By the beginning of August, of the 250,000 European inhabitants of Oran only 40,000 were left. When the exodus was all over it was estimated that 50,000 pieds noirs had gone to Spain; 12,000 to Canada; 10,000 to Israel; and 1,550 to Argentina. But the huge mass, 1,380,000 strong (which included the luckier Muslim refugees) — equivalent then to the combined population of the two biggest French cities after Paris — had flooded into France.

QUESTION: The claim of 'miraculous smoothness' seems to minimize the Oran massacre of pieds noirs. How did historians reconcile this official smoothness narrative with the violence in Oran?

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1620