Ost Fraktion

In the collective imagination France is a paradise of democracy, as French invented it with their famous revolution.

Of course  the guillotine was a French invention too and looks as a good symbol for this song and its subject: the French colonialism in Algeria.

Without watering down the whole history of Algeria, it might be enough to look at the horror of  the "Paris massacre".

On October 17th 1961, Maurice Papon, previously collaborationist of the Vichy Republic, chief of police in Paris decides to ban demonstrations and to prevent riots  based on ethnicity: all the North-Africans were subject to a curfew and gathering was forbidden. But Algerians, eager to demonstrate for the independence of their country organized a peaceful mass demonstration. The reaction of Papon and  the police was terrifying: 200 people killed and hundred injured. Unarmed protesters were attacked even with pickaxes and dumped injured or dead in the Seine. Witnesses told that the Seine looked red and in the following days the bodies re-emerged at Pont Saint-Michel.

Considering this massacre in their capital city, imagine what the inventors of the guillotine were able to do in Africa: executions, tortures and deportations of millions of people.