French Muslims of Algeria

The mobile guard had completely closed the passage of the bridge.

Some had machine guns with a tripod on the ground.

This is the memory I have when all the first rows fell as a result of the bullets already fired.

There was certainly an order that no Algerian pass.

I tried to run to hide… It was dark night.

And there I stumbled.

I thought it was the sidewalk, but it was bodies.

And other bodies fell on me,

says

I couldn't free myself anymore.

I was starting to lose my breath.

I gasped and thought my time had come.

I started to say my prayers and miraculously someone pulled me by my feet from the pile of dead bodies and wounded men who couldn't move.

He was my uncle.

When I arrived at the Neuilly bridge, I was completely flabbergasted.

On the platform, there were people, obviously Algerians, who were bloodied and the cops forbade anyone to speak to them.

I understood when I went out because I met a friend who also had a pad nearby.

Like me, he had seen people bleeding.

I had never seen that in my life.

As soon as they saw Algerians, the cops beat on them

The Renault FLN came to find us saying: '

They had instructions to go there unarmed.

There were four or five of us at Renault and we had been told to go to Opéra

There were several police vans, ”

continues Benoît.

As people whose profile suggested they were Algerians came out of the metro, they were checked.

In the meantime, a growing mass of Algerians has built up.

We followed the demonstration on the sidewalk, which was, as far as I remember, silent.

Until the moment when we arrived at the height of the Rex, the cinema.

And that's when we heard gunshots, the dispersal. 

 And there, it was the stampede.

We saw that the demonstration spread out into all the surrounding streets to escape the barrage of fire from the police.

And then we found a comrade from Renault who was in the car and we went around,

continues Clara.

There, we saw the police vans picking up, so to speak, Algerians.

I have the memory in the metro of having seen, from a little far indeed, bodies spread out.

This assessment was perpetuated as a false official truth by the prefect of police Maurice Papon, who published his memoirs in the 1980s

.

In reality, Jean-Luc Einaudi, the main author of books on this event, from the 1990s, tried to make lists of missing persons.

He arrives at a first quantified assessment which revolves around 200 victims who disappeared on October 17, in the weeks preceding and immediately following 

It's still quite distressing to find mothers whose husbands have been arrested and who turn to the works council because it was a welcoming place to find out what to do, how to have news.

These are

There are CGT leaflets that were published the next day or two days later because in some workshops, Algerian workers were absent

I think the information has circulated.

There were those who didn't fit and the bodies that people had seen floating in the water.

The idea is that many Algerians have been thrown into the water.

In the shantytown, some have returned and others never.

Life took over.

Me, I went back to school,

says Khaled Benaissa.

People spoke very little about it because children also had to be protected, I think.

There has been a tendency in France on the part of the official authorities to put a modest veil on this event as on the violence of the war,

.

Georges Pompidou went further than de Gaulle.

It was necessary, he once said, “

”.

Giscard d'Estaing went much further because he was rather pro-French Algeria at the time 

 It was not until the 1980s, although Mitterrand was not too keen on telling the truth about this period when his attitude was not always very clear, for there to be a beginning of the process of establishing the facts , including on October 17,

continues the historian.

A process that also relies on the families of Algerians who have suffered this repression and who are beginning to speak.

Some families have told their children and these children are beginning to demonstrate at the Saint-Denis canal, for example, where there were drowned victims, at the Saint-Michel bridge, and certain associations are joining in.

At the end of the 1980s, the association

, with children of immigration.

The issue is transmission

And me, when I talk to my children every day, I tell them one very important thing: it's not a memory of pathos.

We are not here to cry, to say “

”.

Not at all.

We are proud that our parents, our grandparents, carried this story and that they remained standing.

What must be valued is courage

We could almost repeat the 2001 call word for word. This proves the extraordinary resistance we are encountering to obtain recognition of what was perpetrated 60 years ago 

simply remember what happened, that is to say several dozen died in tragic conditions

a bloody repression on October 17, 1961

If the Republic were so lucid, it could not qualify the massacres of October 17, 1961 as bloody repression.

October 17 must be considered a massacre, with summary executions, drownings... We know that there were in the very courtyard of the police headquarters, a few tens of meters from the offices of Maurice Papon, summary executions.

We are part of this memory of the Paris region.

It is therefore a plaque which will indicate that we inaugurated a square on October 17, 1961. There may also be a description of the events as we have in other neighboring towns,

For 15 years, despite repeated requests, despite the presence of associations, of families whose parents, brothers, sisters were victims of the repression of October 17, the municipality stubbornly refused to grant a place of memory,

remembers the chosen one.

We had somewhat surprising exchanges in the municipal council.

He said to himself that these were brawls between FLN militants and that in these brawls, there had actually been deaths.

It really went as far as a form of historical revisionism and denial of the gravity of the repression, of the gravity of the event.

Given that these were people who claimed to be politically Gaullist, there was also this idea that we were going to tarnish not only the image of France, but also the image of their political family and of what they believed as activists

In the case of the Algerian war, and perhaps even more of October 17, 1961 because it happened in Paris, the whole thing undermines the national republican mythology on the idea that the Republic has always faithful to its principles,

analyzes political scientist

.

This challenges partisan mythologies, those of the Communist Party leadership, which has always claimed to have been consistently anti-colonialist.

In the case of Algeria, this is not true.

This calls into question that of the Socialist Party as the great party of emancipation and progress, whose ancestor, the SFIO, played an absolutely deleterious role during the Algerian war.

And it undermines great personal mythologies.

Who was prime minister?

Michel Debré, one of the writers of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.

Who was President of the Republic at the time?

General de Gaulle.

All of these elements mean that, on the right as for part of the governmental left, this past is an extremely dangerous past.

I'm not necessarily unbridled optimism because it seems to me that Emmanuel Macron is adopting a tactic which consists of giving in a little so as not to give in on the substance, "

says

.

If we compare with most of the other great European colonial powers, or most of the other States which were built on the partial destruction of the indigenous populations, we realize to what extent, indeed, in these areas and on these matters , France is ominously late.