Thread by @ArthurAsseraf

60 years ago, on 17 October 1961, the Parisian police threw Algerians into the Seine.

Dozens of men and women who were demonstrating against a discriminatory curfew targeting Algerians were massacred.

This event has to be understood as part of a bigger story 1/

Algerians had long migrated to France in large numbers since the 1920s. Colonial methods of repression followed them in their migration. Special police services tracked them, often made up of officers with experience in North Africa. 2/
muse.jhu.edu/book/60103

Algerian workers in France were often politically active. During the independence war (1954-1962), many of them were involved in the struggle. Different Algerian movement fought each other and different French targets. 3/

In the midst of this violence, in October 1961, the government instituted a curfew ONLY for Algerians. In protest at this discrimination, they organised a protest. Under the orders of Maurice Papon, head of the Paris police, officers brutally repressed the demonstration. 4/

It is partly because of Papon that the massacre is famous. At the time, it was censored, and there was not much discussion of it. But it re-emerged in the 1990s. Before Paris in 1961, Papon had coordinated the massacre of hundreds of Jews in the Southwest of France in 1942-44 5/

In 1995, Papon was put on trial for his involvement in the Holocaust. Activists pointed out that he was not being prosecuted for killing Algerians less than twenty years later, spurring more discussion of the October 1961 massacre 6/

The massacre has rightly attracted attention bc it happened in the heart of Paris. But it is the most famous event in a much wider chain. Many more Algerians were killed far away from this attention. As préfet of Constantine from 1956-8, Papon also supervised their repression 7/

Others would be killed by the Paris police after the independence of Algeria in 1962. Independence did not stop Algerians from coming to France, and it did not stop discriminatory police measures against them. 8/

The massacre of 17 October 1961 is a window into a particular history of the French state, one which connects different forms of violence in Europe and North Africa, colonial and non-colonial, across multiple regimes. 9/

On a personal level, one of my first 'political' memories was when Papon was on trial in 1997. He asked for clemency for his old age.

As we were watching the TV, my mom said icily, 'well he didn't spare the elderly when he shipped us on trains to be killed'

ps: there is an essay about this, and the difficulties of learning how to connect different forms of racial violence, that I have written in my mind for a very long time. commission me <3

Many DMs asking for reading:
the best book is by two British historians, Jim House and Neil McMaster, “Paris 1961”.

You can also check out @campvolant’s recent “Ici on noya les Algériens” …

For novels, there is an interesting novel by William Gardner Smith, The Stone Face, recently republished by @adamshatz (which I have yet to write about 😬)
and a more recent one by Leila Sebbar, La Seine était rouge