With this ample and rich monograph, the historian Laurence Montel proposes to carry out the long-term archeology of the dark side of the Phocaean city. Starting from judicial archives from the beginning of the 19th century, and by retracing in a subtle alternation of facts and the discourses (political, journalistic, literary) that they produced, it shows how the image of Marseille became that of a “ French Chicago”, first by the industrial development of which it was the scene, then by its “dangerous classes” and finally the emergence of a corrupting underworld to the point that the city was placed under state supervision in 1939 . A formidable and very fine undertaking of deconstruction of our representations through historical analysis.
Laurence Montel | Marseille, “capital of crime”? The roots of an imagination. Champ Vallon, coll. “The public thing”, 416 p., €27
Marseille, “capital of crime”? achieves the feat – unlike so many other books which have fallen into the trap – of neither being a plea for this city that we like to point the finger at (because for the author it is not a question of “save Marseille” from its demons, and from the contemptuous Parisian gaze…) nor a complacent dive into the depths of the port city (because the researcher always keeps a cool head, neither tears nor laughter, she has notably stripped down the magnificent archives departmental roads of Bouches-du-Rhône without trembling, which is no easy feat). Likewise, Laurence Montel knows how to keep the present at a distance, and if she evokes the narcocity in the introduction, it is to better underline the need to introduce historical depth into our view of the lives of its inhabitants. Likewise, the historian recognizes the importance of social imaginations, dear to the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis and mobilized by the historian Dominique Kalifa in particular, but she moderates it by taking up the analyzes of the great historian of the Occupation Pierre Laborie ( 1936-2017) when he “ states that the construction of social representations proceeds through interference between structural data, a background of motifs and interrelations inherited from past times, accumulated, variously maintained, reinvested and remodeled, and conjunctural data, which result from the reception of facts in the ephemeral time of the present and their interpretation in a perspective oriented towards the future ».
This beautiful work therefore follows a chronological plan, it begins at the end of the first decade of the 19th century and ends in what mediatically constituted the high point of a criminal Marseille, the 1930s, with the symbol of its profound political disruption, a terrible news item: the death of 73 people during the fire in the Nouvelles Galeries on October 28, 1938 – the left-wing municipality was accused of being incompetent and corrupt; in 1939, the decision was taken in high places to put the governance of Marseille under the supervision of the State. The interwar period was the culmination of the fall of the city which, at the end of the Empire, appeared in comparison to Paris as an almost idyllic place.
Fire at the Nouvelles Galeries (Marseille, 1938) © CC0/WikiCommons
Laurence Montel, based on an analysis of judicial files crossed with that of the local press (The Semaphore et The Little Marseillaisin particular), looks back on a series of emblematic cases, notably that of the “stock market bandits” in 1930 and, even more spectacular, the attack on the “gold train” in 1938, combining armed attack and train looting. “ On September 22 at 1:40 a.m., courier train 4818 left Saint-Charles station towards Avignon under the control of five railway workers. About two hundred meters from Saint-Barthélemy, the train stopped unexpectedly and a dozen men, dressed in overalls and hooded, stormed it, strafing it with revolver shots. Once on board, some keep the railway workers at bay while others head towards the van containing the valuable packages. They shoot the employee responsible for their surveillance, who lies down and plays dead, then without hesitation seize three weighted baskets which they load into a van. A whistle sounds the reminder. Everyone leaves the scene, leaving behind an injured railway worker with numerous shell casings and a woman’s stocking that served as a hood. In less than five minutes, the criminals seized twenty postal packages, each containing a gold ingot, coming from the Belgian Congo and destined for Belgium. » Marseille is in fact, in this first twentieth century, the gateway from the colonies to their metropolises. Between 1870 and 1931, maritime traffic tripled and passenger traffic quintupled. Port of embarkation to Africa, port of call for several decades towards the Americas, notably for Italian migrants, Marseille is at the center of migration movements, that of the vast majority of young single men, whose presence generates games, prostitution and trafficking of all kinds (including opium), which, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, were the subject of great tolerance, even lucrative complacency for elected officials and other notables.
The crucial period in this construction of Marseille as a capital of crime is that, insists the historian, which extends from 1860 to 1910 – to the point that in 1908 the State, worried about the local situation, decided to take control of the municipal police. It is difficult to describe the picture that Laurence Montel paints as it is so abundant: one figure can nevertheless give an idea of it, that of the nerves (the nerve, in French), the young “typical” Marseillais. This character, who can only be assimilated inaccurately to the Parisian Apache, spans the period. It then emerges that Marseille is described as a court of miracles without thieves, a city without slums. The word appears in the newspaper The Semaphore to qualify popular male youth. From the pen of a critic, Gustave Bénédit, returned from Paris, after having failed to become a figure on the opera scene: “ The nerve moves the shoulders forward and communicates a perpetual swing to his arms which are completed by two constantly clenched fists. »
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Travel literature takes hold of it, and here comes the nerd, like the “guy from the North”, “ an authentic specimen of the people, who walks with his cap askew, a flower in his mouth, with a very short yellow jacket, extremely tight pants at the top, which well represents the boiling south “. This lazy fighter does not practice any profession. Over the years, the image of the nerd, “ beautiful indolent idle “, is tarnished, in particular after the Commune of Marseille of which he was an active element: he is thus described as “ republican of bad character, scum of the people and monster with a human face, worthy son of Marat », soon supplanted by the quecou, a dangerous criminal. The thieves, thanks to the development of consumption, descend into theft, this form of delinquency takes on a massive dimension. Property crimes exploded in 1880. “ Money is always stolen, underlines the historian, securities, edibles and materials such as rope, coffee, coal, grains, copper, lead, wood. This is nothing new. But certain targets show unprecedented refinement, the diffusion of ready-to-wear, new materials and exotic products: stockings, fine lingerie, costumes, hats, matches, rubber fabric coupons, telephone cables, dates. »
Of course, it was the 1930s which were the most spectacular in terms of the scene of crime, because theft, trafficking, corruption, pimping, clandestine gambling took extreme forms there; from Paris, we have looked at Marseille for a century with concern but also with a form of contempt which hides jealousy – the historian has very beautiful developments on this view from the outside.
It remains that the major contribution of Laurence Montel’s book is to have managed to place the criminal imagination of the Phocaean city in the long term; each new Minister of the Interior would do well to have on his desk, Place Beauvau, a copy of this fine work: without a doubt, he would look differently at Marseille and its minos.
