This overview charts the evolution from the 1950s to the 1980s of the French detective or crime film (le polar). Proto-noir films shot before World War II had been primarily centred on Paris, a trend furthered in post-war works which regularly conjoined seedy Pigalle and the glamorous Champs-Elysées as two sides of the same coin. From Jacques Becker (Casque d’or, 1952; Grisbi, 1954) to Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Doulos, 1962; Le Samouraï, 1967) via Jules Dassin (Rififi, 1955), a gradual shift toward suburban locales takes place around new genre conventions and motifs. The suburbs variously lend themselves to hideouts, shootouts and executions; to the sale of all things illegal or counterfeit; to the gloomy atmospherics of railway tracks, deserted roadways and abandoned villas. A subsequent generation of directors would exploit the multi-faceted social and geographical reality of the modern housing estates that encroached upon traditional allotments of single-family homes and pockets of suburban wasteland; Henri Verneuil’s mainstream caper Mélodie en sous-sol (1963) thus portrays a disorientatingly mutating Sarcelles. Most decisively, Alain Corneau’s naturalistic noirs Série noire (1979) and Choix des armes(1981) add a sociological dimension to the genre by broaching questions of violence, alienation and devastation.

As state involvement in the provision of social and medical welfare grew during the twentieth-century, it was often seen as antagonistic to the work of voluntary associations which had pioneered many different types of welfare provision. Pat Thane argues that such assumptions are a false dichotomy and develops a case study of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (NCUM), founded in 1918, as a means through which to assess the changing landscape of twentieth-century social welfare and the relationship between voluntary action and public sector welfare. The work of organizations like the NCUM actually intensified with the growth of state welfare provision from the inter-war years onwards; a pattern which was duplicated across the welfare sector more generally Thane contests political arguments that the ‘big society’ should replace the supposed ‘stranglehold’ of state welfare by highlighting the extent to which the historical relationship between voluntary associations and the state has actually been creative and mutually sustaining.

This concluding chapter offers a theoretical reading of the drive to secure within the terms of Lacanian desire. It asks whether there is something thrilling and yet masochistic about the Sisyphean pursuit of the unobtainable condition known as security. Given that security pursues an impossible immortality, is it indicative of a fantasy of control and order – rather than a teleological, goal-oriented pursuit? And, as fantasy, is this endeavour structured around an eternal recurrence and repetition, rather than the pursuit and possession of a discrete objective? The chapter suggests that the security edifice is pathology, caused by the Death of God and the resurgent salience of death anxiety in a society bereft of promises to immortality.

This chapter explores the relationship between visibility, memorialisation and security through case studies of the London bombing, the invasion of Afghanistan by coalition troops, and the situation of post-terrorist memorials in tourism economies. It analyses how some invisible (underground) bombsites are made visible during memorialisation to expunge their morbid resonance, whereas other invisible deaths (those of Afghanis) remain inconspicuous given their situation in political structures of grievability. Finally, the chapter explores the integration of post-terrorist memorials into tourist agendas and the function of the tourist gaze as a signifying tool which can reconstitute formerly traumatic sites.