Uncannily, the two cities had acquired many of the siege aspects so brilliantly described by Camus in his grim novel, La Peste (first published in 1947), based upon a plague-ridden Oran. The fictitious plague, writes Camus, “had swallowed up everything and everyone. No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all.” As in Camus’ Oran, in Algiers alone more than 200 check-points were set up to examine papers and control movements within the city. Trolley-bus windows bore heavy metal grilles to protect against the random grenade; a curfew emptied the streets of vehicles from 9 p.m. onwards, and at 1 a.m. the public lighting was extinguished, plunging the city into darkness.

XREF: Parallels the fictional plague in La Peste with the real urban siege conditions of wartime Algiers, connecting literary vision to lived history.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1506