019- 2, 2; Compagnie des eaux de la banlieue de Paris to Hervo, n.d. [1962], Dossier général thématique, FMH, ARC 3019- 2, 2.

132. Ninety- three residents of La Folie to the mayor of Nanterre, November 16, 1962.133. See, e.g., bulletin municipal de Nanterre, December 1957, Dossier général chronologique,

FMH, ARC 3019- 2, 1.


134. Deputy mayor of Nanterre to Hervo, February 15, 1963.135. Ibid.136. Lallaoui, Du bidonville aux HLM, 56.137. Hervo, Chroniques, 18.138. See Nancy Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution,

Recognition, and Participation,” in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 7 – 109.

139. See Lyons, “Civilizing Mission”; Lyons, “Social Welfare”; and Cooper, Colonialism in Question.

140. Laurent Dubois, “La République métissée: Citizenship, Colonialism, and the Borders of French History,” Cultural Studies 14, no.1 (2000): 17.

141. See Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

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