Sixty years ago, on October 17, 1961, dozens of Algerian immigrants were killed and wounded during a demonstration in Paris. Yesterday, Emmanuel Macron went further in condemning the facts than any French president to date, denouncing “inexcusable crimes for the Republic”.
The context
In October 1961, as the Algerian war was drawing to a close, a curfew was decreed in France for those who were called at the time the “French Muslims of Algeria”. In recent months, many police officers have been assassinated in Paris by activists of the FLN (National Liberation Front, which campaigns for the independence of Algeria).
The prefect of police of the capital, Maurice Papon, promises his men a bloody repression with complete impunity. “For a given blow, we will carry ten”, launches the senior official. Algerian immigrants are gradually victims of revenge on the part of the police. On October 5, the state implements a curfew that targets only Algerian workers, they are then banned from driving between 8:30 p.m. and 5:30 a.m.
It is in this context of tensions and to protest against this unfair measure that the FLN calls on the Algerians to demonstrate peacefully on October 17 in three places in Paris: the Place de l’Etoile, the Grands Boulevards and the boulevards Saint-Michel and Saint Germain.
THE evening of October 17
In the evening, tens of thousands of unarmed Algerian demonstrators invaded these three areas. Very quickly, the police forcefully represses those present. Many dead and wounded litter the streets of Paris, some of them are even thrown into the Seine.
The next day, the police headquarters communicated an official report of two deaths and the press did not immediately report the violence of the events. It will be necessary to wait for the work of several historians and associations so that the death toll swells although it has never been precisely established (the sources differ between a few dozen killed to more than 200).
An event little known to the French
This event has long been overlooked by the French state. “A desire for judicial oblivion, which was combined with the amnesty decrees, which covered the facts of maintaining order in France, a difficulty in accessing the archives, the purification of a certain number of funds … all this contributed to this occultation phenomenon until the end of the 1970s ”, declared in 2011 in the columns of the World historian Gilles Manceron.
Until October 17, 2012, when the new President of the Republic at the time, François Hollande, paid tribute to the victims who had fallen fifty-one years earlier: “On October 17, 1961, Algerians who demonstrated for the law at independence were killed in a bloody crackdown. The Republic clearly recognizes these facts. Fifty-one years after this tragedy, I pay tribute to the memory of the victims. ”
On October 17, 2019, a steel stele was inaugurated on the Saint-Michel bridge by Anne Hidalgo. Others, like Stéphane Troussel, the president of the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, asked for the recognition of a national day of commemoration: “I call again on the State to officially recognize, with the establishment of ‘a national day of remembrance. Let’s talk about the victims of this repression in our school curricula, far too concise on this subject, let’s talk about them in official speeches… ”.
Like every year, Paris remembers the # 17october1961 and the bloody repression of the Algerian demonstration in the capital. The stele unveiled today is a new testimony to the respect due to the memory of the victims. #ParisRemember pic.twitter.com/vNcksGmDEw
– Anne Hidalgo (@Anne_Hidalgo) October 17, 2019
If his request has not yet been materialized, Emmanuel Macron has taken a new step this Saturday, for the 60 years of the drama. Faced with relatives of victims sometimes in tears, the Head of State participated – an unprecedented gesture for a French president – in a tribute on the banks of the Seine, near the Bezons bridge, borrowed in 1961 by the demonstrators Algerians arriving from the neighboring slum of Nanterre at the appeal of the branch of the National Liberation Front (FLN) installed in France. There, he denounced “crimes inexcusable for the Republic”.