La manifestation la plus réprimée de l’histoire – Le Jeune Indépendant

On the night of October 17, 1961 in Paris, the Seine, a once mythical river for writers and poets, became the silent tomb of hundreds of Algerians living in France who came out to peacefully demand the right to dignity. Sixty-four years later, the memory of this tragedy, signed by the sinister Police Prefect Maurice Papon, with the discharge of the highest French authorities, still haunts the conscience of official France.

What was supposed to be a peaceful march against injustice turned into carnage decided at the highest level of the state. A state crime coldly executed by the Parisian police, under the orders of a prefect known for his collaborationist past with the Vichy regime and subsequently assassin of the Algerians when he officiated in Constantine.

This Tuesday in October, official France, which wanted to be the “homeland of human rights”, revealed in broad daylight the brutal face of its ending colonial empire. Because this night of blood was not a “slip”, but rather the continuity of a system based on the negation of the other, on the contempt of a people who had claimed to be “civilized”.

It all starts with a discriminatory curfew, in agreement with the government and the Presidency of the Republic. On October 5, 1961, police chief Maurice Papon imposed a measure reserved only for “French Muslims from Algeria”: a ban on traveling after 8:30 p.m. in Paris and its suburbs. Humiliating, arbitrary, this curfew triggers the anger of the National Liberation Front (FLN), which calls for a peaceful march to protest against this segregation from another age.

On the evening of October 17, 1961, some 30,000 Algerians, according to reports from the Amicale des algériens de France, mostly workers, students, fathers, veiled women, children, came out of the shanty towns of Nanterre, Gennevilliers and Saint-Denis, dressed in their Sunday clothes. They are heading towards the center of Paris, sometimes brandishing a flag, but without weapons, without violence. They just want to show that they exist, that they are human beings. But the response from the authorities is relentless. As soon as night falls, the city becomes a theater of horror.

The police hit, shoot, raid. Demonstrators were executed on the spot, others bludgeoned to death in police stations or thrown, still alive, into the Seine. Witnesses tell of the Seine red with blood, the cries of the wounded, the bodies floating between the bridges of Paris. The official report, which is misleading, will speak of “three deaths”. Historians speak of more than a hundred victims, perhaps up to two hundred, without counting those who disappeared. There were 302 deaths, including around forty drowned in the Seine, plus 1,800 injured and at least 12,000 demonstrators arrested.

Omerta and media censorship

This crime, although committed in the heart of the capital of the “free world”, will be immediately suppressed. The French press, under pressure from the authorities, remains silent or minimizes the facts. The rare journalists who try to testify, like Claude Bourdet in France-Observateur, are threatened. The striking photographs were confiscated. In the days that followed, Algerian families desperately searched for their loved ones.

Hundreds of men never return. Sometimes we find a body floating in the Seine, sometimes nothing. Official records lie, police stations destroy evidence. The Republic, although quick to give moral lessons, covers up a premeditated state crime, organized and assumed by the police hierarchy.

For more than three decades, the truth will remain buried in silence and fear. The French authorities maintain the fiction of a simple “incident”. The school doesn’t talk about it, the media forgets, and the archives are locked. It was not until the end of the 20th century that the lead cover began to crack.

Historians break down the wall of denial

It is thanks to the stubborn work of historians and activists like Jean-Luc Einaudi, Jim House, Benjamin Stora and Jean-Paul Brunet that light is beginning to be shed. In 1991, Einaudi published The Battle of Paris, the fruit of years of investigation and collection of testimonies. He describes a methodical repression, ordered from the top of the prefecture, and puts forward the thesis of “slippage”.

In 1998, during the trial of Maurice Papon for his participation in the deportation of Jews under Vichy, the historian was heard as a witness. Faced with justice, he accuses: “On October 17, 1961, the Parisian police killed on order.” His research will later be confirmed by the partial opening of the archives, which will prove the implementation of a planned repression.

The work of historians also reveals the extent of the lie, hundreds of anonymous bodies hastily buried in mass graves or recovered without identification. On October 17, a colonial war was imported into the heart of Paris.

For Algerians, the massacre of October 17 is only one link in a history of colonial violence. Before Paris, there was Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata in May 1945: thousands of civilians massacred by the French army for demanding freedom. There was also torture in the camps, summary executions, villages burned, mass deportations.

France claimed to bring “civilization”, but in 1954, more than 90% of Algerians were illiterate. A century of domination had brought neither schools, nor hospitals, nor dignity. This system of exploitation, based on segregation and injustice, could only end in bloodshed.

And it is this same colonial spirit, this same brutality, which was expressed in Paris, in the city of lights, in October 1961. The “country of human rights” then had its hands covered in the blood of a people it claimed to educate.

Recognition by droppers

We had to wait until 2012, more than half a century, for a French president to finally mention the repression of October 17. François Hollande declares that “on October 17, 1961, Algerians were killed during a bloody repression.” Sober, measured words, without naming the person responsible, without saying the word “state crime”. A partial recognition, almost administrative.

In 2021, for the 60th anniversary of the massacre, Emmanuel Macron takes a further step. During a ceremony at the Bezons bridge, he paid tribute to “the victims of a crime inexcusable for the Republic”. He observes a minute of silence and lays a wreath. But it stops there: no official apology, no legal recognition, no compensation. The president refuses the term “repentance”, in the name of a “desire for national unity”.

The historian Benjamin Stora, in his report on the memory of colonization, believes that recognition is “a necessary but still incomplete path”. The refusal to confront the past, he emphasizes, prevents France from building a peaceful memory. Despite symbolic progress, some voices in France continue to deny or minimize the facts.

Political leaders, particularly on the right and the far right, denounce “unnecessary guilt”. Some go so far as to question the number of victims, or to justify the repression with “FLN violence”. This attitude reveals the difficulty, even the refusal, of assuming responsibility for a colonial system which has had a profound impact on French society.

However, the facts are there. Archives, testimonies, judicial investigations and university studies converge: October 17, 1961 was a state crime, planned, covered up, assumed, then erased. Today, in Algeria as in France, the memory of October 17 lives on.

In Paris, commemorative plaques recall the tragedy, notably that of the Saint-Michel bridge, inaugurated in 2001. Associations, such as In the Name of Memory, continue to organize marches and tributes. In Algeria, every October 17 is a day of reflection, inscribed in national memory as an act of resistance and dignity.

Recognizing this pogrom, as the historian Pierre Vidal Naquet described it, does not serve to reopen the wounds, but to prevent it from closing on lies. It is doing justice to the dead, but also to history. Because the blood of Algerians spilled on the cobblestones of the capital of “human rights” does not demand revenge. It demands truth and recognition, particularly in French school textbooks.