50 Centimes Sétif Massacre

The 1975 date places this coin a full thirty years after the Sétif and Guelma massacres of May 8, 1945, when French security forces and settler militias killed somewhere between 6,000 and 45,000 Algerians — a range that itself reflects how thoroughly the event was suppressed in French official memory. Algeria had been commemorating the date as a national holiday since independence in 1962, and the coin fits within the broader effort of the Boumédiène government to anchor the new state's identity to its anticolonial martyrology.