The head of state should support a new “recognition”, announced the Elysée. This is part of the continuity of a process begun at the start of the five-year term.
President Emmanuel Macron will make a memorial gesture on Wednesday to returnees from Algeria which will relate to the shooting of the rue d’Isly in Algiers, in which dozens of supporters of French Algeria were killed by the army in March 1962 .
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The head of state will weara word of gratitudeduring a meeting with associations of repatriates from Algeria, commonly called the “blackfoot“, at the Élysée, indicated Tuesday January 25 the French presidency. “One of the highlights of the President of the Republic’s remarks will revolve around what happened on March 26 in Algiers, rue d’Isly“, added the presidency, without further details.
Series of memorial gestures
A week after the signing of the Evian Accords and the ceasefire, on March 19, 1962, in Algeria, civilian demonstrators in favor of French Algeria who were trying to force their way through the Bab El-Oued district, in the center of Algiers, were machine-gunned at a roadblock held by the French army. The shooting, which lasted more than a quarter of an hour, caused, according to various sources, at least fifty deaths, all civilians, among the demonstrators. The shooting in the rue d’Isly marked the beginning of the mass exodus of Pieds-noirs from Algeria.
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This “acknowledgementwill be part of a series of memorial gestures, since the beginning of the five-year term, in view of the 60th anniversary of the end of the Algerian war. On September 14, 2018, Emmanuel Macron acknowledged, “in the name of the French Republic», that the young communist mathematician Maurice Audin had been «tortured to death, or tortured and then executed by the French army” in 1957. On March 3, 2021, he also recognized that the nationalist lawyer Ali Boumendjel had been “tortured and murderedon March 23, 1957 by the French army, contradicting the initial version of a suicide. On September 20, 2021, the Head of State asked “sorryto the harkis, Algerian auxiliaries to the French army, who wereabandonedby France. A bill, recording this “pardon” and attempting to “to fix» the damages suffered, is currently being examined in Parliament.
Emmanuel Macron also denounced “inexcusable crimes for the Republicfor the 60th anniversary of the massacre by the French police of Algerian demonstrators on October 17, 1961 in Paris. “The objective remains the same, to build in the long term a peaceful, shared memory, common to all that have been until then the memories linked to the Algerian war and to colonization.“, underlined the Elysée.