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🪵 The Threshold

During 1960 the F.L.N. waged a war of terror against the M.N.A. inside Paris

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tagsja-picks, factual_claims, singleton, xref, category/factual-claims
aliases@horne_savage_1977, loc. 1254

4 min read

During 1960 the F.L.N. waged a war of terror against the M.N.A. inside Paris

Evidence

In 1960 the killings reached a crescendo as the F.L.N. stepped up its campaign to achieve total ascendancy. Barely a day went by without a corpse fished out of the Seine, or found hanging in the Bois de Boulogne. A favourite place of reckoning was the quiet Canal Saint-Martin, flowing towards the Bastille in the east of Paris, which with hideous regularity yielded up its crop of sacks containing the disfigured bodies of Algerians. As during the Battle of Algiers, women were often employed as executioners’ “liaisons”; they would take a pistol concealed in a handbag to the appointed place, slip it to the killer, then take it back immediately the deed was done, to disappear silently into the crowd. Under the blanket of terror successfully imposed by the F.L.N., the French police received a minimum of information — even from the relatives of victims — with which to track down the terrorists. Meanwhile, the perfected system of fund-raising was bringing in from the Paris region alone something like three hundred million francs a month. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1254 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

One such group five hundred strong was created, armed and uniformed in eastern Kabylia under a former M.T.L.D. municipal councillor called Bellounis. At first the F.L.N. reacted by slitting a few random throats. In Algiers, Soustelle’s psychological-warfare experts began to toy with the idea of using Bellounis’s dissident force as an “anti-guerrilla” along lines that had proved profitable in Indo-China. Then, with the summer of 1955, the ferocious Amirouche—in whose sector Bellounis had appeared—moved in, encircling Bellounis’s camp at Guenzet and attacking it by surprise. The internecine massacre lasted forty-eight hours, watched gleefully by neighbouring French troops without intervening. Only Bellounis and a handful of his five hundred men escaped alive. Bellounis now directed his footsteps towards the French. Amirouche’s operation did, however, signify the end of the M.N.A. challenge in Kabylia, and the beginning of its elimination as a serious rival to the F.L.N. throughout the country followed in the second half of 1956; an elimination that was to have meaningful echoes when, by the first Evian negotiations of 1961, Gaullist France toyed vainly with hopes of the all but extinct M.N.A. providing an interlocuteur valable alternative to the F.L.N. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 422 (#expands, via linked claim)

But it was in the mother country that the F.L.N.—similarly to the I.R.A. in times of maximum stress in the 1970s—now concentrated its terrorist activities. Between 24 August and 28 September there were 181 attacks on property and 242 against people, causing eighty-two deaths and injuring another 168. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 969 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: MĂ©louza massacre grew from F.L.N.-M.N.A. rivalry, not solely French action; The F.L.N. moved its terrorism into metropolitan France in summer 1958; The F.L.N. waged an internecine war in Paris killing hundreds annually by 1960. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1254 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

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