In 1826 the ruling bey, Hadji Ahmed, led a revolt against the dey of Algiers and proclaimed the independence of Constantine, but when the French invaded the country ten years later he made common cause with his former suzerain against the unbeliever. Upon the fall of Algiers Hadji Ahmed fled to Constantine, raised an army of Kabyles, and defied the French to dislodge him from his precipice-bordered stronghold. In 1836 Marshal Clausel advanced on the city with an army of eight thousand men. He attempted to storm it under cover of night by way of the old Roman bridge at El Kantara but was repulsed with great loss and fell back with his beaten army to Bône. But in the following year a stronger force under General Damrémont approached the town by the connecting western isthmus. To the French summons to surrender Hadji Ahmed sent the curt response, “He who would be master of Constantine must cut the throat of the last of its defenders.” During the course of the siege which followed, General Damrémont and his second in command General Perrégaux, were killed side by side while directing the operations from an exposed position, whereupon the command was assumed by Marshal Valée, who, in spite of enormous losses, carried the town by storm. In their efforts to evade capture, hundreds of Kabyles sought to lower themselves down the cliffs by ropes, but the ropes broke and the fugitives met their deaths on the rocks a thousand feet below. Hadji Ahmed evaded capture, however, and for eleven years defied the French from his stronghold in the Aurés Mountains, but he accepted the rule of France in 1848 and passed to the Moslem paradise two years later. With the unfurling of the tricolor on the heights of Constantine the turbulence and bloodshed which had marked the city’s history all down the ages came to an end. Numidians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Berbers, Turks, all tried to hold it and failed. But French for three quarters of a century it has been, and French it promises to remain. * * * * *