Ah, the 1950s !

Submitted by C. Paul Barreira (Australia), Dec 29, 2015 at 01:41

In chapter six of Maigret's Memoirs, we learn the following:

Is it generally known that there is one squad [of police] solely concerned with the two to three hundred thousand North Africans, Portuguese and Algerians who live in the outskirts of the 20th arrondissement, who camp out there, one might rather say, scarcely knowing our language or not knowing it at all, obeying other laws, other reflexes than our own? ...Many of then ask nothing better than to be assimilated, and our difficulties don;t come from them, but there are some who, whether as a group or as individuals, keep deliberately on the fringe and lead their mysterious lives, unnoticed by the crowd around them.

27 September 1950

The current situation differs in some ways but the question is an empirical one: by how much?

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