On the night of 29 March 1947 nationalist insurgents armed mainly with spears attacked French posts and plantations in eastern Madagascar, and the revolt spread through the eastern forest belt. The colonial authorities blamed the MDRM party and arrested its leaders, including its deputies to the French National Assembly, several of whom were sentenced to death in 1948 in a trial that, according to Wikipedia's account, relied largely on evidence obtained through torture; the sentences were commuted in 1949. Jean Fremigacci, working from the colonial archives and field inquiries, documents war crimes in the first three months — the machine-gunning of detainees in railway wagons at Moramanga on 6 May 1947 (at least 124 and probably over 160 dead), killings at Mananjary, prison massacres, systematic burning of villages and executions without trial — totalling one to two thousand dead, after which the command ordered restraint and pursued a slow 'pacification' that lasted until late 1948, with the last armed resistance ended in early 1949. Most of the dead were people who had fled into the forest and died of hunger and disease. In 2005 President Chirac spoke in Antananarivo of the 'unacceptable character' of the repressions produced by the colonial system, and in April 2025 President Macron acknowledged 'painful pages', including 1947, and announced a joint Franco-Malagasy historians' commission.
French colonial forces and police suppressed a nationalist insurrection in eastern Madagascar, during which much of the rural population of the insurgent districts fled to forest refuges and more than 18,000 people were arrested
The range is Jean Fremigacci's estimate from provincial archives and field inquiries: 30,000–40,000 Malagasy dead, of whom no more than 10,000 died violently (including the 1,000–2,000 victims of French war crimes and fewer than 2,000 Malagasy killed by insurgents) and about three-quarters died of malnutrition and disease while in flight, some share of which he notes would have occurred anyway. Official figures vary far more widely: 89,000 in the first official count (as reported by Herodote and Wikipedia), 80,000–100,000 cited by High Commissioner de Chevigné in 1949, which Fremigacci traces to the December 1948 count of people still in dissidence being declared dead, 11,162 in the 1950 colonial inquiry, which he calls an evident undercount, and 15,000 cited by François Mitterrand as minister in 1951. Fremigacci records 242 deaths among colonial troops other than Malagasy; Herodote gives 550 Europeans killed, 350 of them soldiers, and about 1,900 colonial troops, mostly Malagasy auxiliaries.
Jean Fremigacci documents the Moramanga and Mananjary massacres, executions without trial, the systematic burning of villages in the first months, more than 18,000 arrests mostly of innocent people, and the use of violence and torture in police interrogations.
Madagascar