Algiers is a pivotal setting in the novel’s account of the Algerian War and the political crisis that followed it. The city marks Guido’s emergence as a soldier alongside Creasy, then becomes the scene of a confrontation between the army, the gendarmes, and European settlers. Its role links the men’s military partnership to the rebellion that brings their Legion service to an abrupt end.

Wartime Setting and the Men’s Rise

The Battle of Algiers, which began in January 1957, provides a chronological marker for Guido’s progress in the Legion. By then he had taken Creasy’s advice seriously and modeled himself on his sergeant; he had made his mark and been promoted to Legionnaire first class. A year later Guido, like Creasy, had become a non-commissioned officer. The novel presents Algiers not simply as a backdrop to their advancement but as a point in the story at which their relationship has grown beyond instruction: their military conversations become exchanges between equals, and the ease of their silences helps each recognize the other as a friend.

Their partnership also acquires a public dimension as the war intensifies. Colonel Dufour recognizes both men’s ability and their friendship, and Creasy and Guido are placed together with their units whenever possible. They become a formidable pair, known throughout the Legion. The city’s wartime context therefore frames both an individual development—Guido’s rise from pupil to fellow NCO—and a bond that the military institution itself comes to recognize and use.

Barricades and Military Division

Algiers later becomes the setting for a conflict within the French war effort. When it becomes clear that de Gaulle is planning a political settlement, the pieds noirs respond furiously, erecting barricades in the city and defying the army. Many professional soldiers sympathize with them, particularly the para units that have borne much of the fighting. The gendarmes are ordered to clear the barricades, with two para units, including the Legion’s 1st R.E.P., sent in support.

The para units drag their feet during the operation, and the gendarmes suffer many dead and wounded. This hesitation makes the barricades more than a street obstruction: they expose a fracture between the government’s orders and soldiers who sympathize with the settlers. Colonel Dufour is removed from command. Rather than appointing an officer considered politically reliable, the high command temporarily places Elie Denoix de St. Marc in charge. His uncompromising bravery and standing among his men make him a powerful leader, but his authority will carry the regiment further into open political defiance.

The Rebellion and Its Aftermath

St. Marc leads the 1st R.E.P. into the 1961 generals’ rebellion against de Gaulle, making the regiment a cornerstone of the plotters’ plans. They expect the rest of the Legion to join them, but that expectation proves mistaken: only the 1st R.E.P. acts against the government. The rebels even arrest Gambiez, the Army Commander-in-Chief. In the novel’s sequence of events, Algiers is thus tied to a crisis that reaches beyond the barricades, as military loyalty becomes inseparable from the question of political obedience.

The rebellion fails. On April 27, 1961, the twelve hundred Legionnaires of the 1st R.E.P. dynamite their barracks and fire their ammunition into the air. Pieds noirs line the route and weep as the paratroopers leave Zaralda, singing Edith Piaf’s Non, je ne regrette rien. The scene’s song and farewell contrast with the regiment’s earlier reputation as a formidable fighting force: its departure follows not a battlefield defeat but a failed political revolt.

The regiment is disgraced and disbanded. Although it has lost three hundred men in the war for France, de Gaulle is in a vengeful mood. Rank-and-file Legionnaires are absorbed into other units; officers either flee to the O.A.S. or surrender for trial on mutiny charges. Senior non-commissioned officers, including Creasy and Guido, are discharged. Guido later explains that they had done what they had been taught to do—obey their officers—and recalls that at one point they expected to parachute onto Paris and arrest de Gaulle. He also acknowledges that the French public was horrified, and argues that a Legion of more than thirty thousand acting as a whole could have been unstoppable. Algiers’s place in the novel is therefore bound to the consequences of military obedience: the political conflict that gathers around the city ends the careers of men whose professional loyalty has become politically unacceptable.