60 years since the Paris massacre that was doused

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The official death toll after the bloody night was three, of which two were Algerians. Later, historians have estimated that between 50 and 200 people were killed. The reason for the uncertain death toll is, among other things, that French police threw many of the victims into the river Seine.

The demonstration took place on October 17, 1961 and was aimed at a curfew that only applied to people with a background from Algeria, and which had been introduced barely two weeks earlier.

Most of the participants had traveled to the city center from poor suburbs north and east of Paris to show their opposition to what they perceived as a deeply unjust coercive measure.

Among the participants were men, women and children, and many of them were dressed in their best clothes for the occasion.

Would prevent fundraising

Even before the massacre, many Algerians had been subjected to frequent police checks and harassment, including on their way to work. They were also targets of racist attacks under the auspices of a terrorist group that wanted Algeria to remain part of France.

The reason for the curfew was that the French authorities wanted to prevent Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) from raising money for its fight against the French colonial power, a war that ended with Algeria’s independence barely a year later.

It was the FLN that called for the demonstration. In the weeks before the demonstration, the group had killed five French policemen, and to stop the protest, French authorities deployed about 10,000 policemen.

Nazi collaborator

The man who ordered them to attack was Maurice Papon. He was the chief of police in Paris, despite the fact that it was a well-known fact that he had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

“Many of the victims died of police shots, dozens of others were drowned in the Seine, and several were strangled after being thrown to the ground and covered with piles of corpses,” reads the description to the French National Museum of Immigration History.

The French historian Emmanuel Blanchard has called the killings the worst repression in Europe after World War II.

False rumors

It was later revealed that some police officers were affected by erroneous reports that some of their colleagues had been killed during the demonstration.

Papon was later convicted of war crimes in connection with the deportation of 1,600 Jews to the concentration camps.

During the trial against Papon in 1997, the historian Jean-Luc Einaudi said that Papon’s police forces opened fire on the Algerians, and that the police were then observed throwing the slain into the Seine.

But apart from a few eyewitnesses, few were aware of what had happened. Attempts were made to hide the misdeeds and douse them down. Nevertheless, rumors spread, and on one of the bridges over the Seine near the Louvre, a famous graffiti was written that read “Here we drown Algerians.”

Detention camps

However, many Algerians never made it to the demonstration. They were surrounded by the police as they got off the subway, and the bus to internment camps that had been prepared in advance. There they were beaten or deported to Algeria. Those who were allowed to go home were lucky. It is estimated that 12,000 people ended up in the camps.

Jacques Simonnet, a psychiatrist who was a student in 1961, witnessed the treatment of inmates in one of the camps. He says they were kicked, beaten and beaten with sticks.

– The violence reached a level that was indescribable, he says.

French admission

In 2012, then-French President François Hollande acknowledged that the attack on the protesters was a massacre.

Algerians who demonstrated for their right to independence were killed in a bloody repression. The Republic clearly acknowledges these facts. I honor the memory of the victims, Hollande said.

The socialist mayor of Paris had previously set up a memorial form near the police headquarters, not far from the Notre-Dame Cathedral, to mark the massacre that took place in the middle of Paris’ most famous district.

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