Susan J. Terrio

New Barbarians at the Gates of Paris?: Prosecuting Undocumented Minors in the Juvenile Court—The Problem of the 'Petits Roumains'

This article centers on the unaccompanied, undocumented minors who are arrested and subject to prosecution for non-violent offenses at the Paris juvenile court in disproportionate numbers. It illustrates the processes whereby public authorities distinguish between the criminal vagrant whose agency and choice makes him more accountable and liable for punishment and the victimized child whose vulnerability and manipulation by others makes him less responsible and eligible for assistance. The article examines the current debates surrounding children and agency within anthropology and asks what the French case adds to our understanding of the changing notions of childhood as well as the newly porous boundaries between the child and the adult.

Reinventing the Republic: Gender, Migration, and Citizenship by Catherine Raissiguier

In her excellent book on the sans papiers movement in contemporary France, Catherine Raissiguier examines French understandings of citizenship, national belonging, and equality through the lens of gender activism and immigration policy. To analyze the increasingly restrictive immigration policies that produced a 1996 police raid on undocumented African families who sought sanctuary in a Parisian church, Raissiguier uses the concept of “impossible subjects.” She borrows the term from historian Mae Ngai’s brilliant book of the same name. In that book, Ngai charts the historical origins of illegal immigration in American law and society and links its emergence as a central problem in 20th-century US policymaking to culturally inflected ideas about race, nation, and polity. In an echo of Ngai’s work, Raissiguier explores the evolution of French law on immigration but limits her purview to the post–World War II period. She draws on the multiple sources available to historians—legal, journalistic, political, and social scientific texts—but also includes in-depth ethnographic interviews to track the sans papiers movement. Her focus is on the working women, and she places their politics, individual subjectivities, and migration stories at its core. This focus is a necessary corrective to the official accounts, which mask the crucial role played by women activists. It is also an important and original contribution to current work on immigration and citizenship on France. Raissiguier argues convincingly that the sans papiers’ decision to become visible by directly confronting French authorities despite the risk of deportation is a radical form of politics. In their collective actions, they use the language of human and civil rights to position themselves as rightful subjects under French law even as they highlight the contradictions at the heart of the French republican model. Their social, political, and economic vulnerabilities belie the universalist claims of French politicians and jurists that France is a champion and exemplar of human rights. The women’s actions also challenge the dominance of the male leadership that attempts to speak for and about them. Their sheer persistence in organizing marches, hunger strikes, and public demonstrations while juggling work, family, and home life, as well as their refusal to be pushed aside either by African male elders

Silence in the Court and Testimony Behind Bars Juvenile Defendants and the French Judicial System

This article addresses salient questions in literature and anthropology centring on the politics of writing, readership and representation in a context marked by highly charged public debates on the nature, causes and perpetrators of youth violence. It critically examines and juxtaposes two sets of texts, one set produced by incarcerated youths in a writing workshop at a juvenile detention facility in Bordeaux, and the other taken from court transcripts at juvenile trials in the Paris Palace of Justice. The workshop texts, written under the guidance of novelist François Bon, allow rare access to youths’ familial milieux and to their understanding of their own place in a cycle of marginality. The texts taken from court trials privilege the voices of prosecutors, judges and attorneys who speak for, about and over the voices of young defendants. The texts produced by juvenile inmates are confronted with and speak to the plight of the young defendants.

Craft, class and chocolate: using cultural anthropology as a critical resource in the study of French civilization

My introduction to French language and civilization began in 1958 when the local school principal persuaded a charming and energetic French war bride who lived in our town to teach her native language to the primary school classes. From the first lesson of Madame Smith I was smitten bv the beauty of the language and bv the allure of things French, in particular the cultural differences between her native land and mine. I continued to enrol in