Beyond October 17, 1961

During the repression of what is called “ demonstration » of October 17, 1961, one hundred to two hundred Algerians were murdered by the Parisian police, while thousands of others, among the 11,000 arrested, were deported to Algeria. 20 to 30,000 people (between a quarter and a sixth of Algerians in the Paris region) took part in this demonstration. Long forgotten, this event has, over the past twenty years, given rise to abundant historiographical production, which has made it possible to clearly establish the facts. The book by Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961, The Algerians, the Republic and State Terror published in 2008 seemed to exhaust the question. These documents presented here, however, have the advantage of providing previously unpublished testimonies on police repression (October in Paris And Here we drown the Algerians) and to return to the genealogy of this violence (The Parisian Police and the Algerians).

Three views on the Algerian war in mainland France

The work The Parisian Police and the Algerians is taken from Emmanuel Blanchard’s thesis. This is an extremely rigorous, convincing and nuanced work, which is based mainly on the archives of the police headquarters (PP) and the Ministry of the Interior. Starting from a questioning of the social conditions of the repression of October 17, 1961, the author looks at the daily practices of the Parisian police towards Algerians and the “ materiality of their interactions » (p. 8), drawing inspiration from the work of Alain Dewerpe on “ state massacre » from the Charonne metro station.

In the first part, Emmanuel Blanchard describes the new status of Algerians, adopted between 1944 and 1947 to save the colonial project, and its consequences in mainland France. It is, according to the author, a “ real legislative and institutional disarmament in matters of police » (p. 32) to the extent that Algerians are now theoretically French citizens. Emmanuel Blanchard analyzes in a second part the adaptation of the police to this new situation, through the creation of apparently generalist services and the adoption of different methods during the period 1947-1958. The third part returns to the construction of the “ North African problem » by the PP at the same period, through the analysis of discourses which equate Algerian workers with beggars and criminals. The issue, for the PPis to legitimize the rebuilding of police services specific to Algerians, despite their new status as French citizens. These projects meet with significant support, due to the proximity of the police chief with certain elected officials and the press, but cause recurring conflicts with the Ministry of the Interior. Finally, the last part describes the success of the empowerment strategy of the PP between 1958 and 1962 under the leadership of Maurice Papon. Specialized services were finally created, whose radical methods were imported from colonial terrain and borrowed from the military register. The manifestation itself is not discussed until chapter 11, in conclusion.

October in Paris is a documentary film made by Jacques Panijel in the wake of the events. This is a committed document,

hot and incriminating testimony on the acts committed by the Parisian police. The director belonged to the Audin committee, formed following the disappearance of the young Algerian communist mathematician in 1957, arrested and murdered by the French army. The film was censored upon its release and seized at each screening attempt. Subsequently, Jacques Panijel refused its distribution for reasons that remain obscure, despite obtaining a visa in 1973. The film was only released on screens for the fiftieth anniversary of the demonstration, after Panijel’s death in 2010. Filmed between the slums of Nanterre, Gennevilliers and Goutte d’Or, this documentary gives voice in the first part to beaten Algerians, some tortured or left for dead by the French police, between 1958 and 1961. The second part evokes the demonstration, through the filmed reconstruction of the departure of the demonstrators from Nanterre and a montage of photographs. This documentary constitutes an exceptional archive on the violence used against Algerians and, more generally, on the sociology of Parisian Algerians in the 1960s. The documentary gives voice to several women and children, but also to qualified workers , whose presence is often ignored.

Here we drown the Algerians was made fifty years later, in 2011, by Yasmina Adi. She had already achieved The other May 8, 1945about the Sétif massacre, which constituted a real work of historical research. Here, the author claims above all a memorial aim. Centered on the repression of the demonstration, this documentary has the originality of giving voice to several women, widows of demonstrators, but also activists of the FLN. It is based above all on remarkable documents from the archives of the PPlittle known until now: photographs of PC of the police on the evening of October 17 and Algerians interned at the Parc des Expositions, newsreel film on the expulsion of Algerians at the Bourget aerodrome, etc.

The actors of the repression

Emmanuel Blanchard provides particularly interesting elements on the sociological recruitment of agents at different levels of the police hierarchy. His research is notably guided by the hypothesis of the colonial socialization of actors as a factor in explaining violence. If the police chiefs are for the most part “ integrated into the colonial space » (p. 176), the study of the careers of a sample of peacekeepers leads him to conclude that “ weakness of colonial capital » of most agents, whose colonial experience is generally limited to their military engagement in Algeria.

It is therefore on specialized services in populations “ North African » (North African Brigade in the interwar period, then Brigade of Aggressions and Violence from 1953) that he focuses his study on. It shows in particular that among the agents recruited, whether they are French or “ North Africans », Berber or Arabic speakers are still in the minority. This was no longer the case after 1958. Maurice Papon created technical assistance services modeled on the SAS Algerians and led by officers of Algerian Affairs, and especially the Auxiliary Police Force (FPA) in 1960. This unit “ military-police » (p. 322) is made up of harkis recruited in France and Algeria. The latter play a central role in the repressive system established by the prefect. Their number is reduced to around 400 among the 20,000 agents of the PPbut they are on the front line among the different units engaged on the evening of October 17. More generally, they are responsible for the tasks of “ low font ” and we delegate to them the acts of torture perpetrated in the cellars of the Goutte d’Or (filmed in October in Paris).

Regardless, traditional police forces resort to humiliation and violence against Algerians on a daily basis. However, it emerges from this study that this general attitude is not explained by a colonial socialization of agents, but rather by the construction of a figure of the Algerian as “ undesirable “.

Periodization and nature of violence

We can regret the absence of contextualization in Yasmina Adi’s documentary, which hardly goes back beyond the establishment of the curfew on October 5, 1961, considered the immediate trigger of the demonstration. This film, however, has the advantage of not stopping on the date of October 17 and of focusing on the reactions of French society in the following weeks, while we often wrongly emphasize the silence that followed. Filmed at the time of the events, October in Paris did not require returning to a context then known to all. It is, however, interesting to note that the testimonies mention abuses that occurred as early as 1958, a sign that the violence of the police on the evening of October 17 was then perceived as the continuity of pre-existing practices. Directed by a resistance fighter of Romanian and Jewish origin, this film explicitly places October 17 in the context of the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War. The film ends with images of Charonne, while the voice off suggests that the “ fascism ” is the source of police violence. It is by adopting a medium-term perspective that Emmanuel Blanchard stands out in the already very marked field of “ October 17 “. Despite the date of 1944 announced in the title, the author dates his analyzes back to the interwar period. This periodization allows him to underline the antiquity of the differentiated treatment of Algerian migrants. At the same time, the author relativizes the colonial specificity by emphasizing that the forms of management adopted by the police with regard to Algerians are, in certain respects, close to the treatment of other populations considered undesirable, such as prostitutes, vagabonds or even foreigners. Emmanuel Blanchard also notes that the Algerian war of independence began in 1945 and recalls little-known episodes such as the repression of the July 14, 1953 parade in Paris (which left six Algerians dead) and the Goutte riot d’Or in July 1955 (which led to the expulsion of 400 suspected nationalist activists to Algeria). The repression of October 17, 1961 therefore appears to be the culmination of a process that had been underway for a long time.

October 17, 1961: a colonial massacre

The work of Jim House and Neil MacMaster has already shown that the repression of October 17, 1961 did not constitute an isolated accident, the result of police slippage, as Jean-Paul Brunet sought to show, but was similar to A “ colonial massacre “. Emmanuel Blanchard takes up this idea: it is both the colonized nature of the repressed, and the “ blank check » signed by Maurice Papon to police officers exasperated by the murders of agents perpetrated by the FLNwhich make the massacre of October 17, 1961 possible. The author makes a judicious comparison with the massacre of the Carrières centrales in Casablanca in December 1952, during which several hundred Moroccans were killed. Concerning the immediate circumstances, Emmanuel Blanchard also provides a new and convincing analysis based on the archives of the police unions: Maurice Papon showed no concern to protect the peace guards he had engaged in the fight against FLN and then relied on their anger to promote indiscriminate repression. The contribution of Emmanuel Blanchard’s study, however, lies not so much in the interpretation of the immediate causes of the violence, as in his socio-historical analysis of the constitution of “ North African problem » in the second half of XX^e century, in the heart of the imperial capital.