This Monday marks the macabre anniversary of one night of events that have largely been written out of official French history. On October 17th 1961, hundreds of Algerian pro-independence demonstrators were attacked and murdered by Paris police, most of them thrown into the river Seine. Official records report only two people died. The day will be marked by a series of demonstrations around France, calling for the formal recognition of the massacre that has remained smothered by cynicism, and latterly indifference, for half a century. Patricia Brett reports on the background and details of that sinister, cold autumn evening.
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Fifty years ago, on October 17th 1961, French police mounted a vast operation to prevent a banned demonstration called in Paris by the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), and which resulted in the massacre of hundreds of the unarmed participants. It would become, and remains, one of modern France's darkest secrets.
The peaceful demonstration through the French capital, protesting a curfew imposed on the Algerian community in Paris, was organised just months before Algeria would finally achieve independence from France, after a bloody war that began in 1954. It was a dirty conflict with torture and abuse of power by the French military and random attacks and killings by the FLN, the principle Algerian independence movement.
The hate and tensions created by the war were still at a flashpoint that October. The FLN was considered by the French government, and much of the country's population, as a terrorist organisation, but the ease with which the savagery of the police actions that evening has been overlooked almost beggars belief.
The official toll is two demonstrators dead from gunshot wounds and several dozen injured among both demonstrators and police. The reality, established by numerous witness accounts, was very different; hundreds died, drowned after they were thrown into the river Seine, others beaten senseless under police batons.
The reports, including those by police officers themselves, of horrific police brutality and of hundreds of deaths were dismissed by the administration of President Charles de Gaulle as vague, unaccountable rumours. Then-interior minister, Roger Frey, explained that there "was not the hint of an inkling of a shadow of proof" of police wrong-doing.
At the time, the press, muzzled for national security reasons, for the most part reported the police version of events. Attempts by the opposition to instigate inquiries were rejected by the Gaullist ruling party.
Mediapart, together with, Au Nom de la Mémoire (In the Name of Memory), an association created by relatives of the participants of the demonstration, is striving to shed light on this secret and contested chapter of French history. In the approach of the 50th anniversary of the demonstration, Mediapart commemorated the event by publishing in its French-language pages a series of witness testimonies and documents, and a 1991 a documentary called 17 octobre 1961: Le silence d'un fleuve (October 17, 1961: The Silence of a River).
'Police officers were not altar boys'
Paris, under the iron fist of the head of police (préfet de police) Maurice Papon, was in a state of war in October 1961. Papon, who was appointed to Paris from French ruled Algeria where he served two years as a regional officer (préfet), was well experienced in politics of extermination; in 1998 he was sentenced to ten years in prison for crimes against humanity, after it was revealed, initially by investigative weekly Le Canard Enchaîné in 1981, that, as secretary-general of the prefecture in Bordeaux during WWII, he participated in the deportation of more than 1,600 Jews to German death camps. The secret, like October 17th 1961, had been well kept, for Papon even served, between 1978 and 1981, as budget minister under President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
Claude Toulouse, a police officer in 1961, interviewed in the documentary ‘October 17, 1961: The Silence of a River', said the police routinely raided the suburban shantytowns where many Algerians lived and rounded people up; selected a number to be released while a number of others "were taken for further questioning and that was when torture could occur". This sometimes resulted in death, he said, adding "the methods used by the army in Algeria, they were the same as ours. Police officers were not altar boys". This testimony is corroborated by Gérard Monate, former head of the General Police Union, also interviewed for the documentary.
Sixteen police officers were killed in 1961, and the climate in police ranks was of fear coupled with a desire for retribution, Monate explained. This desire, he said, was fuelled by the top brass. At the funeral of an assassinated colleague, he continues, Papon said that "for every blow received ten would be returned. I think he meant that we won't give in to violence, but in the hours that followed, in every police station, the slogan became: for every one of us, we'll kill ten of them".
This explosive mix was made more volatile by the creation, in early 1961, of a clandestine group called the OAS, l'Organisation armée secrète, the Secret Army Organisation. Led by a group of rogue military officers determined to keep Algeria French, the OAS conducted a campaign of bombings and assassinations and came close, in March 1962, to assassinating President Charles de Gaulle (and which inspired Frederick Forsyth's book, Day of the Jackal).
In January 1961, the French, tired of the war, voted in favour of Algerian self-determination and de Gaulle began peace talks with the "rebel leaders". But he came to power in 1958 by implying that, with him in charge, Algeria would remain French. Those who had believed in him felt betrayed.
By October the peace talks had been stalled for six months, each side trying to grapple a better deal.
In the meantime, Paris police activity was given added impunity by a curfew on Algerians between the hours of 7pm and 6am, recalled Ali Harroun, a France-based FNL leader interviewed for the documentary. "The base was asking for an end to the curfew," he says. "It was decided that the best way to do that was to call a huge demonstration, with women and children, to march peacefully," he added.
Busloads of Algerians thrown over bridges
But for the police the march was an act of war to be stopped. The Algerian shantytowns were located just outside the city limits. One of the largest was in Nanterre, northwest of Paris, in which 10,000 Algerians lived. To reach Paris, the crowd, women and children in front, had to cross the bridge at the posh suburb of Neuilly.
That was where the police waited for and attacked them, former police officer Toulouse explains. "The police closed off the bridge at both ends so that many [demonstrators] were caught on the bridge. The two police sections closed ranks and those in the middle were thrown in the river and that's where many were drowned," he says.
Police union leader Monate testifies that busloads of Algerians were brought to several Paris bridges, the men unloaded, and thrown into the river. "Every time there was a group [of Algerians] the police felt the need to say enough! We've had it! That's October 17th! Good thing the police didn't have guns or they would have shot into the crowd."
French writer François Maspero, a supporter of the Algerian cause is interviewed in the documentary. He described the military precision with which the police singled out many Algerian men in the corridors of the metro and rounded them up before they could reach the street. Yet some escaped and made it to the boulevard Saint Michel, at the heart of the Latin Quarter, just across the river from Paris police headquarters, the Préfecture de police.
Maspero was there too and remembered a group of several hundred Algerians marching up the boulevard. There was a minute of joy at being there together, he said, before the police attacked. "What strikes me, in my memory, is the sound - the sound of the night sticks on skulls, on bodies. The noise of the sticks beating unarmed people," he recalled.
Shocked by what they or others had done, several police officers, confessed to the press and a few stories were published. The whistle blowers said that superior officers, including Papon, voluntarily turned a blind eye to the violence and alleged that some of the worst atrocities occurred at police headquarters, itself. Most press coverage, however, hailed the police for preventing terrorists from parading in the streets of Paris and approved the expulsion of hundreds of those arrested on October 17.
The Paris city council also praised the police and gave them more repressive powers. The Socialist and Communist opposition parties called for an inquiry but the ruling Gaullist party rejected the proposal.
The rounding up of Algerians by Papon was redolent of the anti-Semitic methods used by the WWII collaborationist Vichy regime he previously served. In Parliament, centrist MP Eugène Claudius-Petit asked "shall we now know the shame of the yellow crescent after knowing that of the yellow star"?
About 11,000 men were rounded up on October 17th and held for several days. Of these, some were released, some were expelled to camps in Algeria, others remained missing. Historian Jean-Luc Einaudi estimates there were about 300 dead. When the ceasefire agreement was signed in March 1962, there were 62 cases pending of Algerians missing since that night. But the agreement provided for an amnesty and all the cases were closed.
The events sank into near oblivion, silenced by the official denials and kowtowing media disinterest, aided by the shock and fear of the participants. Fifty years later, along with other unhealed wounds of the Guerre d'Algérie, it continues to fester.
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(Editing by Graham Tearse)