Historians still find the “fraternisation” phenomenon of 16 May hard to explain. The official line of the F.L.N., as well as that of French sceptics, is that the whole demonstration was phoney, rigged by the psychological warfare experts of the French Cinquième Bureau; that the women who had so joyfully cast away their haiks were simply tarts rounded up for the occasion. But this at best can only be a half-truth. It is true that on the previous day para teams organised by Godard, Trinquier and Léger, who had all become intimately acquainted with the Casbah during the Battle of Algiers, had been hard at work coaxing the Muslims to turn out and stirring them up with heady assurances of equality and integration. But, unaccountably, success snowballed beyond all their expectations; instead of a hoped-for 5,000, it was a crowd of something like 30,000 Muslims that reached the Forum that evening. Stern critics of Algérie française like Le Monde and François Mauriac agreed on the genuineness of the demonstration, acclaiming it as a basis for new optimism. What thoughts and hopes lay behind those deeply etched, inscrutable Muslim faces on the Forum that day is difficult to divine, except perhaps a mystical, irrational belief that somehow the magical figure of de Gaulle was going to solve everything.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 889