With the exception of the 17-19 October 1961 Bataille de Paris, the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV) was the primary destination for FMA—Français Musulman d’Algérie or Muslim French of Algerian origin—picked up during nocturnal police raids in Paris and its inner suburb between early 1959 and the Evian Accords (18 March 1962). These raids and the 17-19 October demonstrations and massacre have been vividly chronicled by Jean-Luc Einaudi, Linda Amiri, and Emmanuel Blanchard amongst others. They recounted the massive numbers of men photographed and fingerprinted, detained beyond legal limits and tortured at the CIV. The archives of the CIMADE document their members’ social work conducted on behalf of the detained men. Activist Monique Hervo detailed the black eyes and broken bones of the men who returned home to Nanterre after CIV internment. Historians, activists and journalists recorded and drew relations between police policies, political protest, and individual lives impacted by the struggle for independence and its repression through detention in the CIV. 

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To learn more about how forensic architectural practices were employed to locate and visualize the CIV and the next steps, conceptualizing site-specific ways to build and share knowledge about the CIV, please see "Forensics and Fora: Reconstruct ting and Remembering the CIV," published in the proceedings of the 110th ACSA annual conference.​