Half a century after the start of Algeria's war of independence, ties between Paris and Algiers have improved to the point of planning a friendship treaty next year.
Presidents Jacques Chirac of the former colonial power and Abdelaziz Bouteflika of the oil-rich north African country have in recent years paid much attention to trying to cast the relationship in a new mould.
"Old wounds have healed" and relations have "moved into a new era of a different quality because of the commendable efforts made by one side and the other", Bouteflika said in August when he and Chirac took part in commemorations of the World War II allied landing in southern France.
The two leaders in March 2003 signed an "Algiers Declaration" to strengthen bilateral co-operation. Last April, they decided to head on towards a friendship treaty like one which was signed in 1963 as the basis of a special relationship between France and Germany.
The past few months have seen a succession of visits by French officials to Algiers to lay the groundwork, including Minister of the Economy and Finance Nicolas Sarkozy who saw his Algerian counterpart Abdelatif Benachenhou in July.
They signed a Growth and Development Partnership Accord, which will release almost two billion euros of French money to Algeria by 2007, enabling the country to reduce its foreign debt.
The deal also eased the way for French investment in Algeria, offering the option of converting Algerian debts to France and boosting co-operation in strategic sectors including transport, water and power supplies and the construction industry.
Trade between the two countries reached the level of 6.7 billion euros (8.5 billion dollars) in 2003. France is Algeria's principal partner for supplies and in return is its third-largest market for natural gas and fifth largest importer of petroleum products.
Algiers and Paris also paved the way for a bilateral defence agreement when Michele Alliot-Marie in July made the first visit to Algeria by a French defence minister since the end of the independence war in 1962.
This partnership is expected to lead to joint naval exercises, arms deals and officer training programmes.
French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin has announced that the two countries want to set up "joint poles of co-operation" to combat terrorism, organised crime and clandestine immigration.
The new relationship is also to be made concrete by the reopening of French cultural centres at Constantine on Algeria's north-eastern Mediterranean coast and in Tlemcen in the west.
Both were closed in 1995 when an Air France passenger Airbus was hijacked in Algiers in December 1994, during the second year of a serious Islamic fundamentalist insurgency in the country.
Plans are in hand to reopen the French consulate in another major north-western city, Oran, closed in 1994, as well as to boost consular services in the eastern city of Annaba and in Algiers in order to speed up the handling of visa applications. Algiers considers that the current number of visas for people wishing to visit France is meagre.
The improvement in ties is manifest in the willingness of "pieds noirs", the name given to French people who lived in what was once regarded as an overseas administrative department of mainland France, to speed up a "first wave" of returns to the land of their birth.
French in September became the compulsory second language taught to primary school pupils.
Some outstanding issues remain to be solved by one side or the other to turn the page on past conflicts now much written about as details of atrocities emerge.
One key issue concerns the harkis, who were Algerians who served with the French army during the independence war of 1954-1962. They hope for recognition and a gesture from Bouteflika, who some years back outraged their movement, the National Union of Harkis, by dubbing them collaborators.
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