60 years after the tragedy of the Charonne metro in Paris, tribute to a Nantes victim
60 years ago to the day, February 8, 1962, nine people were killed in a police crackdown in the Charonne metro station in Paris. The victims were all CGT activists who participated in a demonstration, called by several unions and bringing together nearly 30,000 people, against the attacks perpetrated by the OAS, a terrorist organization in favor of French Algeria.
among the deadAnne-Claude Godeau from Nantes. She was only 24 on the day of this bloody repression, which was remembered as one of the dark hours of Gaullist France and the beginnings of the Fifth Republic.
Born in Nantes in 1938 into a militant family: a communist city councilor dad, a mom committed to the CGT, she joined the same union, like her four sisters. At 22, she quickly won the PTT competition and found herself at the postal check center in Paris.
A tribute ceremony in Nantes this Tuesday
At that time, in the midst of the Algerian war, Paris was regularly the scene of clashes between supporters of independence and militants of French Algeria. After the generals putsch in Algiers in April 1961, General de Gaulle establish emergency state. And it is under this state of emergency that the prefect of police of Paris, a certain Maurice Papon, orders his troops to disperse this demonstration which he had not authorized. Trapped in the Charonne metro station, Anne-Claude Godeau and eight other demonstrators are killed. A few days later thousands of people marched in Nantes for his funeral, 25,000 would write the newspaper l’Humanité.
Today a street in Nantes and a room in the people’s house of Saint-Nazaire bear his name. A tribute will be paid to him this Tuesday, at 4:15 p.m., at the Gaudinière cemetery, where Anne-Claude Godeau rests.