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In September 1887, a stalwart Figaro reporter broke the news that high-ranking officials of the Paris Police were in possession of cardholders ( portecartes) fashioned from the cadaver of Henri Pranzini, a migrant from Egypt recently executed in Paris for triple homicide. The ensuing scandal opened a unique perspective on the interplay between the French colonial imagination and the “security discourse” that became prevalent in Paris during the late nineteenth century. At a pivotal moment in the history of republican expansionism, doctors, social theorists, police investigators, and newspapermen competed to articulate the threat posed by Pranzini, a veteran of imperial wars in Africa and central Asia whom they racialized as a “Levantine” and a “rastaquouère” (social upstart). Their investigations produced a new criminal archetype, that of the shapeshifting colonial antihero who returns to menace the mother country. This article proposes the concept of “imperial insecurity” to explore how colonial adventurism reverberated back to Paris in real and imagined forms of violent criminality. Mention of Pranzini in parliamentary debates suggests that colonial migration became fodder for proponents of tighter immigration restrictions at the outset of the republican colonial project in the late nineteenth century.