The Sétif and Guelma Massacre: VE Day's Other Anniversary in Algeria

On May 8, 1945, as Europe celebrated Nazi Germany’s surrender, roughly 8,000 Algerians gathered in the northeastern town of Sétif for what began as a Victory in Europe Day march. The crowd, predominantly Muslim, was also using the occasion to demand recognition of Algerian nationalist aspirations, and when demonstrators unfurled banned Algerian nationalist flags and banners, French police opened fire on the procession. The shooting set off rioting that spread through Sétif and into the surrounding countryside, where Algerians attacked French settlers, killing 102 of them over the following hours and days.

France’s response was neither immediate nor proportionate to the violence it was ostensibly answering. Over the following two months, French colonial authorities, acting on instructions from Paris, conducted a sweeping reprisal campaign across the region around Sétif, Guelma, and Kherrata, deploying army units that included the Foreign Legion alongside Moroccan and Senegalese colonial troops. The operation used what French military planners called a ratissage, a systematic “raking over” of Muslim Algerian rural communities suspected of involvement, and included summary executions carried out without trial, along with aerial bombardment and naval shelling of villages in the affected areas. European settler militias carried out additional killings of their own alongside the official military campaign.

How many Algerians died in the reprisals is a question that has never been settled, and the range of credible estimates is unusually wide even by the standards of contested colonial-era death tolls. French colonial authorities’ own count at the time put the toll at 1,500 Algerians killed, against 103 French settlers. Algerian nationalists at the time, and independent Algeria’s government after 1962, cited a figure of roughly 45,000 dead, a number that has become the officially commemorated toll within Algeria itself. Later French historians, working from archival research rather than either side’s contemporaneous political accounting, have generally settled on estimates in the range of 15,000, still an order of magnitude below the Algerian figure but far above what French authorities acknowledged in 1945. Whichever figure comes closest to the truth, the massacre’s political effect is not in dispute: it is widely regarded by historians as the moment that convinced a generation of Algerian nationalists that negotiation with France could not deliver independence, radicalizing a movement that would launch the war of independence nine years later, in 1954.