As time progresses memories continuously vanish into the annals of history, yet for the silenced Parisian case of the 1961 Algerian bridge episode their significance has developed ever greater potency amidst new perspectives and discourses. On the evening of the 17th of October 1961, one of the darkest episodes of state violence in modern history took place on the streets of Paris when 30,000 Algerians took part in a peaceful demonstration coordinated by the National Liberation Front to oppose the curfew enforced on Muslims. Under the orders of Maurice Papon, Paris police chief, police began to suppress the protest using extreme violence, arresting around 12,000 Algerians and killing hundreds. Despite the severity of these events, police crimes remained largely obscured from the public for decades and only began to resurface in the 1980s.
To understand the events of 17 October though, the wider context of the Algerian War of Independence must be considered. The war was a brutal conflict from 1954 to 1962 between France and the National Liberation Front (FLN), an Algerian nationalist movement seeking independence. Frequent press coverage of French military assaults on Algerians resulted in the widespread desensitisation of the French public to reports on attacks against Algerians. On top of this, the right-wing press fuelled a growth in racism; this is witnessed through the increasing public disregard and police violence towards Algerians in France over the course of the war and would affect the public reaction to the events of 17 October.
A key point of contention surrounding the events of the 17th of October has been the number of casualties. Official government reports directly following the events argued there were only three Algerian deaths which were attributed to internal FLN conflict. However, this figure clashed with testimonies and reports that resurfaced in the 1980s. On one end of the spectrum is Brunet, a police archivist whose analysis of internal police reports suggests that police violence directly caused 30 to 50 deaths. He argues these reports are accurate as they were internal reports with no public access and thus had no reason to be misleading. However, his reliance on police reports overlooks crucial sources such as witness testimonies and medical reports, which bring to light falsification even within internal police archives. Police cover-ups can be seen in many discrepancies between sources, for example, one victim’s death was classified as a road accident despite his autopsy report stating ‘death consequent on cranial and abdominal trauma – homicide’. Similar discrepancies can be seen throughout police reports and reveal the true rhetoric of misinformation in government statements to the public as well as within the archives. This suggests that Brunet’s assessment of 30 to 50 deaths may be well below the true figure.
On the other side of the spectrum, historian Einaudi, along with other researchers, has argued that the figure is far higher and indeed in the hundreds. Based upon witness testimonies and archival research, Einaudi estimates that the number of deaths could be as high as 200, which he justifies through his correlation to the 210 Algerians who were reported ‘missing’ from those detained in a camp at Vincennes. Einaudi interviewed many witnesses of 17 October to uncover the true nature of police brutality, including one survivor Djoughlal Ahmed who described his experience of being brutally beaten by police before being thrown into the Seine unconscious along with many others. These testimonies collated by Einaudi marked a watershed in the account of 17 October as it was the first time a much larger and clearer image of the events was created and sparked much debate against the official government narrative. Nevertheless, these numbers have been strongly contested by Papon, and there has been criticism of Einaudi’s inflationist methods which have incorporated all possible signs of a state cover-up.
Although a definitive number will never be reached, the ensuing debate has made clear the immense number of crimes that took place on the 17th of October, as well as the concerted effort of the government and police to repress the events and spread misinformation. Even taking Brunet’s minimalist figure, the events can still be classed as a massacre according to Vincent Luscious, Paris Prosecutor, in 1999. It is key to recognise that a focus solely on quantification should not overshadow the acknowledgement of the profound injustice and repression that permeated the highest levels of the French state.
But how did the massacre remain hidden for so long? Traditional narratives have argued that it was the government’s censorship tactics which erased the events of 17 October from memory until Einaudi and others came along in the 1980s. However, closer analysis reveals another explanation of much wider public complicity in which the public simply chose to forget the events by way of turning a blind eye to police violence against Algerians. While some newspapers like Le Monde, L’Humanité and Libération attempted to expose the realities of state violence, much of the mainstream media simply followed the official government narrative and quickly moved on from the story. This limited coverage along with the reluctance of French society to confront police violence against the Algerians allowed the event to fade from public consciousness. One journalist, Georges Montaron, suggested that ‘racism is in us’ as during the demonstrations of 17 October there were members of the French public who denounced the Algerians and even handed them over to the police.
The absence of leftist political support also played a significant role in the lack of a large-scale protest following the events of 17 October. Left-wing parties like the French Communist Party (PCF) which had previously supported Algerian independence were now reluctant to address the massacre for fears of sparking controversy at the risk of depleting their French support base. The PCF instead supported the prevailing contemporary rhetoric of anti-fascism to criticise the Algerian War. In doing so, public perception of 17 October were shifted from protestor demands and police violence to a general call for the ending of war and fascist government.
However, this should not remove accountability from the French public, who played a central role in ignoring evidence of police brutality provided to them in newspapers such as the ones earlier mentioned which published numerous articles on inconsistencies in the government’s report of only three deaths. For example, Libération published an article detailing how the ‘bodies of two Algerians found in the Seine, in Argenteuil. Both had their hands tied behind their backs and their legs tied.’ There were also many witness testimonies from Algerians which proved that they were not afraid to speak out. Public acknowledgement can also be seen in student demonstrations around Paris which used the slogan ‘Papon, murderer’ and called for Algerians to be released. The accusation of blame on Papon once again exemplifies public understanding of Papon’s role in the 17 October attacks alongside extensive awareness of state violence. However, these demonstrations failed to gain much traction from other demographics of the French public and right-wing newspapers, indicating the widespread indifference in the majority of the population.
Public inaction played a pivotal role in the collective ‘forgetting’ of the events of 17 October. Within a few weeks, media coverage and protests dwindled due to a lack of interest and support. This suggests that the erasure of these attacks from public memory up until their re-emergence in the 1980s was not as a result of an absence of knowledge but rather a deliberate process known as ‘aphasia’, a conscious system of disremembering caused by a lack of ability to express oneself appropriately.
The 1961 Algerian Bridge massacre stands out as one of the bloodiest scenes of state atrocity and suppression in the twentieth century. The events of 17 October exemplify the extension of violence into the heart of the metropole during the Algerian War as France attempted to clutch onto the remaining remnants of its colonial authority. The process of uncovering the true nature of state violence has taken decades and even after more than 60 years it remains today a contentious subject of discussion as President Emmanuel Macron denounced the ‘inexcusable crimes’ of 17 October but refused to formally acknowledge state responsibility. It is clear that many factors contributed to the silencing of events from the deliberate misinformation of official documents to public ‘aphasia’, but the full answer still remains incomplete.
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Bibliography:
Le Monde
L’Humanité
Libération
Testimony of Djoughlal Ahmed, in Jean-Luc Einaudi, La bataille de Paris, 17 octobre 1961 (Paris, 1991), 169.
Boltanski, Luc. Love and Justice as Competences: Three Essays on the Sociology of Action, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, 2012).
Brunet, Jean-Paul. Police contre FLN: Le Drame d’octobre 1961 (Paris, 1999).
Brunet, Jean-Paul. ‘Police Violence in Paris, October 1961: Historical Sources, Methods, and Conclusions’, The Historical Journal, 51:1, 2008, 195-204.
Cole, Joshua. ‘Remembering the Battle of Paris: 17 October 1961 in French and Algerian Memory’, French Politics, Culture & Society, 21:3, 2003, 21-50.
Einaudi, Jean-Luc. La bataille de Paris, 17 octobre 1961 (Paris, 1991).
Stoler, Ann Laura. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Bristol, 2016).
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