La torture et l’armée pendant la Guerre d'Algérie, 1954–1962

The torture practiced by the French army during the Algerian War left a lasting mark on the national memory, to the point of constantly returning to the news, often to fuel clashes or scandals. Far from controversy, this book sheds light as never before on the mechanisms of torture, which have their origin in colonial racism and the methods inherited from the war in Indochina. Thanks to the finally opened public archives and the testimonies of soldiers and officers, the author analyzes, in addition to the functioning of the institution, the actions of the torturers, the discourse and the motivation of self-justification as well as the individual and collective violence in the face of fragile barriers of conscience or morality. In the background appear the responsibilities of political power and the echoes that reached public opinion throughout a war that did not want to speak its name. This book recreates this dramatic side of history by combining unpublished archival work and surveys of witnesses, in a close study that draws on both anthropology and political history. [translated from Amazon]