It is a surly city, harrowed by the stresses of over-population and under-employment; with the architecture of Cannes, but the atmosphere of Aberdeen. During the day the cafés are thronged with all-male, typically Arab society. At night the city, responsive to President Boumedienne's own personal brand of puritanism, closes down like wartime Toronto on a Sunday. The once exclusively pied noir areas of Algeria have become so totally Arab in atmosphere that one wonders how the French dreams of "integration" or "association", or the liberal hopes of a Camus for a multi-racial society of the 1950s, could ever have come true.

XREF: Connects to broader post-colonial North African history and the failure of French integration policies, echoing themes in Memmi and Fanon.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1691