Eight days after Évian Agreements, a demonstration by pieds-noirs in Algiers turned into a massacre, depicted in Stéphane Giusti's award-winning novel.
Évian Agreements lead to Algiers massacre
Eight days after the Évian Agreements, a demonstration by pieds-noirs in Algiers turned into a massacre. The Évian Agreements, signed on March 18, 1962, granted independence to Algeria, but three thousand pieds-noirs gathered on Isly Street in Algiers eight days later to demand that "their" land remain French.Tirailleurs open fire during demonstration
The tirailleurs opened fire, causing forty-nine deaths and two hundred injured. The trigger for this massacre remains unknown even today. This event, still claimed by the nostalgics of French Algeria and the far right, is depicted in a novel by Stéphane Giusti.Novel wins historical fiction award
The novel, written in a choral style, follows the morning of the demonstration through the stories of six characters, each caught up in the events hour by quarter of an hour. The characters include a gendarme, the daughters of small merchants, the wife of a communist film projectionist, a young OAS supporter, and a priest tormented by a sense of anger "since the beginning of this war that cannot distinguish the just from the unjust, the executioners from the victims, because they are sometimes one and sometimes the other."Author portrays colonial violence
Stéphane Giusti accurately describes the colonial violence of that era, drawing the pied-noir society in all its complexity, all its diversity, infected by hate, by violence, and infiltrated in its smallest corners by the OAS, which appears in all its abomination.Algiers as a symbol of simmering hate
Algiers is portrayed as a cauldron in which this hate simmers until death. "Algiers resembles Pompeii. It is not lava that invades the streets, it is not ash that falls on the rooftops but hate, an unrelenting, incandescent hate."
