Massacre 60 years ago: Macron condemns “unforgivable crimes”

In October 1961, French police brutally crushed the protest of immigrants of Algerian origin. The massacre was long hushed up. Julia Borutta about a difficult memory and an important apology.

The demonstrators had dressed up extra – about 25,000 men, women and children marched through the rain-soaked streets of Paris on the evening of October 17, 1961 in Sunday clothes to demonstrate in dignity for their rights and against the night curfew for immigrants of Algerian origin.

This racist condition was imposed by the prefecture of police in response to bomb attacks by Algerian liberation fighters in Paris. But what began with dignity and peace, ended cruelly and in many cases fatal.

“Crammed together like sheep”

A contemporary witness reports: “They struck with everything they could get their hands on. I don’t know. Was it iron bars or rubber truncheons or rifle butts?”

Another man adds: “They took us on buses to a kind of camp in Vincennes. Many of us were covered with blood – on our head, on our hands or on our back. My ear was bleeding. We were crammed together like sheep for four days. It was simply terrible.”

Covered by the police command

By “they” are meant police officers who were covered by their superior Maurice Papon, a notorious colonial official and former representative of the Vichy regime.

“What happened there was a massacre,” remembers a passerby who only happened to be an eyewitness. “I can still hear the sound of batons on my heads. A pack of policemen beat the people. My friend next to me berated the policemen and shouted ‘Murderer!’. They came up to us, but a superior held them on: No, not the whites! “

The dead were floating in the Seine

How many people died that night is still not clear. The next morning the police spoke of three dead, but the demonstrators’ relatives missed dozens of their compatriots.

It is certain that even in the courtyard of the Paris police prefecture people were mistreated, killed and thrown into the Seine. The youngest victim to be pulled out of the river days later was 15 years old.

The massacre is followed by the cover-up

Historians now assume up to 200 dead and hundreds injured. “It is the state that used violence,” states political scientist Olivier La Cour Grandmaison. “Because Maurice Papon was covered by the Prime Minister. But the state not only carried out the massacre, but also guilty of a state lie and concealed the events of that night.”

The dead are neither registered nor counted. No police officer is convicted of the brutal attacks. For decades, the archives of the police prefecture did not remain accessible at all or only to selected people.

The children ask questions

Only years later do historians and children of the demonstrators begin to ask questions. Like Mehdi Lellaoui and Samia Messaoudi, founders of the Au nom de la Memoire association. They say: “If there are dead, there are also murderers and those responsible have to be named: the Paris police, the interior minister at the time, the prime minister, and finally the then president Charles de Gaulle.”

It was a state crime, a massacre. These may be words that can scare politics, but they are essential to the collective memory.

Macron promises clarification

For decades, French heads of state have found it difficult to acknowledge this crime. President Francois Hollande spoke of “bloody” but not of “state” repression. Numerous commemorative plaques now remind of October 17, 1961, but nowhere are those responsible mentioned.

President Macron made coming to terms with France’s dark colonial past a top priority. But he wants to be re-elected next year. To pillory the police and the French state representatives from that time would not go down well with many conservative voters.

Samia Messaoudi wants to keep fighting: “Recognition is a political question, but for our parents it is a question of dignity.”