Marseille

Marseille is both a point of departure and a center of underworld power in the novel’s account of the conflict around the OAS. Marc Rodin leaves its shore for Algeria in the spring of 1956, imagining that the campaign there will fulfill his life’s work; elsewhere, Marseille’s Corsican networks connect criminal influence to the SDECE Action Service and its vendetta against the OAS.

A departure for Algeria

Rodin’s departure from Marseille marks the beginning of the commitment that will lead him toward the OAS. After years of combat in Indochina and the French withdrawal, he sees Algeria as the chance to prevent another betrayal of the Army. In the spring of 1956, he leaves Marseille convinced that the distant hills of Algeria will restore the French Army’s standing in the eyes of the world. The passage gives the departure a personal as well as political weight: Rodin is described as being as nearly happy as he will ever be, because he believes his life’s work is about to reach its culmination.

A military connection outside the city

Marseille also appears in the background of Rend Montclair’s life. Three years before the spring of 1963, while Montclair ran the pay-accounts department at a Foreign Legion of France base outside Marseille, his nineteen-year-old son was serving in Algeria. The young man was captured by guerrillas; a Legion patrol later found his body in the village it had taken. Montclair never saw the body, but heard what had been done to his son. The distance between the base near Marseille and the violence in Algeria did not protect him from the war’s consequences: the account of his son’s fate helped make Montclair a hardliner within the OAS.

Corsican networks and the vendetta

Marseille is part of a wider geography of Corsican influence. Corsicans dominate both the Paris and Marseille underworlds and the SDECE Action Service. The novel traces that influence back to the Allied landings in southern France in 1944, when Corsicans helped the Allies for their own ends and later gained control of much of the vice trade along the coast. In the early 1960s, they again fight for France, this time in a vendetta against the OAS, declared after seven SDECE Action Service men were captured alive in Algiers and their bodies were later found mutilated and displayed. The conflict could become almost fratricidal: many OAS members were pieds-noirs, French people born in Algeria, and the text notes that they sometimes shared characteristics with their Corsican opponents. Marseille’s significance is therefore not confined to Rodin’s departure or Montclair’s family history; it belongs to a network in which military service, criminal power, and political violence overlap.