by Nabila Ramdani
People gather during a commemoration ceremony on the Saint-Michel Bridge, near a plaque commemorating the victims of the 17 October 1961 massacre, in Paris, France on October 17, 2016. [Mustafa Sevgi – Anadolu Agency]
The most murderous episode in the postwar history of Paris came in October 1961, when up to three hundred peaceful French- Algerian protesters were slaughtered in cold blood around iconic national monuments, including the Eiffel Tower and Notre- Dame Cathedral. The police responsible cracked down on a demonstration by thirty thousand people calling for an end to the Algerian War and immediate independence from France. The march had been organized by the FLN [National Liberation Front], in breach of the colonial curfew legislation. The most memorable— and vicious— atrocities saw policemen herding panicking crowds onto Paris’s bridges, where many demonstrators were tossed into the Seine.
Normally a romantic symbol of the most popular tourist city in the world, the river became a watery morgue for scores of victims, whose lifeless bodies washed up for weeks afterward. Others were shot or beaten to a bloody pulp in police stations, where their mutilated bodies testified to truncheon and rifle- butt injuries. Some ten thousand more were rounded up inside the city’s sports stadiums and attacked and interrogated. Torture methods included captives being forced to drink bleach.
My father told me about compatriots his age who were hanged from trees by police in the thick Vincennes woods, on the eastern edge of Paris. It was the site of the concentration camp for dissident Algerians, just near the Château de Vincennes where King Henry V of England died. One of the hangings made a small item in the Manchester Guardian in early 1962 under the headline “Strange Fruit in the Trees,” which was taken from the lyrics of the song most famously performed by Billie Holiday about lynchings of African- Americans.
More incongruous still, the gruesome event was covered in a column entitled “La Vie Parisienne,” which usually focused on artists honing their talent in the City of Light. So it was that the bloodbath, which amounted to state terrorism, was relegated to quirky corners of the press. By contrast, historians Jim House and Neil MacMaster described the massacre as the “bloodiest act of state repression of street protest in western Europe in modern history.”
Maurice Papon, the Paris police chief who instigated the October 1961 killings, died in 2007, and some of his unrepentant and unpunished henchmen still remain at large, albeit unidentified. Like Papon, many of the killers had been Nazi collaborators who learned their crowd control methods from the Gestapo. They were experts at disinformation too: the official death toll after Papon’s self- proclaimed “Battle of Paris” was initially said to be three, then revised to a vague “several dozen” almost forty years later. No judicial inquiry ever took place, with many French still blaming Algerian infighting and terrorist attacks for the deaths. Papon was finally brought to justice for crimes against humanity— but only for those he committed during the Second World War. President Charles de Gaulle, and then successive governments, ensured he was never indicted for what he did to the French- Algerians of Paris. There was no trial, or any kind of public inquiry, let alone an apology or reparations.
There has never been a “Holocaust moment” for the victims of the police brutality of October 1961. It was in 1995— more than fifty years after some seventy- five thousand Jews were rounded up by the French authorities and sent to the Nazi gas chambers— that President Jacques Chirac finally confessed and pinned responsibility firmly on “the folly of the French State.” “France, the homeland of the Enlightenment, and of the Rights of Man, a land of welcome and asylum . . . committed the irreparable,” said Chirac. “Breaking its word, it handed those who were under its protection over to their executioners.” Yet in 1961, the French did not hand their Algerian Muslim victims over to anyone. On the contrary, they did the killing themselves.
Few would argue that the tribal murders committed by Paris police more than sixty years ago are likely to be repeated today, but nor would anyone pretend that the discriminatory policies that gave rise to such horrors have left modern France. A sense of “otherness” for millions of Muslim citizens helped define the Fifth Republic, and the colonial tradition has by no means disappeared. It can be measured by the amount of draconian policing and indeed in the widespread discrimination suffered by Algerian communities in France, alongside other Muslims from the Maghreb and the rest of the African continent. Yes, France moved away from imperialism and attempted to guarantee its material wealth and security through the far more enlightened European project, but the brutality developed over decades of terrorism still lingers.
Extract from Nabila Ramdani’s first book Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic published by Public Affairs and Hurst.
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