Decay and Afterlife: Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900

Naomi Davidson (2012), and Felix Germain and Silyane Larcher (2018), to name but a few, have pointed out postcolonial legacies still apparent in French politics, culture, and society. Parkash cites many of these scholars and is clearly in conversation with them. In framing the book as an expos e of hidden imperial legacies, Prakash sets up a rhetorical strawman he does not need. The strength of the book is not in proving that empire molded Paris. We know it did. Rather, the book’s innovation is its ability to move between scales, its attention to the local, the national, and the imperial. Empire on the Seine demonstrates that the Paris police sought to control North Africans in particular, targeted ways and shows how the political policing of Algerians during the Algerian War built surveillance goals into ostensibly nonpolice services. The most exciting argument of the book is this reframing of what we mean when we talk about policing. Prakash discusses police officials and the police as an institution, but he also includes an analysis of social services, urban planners, and building managers. The ghosts of empire, Prakash points out, are apparent in France today in the police treatment of sensible zones, and in the rhetoric around the blight of bidonvilles and public housing units (HLM). The book builds on the granular archival work of Emmanuel Blanchard’s La police parisienne et les Alg eriens (2011) to bring important new insights to the study of policing minorities in Paris and would be of interest to students and scholars of the French Empire, Paris, and (post)colonial policing. Pushing forward conversations about the scope and face of the police, Empire on the Seine invites scholars to rethink mechanisms of state power and forms of state violence.