Paris massacre

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Commemorative plaque for the massacre. Text: "In memory of the numerous Algerians who fell victim to the bloody suppression of a peaceful demonstration"

As massacre of Paris one was mass murder and crimes against the state in Paris on 17 October 1961 during the Algerian War (1954-1962) in history. The Paris police went on the orders of the administration brutally against an unauthorized but peaceful demonstration of several thousand Algerians prior to the Algerian independence movement FLN had called. It is estimated that at least 200 people were killed. They were shot, beaten and partly drowned in the Seine . The bloody mass demonstration was almost completely hushed up in the French media for a long time and only became the subject of public discussion in France after a long time.

procedure

Two weeks before October 17, the city administration had issued a night curfew for French people of Algerian origin in the Paris region. This was portrayed in response to the FLN's recent attacks on police officers and gendarmes in France, in which several officers were killed. Previously, the fighting had been limited to Algeria. The mood among the city administration, the police and parts of the French public was correspondingly irritable.

Although the demonstration was peaceful, albeit in disregard of the curfew, Maurice Papon , head of the police and member of the French cabinet until 1981, issued an order to shoot. The Paris police, gendarmerie and riot police CRS then acted under the command of Papon with extreme brutality against the demonstrators. Papon was empowered by the government to "restore calm to the streets of Paris".

As police prefect, Papon was responsible for these dead, as Jean-Luc Einaudi pointed out, among others. Others, including Pierre Messmer in the later trial against Papon (see below), added that then Prime Minister Michel Debré and General de Gaulle were also to blame for giving Papon a free hand and covering his back.

Papon was convicted of crimes against humanity as a senior official of the Vichy regime in 1998. However , he was never prosecuted for the killings of Paris because of a general amnesty for all crimes committed in connection with the Algerian war.

A defamation lawsuit that Papon filed against historian Jean-Luc Einaudi in 1998 was dismissed a year later by a Paris court.

The exact number of deaths is unknown. At the time, police reports only spoke of three dead. In the spring of 1998 a report commissioned by the then Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement was published by Dieudonné Mandelkern, a member of the Conseil d'État , which corrected this number to 32. Historian Jean-Luc Einaudi lists 384 victims, including all those previously found in the waters around Paris; however, the number is probably higher because there are still unexplained cases and missing persons. Some of those arrested were interned in the open air for several days, and around 500 of them were then deported to Algeria. Weeks later, bodies were found in the Seine. There was practically no media coverage of the massacre at the time. Almost all of the publicly known photos are by Élie Kagan . To this day it is an event that is partially taboo in French society .

Commemoration

On October 17, 2001, the Social Democratic Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë , inaugurated a plaque on the Pont Saint-Michel to commemorate the event. The conservative opposition in the Paris City Council boycotted the ceremony. There are also memorial plaques for the massacre in Aubervilliers (photo) and Saint-Denis .

On October 17, 2012, the massacre was recognized and condemned by the French President François Hollande .

Movies

Jacques Panijel made the film Octobre à Paris about the events back in 1961 .

The massacre was also discussed in the documentary Ordered Silence: The Bloody Night of Paris (2002) by Michael Gramberg.

The Austro-French feature film Caché (2004) by director Michael Haneke addressed the taboo on the massacre in French society.

In 2005 appeared Nuit noire 17 octobre 1961 (Black Night October 17, 1961) by Alain Tasma ; the documentary film was initially broadcast on the private television broadcaster Canal + and was then released in cinemas. In the same year he received the Grand Prix at the Festival International of the Audiovisual Program (FIPA) in Biarritz ; In 2008 it was also shown on TV5 .

The French-Algerian feature film Outside the Law from 2010 also deals with this topic towards the end.

2011: Ici on noie les Algériens - 17 octobre 1961 , by Yasmina Adi.

Comic

In the 1990 comic The Champion , the cartoonist Baru tells the story of a young Algerian boxer who gets caught between the fronts against the backdrop of the Algerian War in Paris. The massacre of October 17, 1961 is also shown here.

literature

  • Martin S. Alexander, John FV Keiger: France and the Algerian War, 1954-62. Strategy, Operations and Diplomacy. Cass Press, London 2002, ISBN 0-7146-5297-0 , p. 24 (extensive, mostly French literature list).
  • Jean-Luc Einaudi : La Bataille de Paris. 17 octobre 1961. Édition du Seuil, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-02-051061-8 (EA Paris 1991).
  • Patrice J. Proulx & Susan Ireland (Eds.): Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France (Contributions to the study of world literature; 62). Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn. 2001, ISBN 0-313-31593-0 , pp. 47-55.
  • Jim House, Neil MacMaster: Paris 1961. Algerians, State Terror, and Memory. Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-19-924725-0 .
    • French: Paris 1961. Les Algériens, la terreur d'état et la mémoire . Tallandier, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-84734-491-2 .
  • Dietmar Hüser: From the “un-scandal” of the Algerian war to the “post-scandal” of the culture of memory. The Paris police repression of October 17th, 1961 . In: Andreas Gelz / Dietmar Hüser / Sabine Ruß (eds.): Scandals between modern and post-modern. Interdisciplinary perspectives on forms of social transgression (Linguae & Litterae; 32). DeGruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-030765-8 , pp. 183-213.

Web links

Commons : Paris Massacre 1961  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Bert Eder: 50 years later: Nobody counted the victims . In: The Standard . October 21, 2011
  2. ^ L'Express ( Memento of November 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ a b Bernhard Schmid : The official version ( Memento of the original from April 16, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / jungle-world.com archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Jungle World . March 31, 1999
  4. ↑ Ursula Welter : Bloodbath on the Seine . In: Deutschlandfunk . 17th October 2011
  5. ↑ BBC News : Paris marks Algerian protest “massacre” . October 17, 2001
  6. ↑ Hollande acknowledges massacres of Algerians. In: Spiegel Online . 17th October 2012.
  7. ^ Netzeitung : The 1961 massacre ( memento from June 23, 2013 in the Internet Archive ). October 19, 2005
  8. ↑ Review in Le Monde of October 13, 2006. The book is based on previously closed archives