Talk:Battle of Philippeville

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 * This was not a battle. This was a massacre by Algerian rebels, followed by a much larger retributive massacre by French forces and armed pied-noirs civilians. Call a spade a bloody spade.

--jessica
 * I absolutely agree... the reprisals killed thousands. I added that to the end of the wiki but my additions were removed before i got to add citations. Relying only on Aussaresses's account skews this article absurdly. He book's aim was to defend his acts of torture on innocent suspects in Algeria. He tries to make them seem as crazy as possible.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.237.81.237 (talk) 19:19, 28 January 2010 (UTC)


 * The account of the battle of Philippville, or massacre if you will, disagrees with the account given in the master category, The Algerian War. The conflicting accounts effectively nullify each other. Given that the account here relies on a single source makes this account highly susceptible to bias. I am not an expert on the battle, or massacre, so I cannot validate one account or the other.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.98.66.208 (talk) 15:05, 30 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Material from the British historian Alistair Horne's account of the Algerian War "A Savage War of Peace" has been added in an attempt to give a more balanced account of what appears to have been an atrocious affair on both sides. Following an account of the killings in Ain-Abid, Horne comments that: "The details sicken the stomach but they need to be recounted for no other reason than to explain the potent and profound effect that the "Philippeville massacre" was to have on the piers noirs, on Jacques Soustelled, and indeed on the whole subsequent history of the Algerian war.Buistr (talk) 08:30, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Citing Aussaresses
Surely it's clear that Paul Aussaresses is as biased a source as they come. Not only was he involved in the French side in the conflict, but, as the article about him says, he is controversial for the fact that he admitted and defended his use of torture as part of the French counterinsurgency effort, also in the very book The Battle of the Casbah that is being cited. He is obviously motivated to present the events in a way that justifies his own actions and his use of torture as much as possible. Some or all of the claims themselves may well be true - Evans, too, says there were atrocities by the rebels - but they should not be sourced to Aussaresses.--94.155.68.202 (talk) 20:51, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Artículo claramente sesgado contra el pueblo argelino
Falta un mínimo de imparcialidad. Son archiconocidas las torturas contra argelinos. Intelectuales franceses como Sartre o Beauvoir, las denunciaron, y varios periódicos. 2A02:2E02:E040:1400:D5A2:6E95:D25F:1C02 (talk) 18:05, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

November 2022
With regard to this edit:
 * The blind revert was totally unjustified (you removed sourced content, added sources that are already cited in the article and restored an old irrelevant tag).
 * The claim that Casualties3 is absolutely necessary is also baseless since per Template:Infobox military conflict, casualties3 is optional and used where only the total casualties of a conflict are known, or where civilian casualties cannot be directly attributed to either side. Clearly, this isn't the case here. M.Bitton (talk) 15:12, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

The ""sourced content"" before my edits claimed that the French sustained up to 12,000 casualties while the FLN 134. What sourced content did i remove exactly? I would really like to know. As for casualties3, while it is optional, i don't see why it's not accepted here, the number of civilian dead is unsure, and i don't see why Muslim civilians killed in the massacre are counted as FLN casualties, or Algerians killed by the FLN for being suspected of pro-french sentiments are counter as French casualties. The perpretrators are also very often unknown. The FLN, the French army, and various armed Pieds-Noir Militants all went after Muslims in the area, each with their own reasons, and all of them tried to blame the other as much as possible. As for the French military, they sustained 31–47 military and law enforcement deaths according to the French government and Vetillard respectively. Whatever748 (talk) 15:27, 12 November 2022 (UTC)
 * You reverted "Lostlegion", that I can understand as their edit was inapropriate, but the rest is your change. You removed the 3,000 to 5,000 figure (already sourced in the article). It's not accepted here because we know exactly who killed whom (if the religion of the ones that have been killed is important, then it can be added alongside the numbers). M.Bitton (talk) 15:35, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

Bernadette Mello
The story of the 5-year old who was dismembered and then put back into her disembowled mother is an exaggeration of the facts, while it is true that she died, the story is false and serves as pro-French propaganda of the savagery of the FNL.

Here is the source and its quote translated into english: http://colloque-algerie.ens-lyon.fr/communication.php3?id_article=276

"Reading one of these stories, my interlocutor from Aïn Abid did not get carried away in exaggerating the horror. She sent a letter to the author of the article to correct her account of the massacre: three adults, two men and a woman, had their throats slit, Josée, the nine-year-old girl, was shot dead, little Marie -Bernadette had her head smashed, she was not cut into pieces. No woman was disemboweled, two were saved: the grandmother, protected by her unconsciousness, was unharmed and Mrs. Mello, the mother of the two murdered children, seriously injured by an attempted throat slitting, survived like her son Jean-Pierre, thirteen years old, injured in the back by pickaxe blows. But the details of this witness have not been published." Mimckeev (talk) 10:46, 1 February 2024 (UTC)