It was inside France, though — and particularly in the Paris area, where Messali had exerted a traditionally potent influence from the days of the antediluvian Etoile — that the M.N.A. remained strongest. Starting in 1957, a savage internecine war had raged between the two factions, which by 1960 had already claimed hundreds of dead among the 250,000 Algerian workers in the Paris region alone. In 1960 the killings reached a crescendo as the F.L.N. stepped up its campaign to achieve total ascendancy. Barely a day went by without a corpse fished out of the Seine, or found hanging in the Bois de Boulogne. A favourite place of reckoning was the quiet Canal Saint-Martin, flowing towards the Bastille in the east of Paris, which with hideous regularity yielded up its crop of sacks containing the disfigured bodies of Algerians. As during the Battle of Algiers, women were often employed as executioners' "liaisons"; they would take a pistol concealed in a handbag to the appointed place, slip it to the killer, then take it back immediately the deed was done, to disappear silently into the crowd. Under the blanket of terror successfully imposed by the F.L.N., the French police received a minimum of information — even from the relatives of victims — with which to track down the terrorists.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1254