French President Emmanuel Macron leaves the European Council building in the early morning during an EU summit in Brussels, on Monday. Photo: AFP

French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday condemned as "inexcusable" a deadly crackdown by Paris police on a 1961 protest by Algerians whose scale was covered up for decades, disappointing activists who hoped for an even stronger recognition of responsibility.

Macron told relatives of victims on the 60th anniversary of the bloodshed that "crimes" were committed on the night of October 17, 1961, under the command of the notorious Paris police chief Maurice Papon.

He acknowledged that several dozen protesters had been killed, "their bodies thrown into the River Seine" and paid tribute to their memory.

The precise number of victims has never been made clear and some activists fear several hundred could have been killed.

Macron "recognized the facts that the crimes committed that night under Maurice Papon are inexcusable for the Republic," the Elysee said.

"This tragedy was long hushed-up, denied or concealed," it added in a statement.

Algerian President Abdelmadjidn Tebboune said there was "strong concern for treating issues of history and memory without complacency or compromising principles, and with a sharp sense of responsibility," free from "the dominance of arrogant colonialist thought," his office said in a statement. 

The deadly 1961 crackdown revealed the horror of "massacres and crimes against humanity that will remain engraved in the collective memory," he said in a statement released by his office. 

"There were bodies on all sides, I was very afraid," recalled Bachir Ben-Aissa Saadi, who took part in the rally and was 14 years old at the time. 

The rally was called in the final year of France's increasingly violent attempt to retain Algeria as a north African colony, and in the middle of a bombing campaign targeting mainland France by pro-independence militants.

Papon was in the 1980s revealed to have been a collaborator with the occupying Nazis in World War II and complicit in the deportation of Jews. He was convicted of crimes against humanity but later released.

Macron, the first French president to attend a memorial ceremony for those killed, observed a minute of silence in their memory at the Bezons bridge over the Seine where the protest started.

His comments that crimes were committed went further than predecessor Francois Hollande, who acknowledged in 2012 that the protesting Algerians had been "killed during a bloody repression."

AFP