The French executed their own proxy Bellounis and displayed his corpse

Evidence

On 22 May he addressed a series of slightly mad letters to President Coty and General de Gaulle; three days later he refused to attend a meeting with his “controller”. … Some weeks later, Simone de Beauvoir noted in her journal: “The French have killed Bellounis, who was accused of having shot four hundred of his men; the Italian newspapers say the French have killed Bellounis and the four hundred men.” The official account is that Colonel Trinquier, who was commanding the 3rd R.P.C. after Bigeard had been repatriated and, having been despatched to wind-up “Operation Ollivier”, came across the recently executed corpses of Bellounis’s victims and decided to grant him no quarter. On 14 July the bullet-riddled body of Bellounis was picked up near Bou-Saada and displayed widely as a “traitor to France”. With the death of Bellounis there ended disastrously yet another private army enterprise; at the same time, it also removed for the F.L.N. the last major threat of a rival military bid by the Messalists. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 802

Categorization

• XREF: Bellounis and the M.N.A.-Messalist rivalry referenced in earlier chapters (Mélouza massacre). — connects to: France armed defector Bellounis into a private Muslim ‘third force’ army; French disinformation exploiting Algerian internal mistrust triggered murderous self-purges — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 807
• QUESTION: The de Beauvoir note suggests France killed Bellounis partly to cover the mass execution of his followers — worth chasing alternate accounts.

Related

• France armed defector Bellounis into a private Muslim ‘third force’ army (similarity 0.86)
• French disinformation exploiting Algerian internal mistrust triggered murderous self-purges (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• French disinformation exploiting Algerian internal mistrust triggered murderous self-purges #qualifies (0.75) — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 807