Water, North African Immigrants, and the Parisian Bidonvilles, 1950s – 1960s Hugh McDonnell Water. The obsessive fear of all these poor people. — France-Soir , October 30, 1965 P remiering at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, the highly acclaimed and controver- sial Hors-la-loi ( Outside the Law) presented the Parisian shantytowns to an inter- national audience for the first time. The film depicts one such bidonville in Paris in the course of the Algerian war as it unfolded in the metropole, as part of the broader narrative of the trajectory of three Algerian brothers from the massacre in the east- ern Algerian town of Sétif in 1945, to the conclusion of the conflict in 1962. 1 These informal settlements peppered the outskirts of Paris and other French cities begin- ning in the early post – Second World War years and were not completely removed until the 1970s. The French historian Muriel Cohen notes that the film was not without historical misrepresentations, however. The most striking of these included the depiction of public water fountains right in the middle of the bidonvilles. 2 With- out wishing to be ungenerous about the writer and director Rachid Bouchareb’s achievement, this mistake is symptomatic of a certain trend in the treatment of the history of Algerian migrants in France. Indeed, the history of everyday life of Alge- rian immigrants has been somewhat obscured by attention to the dynamics of high politics and military confrontation between France and Algeria, particularly in the period around the Algerian war of decolonization from 1954 to 1962. Works such as Radical History Review Issue 116 (Spring 2013) DOI 10.1215/01636545-1965684 © 2013 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. 31