The Casbah of Algiers in the war of independence

The Casbah's military significance in this period was a direct consequence of how it was built, and the historian Zeynep Çelik states it plainly: the complex configuration of the quarter, with its interlocking terraces, passageways and tortuous dead-end streets, made penetration by French authorities difficult and made defence easier.

Take the parts separately. The largest street of the pre-colonial city, the road linking Bab el-Oued and Bab Azzoun, was three metres wide. By the early 1950s municipal refuse was still being collected by donkey cart, because ordinary vehicles could not get through. The houses present blank walls to the street with minimal openings, so there is nothing to see into. And the roof terraces form a continuous upper level: it was possible to pass from one terrace to another and visit other houses without ever using the street, which Çelik describes as an alternative public realm extending across the whole city.

None of that was designed for war. It was designed for a hot climate, a steep hill and a social rule about privacy, as the architecture page sets out. But the French army noticed its other use immediately. Çelik quotes an official report from the period right after 1830 observing that because it was possible to pass easily from one rooftop to the next, during times of revolt such communications would come in very handy.

That report was written a hundred and twenty seven years before anyone fought here.

It matters that the Casbah was not a well-kept historic district when the war began. It was an overcrowded one, and the overcrowding was a product of colonial housing policy.

Density in the upper Casbah ran at 1,430 people per hectare in 1881 and 2,028 in 1921. By the 1931 census some fifty four thousand people were living at nearly three thousand per hectare. By 1949 sixty four thousand people occupied about thirty eight hectares, reaching three thousand five hundred per hectare in places, against a commune-wide Algiers average of about a thousand.

Of the roughly two thousand two hundred and fifty buildings of the upper Casbah recorded around 1949, fifteen residences were classified as being in good condition. Thirty three houses were demolished in 1948.

Two things are genuinely unsettled, and a page that glosses over them is not telling the truth about the record.

The name. Le Monde reported in 2007 that many older Algerians reject the phrase battle of Algiers altogether, on the grounds that there were not two opposing camps but a regular army of occupation facing a largely defenceless population. That objection is not a quibble about wording. It is an argument about what kind of event this was.

The dates. There is no agreed chronology. The French military framing, as the historian Mohamed Harbi summarises it, runs from the investment of General Massu's 10th Parachute Division with police powers on 8 January 1957 to the eradication of the last FLN armed group on 8 October 1957. A chronology compiled by the Alger 1957 research project dates the grant of police powers to 7 January 1957 by ordinance. Britannica dates the episode to 1956 and 1957. The Library of Congress country study starts it on 30 September 1956, when three women placed bombs at three sites in the city. One encyclopaedia entry dates it September 1956 to May 1957, one research reference has it ending in June 1957, and a peer-reviewed account frames the whole thing as 1956 to 1958.

Le Monde also reported that 7 January 1957 is not the symbolic date for Algerians, who would date it instead from the eight-day strike, from the killing of Ben M'hidi, or from 8 October 1957. The full list of versions is in the table further down this page.

The FLN's Autonomous Zone of Algiers, the ZAA, was set up in mid-1956. It divided the city into three sectors, Centre, West and East, each run by a council with politico-military, financial and intelligence branches, with zonal committees for liaison, intelligence, press and propaganda, justice, sanitary services and labour, and a four-man zone council at the top.

Within the quarter the fabric itself was adapted. Yacef Saadi, who headed the network from August 1956, is described as having created a series of secret passages running from house to house, together with bomb factories, caches and hiding places behind false walls. Çelik describes a system of planques, hideouts, organised zone by zone. During the reorganisation of February 1957 Yacef is recorded as changing hideout seventeen times.

On the other side, Massu commanded the 10th Parachute Division and held delegated civil powers alongside his military command, concentrating both in one person. Regiments took charge of urban quadrants and held those they arrested in secret. More clandestine structures, including the Operational Protection Detachments, were staffed and paid by the army. Harbi writes that the paratroop officers had acquired a practice of social war in Vietnam, that they modelled their organisation on the FLN's own, and lists their methods as sealing the city, gridding the urban space and the population, multiplying torture centres, opening transit and sorting camps, and generalised card-indexing of the population.

Large cordon-and-search operations in the Casbah predate Massu's arrival by nearly a year, and Çelik documents them.

On 28 March 1956 police sealed Rue Marengo and Rue Randon and the streets around them and questioned more than two thousand people, of whom five hundred were taken to police headquarters. A similar operation ran in the upper Casbah the same evening. On 26 May 1956 a giant control operation confined six thousand five hundred residents for twenty four hours and interrogated more than four thousand, the quarter surrounded at midnight with machine guns and grenade launchers placed on the Boulevard de la Victoire and the Rue de la Lyre. On 23 September 1956 twenty four smaller streets were closed to circulation for an indeterminate period. On 8 January 1957 two thousand troops began searching the upper Casbah at three in the morning.

The FLN, with the MNA and the PCA, called a general strike to coincide with the United Nations debate on Algeria. It was called for 28 January 1957 and intended to last eight days. One account dates the start to the 27th, recording that by the evening of that day Algiers was already a dead city and that the next morning the shutters of Muslim shops stayed down in their overwhelming majority.

It was broken within weeks. The Library of Congress study records that Massu used paratroopers to break the strike and then systematically destroyed the FLN infrastructure in the city.

Whether calling it was wise is still argued in Algiers itself. Le Monde reported people asking, fifty years on, whether the eight-day strike should ever have been launched, given that it allowed Massu to generalise and systematise torture.

Nothing in this section is stated as a bare fact. Each item is attributed.

The French state's own position. In a declaration of 13 September 2018 President Macron recognised that the mathematician Maurice Audin, arrested at his home on 11 June 1957 and never seen again, was tortured and then executed, or tortured to death, by the soldiers who arrested him. The declaration attributed this to a legally instituted arrest-and-detention system flowing from the special powers Parliament granted the armed forces in 1956, a system installed without any change to the penal code, so that torture remained illegal and went unpunished. It also opened the state archives on wartime disappearances.

The administration at the time. Paul Teitgen, appointed in August 1956 as secretary general of the Algiers prefecture with responsibility for general police, was a Resistance member who had himself been tortured by the Gestapo. On 24 March 1957 he wrote to the resident minister asking to be relieved, saying that what they were engaged in was not illegality but anonymity and irresponsibility, which could only lead to war crimes. He recorded recognising on detainees the marks of torture he had suffered himself. He put disappearances for the first seven months of 1957 at 3,024, and said he had signed some twenty four thousand orders assigning people to camps. His resignation was refused. He left the prefecture on 12 September 1957.

A perpetrator. General Paul Aussaresses, intelligence chief in Algiers during 1957, described in his 2001 memoir methods running from blows to electricity to suffocation with water, acknowledged summary killings, called the practice efficient, said he was only carrying out orders, and wrote that the justice minister had been informed. In January 2002 he was convicted in France and fined for complicity in justifying war crimes.

A survivor. Henri Alleg, imprisoned and tortured by French authorities, published La Question in 1958. It was banned in France and received wide international attention.

The scholarship. The standard monograph is Raphaëlle Branche's study of the army and torture during the Algerian war, published by Gallimard in 2001, whose sixth chapter is titled after this episode and the reign of torture. Marnia Lazreg, writing for Princeton University Press, argues that torture was institutional rather than aberrant and central to the doctrine of guerre révolutionnaire. Britannica states that the French military resorted to the torture and summary execution of hundreds of suspects.

Scale. Harbi writes that extrajudicial liquidations became common currency, that tens of thousands of people were arrested and that close to three thousand disappeared. The historian Benjamin Stora has said there were more than three thousand disappeared. One peer-reviewed account estimates that in a quarter of eighty thousand people, thirty to forty per cent of the active male population were arrested for questioning and tortured, while putting the number directly involved in armed action at around four thousand five hundred in a Muslim population of four hundred and fifty thousand, and noting that most of those interrogated were fund collectors, messengers and relatives rather than fighters.

Where. Sites named in reporting include the villa Sésini, the El-Biar centre where Audin died, the engineers' barracks at Hussein-Dey, the Delly-Brahim barracks and the Sarrouy interrogation centre, which is a school again.

Ali la Pointe was killed when French paratroopers dynamited the house he was hiding in, on what was then the Rue des Abderames. Hassiba Ben Bouali, who was nineteen, died with him, along with Mahmoud Bouhamidi and Omar Yacef, known as Petit Omar, who was twelve.

The wider toll is disputed. Le Monde reported seventeen dead including eight children, and the collapse of the neighbouring house as well. Çelik writes that a group of houses was blown up, killing Ali la Pointe and Hassiba Ben Bouali in addition to thirty others, although she dates the event to 1958 where every other source consulted gives 8 October 1957. Natalya Vince and the Algerian daily Horizons name the four dead and give no wider figure. All four versions are given here because the page cannot responsibly choose between them.

The neighbouring family lost two young daughters in the collapse and were still living next door in 2007.

The French command treated the death of Ali la Pointe as the end of the battle. Afterwards the quarter was placed under military control: officers in far greater numbers, strategic crossroads wired, entries and exits controlled, and public space hung with propaganda posters. In December 1960 a tract published in El Moudjahid called the Casbah the new ghetto of Warsaw, and referred to the two hundred thousand people besieged in it.

Larbi Ben M'hidi was arrested on 22 February 1957 and killed. The Alger 1957 chronology gives 4 March 1957; Le Monde, quoting the Algerian ministry of mujahideen, gives 3 March. The killing was officially presented at the time as suicide. Harbi states he was coldly murdered by commandant Paul Aussaresses and the killing disguised as suicide; Aussaresses himself claimed in 2001 that Ben M'hidi was killed under his command. In November 2024 President Macron formally recognised that he was killed by French soldiers.

Ali Boumendjel, a nationalist lawyer, was killed on 23 March 1957, his death also presented as suicide. On 2 March 2021 President Macron acknowledged that he had been detained, tortured and killed.

Yacef Saadi was captured on 24 September 1957. Sentenced to death, his sentence was reduced and he was pardoned in 1958 by Charles de Gaulle. He died on 10 September 2021, aged 93.

Zohra Drif, then a law student at the University of Algiers, was arrested on the same day on the Rue Caton. She was sentenced to twenty years' forced labour, served five, was released at independence, and later sat in Algeria's first National Constituent Assembly and for fifteen years in the Council of the Nation. She has published her own account.

Djamila Bouhired was arrested in April 1957 leaving the Casbah, tortured, tried before a military court and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by President René Coty on 13 March 1958, and she was released after independence.

The house on the Rue des Abderames was rebuilt as it had been. The street is now the Rue Bessa Lakhdar. The building became a museum in 2006, housed a sewing centre until it reopened in 2019, and is now the Musée Ammar Ali, generally known as the Musée Ali la Pointe, run by the local authority and free to enter. Its displays are framed photographs and press cuttings along the walls, covering 1956 and 1957 and the fighters of the Autonomous Zone.

In January 2007 Le Monde reported that nothing in the Casbah marked the house at all, though anyone who asked would be directed to it, and that people entered it rather as they would enter a mosque.

Street names carry most of the commemoration. A major Algiers boulevard is named for Hassiba Ben Bouali, which Natalya Vince reads as a deliberate attempt by the post-independence state to write an official collective memory into public space. Inside the Casbah, streets were renamed after independence: the Rue de la Grenade became Kheireddine Zenouda, the Rue Kléber the Rue des Frères Bachara, the Rue de la Lyre the Rue Ahmed Bouzrina. The national memorial, Maqam Echahid, was inaugurated outside the quarter in 1982 for the twentieth anniversary of independence.

Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers was released in 1966, produced by Igor Film and Casbah Film, with Yacef Saadi among its producers. It was shot on location in the markets and narrow streets of the Casbah itself, using black and white stock and handheld cameras to give it the look of documentary, with a cast of roughly a hundred and fifty non-professionals. Yacef Saadi played a thinly fictionalised version of himself.

It is worth being clear on one point, because the belief is widespread: no newsreel footage was used. Britannica records that every frame was shot by Pontecorvo. The film won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1966, took three Academy Award nominations, was not shown in France until 1971, and has since been studied by militaries and by revolutionary organisations alike. The BFI lists it as independent Algeria's first production.

A film is not a source for what happened, and this page has not used it as one. But it is the reason most people outside Algeria have any image of this quarter at all, and the four people who died on 8 October 1957 are known to the world largely through it.

Every source used is listed at the foot of this page and every one of them can be checked. Where the record conflicts, the conflict is shown rather than resolved. Where a statement is an allegation, the person or institution making it is named. Where the French state has formally acknowledged something, that acknowledgement is dated.

There are things this page does not yet cover properly, including the experience of the quarter between 1958 and 1962, and the lives of people in the Casbah who were not combatants on either side. If you have documentation, or if anything here is wrong, please write to admin@casbah-alger.com.