Malagasy Uprising
France crushed a nationalist rising in Madagascar between 1947 and 1949, and the death toll is still disputed by an order of magnitude. The island had been annexed in 1896, the monarchy abolished and the queen exited to Algiers. Some 40,000 Malagasy fought for France in the two world wars, and the veterans came home with an argument about what that had earned. The Mouvement démocratique de la rénovation malgache won every seat Madagascar had in the French assembly in 1946 and pressed for autonomy within the French Union by constitutional means. The rising that began on the night of 29 March 1947 with attacks on a military camp and settler plantations in the east was organised by more radical secret societies, and the MDRM leaders in Paris denounced it. France declared them responsible anyway, dissolved the party, and arrested its deputies after lifting their immunity. The suppression used Senegalese and North African colonial troops, mass arrests, village burnings, forced displacement into the forest where people died of hunger and malaria, and torture. Prisoners were reportedly thrown from aircraft. French official figures gave 89,000 dead and were later revised down to around 11,000; Malagasy sources claim up to 100,000, and no reliable count exists. Three MDRM deputies were sentenced to death and reprieved. Madagascar became independent in 1960 with a president France found acceptable. A French president acknowledged the repression as unacceptable only in 2005. The rising is barely known in France and is the founding national trauma in Madagascar, commemorated every 29 March. Its leaders are on the banknotes, and the archives of the repression were opened only in part.
- Year: 1947 CE
- Category: Military
