By early 1962, the Algerian War had ground on for nearly eight years. The National Liberation Front's guerrilla campaign and France's brutal counterinsurgency had devastated the country. On March 18, President Charles de Gaulle signed the Evian Accords with the FLN's provisional government, confirming Algeria's independence. For Algeria's roughly one million Pied-Noirs -- Europeans born in North Africa who formed about ten percent of the population -- this was an unthinkable betrayal. The Organisation armee secrete, a paramilitary group fighting to keep Algeria French, had established its headquarters in the Algiers neighborhood of Bab El Oued. When the French Army blockaded the area, the OAS called for massive demonstrations to break the siege.

Crowds of Pied-Noirs marched through Algiers on March 26, denouncing the peace treaty they saw as a death sentence for their way of life. On the Rue d'Isly, they met a roadblock manned by forty-five soldiers of the 4th Tirailleur Regiment -- young, conscripted Algerian Muslims who had been pulled from active duty in the countryside just nine days earlier. They were untrained for crowd control and poorly commanded, with only a single junior officer supervising. As the unarmed demonstrators pressed forward, an unknown sniper reportedly fired from a nearby rooftop. The soldiers panicked and opened fire with machine guns. For approximately fifteen minutes, they shot into the crowd, hitting nearly three hundred people. Between fifty and eighty demonstrators were killed outright. Another two hundred were wounded.

News of the massacre spread across Algeria and catalyzed what many Pied-Noirs had feared most: the realization that France would not -- could not -- protect them. In the months that followed, roughly 900,000 Pied-Noirs abandoned the only homeland most of them had ever known. The majority settled in southern France, where they were met not with sympathy but with suspicion. They were treated as outsiders in a country they considered their own, carrying a grief that French society was unprepared to acknowledge. The 4th Tirailleur Regiment was disbanded two months after the massacre. Military investigators concluded that deploying exhausted, demoralized Muslim troops -- untrained for police duties and commanded by a single junior officer -- to control a large crowd of European demonstrators had been a catastrophic error of judgment.

For decades, France refused to officially acknowledge what happened on the Rue d'Isly. Pied-Noir organizations lobbied persistently, but successive governments avoided the subject. It was not until January 26, 2022, that President Emmanuel Macron formally addressed the massacre during a meeting with Pied-Noir descendants at the Elysee Palace. "This massacre of March 26, 1962 is unforgivable for the Republic," Macron stated. "That day, French soldiers, deployed counter-intuitively, morally damaged, fired on the French." He also expressed remorse that the Pied-Noirs had not been "received and listened to" upon their arrival in France. The acknowledgment came sixty years late, but for the survivors and their children, it was the first time the Republic had spoken clearly about a day when its own soldiers turned their weapons on its own citizens.