Postwar Paris has remained no stranger to political battles in its streets. Violent demonstrations accompanied the Communist withdrawal from the coalition government in 1947. In the Fifties the Left took to the streets again in protest against the colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. And, in 1961, in one of the most shameful episodes in modern French history, some two hundred Algerians were killed by the police during a civil rights demonstration.This "secret massacre", which remained covered by a veil of total official silence until the 1990s, took place during the Algerian war. It began with a peaceful demonstration against a curfew on North Africans imposed by de Gaulle's government in an attempt to inhibit FLN (National liberation front) resistance activity in the French capital. Whether the police were acting on higher orders or merely on the authority of their own commanders is not clear. What is clear from hundreds of eyewitness accounts, including some from horrified policemen, is that the police went berserk. They opened fire, clubbed people and threw them in the Seine to drown. Several dozen Algerians were killed in the courtyard of the police HQ on the Île de la Cité. For weeks afterwards, corpses were recovered from the Seine, but the French media remained silent, in part through censorship, in part perhaps unable to comprehend that such events had happened in their own capital. Maurice Papon, the police chief at the time, was subsequently decorated by de Gaulle. He later came under scrutiny for his role in deporting Jews to camps in Germany during World War II and was later sentenced to ten years in prison "for complicity in crimes against humanity". In the extraordinary month of May 1968, a radical, libertarian, Leftist movement began in the Paris universities. Students began by occupying university buildings in protest against old-fashioned and hierarchical university structures, but the extreme reaction of the police and government helped the movement to spread until it represented a mass revolt against institutional stagnation that ended up with the occupation of hundreds of factories across the country and a general strike by nine million workers. Yet this was no revolution. The vicious battles with the paramilitary CRS police on the streets of Paris shook large sectors of the population – France's silent majority – to the core. Right-wing and "nationalist" demonstrations – orchestrated by de Gaulle – left public opinion craving stability and peace; and a great many workers were satisfied with a new system for wage agreements. Elections called in June returned the Right to power, the occupied buildings emptied and the barricades in the Latin Quarter came down. For those who thought they were experiencing The Revolution, the defeat was catastrophic. But French institutions and French society had changed – De Gaulle didn't survive a referendum in 1969. His successor, Georges Pompidou, only survived long enough to begin the construction of the giant Les Halles development, and the expressways along the quais of the Seine. In 1974, he was succeeded by the conservative Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who appointed one Jacques Chirac as his prime minister. In 1976, Chirac resigned, but made a speedy recovery as Mayor of Paris, less than a year later.
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