With the exception of the 17-19 October 1961 Bataille de Paris, the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV) was the primary destination for FMA—Français Musulman d’Algérie or Muslim French of Algerian origin—picked up during nocturnal police raids in Paris and its inner suburb between early 1959 and the declaration of Algerian independence (mid-1962). These raids and the 17-19 October demonstrations and massacres have been vividly chronicled by Jean-Luc Einaudi, Linda Amiri, Sylvie Thenault and Emmanuel Blanchard amongst others. They recounted the massive numbers of men photographed and fingerprinted, detained beyond legal limits and tortured at the CIV. The archives of the CIMADE document their members’ social work conducted on behalf of the detained men. Activist Monique Hervo detailed the black eyes and broken bones of the men who returned home to Nanterre after CIV internment. Historians, activists and journalists recorded and drew relations between police policies, political protest, and individual lives impacted by the struggle for independence and its repression through detention in the CIV. 

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to be continued...

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