But usually they were forced to live in the worst city slums of Paris or Marseilles, in family-less celibacy and dispiriting isolation in overcrowded tenement houses. Their contacts with French life would often be limited to members of the Communist Party and other disgruntled proletarian militants, so that when they returned to Algeria they brought with them seeds of more coherent discontent, awaiting germination.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 187