09-05-2025
Remembering Sétif, the VE Day colonial massacres that ‘lost Algeria' for France
On the morning of May 8, 1945, even as revellers thronged the streets of French cities to celebrate the end of World War II, a crowd of around 10,000 people gathered in Sétif, a commercial hub in Algeria 's Constantine region, east of Algiers.
The local authorities, in what was then a French département, had authorised a rally to celebrate the victory over Nazi Germany, while forbidding any flag other than that of liberated France.
Still, some demonstrators showed up waving Algerian flags and singing the patriotic chant ' Min Djibalina ' (From our Mountains), which would later become an anthem of the independence struggle. Some cried 'Free Messali Hadj', calling for the release of a jailed champion of Algerian independence. Others shouted, 'We want to be your equals' and 'Down with colonialism'.
Suddenly, 'a policeman shot an Algerian flag-bearer, sparking shock and anger among the crowd, who then turned on the Europeans who were present,' Benjamin Stora, an Algeria-born French historian, said in a 2022 interview with FRANCE 24.
Stora, who spent half a century investigating the fraught history between Algeria and its former colonial power, said 'tens of thousands of people' were killed in the ensuing repression, which he described as a weeks-long 'massacre'.
'It was a war of reprisal that lasted practically two months,' he explained. 'We talk about the events of May 8 but in truth the repression lasted through May and June 1945.'
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Algerian nationalists at the time said some 45,000 people were killed in the massacres at Sétif and in the towns and surrounding areas of Guelma and Kherrata, an estimate later adopted by independent Algeria in 1962.
French authorities in 1945 put the death toll at 1,500 Algerians and 103 'Europeans', the term used to refer to Algeria's white, settler population.
'Various figures have been put forward,' said Stora. 'US intelligence spoke of 30,000 dead, while historians' estimates range between 8,000 and 20,000 dead. There were summary executions, arbitrary arrests and murders committed by the regular army, but also by European militias (...) The repression was absolutely appalling.'
Point of no return
A turning point in Algerian history, the Sétif massacres are intimately tied to the end of the World War II, during which General Charles de Gaulle's Free French forces – opposed to Nazi-allied Vichy France – had relied heavily on colonial troops.
In the months following the bloody repression, hundreds of thousands of Algerian Muslim soldiers, who had fought with the Allies against Nazi Germany at the battle of Monte Cassino in Italy and during the Provence landings, were gradually demobilised and sent home.
'Upon returning home, Algerians who had fought with the Allies for two or three years were shocked to discover the scale of repression. Many families had been affected, since all the northern part of Constantine province had been bombed, particularly by the air force,' said Stora.
Veterans who 'took part in the war effort had thought they would be rewarded. Or at least that their rights would be recognised,' he added.
The scale and horror of the massacres perpetrated by police, the army and parts of the settler population persuaded many advocates of Algerian independence that peaceful dialogue was simply not on the agenda in the wake of World War II.
Algerian nationalists who had opposed colonial rule since the 1930s soon turned to armed struggle, launching a bloody war of independence in November 1954 that would end nearly eight years later with the departure of over a million French and other nationals who were living in Algeria.
Indifference, then ignorance
The massacres of May-June 1945 marked a turning point for a generation of Algerians who believed that fighting to liberate France would in turn pave the way for their liberation from colonial rule.
In mainland France, however, indifference prevailed. Absorbed by his efforts to rebuild France and restore its standing among the world's powers, Charles de Gaulle devoted just two lines to the subject of Sétif in his memoirs.
Two voices attempted to break this deafening silence.
One was José Aboulker, an Algerian member of the French Resistance who denounced the massacres in a speech at the National Assembly in Paris in June 1945. The other was Albert Camus, 'who protested vigorously against these massacres, saying that Algerians were considered inferior, as though they were subhumans', said Stora.
'Camus spoke vehemently against the colonial system,' he added. 'He was one of the few French intellectuals, perhaps the only one in 1945, to realise the significance of these terrible events, which would lead to a hardening of Algerian nationalism.'
Eighty years on, recognition of this tragic episode is still in its infancy.
In 2005, at the request of then president Jacques Chirac, the French ambassador in Algiers, Hubert Colin de Verdière, referred to the 'massacres' of May 8, 1945, as an 'inexcusable tragedy', marking the first such acknowledgement by a French official.
On a visit to Guelma University three years later, another ambassador to Algeria, Bernard Bajolet, acknowledged 'the very heavy responsibility of the French authorities of the time in this outburst of murderous madness [which claimed] thousands of innocent victims, almost all of them Algerian.' Referring to the hundreds of Algerians thrown into the town's mountain gorges, Bajolet said the massacres 'insulted the founding principles of the French Republic and left an indelible mark on its history'.
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In April 2015, a French minister laid a wreath in front of a stele commemorating the first Algerian victim of the crackdown on the Sétif protest of May 8, 1945. Three years earlier, former president François Hollande had acknowledged in a speech to the Algerian Parliament 'the suffering that colonisation inflicted' on Algerians.
No French president has apologised for the colonial crimes perpetrated during more than a century of French rule over Algeria.
Since 2020, May 8 has been known in Algeria as 'National Remembrance Day'.
Divided memories
French officials' tentative gestures to acknowledge colonial-era crimes in Algeria have so far failed to bridge a deep divide in the way the two countries perceive their shared past.
'The fact that it has taken so long to face up to the reality of colonial rule has only widened this divide,' Stora observed. 'These opposing memories need to be bridged, so that we can move forward together and so that historical memory is not an obstacle to a Franco-Algerian relationship.'
Since 2022, Stora has co-chaired a committee of French and Algerian historians tasked with reviewing the countries' shared past and achieving a 'reconciliation of memories'. Its work has been derailed by a resurgence of diplomatic tensions between Paris and Algiers, inflamed by France's recognition last year of Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara, where Algeria backs the pro-independence Polisario Front.
In a recent interview, Stora said the historians' work was effectively at a standstill.
'The commission has not met for a year now,' he said. 'Political issues have interfered with its work.'
Meanwhile, a group of French lawmakers led by leftwinger Danièle Simonnet has launched a separate initiative to recognise the 'Other May 8' – a phrase used to refer to the Sétif massacres – as a 'state crime'.
'France has recognised these terrible massacres, but it hasn't acknowledged that this was a state crime,' said Simonnet. 'Sétif was bombarded, it was a massacre on a huge scale, and it's important that we face up to that fact.'
A former member of the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party, Simonnet has set up a cross-partisan group at the National Assembly that auditioned historians and organised a conference on the events of May-June 1945. She is now urging President Emmanuel Macron to directly address the Sétif massacres.
'Many families are still scarred by this history,' she said. 'To move forward together, it would help if the president could put words on what happened, even if it's just a speech.'
Simonnet was part of a delegation of French lawmakers who travelled to Algiers on Thursday to attend events marking 80 years since the massacres at Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata.
In a message this week, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune framed the commemorations as a matter of national pride and described the events of May-June 1945 as a prelude to Algeria's fight for independence.
'The commemoration of May 8 reflects the Algerians' commitment to freedom and dignity, for which they took to the streets with bare hands to confront an enemy,' Tebboune said, calling French colonialism 'genocidal' and a crime against humanity.
