On October 17, 1961, French security forces committed a massacre on the orders of the Paris security director, Maurice Papon. The police attacked a peaceful demonstration of about 60,000 Algerians, leaving dozens dead and wounded. For decades, talk of the massacre remained a blackout in France.
Historians describe the massacre of October 17, 1961 in Paris, or what is also known as the "Seine massacre", as "one of the darkest pages in the history of France." Peaceful demonstrators violently, then the security forces in the Paris "capital of lights" executed some of them, and dumped their bodies in dirty water canals and in the course of the Seine.
The demonstrations were organized by the "French Muslims of Algeria" (FMA), in response to a call by the Association of the National Liberation Front (FLN) in France to go out in rallies, in protest of the curfew decisions imposed by Maurice Papon, director of the security of the capital, exclusively on Algerian Muslims.
The systematic violence against the Algerians continued for days after the massacre, then the French authorities deliberately covered up their heinous crimes, preventing eyewitnesses and the families of the demonstrators from talking about the massacre, and concealing images that highlight the bloody and barbarism of the French security forces during the massacre.
The right of the Algerian people to self-determination
The Paris massacre is considered one of the distinguishing signs that permeated the Algerian liberation revolution or the “Algeria War” between 1954 and 1962, and the Algerian revolution caused the fall of the Fourth French Republic and the return of General Charles de Gaulle to rule as “President of the Council”, after the failed coup carried out by a number of military personnel. The French on May 23, 1958 in order to avoid Algeria's independence.
After de Gaulle became the first president of the French Fifth Republic, he was aware in his heart that the values that the international community sought to establish in the post-war period, also known as the "post-colonial phase", foremost of which is the right of peoples to self-determination, would be inevitable. They are inevitable, which is what prompted him to work to put an end to the bloody conflict during the Algerian liberation revolution.
The French agreed with de Gaulle, on January 8, 1961, the result of the referendum on giving Algeria the right to self-determination was 75.26%, but the "Organization of the Secret Army" (OAS) founded by Jean-Jacques Sosini and Pierre Lagayard on February 11 / February of the same year in the Spanish capital, Madrid, I tried in various ways to preserve French Algeria.
Racist administrative measures
The "secret army" attempted to sabotage the official talks that began in May 1961 between France and the Provisional Government of Algeria (GPRA), the political arm of Algeria's National Liberation Front.
The sabotage took place in cooperation with some members of de Gaulle's government himself, who did not like the idea of Algeria's independence, led by Michel Debray, then French Prime Minister, along with a large number of other French officials.
Opponents of the idea of Algeria's independence resolved to exercise unprecedented violence against the Algerian National Liberation Front to obstruct negotiations and reduce the chances of giving the Algerian people the right to self-determination. Debray dismissed his minister of the interior, loyal to de Gaulle, and replaced him with one of his close associates, Roger Freeh, along with the latter, Maurice Papon, director of Paris security.
The crackdown on Algerians began with police raids accompanied by a parallel police force, the French version of death squads in Latin America.
On October 5, 1961, Baboun announced in a press release the introduction of a night curfew in Paris and its suburbs for “Muslim Algerian workers,” “for the Muslims of France,” and “for the Muslims of France from Algeria,” in the words of the capital’s security director at the time.
Historians considered that the "racism of administrative measures" adopted by Baboun angered the Algerians, as approximately 150,000 Algerians lived at that time in Paris, many of whom were officially considered French and possessed a French identity card.
A call to protest and brutal French violence
Following the unjust night-time curfew measures, the FLN called on “the Algerian population of Paris, the men, women and children, to demonstrate peacefully against the curfew” on October 17, 1961.
According to historian Jean-Luc Aynaudi, "Police chief Maurice Papon, about 7,000 French security personnel, and about 1,400 riot police, intervened to prevent this demonstration on the pretext that it did not receive legal approval."
All access to Paris, metro stations, and train stations were blocked, and among the approximately 150,000 Algerian residents of the French capital, 50-60,000 were able to join the demonstration. Among the protesters were Moroccans, Tunisians, Spanish, Italians, and many immigrants who reject the policies of discrimination and racial discrimination.
French security forces met the demonstration with unprecedented violence, and British historians Jim House and Neil McMaster describe this bloody event as "the most violent repression of street protests by a contemporary state in Western European history."
During the night, the massacre took place in the courtyard of the police headquarters, which resulted in the death of dozens of victims as a result of the brutal practices of the security forces of the French capital. Dozens of French police officers and their bodies dumped in the river Seine and in the dirty water canals of the French capital.
For a period that spanned for decades, the French authorities tried to obscure the truth of what happened on that dark night, and the number of dead, according to the official toll, was "only three people." Today, the official approximate number of the dead reaches at least 48, although some historians raise it to hundreds.
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