After five days of chaos, French military and police restored order, but then carried out a series of reprisals for the attacks on settlers. The army, which included
Foreign Legion, Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian and
Senegalese troops, carried out summary executions in the course of a
ratissage ("raking-over") of Muslim rural communities suspected of involvement. Less accessible
mechtas (Muslim villages) were bombed by French aircraft, and the cruiser
Duguay-Trouin standing off the coast in the
Gulf of Bougie, shelled
Kherrata. Pied noir vigilantes lynched prisoners taken from local jails or randomly shot Muslims not wearing white arm bands (as instructed by the Army) out of hand.
[3] It is certain that the great majority of the Muslim victims had not been implicated in the original outbreak.
[5]
These attacks killed anywhere between 1,020 (the official French figure given in the Tubert Report shortly after the
massacre) and 45,000 people (as claimed by Radio Cairo at the time). Alistair Horne notes that 6,000 was the figure finally settled on by moderate historians but acknowledges that this remains only an estimate.
[5] The Sétif outbreak and the repression that followed marked a turning point in the relations between France, and the Muslim population since 1830, when France had
colonized Algeria, the closest portion of Africa to France. While the details of the Sétif killings were largely overlooked in metropolitan France, the impact on the Algerian Muslim population was traumatic, especially on the large numbers of Muslim soldiers in the French Army who were then returning from the War in Europe.
[6] Nine years later a general uprising began in Algeria, leading to independence from France in March 1962 with the signing of the
Evian Accords.
They might as well hold up a banner saying 'I work for hasbara'
