The Battle of Paris - October 17, 1961

Le Seuil, Paris, 1991, 329 pages - ISBN 978-2020135474

A fundamental work which definitively establishes Jean-Luc Einaudi as the essential historian of the massacre of October 17, 1961.

This moving book reconstructs, hour by hour and case by case, how the Parisian police led by Maurice Papon shot, drowned and massacred with rifle butts unarmed Algerians who had come to demonstrate peacefully against the curfew.

Einaudi demonstrates that, contrary to the official version which spoke of two deaths, the repression caused more than two hundred victims.

The author consulted previously unpublished archival documents, Parisian cemetery registers, contemporary press reports, official texts, and collected over a hundred direct and indirect testimonies. He reveals how, at the very moment when the public authorities were downplaying the facts, the police continued the manhunt in the following days.

The book also exposes the years-long disinformation campaign to suppress the truth.

With more than 30,000 copies sold, this major book has helped break the silence surrounding one of the darkest pages of the Fifth Republic and the Algerian War.