Abstract

Death in the Subway

The morning after the massacre in Paris, France on February 8, 1962 in which eight persons were killed and hundreds wounded by General Charles de Gaulle's police, the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune fell cheerfully into the trap laid by Interior Minister Roger Frey, who said, "It was a deliberate Communist provocation." The French Union of Students and other non-Communist bodies, thereafter joined by the Communist Party, and the Independent Socialists decided to stage a demonstration. Instead of treating these people as natural allies against the Fascist menace, the government not only prohibited the demonstration, but also encouraged the police to treat the demonstrators with utmost cruelty. The climax was reached, after numerous brutal incidents, when a crowd fleeing from the police rushed into the Charonne subway station. A horrible stampede followed, with policemen blindly lashing out at layers and layers of people who fell upon one another.