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.

QUESTION: The counterfactual — would the Ben Kheddas have joined the rebellion if released — remains open; the author's certainty about prison's recruiting effect contrasts with this genuine uncertainty.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 350