CAMPAIGN AGAINST TORTURE.

Torture is violence deliberately inflicted upon another individual with the intention of making him suffer. Its basic psychological mechanism depends on the torturer's manipulation of the idea of the other's death; this manipulation is made possible by the fact that the torturer's power is absolute, that he controls both time and space for his victim. During the Algerian War of independence (1954–1962), torture was widely practiced by the French army in Algerian territory. It was also practiced by the police, both in France and in Algeria. It was considered by some an acceptable means in a struggle where the need for intelligence was regularly stressed, especially to combat terrorism. Others, however, disagreed; as evidence of the regular use of torture became public, a campaign against torture developed throughout France.

HOW THE CAMPAIGN BEGAN

Although French law prohibited the use of torture and characterized it as a crime, repressive institutions regularly resorted to violence of this type. It was perpetrated by agents of the state under the supervision of their direct superiors. Given the ambiguous status of torture as illegal but legitimated violence, it was logical that France officially denied its existence or at best attributed it to the exceptions and excesses of deviant soldiers or policemen. However, study of the punishments inflicted reveals beyond the shadow of a doubt that these men were acting on orders they had received, in spirit if not in letter.

Police use of torture was a recognized reality before the war began, as attested to by precedents in Indochina and Madagascar, but also in Algeria at the beginning of the 1950s. Thus, on 2 November 1954, the writer François Mauriac could write in his weekly column "Bloc-notes": "at all costs, police use of torture must be stopped" (L'express, 2 November 1954). News of the fate of militant Algerian nationalists during the first two months of the war reached metropolitan France, giving rise to articles in communist and progressive newspapers such as L'humanité and France-Observateur, and even the weekly magazine L'express.

As yet there was no actual campaign against torture, only individual acts of protest that soon faded from view. Not until the beginning of 1957 did a widespread protest movement emerge, in conjunction with the release of several statements from soldiers on the methods used in Algeria in 1956. Previously, little had been known about violence committed far from metropolitan France, in a territory where censorship was increasingly strict and where, in any case, the military was operating beyond the scrutiny of journalists or other outside observers. Only members of the military were in a position to shape public opinion about crimes committed by the army because only very rarely did the Algerians themselves have access to the media.

Conscripts were thus the source of the first widespread campaign to inform the French public about torture, in the spring of 1957. All of them waited until they had returned to France and left the army to make their experiences known. The first large-scale wave of returning troops took place at the end of 1956, and soldiers' testimonies began to appear in the press early the following year. The accounts varied in format: articles such as the one by Robert Bonnaud in Esprit, "La paix des Nementcha" (The peace of the Nementchas), in April 1957; brochures such as the posthumously published letters of Jean Müller, entitled "De la pacification àlarépression: Le dossier Jean Müller" (From pacification to repression: The Jean Müller file), published by Les Cahiers du Témoignage Chrétien; or in serial form, as in the case of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, who in his weekly, L'express, published his account of his experiences as a lieutenant in the reserves called up to serve in Algeria. Another important publication came out of more confidential channels close to the Catholic organization Mission de France: the brochure Des rappelés témoignent (Recalled reserve officers bear witness), which was published by the Committee for Spiritual Resistance and brought together testimonies from many anonymous soldiers. Such accounts were echoed by the book Contre la torture (Against torture), written in protest by the philosopher Pierre-Henri Simon. In it he categorically condemned the use of torture, explicitly referring to the very recent history of the torture of members of the French Resistance by the Nazis and French collaborators.

ETHICAL AND HISTORICAL ARGUMENTS

In France at that time, this reference was by no means rhetorical. It was present in the minds of servicemen charged with "maintaining order" in Algeria and in the stories of some of those who, appalled by what they had seen in Algeria, decided to make these facts known to the public. The reference to World War II thus took on a moral value: Nazism was absolute Evil, and any French action that might be comparable to it was an ethical scandal.

For others, speaking out in public had a more directly political meaning. They wrote or published with the aim of provoking a political reaction from the authorities or influencing public opinion. In this vein, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber asked the French people, By using unworthy methods, was France not simply "handing the enemy the idea of justice, that is, the victory?"

The beginning of 1957 was marked by revelations about the methods used in Algeria, based on soldiers' firsthand accounts, along with symbolic gestures on the part of internationally prominent figures, such as the resistance writer Vercors refusing to accept the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, or General Pâris de Bollardière asking to be relieved of his command in Algeria. Although these actions were not concerted, they produced echoes that might have given the impression of an organized campaign to influence public opinion. In fact, there was nothing of the sort. It was simply that the methods used by the French army to win the war and, in particular, to combat terrorism in Algiers since 1957 had by then become a major topic of discussion in French families and at the United Nations alike, and were therefore regularly mentioned in the press. In particular, Le monde and its editor, Hubert Beuve-Méry, whose high moral sense was incontestable, participated regularly in questioning the means used and the "demoralization" that might result within the army and within the nation.

It was impossible for a democratic, supposedly law-abiding government to be satisfied with this type of response. The accumulation of damning testimonies led the prime minister to appoint an investigative commission charged with establishing the truth about "the possible reality of the reported abuses." In fact, this commission to "safeguard individual rights and liberties" was charged as much with whitewashing the French army of the accusations made against it as with investigating practices unworthy of France. Initially, it was created above all as a way to gain time: as long as the commission was at work, the critics were relatively silent.

THE AUDIN AFFAIR

Meanwhile, repression and repressive methods continued. The French public was soon made aware of other cases showing that torture was still being practiced, especially in Algiers. The case of members of the clandestine Algerian Communist Party captured public attention. When a group of Christian progressives were arrested and tortured in the spring, Europeans too were affected. One of them disappeared at the hands of the paratroopers who had arrested him. News of the man's disappearance rapidly reached metropolitan France, and it was to become the symbol of the arbitrariness that reigned in Algeria. His name was Maurice Audin.

The public examination of Audin's thesis in mathematics was held in his absence in December 1957, and a committee of intellectuals was formed to discover the truth of his fate and, more generally, to disseminate information about torture. It was headed by the renowned mathematician Laurent Schwartz. Other Audin committees then formed throughout France and served as channels for information obtained by the activists. Among them, the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet collected all the official documents that would enable him to establish how widespread the practice of torture was and, further, to demonstrate that the official theory of Maurice Audin's escape was a lie to cover up his physical elimination. This patient deconstruction of the official discourse culminated in a book published by the Éditions de Minuit in May 1958: entitled L'affaire Audin (The Audin affair), its presentation was modeled on the Dreyfus affair. Pierre Vidal-Naquet's perspective was French: his aim was not to participate in the Algerian struggle for independence but rather to defend France's principles and values, which were being harmed by the actions of its own troops.

THE ALLEG AFFAIR

Other actors in the campaign against torture had different motivations. For the lawyer Jacques Vergès, the issue was first and foremost to support the Algerian National Liberation Front (NLF) in its struggle for independence. Vergès had found a sympathetic listener in the publisher Jérôme Lindon, and the Éditions de Minuit, born out of the resistance to Nazism, had decided to join the campaign against torture in connection with the case of a young Algerian woman arrested in the spring of 1957.Pour Djamila Bouhired (On behalf of Djamila Bouhired) was the first in a series of several works denouncing French methods in both Algeria and France. The best known of these was the testimony of Henri Alleg, one of Audin's companions and editor in chief of the Algerian Communist Party organ Alger Républicain. Arrested in June 1957, Alleg had been tortured by paratroopers and then imprisoned. His story was published by Jérôme Lindon under the title La question (The question). The fact that the book was published by a press that had no special connections to the Communist Party lent it particular credibility. The French Communist Party nonetheless mounted a public awareness campaign around Alleg's case, and it was not alone in the fight against torture.

Alleg's book immediately became an important vector of mobilization and knowledge. A few weeks after its publication it was banned, but before that it was read in public and distributed by booksellers and activist networks, and clandestine distribution continued after it was seized. The sociologist Edgar Morin was quick to liken its impact to that of war deportees' testimonies. In France-Observateur Morin wrote:

this book is the book of a hero—a hero because he fought, resisted, was subjected to torture, responded, denounced it, and finally, because he wrote this book.… Deportees' accounts hit the complacent full in the face after Nazism. The Question is hitting us full in the face during the Algerian war. Each of us must look The Question in the face and answer the question it asks. (20 February 1958)

That question besmirched a French government already weakened by the bombing of a Tunisian village on the Algerian border. The book, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, was very quickly translated into several languages. As the Algerian situation became an international concern, questioning of the methods used also became international in scope, and Sartre, together with three other French Nobel Prize winners (François Mauriac, André Malraux, and Roger Martin du Gard) sent a "solemn address" to the president of the republic in April 1958.

A POLITICAL SHIFT: FRESH HOPE?

The accession to power of General Charles de Gaulle led to André Malraux's joining the government. On 24 June 1958 Malraux publicly declared, in a press conference quoted in Le figaro the following day, "not a single act of torture has occurred, to my knowledge or yours, since General de Gaulle came to Algiers. Not a single one must occur from now on," and he invited the three other Nobel Prize winners to form an investigative commission in Algeria. This commission never actually came into being; de Gaulle decided instead to reactivate the commission to safeguard individual rights and liberties as the best way to obtain information about and follow up any complaints in this area.

In fact, public opinion at that point seemed willing to grant de Gaulle some time to sort out the tangled situation in Algeria. Testimonies denouncing the practice of torture decreased in number. The censors were also vigilant. To cite just one example, Pierre Leulliette's book Saint Michel et le dragon (Saint Michael and the dragon), published by the Éditions de Minuit, was seized. The author, a career paratrooper whose text began with a sentence by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "I do not like to see men wrecked," wrote several hundred pages of testimony about an army that had utterly failed to respect the humanity of its enemies, from the very first days of the war in the Aurès Mountains.

Still, accounts of the methods used in Algeria reached public awareness both in France and internationally. Among the activists, meanwhile, a sense that the gangrene was spreading began to outweigh hopes for improvement. Within the government, Minister of Justice Edmond Michelet had clearly reached the same conclusions, because in January 1960 a member of his cabinet arranged to leak to Le monde an inspection report by the International Committee of the Red Cross denouncing to French authorities the state of the detention camps for suspects and prisoners.

By this time, developments in French policy in Algeria allowed glimpses of Algerian independence. Antitorture activists began to work both on denouncing acts of violence and on fighting to ensure that such acts, present or future, would not go unpunished. They focused on taking note of official declarations and forcing the French state to adopt a coherent stance.

THE BOUPACHA AFFAIR

The legal arena was the final ground for the campaign, and the last years of the war were dominated by the face of a woman who became the symbol of this form of violence: Djamila Boupacha. This young woman had been arrested in Algiers in 1960, suspected of having planted a bomb. She was tortured and raped. The tactic of Gisèle Halimi, the lawyer for the Algerian militant, was not to focus on general arguments but rather to consistently refer to this particular and concrete case. She thus raised the question of torture as a whole but prevented the authorities from hiding behind general answers: this was a specific case, and specific answers were expected. In the same way that Audin committees had formed, Boupacha committees were organized throughout France and functioned as channels for activist publications and information about the Boupacha case.

Popularized by a portrait by Picasso and supported by Simone de Beauvoir, Boupacha's case was continually pushed into the spotlight by Halimi, who organized press conferences and used the media and public opinion to exert pressure on political and military authorities so that her client's torturers might be brought to justice. These efforts were in vain for Djamila Boupacha, but not for the issue of torture, which from then on figured regularly on the French and international scene, a veritable thorn in de Gaulle's side.

These public awareness campaigns against torture achieved very limited results overall. They cannot be credited with decreasing the practice of torture. Their existence, however, was a problem for the army, which regularly had to respond to them. In the short term, their real consequences may have been both positive and negative for the victims, protecting them from disappearing but exposing them to reprisal. However, these campaigns did help to discredit France within the international community, and they thus played a role in resolving the conflict.

In France there was generally heightened sensitivity around the issues of torture and the war as a whole, but the military resisted any change. In January 1962 three officers who acknowledged having tortured a young Algerian woman to death were acquitted by the military tribunal in Paris. Faced with this independence of military justice from the laws of the state, political authorities filed an appeal in the Court of Appeals, determined to show that the values that had dominated the war could no longer obtain in peacetime. A petition was organized in which a number of prominent figures expressed their indignation:

while we take glory in our civilization and our legal traditions … and at a time when we are still gripped by the memory of Nazi barbarism, how can we not feel to the highest degree the shame that such a crime could be followed by an acquittal, how can we not feel distressed at the deepest level of our being?

The arguments were the same as at the beginning of the war, except that, within a few weeks of the cease-fire, the focus had shifted from the fight against torture to the struggle against absolving and forgetting it. The amnesty that came with the Evian agreement in March 1962 ending the war in Algeria clearly showed how critical this new focus was.

See alsoAlgeria; Algerian War.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berchadsky, Alexis. La question d'Henri Alleg: Un livreévénement dans la France en guerre d'Algérie. Paris, 1994.

Branche, Raphaëlle. La torture et l'armée pendant la guerre d'Algérie, 1954–1962. Paris, 2001.

Evans, Martin. Memory of Resistance: The French Opposition to the Algerian War. Oxford, U.K., and New York, 1997.

Le Sueur, James D. Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria. Philadelphia, 2001.

Simonin, Anne. "La littérature saisie par l'histoire: Nouveau roman et guerre d'Algérie aux Editions de Minuit." Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 111–112 (1996): 59–75.

Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. La raison d'état. Paris, 1962.

——. Torture: Cancer of Democracy, France, and Algeria, 1954–62. Translated by Barry Richard. Baltimore, Md., 1963.

——. Les crimes de l'armée française. Paris, 1975.

——. Face à la raison d'état. Paris, 1989.

——. L'Affaire Audin. Rev ed. Paris, 1989.

RaphaËlle Branche