Robert Bonnaud

Robert Bonnaud (13 November 1929 – 22 January 2013) was a French anti-colonialist historian and professor of history at the Paris Diderot University.

In 1957, following the advice of his friend Pierre Vidal-Naquet, he published in Esprit an article entitled La Paix des Nementchas (Nementchas’ Peace), where he denounced massacres he witnessed made by the French army in Algeria, on 25-26 October 1956. In June 1961, he was arrested and jailed in Marseille's Baumettes prison as a supporter of the Algerian nationalists of the FLN; Hargreaves calls him "the leader of the Jeanson network in the Marseille region". In June 1962, two months after the Evian agreements and the proclamation of Algeria's independence, Bonnaud was released but suspended from all teaching duties. That restriction was lifted two years later and he was formally pardoned in 1966. He died, aged 83, in Paris.