Commemoration or Denial? Shifting Memories of the Algerian War in France

By Léa Besnard

Paris, 17 October 1961. In the midst of the War of Independence, thousands of Algerians responded to the call of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) to demonstrate peacefully against French colonial rule. Defying a nighttime curfew imposed specifically on Algerians by Paris prefect Maurice Papon, they gathered in the capital to ask for independence. However, tensions quickly arose between the protestors and the police forces and escalated into a brutal crackdown – one of the deadliest, and yet least famous, of French modern history.

That night, the police brutally repressed the demonstration. Around 12,000 protesters were arrested, beaten, or held in improvised detention centres such as the Palais des Sports and the Coubertin stadium. Many were killed, with historians estimating between 48 and over 200 deaths, and dozens of bodies were thrown into the Seine. For decades, the French state denied any wrongdoing, refusing to acknowledge deliberate police violence against Algerians. Often forgotten and many times denied, this crime, whose authors remained unpunished, is the symbol of Algerian repression by the French Republic, shedding light on the (lack of) national collective memory surrounding the War of Independence, and its legacy in Algeria.

It is only thirty years later, in 1991, that the number 200 as a total death count will be for the first time put forward by historian Jean-Luc Einaudi, as opposed to the three deaths declared by the Paris prefecture following the incident. Denying such a number, Papon, previously known for his role in the collaborative Vichy regime during Nazi occupation in the 1940s, took the matter to court, but lost the case.

Official recognition by France came only much later. In 2012, President François Hollande publicly acknowledged that “on 17 October 1961, Algerians demonstrating for independence were killed during a bloody repression.” His statement marked the first time the French Republic accepted responsibility for the massacre, over fifty years after the fact. Meanwhile, in Algeria, the date has long been a national day of remembrance, reflecting a profound asymmetry in collective memory between the two nations. In 2021, 60 years after the events, President Emmanuel Macron went further, attending a commemoration at the Pont de Bezons, one of the sites where Algerian bodies were thrown into the Seine by police forces. He denounced the massacre as “inexcusable” and paid tribute to the victims, yet without issuing a formal apology. His presence, however, signalled a gradual shift in France’s willingness to address its colonial history, although many criticised the symbolism of the gesture, which alone was deemed insufficient.

Earlier this year, the topic of Algerian colonisation resurfaced in a heated debate on the RTL radio, which caused the temporary suspension of journalist Jean-Michel Apathie after he drew a controversial comparison between the Ouradour-sur-Glane massacre and the crimes committed by the French army in Algeria between the 1830s and 1962. The Oradour-sur-Glane massacre is strongly anchored in French memory as the worst Nazi crime committed against French people during the occupation, when the Waffen SS massacred an entire village in the Limousin region, resulting in a death count of 642. “Each year, in France, we commemorate what happened in Ouradour-sur-Glane”, he said. “But we, ourselves, committed hundreds like that in Algeria. Are we even aware of it?” To this comment, anchorman Thomas Sotto asked: “Are you saying we behaved like Nazis?”, to which Apathie replied: “The Nazis behaved like us.”

This statement provoked countrywide outrage which resulted in Apathie being temporarily suspended from the radio. However, historically speaking, Apathie’s remark is accurate. Historian Sylvie Tenault explains that while there is no record of the exact scenario of Ouradour-sur-Glane happening in Algeria, he is right to say that the French army did not only lead a war against the Front National de Libération (FNL), but installed a “strategy of terror against the Algerian population”, from the beginning of its colonisation in the 1830s until its liberation in 1962, a strategy also used by the Nazis during the occupation, to deter the French from joining resistance networks. She explains that “rapes, brutal raids, torture, summary executions” and the use of chemical weapons were commonly used as a tool of war against the Algerian population to break their resistance and allegiance to the FNL, which constitutes a violation of international law and human rights. In that sense, activists, historians and journalists have argued in Apathie’s direction in the past, for instance with Claude Bourdet’s 1955 article for France Observateur, titled “Votre Gestapo d’Algérie” (Your Algerian Gestapo), where he compares the French army in Algeria to the Nazi Gestapo.

Apathie eventually resigned, explaining that returning would have meant accepting that the punishment was fair, which he opposes. His case illustrates how tense discussions surrounding French colonial history, still largely unacknowledged in public discourse today, remain. The result is a national memory that commemorates the horrors inflicted on France but remains elusive and defensive on those perpetrated by France. More than six decades after Algerian independence, a lot of work remains to be done by French authorities to recognise and take accountability for the crimes of its colonial past, among which the massacre of 17 October 1961. Because if remembering is political, then forgetting is, too.

Sources: Le Monde, L’Histoire, Élysée, Wikipedia, L’Obs

Written by: Léa Besnard

Edited by: Nina Gush & Sarah Valkenburg