Persuasively he pointed out to Monteil how the French ratissages operations were "our best recruiting agent", and after this extraordinary first meeting between a F.L.N. leader and a French official, Monteil left with the firm impression of "a man of faith, and of good faith, pushed to the limits by a lively sentiment of the injustice that has hit his people". … Would the detainees still have gone over to the rebels if they had been released when Monteil interviewed them at the beginning of March? Or if they had never been arrested in the first place? One may speculate, but all one can be sure of is that here Soustelle got the worst of both worlds: the Ben Kheddas were lost to the rebellion; the mistrust of the pieds noirs for French policy was exacerbated. Prison — as was to be relearnt by the French repeatedly in the course of the Algerian war, by the British in Northern Ireland and by every other mid-twentieth-century regime faced with a similar insurrectionary problem — is a marvellous recruiting and training centre.

XREF: Parallels failures of French in Algeria, British in Northern Ireland, and other mid-century counterinsurgency regimes — a recurring historical pattern.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 349