Le Pavois was the product of a 1920 design competition, won by architects Maurice Gras and Edouard Monestes and sculptors Paul Landowski and Charles Bigonet. The name refers to the ancient practice of carrying a victorious leader aloft on a shield, and the sculpture depicted exactly that -- a fallen combatant borne on a shield by three riders: a winged figure evoking Marianne, a French infantry soldier, and an Algerian cavalryman. Behind them stood two women and two old men, figures meant to symbolize the bonds between the diverse communities of French Algeria. Inaugurated on November 11, 1928, the anniversary of the Great War armistice, it was a monument to shared sacrifice in the Great War, to the idea that French and Algerian blood had mingled in the same cause. That idea, of course, would not survive the century.

When Algeria prepared to host the 1978 All-Africa Games, the question of what to do with Le Pavois became urgent. Many colonial monuments across the newly independent nation had been torn down. Issiakhem chose a different path. Rather than demolish a work that also honored Algerian fighters, he designed a concrete shell that would encase the entire sculpture, transforming the site into the Memorial to the Liberation of Algeria. The gesture was deliberate and layered: the colonial monument would persist physically, its French symbolism hidden from public view but its material reality preserved. It was an act of reinterpretation rather than destruction, a way of acknowledging that history cannot simply be demolished, even when its symbols become intolerable.

The result is one of the more unusual memorials in North Africa. From the outside, visitors see only Issiakhem's stark brutalist form, a monument to Algerian liberation that carries no visible trace of the colonial past it contains. But the French sculpture remains structurally present, a kind of architectural palimpsest where one narrative has been written over another without erasing it. The memorial stands near the Government Palace in central Algiers, on one of the capital's main boulevards, where it continues to provoke reflection about memory, colonialism, and the choices nations make about the symbols they inherit.

Issiakhem, one of Algeria's most celebrated visual artists, was no stranger to the weight of colonial history. His decision to preserve Le Pavois rather than destroy it reflected a sophisticated understanding that monuments carry meaning beyond their creators' intentions. The original sculpture, whatever its colonial framing, depicted an Algerian spahi alongside French soldiers -- a recognition of Algerian sacrifice that many post-independence authorities might have wanted to forget as much as the French symbolism they rejected. By sealing the sculpture in concrete, Issiakhem created a memorial that honors Algerian liberation while acknowledging the tangled history that preceded it. The winged Victory still rides inside her concrete tomb, visible to no one, forgotten by most, but still there.