Today, Algeria’s décideurs — the men who actually make decisions, as opposed to the politicians who bicker in its pluralist but impotent National Assembly — have two claims to legitimacy. The first is that they liberated Algeria from French rule. The second is that they defeated a wave of Islamist terrorism in the 1990s. In Daoud’s view, neither achievement is enough. Algeria will be truly free only when it has been “liberated from its liberators.” It is not simply a matter of overthrowing the government, which he believes was the great illusion of the Arab Spring. Society, too, needs to change if Algeria is to release itself from the fetters of authoritarianism and Islamic piety.

Daoud’s writing has attracted many well-placed readers. He regularly receives calls from members of the pouvoir. Manuel Valls, the prime minister of France, recently called to say how much he admired “Meursault.” “Men in power are fascinated by people like me,” he said. “I don’t have a state or an army, I’m just a guy with an apartment and a car. But I’m free, and they want to know, Why are you free?”

On Jan. 16, the day I arrived in Algeria, thousands of protesters, including Hamadache, marched toward the Place de la Poste in downtown Algiers after Friday prayers, in defiance of a ban on demonstrations in the capital. The Rally in Defense of the Prophet Muhammad had been called in protest against the Muhammad cartoon that ran on the cover of Charlie Hebdo after the massacre in Paris. Aïssa, the minister of religious affairs, opposed the demonstrations, but the anger over the cartoons was raw and easily fanned by Salafist preachers. “Je suis Muhammad” was a common slogan: a curious phrase with which to denounce blasphemy, because it is considered by some Muslims to be blasphemous to declare yourself the Prophet. (The slogan was promoted by the Arabic tabloid Echorouk, a platform for tirades against Daoud; it was later amended to “Je suis avec Muhammad” — I am with Muhammad.) Young men waved the black flag of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and declared the Paris killers to be martyrs. Like many demonstrations in Algeria, it devolved into a riot, with shop windows smashed in the name of the Prophet. Hamadache was arrested in Belcourt, where Camus was raised, and briefly detained for his role in the rally.

The protests in Oran, where anti-Islamist sentiment runs high, were much smaller than in Algiers, but still boisterous enough to hold up traffic. I was heading to my hotel from the airport with Robert Parks, an American academic who is a close friend of Daoud’s. Parks, who has run a research center in Oran since 2006, had been telling me that Algeria was slowly but surely recovering its confidence. Algerians, he said, were grateful to have avoided the tumult of the Arab revolts, thanks to which they had been able to make a more sober, judicious and favorable appraisal of their own conditions. But when a group of young demonstrators marched toward us, he swerved into a back road: he was worried that we would be mistaken for Frenchmen.

The boldness with which Islamists took to the streets was a reminder of the deal that Bouteflika had cut with them shortly after coming to power in 1999. His “reconciliation project” offered amnesty to those who fought in the civil war of 1992-2002, provided they laid down their arms. The pouvoir never negotiated with the political wing of the F.I.S., preferring to settle matters with armed rebels behind closed doors. Security forces who were responsible for extrajudicial killings and disappearances were never charged. Islamist fighters made out even better. They came down from the maquis, the resistance in the mountains, and returned to the mosque. Many were reportedly given jobs and property. The paradox of the recent civil war is that while the Islamists failed to overthrow the state, Bouteflika’s reconciliation project allowed them to increase their presence within it. Islamists are now, in effect, a wing of the pouvoir, which has not merely tolerated them but has allowed them to participate in the National Assembly. And their presence has the added attraction, to Algeria’s generals, the most influential décideurs, of warning other Algerians — and the country’s allies in Washington and Paris — about what might lie in store if the army and the intelligence services loosen their grip.

There’s no doubt that Algeria has made strides since the Black Decade. Although Bouteflika has hardly appeared in public since his stroke in 2013, he remains relatively popular, if only for lack of an alternative, and is widely credited with rebuilding Algeria after the civil war. When I reported from Algeria in 2003, a year after the war officially ended, it was a jittery, traumatized place, and people were still afraid of car bombs and fake checkpoints set up by rebels. Although radical jihadists are still active in the east and the south, today the country is largely safe, not only in the cities but on the roads connecting them. The new East-West highway, built with Chinese labor, has cut in half the drive from Algiers to Oran, once a 10-hour journey. The economy remains heavily dependent on natural gas and oil (more than 90 percent of its exports), but it has nearly $200 billion in foreign-currency reserves. Algeria has earned the admiration of Western powers, above all the United States, for its role in regional counterterrorism, for the expertise and efficiency of the intelligence services and for its resourceful diplomatic efforts in Tunisia, Libya and Mali. In the words of its energetic foreign minister, Ramtane Lamamra, Algeria is “an exporter of security and stability.”