By Jacob Mchangama
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 modern history.” At least 48—but possibly hundreds—were killed.
Yet for decades, the official story minimized the violence. The death toll, it was claimed, was three. Police had acted to defend themselves. The protesters were terrorists.
The French state actively buried the truth. Records were falsified. Evidence suppressed. Investigations blocked. Publications seized. The paper trail was shaped to match the story.
In 1999 the French Public Prosecutor’s Office concluded that a massacre had taken place, but only in 2012 did President Hollande acknowledge it on behalf of the French Republic. This is the danger of a public sphere without a distributed capacity to challenge official accounts in real time: It is difficult to imagine that the events of October 17 could have been hidden for so long if thousands of protesters and bystanders had carried smartphones, livestreamed the crackdown, and uploaded footage as the bodies hit the water.
Paris 1961 is a historical warning. Minneapolis 2026 is its modern counterpoint.
Within hours of the killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents on January 24, top officials attempted to shape the narrative. They placed the blame squarely on the victim, with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem claiming that Pretti “approached” ICE officers with a gun and was killed after he “violently resisted” attempts to disarm him. White House Senior Advisor Stephen Miller called Pretti “an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.” FBI Director Kash Patel said, “You don’t have a right to break the law and incite violence.”
In other words, Pretti supposedly posed a threat and paid the price.
But something happened that couldn’t have happened in France in 1961. As bystander footage spread across social media, the official narrative began to collapse. Videos appeared to show a cellphone in one of Pretti’s hands and no gun in the other. Officers also appeared to remove his holstered gun—legally carried—before he was shot several times. It then emerged that Pretti was an ICU nurse with no criminal record—hardly the prototype of a terrorist.
The official account was clearly at odds with the best available evidence. Four days after the shooting, the Trump administration is already scrambling to save face, cast blame, and “de-escalate” the ICE presence in Minnesota.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).