The village of Lodi, some 100 kilometres south west of Algiers, near Medea, bears the prestigious name of the Italian bridge that allowed Napoleon’s troops to enter Milan victorious.
It also incarnates a dark episode in history.
It was here, during the Algerian War of Independence, that hundreds of “pieds-noirs” (French nationals living in Algeria) who sympathised with the fight for independence, were summarily imprisoned. For years they squatted in dilapidated ramshackle buildings surrounded by barbed wire, inspected day and night by an army of military police, tucked away from prying eyes and populated areas. Having never been tried or found guilty. On nothing more than an order from the local administrator, the latter day equivalent of a “lettre de cachet” through the dark years of the Algerian conflict.
Among the dozen or so “accommodation centres”, that appeared after the insurrection on 1st November 1954, Lodi is a special case. It is the French camp, the camp for the pieds-noirs. People from all walks of life met here: doctors, architects, train drivers, gasmen, electricians, resistance workers from the Second World War, former prisoners of Dachau… but also Albert Smadja, lawyer to Fernand Iveton, the only Frenchman in this conflict to be sent to the guillotine for trying to set off a bomb; Georges Hadjadj, the last cellmate of the maths professor Maurice Audin who “disappeared” after his final session of electric shock torture; and Henri Alleg, the author of La Question, who arrived in the summer of 1957, after many days of torture at the hands of paratroopers. And many, many more.