In an interview with the author in October 1973, President Bourguiba of Tunisia persisted in the belief that “more than 50,000” had been killed after Sétif. Maître Teitgen, the liberal secretary-general of the Algiers prefecture in 1956–7, told the author that he reckoned the Muslim dead at “probably 15,000”. The discrepancy in the figures may (according to Robert Aron) be partly accounted for by the fact that many of the inhabitants of suspect mechtas “disappeared” into the hills in advance of the army ratissages, and were thus subsequently accounted for among the presumed dead.

QUESTION: The 50,000 vs 15,000 discrepancy raises the question of whether official counts were systematically inflated post hoc.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 124