We would be walking at four in the morning by patriotic songs.

Her cell was just above the courtyard where the executions took place.

And when we heard these early morning songs, these hints to liberty and life,

we knew that our brothers were about to be executed in the most barbarous manner.

Zora Driff was 20 when she planted a bomb in the centre of Algiers.

She paid for it with four years behind bars and only just escaped the guillotine herself.

Everyone frowned to a country of human rights, liberty and all that,

killed, assassinated between nine and twelve freedom fighters like this.

That is the France that confronted us.

It's 60 years since the end of the Algerian War of Independence.

And this became France goes to the polls in the first stage of electing a president.

I'm Edward Sturton and I'm exploring how the Algerian War still casts a shadow over the president.

For the BBC World Service, this is the shadow of Algiers.

I've been both fascinated and haunted by this chapter of French history since I was a correspondent in Paris in the 1980s.

After all these decades, many of the passions that war inspired are as raw as ever.

Its legacy still divides, still spills over into demonstrations and sometimes violence.

It's the ever-present background to French debates about race and religion,

to terrible events like the Bataclan massacre and the Charley Ebedo killings,

and very much to the current presidential election.

I think that the legacy of the Algerian War did fundamentally poison and influence French politics for generations and still does in very complicated ways.

And as far as Algerian politics are concerned...

It's the only history of Algeria we know.

...