Journal of Undergraduate Research
Volume 8, Issue 3 - January/February 2007

Testament to Torture: The Gangrene Affair

Christopher Church

ABSTRACT

Amidst the Algerian War, a story of torture shook the French nation, provoking a public outrage and inducing a heated debate in the press. Seven Algerians, five students and two businessmen, were taken by the police from their Parisian homes as possible members of the Algerian insurgency. These seven innocents were then tortured at Fresnes Prison in Paris before being released; no charges were pressed. The torturestook place only eight months after Charles de Gaulle reformed France into the Fifth Republic, and they occurred less than three hundred yards from President de Gaulle’s official home at the Elysée Palace (Stuart 10). The acts were so horrific that two of the five students had to be hospitalized. Mustering up the courage to confront the French government, the five students compiled their testimonies into a work entitled La Gangrène. As soon as the book hit the presses, a scandal was born. Thirty-thousand copies of La Gangrène sold out in only two days. After the French police smashed the printing plates in a vain attempt to silence the testimonies (10), La Gangrène resurfaced in Jean-Paul Sartre’s periodical Les Temps Modernes and in newspapers such as Temoignages et Documents and Temoignage Chretien. The torture of these students struck a strident chord with the French, whose frustration was exacerbated by a botched cover-up by the Gaullist government.

Little has been written about “La Gangrène” since that initial outrage, and of the paltry number of works that even reference the episode, the most notable is La gangrène et l'oubli : la mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie by Benjamin Stora. Unfortunately, the book does not directly examine the specifics of La Gangrène, andthough Stora uses the same metaphor to describe the French psyche as that used to describe the torture affair, he gives little mention to the Gangrene Affair itself. While he does examine the role of torture in the Algerian War, he supplants the 1959 Gangrene episode with the Maurice Audin Affair from two years prior, in which an Algerian mathematician was suspected of being a terrorist, captured by French parachutists outside of Algiers, and then tortured to death at the command of French officials (Stora 30). Additionally, Stora’s work is only available in its original French, and by virtue of the language barrier it is largely unavailable to an American audience, that is, if one can actually obtain a copy of this work: La gangrène et l’oubli  is currently out of print. A translated edition of La Gangrène is available thanks to Robert Silvers and the small private press of Lyle Stuart, but the edition dates to1960, only ten months after the episode itself.

Therefore, it appears that forgetfulness (l’oubli) has prevented historiographic reflection about the Gangrene Affair. Yet, one need only glance at the photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to realize the relevance of the Gangrene Affair to current events. Torture has become endemic to U.S. actions in Iraq and Afganistan, and it also has come to characterize the "War on Terror." Since 9/11, the U.S. has held prisoners from over forty different foreign countries at Gitmo prison in Guantánamo Bay, many for more than three years, and all virtually incommunicado and without legal charges brought against them (Mayer, “The Experiment”). At Gitmo, something as simple as toilet paper is considered a luxury item, and at Abu Ghraib human life is considered expendable. For instance, a prisoner under the “care” of the U.S. government in Abu Ghraib died in an “interrogation” turned execution. Interrogators covered Manadel al-Jamadi’s head with a plastic bag and then bound him in a crucifixion-like pose, leaving him to die of asphyxiation (Mayer, “A Deadly Interrogation”). The U.S. government now considers possible terrorists “unlawful combatants,” thus placing them outside of standard prisoner-of-war clauses (Mayer, “The Experiment”). Is it merely a matter of time before the U.S. seeks to “interrogate” domestically? Will the new victims of these “interrogations” be Arab students studying in New York?

To best understand the outrage surrounding La Gangrène, one must comprehend the precariousness of French and Algerian identities during the war. France colonized Algeria in 1830, and over the course of a century the two peoples intermingled. Then, swamped with immigrants from the mainland after the Second World War, Algeria was deemed a French department. Ostensibly, torturing an Algerian becameas outrageous as torturing a Frenchman. To the contrary, however, the relationship between Algerians and Frenchmen was marked by violence. The following illustration (fig. 1) from La Résilience du Peuple, captioned “Entre nous et eux, rien que des barbelés,” bespeaks the simultaneous immixture/separation of Franco-Arab identities. The caption translates “Between us and them, nothing but barbed wire,” and in the image such barbed-wire separates the spectator from destitute yet innocent Algerian children. On the one hand, as symbolized by the barbed wire, the brutality of the Algerian conflict alienated the French from the Algerians, and the article itself, entitled “French Justice Put to the Algerian Test,” questions both the validity of French unity with Algeria and the credibility of French justice. On the other hand, inasmuch as the newspaper article distinguishes between “us and them,” it conjoins the two parties by entangling both of them in the violence of the conflict. The barbed wire thus serves simultaneously as a point of separation and a point of conjunction; violence becomes the connection between French and Algerian identities, one that makes possible the tortures at Fresnes prison.

Figure 1. An image from the newspaper La Résilience du Peuple that demonstrates the violence of the Algerian War

Figure 1. An image from the newspaper La Résilience du Peuple that demonstrates the violence of the Algerian War

As with the modern-day tortures at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, the wartime violence disrupted the mentality of the populace and shook the people’s faith in the French government. The confusion of French and Algerian identities led Gilles Martinet to ask a year later, “Qui sont les traitres?” (“Who are the traitors?”) Was the French police doing its duty to control terrorists, or had it overstepped its bounds and become as treacherous as those it had intended to stop?

Entrenched in what would become an eight-year long conflict with Algeria, France was brought face-to-face with corruption within the very polity of France itself.  Though French fascists were fighting an unsanctioned war in Algeria against insurgent groups such as the Front Liberation Nationale (FLN), few in France believed the Gaullist government to be capable of committing the very atrocities it claimed to be trying to prevent. Charles de Gaulle positioned himself as a mediator, as an arbiter vying to keep France whole. Despite the pretense of fairness, however, de Gaulle’s government stopped at nothing to maintain French order in Algeria. Torture became an everyday fact for those battling for control of the North African country. Although this overseas torture was far removed from the nation’s capital, as the American publisher of La Gangrène noted in 1960, “The disease spreads. When it is condoned by a nation in one part of its body, it travels. The disease crawls. An arm then, now a leg” (Stuart 13).

In the years leading up to 1959, the French held to the myth of la resistance by disavowing the gangrenous colonialism in Algeria. Insofar as the press brought to light the vindictive violence that characterized the Algerian War, it displaced that violence to the margins. Before La Gangrène’s publication, the French believed that the mainland still stood for liberty: no clear connection could be drawn between the right-wing extremists in Algeria and the “morally” upright Gaullist government in France that championed resistance to all forms of oppression. The distinction between the overseas Algerian department and mainland France was convenient, because it permitted the French populace to remain disconnected from the atrocities that occurred overseas. In 1959, however, that distinction crumbled, because terrorism had been found in Paris itself. The vindictive measures meant to halt terrorism were misdirected toward innocent students living within France. Overall, the French began to question the motives of their government. If the Gaullist government claimed that Algeria was an integral part of France and that Algerians were citizens just like any mainlander, there could be no confusion to the French reader of La Gangrène about the citizenship of Algerian students studying and living in France’s capital. In short, La Gangrène elucidated the extremism inherent in France’s so-called “peacekeeping” policy in Algeria.

The official backlash of La Gangrène’s publication was staggering. On 19 June 1959, just one day after the book hit the shelves, the French Minister of the Interior M. Debré seized the publication of La Gangrène, calling it a “total fabrication which could not in anything represent [the least] shade of truth” (“fabrication totale qui ne saurait en quoi que ce soit représenter l’ombre de la vérité”; “La Gangrene Gagne”). Despite considering the work to be grossly far-fetched at points and downright ludicrous at others, he placed it under the jurisdiction of the government and deemed it to be a threat to national security. According to a 27 June 1959 issue of The Guardian, French Premier M. Michel Debré went so far as to condemn the eye-witness testimony as a communist forgery. Denying that “the disease” had spread to the French mainland, Debré looked for an external cause to explain to the French populace how these crimes against humanity could occur in a democracy as grand as that of the French nation.

Debré’s condemnation forced the testifiers in La Gangrène to substantiate their claims. Doubt shrouded their testimonies, and the French populace simply did not want to believe themselves capable of the Nazi-like atrocities from which they had escaped only fourteen years earlier. Taking stock in de Gaulle’s political platform after World War II, which proclaimed all Frenchmen to be in a constant state of resistance, the French believed themselves unable to accept injustice without a fight. Intentionally ignorant of its own Nazi inclinations during the Gaullist period, France fought to maintain a sense of integrity. To a consciousness that fought desperately to posit itself as being in perpetual resistance, to a nation that ignored the fact that less than two percent of able-bodied Frenchmen were actually part of the French Resistance, to a post-war culture that denied its unmistakable involvement with the Nazis, these tortures were an anathema. Not only were they antithetical to the post-war conceptualization of the French nation, they threatened to shred the image of La Belle France to which the post-war populace so fearfully clung.

In the end, Debré’s denial failed to silence the Algerian victims. In fact, two of the students, Bechir Boumaza and Khider Seghir, were present at Debré’s press hearing and prepared to show the marks on their wrists where they had been “firmly tied” (“Who’s Lying”). In a 24 June 1959 issue of France’s satirical periodical Le Canard Enchainé, editors voiced their frustration with the official censors, claiming that they could not tell their readers anything about the book’s contents. Yet, they could “at least say this—whoever reads this book will not be able to sleep any more. So we won’t speak of gangrene—we’re in good health. Such good health that we’re probably going to die of it” (qtd. in Stuart 10). Voicing a similar sentiment, an article appearing in France Observateur on 29 June 1959proclaimed “the Gangrene gains” (“La Gangrène Gagne”).

Nevertheless, an argument about La Gangrène’s tenability was waged within the press. In an article entitled “Le Dossier de ‘La Gangrène’,” France Observateur reproduced an infamous communiqué from the Public Prosecutor of the Republic that denounced La Gangrène. France Observateur then juxtaposed this communiqué with a response from Jerome Lindon of Editions de Minuit, the publisher responsible for releasing La Gangrène. In his editorial, Lindon advocates the book written by the allegedly insurgent students, and like Emile Zola eighty-years before him, he dares the French people to stay complacent. In the follow-up issue to “Le Dossier de ‘La Gangrène’,” Lindon exclaims,“Do not count on us [the production company] to return the silence” (“Ne comptez pas sur nous pour retourner au silence”; “La Gangrene Gange”). Agreeing with Lindon’s maxim, France Observateur guides readers to sympathize with the Algerian students and to disagree with the actions taken by de Gaulle’s still nascent government. France Observateur makes its stance quite clear: “As Lindon underlines, this text is nothing but a recital, in good French, as students must be able to write, Algerians certainly, but all the same students of political science” (“Comme Lindon le souligne, ce texte n'est qu'un recit, en bon francais, comme doivent etre capables de l'ecrire des etudiants, algerienes, certes, mais toute de meme etudiants en sciences politiques”).

As Lindon claims, the book was not published until it had been checked and cross-checked, a process that took months (“Dossier de ‘La Gangrene’”). Not only was the validity of La Gangrène nearly incontestable, Lindon asserts that news of this sort was not new, that “tens of testimonies appeared these past few years, reporting facts of this kind, located for the majority in Algeria, without causing the least official reaction of indignation” (“Des dizaines de temoignages sont parus ces dernières annees, relatant des faits de ce genre, situes pour la plupart en Algérie, sans susciter la moindre reaction officielle d'indignation”; “La Gangrene Gagne”). A year prior to publishing La Gangrène, Lindon published Henri Alleg’s La Question, which examined the use of officially sanctioned torture in Algiers. The French populace had heard it all before: La Question sold nearly six-hundred thousand copies before La Gangrène ever hit the presses (Stuart 11).

Rather than being outraged at the possible occurrence of such crimes, de Gaulle’s staff lampooned Lindon. Though excerpts of these testimonies had appeared in newspapers long before they were collected into manuscript form, the government focused on Editions de Minuit, in part due to the publisher’s anti-authoritarian history. Already a thorn in the government’s side, Lindon was seen as an upstart who needed to be silenced. However, his anti-authoritarianism exhibited the very spirit that de Gaulle claimed as his own, for his publishing house was part of the French Resistance movement during the Nazi occupation. It fought tooth and nail to publicize that which the Vichy government fought to keep secret and worked vigilantly to loosen Hitler’s hold on France (Stuart 10).

The French press continued to publish stories about colonial oppression. With the rise of the right-wing zeal that would later culminate in a well-greased terrorist organization, the French populace became increasingly aware of extremist activity in Algeria. By 1960 French fascist elements coagulated into the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a terrorist group of self-proclaimed French patriots ruthlessly devoted to the preservation of a markedly “French” Algeria (Le Sueur xli).  By the end of the war, the OAS stopped at nothing to prevent an easy transfer of power. Employing violence to disrupt the peace process and aiming to discourage the French government from withdrawing from the country, OAS’s commando squads terrorized both the Muslim and Franco-Algerian populaces.

As demonstrated by figure 2, a drawing by contemporary political cartoonist Jacques Kamb, the French political left viewed the OAS as the product of France’s Vichy past.  In this cartoon, which appeared in the communist newspaper l’Humanité, Kamb poignantly condemns the OAS as a racist, anti-democratic, and terrorist movement. Hanging behind the masked and arm-banded “revolutionary” lay both the Nazi Swastika and a large stack of military weaponry. Kamb’s contemporary, Siné, also composed numerous political cartoons likening the OAS to the French government for actions like those described in La Gangrène. He displayed the ironic contradiction between the French government’s belief in liberty and its firm support of colonialism and complete disregard for Algerian life. Similarly, a political cartoon from a 14 December 1961 issue of L’Express displays the irreconcilability of the OAS and the Gaullist myth of a France resistant to all forms of fascism (fig. 3). Though the caricatures of de Gaulle’s government and the OAS antagonize one another, they are nearly identical in appearance: the sole difference is that one holds a briefcase and the other a bat. Above the head of the French governmental official are plastered the words “Vive de Gaulle,” a slogan that recalls the trademark of the French resistance. Battered by the existence of the OAS, de Gaulle’s idealized France crumbled. In short, the French government’s actions most closely corresponded with the violent radicalism of the OAS ultras, who were taking, as Siné sarcastically states in a 1962 letter, the “real risks.”


Figure 2. A political cartoon by Jacques Kamb in the newspaper l’Humanité. The caption reads, “And like that,  you believe that they are going to take us for sans-culottes?”

Figure 2. A political cartoon by Jacques Kamb in the newspaper l’Humanité. The caption reads, “And like that,  you believe that they are going to take us for sans-culottes?”


Figure 3. A political cartoon from L’Express that shows the disintegration of the Gaullist myth at the hands of the OAS

Figure 3. A political cartoon from L’Express that shows the disintegration of the Gaullist myth at the hands of the OAS

The roots of the racism that characterized the OAS can be unearthed in the Gangrene interrogations, which the Direction de Surveillances Territoire (DST) carried out in a manner better suited to the Gestapo. Bigoted DST officials hurled insults at their captives: they called twenty-seven-year-old Benaissa Souami a “shitty intellectual” (Souami 34) and then forced him to insert a wine bottle into his rectum (44). Nevertheless, a clear-cut distinction must be made between the OAS (a terrorist faction of discontented Frenchmen) and the DST (the French equivalent to the U.S. FBI). While the former functioned outside of the jurisdiction of the government, the latter worked under the government’s blessing. Affairs such as the M. Audin and Gangrene episodes became commonplace by 1962, destroying the government’s “resistancialist” image and paving the way for the 1969 release of the landmark film Le chagrin et la pitié, which made French collaboration all too clear.

In a preface to a published excerpt from La Gangrène, Temoignage Chretien labels the collection of testimoniesas a milestone to the amelioration of French relations with Algeria. Presented with such an inexpiable act, the newspaper argues, the French government cannot help but be more compromising. While France Observateur contends in“La Gangrène Gagne” that the French government’s overreaction lends credence to the testimonies, Temoignage Chretien proposes the irrelevance of La Gangrène’s truthfulness. Given the state of affairs in Algeria, posits the newspaper, La Gangrène is true enough: “It is thus necessary that the facts be known to be condemned as much as necessary, in the interest of France and Franco-Algerian friendship. And if La Gangrène is not all true, that the book helps [this friendship] has to make all the truth” (“Il faut donc que les faits soient connus pour être condamnés autant qu'il sera nécessaire, et cela dans l'intérêt de la France et de l'amitié franco-algérienne. Et si La Gangrène n'est pas toute la vérité, qu'au moins le livre aide a faire toute la vérité”; “Un extrait”).

Likewise, Americans can learn from the mistakes of the French government and in doing so heal our relations with the Arab world. As testimonies amass, we must relinquish the image so rooted in our minds: America is no longer the great “liberator” of Europe, the champion of democracy who vanquished Nazi fascism. In light of the Korean War, Vietnam, and now two Gulf Wars, we must fess up to our compulsion to police the world: our attempts to control methodically other nations, to suppress political systems unlike our own. Just as La Gangrène forced the French to abandon the Gaullist myth and to acknowledge their own fascist inclinations, the photographs from Abu Ghraib have proven false our hitherto unshakeable belief in unbridled democracy. Gitmo and Abu Ghraib blot our innocence and betray our imperialist leanings. After all, Guantánamo Bay is itself a colonial holding forcibly leased from the Cuban government over a century ago, and Abu Ghraib the result of a war in search of phantom weaponry. As in Algeria, the United States’ “peacekeeping” mission in Iraq has been met with a guerrilla insurgency that resists the dominance of a self-proclaimed benevolent power. Whether “spreading democracy” or “maintaining order,” a guise is a guise, and a ruse a ruse. Rather than projecting an antiquated image of ourselves, we must face up to the facts and bear witness to the undeniable testaments to torture.

REFERENCES

  1. “Le Dossier de ‘La Gangrene’.” France Obesrvateur. June 25, 1959.
  2. “Un extrait de ‘La Gangrene’.” Temoignange Chretien. June 26, 1959.
  3. “La Gangrene Gagne.” France Observateur.  June 29, 1959.
  4. “La Justice Francaise à l’Epreuve Algérienne.” La Résilience du Peuple. December 21, 1957.
  5. Kamb, Jacques. L’Humanite. “L’O.A.S.? Un gang fasciste.” January 11, 1962
  6. Le Sueur, James D. “Introduction.” Journal 1955-1962: Reflections on the French-
    Algerian War. Ed. James D. Le Sueur. Trans. Marry Ellen Wolf and Claude Fouillade. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2000.
  7. Martinet, Gille. “Qui sont les traitres?” France Observateur. April 28, 1960.
  8. Mayer, Jane. “The Experiment.” The New Yorker. July 4, 2005.
    << http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050711fa_fact4>>.
  9. Mayer, Jane. “A Deadly Interrogation.” The New Yorker. November 14, 2005.
    <<http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051114fa_fact>>.
  10. “L’Oaèsse, qu’est-ce que c’est?”. L’Express. December 14, 1961.
  11. Siné. Le déshonneur est sauf!: Dessins de la guerre d'Algérie. Paris: Découverte, 1992.
  12. Souami, Benaissa. “We’ll treat you decently.” The Gangrene. Trans. Robert Silvers. New York:
    Lyle Stuart, 1960.
  13. Stora, Benjamin. La gangrène et l'oubli : la mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie. Paris, Editions La
    Decouverte: 1992.
  14. Stuart, Lyle. “Introduction.” The Gangrene. Trans. Robert Silvers. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1960.
  15. “Who is Lying about ‘La Gangrene’?: Denials—and counter-denials—of torture story.” The Guardian. June 27, 1959

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