The American People Fact-Checked Their Government

The American People Fact-Checked Their Government

(Photo by Roberto Schmidt / AFP via Getty Images.)On October 17, 1961, tens of thousands of Algerians marched through the streets of Paris in peaceful defiance of a discriminatory curfew imposed by the French state. Police opened fire, beat protesters, arrested them en masse—and, in some cases, threw people into the Seine, where they drowned. Historians later called it “the bloodiest act of state repression of street protest in Western Europe in…