The View from a Drawbridge

I’m 49 years old, and I’m just learning about something horrendous that happened on this day only a few years before I was born. I have no idea why this should be the case, other than the fact that I had a spotty and typically subpar Florida public school education.

I knew about the Algerian War in which that country ultimately gained its independence from France. That independence was hard-won indeed, and that war was extremely dirty on both sides– full of torture, disappearances, bombings and atrocities too numerous to mention. What I didn’t know about was the Paris massacre of 1961, in which at least 40, but quite possibly 200 people died.

On October 17^th, 1961 in the city of Paris, 30,000 Algerians staged a protest about the Algerian War. According to Wikipedia, “Many demonstrators died when they were violently herded by police into the River Seine, with some thrown from bridges after being beaten unconscious. Other demonstrators were killed within the courtyard of the Paris police headquarters after being arrested and delivered there in police buses. Officers who participated in the courtyard killings took the precaution of removing identification numbers from their uniforms, while senior officers ignored pleas by other policemen who were shocked when witnessing the brutality. Silence about the events within the police headquarters was further enforced by threats of reprisals from participating officers.”

In 1998, the French government finally acknowledged the death of 40 people on that tragic day. In 1999 the national assembly finally passed a law that allowed the term “Algerian War” to be used. What a shocking level of revisionist history to participate in for nearly half a century. But I doubt that any government can escape that accusation. God knows America can’t. I know I will never gaze upon the Seine in the same way again.

I couldn’t even tell you about how I recently learned about this event. It got overshadowed by my utter disgust that it isn’t more widely discussed. It made me wonder what else I am blissfully ignorant of. We live in a world in which there are so many brutalities that more and more of them fall by the wayside. So I decided that on this day I would bear witness in my humble blog, because 200 lives, even one life for that matter, is too precious to forget.

Please join me in a moment of silence.

I got this image from an amazing article that can be found here.