EUROPE'S loss of empire can be read in the signposts of the cities of the Third World. The main thoroughfare of Algiers, the rue Michelet under the French, is today called the rue Didouche Mourad. And Colonel Amirouche, Ben Mahdi Larbi, and Abd El Kader have supplanted Victor Hugo, Sadi Carnot, and Richelieu. Yet in the heart of Algiers, adjacent to the University and at the intersection of streets bearing the Arab-sounding names of heroes of the Algerian Revolution, is to be found the place Maurice Audin, a name unmistakably French. A vestige of Algérie Française, an inexplicable oversight in the politics of municipal symbolism? The 1974 edition of the scholarly guide bleu to Algeria (the first to be published since the outbreak in 1954 of the war for independence) notes the central location of the place, but without explaining why it is named after a Frenchman, and an obscure one at that. Who was Maurice Audin?

Late in the evening of June 11, 1957, in the course of the so-called "Battle of Algiers," French paratroops arrested a young university mathematics instructor named Maurice Audin. He was taken from his apartment to a villa in the fashionable neighborhood of El Biar and questioned about his relationship with two members of the Algerian Communist Party whom the Army suspected of terrorist activity. When after several days he failed to return home, family and friends made inquiries about him. Military authorities reported that on June 21, 1957 he had escaped their custody. Maurice Audin vanished, never to be seen again.