World Reactions to the 1961 Paris Pogrom

On 17 October 1961 a peaceful protest of Algerians in Paris, against a night-time curfew which applied only to them, was organised by the Féderation de France of the Front de Libération National (FLN), near the end of its guerrilla war against the French authorities in Algeria (1954-1962). The march was brutally repressed by the police, with somewhere in the region of 200 fatalities. Long a taboo subject in France, these events have recently been the subject of public controversy, notably during the 1997-98 trial of Maurice Papon, the Paris prefect of police in 1961, for crimes carried out during the Second World War; and in Papon's unsuccessful 1999 libel action against the author of a prominent book on the 1961 massacre, Jean-Luc Einaudi.2 This article aims to investigate the neglected subject of international responses to the 1961 massacre.