The death of right-wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen on Tuesday has brought dark memories to the surface for many in Algeria, where he was accused of using torture during the war of independence. He also raised heckles with his rejection of migrants, his position on Islam and on France's colonial role in the north African country.
Jean-Marie Le Pen's involvement with Algeria began in the mid-1950s.
Freshly elected to parliament, he left France at the age of 27 to fight as a paratrooper against the country's struggle for independence from France.
"I felt that it was my duty to go there with the contingent since, deep down, I agreed to preserve this part of France," he said of this period.
There, he was accused of torture. While he would later deny these accusations he did not deny that this type of practice took place.
"If it is necessary to torture one man to save a hundred, torture is inevitable, and therefore, in the abnormal conditions in which we are asked to act, it is just," Le Pen was quoted as saying in Le Monde, in 1957.
RFI correspondent Fayçal Metaoui cites the eyewitness accounts of Mohamed and Dahmane, two Algerian veterans, who testified against Le Pen in a documentary broadcast in 2017.
"They removed the mattress, tied me and my father to the box spring... and then they started the electricity. And it was Jean-Marie Le Pen who flipped the switch. It was Jean-Marie Le Pen! He was the leader of the torturers at Fort l'Empereur!", the men said.
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Painful memories
Farida, a pharmacist, also evokes Le Pen's presence in Algeria's war years. "Jean-Marie Le Pen was a person reviled and hated by Algerians because of his dark past. During the French occupation, he practiced torture against Algerians in a horrific manner," she says. "He tried not to admit to his crimes, but testimonies and evidence exist that confirm his actions."
Kamel, a teacher, accuses the founder of the National Front of promoting racism. "These heinous practices during the national liberation war are remembered by today's generations and it does not stop there. Since then, Le Pen has greatly contributed to building an opinion hostile to migrants in France and to spreading hatred against foreigners in this country."
Le Pen's time in Algeria would be key to the rest of his political career. It was with supporters of French Algeria and former collaborators with the German Nazis that he created the National Front in 1972.
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For French historian Benjamin Stora, "Le Pen is fundamentally a man of the Fourth Republic, and this is the moment when the colonial empire falters."
Arriving too late for the Indochina War, Le Pen intended to make up for it in Algeria, Stora explains in an interview on FranceInfo on Tuesday.
"The whole political memory [of Jean-Marie Le Pen] is that of nostalgia, of a great France of the empire, which according to him would have been betrayed and abandoned by the various French political leaders".
Anti-immigration
Le Pen's party's obsession was immigration, particularly from Algeria - a subject he brought to the fore in French political debate from the 1980s onwards.
Le Pen earned numerous condemnations for his racist and discriminatroy comments over the years.
In 2005, for example, he was sentenced on appeal to a €10,000 fine for inciting racial hatred after comments in an interview with the newspaper Le Monde on 19 April, 2003.
"The day we have in France, no longer 5 million but 25 million Muslims, they will be in charge. And the French will creep along beside the walls, get off the sidewalks and lower their eyes," he said in the interview.
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He was ordered to pay €10,000 in damages to the Union of Jewish Students of France for comments he made in 1996: "I believe in racial inequality. Yes, of course, it's obvious. All history demonstrates this. They do not have the same capacity nor the same level of historical evolution," he declared.
Elsewhere in Africa, Le Pen had mixed reviews and found himself at odds with most leaders.
He never hid his admiration for South Africa's system of aparteid and was accused of receiving money from Gabon's president Omar Bongo in 1987, a charge he denied.
In the end, it was only with Jean-Bedel Bokassa that Jean-Marie Le Pen maintained a semblance of a relationship. He met the deposed Central African leader in France in the early 1980s. The two men shared a common past, that of fighting in the Indochina war within the French army.
