MASSACRES AND THEIR HISTORIANSRecent Histories of State Violence in Franceand Algeria in the Twentieth CenturyJoshua ColeUniversity of MichiganHistorians cannot resist violence.* Not simply because of a voyeuristic interestin the dramatically lethal but also because many of the most vexing questionsabout the writing of history converge in the crucible of violent events. Historians are attracted to the subject because they hope that it might tell themsomething about the fundamental problems in their discipline: questionsabout causality agency narrative and contingency; about the readability ofthe past and the conclusions that one can draw about complex social phenomena from fragmentary and often one-sided bits of evidence. Inevitably however some historians who write about violence will find their work takenup in broader public debates and these discussions can take them far from thelibraries archives and classrooms where they are most comfortable. In thisway historians are ushered some more willingly than others into turbulentpublic forums where their status and claims for expertise make them bothsources of legitimation and targets of attack. Regardless of the success of historians in addressing the questions raised by violence the nature of theirefforts and their varying claims for objectivity or completeness make themirresistible reference points for others who have a different axe to grind. Historians cannot resist violence but others who speak of violence cannot resisthistorians either.This tension between public debate and historical research is clearly visible in recent work about violence and the French colonial empire. Since thethirtieth anniversary of Algerian independence in 1992 a steady stream ofworks dealing with colonial violence has appeared with much attentiondevoted to the volatile period between the end of World War II and the early1960s when most of France’s colonies gained their independence. At least twoFrench Politics Culture & Society Vol. 28 No. 1 Spring 2010doi:10.3167/fpcs.2010.280107 Massacres and Their Historians107phases in this discussion can be discerned. In the early to mid-1990s many ofthe relevant archives from this period remained closed and public discussionsof colonial violence seemed to be driven largely by non-historians and contingent circumstances. Since those years however more of the archives havebecome available and academic historians have entered the public discussionin larger numbers. Both before and after the opening of the archives however it was less the question of colonial violence itself that commanded the attention of both the public and researchers than the history of particular violentevents. Three events in particular served to focus public attention in France onthe question of colonial violence: the massacres at Sétif and Guelma in theeastern Algerian department of Constantine in May 1945; the deaths of Algerian protesters at the hands of Paris police in October 1961; and finally thepolice killings of protesters at the Charonne metro station in the capital during a demonstration organized by the Communist Party and trade union organizations in February 1962.The afterlife of these three events share a similar trajectory: initially forgotten by the wider public their respective memories survived in the ensuingdecades because of their significance for particular groups in the polity. It isonly in recent years that they have come to be seen as connected in importantways. The massacres of Sétif and Guelma remained largely unknown in France but in Algeria they were memorialized in the strongly nationalist historiography that focused on the events leading to independence in 1962. The fact thatthe victims of police violence at Charonne in 1962 were members of the Communist Party meanwhile meant that their memory was strongly associatedwith the commemorative practices of the French Left in 1960s and 1970s. TheAlgerian victims of police violence in October 1961 on the other hand hadno powerful organizations to represent them in the public sphere and theirmemory survived largely in the minds of direct participants until the 1980sand 1990s when a series of coincidences renewed public interest in the disputed events of October 1961.It was the trial of Maurice Papon in 1997-1998 for crimes against humanity committed during the Second World War that brought wide attention topolice violence against Algerians in Paris in 1961 because in addition to beingresponsible for the deportation of 1500 Jews from Bordeaux during the German occupation Papon had also been Prefect of Police in Paris between 1958and 1967. During Papon’s trial author Jean-Luc Einaudi testified that policeacting under Papon’s authority had murdered dozens of Algerians (who were of course of French nationality) in Paris on 17 October 1961 during a demonstration in favor of Algerian independence.1 Einaudi’s testimony received widecoverage and Papon sued him for libel for maintaining the accusations inprint. The tactic backfired however when the court ruled that Einaudi waswithin his rights to use the term “massacre” to refer to the killings of demonstrators by the police.2 The ongoing controversy highlighted the difficulty thathistorians and other investigators had in accessing police and military archives 108Joshua Colerelated to the Algerian war and Einaudi’s efforts helped bring pressure on thearchival administration to open to public scrutiny documents relating to thecolonial period.3In recent years a new generation of scholars completed the first dissertations using these archives and their work ushered in the second stage in thehistorical reconsideration of colonial violence. The public defense in December 2000 of Raphaëlle Branche’s thesis on torture and the French military during the Algerian war was an event notable enough to be written up in theFrench press and many voices were quick to express the hope that this newscholarly work marked the beginning of a more systematic and measured discussion.4 Such hopes proved premature however as the near simultaneouspublication of two autobiographies—one by an Algerian woman tortured bythe French military during the Algerian war and another by a self-confessedtorturer and murderer from the French army—kept the ensuing controversyon the front pages of the daily press but did not necessarily encourage thekind of scholarly discussion ostensibly favored by historians.5 SylvieThénault’s important book on French magistrates law and the courts duringthe Algerian war (2001) for example played little role in the public debate perhaps because it did not lend itself to the kind of sensational reception thatgreeted Raphaëlle Branche’s work. Yet arguably Thénault had done just asmuch to illuminate the ways that key institutions of the French republic wereshaped by the emergency situation confronting the government during theAlgerian war.6 Instead of a calm and measured discussion about the broad history of French colonialism and the place of violence within this history aflurry of books on specific and sensational violent events has come out inrecent years including two books by Jean-Paul Brunet on police violence inParis in 1961 and 1962 (published in 1999 and 2003 respectively); a furtherbook by Linda Amiri on violence between the police in Paris and Algeriannationalists during roughly the same period (2004); a co-written volume byJim House and Neil MacMaster on the same subject (2006); and Alain Dewerpe’s historical anthropology of the February 1962 murder of demonstratorsby police at the Charonne metro station.7 Meanwhile historians Annie ReyGoldzeiguer and Jean-Louis Planche both published books on the 1945 massacres in Sétif and Guelma.8 New works on related subjects continue to appearwith some frequency but the discussion continues to be dominated by historians from France Britain and the United States and it has been more difficultfor scholars working in North African universities to gain the same kind ofattention or support for their research.9Inevitably this outpouring of scholarship and its reception have beenshaped by larger discussions about the relevance of the colonial past toFrance’s contemporary social and political situation. This is especially true ofworks dealing with the history of French Algeria and the war of Algerian independence. Each of the above books is about a moment of violence that by the1990s had achieved a kind of iconic status because of their place in bitter pub- Massacres and Their Historians109lic debates. Even before these books were published “Sétif ” “17 October1961 ” and “Charonne” had been so frequently evoked in both France andAlgeria by politicians and commentators across the political spectrum thattheir names had become a kind a shorthand for evoking the violence of thecolonial period and their anniversaries have become opportunities for variousforms of ritualized public commemoration as well as expressions of rancorand regret. The resonance of these events and the dates they evoke is demonstrated clearly by the titles inevitably chosen by these authors (or their publishers) titles which depend on the instant recognition of the drama that theycontain: Paris 1961 (McMaster and House); Charonne 8 février 1962 (Dewerpe);Charonne (Brunet); and Sétif 1945 (Planche). Only Amiri resisted the temptation to link a resonant place name with a key date though her own title (TheBattle of France) echoes that of the legendary 1965 film by Gillo Pontecorvo The Battle of Algiers.10 In each case the publishers seized upon the opportunityof exploiting the sensationalist atmosphere surrounding these events in thepublic imagination. This is unfortunate because in their own way—and withvarying degrees of success—each of these books attempts to move beyond thehyperbolic claims and bitter accusations that have so often characterized public debate about these events and their significance.It is worth asking why the 1945 massacres in Sétif and Guelma haveemerged alongside the police violence in Paris in 1961-1962 as the obligatorypoints of reference for public discussions of France’s colonial past. There are of course other equally horrific events to choose from. Part of the answermust arise from the way that these two moments bracket the crucial period ofdecolonization the years from 1945 to 1962. The brutal French repression ofa perceived insurrection in the region around Sétif and Guelma in May 1945has often been portrayed as the true beginning of the war for Algerian independence.11 The violence in Paris in 1961-1962 on the other hand hasbecome the indisputable illustration of what ultimately resulted from France’smisguided efforts to keep Algeria French: a nation divided against itself on theverge of civil war with members of the military contemplating a coup d’état and a desperate state defending itself by unleashing the murderous violencethat had long been routine in colonial spaces within the heart of the Frenchcapital itself.The fact that present-day discussions focus so relentlessly on the violenceassociated with decolonization rather than say the violence of conquest inthe nineteenth century suggests that what remains disturbing to the widerpublic is less the fact of violence itself than the circumstances that connectit to the loss of colonial power and authority in the mid-twentieth century.For residents of metropolitan France nowhere was this loss more traumaticthan in Algeria. A significant number of people are alive today who experienced and remember these events including both former Algerian colonialsubjects and former French-Algerian colons the pieds-noirs.12 It is also truethat France’s current political institutions are much more closely connected 110Joshua Coleto the events and history of decolonization in Algeria than they are to theregimes that embarked on African and Asian conquest in the nineteenth century. The focus on Algeria however has produced a blinding glare distracting observers from other equally horrific events from the same period. Thekilling of French-African troops in Thiaroye (Senegal) in 1944 and again inCasablanca in 1947 the bombing of Haiphong harbor in 1946 and the massacre of tens of thousands of people in Madagascar in 1947-1948 have allreceived some attention in recent years but it is Algeria which again andagain emerges as the central reference.13Algeria’s unique place among the list of French colonies stems from twofacts: first it had by far the largest colonial settler population among all theFrench colonies and second for most of the colonial period Algeria was nota colony at all but a legal part of France.14 These facts paradoxically mean thatwhile Algeria can in no way be seen as representative or typical of other Frenchcolonies in Africa Asia the Caribbean the Indian Ocean or the Pacific itsimultaneously serves as a kind of archetypal or illustrative example of the“essence” of French colonialism if such a doubtful thing could be said to existat all. In this way for better or worse French Algeria has become the test casefor any general inquiry about the nature of French imperial control. Whetherthe question is about military conquest political aspirations legal structures definitions of citizenship or the social and economic consequences of Frenchoccupation it appears that the particular circumstances of French Algeria mustalways be a part of the answer.It is important to recognize this fact at the outset because most of thesebooks despite their ostensibly narrow focus on the circumstances of one particular event seek to draw conclusions about French colonialism in general.15A central question motivating much of this work is the place of violencewithin the French colonial order: Was this violence “systemic ” a structuraland necessary part of colonial control or was it simply the circumstantialresult of various weaknesses and failures on the part of those whose job it wasto maintain security in the colonies? The claim that colonialism was a “system” with violence at its center is associated with Jean-Paul Sartre who wrotein 1956 as the war with the FLN was heating up that Algeria was “alas theclearest and most legible example of the colonial system.”16 The logic of thissystem its “internal necessity ” he wrote “was bound to lead us exactly wherewe are now”—that is to a war with Algerian nationalists. For Sartre the colonial system in Algeria was organized for the purposes of economic exploitation. Colonial settlers using force if necessary employed the former owners ofthe African landscape as laborers to produce goods cheaply for export toFrench markets. Such a system could only be maintained by military conquestand a civic order that preserved a strict demarcation between colonial subjectsand the privileged class of colonial settlers. Frantz Fanon famously argued inthe opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth that the daily violence of thecolonizing power would inevitably be met with the relentless and desperate Massacres and Their Historians111violence of colonized peoples who could only realize their own humanity bydestroying a social order predicated on their debasement.17 Fanon’s argumentsabout the centrality of violence to the colonial project have been taken up anddeveloped more recently by historians such as Olivier Le Cour Grandmaisonand Sidi Mohammed Barkat.18Roughly speaking and though they might disagree on many other things MacMaster House Brunet and Amiri all writing about police violence inParis in 1961-1962 tend to side with those who see these violent events as theoutcome of a cycle of domination and force that was inherent to the Frenchcolonial order. Jean-Louis Planche on the other hand writing about the massacres in Sétif and Guelma in 1945 explicitly declares his intention of demonstrating that these killings were not the result of a systematic logic of terror atthe heart of French colonialism. Dewerpe for his part refuses to connect thekillings of demonstrators by the Paris police at Charonne in 1962 to any logicthat one might call “colonial” at all and instead finds its ultimate causes inthe internal procedures and tactics of a police bureaucracy charged with maintaining order on the city streets in the face of a defiant public.With regard to the long history of conquest and resistance in North Africa the contention that violence lay at the heart of the colonial enterprise is bothunremarkable and incontestable. At the same time however it is also true thatbooks about particular historical events may not be the best means to answerquestions about the systematic nature of this violence. An event whose “delusive smoke fills the minds of its contemporaries ” as Braudel famously framedit resists systematizing precisely because of its singular nature.19 Events lendthemselves too easily to complex narratives and thus defy attempts at generalization. Indeed it is precisely the complex and contingent political contextof the massacres in Sétif and Guelma in 1945 that allowed Jean-Louis Planchein his new book to deny that the killings stemmed from any general logic ofterror at the heart of French colonialism. He denied as well that the massacreswere the result of a conspiracy planned ahead of time and dispelled any lingering tendency to blame officials associated with the Vichy regime for thekillings. Instead Planche argued that the deaths of as many as twenty thousand Algerians in the early summer of 1945 at the hands of French military police and private militias were the result of a panicked even paranoid preemptive strike against an insurrection that was so feeble and disorganized ithardly deserved the appellation.Certain facts about the repression in Algeria after 8 May 1945 do not seemto be in dispute. On that day coinciding with the celebrations of V-E Day inEurope Algerian nationalists called for demonstrations in many Algeriantowns and cities. Members of the clandestine and banned Parti populairealgérien (PPA) led by the imprisoned Messali Hadj and supporters of FerhatAbbas’s legal but closely watched Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté (AML) sought to impress the French authorities with a show of Algerian resolve andunity at a moment when the postwar institutions of the Fourth Republic were 112Joshua Colebeing created.20 The demonstrations were met with police violence in manyAlgerian cities but the worst confrontation occurred in Sétif a medium-sizedcity in eastern Algeria. On the morning of 8 May police in Sétif fired ondemonstrators carrying flags and banners calling for Algerian independence.In response enraged demonstrators ran through the town attacking andkilling many French settlers. As news of the violence spread throughout theregion spontaneous local revolts occurred over the next four days in severalother towns and the number of settler deaths rose to 103 by 12 May.21 Giventhe green light from civilian officials in Paris local authorities in Algeriaembarked upon a brutal repression in which the army and civilian militiasembraced a policy of collective punishment. Entire villages of colonial subjectswere held responsible for the violence in Sétif and the surrounding region andwere attacked by heavy artillery aircraft and in some cases naval bombardment. Many thousands of Algerians were killed. In Guelma a smaller city tothe east of Sétif no settlers were killed on May 8 but sporadic attacks in subsequent days triggered a drastic reaction by civilian militias organized by theGaullist sub-prefect André Achiary. According to historian Jean-Pierre Peyroulou settler vigilantes organized and assisted by local authorities killed between1 500 and 2 000 Algerians solely in the area around Guelma in the weeks following the demonstrations of 8 May.22Historical controversy about the events in eastern Algeria in 1945 is inseparable from the larger debates about the origins and meanings of the war forAlgerian independence. The French civilian and military authorities admittedonly 1 340 deaths in what they claimed was a justified police action againstrebellious nationalists. In Algeria historians and militants sympathetic to thenationalist movement put forward a number closer to 45 000 deaths. AbdelkaderDjeghloul in his preface to Radouane Ainad Tabet’s Le Mouvement du 8 Mai1945 en Algérie (1985) argued that the insurrection could be seen both as adirect continuation of rural resistance to colonial rule going back to the nineteenth century and the opening of a new phase of struggle that would culminate in national independence in 1962. Djeghloul’s arguments here echoedthose of Mahfoud Kaddache whose monumental history of the nationalistmovement in Algeria published first in 1980 and in a revised edition in 2003 emphasized the breadth and significance of the national movement in Algeriain May 1945 the insurrectional nature of the uprising and its ultimate destination in the coming decade: a successful war for independence.23In arguing for an elevated number of victims Planche is challenging notonly the French government’s far more conservative estimate but also theevaluations of previous French specialists in North African history such asCharles-André Julien and his student Charles Ageron who estimated thatbetween six and eight thousand colonial subjects lost their lives in the 1945repression.24 At the same time however Planche marks his distance from thehistorians of Algerian nationalism who see the event as part of a continuoustradition of Algerian resistance to French rule. Planche argues that the nation- Massacres and Their Historians113alist movement in Algeria in May 1945 was disorganized and uncertain andthat the uprising such as it was in no way deserved the term of “insurrection.” It certainly did not merit the overwhelming and brutal force that theFrench authorities brought to bear on the local populations of the departmentof Constantine during these weeks. Although Planche acknowledges the disruption caused in Algeria by the Second World War the Vichy period and thesubsequent Allied occupation he prefers instead to see the crisis of 1945 interms of a resurgence of the complicated political tensions that existed at thelocal level in Algerian cities in the 1930s.25Planche is on familiar ground here as the author of a thesis on Algerianpolitics in the 1930s and that earlier work’s arguments are reprised in the firsthalf of his new book on Sétif.26 In Planche’s account the powerful intereststhat controlled Algerian politics following World War I had delegated theirpower to a center-left coalition which took the name of “Radicalisme” fromthe Radical Republican party of the Third Republic. This centrist coalition hadmanaged to maintain a political peace among settler elites and minimized thepolitical divisions among the “Europeans” in Algeria that might have threatened their dominance over the mass of colonial subjects. Four thingshappened in the interwar period however to disturb this coalition: theappearance of a strong and independent communist party the organization ofMuslim elected officials following the post World War I reforms the emergence of a mass-based Algerian nationalist movement in Algeria itself and acorresponding new form of right-wing militancy among certain settler circles.Planche argued that a portion of the traditional settler elites in Algeria wouldhave preferred to transfer their allegiance from the Radicals to the new Rightin the 1930s yet such a difficult shift threatened to destabilize the delicatebalance within Algerian politics between large and small-scale settler establishments lower and upper middle classes urban and rural interests and“Europeans” and “Muslims.”27The advent of the Popular Front after 1934—coinciding with a flaring oftension between Muslims and Jews in Constantine—exacerbated these conflicts in Algeria which experienced a prolonged political crisis lasting until theoutbreak of the war five years on. The extreme right-wing in Algeria was galvanized by the Popular Front’s leftist coalition a movement that ralliedaround principles of equality and republican citizenship in France whileexpressing opposition to authoritarian regimes elsewhere in Europe. The cityof Constantine became a stronghold of François de la Rocque’s Croix de feu and Jacques Doriot’s extremist party—the Parti populaire français—developeda strong following in Oran and other towns. Meanwhile when socialist LéonBlum took power in 1936 he was forced to walk a…
