During that month of June alone, no less than 350,000 of the million pieds noirs left Algeria, compared to the 100,000 which the French government had calculated might depart over the first year of Algerian independence. No words of assurance by High Commissioner Fouchet or Farès could stem the panic-ridden exodus. Cars were put up for sale at £10 apiece, or simply abandoned in the street; parking lots looked like scenes from the British evacuation of Dunkirk. The smart shops in the Rue Michelet offered their entire stocks for sale at knock-down prices; bar-keepers simply closed the shutters and left. “Let’s face it,” a senior French official told British journalists, “the whole of Algeria’s up for sale.”

XREF: Evokes comparisons to French colonial exit from Vietnam (Dien Bien Phu) or the Partition of India exodus in scale and suddenness.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1616