The legacy of France can and should only be remembered as one utterly stained by (or, more accurately, formed from) its brutal colonialist and imperialist endeavours.
@sissa-arrows source (french)
French police killed at least 100 people in 1961, throwing some of them into the River Seine to drown them.
this part is especially triggering for me, since i learnt this past 17th October, that my Grandmother, who was 15 years old at the time, arrived with her mother at this horrific scene a bit too late and was nearly arrested by the police. I can't imagine what would have happened to her if they had left the house earlier.
The rare white people who witnessed this on the right side of history said that one of the things they won’t forget is how they fellow white parisians turned into informants for the police and how during all of the night they called the cops on the Algerians who managed to hide or escape.
Over 200 Algerians were killed that night over 500 if you count the one killed in the following nights but thousands more were arrested (over 10000) every single ministry was an accomplice they used to public buses to transport them kept them in a stadium because the precincts were not big enough… While the people killed were men and women, the people arrested were a huge majority of men. So the following days the women and children started calling for a peaceful march to ask for their husbands and fathers to be released. This time they knew that the public opinion wouldn’t look kindly to it if they killed them. So the police instead arrested the women and sent them to a psychiatric hospitals saying they were unstable and needed to be locked inside. Luckily the director was a good man so he refused to lock the women inside the hospital saying they were perfectly sane but he also refused to let the police take them. So he waited until the police left to help the women leave back to their places.
There’s a documentary about it (I don’t remember if the psychiatric hospital was in this documentary or in an other) made by an Algerian woman in the diaspora in France. It’s filled with testimonies and a woman explains that when her husband left for the protest he told her to take care of the children and that if something happened to him she needed to make sure their children would go to school school and be good students. He survived to October 17 but was found and killed by the police on the 19th.
Lastly in 2021 Macron pretended to atone for what happened and with the police prefect they went to pay their respect on the bridge where most of the massacre happened and they went to put flowers. He was the first president doing it. Except after doing it in front of the camera the police then stopped the peaceful march that the survivors and the families of the victims organize every year and they kept them from putting flowers there and pay their respect. Macron did a lot of fucked up shit but pretending to acknowledge a massacre from the police while using the police to stop Algerians from paying their respects to the victims was really the thing that stayed in my mind the most. Nothing says “we actually don’t regret sending the police against a peaceful protest of Algerians and will do it again” as well as sending the police against the peaceful march organized by the descendants of those killed and by the survivors…
