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Long history of a forgotten massacre

17.10.11

During the 1970s and 1980s, the memory of 17 October 1961 was enveloped in a thick shroud. At the time, it seemed that there were no traces of that autumn day when unarmed men, women and children, who had turned out to protest  with their families in the streets of Paris, were bludgeoned to death by policemen wielding rifle butts, thrown into the Seine, or hanged and left to die in the woods.

"It is quite simply one of only a handful of occasions since the 19th century when police opened fire on workers in Paris," remarks historian Benjamin Stora. In the weeks that followed, the swollen faced corpses of dozens of Algerians were fished out of the Seine. Benjamin Stora believes that the repression resulted in a hundred deaths, for English historian Jim House there were "at the very least" 120 or 130, while the author of La Bataille de Paris, Jean-Luc Einaudi, claims there were more than 150.

On that day, the "French Muslims of Algeria" had turned out in response to a call from the French wing of the FLN to protest against a curfew imposed by the head of Parisian police and former Vichy official, Maurice Papon. Approximately, 20,000 men, women and children from a population that was usually confined to shantytowns in the city’s suburbs joined peaceful marches in the Latin Quarter, on the Grands Boulevards, and close to the Champs-Elysées in central Paris.

Source: Presseurop - English