French political deportees and urban poor were exported to Algeria as penal colonists

Evidence

The discrepant and confused accounts of the numbers of colon who left for Algeria between 1848 and 1851—and the conditions under which they did so—is itself instructive. By some counts, 14,000 “Parisian workers” were sent by decree in September 1848, followed by 3,000 “republicans” after the 1851 coup d’état of Louis Napoleon. “Disorder” in Paris led to 450 political deportations to the Algerian penal colony of Lambese, and deportations to at least six former colonies agricoles (agricultural colonies) newly converted into colonies penitentiaires (penal colonies). Thousands were recruited as well under an intensive colonization program to make colon out of a toxic mix of unprepared urban poor, alternately referred to as the unemployed (les sans-travail), the insurgent (les révoltés), and the rootless and dispossessed (les déracinés). How many of those from Mettray were included within the intensive deportation-cum-colonization project is hard to say. But what this amalgamation of colonizing projects underscores is the extent to which colonies agricoles, colonies penitentiaires, and European colonial settlement were conceptually and politically tethered projects. This was a carceral archipelago of confinements, detentions, and cordoned-off space that cut across the imperial globe. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 767

Categorization

• QUESTION: The unstable, contradictory archival numbers on deportation volumes and conditions point toward the epistemic anxiety theme the reader is tracking in colonial archives.
• XREF: The “conceptually and politically tethered” conflation of agricultural relief, penal colonies, and settler emigration parallels the reader’s interest in how empire, welfare, and carceral projects fused in one colonial logic.