In the absence of official estimates, the plaque commemorating the massacre reads, "In memory of the many Algerians killed during the bloody repression of the peaceful demonstration of 17 October 1961".

On 18 February 2007 (the day after Papon's death) calls were made for a Paris Métro station under construction in Gennevilliers to be named "17 Octobre 1961" in commemoration of the massacre.

In fact, Papon was not charged and convicted until 1997–98 for his World War II crimes against humanity in being responsible for the deportation of 1,560 Jews, including children and the elderly, between 1942 and 1944.

Before his appointment as chief of the Paris police, Papon had been, since 1956, prefect of the Constantine department in Algeria, where he actively participated in the repression of and use of torture against the civilian population.

[10] Encouraged by far-right deputy Jean-Marie Le Pen, 2,000 of them attempted to enter the Palais Bourbon, seat of the National Assembly, with shouts of "Sales Juifs!

"Prohibited zones, detention centers (camps de regroupements), torture, executions without trial: this is the reality of the war he [Papon] was supervising out there."

[14] A former member of the FTP resistance, reporter Madeleine Rifaud wrote in L'Humanité: In the past two days, a racist concentration camp has been opened in Paris.

Led by Captain Raymond Montaner and based at the Fort de Noisy, Romainville, it was composed entirely of Algerian Muslims recruited in Algeria or France.

Algerians were arrested at work or in the streets and thrown into the Seine with their hands tied in order to drown them, among other methods, as shown for example in a report by the priest Joseph Kerlan from the Mission de France.

[19] According to Einaudi, "It was in this climate that, on 2 October, during the funerals of a policeman killed by the FLN, the police prefect [Papon] proclaimed, in the prefecture's courtyard: 'For one hit taken we shall give back ten!'

The French Federation of the FLN thus called upon the whole of the Algerian population in Paris, men, women and children, to demonstrate against the curfew, widely regarded as a racist administrative measure, on 17 October 1961.

[23] Following historian Jean-Luc Einaudi's testimony during the Papon trial in the late-1990s, left-wing police Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement ordered the opening of parts of the archives.

Einaudi concluded his op-ed stating that: "on the night of 17 October 1961 there had been a massacre perpetrated by the police forces acting on the orders of Maurice Papon."

[25] This contradicts David Assouline, who in 1997 was granted limited access to consult part of the police documents (which were supposed to be classified until 2012) by Minister of Culture Catherine Trautmann (PS).

He found a list of 70 persons killed, while the texts confirmed Einaudi's comments that the magistrates who had been called on by the victims' families to consider these incidents had systematically acquitted the policemen.

Although criticizing Einaudi on some points, Thibaud also underlined that Brunet had consulted only police archives and took the registers of the IML medico-legal institute at face value.

A few days later, some anonymous policemen published a text called A group of republican policemen declare... (Un groupe de policiers républicains déclarent...) on 31 October, stating: What happened on 17 October 1961 and in the following days against the peaceful demonstrators, on whom no weapons were found, morally forces us to bring our testimony and to alert public opinion (…)All culprits must be punished.

The punishment must be extended to all responsible people, those who give orders, those who pretend to just let it happen, whatever their high office may be (…)Among the thousands of Algerians brought to the Parc des Expositions of the Porte de Versailles, tens were killed by blows from rifle butts and pickaxe handles (…) Others had their fingers chopped off by members of law enforcement, policemen and gendarmes, who cynically had renamed themselves "welcoming committee".

A good hundred people were subjected to this treatment (…) [In the Parisian police headquarters,] torturers threw their victims by tens in the Seine, which flows only a few meters from the courtyard, to keep them from being examined by forensic experts.

[5][6][39][40] The establishment of an official memorial and thus also the commemorative plaque proposed by the political left and supported by the Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, were however by no means uncontroversial.

[42][43] The right-wing representatives opposed the proposed plaque, viewing it as a way of blaming the political authorities in 1961 and not to recognise the reciprocal violence between the FLN and the police.

[6] Although it was the extreme right that first fiercely opposed the decision, many centrist and left-wing politicians, including former Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement, also did so, the latter because it could harm national cohesion.

[48] The unveiling ceremony of the plaque took place without the presence of an official representative of the Socialist government and the Élysée Palace, as well as in the absence of any local right-wing politician.

: “in memory of the many Algerians killed during the bloody repression of the peaceful demonstration on 17 October 1961”) and therefore remains very vague, addressing neither the agency of the perpetrators nor any kind of responsibility.

The chosen text was also criticised by historian Olivier LeCour Grandmaison, president of the 17 October 1961 Association, declared to L'Humanité that "if a step forward had been taken with the decision of the city of Paris to put a commemorative plaque on the Pont Saint-Michel, [he] deplored that the text which was chosen for it invokes neither the idea of a crime against humanity nor the responsibility of the author of the crime, the state.

Plaques and the renaming of streets, squares and public loci as ‘17 October 1961’ are memory initiatives that ensure the transition from state lie to the historical transformation of one of the traumatic situations embedded along the fractured lines between the colonial and the post-colonial.

Plaques are akin to sites of memory, part of the process of healing traumas by keeping them alive in the present and represent the engagement of the post-colonial period towards correcting the distortions of silenced history.”[63]On 17 October 2012, President François Hollande acknowledged the 1961 massacre of Algerians in Paris.

[69] On the occasion of the opening ceremony for the 2024 Olympic Games taking place in Paris, the members of the Algerian delegation tossed red roses into the Seine to honour the victims of the massacre.

It is a mark of the success surrounding the official blackout of information about 17 October that Smith's novel, written by a foreigner in France and published in the United States (it could not be published in France), would stand as one of the few representations of the event available all the way up until the early 1990s–until the moment, that is, when a generation of young Beurs, as the children of North African immigrants call themselves, had reached an age at which they could begin to demand information about their parents' fate.

Professional or academic historians have lagged well behind amateurs in the attempt to discover what occurred on 17 October; investigative journalists, militants, and fiction writers like Smith, or the much more widely read detective novelist, Didier Daeninckx, kept a trace of the event alive during the thirty years when it had entered a "black hole" of memory.