May 8, 1945: The historian O. The Grandmaison Court launched a petition for the recognition of crimes against humanity committed in Algeria by France

The other May 8, 1945. 80th birthday

Appeal for the recognition of crimes against humanity committed in Algeria by France

It is impossible to celebrate this eightieth anniversary of victory against Nazism without wanting to get out of oblivion what happened in Algeria this same May 8 and the following days.

Peaceful demonstrations in Sétif, Guelma, Khératta and the region were crushed in the blood; Nearly 35,000 Algerian civilians were massacred by the police, the gendarmerie, the colonial militias armed by the local authorities, the French army, acting on the orders of the executive. It was during this massive repression that we deplored in Sétif and around a hundred European victims.

Amputating our common history by the concealment of this state crime does not allow France to put an end to the colonial page of its history. If, on March 19, 2016, the President of the Republic, François Hollande, admitted that the colonial system in Algeria was “unfair” and “denied the aspirations of the peoples to decide on themselves”, we must go further in Saying the truth about the massacres of May 8, 1945. Likewise, the symbolic gesture made to Sétif in 2015 by the Secretary of State responsible for veterans and memory, JM. Todeschini, remains very below this request.

Following the mobilization of the collective in 2015, the Paris Municipal Council unanimously asked the Head of State to recognize these massacres as state crimes. Wishes in this sense have been adopted by several cities including Rennes, Nanterre and Ivry-sur-Seine, and commemorative plaques of these massacres exist in several cities of France.

On April 14, 2015, a unitary collective for the recognition of 1945 state crimes in Algeria (Sétif, Guelma, Kherrata) was formed. In addition to this recognition as a state crime, he asked: the opening of all the archives, the registration in the national memory of these events through strong gestures of the highest authorities in the State and support for dissemination Documentaries relating to events in National Education as in public media.

On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of these massacres, on May 8, 2025, we call for unitary rallies throughout France to demand the recognition of these massacres as crime against humanity and the satisfaction of these claims.