Foreign News: The Right to Be Angry

Nothing has really been done to prevent torture. Everything, on the contrary, has facilitated it: the attitude of the opponent, the helplessness of authority, the indifference of public opinion, and the laws themselves.

—Le Monde

Once again torture—the Algerian war’s most harmful blemish on France’s good name—made news. A year ago La Question, an account of French army torture in Algeria, sold 65,000 copies, stirred up a storm of public indignation before the government banned it. Last week Paris police seized another shocker. La Gangrène, 24 hours after it rolled off the presses. Even so, thay were too late again.

La Gangrène is a grim, simply told report of tortures suffered by five young Algerians seized by the Paris police last December. Their accounts, smuggled in segments out of Paris’ Fresnes prison where the five are still awaiting trial, describe how they were beaten and tortured to reveal not only the names of F.L.N. accomplices but also names of sympathetic French priests and lawyers they had consulted. Several of the Algerians were tied naked like animals on a spit and subjected to successive electrical charges through electrodes attached to their lips and genitals. Others, says La Gangrène, were plunged head down into buckets of water, vomit and urine while their interrogators stood by laughing.

Although the government said it had seized La Gangrène “to stress the infamous and lying nature of this libelous publication,” inside the Cabinet angry protests against its seizure were made by André Malraux and Minister of Justice Edmond Michelet, a liberal Catholic who was once an inmate of a Nazi concentration camp.

In the French Senate, Gaston Defferre, the Socialist mayor of Marseille, put the issue bluntly to Premier Michel Debré: “It is the government’s duty to condemn torture. If it believes such practices are necessary, it must say so. It must not hide the truth.” White-faced, Debré interrupted to call the book a “complete and utter fabrication. When the limits of what I would call ‘the right to be angry’ have been overstepped, measures have been taken.” Debré said that “two hired Communist hacks,” were authors of the book, though it is issued by a respected resistance-born publishing house, Les Editions de Minuit.

The severe problem posed by La Gangrène is that, although De Gaulle has succeeded in curbing army excesses in Algeria, French police methods at home in Metropolitan France are still a law unto themselves. In L’Express, Nobel Prizewinning Novelist Francois Mauriac wrote: “De Gaulle, Debré, Michelet are horrified by the idea of torture, as were the Socialists, Radicals and M.R.P.s of the Fourth Republic. But governments pass. The police remain, and governments all have this in common: they cannot do without the police and are scared of displeasing them.”