Torture During The Algerian War - in Metropolitan France

In Metropolitan France

The war also affected metropolitan France. Little firm evidence exists about the use of torture by either side, but there are instances where French police or police auxiliaries may have engaged in torture as well as murder of FLN agents or protesters, and likewise the FLN may have used torture in eliminating opponents and in collecting funds among Algerian expatriates in France.

After being involved in early repression in Constantine, Algeria as prefect, Maurice Papon was named head of the Parisian police on 14 March 1958. Tensions increased after 25 August 1958, when an FLN guerilla offensive in Paris killed three policemen on boulevard de l'Hôpital in the XIIIe arrondissement and another in front of the cartoucherie de Vincennes, leading to arrestations and internments of Algerians suspected of supporting the FLN. In 1960 Papon created the Auxiliary Police Force (FPA - Force de police auxiliaire), which was made up of 600 Algerians by autumn 1960 and operated in areas densely populated by Algerians in Paris and its suburbs. While incompletely evidenced, the strongest presumption of torture by the FPA pertains to two locations in the XIIIe arrondissement. Further escalation occurred from August to October 1961, as the FLN resumed bombings against the French police and killed 11 policemen and injured 17 (in Paris and its suburbs). This culminated on 17 October 1961, when the French police repressed a demonstration of 30,000 Algerians who were ostensibly protesting against a de facto curfew imposed on them by the prefecture of police, though the FLN had planned the demonstration as potential provocation as well. While estimates differ, the number of dead officially acknowledged (in French government reports and statements of 1998) is 40 to 48. Some protesters may have been tortured before being killed and their bodies being thrown in the Seine.

From 1954 onward, the FLN sought to establish a politico-military organization among the 300,000 Algerians residing in France; by 1958, it had overwhelmed Messali Hadj's Algerian National Movement, despite the latter's popularity with Algerian expatriates at the onset of the war. Torture was occasionally used alongside beatings and killings to eliminate opponents of the FLN, and the death toll of this internecine violence within France alone was approximately 4,000. Subsequently, the FLN used this organization to obtain a "revolutionary tax" that FLN leader Ali Haroun estimates amounted to "80% of the resources of the rebellion"; this was partly done through extortion, in some instances by means of beatings and torture.

An important issue within metropolitan France was public opinion, given that a substantial native population held a formally anticolonialist ideology (Communists, in particular) or was debating the war. The parties fought on this front too. The Prefecture of Police denied using torture or undue violence. Conversely, informers reported an organized campaign to implicate the FPA such that FLN "leaders and carefully chosen militants from the workers' residence in Vitry - 45, rue Rondenay - have been tasked with declaring in cafés and public places that they have suffered exactions, have been robbed of a pocketbook, a watch and were victims of violence by the 'Algerian police'." A note diffused by the French arm of the FLN to its branches in September 1959 specifically focused on making claims of torture to influence the legal system:

For those of our brothers who will be arrested, it is important to specify what attitude they must adopt. Regardless of the way that the Algerian patriot is treated by police, he must in all circumstances, when presented to the prosecutor state that he has been beaten and tortured... He must never hesitate to accuse the police of torture and beatings. This greatly influences the judge and courts.