A Brutal Colonial Legacy is Tinder for the Fires That are Sweeping Across France

The reticence of France to allow its own universal pretensions (Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité—the phrase from the revolution that was the center of the 1958 Constitution of the Third Republic) to be heard in the colonies ran from 1804 in Haiti to the wars against national liberation by the French from Algeria to Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s. So ugly is that history that French students are not taught it in an unvarnished manner. If a French student is asked how many Algerians died due to the brutality of the French regime during the liberation war (1954-1962), they would be hard-pressed to come up with the real number, which is over a million; nor would those students know that when thirty thousand Algerians marched in Paris on October 17, 1961, the French police killed at least a hundred of them and threw their bodies into the River Seine, while arresting at least fourteen thousand people. More

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