Overview
The armed struggle of the FLN and of its armed wing, the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) was for self-determination. The French state itself refused to see in the colonial conflict a war, as that would recognize the other party (the National Liberation Front, FLN) as a legitimate entity. Thus, until 10 August 1999, the French Republic persisted in calling the Algerian War a simple "operation of public order" against the FLN "terrorism." This was therefore a 'classic' colonial war of liberation and it is on these different viewpoints (police action vs. war) that much of the argument about these events tends to focus.
Thus, the military did not consider themselves tied by the Geneva Conventions, ratified by France in 1951. Beside prohibiting the use of torture, the Geneva Conventions give the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to the detainees. Detainees, who included not only FLN members but also old men, women and children, were thus not granted prisoner of war (POW) status. On the contrary, they were considered as "terrorists" and deprived of the rights which are legally entitled to belligerents during a war, including cases of civil wars under Geneva Convention Protocol II.
Violence increased on both sides from 1954 to 1956. But in 1957 the Minister of Interior declared a state of emergency in Algeria, and the government granted extraordinary powers to General Massu, head of the armed forces in Algeria. The Battle of Algiers, from January to October 1957, remains to this day a textbook example of counter-insurgency operations. General Massu, who was assisted by General Aussaresses and then Colonel Bigeard, of the 10th D.B. (Paratrooper division) made widespread use of methods used during the Indochina War (1947–54): they included a systematic use of torture, including against civilians, a block warden system (quadrillage), illegal executions and forced disappearances, in particular through what would later become known as "death flights" (at the time, victims of such methods were known as "Bigeard's shrimps", or "crevettes Bigeard"). All these methods were documented as standard counter-insurgency tactics by Colonel Trinquier in Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (1961), a reference in the areas of "counter-revolutionary war" and of psychological warfare.
Although the use of torture quickly became well-known and was opposed by the left-wing opposition, the French state repeatedly denied its employment, censoring more than 250 books, newspapers and films (in metropolitan France alone) which dealt with the subject (and 586 in Algeria). Henri Alleg's 1958 book, La Question, Boris Vian's The Deserter, and Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film Le Petit Soldat (released in 1963) are famous examples of such censorship. A confidential report of the ICRC leaked to Le Monde newspaper confirmed the allegations of torture made by the opposition to the war, represented in particular by the French Communist Party (PCF) and other anti-militarist circles. Although many left-wing activists, including famous existentialists writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, denounced without exception the use of torture, the French government was itself headed in 1957 by the general secretary of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO), Guy Mollet. In general, the SFIO supported the colonial wars during the Fourth Republic (1947–54), starting with the crushing of the Madagascar revolt in 1947 by the socialist government of Paul Ramadier.
The controversy over the use of torture continues to have echoes today. Already in 1977, British historian Alistair Horne wrote in A Savage War of Peace that torture was to become a growing canker for France, leaving behind a poison that would linger in the French system long after the war itself had ended. At the time, Horne could not confirm or deny that torture had been ordered by the highest ranks of the military and civilian hierarchy of the French state. Despite France's difficulties in looking at its past, which is made evident by the obstacles it continues to put before the historical research, and the way the Algerian War is taught (or not) in French high-schools, the fact that torture had not only been massively employed, but also ordered by the French government, was confirmed by General Aussaresses in 2001.
These revelations followed testimony from a former tortured ALN activist, Louisette Ighilahriz, published in Le Monde on 20 July 2000, three days after the visit to France of Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Louisette Ighilahriz declared that she had been tortured for three months and accused as the responsible party General Massu as the then-commander of the French armed forces. Massu used this opportunity to publicly regret the use of torture, declaring that it could have been avoided. On the other hand, General Bigeard violently denied its use.
General Massu, Aussaresses, and then Colonel Bigeard were the military commanders during the 1957 Battle of Algiers. The following year, General Aussaresses confessed in his book "Services spéciaux, Algérie 1955–1957" (2001) to having engaged in torture and illegal executions, on direct orders from General Massu. Aussaresses declared that torture had been directly ordered by Guy Mollet's government. Paul Aussaresses was condemned for "apologism for war crimes", because he had justified the use of torture, claiming it had helped to save lives. Although Aussaresses claimed that torture was an efficient way to fight against what he saw as FLN terrorism, recent historical research demonstrate that, contrary to the popular "ticking time bomb scenario", torture was not used for short-term intelligence purposes. Instead, the aim of torture was not to make people talk but to affect the group as a whole and to break the civilian population's morale. Torture was fully a part of the psychological warfare methods as theorized by General Salan and others (Branche, 2004).
The 2004 Court of Cassation judgment condemning Aussaresses stated that "freedom to inform, which is the basis of freedom of expression" does not lead to "accompany the exposure of facts ... with commentaries justifying acts contrary to human dignity and universally reproved nor to glorify its author."
Read more about this topic: Torture During The Algerian War