Biribi: The Penal Colonies of the French Army

Biribi is nowadays a forgotten and incomprehensible word for most people in France. But it was a well-known name in the late nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth century. For every young Frenchmen who had to give two or three years of his life for conscription, Biribi was synonymous with hell on earth and symbolic of the French state’s military oppression. In fact, Biribi was the generic name given to the diverse disciplinary or penitentiary institutions of the French army: discipline sections, African Battalions, penal camps and others. These numerous structures had two common points: their localization in North Africa and their reputation as an awful and barbarous regime. Since 1890 (date of the publication of the novel Biribi by Georges Darien) to the eve of World War II, Biribi has become a major issue of the French popular culture and of our social imaginary: a target for the antimilitarist movement, an exotic theme for dime novels, story papers, popular songs and newspaper reports, a sign of pride and glory in the culture of the underworld (all famous gangsters were veterans of the African battalion). This talk will present the organization of this forgotten system, the making of its imaginary and the social and cultural meaning of its popularity.
Professor Kalifa’s research is devoted to the representations of crime and police in modern France as well as mass culture and the process of social control. He is the author of numerous books: L’Encre et le sang: Récits de crimes et société à la Belle Epoque (Fayard, 1995) ; Naissance de la police privée: Détectives et agences de recherches en France, 1832-1942 (Plon, 2000), La Culture de masse en France, 1860-1930 (La Découverte, 2001), Vidal le tueur de femmes: Une biographie sociale, avec Ph. Artières (Perrin, 2001), Crime et Culture au XIXe siècle (Perrin, 2005), and the editor or co-editor of Les Exclus en Europe (L’Atelier, 1999); Histoire et archives de soi (Sociétés & Représentations, 2002); Imaginaire et sensibilités au XIXe siècle (Créaphis, 2005); L’Enquête judiciaire en Europe au XIXe siècle (Créaphis, 2007), Le Commissaire de police au XIXe siècle (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2008); and Métiers de police, XVIIIe-XXe siècles (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008).

Sponsored by the Series in Contemporary Literature, the Department of History, and the Department of French and Italian.

jwil 02.x.2009