Then, only ten days later, had come the shocking headline news of the massacre of the twenty-one conscripts at Palestro. The Press had spared none of the details of the dreadful mutilations and tortures that had killed the boys, most of whom came from the Paris region. The meaning of the war had been brought home to French families in the most brutal possible way and, with the return of Mollet’s rappelés after they had served their time in Algeria, the whole country found itself increasingly involved.

DEFINE: Defines the Palestro massacre of 1956 as a turning-point event that made the Algerian War's brutal reality visible to French families.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 726