page_title: Ambush of Palestro
section_title: Collective memory
hierarchical_section_title: Ambush of Palestro / Consequences / Collective memory
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Plaque commémorative sur le monument aux morts de Crosne, en Essonne. On y lit notamment le nom de Jean David-Nillet, fait prisonnier lors de l'embuscade de Palestro du 18 mai 1956 et mort lors de l'assaut de l'armée pour le libérer.
context_page_description: The Ambush of Palestro, or Ambush of Djerrah, took place on the 18th May 1956, during the Algerian war, near the village of Djerrah in the region of Palestro in Kabylie. A section of about forty men from the National Liberation Army under the command of Lieutenant Ali Khodja ambushed a unit of 21 men from the 9th Colonial Infantry Regiment of the French Army commanded by Second Lieutenant Hervé Artur.
  The ambush led to the complete destruction of the small unit of French marines, with a total of 20 French soldiers killed, including their commander, Hervé Artur. One French soldier was taken prisoner and later released. Algerian losses are unknown, but thought to number around one killed and a few wounded.
context_section_description: According to historian Benjamin Stora, "Palestro would remain the most famous ambush of the war, a symbol of the worst that can happen: a surprise attack, impossible to defend against, mutilation of corpses. The military hierarchy was also adept at using this trauma to overcome reluctance."
  As a military event the ambush itself was not particularly significant, in terms of either casualties or the death of the particular officer commanding the section, the incident was well within the norms of 1956. The event nonetheless took on, in the following days and for very long afterwards, a particular importance, joining in the French imagination, next to the massacre in Constantinois on August 20, 1955 and, a year later, the massacre of Melouza, a triptych that supposedly symbolised the violence and savagery of the independence fighters.
  Official discourse, or in the media, associated with the "fellagha" an image of "savagery" and "fanaticism", proof of the "primitive character" of the Algerian being the ambush itself and the mutilations that accompanied it. The word "massacre" came to be used rather than "ambush", as the event was initially called. Finally, the event itself took on a whole other meaning: it was no longer a defeat of the French Army, but violence that targeted — by assimilation — "civilians".
caption: Commemorative plaque on the monument to the dead in Crosne carrying the name of Jean David-Nillet, originally from this town who died in the French Army's assault to free him.
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