Remembering the Battle of Paris
in French Politics, Culture & Society
Kader was there on 17 October 1961—at the Madeleine metro station at about 6:30 in the evening. He was also there at the Palais des Sports three days after the demonstration, and for 33 days at the police department’s Identification Center at Vincennes. In 1981, when Kader gave this testimony to Libération, he was still “there”—in France—living in the same worker’s dormitory that had been his home in 1961. After being held in a camp in Algeria, he had returned to the country where he felt humiliated and where he had been tortured, because his family had been killed and his political allies exiled. He was not bitter. “We were at war.” Who is this “we”?