Algiers is the novel’s focal point for the violent contest between the OAS and the Gaullist authorities during the final struggle over French rule in Algeria. The city is more than a battlefield: the killing of seven undercover Action Service agents there provokes a vendetta, while the defeat and exodus that follow help carry the conflict into exile and across the Mediterranean to France.

A city at the center of the conflict

In Algiers, the struggle between the OAS and the Gaullist authorities becomes an underground war as well as a contest for power. The Action Service agents known as the barbouzes infiltrate the OAS, gather information, and enable arrests; the service also uses lethal force against wanted men outside France. The OAS, already practiced in violence, regards these operatives with particular hatred. The novel presents the city’s conflict as one in which clandestine intelligence and reprisals blur the distinction between military action and terror.

During the last days of the power struggle, the OAS captures seven barbouzes alive. Their bodies are later found hanging from balconies and lamp-posts, with their ears and noses removed. The fate of those who died under torture in the conflict’s cellars is left unknowable. That unresolved violence makes Algiers a place where neither the record of the dead nor responsibility for their deaths can be fully recovered.

Reprisal and the wider Algerian war

The killing of the seven agents prompts a Corsican vendetta against the OAS. Corsicans are influential in both the Paris and Marseilles underworld and the Action Service, and the novel connects this retaliation to older patterns of alliance and self-interest: Corsican networks had aided the Allies during the 1944 landings in southern France and later gained control of much of the Riviera vice trade. In the early 1960s, they fight for France again, this time against the OAS. Because many OAS members are pieds-noirs, the conflict can take on a nearly fratricidal character.

Algiers also belongs to the wider war that has radicalized Marc Rodin. After moving from rural fighting to the cities, Rodin serves first in Bone and then Constantine, not Algiers. His experience there nonetheless clarifies the conflict’s urban dimension: he hates the bomb campaign against French civilians and earns the title Butcher in the Casbah for the measures he takes in Constantine. The distinction matters: the novel situates Algiers within a countrywide struggle, while assigning specific episodes of Rodin’s career to other cities.

Defeat, departure, and narrative significance

As French settlers flee the war-torn coast, the OAS exacts a final destructive revenge on what they are leaving behind. When the struggle ends, exile is the remaining fate of leaders known to the Gaullist authorities. In the winter of 1961, Rodin becomes deputy to Antoine Argoud, the OAS operations chief in exile: Argoud supplies inspiration for the campaign against metropolitan France, while Rodin supplies organization and practical calculation. The movement from Algiers to exile marks a decisive change in the conflict’s geography and strategy.

The city’s significance therefore rests both in its violence and in its consequences. The deaths of the barbouzes expose the reciprocal brutality of the underground war; the ensuing vendetta and the leaders’ exile show how the defeat in Algeria does not simply end the conflict. It transforms it, carrying the struggle from a contest over French rule in Algiers into an offensive directed at France itself.