Details of the Sétif bloodbath were played down with remarkable success in metropolitan France. Simone de Beauvoir recalls: “We heard very little about what had happened at Sétif,” and noted that the Communist L’Humanité acknowledged only a hundred or so casualties, while de Gaulle in his memoirs dismisses the bloody episode in one terse sentence: “a beginning of insurrection, occurring in the Constantinois and synchronised with the Syrian riots in the month of May, was snuffed out by Governor-General Chataigneau”. Yet the army repression must have been carried out on orders from de Gaulle’s coalition government, and it must equally have been fully aware of the extent of the ensuing bloodbath; on both scores it is to be noted that the Communist ministers shared responsibility without a murmur.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 76