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A French Ford came down the boulevard bearing four Moslems: two men, a woman and a child. The young Europeans invited the woman and child out. Then they dragged out the two men, beat them to death, and threw the bodies over the sea wall to the rocks 40 feet below. Then they lifted the Ford and dropped it over the cliff after them. Police, stoically watching this performance, brushed aside a protest by foreign newsmen that they stop the slaughter, said: "We haven't received orders." A French paratroop major who tried to intervene was slapped in the face by a uniformed Territorial private. Dazed and humiliated, the officer stumbled away, muttering: "Are these people worth saving?"
Helpless Minister. There were Frenchmen in Algiers who risked their lives to save Moslems. During one struggle, a middleaged, bespectacled Frenchman broke through a crowd of young hoodlums, put his arm around a bleeding Moslem, and amid jeers and threats led him away. In the center of the city another crowd, storming through the streets, was stopped by a paratroop colonel. "Our fight here must be dignified and worthy!" shouted the colonel. "Go home quietly." The crowd cheered him, broke into the Marseillaise, then went on rioting. Sitting in his office in the gleaming white government building, Minister Resident Robert Lacoste read the reports of mob violence, called in the leaders of veterans' groups to urge them to halt rioters in the streets. But for all his anger and bitterness, Lacoste was helpless. Early in the evening, fatigue finally dissipated the mobs.
Next day many French reacted with shame and revulsion. Embarrassed officials announced five Moslems killed (a low estimate), 200 Europeans arrested. Even the Algiers press^ which has long campaigned for an all-out fight against the rebel Moslems, found the rioting excessive. Said Echo d'Alger: "The boys who rioted were playing the rebels' game." In Paris, Figaro editorialized: "We are left speechless." But the students and veterans who had led the rioting were neither speechless nor ashamed. In a joint statement they proclaimed: "People of Algiers, once again you have displayed in a striking fashion your anger at too many unpunished crimes, and your determination to remain French on French soil."