THE darkest events in postwar French history took place in Paris on a filthy night in October 1961. Yet until François Hollande quietly nudged France to look them in the face on Wednesday, they had not officially happened at all.

The massacre of perhaps as many as 250 Algerians peacefully protesting against a curfew on the entire north African population of the city was one of numerous atrocities during the Algerian war of independence. But here the killing was done in the centre of Paris. Some were shot by the police, others pushed from bridges into the swollen Seine. Almost no one said anything.

It says much for the fear and madness of the time that, 51 years later, we still don’t know how many people were killed that night. Not even the police themselves seemed to be counting.

Until President Hollande caught the country by surprise by paying homage to the dead with three short sentences of recognition, France was still officially in denial. The official story of October 17 remained that of the then prefect of police, Maurice Papon.

Papon would later be convicted of crimes against humanity for his part in the deportation of Jews to death camps during the Nazi occupation. Many of the police he led that night in Paris had served in Algeria, and many too had had a hand in rounding up thousands of Jews in the city for the Gestapo.

Jacques Chirac finally owned up to the French police’s responsibility for that in 1995, which was not only a comfort to French Jews but lifted a burden of official silence that had weighed on France.

Hollande has gone further in expressing France’s contrition for its part in the Shoah, to the annoyance of Nicolas Sarkozy’s former prime minister and key gurus. Sarkozy’s pitbull in parliament, Christian Jacob, now lambasts Hollande for blackening the “republican police” by recognising the massacre of Algerians.

The country Hollande inherited from Sarkozy was toxically divided by class, religion, ethnic origin and the worst sort of populist politics. But Hollande seems convinced that understated frankness about the past can help to heal the divisions that have sapped France.

His first few months in power have seen him subtly remaking what it means to be French — jettisoning Sarkozy’s edict that schoolchildren must be taught the positive side of French colonialism — and undoing Sarko’s notorious claim that “the African has not entered history enough” with his own speech in Dakar recently.

He even criticised Jules Ferry, one of the heroes of the republican left, for his support of colonialism.

What recognition of the October 17 massacre finally means for rapprochement with Algeria — now celebrating the 50th anniversary of independence, which has delivered much blood and tears and little freedom despite enormous oil wealth — is anyone’s guess. Hollande is going there next month. An apology for French colonial crimes has long been demanded by Algerian veterans of the war. But lachrymose apologies are neither the French nor Hollande’s way. He seems to prefer simply recognising the facts, difficult as they may be.

Watching the French squirm in post-colonial denial has long been great sport on the other side of the channel. But Britain has nothing to be smug about when it comes to post-colonial amnesia: atrocities in Kenya, Malaya (as it was then) and elsewhere at the same time were being swept under the carpet.

But Britain did learn one lesson from centuries of banging its head against a wall in Ireland. Through the Bloody Sunday massacre in Northern Ireland when 26 unarmed civil-rights protesters and bystanders were shot by the British Army, whose ghosts and survivors I grew up among, it finally learned after 40 years that, although truth hurts, it hurts rather less than lies. — The Guardian, London

Fiachra Gibbons is a writer based in Paris.