Sixty-three years ago, 30,000 Algerians who came to demonstrate peacefully in Paris were subjected to violent repression, leaving many people dead and injured.
Historians say “at least dozens” of people were killed as a result of police violence. The French Parliament is scheduled to discuss, on Thursday, a draft resolution supported by President Emmanuel Macron’s party, demanding that the government allocate a day to commemorate this massacre.
On Oct. 17, 1967, six months before the Evian Accords established Algeria’s independence from France, the “French-Algerian Muslims,” as they were called at the time, flocked from poor neighborhoods in the suburbs and popular neighborhoods in Paris, where they lived.
At the invitation of the French branch of the National Liberation Front, an Algerian political party, they defied a ban imposed by police director Maurice Papon, who was later convicted in 1998 of complicity in crimes against humanity for his role in the deportation of Jews between 1942 and 1944.
These demonstrators faced the most fatal repression in Western Europe since 1945, according to historian Emmanuel Blanchard. On that day, the police arrested about 12,000 demonstrators. Bodies with multiple bullet wounds or signs of beating were recovered from the Seine River in the following days. In 1988, an advisor to the Prime Minister’s Office during the Algerian War estimated that police “attacks” had killed about 100 people, while a government report in 1998 counted 48 deaths.
In a declassified archive, published by the French website Mediapart in 2022, a memorandum from a high-ranking official, who worked as an advisor to Charles de Gaulle, dated October 28, 1961, states that there were 54 dead. The toll presented by historians over the years ranged between 30 and more than 200 deceased.
Blanchard recalls that as soon as the first demonstrators began arriving at Neuilly Bridge, west of Paris, security forces fatally shot a quiet crowd, which included families. The violence of police officers increased when they heard radio messages published by the police falsely announcing that officers had been shot dead. Shooting operations also occurred in several places in the capital.
These violations were not recognized until 2012, when then-French President François Hollande, commemorated for the first time the “memory of the victims of the bloody repression” to which they were subjected while they were demonstrating for the “right to independence.” In 2021, Emmanuel Macron spoke of “unforgiveable crimes” committed “under the authority of Maurice Papon.”
