Allied armies remained in the country, however, though by now the principal perceived risk came from the fraternal forces across the new "Iron Curtain", occupying what had been identified till October 1949 as the Soviet occupation zone.
Morain undertook his military service between April 1950 and October 1951 with an Engineering Regiment based in Trier, close to the West German frontier with Luxembourg.
He also volunteered intermittently as an adult mentor at the "Cité de l'Esperance" (loosely "City of hopefulness"), a refuge for "difficult or delinquent young people" at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.
[1] He found no sign of an active trades union presence, and although most of his co-workers were Algerian, he spent much of the time assigned to small construction sites where large scale political organisation was impossible.
He was armed with a list of subscribers in the area for "Le Libertaire", the anarchist newspaper, but when he made contact with the publication's readers in and around Roubaix and Lille he was disappointed to find that they "were not militants".
He was also the writer of several major articles appearing in "Libertaire", dealing with the working conditions of Algerian workers employed by the textile factories and other industrial enterprises in Roubaix.
[2] On 1 May 1955 Morain participated in the violent confrontations which took place in Lille between police and demonstrators carrying banners proclaiming the "Free Algeria" message.
[2] A couple of weeks later he was apprehended by customs officials after he had been spotted on the bus connecting Roubaix and Tourcoing, distributing leaflets on behalf of the "Anticolinialist Liberation movement" ("Mouvement de Libération Anticolonialiste " / MLA).
Commentators stress that it was not his involvement in the violent street demonstration of 1 May 1955 that concerned the authorities at this stage, but his authorship of an article that had appeared in the 5 May edition of an anarchist magazine under the eye-catching title, "In the north the Algerians have shown French workers the way ahead" ("Dans le Nord, les Algériens ont montré l’exemple aux travailleurs français.").
The president of the court, considering his involvement alongside a number of Algerian liberation activists in the 1 May Lille street protest, asked for confirmation that Morain himself was nevertheless French.
One of France's most high profile intellectuals, Albert Camus, put his name to a powerful message of support published in L'Express on 15 November 1955: "Sticking with the commonplace, I note that a young militant, Pierre Morain, has been placed behind bars because he has demonstrated a contrarian spirit over the matter of Algerian policy.
")[7] Albert Camus was in some ways himself conflicted over the Algeria crisis, but he was steadfast in his opposition to unjust punishment of those who struggled for Algerian independence, and he would continue to back Pierre Morain's activism the rest of his life.
[3] Even after his release in March 1956, Pierre Morain was still facing a charge of "undermining the external security of the state", on account of an anti-colonialist article that had appeared in "Le Libertaire" before his imprisonment.
In January 1957 he was part of an FCL team that launched an attack involving plastic explosives[1] against a Poujadiste cell along the Rue Blomet in the 15th arrondissement of Paris.
[1] At the end of 1959, as a new French government cautiously began the shift towards acceptance of Algerian independence and fighting in Algeria increasingly acquired the character of a civil war, Pierre Morain rejoined the Communist Party.
[1] In the aftermath of May 1968 Georges Fontenis re-established contact and together they tried to relaunch the network of former comrades from their FCL days and launching an appeal to members of the Union des groupes anarchistes communistes (UGAC), another organisation which seems by this time to have been effectively defunct.
Pierre and Suzanne Morain visited the Larzac plateau in 1976 in order to join in the demonstrations and other actions against government plans (subsequently abandoned) massively to extend a military base there (from 30 to 170 square kilometers) which reportedly would have necessitated the expropriation of 107 farms and 12 villages.
The scale of the government plans meant that by now there was a large community of left-wing activists based in the area in order to oppose the development.
The Moarains found themselves accepted and integrated into the local community and decided to relocated permanently to the Larzac, moving into an abandoned farmstead inside the proposed confines of the new "forbidden zone".
[1][3] They continued to involve themselves in left wing causes nationally and internationally, notably in support of oppressed members of Kanak, Nicaraguan and Palestinian communities.
In 1999 they joined José Bové in the widely reported "taking down" of a new McDonald's outlet at Millau as a protest against the mercantilist trade policies of the United States government.