The repression of immigration infractions in the French criminal courts (1880-1938)

International audienceIn the 19th century, immigration offenses have a mainly ex post immigration regulatory function, mostly punishing vagrants and beggars, whose integration is considered a failure. The apparition of specific foreigner measures at the end of the 1880’s, the non-respect of which soon leads to a trial in a tribunal correctionnel, does not however fundamentally changes the “repressive regime” inherited from the 19th century. The discrepancy appearing during the 1880’s-1890’s is less related to repression than to legal order. Immigration becomes a question strictly related to the sovereign power and falls under the administration’s jurisdiction only, without any legal guarantees. This gradual empowerment of foreigners as a legal category, following a process neither unquestioned nor linear, finally leads to the 1938 decree-laws. These decree-laws designed a worsened repressive regime towards foreigners deemed “undesirable” and therefore created a specific law for foreigners which is not being derogatory from the common law in the strict sense of the term but could be labelled as an “exceptional common law”. The blurring of borders within the political order that can be seen in 1938 shows how justice can be at the boundary between the law that ties and limits power and the concrete wielding of the State’s strength