Constantine marks a turning point in the novel’s portrayal of the Algerian war: it is where Marc Rodin moves from fighting rural insurgents into the city conflict that hardens his methods and earns him the name Butcher. It is also more than a military posting. The city is André Casson’s home and the site of his revolt against the end of French rule, while a barracks there anchors the account of Jean-Claude Dumas’s service and death elsewhere in Algeria.

From the countryside to the city

After being promoted to lieutenant-colonel, Rodin left the rural bled and moved first to Bone and then to Constantine. The change of posting brought a change in the character of the fighting. In the countryside, he had faced the National Liberation Army, irregular forces whom he nevertheless regarded as soldiers. The cities confronted him with a different kind of violence: bombs planted by cleaners in French-patronized cafés, supermarkets, and playgrounds, places where civilians went about ordinary life.

Rodin understood this urban conflict through his conviction that Algeria was part of France and deserved the same defense as Normandy, Brittany, or the Alpes-Maritimes. In his view, the rebellion should have been defeated with greater support from home, not accommodated through political retreat. Constantine therefore becomes a place where an argument about the status of Algeria is translated into daily coercion: the city’s civilian spaces are exposed to bomb attacks, and Rodin answers with measures intended to root out those responsible.

Rodin’s countermeasures

The narrative links Rodin’s campaign in Constantine with the title given to him in the Casbah: Butcher. It does not reduce that reputation to a single action. Instead, the name follows from the severe measures he took in an effort to cleanse the city of bomb-planting insurgents. His response belongs to a war in which violence against civilians and violent countermeasures become part of the same urban landscape.

Rodin’s certainty that stronger force could still secure victory also blinded him to the larger costs of the conflict. The rebellion had spread despite the killing of insurgents and the destruction of villages; meanwhile, France faced an escalating financial burden, a tottering economy, and demoralized conscripts. Those pressures were not confined to Constantine, but they sharpen the significance of Rodin’s posting there. The city is a local theater of a war whose political and military foundations are failing, even as he continues to treat greater force as the answer.

Casson and the revolt

Constantine is André Casson’s native city and the setting of his earlier political commitment. When French settlers rose in revolt in 1960, he was among the leaders there. He kept his bank job afterward, but watched accounts close as business owners sold up and returned to France. For him, these departures made the decline of the French presence in Algeria visible in the everyday workings of commerce.

After the Army mutiny, Casson joined an OAS unit in robbing the bank where he worked of thirty million old francs. His complicity was reported by a junior cashier, ending his career with the bank. He sent his wife and two children to live with his in-laws at Perpignan and joined the OAS, bringing a different kind of resource from Rodin’s military experience: personal knowledge of several thousand OAS sympathizers then living inside France. Constantine thus stands at the beginning of a chain linking local revolt, the loss of a civilian career, and underground organization beyond Algeria.

A barracks and a distant death

Constantine also appears in the account of Jean-Claude Dumas, whose military life included the barracks there, assault courses, and discipline. His death, however, did not take place in the city. During a patrol searching for insurgents who had killed a settler family, his platoon encountered a battalion of the National Liberation Army in a dawn skirmish in the mountains. After the unit withdrew under pressure and repeatedly called for air support, fighter-bombers arrived at eight o’clock. Dumas, wounded by a bullet through the lungs, died with blood on a corporal’s knees beside a rock.

The distinction between the barracks and the battlefield matters: Constantine supplies the routine setting remembered from Dumas’s letter, while the fighting that killed him happened elsewhere. By bringing that remembered military life into the same broader geography as Rodin’s posting and Casson’s political trajectory, the novel makes the city a point of connection between the army, the settler revolt, and the clandestine struggle that followed.