On May 8, 1945, thousands of Algerians - men, women, children - took to the streets, flags in hand, to denounce the colonial order.
They were met with fierce, planned, systemic repression.
An imperial revenge: live ammunition, bombings, machine-gun raids, roundups, summary executions, mass arrests, razed villages, improvised mass graves.
The death toll, still difficult to establish with precision today, is estimated by historians to have reached more than 45,000. A true crime against humanity that the French Republic stubbornly refuses to acknowledge.
== Justice Trampled ==
Despite a timid recognition in 2005, which spoke of an "inexcusable tragedy", no French president has had the courage, or the honesty, to name things: it was not a blunder, nor a slip-up.
It was genocide, an act of state terror carried out against an unarmed population, guilty only of having believed their word.
== Buried memory, justice denied ==
For Algeria, May 8 remains a national mourning, etched in the flesh and memories. It is not just a historical date: it is a collective trauma, passed down from generation to generation, and now anchored in the very DNA of the Algerian people. This refusal to forget is in direct opposition to the strategy of denial and memory erosion maintained by the French state.
Not content with failing to acknowledge the genocidal nature of these massacres, France continues, even today, to symbolically violate Algeria. It flouts the memory of the dead by denying them a dignified burial, and it delegates to its media and political channels the task of sullying yesterday's battles—as if to better justify today's silence.
== The strategy of time: a French illusion ==
The French strategy is clear: let time do its work, erase memories, bury witnesses, neutralize transmission.
But what Paris pretends to ignore is that the Algerian trauma does not fade away: it is transmitted, it is reinforced, it is crystallized. And as the generation of mujahideen disappears, a new generation is born, educated, connected, determined to demand truth and justice.
On May 8, as fanfares echoed beneath the Arc de Triomphe, Algeria wept. Not for its soldiers, but for its martyrs. Not for a victory, but for a genocide. And it still waited for France—the nation of the Enlightenment, of human rights, of great principles—to finally face the bloody shadows of its colonial empire.