In those same waters, always different, into which Inspector Javert, persistent pursuer of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, threw himself forever; in that eternal current into which the poet Paul Celan, of the “black milk of dawn,” threw himself from the Mirabeau Bridge, the French police threw hundreds of Algerians into that same river of history, the Seine, in the terrible Paris Massacre in October 1961.
The novel inauguration of the Olympic Games in Paris, on the waters of the Seine, stirred up the history of another act of vileness on the part of the French metropolis against its oppressed colony of Algeria, which since the 1950s (actually, long before) dared to rise up against the colonizers in a heroic feat of national liberation, which kept the world in suspense during the Cold War.
For 132 years, France kept the Algerian people under its colonialist yoke, and they were only able to declare their independence in 1962 after suffering all kinds of abuses, plundering, torture, persecution, and mistreatment in droves. During the long struggle to shake off French oppression, more than one and a half million natives of this North African country died in a destructive and criminal act that has been classified as genocide.
And while boats, flowers, and flags sailed by on the Seine and the Olympic delegations were parading in a long and intense way, watched by the whole world, a few “party poopers” recalled the days of terror in the autumn of 1961, when thousands of Algerians in the French capital demonstrated against the occupation of their country in a peaceful demonstration that was subjected to all sorts of brutality by the French officers. The historian Jean-Luc Einaudi, in his research entitled The Battle of Paris, claimed that between 200 and 393 demonstrators were killed by the police in a massacre that was kept secret and silenced by the state for a long time.
The then President Charles de Gaulle thought that all those deaths, that infamous repression, the torture of prisoners, for example, at the Pierre de Coubertin stadium (the name of a misogynist, colonialist, racist, xenophobic baron and promoter of the Olympic Games of modernity), those thrown into the Seine after being beaten by the gendarmerie, were “a secondary matter.” He must have presumed that killing Algerians was the same as shooting ducks in cruel hunting operations.
After all the barbarity of the “civilized” French police against the Algerian “plague,” and despite the fact that so many people died, since the corpses appeared in other towns along the river, only a graffiti, as a memory of the ignominy, was written on the banks of the historic Seine: “Here we drowned the Algerians.” The massacre was covered by oblivion for a long time.
However, the following year, in 1962, the National Liberation Front of Algeria achieved independence for the country. Of course, a lot of water had passed under the bridges of the Seine, as had many corpses of their compatriots, and the “Battle of Algiers” (remember the film by the Italian Gillo Pontecorvo) had borne fruit after so much bloodshed. In the fifties regarding this Algerian movement and other political aspects, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus broke off relations, which slipped from friendship to hatred. Those debates between the author of La Naïve and the author of The Stranger still stir up fibers of history.
Someone said, with a hint of black humor, that both philosophers and writers “run the typical 21st century risk of becoming t-shirts and clichés,” or rather, caricatures, bazaar merchandise in times of social networks and other banalities. In any case, both were intellectuals who took a chance on political positions, which they were always challenging and questioning. Perhaps they did not harbor dogmatism or an uncritical and vulgar following.
In May 1968, when Camus had already been dead in a traffic accident for eight years, Sartre was carried on the shoulders of French students as the “real French thinker” for his permanent irreverence, always “against the grain,” always ready to shoot against the established and the apparently immutable. Oh, and returning to the Algerian conflict, this not only manifested itself with all its explosions in the colony but also in the metropolis, where it ignited the bonfires of public debates and popular marches.
On the same river where French police killed dozens of Algerians, the opening ceremony of the Olympics was held, where the Algerian delegation was seen throwing flowers into the water in memory of the martyrs. And some, or who knows how many on earth, reaffirmed that those condemned by today’s neocolonialism can achieve independence and freedom. Only if they persist in the struggle, only if they do not give up.
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