Elements from the French Armed Forces used deliberate torture during the Algerian War (1954–1962), creating an ongoing public controversy. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a renowned French historian, estimated that there were "hundreds of thousands of instances of torture" by the French military in Algeria.
Overview
The Algerian War was an armed conflict between the French Armed Forces and the Algerian National Liberation Front between the years 1954-1962 which ended with Algeria gaining independence from France. The French state itself refused to see the colonial conflict as 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."
Since France did not consider the conflict to be a war but rather "maintaining order" in the country, it did not consider itself tied by Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which only mandates the humane treatment of persons in a non-interstate conflict. Besides prohibiting the use of torture, Common Article 3 gave the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to the detainees. Those detained by the French were considered criminals and therefore did not receive the treatment that should be granted to them under Common Article 3. It wasn't until it became public knowledge in 1957 that the French government was using torture that they began to grant more rights to captured rebels. In 1957 the leader of the French Army in Algeria, Raoul Salan, announced that the they would start treating captured enemies “as close as possible as the way in which prisoners of war are taken care of by civilized countries.” There was also the creation of interment camps for prisoners the following year, but the French government continued with their stance that the conflict was not a war.
Early in the war, the FLN was progressively assuming control in Algeria through targeted acts against French nationals and Algerians supporting the French. From 1954 to 1956, the amount of violence massively increased, accompanied by summary executions and internment in camps by the French army. Justified by the notion of "terrorism", torture was used indiscriminately against FLN detainees and civilians suspected of aiding the FLN. General Salan, commander-in-chief of the French forces in Algeria, had developed in Indochina a theory of "counter-revolutionary warfare" that included the use of torture.
The ICRC was authorized by Radical-Socialist prime minister Pierre Mendès France on 2 February 1955, to have access to the detainees for short missions of one month, but their report "was not to be made public." His government had to resign three days later. According to historian Raphaëlle Branche, "it was as if Mendès France was preparing for his departure by setting up as many protective barriers as possible." The French Army did not consider the detainees as POW's, but as PAM (French acronym for "taken captive while in possession of weapons", pris les armes à la main).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 1954 song Le Déserteur, 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.