"[1] Since 1936, with an interruption under Vichy and German occupation, the French Communist Party (PCF), the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), and various associated movements such as the League of Human Rights[2] have organized a parade in Paris to celebrate the "values of the Republic" on the national holiday.

Messali Hadj had created the MTLD in 1946 to serve as a legal cover for the Algerian People's Party, an independence organization banned in 1939, which had 20,000 militants in Algeria and 5,000 in metropolitan France in 1953.

While the Vietnamese fighting the Indochina War participated in demonstrations organized by the PCF and CGT, which also involved dockworkers in Oran or Casablanca, some Algerians in France were the only ones to resort to independent processions for their political demands.

The event was covered by journalist Madeleine Riffaud, who had been closely following the issue of immigrants in La Vie Ouvrière (CGT) alongside her partner at the time, Roger Pannequin.

A police raid, a commonly used term at the time, was conducted on Algerian workers at Salle Wagram.In December, the MTLD planned to hold a meeting with representatives from Arab countries at the United Nations.

On May 28, Algerian communist Hocine Bélaïd was killed near Place de Stalingrad during a demonstration against the visit of American General Matthew Ridgway, who was accused of using bacteriological weapons in the Korean War.

According to lawyer Amar Bentoumi, who would become the first Minister of Justice in Algeria in 1962, and historian Daho Djerbal, the Messalist demonstration was organized by Mohamed Boudiaf and Didouche Mourad, two of the six future founders of the National Liberation Front (FLN).

The reading of the RG (General Intelligence) files reveals that the law enforcement had reports of preparatory meetings of the MTLD held at the headquarters on Rue Xavier Privas in the days preceding the demonstration.

In a leaflet, the French Communist Party (PCF) of Val de Grâce criticizes the fact that the police "protected groups of provocateurs who had unsuccessfully attempted to disrupt the processions at several points."

It was then that around 2,000 North Africans, seizing any projectiles within their reach (cobblestones, iron bars, tables, and chairs), and some armed with knives, brutally attacked the small number of present officers.

There are divergent versions: one suggests that the law enforcement intervened in response to the display of an Algerian flag, while another claims that the procession left the designated area without dispersing.

In L'Humanité : The communists of the 18th arrondissement sing La Marseillaise, just as police officers emerge from the adjacent streets, striking the demonstrators and venting their anger on the portrait of Messali Hadj.

In addition to these cases, L'Algérie libre mentions two other individuals, Vasvekiazan with a head injury and Cyprien Duchausson with an injured hand, who were admitted to Saint-Antoine Hospital.

In his supplementary report addressed to the Director General of Municipal Police, Commissioner André Bondais stated that he encountered the photographer, but "he did not show any signs of being hit and never claimed to have been struck."

A significant solidarity movement towards the injured is being organized: The next day, I think the police wanted to take us back, and the hospital staff – doctors, nurses – communists, and MTLD militants came to block them.

Thousands of Parisians come to pay their respects in front of the lead-sealed coffins of the victims, including Laurent Casanova and Léon Feix from the PCF, Boumendjel Ahmed from the Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto, Alice Sportisse from the Algerian Communist Party, Abdelkader Cadi, Lakhdar Brahimi, Yves Dechezelles from the Congress of Peoples against Imperialism, Louis Massignon, a professor at the Collège de France, Charles-André Julien, a professor at the Sorbonne and member of the France-Maghreb Committee, Claude Bourdet from L'Observateur, Georges Suffert from Témoignage Chrétien, Albert Béguin from the journal Esprit.

In the days following the bloody incident, the French Communist Party (PCF) denounces "the deliberately provocative nature of the July 14th shooting against a regularly authorized parade" and affirms "that the police prevented the normal dislocation of part of the procession and the peaceful flow of Algerian demonstrators along the Cours de Vincennes."

Historian Louis de Villefosse laments that "Algerians are practically treated as foreigners on their own soil, deprived of all political freedoms and all social rights guaranteed by the Constitution."

Other personalities deplore the police intervention: Dr. Georges Bourguignon, member of the Academy of Medicine, former governor of the Bank of France Émile Labeyrie, writer Jean Cau.

Unlike the massacre of October 17, 1961, the press at the time extensively covered the events of 1953 but in terms that scandalized Albert Camus, who sent a letter to the newspaper Le Monde: When one observes that most newspapers (yours being among the exceptions) cover with the modest term 'brawls' or 'incidents' a small operation that cost seven lives and over a hundred injured, when one sees our parliamentarians, eager to run to their parishes, hastily disposing of these inconvenient dead, one is justified, it seems to me, in wondering if the press, the government, and the Parliament would have shown such casualness if the demonstrators had not been North Africans, and if, in the same case, the police would have fired so confidently.

Although it agrees with the official thesis of an initial aggression by North Africans, Le Parisien libéré nevertheless denounces the behavior of the police towards one of its photographers, Robert Trécourt.

Le Populaire, which now only appears on two pages, briefly covers the event and takes an anti-communist approach, typical of the organ of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO): "Once again, the Stalinists have used the North Africans of Paris as shock troops."

Just created in March 1953, L'Express provides only a few lines: "An odious police provocation" or "legitimate response to a communist riot," the brawl in Place de la Nation appears to indicate a hardening of the methods used to maintain public order.

Claude Bourdet, director of L'Observateur, accuses Léon Martinaud-Deplat, Minister of the Interior in the Laniel government: He is the number one agent of the big colonizers, whose instructions are transmitted to him by Senator Borgeaud, king of viticulture in Algeria.

The Protestant weekly magazine Réforme laments that the "National Assembly failed to capture the triple political, social, and human aspect of the situation of North Africans in France, which the tragedy darkened, both in Paris and in Algeria."

André Sevry, in the weekly magazine Témoignage chrétien, describes the "horror spectacle offered to the demonstrators": I will not soon forget that evening of July 14th, in Place de la Nation, strewn with debris, pieces of wood, torn banners, leaflets, lost shoes, newspapers stuck to the greasy pavement, and the murmuring of the last breaths of the storm.

That black helmet, fallen like a phenomenal mushroom, the surging ebb of cars towards Vincennes, people running, hugging the walls, and above all, those lifeless bodies lying on the polished road, on both sides of the columns of the Throne.

The director concludes his book hoping that it will help bring this part of French history out of oblivion and that "this massacre will be recognized as a state crime, as was the case with the events of October 17, 1961, and February 8, 1962."

On that day, 6 Algerian independentist militants from the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties and a member of the CGT were killed.The ceremony took place in the presence of a large crowd, including Catherine Vieu-Charier, Deputy Mayor of Paris in charge of Memory and Veterans Affairs, Catherine Barrati-Elbaz, Mayor of the 12th arrondissement, Daniel Kupferstein, Alain Ruscio, local elected officials, survivors, members of the victims' families, MTLD activists, trade unionists, and historians.

On that day, six Algerian independentist militants from the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties and one communist and CGT trade unionist activist in the metallurgical industry were shot dead.