An Interview with Henri Alleg

The journalist Henri Alleg (pseudonym for Harry Salem), a major anticolonial figure of the twentieh century, died on July 17, 2013. A Franco-Algerian citizen, Alleg was born in London in 1921 to a Jewish family—an English mother and a Polish father—who later settled in France. In 1940, at the age of nineteen and by mere chance, Alleg moved to Algeria, where he eventually joined the Parti Communiste Algérien (PCA) and fought for Algeria’s liberation from French colonialism. From 1951 to 1955, when it was banned by the French colonial government, Alleg served as the editor-in-chief of Alger Républicain, the proindependence newspaper to which Albert Camus and Kateb Yacine occasionally contributed.

After his arrest in 1957 at the home of his friend Maurice Audin (who had himself been arrested the day before and would not be seen again), Alleg began writing his seminal anticolonial work, La Question, a firsthand account of the torture he had experienced at the detention center of El-Biar. Bit by bit, this account was smuggled out of prison by Alleg’s lawyers and typed in France by his wife, Gilberte Salem-Alleg, who had been expelled from Algeria with their two children. The manuscript, first entitled Interrogatoires sous la torture, was picked up and subsequently printed by Jérôme Lindon’s Editions de Minuit in February 1958.¹ More than sixty thousand copies of La Question were sold within two weeks. The French government’s ban of the book a month later (France’s first ban since the eighteenth century) promptly triggered a new publication by Nils Andersson, in Switzerland, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre.

To fully understand the considerable stir La Question caused in France, one needs to put it in historical context. In colonial Algeria, torture was a long-standing fact of life, which the press, threatened with censorship, generally avoided mentioning. Anticolonial activists in Algeria knew that their arrest would likely lead to torture. In France, however, torture was largely denied, and most people clung to a vision of that country as a land of civilization. Those who dared denounce torture were considered antipatriotic and shunned, whether or not they might have fought against Nazism during the Second World War. When, on rare occasions, the reality of torture in colonial Algeria was evoked, the French government differentiated between the torture inflicted by the French army and that inflicted by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Torture was framed as a justified response to a barbaric onslaught menacing social order and progress.

Alleg was a well-known journalist affiliated with the Fédération de la Presse, a member of the PCA with many contacts, and the director of a daily that pointed to the injustices and violence borne of (French) colonialism at every turn. His denunciation of the torture that he had suffered at the hands of brutal French paratroopers provided a devastatingly direct yet eloquent testimony, which jolted French society. It gave rise to a greater demand for accountability on the part of the colonial government, blew apart France’s ethical pretenses, and initiated the long and sinuous process of historical reexamination that continues to this day.

La Question, which Pierre Vidal-Naquet viewed as one of the two “most beautiful narratives inspired by the Algerian struggle” (1998:132), has retained its evocative and indictive potency, and not just in relation to a French context.² Because torture is a universal and recurring issue, new translations of the book appear regularly which apply to new countries and assist in analyzing and combatting it.

Sentenced to ten years of imprisonment for “atteinte à la sûreté extérieure de la France” (violation of the state’s external security) and “reconstitution de ligue dissoute” (reconstitution of a dissolved league), Alleg was transferred to Rennes, France, in 1960. After escaping from prison, he rejoined his family and fellow militants in Czechoslovakia. He returned to Algeria after the Evian Accords in 1962 to help rebuild Alger Républicain, but after the 1965 military coup that brought Houari Boumedienne to power, the newspaper...