A French administrative court has ruled that the state was at fault for failing to properly investigate the death of an African rifleman killed in the 1944 Thiaroye massacre in Senegal, when the French army opened fire on its colonial troops who were demanding their pay.
The Paris administrative court ruled last Friday that French authorities had not only provided the soldier's family with false information in the years following his death, but had subsequently failed to use all available means to establish the precise circumstances of his death or the location of his burial.
While the court acknowledged it could not rule on the death itself due to the statute of limitations, it found that the state's failure to investigate amounted to a fault giving rise to liability.
The tribunal awarded €10,000 in damages to the soldier's son, who brought the case to court last June, accusing the French state of concealing mass graves and blocking justice.
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The massacre took place on 1 December 1944 at Thiaroye, near Dakar, when French forces fired on West African riflemen - known as tirailleurs senegalais - who had served in the French army and who mutinied over unpaid pages.
The precise death toll, the full circumstances of the killings and the location of the victims' graves remain unresolved.
Visual retelling of Thiaroye massacre sheds new light on French colonial atrocity
'Ungrateful' France
The son, Biram Senghor, who was not named in the ruling, welcomed the verdict but said it was inadequate.
"I am truly glad that French justice has condemned the French state, because the French state has been unjust - an ungrateful state," he told RFI. "France had great need of the Africans who were mobilised. So when it refuses to pay them at the end of that work, it is because France is ungrateful."
Senghor argued that France owed the families of the tirailleurs far more than a symbolic sum.
"France must also pay damages and interest," he said. "It has been 82 years now that France has been prevaricating and refusing to pay. The amount it has been ordered to pay does not even cover four years of work, let alone my father's life, which France took from him."
French massacre of WWII African riflemen premeditated, covered up: report
The tribunal noted that in the decades that followed the massacre, France had wrongly characterised the soldier as a deserter, claimed his wages had been paid in full, and described the French troops' action as a proportionate response to the situation they faced.
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Those claims were later acknowledged to be historically inaccurate: in 2019, France admitted the soldier had not deserted.
In 2024, President Emmanuel Macron formally recognised that the events at Thiaroye constituted a "massacre" and that the soldier had died "for France".
Eighty years on, the trauma of the massacre is still felt in Senegal and across the West African countries from which the soldiers were drawn - including present-day Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea and Burkina Faso.
