In the course of that first night, the deadly fusillade soon forgotten, some extraordinary scenes of fraternisation took place on the barricades. Arriving at the university, Captain Pierre Sergent of the 1st R.E.P. strode up to shake Lagaillarde by the hand, assuring him, “I’ll never have you fired upon.” Women of the F.N.F. men behind the barricades were allowed to come and go as they pleased, bringing supplies of croissants, thermos flasks of coffee and wine, which were readily shared out with the passively attendant paras. On the same barricades the barmen of the Saint-George and Aletti hotels, normally bitter rivals, were found jointly dispensing hospitality. As Lagaillarde remarked at his trial, the barricades “instead of dividing, united everybody”, and, for the first three days as the weird stalemate continued, a kind of picnic spirit prevailed in the unusually balmy January weather. But amid the fraternisation one important ingredient was still pointedly missing: the Muslims. With a big effort, a few pathetic handfuls of elderly veterans were drummed up, many of them maimed and of First World War vintage; but, on the other hand, large groups of Casbah urchins gathered to chant at a discreet distance: “Algérie Arabe! À bas Massu!”

XREF: Connects to the broader Algerian War dynamics of pied-noir unity against both the FLN and French government, where the settler population cohered around European identity while Muslims remained outside the fold.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1102